_{Photo by Nischal Masand on Unsplash.}
There lived a man, blind from birth, crippled from the waist down. He lived on the outskirts of our village. He was a curiosity and we used to go to taunt him, steal his maize and move his chair. He would rain curses on us and sometimes, his cane would touch one of us. Yet, we always went back to his house. May be, because it is easy for man to oppress and intimidate the weak especially when we are preys to others stronger than us.

My father was a palm wine tapper, who drowned in his product more than he sold it. He always returned from the bush swaggering, staggering from left to right, with flies escorting the kegs of palm wine on his shoulder. But I loved him the most. He sang beautiful songs and told awesome stories at night when the moon is up in the sky and the town crier had passed with his gong.

My mother never smiled and her hands were never empty. She always had something in it; a pot, a cup, vegetables, yam, meat, fish, hoe, cutlass. She was always busy but her eyes never kept still. She saw everything even what I and my friends were doing behind her, what we had done and weirdly, what we intended to do. She was a goddess, I tell you. The only person that made her smile was my father.

When she saw him stagger into the house, her eyes would light up, she would smile and shake her head and go to him. Their relationship was quite weird. I was never able to figure out what father saw in her.

Father was slim, light complexioned and the most handsome man in our village. I know this because any time I walked with him, the village women always called out to him, from the young single maidens yet to find a man to warm their mats to the old crones with lips lacking teeth. It always irritated me the way they threw their selves at him. Yet in his drunken state, he never fell for any of their antics.

My mother on the other hand was a broad, dark skinned powerhouse with limbs like tree trunks and huge palms. Her family had been lumber traders who travelled across the big river to the villages of the sea people at the place where they said the big river dumped into a bigger river.

I have not seen this huge river that covered the world but I believed it existed because my mother told me so and she never lied. She was not a beauty but she was hard working and my father loved her.

_{Photo by Sarah Louise kinsella on unsplash}

One day, we went to pluck mangoes at the old crone, Mama Ladida’s place. The mangoes were ripe and they hung low but we had avoided it before because of a red cloth that was tied to the tree trunk but on that fateful day, the red cloth was gone. As far as we were concerned, the curse the old witch had placed on the tree was gone. We rushed to the tree and we began to pluck as much as we could. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere the old woman appeared. She stood watching us, a crooked smile on her face.

We gathered our mangoes and took to our heels but Saka did not go. I don’t know what came over him; he decided to throw stones at the old crone. We watched from a safe distance as he threw stones. We watched as one of the stones hit the old woman on her shoulder and we hailed Saka for his bravery. He ran to join us, swollen like he had driven the Obolo people away from our farms single handedly.

We praised him as we ran home, excited that we had faced the old witch without getting cursed or charmed. We shared the mangoes we had plucked and then we went our separate ways.

I got to my father’s compound and met a crowd standing in front of the entrance. They were silent and they parted for me to pass through into the house. The sitting room was dark with the shadows of the afternoon sun playing on the walls. My mother was seated on the floor cradling my father’s head on her laps. I stood before them, my hands clutching my sack of mangoes to my stomach.

My father must have passed out from drinking too much, I thought but why was the whole village standing in front of our house?
My father sighed and shifted. The sun shimmered in the room and fell on my father’s shoulder. There was a big sore there. I stared at the sore, watching the worms wriggle inside it as if it had started to fester.

I could not understand what was happening. I looked at my mother. She looked at me and in her eyes, I saw nothing. The fire in her eyes that burnt bright, that brought me and father home after we had roamed round the village had dimmed and I could see it going cold.

I tried to speak, to ask something but the words stuck in my throat. I coughed as the sun appeared again and a shadow fell at our door. I turned and I stepped back in fear. Before me was the blind and crippled man, the one we always tormented. He had a long staff in his left hand and a little boy stood behind him holding a bag.

I shifted away from the entrance and watched them pass into the sitting room.
In my head, I thought he had come to report me to my parents. I was scared but the sight of my father on the mat held my feet to the ground and besides my shadow moving with the sun, I remained as stiff as a statue.

The blind cripple crawled to the edge of the mat and stared at my father. He raised his sightless eyes and stared at my mother , he dipped his index finger into his mouth and coated it with saliva then he dipped it without hesitation into the wound.

My father’s scream unfroze my legs and I dove at the man but the boy beside him moved like a snake and his punch threw me back to the floor, my threadbare short scraping my buttocks on the floor. I sprang back up, ready for another go at tearing the blind wizard into shreds but my mother raised her hand and I froze again.

The blind cripple did not consent to recognize my efforts at saving my father from pain. He dug deep into the wound, his finger twisting as if seeking for something within the red swollen flesh. He removed his finger and held it up. On it was a fat wriggly worm. He raised the worm up and he stared at it with his blind eyes then he turned to look at me and he smiled.

“Mango is sweet; a curse caused is sweeter, eh?”

My legs trembled under me. I stepped back and my back touched the wall. My mother turned to look at me, a frown on her face, and a question in her eyes. I shrunk into the wall, the bag of mangoes hidden behind me. My lips were trembling now and sweat beaded my forehead.

“You have roamed wild and free in this village and now you have killed one of the beauties of our world. You have caused a curse to befall your family.”

My father moaned. My mother turned to look at him and I turned to look at them.

“The only way to save your husband, will be for your son to offer four years of service to the owner of the farm he had stolen those mangoes from. If he does not do so, your husband will die in seven days time.”

Never! I will not spend a second with that toothless, shriveled thing. I turned and I sped out of the house into the setting sun. I did not get far. They caught me at my father’s oldest palm tree and they didn’t bother to take me back home.

The old woman was very glad to see me and she showed it by making me sweep the yard, fetch firewood, fetch water, fan the fire and scratch her dirty back. That night I cried. This was going to be my life for four years.

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written by @warpedpoetic for Steemianarena.

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