A BOY'S MEMOIRS: A PIECE OF FICTION

Brume never liked onions in his noodles. He hated garlic more. My brother always smelt of garlic. He said it helped with the lungs. He smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. Brume did not like my brother, no sir, he certainly did not. He loved to smoke my brother’s weed though. My brother would come in late in the afternoon, sweat beading his forehead like big pimples. He would peer into our faces while we pretended to be asleep. Siesta was compulsory in the house. We hated siestas and every other machinations of the enemy that deprived us of football. My brother, would wave his hands over our eyes just to make sure we were deep in sleep. We knew how to pretend. From our barely open eyelids we would mark where he kept the weed stash.

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Brume didn’t know how to wrap the weed in the rizla, the thin paper used for wrapping cigarettes and marijuana. It was too soft, he always complained. I just watched neither contributing nor commenting in the monologue that usually followed the tearing of bible pages to wrap the leaves in. Brume never looked at me when he used the bible pages to wrap the weed. He said the pages were not too soft or two hard. They were just perfect. Besides, he always said, God was more concerned about what was in our hearts than what was on a piece of paper. He was already in the letters of Saint Paul to the Colossians by this time. It was luck that a group of missionaries had been to our community with those blue Gideon pocket bibles so we had enough pages to smoke until Armageddon. Our hearts were filled with bible verses we had smoked over the months following our discovery of weed.

We had first seen the weed by chance. We had been looking for Nkiru’s panties. Nkiru was the maid and our first crush. She had the reddest lips I have ever seen and it was always dry and peeling. She had to use gloss to keep it moist. She also had a temper that was unbelievable but she had the biggest breasts and buttocks that I had ever seen. Brume hated that I was the one sharing bed space with her. I was known to be all elbows and knees while sleeping but with her, I went an extra mile. I had wrapped my legs around that buttocks in feigned sleep so many times that no one besides Brume was concerned about my sleeping habits.

We would watch her bathe through the bathroom door keyhole and at night when power goes out and the powers that be put on the lantern or candles in the sitting room and kitchen, they don’t put in the bathroom, so we would hang around there and wait for her. While she was bathing and when we were sure that she was blinded by the soap and the darkness of the bathroom, we would creep in, touch her buttocks and run away. Brume said that is how to be a man. I don’t want to be a man yet. I like being a boy. I get away with a lot being a boy. Father does not get away with anything. I see how he looks at Nkiru and I know he wishes he was a boy like me.

We had found her panties hanging from a flower near the canopy that stretched away from the backdoor. The canopy was placed there by my brother so that we could all be outside even when it rained. It was spread like a catapult and I thought it was a catapult until Brume placed the wet thing on my head. The pantie was a small tiny thing and I wondered how she got it around her rather wide waist. Brume said he wanted to keep it as a memento. Brume liked to use big words with me. He liked to show that he knew more about the world than I did but I didn’t care. What will I be keeping panties for when those soft buttocks were just a skin away from me every night?

Nkiru did not take the disappearance of her pantie lightly, after all the news that ritualists were using panties for blood sacrifices to make money was all over town. She thought her pantie had been stolen for such a purpose while Brume carried the panty about like a gold medal for hundred meters in the Olympic Games. My brother bought her another pantie and it made father angry and they exchanged words. I never understood why mother laughed when she heard the reason for their argument. I know brother left the house for two weeks. It pissed Brume off because for two weeks, we had no weed.

We used to go to the open space before the Catholic Church to smoke the blunts. After wrapping as much as we could with torn bible pages, we would leave for evening Mass and on our way we would stop and hide in a cassava farm. In that farm, we would smoke and watch the stars. Sometimes, bigger boys came to join us and sometimes they took the entire weed from us by force. This was not often though because one evening when they tried to take our weed, Brume brought out a gun. I don’t know how it got out of the house but I know if father had found out that he carried his service pistol out of the house, nothing would have saved him. The bigger boys became more careful after that incident and asked politely.

When my brother came back, he looked really thin and his beard was thick. Father told him to go and get his own place but my brother said he had no money. Father let him sleep in the sitting room. That night, Nkiru crept away from the bed and I followed her like a shadow. I found her on top of my brother. It looked as if they were fighting because she was crying and he was covering her mouth with his hands. I told Brume the next day. He looked at me like I was a dunce and focused on wrapping the last weed. That morning, mother caught us with the stash of weed and the bible pages. She fainted but father did not faint when he heard. He drove Brume away from the house and asked him to go back to his mother. Brume took the pantie with him.

It was never the same again after Brume left. There was no weed to smoke and I was addicted to the sweet taste it left on my tongue. I was addicted to the way it made me feel, how it made me free like a bird. Father suspected my brother to be the source of my addiction but he had no proof so he held back his ire. My brother came to me and he beat me for smoking his stash then he warned me never to touch weed again as it was not good for me. I found my own source for weed and bought already wrapped Maryjanes. It is said that once one learns how to wrap the weed there is no going back. I never learnt because I wanted to be able to stop if it becomes too much to handle.

One morning, my brother woke up and said he was going to be a soldier. Mother cried and father was silent. My brother left a week later. Nkiru always cried at night after my brother left. I could hear her on Brume and my brother’s bed. I could not name it her bed. It will always be Brume and my brother’s bed. I thought she wanted to be a soldier too. I asked mother about her constant tears but mother said that she was a fool. A month later, she started vomiting and mother said that she was a big fool.

Mother gathered Nkiru and her things and took her back to the village. I thought Nkiru will never come back. Brume sent me letters. Long letters filled with big words. He was fine, he said. The city was more fun than our small town, he said. He had a girlfriend now. She has big breasts and big buttocks, he said. I replied sometimes. When I told him about the scholarship to study medicine in the United States, he called me a liar and never sent me another letter. My brother never sent a letter but we got a letter from the military command. Yes we did.

They typed it on crisp white paper. It had lots of signatures and stamps at the bottom and it told us that my brother had died in a village deep in the north. Mother had cried but father said nothing. Mother told me to write a letter to a man in Nkiru’s village. The next week, my brother’s things were brought home. They had buried him in the north but we could not go.

I visited the places I used to hang out with Brume before I left for the States. I even smoked a few blunts there but it didn’t feel the same. I could not feel the way I felt when I smoked with Brume. I stopped going to those places. Nkiru came to the house before I left and mother cried and hugged her like a long lost relative. Father did not say anything. He had always been a quiet man but he became worse after my brother’s death. Every time our eyes met, his lips would part as if he wanted to say something but he always sighed, shook his head and walked away.

I stopped smoking before I travelled so as to avoid my test for drugs turning out positive. I arrived the United States in the winter season. It was cold and I was alone. Some months later, mother spoke to me on the telephone; Nkiru had given birth to a baby boy. They had named him Buchi, my brother’s name. I was happy for them. I hope he does not learn to smoke weed or touch the maid’s buttocks but I am not keeping my fingers crossed.

Mother called me again yesterday. Father has run away with a girl of about Nkiru’s age. He left a letter saying he is going to Ghana. I told mother to never worry as long as she has me. She was still crying on the phone when I ended the call. I am not keeping my fingers crossed.

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©warpedpoetic, 2019.