One Love, Many Tears

by Gertrude U. Uzoh

  Christy will do anything within her powers to protect these two. If their safety means she will be staying back herself to face the inevitable fury that Dike vents, then it is worth it. She has strong prevailing reasons for staying behind, and she feels it is worth it if she dies, as long as the children live. If Dike’s wrath must descend on her for the sake of these two beloved ones, let it quickly descend in rain, fire, or brimstone. She is resigned to that. This is a panic resolve, and unbidden, her heart suddenly softens and wants to cry, but she won’t indulge herself now.

  They continue walking fast, and finally they are at the park.

  With a tear-laden heart and a fear of the unknown, Cynthia turns to her aunt as they are about to enter the already half-filled bus.

  “Aunty, I wish you were coming with us. I’m sorry we are making you cry,” she says softly.

  “No, my dear child, don’t worry about me. It’s all right. God in heaven will protect you. He is the God of orphans and the oppressed; he will surely keep you safe,” Christy says, and she uses an edge of her loose wrapper to wipe the tears welling up in the corners of her own eyes. But the pool of tears cannot be stopped by that. She blinks once, and they fall down her face in a shower.

  Turning to Okechukwu, she draws him to herself, placing his head on her bosom in an embrace. Then she brushes one of her hand over his hair, tilting his head backward so that his face is upturned to her. “My dear child, God will be with you. You will live and not die. Remain a good boy; you have always been a wonderful person,” she says, smiling at him with tears running down her face and haplessly drilling around her nostrils with abandon. She sniffs the tears in, and blinks the rest off of her eyes. She is rattled with suppressed sobs

  “Aunty I will remain a good boy, and I will always pray to God like you and Mummy told us,” he replies, wrapping his slender arms ever so tenderly around her waist as he hugs her.

  “It’s okay, my child. God is with you,” Christy says, drawing Cynthia to her as well with her other free hand, in a last embrace. She wipes away the tears from Cynthia’s eyes as well using same loose ends of her waist wrapper.

  “It is well. I love you two,” she repeats, holding them in that embrace. They hold onto her arms tightly for what seems a fleeting eternity, crying. But in one brief twist, Christy suddenly wrings herself off, saying, “Now enter the bus. Once you get there safely, do not forget to write me. I will be joining you soon.”

  She gives them a smile of hope and slowly withdraws. “Now go, before they come here, because my mind tells me that Dike is coming.”

  “Cynthia, let’s go,” says Okechukwu hurriedly, and they head to the bus, bidding their aunt good-bye.

  They enter the bus to sit and wait like the other passengers. Normally, the first bus leaves by 6:00 a.m., but it is now 6:15, and the bus still has three vacant seats to fill up. Christy prays silently in her heart for the remaining passengers to come at once, so the bus will fill up quickly and leave. She doesn’t know it, but she was exactly right in her feelings—Dike is actually on his way and approaching fast. Before long, he will be there.

  Back at Obi’s compound.

  As early as 5:00 a.m., every person seems to be awake and going about various businesses for the morning—except Cynthia, Okechukwu, and their aunt. Some children in the house have gone to fetch water from the stream and to fetch firewood, while some of them stay behind to sweep and tidy up the compound.

  Dike’s wife, Ugomma, has long been up and is now sitting on a stool by the kitchen at the backyard, peeling her melon seeds; she will be taking them to the market later in the day for sale. She is a very beautiful woman in face and body. Nature also blessed her bountifully with a youthful look, such that she looks a lot younger than her age. But people say that she is ungrateful to the nature that made her beautiful; she is not believed to be very beautiful at heart. She has a certain wickedness and selfishness that match those of her husband. People often say that her name, Ugomma—which means the epitome of beauty—is just a mockery and scorns the nature that made her so beautiful physically but did not also allow her to be beautiful at heart. It is only a critical observer that would still see her natural beauty and not overlook it, considering her temperament. Most people find it hard to relate with her, or to even consider her beautiful.

  This morning, Ugomma waits impatiently for the trio to wake up, and before long, she begins to shout at the top of her voice, asking how they could be so lazy that every other child and adult is awake and about, except them. She is the lord of the house—that is the closest description of her influence in Obi’s household. “And that woman Christy, she is not helping these children at all. Oversleeping cannot make them responsible,” she grumbles aloud now so that her husband, co-wives, and others in the house will hear her.

  She is remarkably laden with the inability to show soft emotions. She is full of scorn and bitterness most times, and is hardly a happy woman; rarely will she show any form of real sympathy for anything. Ugomma seems helplessly beguiled by that inability, but she thinks she is just a one-of-a-kind woman.

  Besides, she never liked Susan, and she definitely does not reserve any predilection for Susan’s children or sister. It is just the obligatory burial of the mother that had them all back at Obi’s family after about nine years of exile away from the children’s birthplace. Susan’s funeral was rather a begrudged burial of an enemy by an enemy. Although, it was in defeat of their preferred sentiments, it was simply in sheer compliance to the custom

  that behooves any supposed relative to bury the dead; they performed their burial rites despite the existing rancor. Her children or any relative of hers are definitely enemies, too, by extension, and Ugomma is not a woman that takes it easy on her enemies.

  “Is this the first time somebody died in this village or in this compound? If I get that girl in her sleep, I will strangle her outright. Who is she expecting to sweep the house for her? Is this how their mother raised them—to be irresponsible?” she seethes repeatedly, complaining to the air, and referring to Cynthia this time.

  It seems nobody is responding to her tantrums yet, so she gets off her seat in annoyance, moving aside her basket of melon seeds. With a determination to draw everybody’s attention, she marches heavily toward the main house, thudding heavily through the long corridor. She goes to the fourth room and stops.

  “Who is in this room? Don’t you know that it is morning, and you are still sleeping like logs of wood thrown into the Ngene River? Who are you expecting to sweep the compound and prepare food for you? Open this door!” she commands vehemently, banging at the door. “Open this door before I break it open!” She says this in satisfaction, because by now she has succeeded in getting the attention and support she wants: her husband and some of her co-wives have come out at the sound of her voice and banging. The children also gather around her, as most of them have now returned from the stream

  “Open this door,” she says once more, and then she flings the door open.

  And to her greatest shock, as well as of those around, the room is empty!

  She charges inside with her husband, only to find the room completely bare except for the bed and wallpapers. The room is deserted—Christy and the children are not here, and none of their things is left behind. The room has its own bathroom and toilet section, so Dike and his wife rush through its open doors together, only to collide with each other in the process. It is a painful collision at their foreheads, but their greater pain is the disappointment that the bathroom is empty as well. All the people that come out start with different sorts of remarks and murmurs now, in reaction to the wonder of the unexpected desertion.

  Dike leaves the group immediately and rushes to Onuma’s room near the frontage, rubbing the lump growing on his face as he goes. He is going to alert his brothers.

  And as he walks into Onuma’s room, he is himself alerted,
but in a different way. He can’t fathom this strange view.

  “Okpabia!” Onuma screams from his mat at his wife, who is bending over him and treating his wounds. Worry and confusion are grimly written all over her face. She is patting his badly bruised body clean with a small cloth soaked in a steaming herbal concoction.

  “O o o o kpabia! Nneoma, take it gently, please!” Onuma mumbles incoherently, squelching in unbearable pain.

  Dike is completely shocked. He cannot believe what he is seeing: Onuma is badly injured all over his body—head, face, hands, chest, backs, legs, everywhere—almost like a man raided with leprosy. The luminous electric lamps are bright enough in the room, but the more revealing light of the fast-approaching dawn really helps to make the ugly picture clear to Dike’s darting gaze.

  Dike is frozen as he stares blankly at the man he celebrated with just the night before. At the same time, Dike is disgusted with this unpleasant sight. “What happened?” he finally asks, even though he knows that at the moment, he has at stake something more important to him—the disappearance of Cynthia and Okechukwu. He cannot stand this and only stays briefly to hear Onuma’s wife Nneoma explain that she woke up this morning to find her husband like this, and that he has not said anything except to shout and cry.

  Dike is completely taken aback. He makes an attempt to voice his surprise but quickly stops short, because he had not come here to talk about Onuma, even as pathetic as he looks right now, lying there on the mat. Dike is not forgetting something, and he seems to be very conscious of time. He is very desperate to know the whereabouts of Cynthia and Okechukwu, and that woman Christy. For him, this is more important than anything else at the moment. Not even Onuma’s terrible, entirely new, and puzzling state can thwart this fixed desperation.

  Without wasting much time, he immediately dashes out of Onuma’s room, leaving the alarmed Nneoma behind to continue tending to the mystery. Dike makes straight to his own room now, to quickly grab his old but very dear red cap. In a jiffy he is outside again, making for his bicycle, where it is usually parked near his voluminous farm harvest barn. He is going out in search. He doesn’t mind going alone—after all, Onuma is obviously indisposed, and Onochie went to his own farm much earlier in the morning.

  The entire household is in an uproar now. The people that are presently at home, or who have not yet gone out for their morning duties or the day’s activities—Ugomma, her co-wives, some children, and some other members of the extended family—are all smeared with various shades of consternation and anxiety. Every one of them seems very reflective, as they ponder, chatter, analyze, whisper, and calculate this excitement of the early morning.

  Dike carefully ignores all their “babbling” for the moment, not finding any suitable partner for the trip among them all. He drags his bicycle determinedly from the barn to the frontage, all in a great hurry. Off he goes alone on the rickety bicycle. The time now is 5:50 a.m., and the appearance of dawn has been fast and very bright.

  As Dike speedily cycles along the narrow dusty paths, riding in between various farmlands that link up the villages, he knows the first place to go, if not the only place! Without any doubt at all, he propels his bicycle energetically and straight away toward Susan’s home, believing the children will be there. The joy of knowing what to do to them when he finally gets hold of them, and the triumphant feeling of finally being in control of the situation, gives him unique strength. Basking in the images of his hopes, Dike expertly meanders through the farmlands with ever increasing speed.

  Soon enough, Susan’s home comes to view. However, on reaching the gate, he can see that it is locked from the outside. Nobody can possibly be inside the house.

  “What now!” he grunts gloomily, dismounting his bicycle quickly and resting it on the brown earth. At the same time, taking a hasty leap forward. One, two giant steps, and he makes a rush at the gate, banging and shaking the locks to make certain it is truly locked. Feeling instantly deflated and not understanding the locked gates, Dike does not know what else to do. His high hopes of finding them are dashed in one instant. He looks around frantically to see if he could find anyone to ask questions, but no one is in sight.

  Then luckily for him, after roaming round the fence of the house for a while without any idea of what to conclude about the locked gates, a man suddenly appears from one of the linking farmlands. Impatient to wait on the man’s gingerly approach, Dike walks up immediately to accost him midway. In reply to Dike’s questions, the man tells him he saw Christy with the children this morning, leaving the compound with bags as though going on a journey. The man, Mazi Nnadi, is Susan’s neighbor; he is an early morning farmer.

  “Chei! So this woman wants to take them away!” shouts Dike in dismay, and he quickly runs back to grab his bicycle once more. “As if on a journey?” Dike repeats to himself morosely as he remounts his bicycle. Then he gulps in some air upon his final realization, as the village car park suddenly occurs to him.

  Without even thinking at all, he cycles off at once toward the path on the first connecting farmland that leads the way to the park, leaving the man behind him without another word. Nnadi stares after him in wonder, taking a moment to evaluate the departing man’s worry and hurry.

  Dike had left Nnadi without further questions, because there is only one car park for travelers in the entire circumference of the small villages.

  Dike is speeding as much as he can, but he is no longer with his bicycle. The time now is about 6:45. He is naturally beginning to sense a bigger foul play around this sudden disappearance, and the feeling is slowly threatening his certainty and power. “Why didn’t this come to my mind before now, that this woman is so much a problem? If I get this woman, I will strangle her to death!” he growls to himself emphatically as he stirs his body into the longer pathway that finally leads to the park—half running and half walking. All the time, he is walking as little as possible and running as fast as he deems. A person watching Dike run could only compare him to a skating gorilla whose carriage is hampered by a non-athletic body.

  Dike had thrown his bicycle aside some few minutes back; the rickety piece that brought him this far with inconsistent though reasonable speed is more of a setback by now than a speeding piece; it no longer matches the maneuverability he requires at the moment.

  “I hope I will get there before they leave. I must get them,” he says to himself, adding more speed as he runs. Dike would have flown if he could.

  * * *

  It is at about this time that Christy says she feels Dike is coming. She has that disturbing feeling, and it remains with her.

  At the park, she waits impatiently for the three remaining passengers to fill the bus.

  It is now a few minutes to 7:00 a.m., and the bus is finally filled. The passengers for the journey are now sitting and waiting for the driver to take off. The conductor, known as Nwafor, takes his own seat, shutting the sliding side door. The driver powers the engine.

  Suddenly a man appears from behind at a distance of about thirty feet. It is Dike, and he is running toward the bus and beckoning at the conductor with his two hands in the air, to stop the bus. But instead, the bus speeds off amid his hilarious shouts of, “Wait, wait! Motorcar, wait for me!”

  He runs further after the bus, waving his hands and shouting at it to stop. But Nwafor bids him a good-bye instead, signaling regrettably to him with one hand that the bus is full. Oh, he didn’t come out in time, and the bus is now full and can no longer wait, Nwafor reasons in mild consideration of the man desperately flapping hands at him. He sincerely thinks Dike is another passenger who wants to join the bus to the city. Nwafor never realizes his simple and rather mindless act actually saves the destiny of two youngsters.

  Dike is now standing rooted to the spot, hands still in the

  air. His red cap has long since fallen off in his race toward the bus. He unthinkingly continu
ed in his race after the bus and

  only stopped suddenly in serious abashment when, from the distance, he saw Cynthia inside it sitting by the window. That is why he is now standing immobile with shock and disappointment.

  He sighs in regret, and a rush of tears comes over his fruitless attempt. Getting hold of the departing youngsters means a lot to Dike, and having just missed them like that, by a hair’s breath, is a big loss to him. He is not happy and is sweating all over his body from that unrewarding sprint. He deeply regrets that the idea of coming to the park did not occur to him first, for he is sure to have caught up with the bus, if he had set off earlier. What a shame.

  He is mostly furious at Christy right now. “That woman! If I get her, I will teach her great lessons she won’t forget in a hurry,” he groans aloud with all the animosity he can muster. Talking to himself loudly and at the same time panting heavily as he goes his way, he walks back to locate his bicycle where he left it off, giving little or no care to the many passers-by who stop to stare at him the way they usually do at mad men. From there, he returns to Susan’s home to further check for Christy, but Christy is not there yet.

  Dike finally gives up after a long and fruitless search for Christy; the result shatters his composure for the day. When he gets home in the evening, he is still so angry and disappointed that he can’t even find his usually huge appetite for food.

  If he is this angry, enough to make him ignore food, would he now spare even a fleeting time to see how Onuma is doing with his strange wounds? His concern for Onuma is only that of simple curiosity.