Turkey Stew

In Delta, with the Oyinvwi’s, the very first evil Edojah tasted was a surprise to her mother. Edojah’s mother was a hawker who peddled handcrafted items like fabrics and ceramics she drew herself on the streets. Edojah accompanied her when she was selling more than her usuals–days when she was selling head plates of food and drinks in plastic bottles; both the kind she made and the kind she didn’t. They’d go to big cities and walk the street. It was the only time Edojah was allowed on the road by herself. 

"Use that charm of yours," her mother would tell her, disappearing into the crowd. Guided by lessons from veteran hawkers, her mother knew how to maximize sales by sundown. Alone on street corners, Edojah quickly learned that the veterans were, in truth, nothing more than selfish amateurs. They preferred to work alone, like her mother, and navigated the cities with an intimate familiarity they didn’t care to share firsthand. Her mother would walk until her soles were burnt, arms laden with handcrafted goods and a head plate of treats, and Edojah would coax customers towards her. By evening, both their scarves were heavy with naira.

Her father, an electrician, didn’t like what her mother did. He especially didn’t like the idea of Edojah in the big city alone. What’s wrong with being alone? Was always her mother’s answer. We made alone. We live alone. We get hurt alone. We die alone. We cry alone. We think alone. We die alone again. Then she took her hawking again the very next day.

They stayed out there for merely an hour.

Edojah had quickly sold all of her sweets and even most of her fabrics. She scanned the road, searching between cars along the white dashes for her mother. She finally found her after squeezing through a group of people. Her mother was in the corner, surprised in a city she thought she knew. 

Her father said she needed her space, so she and her brothers gave her that. The night before her father wanted to surprise her, and four nights after her mother was attacked, Edojah saw her mother in front of her mirror finger curling her hair and grinning to herself as she sang Na since den trouble starti oh (huh, huh).

Edojah’s father took her and her four brothers in his truck and drove down the long red road that next morning for what he called an ‘adventure’. Her father’s truck always wobbled on that road. That early in the morning, it had lulled her and her youngest brother to sleep. When the car doors chanted open, they awoke. The road wasn’t red anymore or wobbly, but a smooth dirt field that housed red sheds. Edojah followed her father through it. Then, he stopped them at one of those sheds he said a man he knew owned, and told Edojah to stay out front and guided his boys through it and watched as they tried to catch one of the many turkeys. Edojah, walking slowly over the peanut hulls, only wondered what turkeys ate or what they did all day cooped in that shed, watching from the mesh window. Her brothers never caught that turkey, but her father did. And as she found a lone white turkey in the very back amongst all those brown feathered ones, he knelt down and showed them how to snap a turkey’s neck. Then he handed it to Edojah in the backseat so as to not leave her out (because the killing was a man’s thing and the dealing with what the killing left behind was best handled with a woman’s hand, Edojah supposed is what he meant by that). 

Her youngest brother cried, but Edojah didn’t. 

Their father drove with hard knuckles and rough palms. He told them to stop crying. He said she had the honor of bestowing her mother’s surprise, but truthfully it had been because she was the only one who didn’t seem fazed by that dead turkey in her lap, whose neck hung off her thigh. Edojah figured that was when she learned evil existed all over the place and at each time like darkness do; a shadow not too far from the sun, a house with every one of the lights on that eventually got to shut its eyes, a secret corner in a big city, a familiar road in the dark spreading heavier than it would in the daytime, blinking her eyes just before the turkey died and missing the moment of its death, but tasting it later on.

Edojah blamed the Urhobo family in Delta for her being a vegan. Not the conscious or moral choice most people had to blame, that mother’s surprise. Her favorite: Nigerian turkey stew.

Incarné chuckled softly at the thought of that. “We’re on borrowed time and you’re going on about supper?” She shuffled on the seat that she had once rambled about; the heated cushions and the sage moldings, regarding the way they shaped against you, but then, after thirteen hour rides, there wasn’t much to say about a seat. After thirteen hours, it became like every other passenger seat she ever sat in.

“I thought you enjoyed my stories.” Edojah said tonelessly.

“I do.” She seemed to smile her way, but Edojah wouldn’t know. The van was masked in a dimness, the kind where a low and weak orange light poked holes around the center from a weak interior light on the headliner. Incarné never quite looked at her, unless there was darkness to stand guard between them. “I just never quite understand them.” The headliner was foam lined. The obvious choice. At a certain point it drooped, and if you reached up to feel it, it felt like fiberglass and made you itch all over. Edojah grazed sometimes just for fun. She’d imagine microscopic bugs digging into her skin. She would think of that turkey again.

“Simple, really.” She studied the length of Incarné’s arm. Watched her scratch at the skin and leave a grayness in its wake. It wasn’t the headliner that made her itch, but Edojah.

“A little girl and a dead turkey?”

“To some degree.”

“Sure.” Incarné shifted her legs away from them both. She turned to eye her, her eyelashes long and fake, sweeping the turn of her sad looking eyes. “And the other degree?”

“Evil.”

She nodded slowly, as if her thoughts were a bunch of round spheres she had to roll into place. Her inability to comprehend Edojah became clear. Then she sat forward and checked her watch like she had somewhere to be. She did. Her apartment where everyone was but her; her family sat around a dinner table with a turkey buttered and stuffed in the middle. She tipped her head back up to Edojah, but said nothing.

As they passed a broken street lamp on a busy corner, Edojah laughed. “Do you not feel it surrounding you?”

Incarné nodded. Edojah followed suit with a slight tilt of her head. “Such a coincidence that you and I would be on the same page all the time.”

“No, I…I do.. I almost do. Maybe evil does exist in all ways like you say, or maybe it only exists with man…or maybe it don’t even exist at all.” Incarné preached carefully. The surrounding light turned to a yellow buzz in the underpass, but her own body was still a black shadow in the otherwise dark confinements. Edojah found pleasure in little things, but she liked tunnels and she liked the way the dark sucked you in and spit you out. She watched it almost swallow the woman and almost smiled. When she had been younger, in the middle of the back of that truck, she had done the same. And she had understood her mother a little more then. And they sang Na since den trouble starti oh (huh, huh), while they watched that turkey get swallowed by boiling rouge geysers. Poor things, her mother would mutter over and over again, each time more intentional than the last.

That had been what her mother taught her: intentional with her words, so it didn’t take her long to understand she wasn’t talking about that dead turkey at all, but all the rest of them behind that mesh in that red turkey farm.

Edojah would wonder why they were so poor next on a kitchen stool. “Cause we eat them … or they stuck in a cage … or, or cause they raised all mealymouth?”

Her mother had turned motionless eyes her way. “Na, ‘cause they weak, Edo, poor cause they never stood a chance.”

Don’t be weak, is what Edojah figured her mother meant by that.

The tunnel spit them out. Incarné became distinguishable again. “Everything and everybody have a weakness.”

“Sure, some more than most. Don’t you agree?”

“What was profound about the concept of a dead turkey?” Incarné veered just as the van had. A sharp left down a quiet neighborhood full of dead or dying leaves and emptying trees. 

“I just think it’s fascinating how something can transition so easily.”

They drove over a pothole in the road that threw Incarné off balance for a second, not even confused when it hadn’t phased her in the slightest. Edojah knew they weren’t too different, even though the woman might believe so. Edojah didn’t care to know much about others, but she had accidentally learned that Autumn was her favorite time of the year. She told her that much and watched the way she tried to find her footing in the conversation. Just something for her to have so she didn’t have to come in empty-handed. “There’s a difference between leaves and turkeys.” Was the only thing concrete enough for her to stand on.

“That being?” Edojah gave her an enigmatic smile.

Incarné only paused. There was always a part of their road dance that required her to stand down.

“One thing we all share, Incarné, whether you choose to see it as a weakness or not, is how we all go from hot to cold.”

“That’s an interesting way to put life and death into words.”

“That is where you are confused. There is nothing profound about this for me.”

“Then why?”

She sat unblinking, her wrists rattling behind her back, making for their own song. “My daddy was a good electrician, not much else. It hadn’t done it with one snap. You learn the way life works like that. Holding it. Being responsible for it. It’s like watching ice melt. That’s all it is.”

“No sadness? Grief? Disgust?” It was as if Incarné was listing off emotions, hoping Edojah would cradle at least one of them. She didn’t.

“It’s sad, sure.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

“Then why say it?”

“Just to. It’s not like I understand emotions. Where they stem from, what their purpose is. Their value. Don’t you think all of that, all you just mentioned, is just the way our responses have been conditioned? How we say stuff we don’t feel?”

“I think it’s completely irrational to think some don’t value the sanctity of life. And I think it’s irrational that you’ve made it your burden to box that evil up. To believe in it is one thing, but…”

“Belief holds no value to me. I don’t care about belief or disbelief.”

“Then why is it your burden to box that evil up?”

Edojah thought of the dead turkey, the way its neck hung loose from her knee. The hawkers who the truck, growing increasingly and almost irrationally rancid, passed on the big road that reminded her of her mamma and who she never wanted to be. They were like her mamma the way none of them complained, and they definitely didn’t cry. She figured the last time they had cried was in the back of some pickup with a box of rotting turkeys on their laps, their burdens too.

She thought about the last time she cried. How her mother bent down to her level and told her not to be weak. How she had taken her to that same corner and showed Edojah how to snap a man’s neck. How instead of hugging her, like she had her youngest brother as he sniffled over turkey stew, she watched her puke all of her innocence she might have away.

Edojah had outgrown a lot of things. Like tears, the back of her daddy’s pickup, and fears. Kind of like the need for street signs, maps, and reminders, yet they lingered in her surroundings. The clock, an uncomfortable glare of dancing numbers. The way the road shifted when the van exited off the highway for the third time. A reminder of just how old the city really was, at the root of it all, despite its embellishments. Pretty buildings, disambiguous sculptures, and fake lawns of grass that hid its age. 

However, the exit stood as the initial reminder–a gentle descent signaling the shift.

She shrugged as the car stopped. The prison was the second reminder. Old roses and vines ate at the worn bricks and plaster until it was more foliage than anything. More than anything, proof that nothing really made sense.

“Somebody got to.”