Folake

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 26: Folake

Dr. Akinyele drove up to Park Avenue on the last Saturday of August with her sister in the passenger seat.

Folake Akinyele was forty-six. She was a pediatrician. She had, two months ago in Atlanta, buried her father Adebayo in the small southwest cemetery he had chosen thirty years earlier, and she had decided — in the weeks after — to extend her stay in the United States through the summer before returning to Lagos, because her brother Tunde had finally flown out from San Jose and the three siblings had wanted the rare small stretch of weeks together that their father had, in his long illness, made possible.

She was in Memphis today because Tobi had driven her here.

Tobi had driven her because Mama Tate had, four months ago, asked her to.

They parked at the curb at ten forty-five. Tobi got out first, in the same dark green Subaru she had driven on the third Saturday in May, and she came around to the passenger side and opened the door for her sister, and her sister — who was wearing a pale blue dress and the small gold cross she had been wearing since her confirmation in 1995 and a small white cardigan against the possible chill of an American kitchen in August — stepped out slowly and looked up at the porch.

Mama Tate was in the wicker chair.

Yvonne was in the kitchen with Tiana. Carl was in the carport fiddling with the lawn mower that had been refusing to start since July and which Carl had decided today was the day to settle with. Marcus had flown in the night before for a long weekend with Naomi and was, at this hour, driving Naomi back to Whitehaven for the morning so the afternoon could be Mama Tate's.

"Tobi."

"Mama Tate."

"Bring your sister up."

They came up the steps.

Folake Akinyele stopped at the top. She had the same face as her sister, with the same careful features and the same shade of her grandmother Mama Funmi's cheekbones in the upper part of it, and she looked at Mama Tate with the small private look of a woman who had flown five thousand miles — across an ocean, across a summer, across a father's grave — to stand on a porch in Orange Mound and meet a woman she had heard about in her brother's Atlanta living room in June.

"Mother Tate."

"Folake."

"Tobi told you I was coming."

"She told me in June, baby. She told me again last week. I have been waiting. Sit down. Yvonne has coffee and she has tea. I did not know which you take. You tell me and she will bring it."

"Tea, Mother Tate. Thank you."

Tobi went inside to the kitchen to tell Yvonne. She left the two of them alone on the porch.

Folake sat. She set a small flat paper-wrapped package in her lap. She did not, immediately, open it. She looked out at the pecan tree.

"Mother Tate. Your grandson-in-law's tree is a good tree."

"It is, baby."

"We have a pecan tree at my parents' house in Lagos. My father planted it in nineteen eighty-seven from a pecan he had brought back in his pocket from a trip to Georgia. It should not have grown. Pecan trees do not grow well in Lagos. It grew. It is forty feet tall. My father said all his life that the Lord grew that tree because the Lord had decided the tree would grow. I believed him. I still believe him. My mother and Mama Funmi both cooked with the pecans."

"I would have liked to have seen that tree, Folake."

"I will send you a picture, Mother Tate. Tobi will print it for you on her nice printer. I will send many. I have been taking them for my brother for years."

"You do that, baby."

Tobi came back with a small tray — tea for Folake and coffee for Mama Tate and a small plate with two pieces of the cornbread Yvonne had made that morning. She set it on the small side table. She sat in the small wooden chair Carl kept on the porch for himself.

"Mother Tate."

"Tobi."

"Folake brought you a gift."

"She has the gift in her lap. She will give it to me when she is ready. I am an old woman. I know about gifts. You do not hurry the giving."

Folake smiled. It was a small wet smile.

"Mother Tate. I will give it now. I thought about whether to wait until later in the visit. I do not want to wait. I came a long way with it."

"Give it, baby."

Folake handed her the small flat package.

Mama Tate set it on her lap. She opened it slowly. The brown paper came off. Inside was a small wooden frame, about the size of a postcard, holding a black-and-white photograph.

The photograph was of an older woman sitting at a table. The woman was seated in front of a small window with white curtains. On the table was a small green notebook, open, with the woman's hand — strong, weathered, beautiful — resting on the open page. She was looking up at the camera the way an elder looks up when a grandchild has interrupted her with the camera — with a small patient smile, the smile of a woman who will not, today, rebuke the interruption.

Under the photograph, a small typed label: Olufunmilayo Adetola Akinyele. Lagos. 1991. At her prayer table.

Mama Tate set her hand on the frame.

She closed her eyes.

"Folake."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"This is Mama Funmi."

"Yes, Mother Tate. That is her. That is the small table in the back of our house in Ikeja where she did her morning prayers. The notebook in front of her on the table is her book. The one you have been adding to since May. That same notebook."

Mama Tate did not, for a long moment, speak.

When she opened her eyes they were wet.

"Folake. I have been praying for your grandmother since May fifteenth. I have been praying for her without knowing her face. I have been picturing her. The picture has been my own invention. Tonight I have her face."

"Yes, Mother Tate. I wanted you to have it. My sister told me, when she came back from Memphis in May, that you had sat with her and asked her to write Mama Funmi's name in your book. She told me what you said about the two of you being granddaughters of prayer warriors. I have been thinking about it since. My father said to me on the third of June — two days before he went — that if I ever met you, I was to tell you that he had learned about you on the night my sister drove home and that he had been glad. He said that when he went home — his words — he would tell Mama Funmi about you. He said Mama Funmi would want to know that her book was in another kitchen."

Mama Tate could not, for a moment, speak.

"Folake."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"Your father told her."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Mama Funmi knows about me."

"Mother Tate. I am a physician. I am also a woman with a grandmother who was the prayer warrior of the Ikeja branch of the Methodist church for sixty years and who taught me to pray when I was four. I do not, in my scientific life, speculate about the other side. In my grandmother's life — in the life I inherited from her — I am absolutely certain. My father is with her. They are together. He has told her. She knows."

Mama Tate nodded slowly.

She held the frame in both hands.

They sat for a long time with the photograph on Mama Tate's lap.

After a while Tobi said: "Mother Tate. Folake has a thing to ask you."

"Of course she does, Tobi. Nobody comes five thousand miles to my porch with a gift and a sister and does not have a thing to ask. I have been expecting the ask since the ladies drove up. Ask, Folake."

Folake folded her hands in her lap.

"Mother Tate. I have a patient. He is eleven years old. His name is Ifeanyi. He has — he has a kind of cancer that in American terms would be called neuroblastoma. Stage four. The resources I have in Lagos are — are limited. We are doing what we can. His family is poor. His mother is a seamstress. His father is gone. He has three younger sisters. The mother has been bringing him to me for two years. I have been — Mother Tate, I have been carrying him in my own practice past the point I would carry most patients, because there is something about the boy. He has been prayed over his whole life by his grandmother, who is a woman who reminds me of my own. She is the reason he is still alive. She sits with him in my office. She prays in Igbo over him while I examine him. I have learned her prayers by hearing them. I can say them now myself when I drive home from the clinic. I have been saying them for six months."

"Yes, baby."

"I would like to put Ifeanyi's name in your book. Mother Tate. I know you do not write. My sister told me. I am asking if Tiana would write him. I would like the boy to be carried by someone in Memphis — the way my sister's father is being carried, and my grandmother is being carried. I am asking because I believe — Mother Tate, I am a doctor, and I will say this as a doctor — that the keeping reaches across distances the medicine cannot reach. I have seen it. I have seen it in my own family. I have seen it in this boy's family. I am asking."

Mama Tate did not, for a moment, answer.

Then she said: "Folake. Tiana is in the kitchen with a pen. Yvonne, call Tiana out."

"Yes, Mama," Yvonne called from inside.

Tiana came out. She had the composition book under her arm and the felt pen already in her hand because Tiana had, Mama Tate suspected, been listening through the screen and had been preparing.

She knelt on the porch.

"Dr. Akinyele. What is his name."

"Ifeanyi Chukwuemeka. Spelled I-F-E-A-N-Y-I C-H-U-K-W-U-E-M-E-K-A. Age eleven. Of Lagos, Nigeria."

Tiana wrote it slowly. She wrote it in two-inch block letters, in the careful way she had been writing for three months. She wrote underneath: Neuroblastoma, stage 4. Poor family. Mother a seamstress. Three younger sisters. Grandmother prays over him in Igbo. Held by Dr. Folake Akinyele of Lagos.

She underlined Ifeanyi.

She looked up at Folake.

"He is in, Dr. Akinyele."

Folake closed her eyes.

She did not, for a long moment, speak.

When she opened them she said: "Tiana. Thank you."

"You are welcome, ma'am."

Folake turned to Mama Tate.

"Mother Tate. I want you to know. I was not going to ask. I had decided, on the flight down from Atlanta last night, that I would not. I did not think I had the right. I had come only to meet you and to bring the photograph. But when I sat down on this porch — when I was looking at the pecan tree — I had the clear sense that my grandmother was telling me to ask. The sense was not in any visible form. It was only a pressure. I have learned, in forty-six years, to trust the pressure. My grandmother was right. You received the ask. I am grateful."

"Folake."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"Your grandmother had you in her book since the day you were born."

"I know, Mother Tate."

"She has you there still. She has you in a larger book now — the one the Lord keeps, which no earthly keeper has ever seen. You are, in your work at your clinic, doing the keeping she taught you to do. You do not call it keeping. You call it pediatric medicine with a side of inherited grandmother prayer. It is the same work. Different dialect. Same work."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

"Ifeanyi is in two books now. Tiana's here. Yours there. The grandmother's third. That is three keepers for one boy. The Lord keeps ledgers. The boy is in good hands."

"Yes, ma'am."

They stayed until three-thirty. Yvonne brought out a light lunch — a sandwich each, the soup Yvonne had started that morning, a piece of cornbread — and they ate on the porch. Folake and Mama Tate traded stories. Folake told her about the Methodist church in Ikeja, about the small back-of-the-house table where Mama Funmi had prayed, about the prayer meetings her mother Adeola Akinyele — who had died in 2014 — had hosted in the same house before she had gone. Mama Tate told Folake about Mt. Calvary, about the Mothers' Board, about Mother Wells's funeral in June and what she had said from the pulpit.

Tobi listened. Tobi did not, today, say much. Tobi had, Mama Tate noticed, been quieter since her father had gone. Grief did that to some people. The quieter was not a worse; the quieter was a different. Tobi would be loud again in her own time.

At three-thirty Folake rose.

"Mother Tate. We must go. I am taking Tobi to her favorite barbecue place tonight. We have not eaten at Cozy Corner together since I was in graduate school. I fly back to Lagos on Tuesday. I wanted one night with my sister."

"You go, baby. Cozy Corner is Eldridge's favorite. Marcus ate there on the Fourth. Eldridge would approve. Tell Tobi to order the beans."

"I will tell her, Mother Tate."

Folake bent — slowly, carefully, with the small grace of a Yoruba woman raised by a grandmother who had taught her how to approach an elder — and she kissed Mama Tate on the cheek. She did not, in the kissing, say anything more. The kiss was the closing of the visit.

Tobi kissed her too.

"Mother Tate. I will be over on the fifteenth of next month with the new files."

"Yes, Tobi. I will be here."

Mama Tate did not, on the porch in late August, know for certain that she would be. Her body had begun, in the last two weeks, to have small afternoons she did not remember well the next morning. She had been trying not to think about the fifteenth of next month. She said the sentence anyway. The sentence was what one said on a porch when one was eighty-two and had been asked. She said it. The Lord would arrange the fifteenth.

The two women walked down the porch steps.

At the bottom Folake turned back.

"Mother Tate."

"Yes, Folake."

"Ifeanyi's mother — her name is Chinyere. I forgot to tell you. His grandmother is Nneka. If it is not too much to ask — if you could add them to the back page —"

"Tiana. Add them."

Tiana, who had been standing in the doorway with the book still open on the felt pen, wrote in the small clear hand: Chinyere Chukwuemeka, his mother. Nneka Chukwuemeka, his grandmother.

"Done, Dr. Akinyele," Tiana called.

"Thank you," said Folake from the path.

She got in the car. Tobi got in. They drove away.

Mama Tate watched the green Subaru to the corner and out of sight.

In the late afternoon, Mama Tate sat on the porch alone with the photograph of Mama Funmi on her lap.

She held the frame.

She looked at the face. The face of Mama Funmi was the face of a woman in her sixties — Mama Funmi had been sixty-one in 1991 when the photograph had been taken — and the small careful smile at the camera was, Mama Tate thought, the same small careful smile she herself had given when her grandson Marcus had taken her picture on Mother's Day.

Mama Funmi, she said, in the small interior voice, we never met. We did not need to. You taught your granddaughter to pray, and your granddaughter grew up to be my doctor, and the doctor came to my kitchen in May and wrote your name in my book, and today your other granddaughter brought me your picture from Lagos. I am going to keep you on my side table for the rest of my time. I am going to look at your face in the mornings when Tiana reads the names. The Lord let me see you today. Tell Him thank you for me on your side. I will tell Him thank you on mine.

And tell Eldridge, if you see him. Tell him your granddaughter is a good doctor and that she has been helping me through this year and that she drove her sister from Lagos to my porch today. He will laugh. He always liked hearing about visitors.

She closed her eyes.

The pecan tree shifted. The August light was beginning to change — she could feel the first small hint of the fall shift even though the temperature was still in the eighties — and the afternoon was the afternoon, and the Lord was the Lord, and the cloud of witnesses around the house had, this afternoon, an additional small face in a frame, and the keeping continued in two languages and across one ocean and through three countries, and the Lord, who knew the arithmetic, was the one keeping count.

She sat.

After a while Yvonne came out with a glass of iced tea for her and a small plate of the last piece of cornbread, and the two of them sat on the porch together, and Yvonne looked at the framed picture and said, softly, Mama, she has a good face, and Mama Tate said, Yes, baby. She does.

They sat.

Evening came.

The keeping continued.