"The Mercury Clock" by Chika Onyenezi
We began cleaning that morning when the sun hit the glass louvers. The music of Brenda Fassie played from our old black and white television with a concave screen that irritated my father’s eyes, but not our hungry eyes. My sister scrubbed the floor and cleaned the brown mahogany table while my brother removed cobwebs from the wall edges. I dipped my rag in water, squeezed it dry, and placed it on the dusty glass.
Outside, the sky was blue and the palm trees down the river whistled as the wind passed by. In a small garden by the fence, I saw beautiful flowers growing at the tip of the orange tree. A duck quacked and pruned the water surface for tips. A goat bleated, caged in a pen beside Joe Ninety’s house. The air tasted like orange as the day beckoned Joe Ninety to wake up our street.
Come rain or come sunshine, Joe Ninety must depart at eight o’clock each day, and it was nearly eight o’clock. I watched her move her front door aside. Standing in front of the uncompleted building she began to wail: “Simeon!” Silence followed. Her husband—who made no money and could hardly keep a job—knew exactly what was coming and, quiet as a mouse, walked out into the mist, not to be seen again.
“Is Joe Ninety screaming again?” my brother asked.
If it was your first time hearing her you would assume that someone had put a knife to her throat. But, no, that was just Joe Ninety’s way. She had no shame whatsoever. She beat her husband senseless from time to time, and even beat her neighbor’s wife Mama Junior once in a while. She was full of it. A fighter and a screamer. The street boys nicknamed her Joe Ninety because she knew all the family secrets on our street and recounted them at whim, just like Joe in the television show. Her children hated her for it, but Joe Ninety had the weight of the world on her shoulders. One could see it even in her cheers. In the evenings, she would let us play soccer on the empty field in front of her house while she cooked in her kitchen made of zinc and thatch. Sometimes she would watch us. Occasionally you would find her smiling under a pear tree.
“Simeon!”
The silver pendulum swung as I cleaned our grandfather clock, standing tall and gathering dust behind our blue cushion. It had been left behind by missionaries and now it belonged to us. Father said it used to chime at holy hours back in the sixties, but those days were done. I listened to the ding-dong as the bulbs smashed against each other. A black rat ran out of the broken clock, shivering, and quickly made its way towards the foot of our cushion like an American football player destined for a touchdown. My brother stood by the door, armed with a broom. He clobbered the rat and smashed its head. Blood splattered. The little rat struggled with life and death. Eventually it gave itself up to death.
“Simeon!” Joe Ninety screamed again. “That I asked him to cut the wood and he disappeared. Let me see how he is going to eat this morning. And you too! I will fetch water. I will cook. I will carry the food to sell and all of you idiots do nothing but sit down here. Chai! My God will punish all of you!” Joe Ninety touched the sand and placed it on her lips and pointed towards heaven, swearing over and over. Elijah, Joe Ninety’s other son, yelled back that Simeon wasn’t in the house.
I never got used to whacking rats on the head, or watching rats get whacked on the head. Father once killed a snake in our dining room and carried it out with a shovel. People watched and screamed and covered themselves with the blood of Jesus as Father placed the snake in a shallow grave he dug himself and covered it with dirt.
“So, you haven’t seen Simeon, but you want to eat, akwaya? Ok, let me see who is wiser in this house. Elijah wara mu nku a—Elijah break this firewood for me.” Joe Ninety’s arms flapped while she sat on a small stool oiling her dry skin. Elijah split the wood, put them together, and started a fire.
Soon Simeon walked out from the corner of the house with a shaving stick and a mirror. He’d inherited both his mother’s and father’s stoutness, and wore only faded blue short pants. His face was weary and spotted with acne.
“Did you say that Simeon wasn’t around?” Joe Ninety wailed at the top of her voice.
“What can I do for you?” Simeon asked his mother.
“Simeon, go and marry a wife! You can’t be living in my house at thirty-five. Go and marry before the devil will kiss you with his big lips! Go and marry—oh! Ngozi got pregnant in my house and you said I was a bad mother. Is she not better than you now? Akwa Ngozi is at her husband’s house enjoying now. Do I disturb her? Do I see her all the time? Does she have to split firewood for me?”
Thirty-five years of toiling like a mule and never making it, Simone had dropped out of school earlier than Elijah to help his mother. Then he’d learned to cut hair and opened a barbershop that no one visited apart from my family, because my father was annoyingly cheap, his manual clippers chipping our hair to uneven shreds.
“Simeon! Take the pot of rice and warm it. That is what will bring money for food to this house, not the barbershop you’ve set up here. One customer a week. You can’t even burn your chest to hell with the money from it. Let me see you smoking again in this house. Simeon!”
You know nothing about listening to both Brenda Fassie and Joe Ninety at the same time. It felt like heaven was filled with nothing but humor. Tiny angels of laughter sprinkled us with dew; we all listened to Joe Ninety’s early morning drama unfold, and laughed and laughed.
Satiated with the drama that reeled before me, I dropped the rag into the dirty water. I decided to shower and get ready for a needed haircut. The water hole in our bathroom glowed with darkness and something screamed at me each time I stared into it. I turned away to avoid looking. The water spilled from rusty sprinklers hanging from the ceiling. It was so cold I jumped back and gauged with my hand until my blood told me it was fine to go back in again. I dressed quickly but waited for Joe Ninety to go to the market. I watched her wheel out her damned food truck, dragging it out of a pothole right before the bend by the red and white gate, while a seated dog also watched her.
I walked across the street. Simeon stood by the front door watching the boys playing soccer in the open road. Elijah was among them, dribbling the boys like Pele. Elijah could have played in the major leagues, could have been like Kanu Nwankwo, but it all came down to fate. He netted another goal. Simeon celebrated more than his brother and I startled Simeon when I tapped his arm.
I told him I needed a haircut. He walked into the house and soon came out with his clippers and brush. I sat on the wooden stool while he cleaned the clippers with spirit.
“What have you been up to today?” he asked me.
“I cleaned our grandfather clock,” I said. “Man, I don’t know why we still have that clock in our house.”
“Wait, you guys have a grandfather clock?” Simeon asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Grandfather clock? The big one you mean?”
“Yes.”
“The one with big silver bulbs inside?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“No, what?”
“You haven’t heard that you can be a millionaire naira with that clock?”
“How?” I asked.
“There is mercury inside the pendulum bulb. It can fetch you a million naira at Amawusa, or even more in Abuja.”
“What? No, I haven’t heard. How can we get the money?” I asked. This was a time when my fathers’ salary was thirty thousand naira a month. We were poor. Not dirt poor, but one-piece-of-meat-only-on-Sundays poor. Mother said we needed a mosquito net but father said there was no money, so we stayed without a mosquito net and treated malaria every month. Having a million naira could’ve transformed our lives. I thought I would do what my father would’ve done a long time ago, if he’d known.
“Look at you.” Simeon pointed at me, tapped my shoulder, and said, “Let’s not wait! Right now! Right now! I will take the clock to Abuja, where I can get even bigger money.”
“Okay, come with me,” I said. We walked towards our flat, the soil cold under my bare feet. I showed Simeon the clock hidden behind our cushion.
“I have been coming to your place all this while and I haven’t seen this clock before. How did you guys hide it in plain sight? Original Princeton Grandfather Clock,” he said to himself like an art enthusiast scrutinizing a masterpiece. He made the clock sound so important. To us, it had just been an old relic that needed to be discarded at some point.
“Make sure you bring the money to me,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any stories. It will not be less than a million naira for me.”
“Definitely, I will bring your money to you, man. This is how we will do it now. I will finish cutting your hair and prepare for my travel. It will take me two days to get the money,” he said.
Simeon lifted the clock, his pants dragging while I followed him back to Joe Ninety’s house, where I sat on the stool beside the soursop tree. I thought about it all as I waited for him to come and finish cutting my hair.
“You don’t have to leave immediately,” I said to him. “You can hold on and maybe travel tomorrow or the next to Abuja. It might be less suspicious.”
“You don’t understand the kind of opportunity you’ve given me. I won’t be seeing Joe Ninety again. Imagine what that means for me,” he said.
I imagined it. I would have left immediately too.
He showed me a mirror when he finished cutting my hair. I stared at myself. It looked as if a cutlass had done the job. Visible patches of black hairs stood in the midst of bare skin. He took a bottle of spirit and poured the liquid onto a ball of cotton and massaged my head with it. It stung all over.
“Alright, safe journey,” I said to him and ran towards our home.
But something in me didn’t trust him. I leaned on the dark metal pillar right by our door, my head still stinging, and watched him. He paced around the open windows. I guess he wondered what his life could now become. I thought of the rat and its whiskers like a dial shimmering from time to time as it laid lifeless on the red floor. Yellow and red flower petals fell by the fences, some sticking on the cemented top making the street smell minty. I watched Simeon until the sun moved down to the tip of their building and shone between a plantation of aerial television antennas. The sun dimmed and gave way to stars and Joe Ninety wheeled her truck back home. Simeon left through the back door just as Joe Ninety began screaming again at the front door. He ran with a traveling bag and the clock and I lost sight of him as he made his way towards the river, taking the river path to the town, where I guess he got a bus to Abuja.
Weeks later, Simeon was still nowhere to be found. I kept asking Elijah when he was coming back, but no one knew anything and I never heard from him. My father asked about the missing clock. Its whereabouts remained mysterious to all until everyone, except I, forgot the old broken thing. My father only mentioned Simeon two months later, when I heard him talking with another friend in the front yard. As they ate alligator paper and drank aromatic schnapps served on a silver tray with two glasses, I learned about what had happened to him:
“Simeon. The boy that lived in that uncompleted building, that is the one I am talking about,” my father said. He brought out a tobacco box, tapped it, and pinched it into his nose. He sneezed and sneezed and hit his head twice.
“Can you repeat what he did again?”
“He took his village meeting money and ran away!” my father said.
“That boy that cut your hair for you?” the man asked, and spit. His brown tobacco spittle stuck to the mossy green wall.
“Yes, him. No one else.”
Simeon did come back, but not until three years later. Only I knew what he had taken and what he had failed to do. He wore big soiled ties while gallivanting the streets, preaching the gospel for trifles rather than return home to the stench of Joe Ninety’s mouth. I felt like giving him my own change, instead of asking him for my one million naira or the grandfather clock. Everything else was the same. The earth still shimmered as if boiling hot. Each morning, Joe Ninety still moved her truck. Elijah still accompanied her to the market whenever he wasn’t playing soccer. Creatures still sniffled around where the broken grandfather clock used to be. We tried our best to do away with them. The only ones we never killed were the wall geckos. Armed with nothing but silence, the hopeful geckos slithered across the empty spot, across the walls, only searching for their way to the roof.
Chika Onyenezi is a Nigerian-born fiction candidate enrolled in the University of Maryland's MFA program. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image Journal, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. In addition to writing short stories, he has a novel in progress. You can find him at chikaonyenezi.com
