PRACTICE - TEN

I was up early. After washing my face I prepared things for Laide to have her bath. She was already up and about, cleaning.

I heard Grandpa call from his Obi. I went. He said his barn was empty… he hadn’t been feeling well enough to go to the farm. The young men who used to help the old out in their farms had all migrated to the cities in search of better fortunes. It had never been harder being an old man. What Grandpa was trying to say… I had to go to the farm and get his yams, at least – if I couldn’t accomplish anything else there. There was hardly any food in the house.

Damn!

I informed him that I could buy all the food the house needed… in case he didn’t know. It was an odd idea. He wouldn’t have it. Go buying food when he had surplus in his farm?! There was no contesting it, I had to go. And I knew this man; I dared not ask him for directions to the farm – at my age.

I told him I had to go get ready. I went to ask Grandma and she said, she, a woman, dared not point out directions for me to my father’s farm while he was still alive… It was a taboo or something like that.

My Blackberry’s battery had died, but my Nokia was still alive, so I switched sim cards. I went in search of signal to call my eldest brother. A man that saw me struggling outside the house told me I had to head towards the junction. So I went back in to prepare for the farm… call my brother on the way.

I took a cutlass, hung a hoe on my shoulder, and took a basket and a piece of cloth with which to carry the basket home. I started making my way. Grandpa had come out of his Obi, chewing-stick in his mouth. He asked if I was leaving already, and laughed a wry laugh when I said yes. He said even the sturdiest boy in the village couldn’t trek to Ukpata – that was the farm. The farm was the reason he had a motorcycle… I said, well, I couldn’t ride. There was a bicycle too, and that I could ride. When I wheeled the bicycle out to the front yard, he asked if I was leaving Laide behind. She, meanwhile, had been watching…and she now had that ‘I told you so’ look on her face. Grandpa’s countenance would have it no other way – Laide had to go with me. It appeared we had to undertake and succeed in this together. Modern girl: she came tagging along at once. Grandma yelled in our language. I explained to Laide that she had to go get a wrapper… No need to take off the trouser she was wearing… just tie it over.

                I kept trying to call my brother. It kept cutting. I put clues together, plus the little I could still remember from 1995…and kept going. April 1995 was my second time ever in this village… for a few days. A number of months astride ’91 and ’92 were my first. Then, we had run from a raging inferno in Kano State.

People we passed on the road stared at us until we were out of sight. The ones that knew me came to say hello and pry. Knew our family, actually. I would stare too… if I was in their shoes. What sort of young love… in a place like this… Laide held onto me from behind, and kept cautioning me about my speed on a not-so-good road. I argued that to keep our balance, we had to speed. That’s the trick in riding bicycles. The better riders can go slow; amateurs speed. It was thrilling to ride a bicycle again after so long. When we got to the vast area around where our farm was, we alighted and I wheeled. We were saying hello to people… sheer luck that people were in the farm this early. If we saw people from our clan, meant our farm was close… because the plots were shared amongst clansmen. One woman spoke like a true neighbor, and I knew at once ours was next to hers. It was unkempt. She said she’d intended to help Grandpa weed the following day. With all the rains, weeds were blossoming. And at the spots where yam tubers from last season were gathered under dry debris, the rains had soaked them, creating moisture underneath and causing the yam tubers to start germinating. All these anomalies assured me further that this was our farm.

While I was surveying the heaps of debris, the woman called out to me…

                “They’re starting to germinate, yeah?”

I said yes.

                “Well, they’re yet still okay to eat; a little later and you’ll have to put them in the ground and wait for next year.”

                “They seem far gone already,” I said, “can’t I just replant them now?”

                “Well, you can… But it might be a waste. They’re not all seed yams, and the yield may not be as big as the investment.”

Laide and I started to gather into the basket. Doing it with her, it didn’t feel like work. And it didn’t matter that she didn’t look a useful farm hand. It’s the ideal of grandparents to have their grandsons marry extremely industrious girls… for all of life’s challenges. But times had indeed changed. There was hardly a three percent chance that we would end up as a couple who would have to depend on our subsistence agriculture for a living. Didn’t mean I had our future all sorted out, though.

                Laide took the hoe and started weeding at random. I got her to concentrate on the task at hand. We had filled the basket, now how to carry it was a problem. It occurred to me that, since this woman was our neighbor here, she had to be our neighbor at home too… so I decided to ask her to lend us a sack which she could pick up from the house later on. Laide flashed me a knowing look.

We put the yam tubers in the sack, and it could even take more than the basket. Laide was laughing. I couldn’t help joining her. I was tying the sack unto the back of the bicycle… I asked her to quit laughing and give me a hand. She came to help me, but said she wasn’t getting on that. It was funny, sweet, memorable… That was how we met – watching a picture of an okada man and a woman who carried a sack of cassava in similar fashion… only theirs was a motorcycle. She posted the picture on Facebook, and my curious comments inspired the chat that had brought us here. Our sack now, placed horizontally on the bicycle, didn’t alter the balance; as a matter of fact, it enhanced it. And then Laide could sit high on top of it… I could handle it, really. I could navigate us home this way.

                “It’s the only way we’re going to get home today.”

                “No!” She kept giggling.

                “Don’ worry… I’ll be extremely careful…”

                “I’ll walk.”

                “We can’t walk all the way… Remember they’re counting on us for lunch.”

                “I’m going to fall,” she nagged.

                “No, you won’t. I’ll be extreeeemely careful… Promise.”

She was chewing on the idea.

“Please. Let’s just go home… If you can’t do it for transport, at least do it for love.”

She thought awhile, and then began to smile.

                “I’ll do it for love, Duke. And keep your promise, okay?!”

                “I will, sweetie.”

Phew!

Fear was still in her eyes when she clambered. This girl had to learn to trust me.

We didn’t go too slowly, or balance would have been hard to achieve and maintain. It was my defense again when she protested that I wasn’t keeping my promise. Wherever the road was bad, or too hilly, we got down and wheeled, then got on again… attracting attention the entire length of the journey.

                When we got home, Grandpa was sad that his worst fears had materialized – his yams were starting to rot. He praised our work, but wished we could make more trips to rescue the most we could, and plant the ones we couldn’t. Laide jumped at the errand.

We made two more return trips… the last time we went, we stayed back making hips and planting. We had instructions – as if I didn’t already know – slant the tubers when you put them in the soil; make sure you don’t upturn them; the bigger the hip, the better… on and on.

We went home really dirty, and Mom told me sarcastically that hard work in the farm wasn’t determined by how dirty one came home. I ignored her and went to bathe.