Questions

The very afternoon the rector called my name in the Conference hall as the next person to work in father Wilson's room remains fresh in in my memory like a new name,how Andy and Gozie shook my shoulder roughly in felicitation and how my other friends who were sitting around hailed me like i had won a lottery.

I always remember how ambivalent I felt after the announcement,  happy because it was actually one of the few functions everyone wanted in the school. Besides I had just finished working in the pig farm and working in the father's house was a big upgrade.....I mean, who didn't want to work in the father's rooms?,So that they would place crisp 1000 naira notes in your happy palms in the morning on the days you would vacate for mid term breaks and termly holidays , saying "nga ego Moto",even though it was always bigger than the "ego moto", and on the dreaded Saturdays , while other students cut grasses in the scalding and enervating sun, you would only have to wash the father's clothes which were always clean.   Your hopeful fingers would always frisk the deep pockets of their trousers looking for forgetten money which they never forgot just before you dipped them into the foaming water to wash.

But on  the other hand, i was sad because he was a Septuagenarian in his late 70's, tall, thin and old ,even though he was still quite active for his age and even played badminton  with the students every  evening. Infact, there was a day he kept asking me "have you seen my birdie", ransacking the bags, the wardrobe and the shelves, looking restless and asking the same question with each passing minute, "have you seen my birdie?"   I kept saying no, since i didn't even know what a birdie was.      I eventually went for prep the same day ,opened my dictionary and was shocked to find out that a birdie was just a badminton shuttlecock.
 

Every time he said mass in the chapel,  his frail veiny hands quivered and trembled as if he was  suffering from some kind of manual Parkinson's disease and as a young boy in probably  the most strict of all Catholic schools, with the catechism and other teachings of church in my my head, the trembling of his hands made me see the consecration in a whole different light. We were taught as young Catholics that during the consecration, that as the priest said the prayers over the bread and wine, the bread  instantly turned into Christ's body while the wine turned into Christ's blood.  A strange feeling would  always envelope me because Fr Willy's quivering fingers made the consecration more cinematic and surreal.

Sometimes I would close my eyes with the solemn ring of the alterbell,  and imagine the round piece of host in father Willy's trembling hands turning into Christ's body, a piece of round bleeding fresh flesh, with the crimson blood dripping onto the white altercloth from his outstretched arms, tricking slowly from his hands  down to his lean hairy arms and  coloring his white chasuble, and the wine in the chalice also turning into blood. Everything would seem like a seance to me until I would open my eyes and everything would remain the same. It was just Father Willy, the host, the wine ,his square glasses and his quivering hands.

His double roomed apartment in the Father's quarters always smelled of insecticide, the aftermath of a mosquito massacre, slightly choking. Even though he used  a mosquito net and had all the windows of the apartment covered with nets,he still sprayed insecticides every evening.
Due to poor lighting his room was always dank..,vintage video tapes of "Kill we Nwachukwu" and "power mike" kept  on the shelves,  different music albums that he never played, ranging from Osadebe and Oliver de Coque, down to Jim Reeves and Sade Adu, antique  diocesan black and white calenders that had pictures of afro haired smiling priests on them all combined to give the room the smell and look of a museum.
The first day i reported for duty in the room, he had pulled out a large brown journal that looked as old as him and asked for my name.
"Francis Obi", i had answered and he wrote in down in fine cursives into a long list of names and I guessed it was the names of all the people who had worked with him throughout his lengthy priestly career. It filled me with pride, like I had been inducted into a special hall of fame and i wondered if i was among the persons he had in mind when he said mass.

Sneezing turned out to be a taboo in the room.Once you sneezed, Father Willy would ask you to leave his room and not return till you felt better. He never used the same handkerchiefs twice without washing, a funny but strict habit that made me wash over twenty handkerchiefs every morning.

His blue Volkswagen golf always had a slight niff of petrol then, and i vividly remember the day it happened. I was in the classes reading during the afternoon prep , when a teacher entered our class , moved straight to my locker and said that Fr Willy was calling me in the father quarters. i went up to to the quarters to meet an angry and frustrated Fr Willy.   He was so angry that his cerebral nerves got so visible on his bald pate, like strokes of thunder and lightening. He told me that he had bought Petrol in a gallon on his way back and had kept it on the footmat of the backseat of his car.
As the car fell into a pothole, the gallon fell over and because it had  not been covered properly, petrol spilled all over the floor of the car.
That was the first day i heard the word "blot" because he kept saying "please blot out every drop of the petrol there" , and even after ever i did, the slight smell of petrol still remained in the car for quite a long time. 
     He never allowed anyone to seat in the front seat of his car and he claimed that particular seat was reserved for Mary the mother of Jesus Christ, who  was always with him everywhere he travelled.

Formally,Father Willy was actually  our Spiritual director in the school then, always telling us mesmerizing stories about St Maria Goretti, Padre Pio and the very young Saint Dominic Savio. He always told us that he wanted to die like St Agnes, who was executed for consecrating her virginity to God. Most of back then, even as small as we were found his idea quite absurd.

During the Spiritual Conferences which were held every Sunday in the school, he would tell us about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Aokpe in Benue State, narrating how he was so lucky to even meet the particular Sister that saw the apparition each time it appeared and how he got her mobile number too,even though it was no longer working. Many interesting topics mostly spiritual were discussed during the spiritual Conferences.
The procedure was quite simple. On Saturdays preceding the Sundays of the confrence, a small sized metal box . which had a slight slit, like a ballot box would be kept in front of the chapel and anybody in the school that had any question for the spiritual director would write it on a piece of paper, fold it and push it into the box for the spiritual director to read and address during the confrence im front of the whole students and for closure,the questions were also kept anonymous to discourage students from not writing out of fear.

One hot  Sunday morning in December ,we sat in our pews in the chapel listening with rapt attention as Fr Willy talked about the importance of prayer in our lives. Some of the students were either sleeping or struggling to fend off sleep since the pap which we always had for breakfast on Sundays was beginning to kick in and induce sleep but i managed to be awake, watching sleep command the heads of most students like a furious bandmaster.
Soon afterwards he concluded his talk on prayer and proceeded to addresss the questions, from the metal  question box which had been emptied and placed neatly on the table for him.
He brought out the first piece of paper and peered at it in suspicion before he drew the microphone stand closer to himself and read out the question
"Father, should we continue saying the prayer against bribery and corruption in Nigeria since we say it everyday and yet nothing has changed"  ......My eyes grew wide as soon as he read out the question, because apparently someone had read my mind.     I immediately noticed the nerves on Father Willy's head become quite visible again,since i was sitting in the front seat, directly facing him where he was sitting on a table before the alter.
I wondered what Father Willy would say, since the question which had been asked, was one that been going through my mind as well for a while.
The old priest cleared his throat and and removed the microphone from its stand entirely , holding it in his hands, he said, ""I don't think we should concern ourselves with wondering whether our prayers are working or not but we should ask ourselves what the country would be like if we didn't say that prayer in the first place""
just like that, Father Willy went on to the next question. As little as i was, i was really  dissapointed  with his brief answer because i thought someone his age could have the answer to the many questions in my head then, why God had forgotten our country",why God permitted the slave trade and so many others.
But an idea popped up in my head. I felt that since i had the privilege of working in Father Willy's room, I  could actually ask him any question i wanted.   I  managed to convince myself that he probably answered that question in the conference that way because there was no time to go into details.

I went down for night prep  that day  and eagerly tore out a sheet of paper from my exercise book to write out the questions i would ask the old priest in his room after mass the next day .
By the time i was finished, there were 13 questions in total,  I don't remember most of them but i remember the first question was "Father why does God hate our Country"
I folded my questions neatly and placed in my breast pocket like a cheque  and when the bell for the end of the prep went i marched up to my hostel with pride, like a scientist that had made a sudden breakthrough in his research.

I didn't sleep much that night as i kept on strategizing and restrategizing, thinking of the best possible way to ask him the question without the nerves around his head popping out and  becoming visible. But after the mass the next morning i walked down briskly to the father's house with my questions still in my pocket to find Father Willy lying in a pool of blood in the bathtub,with a kitchen knife he used in peeling oranges buried deep in his chest.
Then, i realized no one would answer my questions.