Obeahman III

She had to find a husband, a good man who would take care of her brothers and sisters and in return for this she would work hard for him, just as her mother had done all her life. She'd never give her heart to him though. Msoto would learn from her mother's mistake.
She ran her mind across all the eligible young men in the village and when she realised none of them were likely to take her on she widened her search to include older men and widowers, men who would welcome the attentions of a healthy fourteen-year-old wife and who had enough experience of life to understand that such a prize did not come without appendages. There was one whom her mind kept returning to. Igbo. As old as her father and with twice as many children, Msoto knew it would not be an easy life but she also knew she could not remain in the village alone and without male protection. With this thought singularly spinning in her head she left her brothers and sisters at home and went to the Obeahman.
She stood at his door patiently until he chose to notice her. She looked calmly in his eye and made her request. 'I need to marry and quickly, Papa,' she said simply.
The Obeahman nodded his wild nest of woolly greying hair at her. 'Who you see child?'
'Igbo.'
If the shaman was surprised at her choice he gave no indication of it. 'He looking?'
'Does it matter?'
The Obeahman threw his head back and laughed. He opened his door further and Msoto stepped into the house.
It was when she was weeding her mother's vegetable garden that he walked by. She pounded the hoe rhythmically into the cracked dry earth and by affecting to ignore his presence, allowed him to view her lithe, black limbs as she worked. It was noon, an unusual time of day to see a working man in the village. He stood by the edge of her garden. 'Hello Father,' she said eventually, and she spoke respectfully her eyes not rising above his chest.
'Looking for a wife. I have plenty daughters at home,' he said in return.
Msoto smiled quietly, long fingers of her dirt-covered hand covering her mouth.
Her life was a mirror image of that of her mother's except that Igbo was not as demanding of her as her father had been to her mother. He bothered her infrequently and the marital bed stood largely unused, as he preferred to curl himself tightly in a blanket and sleep on the floor. Msoto used her body, the only tool she had and she worked long hours with it digging and planting both her mother's garden and now her husband's, she tended to all his children, the eldest of whom was only a year younger than she, and in this way she kept a safe roof over the heads of her siblings.
When a full season had passed and she deemed herself ready she went to speak to her husband. 'I want a child,' she said.
'Enough in this house already,' Igbo replied 'and I 'way too old bring another child in this world.' He underlined his feelings by abandoning the marital bed completely.
'He won't give me a child, Papa and I need to be a mother,' she said to the Obeahman.
Yellow-flecked leonine eyes bored silently into her, stripping bare her soul and he let her into the house. 'I put him in dreamtime. Then his body do what you want.'
'How this happen?' Igbo cried when he noticed her softly swelling body, and when she made him no answer he angrily left the house. His wife had disobeyed him. 'I want hex her,' he said to the Obeahman 'wife belly fill with another man child.' When he returned his step was light, his head clear and free and he rolled the small fetish the shaman had given him around in his palm. He placed it hidden in the house, just as the Obeahman said and set off for the fields where he worked his strong body until sunset.
When her time came she took herself away from the village and laid down in the scant shade of a twig-like tree. She returned in the evening with the child wrapped in a bloody cloth.
'I kep' your family, put food in they belly and aint no complain 'cause they already livin' on God's earth but what you done is a bad thing, bringing a baby in the world aint wanted,' he pushed past her roughly and refused to look at the baby in her arms.
'Help me Papa,' she said to the Obeahman 'this child bring nothing but trouble.'
'Child aint the trouble,' replied the shaman evenly.
She pressed the bundle into his arms and hurried away and when she returned to the house without the baby her husband made no mention of it. The pain in her belly began soon after she made the evening meal and, abandoning her food, she crept to her bed and lay down.
He could almost feel the fetish in the house. It seemed to sing to him from its hiding place and more than once he sneaked away to check on it. Made up from clandestinely collected and microscopic body parts and bound together with a piece of her dress and incantations, it nestled innocently in the marital bed no longer used. He knew she'd never find it there. 'Do your work,' he whispered urgently to it 'take her and her cheating man away.' Without error he carefully recited the sacred words the Obeahman had given him and lay down to sleep.
Msoto was in agony now. The pain travelled relentlessly upwards and coiled around her heart, squeezing it like a vice, and she fell back, heart hammering violently in her chest until it hammered no more.
Fear fired him out of his slumber in the dead of night and he sat bolt upright shivering in his blanket. He saw himself asleep and deep in dreams, entwined in his blanket. He saw himself unmoving except the one part of him which responded to her silent ministrations. He heard the secret words she whispered in his ear, words that kept his spirit from returning to his body while she pulled herself astride him¦
His return to consciousness was fleeting, just long enough for him to know what he'd done before he collapsed on his blanket, and when death hardened the body his face kept its eerie look of surprise.
The Obeahman took the news quite calmly when the ragged group of children appeared at his door stunned and dry-eyed in shock over the unexplainable deaths of their father and young stepmother.