I used to know a man down my street. His name was Inu Akale popularly known as Abe. He was forty-nine years old when he passed away. Before his death, people said that he was a strange man, a diabolic man even accursed from his previous relationships. I was intrigued by these descriptions because I used to know him. He lived down my street in Orizo close. He lived alone on the next block not far away from the Mallam shop opposite our compound. If you climbed up to our rusted rooftop, you would always see him in the evening wearing his white singlet and a patterned wrapper holding a local hand fan with a grimace on his face. It was as if he hated everyone that dared to pass in front of him.
I asked my mother in the afternoon yesterday before I went to school about the circumstance of his death.
‘Oni, why don’t you mind your business and bring me a good report card. All this stress I go to for your school fees’… she blew the coals as she fanned the half-roasted corn ‘all this your awanda if only you applied it in your school’… she was coughing now.
My mother was right. I didn’t have much interest in school but I was curious about a lot around me for example, I was curious about the noise that came from brother Shola’s room at eleven PM every night. It sounded as if a woman was always crying but there was no fight then, in the morning, a young lady would come out of brother Shola’s room smiling. It happened every week and there were always different women in the morning.
Before uncle Abe died, he had a friend called Mr. Shegs. I didn’t know if it was his real name or nickname. All I knew was that, I heard people refer to him by that name. Uncle Abe and Mr. Shegs were good friends even though I didn’t understand the extent of their friendship because, at Uncle Abe’s funeral, Mr. Shegs wasn’t there. I learnt that he had an urgent meeting in the village. There were four beautiful women at Uncle Abe’s funeral which I later found out were Uncle Abe’s wives. At that instant, I thought Uncle Abe was rich but then again, I was wondering why he always looked like he was poor living in our kind of area. I don’t mean all the people in my area were poor. It’s just that we didn’t have cars or personal bathrooms like rich people. My mother said that I should only respond to men who looked rich so that I can marry them and take her out of the ‘slum’. I didn’t know she hated our area. I loved where I was born and grew. I schooled close to home and most of my friends grew up here. I hope to finish school and get a shop for my mother and me so we could be comfortable and happy.
Uncle Abe was a man whose image was shrouded with stories, some true and some untrue. The problem was that you couldn’t easily differentiate the reality of the stories that beclouded him. He looked like a god man. His goodness had a way of bamboozling you. He could pull off his shirt so that another person he never knew would be clothed. He was the kind of man that would do anything to make sure that his neighbors were comfortable at his own expense. When my mother argued with a customer which resulted in an accident of scattering her roasted corn on the ground, it was Uncle Abe who settled the quarrel and paid for all the corn without collecting them.
The thing is, you can never truly know a person until you came close to them and find out that they had flaws. At some point, I thought to myself, the greater degree your flaws, the extreme your public show of goodness. But why all the outward façade? Isn’t it stressful? Things like this make me think even deeper. My mother was right after all. If only I applied my ability to reason to school work, maybe I won’t be coming home with a position of being the penultimate person in the class, or better still I wasn’t always the last.
Uncle Abe, before he passed away, boasted that women were devils. This statement was strange to people who heard it. He held strongly to that belief until his death. He died alone. No wife, child, or friend around him. How can a ‘good man’ die alone? I wonder.
Uncle Abe got married for the first time when he was twenty-three. The marriage ended three years later he had a daughter. After two years he got married again to a lady from Bayelsa, it surprisingly lasted for a year. Uncle Abe swore that he had suffered in the hands of women. According to him, all he did was to love them. After five years of being alone, he got married to a lovely Igbo lady. Shortly after four years and a son, she disappeared without a word. His last marriage before he moved to our area was even more interesting. He married a younger lovely lady when he was forty-two years old. He was in love but the old demons he housed couldn’t let the party be together. She cheated on him confessed and left uncle Abe.
The strings of failed relationships were questionable. Uncle Abe was questionable. In my conclusion and gossips- consisting of half-truths and exaggeration from school, I sifted out facts from fantasy. Before I even found out the sad truth about Uncle Abe, I thought to myself that if he concluded that all women were devils, then he had a knack for converting them from honeys and sweeties to devils and demons because of course, they were all angels and fair-skinned before they turned devil on him after he married them. Uncle Abe never had the innate capacity as a man to love a woman and he never learned. So, in my conclusion, he died of heartache and high blood pressure. If Uncle Abe’s life was an exam, I am sure to get an A.
Written by Theodora Ekah