Miracle was bent over a bucket overflowing with lather when she looked up and saw that the blue of the sky had been replaced with a moving, translucent white. Then, just as immediately as she had seen it, it disappeared, and the sky’s endless whitish-blue returned.
On the floor a few feet from her was a wide, white cloth. It spread out crumpled in places. She rose from where she sat washing and walked to the cloth and stood over it. It was the white she had seen when she looked up.
She hurried into the house to call her husband who was busy fiddling with a radio, trying to fix its antenna with balled foil.
It was late afternoon. Static buzzed in the room. He was sitting in an armchair by the open window, yet sweat ran down his back and tight, puckered face. “You have to see this,” she said, approaching him, and wiped her wet hands with the back of her wrapper. “You have to see what I just saw.”
He did not raise his head from the radio. He kept working it with the foil, twisting the antenna, wishing it would stay in place. Briefly, clear words escaped the radio, but the buzz returned. She turned the radio off. She seized his hand, took the foil from him, set it on the table, and said, “Come,” not minding his tired protest.
He followed her.
Outside, the compound was empty. Other tenants were away at work, their children in cozy classrooms, waiting impatiently for closing bells to go off so they could pack up colorful blue or red or black bags and run out of their classrooms, across fields, and play until their parents closed from work and came for them.
She led him to the cloth and he looked at her and asked, frowning, “What is this?”
“It fell from the sky. I looked up and it was just there, falling from the sky. It landed on the floor and spread out like this.”
He looked at her like she was crazy.
It was not the first time she was saying something like that. When she lost her fourth pregnancy, she had blamed it on a bird. That morning, she had woken up and seen a bird in front of their flat, picking, she had said, at nothing on the ground. He had answered that birds did that sometimes and there was nothing in it, should they go see another doctor? But then she told him that on her way to work, when she started feeling the familiar pain, she looked outside the window of the bus to hide her tears and saw the same bird she had seen at home winking at her from the branch of a tree.
He wondered if this, too, was one of those moments and said, “You have come again with this your …”
“I swear it,” she cut in, “I swear. I was washing and my back started aching because I had been sitting for so long, so I was stretching and I saw it fall like this out of the sky.”
As she had earlier, Kunle stood over the cloth and looked at it, his arms folded behind him. It was stainless. It shone.
“Are you sure you saw it fall out of the sky?”
“Yes, I swear it,” she said. “We don’t have anything like it. I wash for everyone in this house and no one has anything like it. I have never seen this cloth in this house.”
She paused.
“What do we do with it, Kunle?”
“We take it inside,” he said, and they looked at each other and got to work.
He stood on one end of the cloth and she manned the other. They both picked up the two ends on either side. They joined one tip to the other, folding the cloth into a wide rectangle. Then they kept repeating this until the cloth was a slender rectangle. Holding the four ends as they had at the beginning, they walked up to each other and Kunle joined his with Miracle’s, and she gave the cloth one final fold and cradled it like a baby.
Kunle looked around as she entered. The house was quiet, still. The large cashew tree trembled in the distance. He followed her and bolted the door behind them.
Inside, he cleared the broken radio’s parts off the center-table and Miracle placed the rectangular cloth on it.
They both sat watching it, trying to decide what to do, waiting, hoping for something to happen.
***
For a while nothing happened.
Kunle fell sleep on the three-seater couch that dominated the parlor from its place against the wall. Miracle left him and returned to finish washing. After spreading the clothes on the line –three of Kunle’s T-shirts, two of her wrappers, a white dress dotted with blue clouds, and her faded, pink chemise – she went about other chores, humming a tune.
There was heat inside even though power had been restored; their ceiling fan, old and dirty, blew hot. Miracle unwound her wrapper and tied it around her waist, so that the rest of her body from the waist up was unclad, her breasts bobbing as she walked to the standing OX fan and turned it on. The fan had a grating start to it when on 1; she turned the controller to 3 and only its electronic whir and Kunle’s snore could soon be heard in the parlor.
A call woke Kunle up. It rang out as he was trying to rouse himself. It was Mr. Ajagbe, his old boss at Rudolph Chemicals, where he worked as a branch manager until last September, before he was accused of stealing company funds and sacked. He had been innocent, but there had been much evidence to the contrary because someone had set him up and done a good job at it. The call shocked him.
Mr. Ajagbe called again. He let it ring out a second time. Before the phone even rang out the third time, he picked the call and said, “Hello, Sir!”
Mr. Ajagbe was all cheers, as if they were lovers finding each other after months of trouble on a random night with the conditions right, as if the man had not, months back, looked him in the eye and called him a bloody, good-for-nothing thief in the full glare of his co-workers.
He asked how things had been, how far along Miracle was, what he had been up to. Kunle played along. He matched his questions with hearty answers, asked about his wife and children, the company, his health.
Mr. Ajagbe finally worked up the courage and said, “I am calling to offer you a job, Kunle. I know how things were when you left. I gave you a name that wasn’t yours. I’m terribly sorry. We found the person that stole the money. I want you to come back please.”
“Sir?”
“Yes. I want you to oversee the entire business, the whole thing, all the branches. I am stepping down for health reasons and I need someone I can trust. You see, I am an old man, I need someone like you on ground. It’s three times your old salary, Kunle. That is the only way I can truly apologize.”
There was a pause. Mr. Ajagbe asked, “Can you hear me?”
Miracle was standing close to Kunle. She saw the shock on his face and whispered kilo sele?
He gestured for her to wait.
“Yes, I can, I can,” he said and cleared his throat. “I’ll come and see you first thing tomorrow, Sir.”
They heard a knock on the door just as he was about to speak again. Miracle went to answer it. It was the neighbor’s daughter Goodness. She knelt down and wiped dust off her knees as she rose. She was still in her school uniform, a brown pinafore worn over a white shirt that hugged her slight frame.
“How was school, Goodness?”
“Fine, Ma. My mummy wants to see you. She said I should tell you that it is very, very urgent.”
Miracle shouted over her shoulder that she would be back soon, stepped out, and followed the child, trying to match her quick, sharp steps, which were only a beat away from a run, yet measured, almost graceful, in their sharpness.
***
While she waited for Mummy Goodness to come out of the bathroom, Miracle had Goodness and her blind father for company. Goodness was on the floor next to the center-table, writing an assignment, her back turned to Miracle. Her free hand tugged at the pink bow in her hair, which, full and dark, was packed into a large bun. Her father was in an armchair across from Miracle. His head faced the ceiling. Miracle looked at his upturned nose, his blank, white eyes. She remembered watching him wash his car every morning when they had first moved in, how carefully he scrubbed the tyres of his Sienna, the hearty way he answered whenever she greeted him. One day he went to see his mother at Waterside and returned with a mysterious illness that took his legs, a big, blue gout suddenly materializing in his left foot, and then his eyes, the black of which disappeared one morning, leaving him blind and condemned to a chair.
Mummy Goodness appeared in a blue robe that flattened her cherry-sized breasts. She filled the room with a sweet scent. They greeted and she apologized for keeping Miracle waiting. She wanted to know, she said, as soon as she sat in the chair next to Miracle, if Miracle would be interested in a cleaning job. Her brother from whom she had been estranged for years had recently returned from America and needed someone to do thorough cleaning at their family house in Odogbolu. The job would take her less than a week, and for that week she’d earn close to 300k naira.
She quickly did the maths: each flat paid her 15k for cleaning every month, five flats coming to less than 80k, and this job was for a week, for which she’d be paid what would normally take her three months or more to make. It made total sense.
“You can think about it,” Mummy Goodness said.
Miracle laughed, and then, through her laughter, said, “What’s there to think about, Ma? I want to do it. Ese gan.”
Mummy Goodness gave her the address and a number to call. She knelt and thanked her and returned to her flat, where Kunle, sweating, had been making dinner.
He was whistling and stirring yam porridge when she walked in. His movements were quick, animated. A certain cheer had enveloped him. She knew it had something to do with the phone call. She asked him what the phone call had been about. He paused, covered the pot, and led her out of the kitchen and into the dining area. He made her sit and said, “I am coming.”
He returned from the kitchen after some minutes with their food. She asked him what was going on. “Je ka jeunna,” he said, laughing. “Let’s eat first.”
They ate. He put his hand on her thighs as they ate. He fed her chunks of meat and pomo from his own plate. He wiped sweat off her face, filled her cup with water, cleaned up when they finished.
They had rested a bit before he broke the news. Shocked, she also shared hers.
They remembered the cloth on the center-table at the same time. Saying nothing to each other, they hurried into the parlor, where the cloth shone, bright and defiant, under the pale lights in their flat.
Miracle held Kunle as they settled into a chair before the white cloth. Something dead inside them stirred, brushed dust off its bottom, and floated, feral, across the room. There, they made love, both of them a tender, trembling mass filling the room, the house, the dark compound, the warm, starry night with their sweet song, wrapped in a strange new light.
***
Before it came to be theirs, there had been multiple sightings of the white cloth in many places. While Miracle slept, a smile plastered to her face, Kunle woke up in the middle of the night and after trying different keywords – white cloth, white cloth falling out of the sky, cloth falls from sky, miracle white cloth – found an old article online on a website called Ness Ruberts Online. Ness, an American anthropologist, detailed his encounter with the cloth in the article, whose title was HOSANNA. It was from 2008:
I was in the middle of nowhere running from a divorce and buried in research work when I first encountered Hosanna. It was just me and the turmoil roiling inside my heart until it came into my life – a wide white rectangular piece of clothing the size of two regular duvets combined. I looked up and I saw it descending riding on a parcel of wind and when the parcel broke it fell to the ground and I felt for the first time in a while at peace. I was drawn to it than I have ever been in my life to anything. I think it pulled me in or spoke to me. I returned home with it telling no one and my wife no longer wanted a divorce. She wanted to work things out. She wanted to fix things to stay and fight for us. I won a grant I had been applying to for years. My life took a good turn. Until the woman came to me …
The rest of the article was behind a paywall. Kunle checked the subscription plans. The cheapest was 10 dollars, roughly 15k naira. He fetched his card and typed in his details. He broke a sweat. The transaction failed. He tried again a couple more times and when the same thing happened over and over, he gave up and searched Ness Ruberts. He hoped he would find a website, an e-mail address to write to, anything. All he found was another article from 2012 announcing Ness’s death. Popular conspiracy theorist, Ness Ruberts, found dead, the headline ran. Kunle read the article. Morning was getting closer. Its light, still faint, seeped through the windows.
The article led him to Ness’s YouTube page, where he found a video about the cloth. Ness had white, wooly hair. His eyes were vacuous. He seemed edgy. He was wearing a black sweatshirt. Behind him was a painting of a woman who had a bird painted over her left eye. He talked about the cloth, about a woman clothed in white who came to him a full day after he first found the cloth, warning him to not be selfish with it, to not try to keep it for himself. He was to share the cloth with others, let them touch it and ask for whatever they wanted and it would be done. But he had gone against everything the woman had told him. Fearing that people would try to take it from him, he had kept the cloth to himself, and he and his wife, for many months, used the cloth however they wanted. They amassed so much wealth in so little time. There were no consequences. Until he saw the woman again, this time in a dream, and the cloth was gone before he woke up.
Kunle watched many other videos. In some Ness talked about the cloth being sighted in many places. He interviewed a masked man, a leading tech entrepreneur whose business had raised fifty million dollars in seed capital from an investor who was never found. The businessman said he touched the cloth in Patna and later, on a retreat, he went on to figure out what was next for him. He said his wish has been granted.
In 2011, months before Ness was found dead in his home in Oklahoma, the videos stopped.
Kunle looked around the room, out the window. Morning was everywhere.
Miracle stirred. She brushed her eyes as she sat up. She looked at Kunle and smiled. He told her to come. Groggy, she ambled over, and he told her everything.
That evening, the woman came to them. She was fair. Her skin was neat, spotless, the white of her eyes milky and the black jet.
Kunle met her at the door.
Miracle stood behind him and listened.
“We know what to do,” Kunle said.
“I know,” she said and walked away.
The large black gate, its padlock intact, looked dour and merciless in the distance.
***
Mummy Goodness was the first person Miracle told. Before telling her, she made the woman swear she wouldn’t tell anybody about it without first letting her know. The woman was hesitant at first, but she swore, bit the key she had been twirling around her finger.
“This cloth can heal Daddy Goodness,” Miracle said, shocked at her own confidence.
“Where have we not gone to, Ma? We have been everywhere. No one has been able to heal him.”
“Just try, Ma. Try. If it does not work, you don’t lose anything, abi?”
“And you say this cloth fell from the sky?”
“Yes.”
“And got your husband his job back?”
She nodded.
Mummy Goodness followed her and touched the cloth and prayed that her husband would be completely healed. She wanted his legs back, his eyes back, their family wealth back. By the time she returned to their apartment, her husband was on his feet. He had the black of his eyes back. His legs were not swollen. He crashed to the floor screaming and crying when he saw her, and she joined him, and they both cried and cried and cried, holding each other.
Kunle returned that evening with Mr. Ajagbe and his wife. He had told him about the cloth and the man wanted to be healed, too, of diabetes; his wife wanted a bigger store at New Market, more money for her children, good health for her family. They asked and it was done.
Everything they asked for was given.
***
News of the cloth spread and people started to come from all over – in trickles at first, then in their numbers – to touch it. There was a crowd every day in front of their flat, the compound stuffed to the throat with people: white people, their skins reddened by the harsh sun, voices so high it made Miracle laugh; sack-bellied Nigerian men who parked black Range Rovers and Hyundais along the road that led to their house and called Kunle offering millions to touch the cloth; Indians with names like Pratik, Anjaney, and Prashant, most of them men, except the pretty woman Miracle swore she had seen on TV before; loud Black-Americans, Area Boys threatening to tear their door down if they were not attended to, pastors and imams. Sometimes fights broke out. People got injured. Miracle and Kunle, undeterred, worked all day, letting people in, letting them out, counting money, tired yet giddy, their bank accounts swelling by the second. After another burglary attempt, they moved out of their flat to a guarded house in G.R.A., a gift from a politician they helped win his party primaries and then the gubernatorial election.
***
The house was large. It had a wide lawn that held more than a hundred people at once. A tall black gate shielded it.
Armed men guarded it all day. Five of them – two at the gate, one at the main door, and two at the entrance to the room in which they kept the cloth locked away, behind bulletproof glass. Only a portion of it was let out through a small hole at the foot of the glass, so that anyone who wanted to touch it had to kneel down.
They went on like this for several months, during which Miracle got pregnant again.
In her sixth month they decided to slow things down so she could rest. Kunle, too, had started to grow tired. They selected twenty people every week from a large pool, and then, with a very high admission fee, pared the list down to ten. These ten were then allotted specific times during the day. If they showed up late and needed more time, they had to pay additional fees or wait until another lot was drawn. Outside their house an angry mob formed, day and night crying to be let in. Kunle increased the security. The milder policemen, once almost ran over by the crowd, were replaced with eager soldiers who beat the errant mob within an inch of death.
Kunle grew anxious and worried for his wife. Their life had been completely upturned and there was nothing he could do. He thought often about Ness lying dead in his Oklahoma home – his face pale, his lips blue, the rest of his body going frigid – found many days after he had passed by neighbors who couldn’t shake off the pungent smell coming from the house.
Kunle and Miracle were doing the right thing; they did not try to keep the cloth to themselves, but letting the whole world in wore them both out. There was no room for them. They had no life. It was sweet at first, all the money coming in, all the fame, but it became unbearable. More than anything, Kunle wanted some quiet, but he had no respite, not even at night while others slept, because Ness came to him in a dream, warning him to let the cloth go, to give it up.
In the dream Ness had no accent. He spoke in scattered, unsteady English. In yet another dream Kunle was in Oklahoma, at Ness’s home, standing next to his body, death thick in the air. From such dreams Kunle always woke up struggling to breathe, Miracle next to him, shouting his name, “Kunle! Kunle! Kunle!”
***
A slap on the wrist woke Kunle up. It was Miracle.
“My water,” she said. “My water just broke.”
He rushed out of bed and turned on the light. The purple spread was soaked. He helped her downstairs to the car. Two of the soldiers followed them to Olu-Ola Hospital, one driving, the other on Miracle’s right, Kunle on the left.
She gave birth not long after they arrived at the hospital, but the baby, the doctor told Kunle, tapping him lightly on the shoulder, had come out dead, and Miracle was alive but still unconscious.
Kunle drove back home. He would ask the cloth for the life of his wife and child.
Their gate had been thrown open when he arrived. A soldier sat wounded against the wall outside. There were hundreds of people on the lawn, in a crazed lump, struggling with something he could not see from afar. A woman turned and he saw her clutching a piece of the cloth.
He waited for her at the gate, and, weeping, said, “I’ll give you anything you want for that cloth.”
She looked at him, cradling the cloth, which was no longer just a piece but the whole thing, and said, “I thought you knew what to do.”
And, with that, she was gone. ▪