TESTAMENT OF RAGE

There was no presentiment for what happened. No warning that my life was going to soon change forever. Perhaps there should have been. Sketchy images in a dream. A sudden flash of foreboding in my subconscious. A frozen moment with eyes staring vacantly into a fleeting film of the future. Anything. Something to prepare my thirteen-year-old self of the twist that swooped down on me like a hawk bolting down from the sky and snatching at the chick nearest to its claws.

“I will go with you,” Mum insisted on the evening after my uncle, David, called from the village with news. Papa had fallen ill and Dad’s presence, seeing as he was the eldest son in the family, was urgently needed.

“But I thought you are doing something at the Local Government office,” Dad said in protest. “You should finish your business with the government people before coming down to the village. You know how the idiots at that place behave sometimes.”

Dad was right. Those people at the Local Government office were first class idiots. They didn’t think anything of sacking or penalizing anyone who intentionally or mistakenly did anything that could hurt the progress of the government. Just last week, fourteen people were announced “sacked” on the radio from the Local Government headquarters, bringing the tally of sacked civil servants there in three weeks to something close to forty. The idiots were quite simply heartless; they handed out sack letters the way Mrs. Onyekwelibe handed out assignments every time at the end of her class.

And Mum was the secretary of the Local Government chairman. She often said that she was lucky to still be service. And I agreed with her. She was just lucky. Being hardworking or highly disciplined and all didn’t guarantee you longevity at the LG. depending on how badly you’d erred, you wake up one morning, drive to the office and find a neat envelope on your desk, waiting patiently for you. Your sack letter! According to Mum, when you got the letter, you didn’t ask why. You were simply expected to grab your personal items and head in the direction of the gate.

“I’ll call the office,” Mum was saying. “I’ll ask Odinaka to. . .”

Dad didn’t let her finish; he waved her remaining words away with his hand: “You know that’s not how it works over there. They can still penalize you for being absent or worse, sack you.”

“God forbid!” Mum hissed with a snap of her fingers. “Please, don’t say that thing twice, Ndubuisi. And I don’t care what you say, I’m following you to the village to see Papa.” Her voice was firm and brooked no argument.

Dad shrugged in acknowledged defeat. Then he mumbled something in jest about wives who were deaf and stubborn. Mum and I laughed at his joke. And I was filled with the warmth of that moment she shared as a family.

***

It was their voices that woke me up the morning it happened, the next day. It was a cold Saturday morning and I was still in bed, under my warm blanket, dreaming of a place that looked like Disneyland.

Then the voices came abruptly, barging into my delightful dream and rudely yanking me into wakefulness. I blinked my eyes open, a little disoriented. At first, the voices sounded incomprehensible and unreal – the kind of voices you only hear in movies that were designed to be nightmarish.

Then, slowly and steadily, they began to sound real. Human. I recognized them – the voices were my parents’. Loud. Harsh. Snarling. It wasn’t the way I was used to hearing my parents communicate with each other. I sat up in my bed, feeling my heart pound a little faster. What was going on? I had to find out.

I climbed down from the bed, my soles touching the cold, tiled floor, and I felt an iciness run up my feet. I wondered why Dad and Mum were talking so early in the morning, and in such loud, unfriendly voices. I tried to make out something from their words but couldn’t. I walked out to the corridor, and went to the door that opened out into the living room.

I placed a hand around the knob.

And then I heard it – a crashing sound, as though things were falling to the ground, and glasses smashing. I stiffened. Fear rose unreasonably and wildly within me. What on earth was happening?

Like a canon shot, a voice that was unmistakably Dad’s struck my ears with the words malevolently distinct: “You witch, so it was you, eh? So you are the one that poisoned by father? So it was you?” Dad’s voice boomed like thunder. “I never knew that I married a witch for a wife. So it was you?!”

Oh no! I thought hysterically, what on earth was happening? Why was Dad. . .?

Mum’s voice, piteous and pleading, cut into my thoughts: “I didn’t do it, Eric . . . You have to believe me! We both know that I can’t hurt someone! I didn’t poison . . .”

“Shut up!” Dad roared. “Are you calling the native doctor a liar? Shut your mouth, you witch!”

Mum poisoned Papa? Mum was a witch? It sounded ridiculous, yet the accusation curdled my blood.

I was about to turn the door knob when something fell with a thud. It sounded like a body, and the fall was followed with Mum’s whimper. Dad shouted, “I will kill you before you kill my father!”

“Please, Eric. I didn’t. . .”

More things crashed. I’d heard enough. Things, it seemed, were already out of control. I shoved the door open and dashed into the living room – and stopped in my tracks, my eyes widening with instant horror.

What I saw in the living room made me scream.

There was blood everywhere, spattered on every surface my eyes fell on. On the sofas. On the TV and DVD stand. On the stools. On the rug that covered the floor. Blood was everywhere, splatters of it here and there. The glass table in the parlour was shattered to pieces. And Mum was lying on her back, on those scattered pieces of glass. She was in her night dress, the cloth ripped and drenched with red. The red of her blood.

At my horrified scream, Dad, who was standing over Mum’s body, swung around to stare at me. He didn’t look like the man I knew to be my father. His face was as hard as stone, his eyes bloodshot and mad, with a tic working on the right part of his face. Tiny bubbles of froth forming at the corners of the mouth, and his fists were clenched around a pestle. The pestle too was bloody. I needed no one to tell me that he had used it on Mum. My whole body shuddered. I felt nauseous.

“What are you doing there, Chika?” he thundered.

I shuddered again, the shivers running repeatedly over my body. My scream died down, and my throat worked as I retched.

“I asked you a question, Chika. What are you doing there?!”

“Leave my daughter alone, Eric. . .” Mum muttered weakly in agony, gasping out blood.

“You witch!” He rounded on her. “You and your daughter are witches! You want to kill my father!”

“David consulted the wrong native. . .” She stopped to cough out blood. “He met the wrong native doctor. I would never. . .”

“Shut up!” Dad roared violently and lifted the pestle, his expression manic as he did so.

“NO!” I choked out, stumbling forward. “MUM!” I screamed.

The pestle cut through the air and rammed into Mum’s forehead. There was a sharp crack as her skull caved in. Her head flopped sharply backward and her body dropped back on the ground. She lay still. Dead.

“MUM!”

I plunged forward still with tearful eyes. Dad raised the pestle again, to strike her again. And then I pounced on him. I attacked him with everything I had. My feet. My teeth. My fingers. Everything.

The slap that landed on the right side of my face instantly made me dizzy. I was sent flying back, onto one of the bloodstained sofas. Dad made towards me, pestle in hand. I lay helplessly, staring death in the eyes.

Slowly, he raised the weapon he clutched so firmly. Murder masked his face. Demons danced in his eyes. I held my breath. I was young, and I wasn’t supposed to know such ugliness at my age. But there it was.

Then he flinched and screamed. The pestle dropped from his hand to the floor. He jerked his right leg up, clasping his hands around the ankle above the piece of glass that had sliced into the flesh of his sole, sending blood pulsating from the wound. This time, his blood was flowing.

I knew I’d gotten a reprieve, and I seized the chance. I leaped up from the sofa, and snatched the pestle up from the floor. My tears blinded me, and I assumed my face must have some of the madness I’d seen on Dad’s face etched on it. I swung towards him, my father, the man who’d just been about to kill me. He was limping to a seat. He saw me with the weapon and stopped. Abruptly, he fell on the sofa where I previously was.

“Chika, wait a minute, what are you doing?” The demons in his eyes were suddenly gone. What I saw now was fear.

“You killed Mum!” I screamed through my tears.

That was all I needed to hate him and do what I knew I had to do. He’d killed my mother. I advanced. He did nothing. Perhaps he thought that I too would do nothing. But the rage and misery had blinded me and blocked out any hesitation.

I swung my hands, and I struck. He didn’t duck. And the world paused. The silence stretched for a breathy second. Then the pestle crashed down on his temple. Blood squirted from his nostrils. Screaming, I swung again. The blow connected with the top of his head. His skull appeared to collapse. And his lifeless body dropped back on the sofa.

Shaking and crying softly, I threw away the bloodied pestle, turned and ran from the living room, from the house, and into a morning that was still dewy and fresh, with dawn-softened skies that promised a beautiful day ahead. 

Posted by Walt Shakes on February 25, 2014

https://mymindsnaps.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/testament-of-rage/