fair warning: references to bullying and corporal punishment.
*The past comes to you sometimes, especially now when i see myself turning grey and my parents growing fainter, their eyes seeing into another place. I am memory. *
In my mother's backyard lived an orange tree, its bark spotted with a skin sickness peculiar to orange trees. Each morning it left its leaves on the ground, still wet but already drying to brown. Its thorns were big and sharp and waited readily for anyone daring enough to climb. Its branches were high so you had to climb its trunk to get hold of the lowest lift. But its fruits hung round and ready, swollen with juice so sweet the birds sang every morning when a ripe fruit heavy with seed plucked itself from root & settled on the soil. Sometimes, I got lucky and found an untouched fruit on the ground, ripe and ready to eat.
But this was not always so. Sometimes, to get the fruits, my elder brother had to climb into those thorns and shake the branches while I and my other siblings filled basins with the lush green and yellows. Sometimes, my father used an iron pole to bring down the fruits. In either case, they came down in their plenty. We often gave gifts of oranges to neighbours and took some to church for harvests and thanksgiving gifts. Because everyone knew they will get oranges when they were in season, no one disturbed the tree so it grew fat and green, its leaves waiting for me every morning. I hated the task of sweeping that backyard but the kitchen window looked on from that side of the house and my mother was always there watching even as she prepared the day's breakfast.
The sound of sweeping was one of the most common ways through which I knew a new day had began. There was so much soil and greenery in those days. Every flat had a garden behind where ugwu (pumpkin leaf), bitter leaf, water leaf, yam, green, and in some cases cassava grew. In my case, my father had the above plants planted apart from cassava but he also had flowers; roses, hibiscus, lilies, and some whose names I do not know planted around our flat. We also had a guava tree, a mango tree, sugarcane and a pawpaw tree. It was a beautiful clean place to come of age.
During one difficult period in our lives, my mother planted cassava and groundnuts. I followed her to where she ground the cassava and sat with her by the fire while she fried the ground cassava to yellow garri ( a common staple in Nigeria). I found the fermenting and grinding process dirty, maybe because of the smell, but the frying; I didn't know hot garri could be that sweet. My parents had farming experience I think. They were self sufficient people. They tried.
It was my duty to water the flowers during the dry seasons as well as pick up after my father when he trimmed their branches into circles and cones. That was another task I hated. It was always done on Saturdays. Saturdays were supposed to be free days; no school but my parents knew how to hand out chores. We mostly had our first meal by 11am on Saturdays. We will sweep, wash, dust, rearrange, change, move and I will be sneezing by the time we were done. By the time we were done, everyone will be so tired, games like football or seeway or polingo or mopo will be the last thing on anyone's mind.
Siesta was compulsory. My mother enforced it. As she had her afternoon sleep, it was an unwritten law that everyone else had theirs, whether you want to or not, except my father of course. My father read his newspapers or listened to his radio at a low volume in the sitting room. During that time, the radio stations played mostly U.S country music, slow and sometimes sad songs. I did not like them but I got to know them from repetition and from being too restless to sleep.
In fact, I had discovered that my head could pass through the iron bars that protected our room window from burglars. So while the house slept, while the sun scorched the roof until it popped, I would slip through the window to play outside. This only happened when my father was at work. My mother tended to let me get away with little infractions. But the unwritten law was even though I dodged out to play, I had to be back in the house by 6pm, before my father's white Toyota wagon drummed its engine at the entrance to our close. Anytime I failed to get the message, my father reminded me with the cane on my buttocks or palm. I seldom got the message. My mother did instill discipline from time to time and in a strange way, I dreaded her brand of discipline more than my father. My father's presence alone was a deterrent for foolish behaviour but because my mother sometimes ignored my antics I often did not see her hand coming and she came down hard when she wanted to.
Yet, and this is the strangeness of my parents, at moments when I expected to get the beating of my life, they did nothing. Two incidents come to mind. The first was in school. I was small as a child. I still am small. As a result of my size, I got bullied a lot. I resented this. Like any person who has experienced this sort of abuse, when I discovered a boy smaller than myself in my class, I made him the target of my anguish.
It was football during long break at school. I was playing defence with this boy and another bigger boy. Actually myself and the small boy in question were more or less fillers as we barely paid attention to the game that we were supposedly playing. Our job was to kick the ball towards any direction whenever it came near us. It rarely did. Anyway, I was taunting this smaller fellow, hitting him and laughing like the bigger boys did to me. Somehow I got the boy on the ground and he was begging me to stop. I felt powerful so I ignored his pleas. Out of nowhere, the other boy ran up and jumped on top of me. Unfortunately, he landed on my right foot, twisting it somewhat. It was painful. When school closed, I went home hiding the injury.
In those days, I was what they now call a boy with swag. I had the way I walk. We called it feeling or filling back then. Nowadays, it is called swag. I bounced and limped when I walked. It was a style of walk like those rappers I saw on tv do. It took a deliberate attempt to hide myself from people's gaze to stop walking like that, something I regret now. I was small but that walk made people notice me. It seemed as if I had no fear even though I trembled inside. My family was used to me walking like a street smart boy. I had always walked like that. Though the walk is still there now, it is well hidden in a more formal stride of a man with aches all over his body. Age will tell.
On this evening though, I could not hide the pain. My father had some friends around. They were in the sitting room, drinking beer, talking about something or the other. My mother called i and my siblings to come eat our dinner. I came out, walking carefully, trying to maintain the nonchalance but failed because my mother noticed and she asked. I denied anything being wrong. She asked to see my leg and behold the foot was swollen and tender. I expected anger and maybe a whipping but my dad said nothing. He just watched as my mom got sheabutter, placed my foot between her laps and massaged the life out of it. I think I heard God that day. I have never felt pain so bad I began to have visions. I wept and pleaded but my mother went on until she was satisfied. She gave me paracetamol and sent me back to my food. That was the first time.
The second time, it was mopo. Mopo is a fun game involving a ball, bats and sticks. The rules are simple:
- Whoever holds the ball must attempt to hit someone else with it.
- Whoever is hit by the ball becomes it and the person has to pick the ball and try to hit another person.
- The person with the ball has limited movement. They can only move freely while the ball is been hit about by their opponents. Once they get a hold of the ball, they stop moving and must throw the ball from that spot.
- Every other player holds a bat or stick with which they can hit the ball to any distance.
Mopo is a hard game if you're not fast or rough or if you're cruel enough to send the ball flying into the bush and children can be cruel.
On this day, I had returned from school and had my lunch. My mother was still at work so it was just me and a sibling at home. Outside a game of mopo was about to start, so disobeying a major rule about not going outside when mother or father was not at home, we went to join the game. One of the players, breaking a rule, refused to stand where he was hit with the ball but rather pursued us. I have never been a runner. Also, a neighbour has sheets of zinc piled up on his sewage tank. There was a path around the tank but I was young and unbreakable. I jumped across the sheets of zinc and landed on the other side successfully but still got hit with the ball.
Everyone was laughing and I was arguing about the illegitimacy of the play when someone pointed out that I was bleeding. I was so pumped up with adrenaline, I felt nothing. I looked down at my leg and saw blood flowing down to my feet. Then I saw the wound. The game ended with everyone looking at me with fearful eyes. Everyone was afraid of their parents finding out they were out playing.
My sister took me back home and finished rolls of paper towels on the wound but it kept on bleeding. That afternoon it rained heavily. My mother came home drenched. She walked passed where I laid on a sofa, my leg raised like it was broken, my sister and I thinking the position would help stop the bleeding. She walked pass me to the kitchen to drop the roasted corn cobs and coconut she had bought. It was on her return from the kitchen she noticed my leg hanging. She drew closer and raised the paper towel soaking on it. She asked what happened and my sister and I told her. She said nothing. She went into the room, changed into some clothes, picked up her umbrella and took me to the hospital.
My leg was stitched and covered with plaster and cotton wool. When my father came back from work, he saw the injury. The next day, he took me to the hospital to change the plaster and did so everyday after that. Neither of them raised a hand on me or verbally attacked me. Until that wound healed, they never once made any reference to my error of judgment, at least not in my presence.
There have been other wounds since then, both physical and mental. I have learnt to hide most of them from my parents. I have learnt to carry pain and the consequences of bad judgment. This is what it means to grow old, for time to pass i guess.
My father still plants his flowers and fruit trees in his home. They still try to be selfsufficient now but they are older too and it has become difficult to carry these burdens alone and it shows in how they walk, work, talk and pray. Now i am the one who berates them when they make errors of judgment. I am the one who carries their wounds in my heart. Somehow, I still remember that orange tree and its bounty and how sometimes, its fruit was our dinner plus a story beneath lantern light and how inspite of how difficult it was for the two of them, young people as they were then, they did their best with what they had and for that, I am forever grateful.