THE SCHOOL BOY

CHAPTER ONE

Once there was a peaceful village in far South-Eastern Nigeria, blessed with nature's bounty: trees standing proud in the sun, coconut and banana, orange and udala and the fanned-out fronds of the majestic palm. Their farms was verdant with green, their fields golden with grain, their soil rich with yam. Aninri - for that was its name - was not a large village but it was enough and more than enough for its people and they lived in harmony, one umunna to another. This was a time when the Catholic missionaries had begun to make inroads into society but had yet to corrode and supplant the culture they found there with their own. Thus the natives lived in peace with their friendly interlopers and all was well between them. The people of the village had schools and government made available by the missionaries and their more mercantile paymasters and they had their own laws and codes of conduct that had guided them and their fathers and their fathers' mothers since time began.

Of course, like any human society, Aninri had its darknesses, its hidden past, its skeletons in a hundred closets. One such was one of their oldest laws, from harsher darker times. Quite simply, the punishment for theft was to be buried alive.

Another such skeleton was that the people of Aninri had not always lived in such harmony. There were old sins staining their history -- and not all had been forgotten.

So it transpired at the end of one especially hot day that a young man of but 18 years was venturing home from his missionary school. His name was Afamefuna Okoro, the last-born son of his family and father Mazi Ndubuisi Okoro.

As he passed through a shortcut he knew well, the small farm of the ancient widow Echieteka, the sun burned against his black skin, reflecting from the angles of his arm as he dragged his fingers over the tall leaves. Even the ground was blazing hot beneath his feet, forcing him to hop and skip lest they touch the ground too long. His hunger and his thirst were great and the school day had been long; he looked eagerly forward to his mother's delicious soup and the clean cold water of the well in the Okoro compound.

It was in this state of youthful eagerness and sun-fueled misery that he met Echieteka.

The woman was sitting on a large flat stone, near a mango tree, vast green leaves vaulting above her providing ample shade. She was shockingly ancient, gnarled with age, the dry tributaries of the rivers of years written in every line of her skin and face, her hair long and white -- but her eyes were shockingly clear. Most people of her advanced years would have had eyes full of rheum, cloudy with the beginnings of cataracts and glaucoma. Not this one; though they peered out from a face like a map folded too many times on too many journeys, they peered bright as a baby's with an intensity like the flames around a blackening spear.

While there were many old people in the village, Afamefuna had never seen anyone as old as Echieteka. He had seen her before of course; everyone knew about the ancient widow Echieteka, oldest person in the village. His mother always reacted strangely whenever they passed her house, walking faster and talking less.

And then she spoke. "Ehihie oma, nwam (Good afternoon, my child.)" Afam almost jumped out of his skin; he had seen her before from a distance but he had never heard her speak. Her voice was like gravel dragged through silk, her teeth like little brown graves in her gums. He almost forgot to answer her, bad enough that he had been disastrously impolite enough to let an elder greet him first. But before he could begin his apologies, she help up a clawed hand to silence him. "Biko, e nwero ife o mee (Please, it's no big deal)

She spoke again: "It's okay, nwam. How is your family?" Afam stammered back that his family was fine, that he was on his way home from school, that ... but Echieteka interrupted him once more: "Family. It's a good thing, isn't it. It's been a long time since I had a family. Sometimes you forget."

"... I don't understand," Afamefuna responded at last, sweat breaking out afresh on his body. He wondered how she could stand the heat. Maybe she was like his own grandmother who always complained of cold in the harmattan -- when for him it was a mildly-chilled relief from the rest of the year.

The old woman lowered her head, shaking it very slowly from side to side as if in wonderment at the ground beneath her feet. She lifted her head again. "Please, can you do me a favour?

Afamefuna looked up at the blazing blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. This was going to be a loooooooong day.

To Be Continued

Glossary

Afamefuna - "May my name never be lost"

Echieteka - "Tomorrow is too far away"

gbata-nuoooooooo: come oooooooooo

umunna - basically "kinsmen" relatives both distant and near, who as a group have influence and a place in any given individuals life

Post-Script

As I wrote this, I wonted it to be done in one short story but the more I wrote, the more the story grew, the more I needed to explain about each character for their actions to make sense. So now it's a multi-chapter hahahahahaha ... epic. We go see as e go dey. If you're interested in something like that, then 👇

you know how we do, na

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misterakpan (61) 7 years ago

@Madmaxfur is back with a banger! I long to see the rest of this story.