Having concluded the unusually prolonged session, and without knowing or meaning it to be their last time together, her children leave for school, promising to abide by her words. However, before leaving, they elicit a promise from her to prepare their favorite for lunch.
At noon, she is sitting on a mat in the balcony known as the Obi with a bowl of food in her hands. Some newly made thatch baskets are beside her, with a half-made one lying nearby, too. On the left is a bunch of processed thatch materials for the baskets, with numerous pieces of it scattered around the Obi. She moved the half-made one aside so that she can eat; she was working on that one before she decided to prepare lunch.
The Obi of her maternal home, is a separate building perpendicularly positioned and away from the main house. Now, sitting sprawled and still eating her lunch inside the Obi, she can hear thudding footfalls coming through the scorched path outside. It is the Harmattan, and she could feel the nostalgic wind blow as well as hear the familiar whistles of dry leaves. She now hears the leaves crushing quickly in surrender beneath the feet of whoever is approaching her home at this unusual hour. Or maybe they are going to visit the next compound, and would soon divert?
No, the footsteps are not diverting. Instead, they are promptly coming closer now, and they stop right in front of the Obi. She barely looks up from her sitting position to see who her unexpected visitors are. It is her in-laws: Dike, Onuma, and Onochie!
Recently, with their continued pressure on her, she has developed an aggressive stance toward them, and this fateful afternoon is not any different.
“God! Why won’t they just leave me alone?” she mumbles to herself plaintively, feeling disappointed. She hardly expected such visitation this afternoon, so she merely removes her gaze from them and rather concentrates on her food, not knowing what to say to them.
They enter the Obi without her summons, after having been deliberately ignored for some time standing there. She gets very angry and charges at them, moving her unfinished meal aside. She tells them in a loud voice powered by anger to go home now and leave her in peace, but they remain inside the Obi and refuse to go.
Their continued unwelcome presence upsets her even more now. She tries not talking to them, thinking that will be enough spite for them. Still they continue to stay, hoping her obvious displeasure will taper down.
Then suddenly, she gathers herself up from her sitting position and dashes off toward the main house without warning. She says she will get her pestle to turn them into cocoyam pudding, unless they leave.
While she is inside looking for the pestle, Onuma quickly signals the most ruthless of the three, Dike, who then immediately pours a few drops of a powdered venom onto Susan’s meal. She left her bowl of food aside, behind the newly made baskets. Dike hastily replaces the poison bottle carefully inside the deep hem of his old red chieftaincy cap. That is one of the unsuspecting parts of his clothing where he normally hides it.
This is surely not an accident at all. It is an opportunistic strike!
Recently, upon Susan’s continued defiance to their advances and their consequent decision to terminate her life, they always visited her with the potion secretly hidden in their hood, concealing the secret motives of their calls. They have waited for an opportunity to strike, the same way the kite spies and waits patiently on its prey. And now, the mission is accomplished.
Susan now emerges from the house with her pestle.
Seeing her armed, Dike, Onuma, and Onochie merely take to their heels. She pursues their shadows as they run toward the roads. She is warning, shouting, threatening, and cursing with her pestle in hand, until they disappear from her sight.
She now walks back to the house after the race. With pestle still in hand and heart beating vigorously after the sprint, she ambles back into the Obi and promptly reaches for her unfinished meal. She finishes the meal as much as she can, savoring the sweetness, yet she is faintly aware of a slight change in taste. It never occurs to her to consider what may have happened while she was inside searching for the pestle.
When she is finished eating, she relaxes, free of the invaders who are long gone. She leans her back to rest a while before continuing with her basket work.
A few minutes later, while working on the next basket, she starts feeling a little discomfort around her lower abdomen. It makes her uneasy, and soon her breath begins to seize at little intervals. She is suffocating and choking—the poison is at work! She throws the basket aside and turns to lie flat on her belly, but it does not help.
“Oh God!” she cries.
She rolls all over the floor, helpless, holding unto her painful belly. She catches her breath in quick gasps and then, begins to vomit.
Unfortunately, she is alone in the house. Others have gone to work or to the farm, and the children are at school. Even in the neighborhood, only the noise of domestic animals can be heard. Everyone has gone to his or her various place of work. There is nobody around to hear Susan and to take her to the village clinic, just a stone’s throw away.
She is lying helpless, yelling and struggling to live for her children, but to no avail. Eventually she resigns with the struggle and now draws her two arms close to hold her head. She realizes it is her time to die, and she prays silently to God, beseeching her children’s welfare.
Then, steadily and very gradually, she gently floats away.
Okechukwu is the first to enter the compound this afternoon, followed in quick steps by Cynthia. He is presently running ahead of Cynthia to report to their mother a particular incident that happened at school today, and Cynthia is coming after him to stop him before he lets the cat out of the bag. The incident was between Cynthia and a girl called Chinaka, her classmate. In the morning, they had argued over whose duty it was to sweep their classroom for the day, and they were eventually punished.
This morning, their classroom was not swept, and therefore it was very unkempt when the sanitary mistress came for the routine check.
It is a Tuesday. According to the duty roster of the class, each student has a particular day assigned for his or her sanitary duties, every week. Cynthia’s turn to sweep the classroom has always been Fridays, so she is surprised to hear her class prefect tell Mrs. Okoro, the sanitary mistress, that she is the one that was to have swept the class today.
In her classroom, immediately after the general morning assembly, Mrs. Okoro is standing in front of the students with her long cane. The students, a collection of about thirty-five teenage boys and girls, are all sitting quietly as Mrs. Okoro scans their faces and the classroom in inspection.
From her seat, Cynthia rises in bemusement as the class prefect calls her name. She says, “Me?”
“Yes, you!” says the prefect. He is a boy named Emeka and is one of the school’s rich boys. But Emeka is also intelligent and smart, and hence he was made the captain of his class.
“But today is Tuesday not Friday. I don’t sweep the classroom on Tuesdays but Fridays,” Cynthia remarks, annoyed that Emeka called her name.
She and Emeka are not very good friends, and he is fond of always putting her down at the playground. She avoids Emeka anytime she can. But he always likes to let her know she is not in his envied clique any time he gets a chance of it. And now, he is calling her to be punished by the much-dreaded Mrs. Okoro.
Cynthia and Emeka are now looking at each other like two lions ready to fight. Emeka seems to be gloating at her bad luck. She purses her lips, feeling defeated as she looks askance at Mrs. Okoro, who focuses her blazing gaze on her.
“Come out here, you!” commands Mrs. Okoro to Cynthia. Cynthia comes out to the front of the class at once. “Don’t you know that cleanliness is next to godliness?” she queries. “Are you not aware of our school rules?” She pauses briefly and then continues after glancing round the classroom once more in dissatisfaction. “You stubborn girl! Why didn�
��t you sweep your classroom? Are you ready to take the punishment?”
Cynthia protests amid Mrs. Okoro’s rising temper. “Aunty, please, it’s not my turn today. It’s Chinaka’s turn to sweep the class. Today is Tuesday,”
“Hey! Don’t even call my name there!” warns the girl Chinaka, who rises from her seat and points a long, slim finger at Cynthia.
“You know you are the one to sweep the classroom, and you didn’t!” challenges Cynthia.
“Who said I am the one? It’s not I but you who are to sweep this classroom today. I sweep on Wednesdays,” Chinaka shoots back.
“Liar!” Cynthia interjects. Then she turns toward Mrs. Okoro and adds, “Aunty, it’s not true. She is lying. She sweeps on Tuesdays. She is the one to sweep today, not me.”
“Shut up! Why did your class prefect call your name?” barks Mrs. Okoro, who is now getting impatient.
“Aunty, I don’t know. Please ask the class; they will tell you the truth.” Cynthia pleads, her eyes stained with tears. She is blinking them away very rapidly in her panic and fear of Mrs. Okoro.
Mrs. Okoro turns away from her, not wanting to pay any attention to her whining or tears.
The other students in the class are all sitting, cringing, murmuring, and fidgeting at Mrs. Okoro’s thunderous voice, while waiting for the moment she will unleash her powerful strokes of cane on the unlucky child.
Mrs. Okoro now turns to the class again and asks in an angry and highly raised voice, “Now, class, tell me the truth and stop wasting my time—before I decide to punish all of you right now. Who is responsible for sweeping your classroom on Tuesdays?” A brief deafening silence befalls the class.
“Before the count of three. One, two, thr—”
The students start murmuring aloud in fright. “You! Stand up!” Mrs. Okoro suddenly says, pointing her long cane at a boy. He stands. “Who sweeps your classroom on Tuesdays?” she demands.
“Ma, it is Chinaka Okonkwo,” the boy says in earnest, his fear of Mrs. Okoro very evident in his faint voice and jitters.
“Aunty, it’s a lie!” cuts in Chinaka from her seat.
“Shut up and come out here’!’ barks Mrs. Okoro at the girl, who seems rather nonchalant. The class continues to murmur aloud. “Silence! Why are you all confused?” she asks them.
“Auntie, I sweep on Wednesdays—you can ask the prefect!” says Chinaka from her seat, half in tears.
“And you, prefect?” Mrs. Okoro says, looking at the boy Emeka. “Can you explain all this?”
“Ma, Chinaka sweeps on Wednesdays, while Cynthia sweeps on Tuesdays. It’s in the new roster,” he says, obviously sweating and panicking.
“New roster? Do we have a new roster?” Cynthia asks, bewildered.
“Yes, Cynthia, see it here. We are no longer using the old one,” explains the prefect, straightening the new roster from its neat folds for her to see. He has just brought it out of his school bag.
“Since when, Emeka?” Cynthia asks him with eyes sparking bright, feeling outsmarted. “And you didn’t inform the class!” she adds. Then she turns in fright toward Mrs. Okoro, having just seen her name on the roster for Tuesdays. Now she realizes she will eventually be the scapegoat. She takes a moment to look in Emeka’s direction, and she can see his suppressed, mischievous smile. Shifting her glance from him, she can also see the elation of Chinakas’s triumph. Feeling so helpless, she turns back to Mrs. Okoro. “Aunty, please I’m sorry, I didn’t know about the new roster. Nobody told me, and I…” she pleads, her voice trailing off as she begins to cry. She is afraid of Mrs. Okoro and her dreaded punishments.
But this is more than Mrs. Okoro can take. She normally gets her intense punishments on any convenient student, and she hates to hear excuses. Even though she knows her responsibility as a teacher is often right as a disciplinarian, she usually treats the students with the notion of a one-ended disciplinarian, always seeing them as deliberately stubborn and disobedient.
“Will you shut up and kneel down? How can you be in this class and yet not know about the changes? You must be a lazy student, then!” says Mrs. Okoro to Cynthia.
By now Cynthia is really in tears and half sobbing as Mrs. Okoro approaches her where she is kneeling.
She nervously moves few steps back on her knees, still protesting. “Aunty, please. I didn’t know the duty roster was changed. Emeka did not announce it to the class! He told only his friends and Chinaka, because they are from the same village.” She begs with tears flowing freely, hoping to be pardoned.
“Class, is this true?” asks Mrs. Okoro, stupefied with astonishment.
The majority answer yes while only the minority of Emeka’s clique say no.
Suddenly there is a swift turn-around as Mrs. Okoro says, “Where is the Chinaka girl?” She asked, looking to Chinaka’s direction. “Out here! And you, class prefect, jump out here too!”
Both come to the front of the class regrettably, protesting in their own ways to declare their innocence. But all that weeping and protesting falls on the deaf ears of Mrs. Okoro as she screams in annoyance at them for having wasted so much of her time. She flogs them severely, four strokes each, and finally orders them to sweep the classroom. Cynthia is not exempted completely. Although she misses, Mrs. Okoro’s strokes, she shares in the sweeping.
Because Mrs. Okoro did not flog Cynthia, Chinaka gets jealously infuriated and takes it personally. She is so angry to a point that when Mrs. Okoro eventually leaves the class, she challenges Cynthia to a fight after school, threatening to beat the daylight out of her.
However, the four strokes of Mrs. Okoro are worth more than ten strokes of another teacher in the secondary school. Mrs. Okoro’s strokes are particularly hot and swelling, such that the students tag it “powerful strokes”.
Her character and demeanor toward the students is also very unfriendly. The students find her quite unapproachable. She is known to shout a lot while instructing them, such that everything she says is either a command or an order that must be adhered to strictly. Coupled with her intimidating height and that thunderous voice, her office as the sanitary mistress of the school fetches her the nickname Lioness from the students.
However, Cynthia is frightened by Chinaka’s threat. She is no match at all for Chinaka in that kind of fight, and she knows she can’t fight like her. Before the end of the break, she goes to Okechukwu’s classroom to inform him of her plan: once the last bell goes for dismissal, he must wait for her at an agreed place on the side road, where she will meet him through an apian way.
This is how they get together after school, and she narrates the event to him while they are coming home.
Six
Having refreshed after lunch, which their mother carefully covered for them in the kitchen, they go about their chores.
Hours later, an untold, deafening silence befalls the compound. Their mother’s body is still lying at the Obi.
Upon entering the compound, they saw her and thought she was asleep as she was lying prostrate in the Obi, with her two arms folded into a pillow for her head. Cynthia playfully warned Okechukwu not to disturb her sleep when he had been running to report that incident at school, and he obliged, saving his tattle for later. They had therefore walked passively past the Obi and gone straight into the main house.
When they returned from school, it was about 1:30 p.m., but now it is 4:00, and their mother is still sleeping. Cynthia now wonders at such an unusual sleep. She imagines their mom must have overworked herself today, which explains why she is resting so endlessly and without care.
But even that is still unusual because on other days, the sound of their footsteps alone is enough to wake her, coupled with their cheery voices. And Cynthia notices another unusual thing still about her mother’s nap: she had not seen her stir or stretch all these while; she just lies there in the same spot
, so still!
Without suspecting anything and in a free spirit, Cynthia decides to wake her up at last, at least just to say good afternoon. She has been playing ball with Okechukwu all the while in front of the Obi. Suddenly she stops throwing the ball and walks into the Obi. Kneeling beside her mother’s body, she tickles her gently, but no response comes. She tickles again and more seriously this time, and nothing happens. Then Cynthia shakes her gently and pulls one of her legs, saying, “Mummy, Mummy, wake up! We’ve come back!” But still nothing comes from Susan.
Then suddenly, Cynthia feels goose bumps all over her body, and her head reels at the same time. A sizzling sensation of fear awakens in her soul, unbidden, as she feel the very cold temperature and stiffness of her mother’s body. She knows it is not a normal body temperature.
At the same time, she sees a bowl of a meal, slightly hidden by some newly made baskets. She wonders briefly at it and then turns her mother’s lifeless body around. She is greatly alarmed to see some white coagulate smeared on her mother’s lips and face; blood clots cover her nostrils, too. There are also some bloodstains, and the stains of the whitish substance, on the floor where her head rested. Susan vomited the whitish foamy substance that is now coagulated when she was suffocating and struggling for her life earlier in the afternoon.
As the details now dawn on Cynthia, she loses her breath in a loud yell and faints.
Okechukwu, who is still playing ball, casually now stops at Cynthia’s sudden outcry. Throwing the ball away, he rushes to the Obi. Seeing mother and sister fallen, he is confused, and he raises an alarm to invite the neighborhood.
Only few of the neighbors have returned from their different places of work, and they come to take Cynthia to the nearby clinic. Okechukwu is badly distressed. Two women are hereby sent to call Christy, Susan’s younger and only sister.
Before long, the neighbors take Susan’s stiff body inside, clean it, straighten it up as much as they can, and finally send it to the mortuary.
One Love, Many Tears Page 5