• Someone is driving cattle to eat cabbages. A trap is laid
Image: FILE
On the night the President prolonged the pandemic curfew for the umpteenth time, the family of Papa 33 had to sleep in the cassava plantation behind their decrepit wattle huts. There was no choice. Zero. The issue at hand demanded it. It had to be done.
Neighbour X had attempted yet again to kill their new mother. This time he had come with a creaking wooden barrow, a sugarcane machete and a gunny sack. He had shouted his intention.
“Bakheba! I’ll chop you into mask-sized chunks of flesh then wheel you in the plastic gunny sack to the new lockdown police roadblock nearby to report his crime of revenge!”
He had wailed how his heart was made of flesh and not plastic.
“I may be an albino but eiish! I’m human and have a temper with limits!” he railed as he did a horrible little war dance. It went up and down on his jiggered toes without nails before the horrified 33 family.
According to him, the antics of Mama 33, owner of the guilty animals, had now exceeded the farthest limits of mercy. They had become too much. Intolerable. I tell you.
It had taken the entire extended family of the 33s – adolescent twins, their hunchback half-sister, four coughing cows, and a wildly screaming goose minus a wing – to control the rage in Neighbour X.
Fought to the ground, disarmed, preached to in mother-tongue scriptures of mercy, and later appeased with a thermos of thin tea with boiled cabbage, X’s fury finally subsided.
He left.
But not before pointing his red enjaka eyes at the 33’s cattle boma with disgust written poetically all over his face. The warning was clear. I tell you.
This was the last time he was tolerating the now incessant nocturnal antics of his neighbour’s livestock. “Death is what will occur here if the mishap is repeated,” he thought in his tiny bald head as he lumbered away on his bow legs.
I tell you a military decision after a meeting of the 33 family was reached. In the cassava field they had to sleep, curfew or no curfew. A trap to set. That night.
*******
Armed with a rusty jiko, a flask of flimsy tea, stout sticks and pot-holed blankets, a smoking plant, they entered the cassava plantation at 12.51 am. The three high school 33s on corona vacation and their asthmatic newly jobless, ex-watchman father aged 70. Their twin home mongrels had been taken to a relative a village away as part of their trap.
1am. 2. 3…. And at exactly half past 3, dozing started. Yet that was the time old 33 heard the barbed fence wire squeak. Squeak. Squeakkk. Sqqqueeak. Silence. Squeak. Silence. Footfalls. Silence. Footfalls. Silence.
33 could hear his own heart pump cold fear all over his asthmatic chest. He whispered to his kin. “He is here!”
They monitored the invading interloper under the silvery moonlight in palpable tension. SHE walked on tiptoes and paused, walked and paused! After a while, the silhouette in its naked splendour and eerie hairdo headed straight for the cattle boma nearby.
It opened it. Drove out the silent cows and shooed them out of the gate and straight into Neighbour X’s cabbage garden… AHA! I tell you.
That was when 33 and his family struck.
Huyooo! Screams! Screams! Footfalls and panting breath. Catch her. The woman, alarmed like a startled duiker, attempted to take off in the direction of the stream. She came face to face with the old man himself with his bow and arrow aimed directly at her heart.
Petrified, the fleeing “woman” stood still like the wife of Lot. Hiding her face from the tensed old man by looking backwards and clutching at her naked “private zones”, she stopped on her tracks. She could see the approaching 33 brothers and their sister with their sticks raised in imminent attack. Caught. She was.
Screams crossed the ridges as neighbours poured out of their sleepy huts and dogs barked across the moon-drenched rural village. Enemy! Enemy! Eneeemy! Echoes. I tell you.
The caught MAN was identified as good old Neighbour Y. Yes, he who sometimes preached in the village church in the absence of the Bishop. He was stark naked with a mound of black cotton clay on his head and tall grass stems stuck into it facing the sky: a ritual wig.
They hung him on the barren mango tree and skinned him alive with sugarcane machetes halfway to his pubic area as they hurled curses at him and the rising crime rate.
The village vigilante arrived, an hour later, to untie his limp and disfigured body. They tied it in a white piece of common cotton and took it to the village police post. He died at noon. I tell you.
Neighbour X confessed in church about how he had mistakenly thought that Mama of 33 had always intentionally driven her cattle to eat his cabbages in the past few weeks.
They forgave each other for the small misunderstanding after looking deeply into their mutual albino eyes. Rumour has it that….
Dr Makokha teaches Literature and Theatre at Kenyatta University