One Love, Many Tears

by Gertrude U. Uzoh

  When his uncles indicate a readiness to retire, Okechukwu is as fast as light and creeps back as quietly as he came, unnoticed. Not the slightest sound is heard from him, and the men never know they had an extra company.

  The night is still dead, and the time is almost 2:00 a.m now.

  The men linger at their drinking binge a little longer, intoxicating themselves some more with palm wine, until they get really tired and stagger to their different rooms.

  Inside again with his sister and aunt, Okechukwu cannot get to sleep again. He is sweating profusely because of the pounding tension and burning heat he is experiencing. He is still in shock of what he just overheard, and he is nervous, restless, and terribly frightened.

  Quietly he walks to the bed where Cynthia and Christy are still sleeping. Obviously they are all weak from yesterday’s activities. He taps his aunt, and she wakes up. Cynthia also wakes up amid Christy’s stirring. Okechukwu whispers, “Aunty, Aunty, wake up, get up.”

  “Okechukwu! You are not sleeping!” observes Christy in surprise. She has woken with a startle at Okechukwu’s tap, and she opens her eyes slowly.

  “Aunty, I just heard our uncles now. They said they will kill us—Cynthia and I, and you,” says Okechukwu in a panic detachment.

  “What are you saying, Okechukwu? Which uncles? Are you sure you were not in a dream?” Christy asks him with little seriousness, thinking the boy must have been disturbed by a dream. She therefore dismisses his words casually, opting to return him to bed.

  But by now, Cynthia is fully awake, too, and sits up alert on the bed.

  “I went outside and I saw them, but they didn’t see me,” continues Okechukwu.

  “Outside! You went outside?” asks Christy in surprise, taking a moment to look at him with great scrutiny.

  “Yes, Aunty, I heard them,” he says in a low voice, ignoring the frown on her face.

  “What did you hear?” Cynthia whispers.

  “Uncle Dike said he will deal with you, Aunty. He also said that in the next market day, Cynthia will be taken mysteriously, and I don’t know what he means by that. He said he needs me to be working on his farm and not going to school anymore.” He sighs with a heave of his shoulders.

  Cynthia and Christy now look at each other in disbelief. “How did you get to know all this?” Cynthia asks skeptically

  “I wanted to go to Mummy’s grave, and I—”

  “To do what?” Cynthia and Christy say together in astonishment. They both quickly bring their hands to their mouths to stifle the sound of their voices in the silence of the night.

  “What did you want to do there by this time of the night?” Cynthia asks again, bewildered but still maintaining a hushed tone of voice.

  “I only wanted to go and be there. I wanted to see Mummy,” he says pitifully.

  “Oh no, my dear boy. Poor child!” Christy says in pity of him, and she reaches up to draw him close to herself. She understands so well what Okechukwu is going through, having lost his mother at this age. Even as an older woman, she is also familiar with the trauma.

  But Okechukwu is not taken by her pity now. He is too frightened and very serious, so he backs off, taking a few steps away from Christy’s outstretched arms.

  “Aunty, I don’t like being here anymore. I don’t want to stay here. They will kill us. I don’t want to die like Mummy!” he says with an extra touch of childish vehemence.

  “But you are not going to die. Nobody is going to kill you!” Christy replies, not quite believing what he is saying.

  “Then let’s go away from here. I saw them—they said they will kill us.” Okechukwu is trying hard to convince her.

  “Okee, are you sure of what you are saying?” Cynthia asks him in a voice mixed with concern, fear, and confusion. What her brother is saying is beginning to affect her.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he insists, looking directly at Cynthia this time. “I just saw them now. I went outside; they were at the verandah, and I hid behind the wall when I heard their voices. I went closer and heard them very well. They want to kill you before the next market day,” he repeats, detailing everything. Cynthia’s mind seems to have suddenly run blank from his projected horror, and when she doesn’t reply, he continues. “Cynthy, please, I don’t want you to die. Let’s go out of here!”

  Now Cynthia is beginning to get his message. She looks at him and can see small tears falling from the corners of his eyes. Then she realizes he is serious. Okechukwu’s anxiety is so contagious that it gets its hold on Cynthia, too.

  “Aunty what are we going to do” she asks in confusion, her voice growing tremulous.

  “We will wait till morning, and—”

  “Nooooo!” cries Okechukwu in an untold urgency, interrupting Christy. “Let’s go right now!” He has never been like this before, and Christy is totally confused of him.

  “To where? It is very late to go anywhere now,” Christy says, still keeping her voice down and at the same time signaling Okechukwu to keep his voice down, too.

  “Aunty, Uncle Dike hates you. He said he would deal with you if you try to stop him or his plans. He said he would deal with you the way he dealt with your sister,” replies Okechukwu desperately, hoping to convince her by giving her more details of what he heard. He does manage to keep his voice lowered.

  “What?” Christy asked with sudden sobriety. Okechukwu’s last statement seems to be a blast on her. “So he is the one, eh? He is the one that killed my sister? Oh, Susan, poor you!” She now starts to cry at this realization.

  Cynthia also realizes what is meant by the comment. Even Okechukwu does not seem to know what that means until now. However, he continues. “He said he would go to Onwukansi at daybreak, so that he can get what he would use to kill Cynthia. Aunty, let us leave this place, please!” he begs again, frightfully. “I don’t want us to die.” Soon he starts to cry too. He is indeed very afraid of dying, and recalling that his mother just died, he loathes death and the idea of dying. But what does he really know? He seems merely to be under some psychic pressure! Or perhaps his timely “strange impulses” are not all that strange at all, and they could be some exceptional perceptive endowment.

  Christy, who is familiar with the name Onwukansi, realizes that the boy wasn’t in a dream after all. Onwukansi is a notorious ritual herbalist in the village, and his name is known far and wide: the one and only Onwukansi, of the mightiest juju!

  By now, Cynthia is also tense with what Okechukwu has been saying. “Aunty it’s true. Okechukwu may be right. This can’t be a dream anymore.”

  “Yes, you are right. But where do you want to go?” asks Christy. “Where can we go now?”

  “Maybe we should go back home first. From there we may then go out of the village,” suggests Cynthia, referring to her mother’s house as home. Surely this place of their paternal heritage is no home for them.

  “Out of the village! To where?” asks Christy again, uncomfortable with the suggestion.

  “To the city!” says Okechukwu suddenly and without thinking.

  Cynthia turns to look at him incredulously. “Which city are you talking about?” she asks.

  “Which city? Where in the city?” Christy asks him too.

  “I don’t know. But let’s go to the city, because I don’t want to die here in the village,” he says with seriousness and dread evident all over him.

  Christy and Cynthia seem helpless. But Okechukwu will not wait for them, and he can no longer stand their seemingly endless reluctance. He quickly moves away from them, stops in front of the bed, drops to his hands and knees, and draws out a bag from under the bed, with which they had packed their things when coming for the funeral. He begins to hastily stuff their items back into the bag.

  Seeing his action, Cynthia spontaneously jumps out of the bed, readily to give him a h
and. Soon they are ready to go.

  Though Okechukwu is only a boy, the sincerity of his fears and actions could not help but make his claims veracious.

  “Aunty, let’s go, first to Mummy’s place,” Cynthia says again, but this time with a faint resolution.

  Going back to their mother’s home two villages away usually takes about thirty minutes of driving through the tarred but poor-condition roads. The time now is 2:35 a.m. There could not possibly be any commuter vehicles on the road at this time, so there is only one option for them: trekking on foot; that would take roughly a hundred minutes. The second concern is how to leave the compound unseen, without waking people up. If they are caught in the act of sneaking out, that will be so bad. Christy wants this sudden departure to wait at least till daybreak, if she can help it. But staring at the stark truth in what Okechukwu told them and the fear that has gotten its full grip on them all, she decides to take the risk, all the while quite aware of the danger looming about their lives, especially those of Cynthia and Okechukwu, if they are to stay back. It appears almost senseless to leave in such a hurry like thieves, sneaking out of their own home. But she would do anything to safeguard the lives of these two, even if it means losing her own life. Even if it seems stupid, she won’t take chances with their safety.

  Laden with this thought, they slip out of the room carefully and without a noise, shutting the door quietly behind them. They walk slowly through the dark corridor and past the verandah. Then they walk by the walls of the fence and cross toward the main gate.

  They are now standing just few feet away from the gate, very near the graves. The few feet between them and the gate is covered by a dim ray of light from the light bulb in the verandah.

  “Remain here while I go to open the gate,” Christy says in a very hushed voice.

  The gate has two giant bolts; it is an old gate that has seen many years of rain and sunshine. Most parts of it have lost the color of its painting and now have the black-brown luster of heavy rusting. The gates are shut and secured by the giant bolts. Christy gently removes the bolts from their holes without a noise.

  However, the hinges of the gates are too corroded and cannot help but make a piercing squeak as Christy pulls the gates apart.

  Suddenly, a voice calls, “Who is there?”

  It is Onuma, emerging from his room through the verandah.

  At the sound of his voice, Cynthia and Okechukwu freeze in the darkness. They now curl to squat behind the fresh mound of their mother’s grave.

  Onuma hears the squeak of the gate—or rather, he thought he heard a sound. His room is the closest to the verandah, so he staggers out immediately, still in a drunken state.

  From the verandah, he hazily strains his eyes to see the gate clearly. There is no one there; all he can see faintly is a bag lying on the ground near the gate.

  Christy was able to slip through the gate to the other side when she heard Onuma’s voice, but she could not do so with the bag. She is now peeking at Onuma through the slightly open gate, from the outside. She is breathing very fast now and almost loses herself to a faint out of sheer fear and uncertainty, seeing that Onuma is now staggering toward the gate and her.

  But Onuma reaches where the bag is and briefly stops in inspection, wondering at it. Then in a dreary state, he concludes that someone who attended the funeral service yesterday must have forgotten the bag. “How careless and foolish!” he says, bending over and stretching out an arm to pick up the bag. But instead of picking up the bag, he shouts, “Okpabia!” and squirms suddenly in pain. Bouncing off fitfully, he makes a small circle run round the bag as he dances unrhythmically in pain.

  He cries again, falling to the ground this time.

  Then he holds his face, twisting and brushing his hands all over his body, as if he is trying to hold himself away from some invisible attacker. He is there for some time, writhing away and getting himself smudged with a generous amount of the brown earth that spans the floors of the entire compound. Finally, he stands up and starts running in the open space, still brushing his hands all over himself—his head, face, back, chest, legs, and back to his head—all the while twisting and writhing in pain.

  He continues with this inexplicable, lonely stampede until he falls down again. But this time, he falls on the base step of the small stairway that elevate the verandah.

  From there, he climbs with difficulty up into the verandah, groping for something to grab unto for support in the same way a blind man does. He slowly locates his room and drags himself through its rattling door. He tries to cry and shout for help, but he cannot find his voice.

  From their hiding place behind the earthen mound of their mother’s fresh grave, Cynthia and Okechukwu cannot understand what suddenly befell the man.

  “Cynthia, come now. Let’s leave,” comes the interrupting hushed voice of their aunt from outside the gate. Her words bring both children out of their momentary perplexity. They run across to meet her.

  Lifting the bag to her shoulder, Cynthia pulls Okechukwu through the gate, and they set off with Christy on the long-distance trek.

  Eight

  Luckily, it is a moonlit night and the moonlight is bright and clear. The stars are twinkling sharply through the brazen sky. The menacing shrieks of cheery crickets are pouring out of the nearby bushes, like some organized serenades of a moonlight dance. They walk through the narrow paths all the way, resting only briefly at intervals. Okechukwu is particularly full of strength. He urges them on with his untold restless fear whenever they want to overstay at any rest point. He is usually the first to regain his strength and say, “Aunty, let’s continue so that we can leave for the city. I don’t want them to catch us. Please.”

  After talking about going to the city, they make a resolution on that at one of their brief intervals. Once they get to their mother’s home, they will pick out a few other things they want with them, among which are some of their school books. From there, they will head to the park, where they will board a bus to the city.

  The park in question is in the same town, the only place city buses load, and it is within a considerable circumference, attracting travelers from the surrounding towns.

  Christy wants them to reach home before dawn, so they will still be able to catch the first bus. Besides getting there on time, she does not want them seen in full daybreak. Their departure to the city must be as secret as possible.

  However, Christy, whose life has been only in the village, with so many engagements of trust there, feels restricted in hurriedly leaving the village. It is a very difficult moment for Christy to agree to that plan in the first place, which is very sudden and almost irrational, as she is beginning to see now. There is practically nowhere they know in the city—how can she just allow them go? What if something happens to them? Where will they be in the city? Who will take care of them?

  But the short space of time will not allow her to answer the questions. There is a looming danger behind them. It is such a frenzy moment, and they are all excited with fear, yet they march on without looking back, and the plan at hand keeps tangling up.

  With some money people offered them at condolence, in addition to the money Christy has now, they will be financially buoyant—for the moment, at least. Christy gives them all the money she has at hand, which is not so much actually, saving only a little for herself. But it would at least be enough to settle their transport fare to the city, as well as feed and meet their needs for a while.

  But where would they be in the city? That is her biggest question now. She knows very well that once it is discovered they’re missing, the very first port of call will be their mother’s home, and she will be the first person expected to explain their disappearance. What will she say?

  Roughly an hour and forty minutes later, they somehow made it to their mother’s home, around 4:30 a.m. There is no time to bathe, ea
t, or change. What is paramount in importance now is their safety, and this means departure. They quickly grab the things they need, and before long, another bag is full. Finally, they set out to the park with two bags full, and another smaller bag of Christy’s, which contains her personal effects. In the limitation of her heart to stop their departure to an unknown area, Christy cries out at how helpless she is to either stop or help them. She can’t just let two young children go off, journeying all alone and all the way to a far and possibly dangerous unknown—a place she herself does not even know. She briefly stops herself in the frenzy to think again. That would be ridiculous! She should rather go with them; she seems to reconsider on a second thought. There has to be another alternative, she says to herself, still racking her brain for a better idea. Maybe she should just go with them, she finally seems to decide. Or maybe she should instead send them to somewhere else she knows would be safe, and join them later. But not the city! She is utterly confused in this moment of critical decision.

  But where else to go? Where is a safe place with an

  acquaintance that Dike or any other won’t easily know? She ponders as they walk on, still not reaching any immediate answer. Her own life will soon be at stake, and she fears in a different way now. She should act fast and secure them all,

  before anybody starts looking for them. She is afraid and worried about the various possibilities, good and bad.

  They are walking hastily and exhaustedly to the park. Their stark anxiety keeps mounting, distracting her ideas and her attempts to think right.

  The only safe, yet unsafe, option they seem to have is the city, Christy finally resolves halfheartedly. What else can I do? she asks herself helplessly, finally giving up hope of any other alternative. They walk on.

  Then suddenly and out of the blues, a fresh option pops into her mind, to her relief. They will have to write her immediately after they get to the city. They can find a church in the city and stay there for a while until she comes; she would be joining them soon. Yes! She feels quite relieved at that thought. This option seems fair enough at last, and they all agree to it. She only hopes that they will find a church, and she prays they would be safe there. She believes if they can find any church, they will be safe. She is greatly restored by that hope. If she had been to the city before, she would have known not to worry about this, for there are a countless number of churches in the city.