SHORT STORY: PUNCHING BAG

By Nwabuisi Kenneth

                           Photo Credit: iStock

PUNCHING BAG

A terrific rain came juddering our windows that night, after we had dinner, after dad had informed us about his travel the next day. Uncle Theo visited us, it was on that same night I found a white powder inside his backpack. Mom chided me though, but uncle and mom still had a squabble that night in our sitting room.

Uncle Theo and mom have both been in logger-heads for weeks now. I can remember vividly one evening, he returned and mom was sprawled over our sofa, in a white attire and hair-tie. Beyond her hair-tie was a neatly cut head. Mom loved Dad so much, but that love was tapered the day Dad's car lost break and he came sliding down the hills while trying to avoid a way-laid truck. The forest he clambered down into was an oasis of tall trees and jagged thorns. A branch of one of those trees got stuck into his ribs and blood spilled.

The next day, Dad was laid to rest. I cried; so did mom, she rolled and turned and raised a leg to exert her grief. Before Dad was finally laid to rest at the burial ground, the saint Cecilia's choir chanted a solemnization hymn, something which ran through several heart-wrenching soprano and its soothing alto. The priest blessed his carcass and sprinkled holy water. We - mom and I - stood under a huge tree. I held mom's hand, consoling her while the other women stood beside her, whispering few indecipherable words into her ears. I remember mom's red eyes was buried on a soaked handkerchief. 

"Ka o di, Ezeudo my husband." My mother said after sprinkling the red earth on his brown coffin. A tiny rain started dropping, someone from the back pulled a black umbrella over mom's head. The beat of the rain on the umbrella was rapid, but outside the umbrella it was so slow in a way that the mourners who weren't under the shade of the umbrella were still standing. I wondered why the rain came at this instant, how it never seemed to go away, how even upon mom's wails there seemed to be a momentary contest between mom's voice and the rain.

I had wanted to sing 'rain, rain, go away' just as mom had always instructed me to while growing up, but I hadn't and the rain came in torrent, pattering heavily on our umbrella, drenching wholely the mom's black attire half-inch away to the ground. The mourners started scampering away, I pulled the hinge of my mom's wrapper heavily, the morgue was busy pulling sand over Dad's grave. I noticed mom's gaze was still, beyond the courtyard, at a distance. I traced her gaze to the horizontal lines the rain drew everywhere, then my gaze caught it, just like hers had done. 

A tall figure making a quick stride up the graveyard. It was Uncle Theo's gusto, the same strident swagger with which he walked. Uncle Theo could easily pass for an actor, his charred skin would easily give him away. Whenever a glimmer of light shines for too long at home, uncle would always come in and everywhere would turn pitch-black. Uncle Theo is a man of his words too, and that's fine. He took everything he had said in the past to the latter. Like the time while I was in primary one, he had promised to take me to shopping the whole day if I came first position in class. Then, there was a boy who was bent on taking the first position. When on that Friday afternoon, I returned and he checked my report sheet and found a bold 'Ist position' written on it, he shook my hand, held it warmly and said, "my boy, you've made me proud."

My ego was skyrocketed, uncle Theo did as he promised. He took me to the best kiddies shopping in town and bought me many goodies: toys, clothes, shoes, bicycle. There was one thing uncle bought for me which up till today, I haven't shown to Mom and Dad. It was a gun. A you gym with bullets. He kept it at his place and taught me how to use it occassionally - each time I visit his house during weekends.

I loved Uncle for keeping to his words. But not until he now came to take over Dad's property upon his death.

"Everything Ezeudo owned is now mine." He said, an air of possessiveness intonated his pitch.

Mom refused him. She loathed him and avoided him like a plague. On the following afternoon, three elderly men walked into our sitting room. They were flanked in native attire, with the 'isiagu' design and round red caps. One of them walked sluggishly as though a heavy hammer was left on the centre of his waist.

They threw flying spittles and splattered mucus from their tobacco encrusted nostrils. And everything landed to our face, they consented to uncle's claims. It came sliding to us: that uncle Theo was now the owner of us, mom inclusive. I wondered which tradition, which custom bequeaths a man's possession to another; including his wife.

Like a jealous bull, Uncle Theo owned us. We became oncemore a property, his property. There were nights my mother sobbed, her face buried on the pillow, and when she heard footsteps approaching the door, she would hold her breath, feigning to be deeply asleep, then Uncle's footsteps would come tapping on the floor like a patter of rainfall on an umbrella. 

He would walk around, probably surveying if my breath came frantically as in a deep slumber. And when I breathed fast as he wanted, to assure him I was asleep, he would first tap my mother's curved breast.

"Beatrice, wake up." He whispered.

My mother drifted to the edge, resisting the urge ignited by his touch. He grabbed her, rubbing her with kisses when my mother, amidst disgust and fortitude, forced her eyes open like a child whose plan has been ferreted out by an adult.

"Oh! You were not asleep afterall." Uncle licked his lips, "That's rather nice, I have come to take my own pound of flesh." He announced and when my mother tried to slouch, I heard a 'ratarata' sound like a palm on a cheek, before he dragged my tearful mother away with him. I lay soaked in my own incapacitatedness.

In the morning, the welt of his palm was left imprinted on my mother's cheek as she hurried to prepare breakfast, I sat beside her and asked, "Mom, what is that mark on your face?"

She batted her eyelids and tried to conceal the mark with her left palm. "It's nothing." She said, I knew there was something, something she knew was beyond my control.

As days spread into nights, and nights learnt how to spread its weightlessness to the strangeness of weeks, I realized how vulnerable mother had become to Uncle Theo's brutality. Sometimes, he hit her with a back hand across her face, almost blinding an eye; other times he unplugged his belt from its hooks, eyes flouncing as he lashed my mother's body.

It didn't hurt much then, when he engaged in this battery in secret, but now he was doing it also in my presence. Once, at my teenage years, I had just started feeling my bones, and I was still entrapped by the weight of urgency that accompanies one to adulthood. I wanted to fight him back but his wiry bones wrung my hands to the back. He threw several punches at me and pushed me to my dead-beaten mother.

And then, I cried.

                                                                                  

AUTHOR'S BIO

Nwabuisi Kenneth holds a BA in English and literary studies from the university of Nigeria, Nsukka. He reads and writes from the small town in Nsukka. His short story "The art of leaving" was longlisted for the Libretto African Anthology prize.