My name is Okenyi Norbert Kenechi and the story that you are about to read is the reality of the world before me. Nothing added, nothing removed.
I will be brief as usual.
A man came to marry my sister, a man who had been married before, until his ex-wife’s brothers arrested him and put him in prison for constantly molesting her and subsequently put an end to the constant molestation. That was years ago. That was the type of man that my sister found worthy of living the rest of her life with, a man who was not able to settle the scores of family life, that was the man she brought home and called him her ‘Honey’ before me. I was not happy, not then, not now.
He didn’t wed his ex-wife, neither did he perform the necessary marriage rights. He was too much in a hurry to have done that. They had fallen for each other’s foolery too had that they lost their senses. My sister had equally fallen for him and all his gimmicks against all useful counsel.
He only connived with some decrepit men, some of them equally despicable in their ways, accused the ex-wife’s ex-husband of cheating and molestation and other sundry allegations that were too rough for the brain to remember and took over.
At least, so I heard. I wasn’t there when they were committing such atrocities, for I would have reprimanded him ‘bigly’. I am blunt like that. But on a second thought, even if I were, it wouldn’t have been any of my business. I have never known him before save for one or two occasions that a drunken man said things that were utterly awful about him. God bless the drunk, their tongue never told a single lie.
I remember vividly, because the words of that drunken man were straight from the heart, striking all the nerves in him to an extent that it got him brutally agitated. I wondered how he knew all those things and in details too.
He had an awesome smile, my sister’s man, a smile that was brighter than his age. He hid a lot of things too, things we will have to discover after he had succeeded in stealing her heart away.
You see that my sister, she was the epitome of unrefined beauty, gifted with the spirit of forgiveness. She is calm to a fault. Men drooled as she walked by with a well standing body stature that was the envy of womankind. Older women will watch her pass and despise their old age. I have seen it happen many a time.
She also took many things for granted, chief of which were the men she associates with. She always loved the wrong persons, persons she had erroneously thought that giving her love to them unconditionally would cure them of their greed for other women. How wrong she was.
Her first husband had died a year into the marriage. His sickness was a cause for worry. It drained her emotionally, psychologically and financially. Even though I have found him on many occasions unwrapping things that he did not wrap, I swore never to tell my sister as it will break her heart and depress her. She had given everything she ever worked for hoping to save the dying man. His survival was all she hoped for but he didn’t make it. I was sad, despite all his faults, he was a good man.
He was weak in a way, with the nerve of a pig, the dead man, but he was good and did that which was right always.
The day he died, I was on my way to the market, at the order of my mother’s boyfriend, my father. My mother and her boyfriend are so much in love that not even my mother’s children could come between them.
A man who was precarious in his ways had owed my mother’s boyfriend some money and in the midst of the tension that my family was into, and the quest for survival of a great in-law, he had sent me to his debtor to collect his money.
The man, my mother’s boyfriend’s debtor, he usually ran at the sighting of any member of my family. But that day, he did not run as I approached him. He did not utter a word either but dug his hand inside his torn trouser and squeezed some tired notes into my rough palms and I bade him goodbye.
On my way home, while reminiscing on what life actually meant to the sick and dying, I was informed by Mama Edozie, that woman with a flying tongue that swept dust of iniquities into her life, that the great in-law had passed. I grew numb with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. It was terrible, sad even, that he had to die the way he did.
But that is the beginning of this story as you know it.
On the night that my sister’s former husband was buried, in all her sorrows, a man had whispered some irritating words into her ears. My sister later explained that the dark-complexioned and tall man was asking for her hand in marriage.
Can you imagine that? That was a woman in sorrow and tears, a woman who had lost a husband being approached by another man on the night that she buried her husband. This life is nothing but a misery and a scum of hive.
To be continued…..
