A HERO'S THORN

 

Today, I graduate from the university, an orphan for most parts.

Today I miss my father. By God! I miss him. I miss his smiles, the way he pats my back whenever he heard that I did something well; like my laundry or the dishes or fail to fail in exams. He understood me. He did ask me if the pupils that took the first position had two heads. He did tell me too, in those days when I failed more often than I passed exams, that when he was my age, he was so good that “no one saw his back”. I wished that I could tell him that it would be impossible for him to disappear or even make his back disappear. He probably would have flogged me; my behind and my back would have been smarting from the kind of beating he would have given me, with wires of our old refrigerator no less. The refrigerator had little use for us while it was alive. It coughed and sputtered and its inside was always hotter than the outside. I had told him once that he could boil food inside the refrigerator. He smiled then. It was one of his good days. When he had not had too much to drink; when he was not grieving over what my mother had said or missing her.

He was the street joke and was the end of so many advices. People warned other people not to look like my father. They would say “Read your book, stay in school or else you will end up like Odegba.” Preachers in the early morning cried out against the early morning chill, wearing aprons that advertised heaven and hell in equal measure, defied the beckoning hands of early morning languor to cry into their megaphones “Repent for the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. Drunks will not enter the kingdom of heaven”. They did not mention my father’s name, at least most of them did not but the way the different preachers went on and on about alcoholism and the way they seemed to bring their annoying megaphones closer to the windows of our one bedroom apartment, one could guess that they were taunting him, taunting us. Yes they spoke of other sins, like the small matter of fornication and adultery which Madam Cool, the Barwoman had a specialty in. She had lain with so many men that her husband had gotten tired of it all and left for the great beyond. No one spoke against Madam Cool because she practically had the dirty linens of most of the preachers. Deacon Eli had tried once and had gotten his favorite boxers and wristwatch thrown at him by an unknown skimpily-clad lady who claimed to have snatched the boxers and the wristwatch as collateral for his inability to pay the going rates for an hour of sex and may have been one of Madam’s protégé. There was also the sin of armed robbery and murder which Atugani did so well that no preacher preached against it. The last preacher that tried lost teeth and could barely hand on to his life. There were sins of gossips and slander which all of them with their loud microphones and loose shirts and baggy trousers over wiry forms held together by a rope-like belt that threatened to squeeze the very life out of them most times.

Sometimes the preachers hung around until my father left for work and coincidentally, they often left too. Yes, My Father, Odegba drinks but he also takes his job seriously what he does not take seriously is what he does after work and his health and his children and his sense of self-worth. Sometimes, I watched them through our window, quickly summarizing their judgements and condemnations for the day and deciding just the number of people that would go to heaven, often they followed my father, singing behind him while he jauntily walked to work, in perpetual hangover, where he fixed people’s homes, chairs, tables, shelves but scatter his own at the end of the day. He was a brilliant carpenter and I had once gotten an advice from a concerned friend of my father when I was barely twelve after another show of shame from my father who he had picked up from a roadside gutter that night.

“You see your father eh?” He said squatting down to get to my height level so close that I could trace the lines in the jowls of his face and his fat cheeks.

“Your father is a very good man. Don’t listen to what these people say about him. You do not know what he knows about woods by being merely a lazy, drunk. He is intelligent and resourceful. I know it’s tough being his son but if you learn half the things he knows about woods and shapes; you are on your way to a very rich future.”

I listened with rapt attention to Samuel, his friend who had more hairs in his beefy arms than he had on his whole bald head. He was not just my father’s friend; he was his only friend. He was always around to pick literarily pick my father up from the doldrums of his drunkenness and his self-pity. He also paid off his drinking debts which left me in two minds about his ultimate endgame. His clearing of my father’s debts sounded good and charitable; totally what one would expect from a friend but it left my father with a fresh tab at any liquor store. It seemed to me like he was the one buying him the drinks and a part of me hated him for it. My father does not owe any other person but the bars. My school fees were always paid on time because he directed his customers to pay directly to the school. Thus, I had everything I needed while growing up. I had all the text books I wanted and my school uniforms were changed once it had shown any sign of tear.

He always found enough time to watch my socks and uniforms till I finished secondary school. He had asked to put me inside the boarding school.

“They get better education” he had said. I declined. I did not want to leave him. We were the only people both of us had. He knew it and I do and as he was as stubborn as I was. I was a chip of the old block.

That night, we fought and I lost. The television lost too, shattered by him when the refrigerator wire he normally used on me got caught in the Television antenna when he swirled it and his brute strength and impetus brought the whole thing down.

I bled that night. I bled. My shirt which I used as a sport jersey in the day and as pyjamas at night taped to my skin by the caked blood on my back and smarted when I pulled at it in discomfort. That night and many nights after that, I could not lay on my back and I wept each night in pain, lying there on the cold mat on a hard floor, while he sat with his ubiquitous transistor radio on the single sofa that functioned also as his bed listening to the white noise when he was too drunk and to voices arguing about politics or religion or society; always arguing but never agreeing; in the few occasions when he was sober. He carried the transistor radio everywhere even when he drank his ‘ogogoro’ and even when he was wasted with it. However, I knew that he did not need the news; I did not need it but we needed the noise.

It distracted us. It saved us from that accusatory silence that would creep in and shout condemnations from its deathly stillness. It would condemn me for being my father’s son and being the harbinger of his distress. His life changed when I was born, I was told. It distracted him too from the thoughts of preachers’ morning condemnations, the thoughts of the jibes of the numerous passersby who derided him and called him names. It distracted him too, I was certain from the haunting mischief of the earth that always conspired to drag him down and drop him into the gutters. It distracted him from being able to look his only son and child in the eyes. His life had changed when he was born, he was told.

The last thing my mother said before journeying to the great beyond was my name “Owendi”. She had named me, my father had later told me, as soon as she had conceived after passing her menopause. Theirs was a love story to last an eternity but it could not outlast a bottle of alcohol. Their story was told by the bald, fat-cheeked Samuel who seemed to have been friends with my father when both of them were still in their mother’s wombs.

My mother and my father had being childhood friends and got married early because of family exigencies. They ran the dusty paths of the village together, swam the streams and went for firewood in the bushes together. The story told that my father had given many a man broken teeth on account of my mother and the story told that my mother returned the favour. My father was 21 while my mother was 18 years when they had gotten married but Samuel said that they were long married before that for marriage is nothing more than hearts in tune with each other, seeking out each other thoughts and hearing thoughts when words are superfluous and deciding to only be pleased and angered by just each other for the rest of their lives. It is when minds copulate, intertwined like wild snakes to lay the eggs of happy homes and rich lives.

My father was an only son and had married his heartthrob with the purpose of procreation but when the tables had turned after three years of marriage without issues, the tables had turned too but my father, Samuel had told me, stayed by my mother’s sides and refused to neither marry a second wife nor divorce my mother. Their marriage was tested for an additional fifteen years before she conceived and named me “Osondi Owendi” for she had said that my conception would please some and would anger some others.

She did not know that at the instance of that naming that my birth would for some reason anger my father. I believed that my father had not known then, until my mother had died from complications in childbirth. I was told by the bald-headed Samuel that my father had disappeared upon hearing the news and I was left in the hospital for more than a week while my father entered into the wilderness of grief. He emerged thereafter with a bottle which he said helped him to handle grief. He later told me in one of his scarce moments of lucidity that the only time he could forget Adimonyemma, my mother was whenever he was drunk.

It was true because at that moment, he was crying like I was at the many times when he had hit me in his drunken rage, he was looking at a scattering of pictures of my mother, their wedding pictures, my mother’s memorabilia: clothes and necklaces and scarves; stuffs that he had refused to sell or give away.

As long as he had them, he had my mother, he said.

To disremember the mother, he also had to disremember the son.

But for me who had no mother to remember, I cannot let go. Holding on to my father is holding on to my mother, who I had imagined was a kindhearted, teetotaler who only doled out ice-creams and never beatings.

My father would beat me, pay my school fees, hug me and throw up all over me in his torpor but I will be there with him because I will not run away from him like he had ran away from both my mother and me. For me, the true test of family is not in riding favourable tides but in staying the course and holding the vessels together when the gales strike the mast of brotherhood, fatherhood and even motherhood. It is holding on when it is easier to let go and trusting even when the loved one is beyond all trusts. It is retaining that sliver of hope that from amidst the clouds, the sun will shine forth.

My father left me when I was 21, of kidney failure. Yet he found enough strength to whisper into my ears before he closed his eyes never to open them again.

“Tear the sofa whenever you need anything.”

Today I graduate because of what I found under the sofa that marked my disappointments and sorrows. He had saved all he had in diamonds, golds and silvers.

In life he would seem a waste of fatherhood but he had proven to be more than most fathers in death. For family is not just about love, it is also about responsibility.