by Aluta Nite
Sometimes while rolling on the grass, she came into contact with a caterpillar without knowing and the result was even more serious itch, scratch and swelling because of the caterpillar’s hair grazing her over sensitive skin. If she happened to see it, hell broke loose because that was one of her arch enemies during that time.
Seeing it move in waves was enough to drive life out of her and its crawling on her was worse than anything she could imagine.
During the hot season, the odd chance of stepping on the dreaded snake along a path or touching one by mistake on a branch of a tree or on the grass sent her blood racing to another world. Both caterpillar and snake scenarios ended any game she loved and after several days the games began again and this history repeated itself over and over.
One more thing that caused a lot of anxiety in her was using a razor blade or knife. Somehow, she was the most awkward and clumsy one with the two implements in her family. She had the fear of the two hurting her one way or the other and in her endeavors in trying to be extra careful while using them, she ended up being very shaky in handling them and cutting herself.
She could not hold them correctly or firmly as expected. Her mother knew this and cautioned her every time she had to use any of them. She also alerted any of Esther's siblings sitting close by to beware of her dangerous handling of such implements in her possession.
She is now an adult and to date even her husband is not comfortable with her handling both as he sees her constantly hurting herself with them and detests the way she holds them. Also, she still fears caterpillars and snakes and is still allergic to grass.
Amy and Chale
Amy and Chale, a sister and a brother respectively were born to Betsy and Jake in the city. Both were tall parents who walked with gait. Betsy and Jake’s marriage did not last long and they went separate ways. Betsy took both children to her mother’s place. Her children were three and five years old then. Her daughter, Amy was the eldest.
Betsy’s father had already passed away leaving her mother with four other children. Betsy’s mother, a soft-spoken woman, was a nurse and she took care of her children single-handed. Betsy was the firstborn. There was one other girl, Martha and three boys, Finco, Moshi and Nico. Their mother remarried one more time much later when her children were now adults, but she bore no child in the second marriage.
Betsy was one of the few local celebrities in her region at that time in the communications industry when the sound media personalities were foreigners in a country that was a colony. Betsy was a reserved person who liked keeping to herself.
Although Betsy took her children to her mother’s modest house, she did not live there. The place was a residential area for the indigenous people working in the city for meager pay. Betsy’s class was now different from before she got the job she was now doing therefore she had to have finer things in life.
Betsy acquired an apartment in the up market area where she lived alone. Later, she got married two more times, but she got no child in these latter marriages. She visited her children often especially in the evenings like twice a week for an hour or so and brought all that they needed and wanted materially, except the daily motherly love, care and guidance.
Jake also visited them infrequently like once in three months for a few hours and also delivered material things that turned out to be merely wants. The two children therefore only lacked real parental love and guidance. Otherwise, they had material things and food in abundance. In fact, they had excess compared to other children in the neighborhood.
Both children did not seem to have good rapport with their father a part from demanding money and material things from him. They tended to run away from him after getting money or gifts from him as if they knew something that other people did not know. They were not polite to him either.
One could hear them telling him, “Go away, we don’t want you here. Leave us alone.”
When he called them, they ran away from him while using rude language loudly and being sarcastic too, yet he went to see them. They also jeered and laugh at him unashamedly. It was like they feared that he could take them away or something. On the other hand, he was a drunkard who also smoked every time.
Growing up in the harsh environment of a mixture of all sorts of people and characters and with no minute-by-minute guidance as their grandmother was on fulltime employment was not good for the young girl and boy. They needed hands on guidance from someone and that someone was not there or available.
As time went on, they developed tendencies of truancy towards school. They could say that they could not find their uniform or shoes or socks or schoolbags or books or pencils or rubbers or anything else. The house help in that house had it very rough with them because they were very disrespectful, disobedient and rude to her.
Meantime, they pretended to be looking for whatever was supposed to be missing while taking their time and the clock was ticking forward. Before long, it was too late to go to school as they did not wish to be punished for lateness and they could not handle punishment.
Unfortunately, they are the same ones who had hidden whatever was being looked for where they themselves knew. The whole idea for them was not to go to school where law and order prevailed. They had tasted freedom from a very early age and they wanted it to remain so. This went on for years and they continued to miss out in school. They were in public schools then.
They could not be in school a whole week or month or term. They could not sit for end term examinations and pass therefore they could not be promoted to the next classes. Repeating classes also had its limits because of age. Still, hands on guidance continued to miss out. They were therefore enrolled in private day schools from middle school that were costly but had a little bit of leeway for spoilt children.
The option their mother took was to move them from school to school, but still it did not work. The same pattern was repeated over and over. Tuition was paid promptly and in full, but there were no pupils in the two to utilize the available resources. Funds were going to waste with this idea of jumping from school to school.
It meant buying complete new sets of uniform, shoes, books and anything else that the new schools required. Their mother and grandmother did not seem to realize what the problem at hand was. Discipline was lacking. Guidance was lacking. Finco, their older uncle, was away in another region and Nico, their youngest uncle, was too polite for the wild children.
There was nothing the children could learn from Martha, their aunt and Moshi, their middle uncle because the two were in the same boat since their mother failed to steer them properly. There was no ideal male figure in the house as Moshi was wild. Martha got married and gave birth to two children who were equally wild and when she divorced, she went to live in the same house with all of them. Although, she was not employed, she could not control the four kids.
By the time Amy and Chale reached ten years of age, Betsy even tried private boarding schools that were pretty expensive, but even this did not work. They boarded city buses and went back home with the slightest excuse.
On the onset of teenage, they refused to go further with education and Betsy also seemed to have given up on fighting with them over school issues. They were simply let free to do whatever they wanted at that crucial and dangerous age. In the house, were two adults and four children that failed to continue with formal education to end of middle school.
Moshi was no good example to Chale and Martha’s son, Adou. He was playing football occasionally, drinking beer, hard drinks and smoking. Martha equally was no mentor to Amy and her own daughter, Cedar. They controlled her and she just sat and laughed with them as if they were all age mates. She personally loved leisure more than anything.
Martha and Moshi did not have what it takes to give the four children. They too lacked it while growing up therefore they did not see anything wrong with what was going on. Betsy and their grandmother had no time for the children, but that was no excuse at all. The house and family were total
pell-mell.
As time went by, Chale followed into Moshi’s footsteps of playing football, drinking beer, hard drinks and smoking. Amy took it a step further. She was drinking anything and taking hard drugs. Her friends were diehard women who had given up in life, some of whom were older than Betsy or her grandmother’s age. Where she slept did not matter.
Before long, she was pregnant at age thirteen and she was drunk all the time she carried the pregnancy. She gave birth to an underweight baby girl called Indi who looked weak, sickly and miserable. Nobody knew who Indi’s father was and in Amy’s drank stupors; she might never have known either.
She had no time for Indi. She dumped Indi at her grandmother’s place and followed her passion of pleasure and leisure. History would repeat itself in the poor little girl’s life in this same house. Betsy and her mother did what they could to bring Indi up in the best way they knew how within their realm of life, but what Indi turned into is not known.
Amy’s life deteriorated further. She now even forgot that there was something called cleanliness or hygiene. She did not brush her teeth or shower often. She did not change clothes or bother much about food. She could disappear for days on end or even weeks. Before long, she died mysteriously at age fifteen.
Chale continued with his drinking spree and playing football occasionally. As time went on, the drinking overpowered him and even the thought of playing football disappeared. He succumbed totally to drinking. He became alcoholic and that is how he lived his life to the end. And that is exactly how Moshi lived his entire life too.
Betsy was able to turn the lives of these children around by simply taking them into her house and living with them with some stricter rules, but she chose not to. She preferred having her sweet time at work, outside work and social life that was new and prestigious at that point in time.
Material things could not raise the children to the required standards or steer them from pitfalls. She herself lived in those impoverished areas and knew very well how chances of coming out successful, was like looking for a needle in the haystack. Alternatively, she should have left the children with their father maybe he could have done a better job.
Wild Wanda
Wanda was a beloved niece to Miranda. Wanda’s mother was Miranda’s young sibling. Miranda thought that she knew Wanda well, but it turned out that she did not. Wanda was an only child to her father, Jeffery and mother Edith. Her mother had problems carrying pregnancies on the onset of marriage and before having Wanda, she had had a few miscarriages.
She was therefore very happy to have Wanda. Jeffery was equally very happy to carry his own child on his hands. Wanda grew up spoilt because she was doted on. There was a house girl to take care of her everything in the house and she therefore learned to do nothing for herself, family or in the house.
She went a step further and became an artful dodger. She played truancy with school and homework. By the time her parents found out what she had been up to from her class teacher, she was behind academically and she had become rude and rowdy. Smothering her with love closed their eyes to reality and by the time they realized, so much damage had been done.
Her mother resorted to spankings while her father resorted to summons. Her parents were not at par on disciplining her therefore Wanda took advantage and lied to them differently and she could run to her father when her mother was furious and he protected her from any slaps if he was around. She became a big pretender and played games with either of them or both of them often to avoid punishments or their finding out the truth.
By the time she turned nine, she was incorrigible in her behavior. One school holiday, Jeffery arranged with Miranda to have Wanda visit her at her suburban farm. She was to stay with Miranda for one month. Miranda observed that she could not listen to instructions. She did exactly what she was told not to do or the opposite.
For example, Miranda had told her not to go alone to the quarters behind the farmhouse at any one time where Miranda’s male helper stayed. Miranda explained to her why she did not want her to go there alone. It was not because she knew something bad about Adam, her helper, but because Miranda was simply being cautious.
Within the next two days, Miranda caught her twice heading that direction alone and on the third day, Miranda actually had to go and fish her from there after calling and looking for her for a few minutes within the rooms of her farmhouse. This was a young man with no wife or girlfriend around and Wanda could easily be bait. Let’s face it, we are all human beings and it is human beings that err. And, prevention is better than cure.
Eventually, her father came for her and she returned to the city. When she turned ten, her father got a new job outside the city and the family moved to a new region. Miranda and her husband, Amos, also moved to the same area three years later when she was already going through menses because Amos also got a new assignment in the same region.
Before Miranda and Amos moved to their own house, they stayed with Wanda’s family for a short stint. Wanda was now bigger and even gutsier. She was wild and cunning. Over and above that, she adored male company over anybody else. She was headed to the dogs in Miranda’s eyes.
Her father was more important than her mother. He sometimes even did her homework for her with the excuse that he wanted her to show good grades so that she could get a scholarship for college later. Male attention at school, on the way and around where they lived tickled her seriously. Miranda’s husband also became bait to her in the mix.
A few times Miranda had the chance to be out with her and Amos, several young men in groups and individually and in vehicles hooted at her to the point of almost stopping and opening the doors for her to enter. And at the car park outside their building where mail boxes were situated, there were young men constantly hovering around while waiting for her.
When her parents were at work and Miranda and Amos were home while waiting to start work and get their own place, she would not do her homework. She wanted to play with Amos. When she saw Miranda approaching, she pretended to be doing nothing wrong. She started hating Miranda because she saw Miranda as an obstacle to her desire.
At one time, Amos was down with a cold and cough. Instead of doing her homework, she ran to his room. Miranda found her sitting on the bed next to him while trying to flirt around him. Miranda told her off and sent her away from the room. She then stood at the bedroom door as often as she could and stole glances of him.
Whenever Amos was going out, she too wanted to go out, but alone with him. If Miranda was also going out, she gloomed about it and either refused to go or went unwillingly and remained miserable all the time they were outside. This could be for a walk to the park just to get fresh air and exercise while her parents were away at work.
In other words, Miranda was on her way and blocking her freedom. Only hell knows how far she could go. Amos on the other hand did not want to upset her nor raise hairs in the house and he therefore just told her off politely while pushing her away every time. She could easily embarrass Amos if caution was not taken.
Luckily, Miranda and Amos got a house and moved out within two months to another location and started their new life without Wanda around. Miranda could not raise the issue of Wanda and Amos with Jeffery and Edith because they could conclude that Miranda was against Wanda or Amos was the one who initiated the happenings, yet they already knew how wild a child she was.
The Village Thief
In one village, there was a family of two boys, three girls and their two biological parents. Their home was neighboring the village school and church. Their neighbors were a few schoolteachers who resided in the school compound and other villagers. Their gate was facing a gravel road and at the back after their farm was a railway. The man of the home was one of the church lay leaders. He was also a farmer along with his wife. The family was hard working and prosperous.
The family was of good standing and was well respected in the village for their orderliness and gentle ways except for their younger so
n, Zadock who turned out to be something odd, as he approached teenage. He refused to go to school and started stealing. He would disappear from home and reappear suddenly. Nobody knew who his friends were and he never used to talk to anybody therefore it was not easy to know what he was thinking or up to. It was like he was not part of that wonderful family.
He was arrested time and time again and sent to remand and prison, but that did not deter him from repeating the crimes. He stole from the neighbors, other villagers, his parents and even from faraway areas. What he did with what he stole was his own secret because nobody knew where he took the stolen items, goods or what he did with the money he got after disposing of the stuff.
He was a tall, thin, dark fellow with quick motions. He would appear and disappear so suddenly like lightning. He walked swiftly, but quietly therefore it was not easy to notice him coming in advance. He never looked at people straight in the eye. He changed routes if he saw someone before that someone saw him. He also did not like open and straightforward paths and preferred zigzag and bushy areas. Most of the times, he surprised whoever was about to see him or meet with him.