That Xmas Day!

                                                                  That Xmas Day!

Christmas was the celebration I had grown up to dislike. I always wished December never came. It was the time other kids in my street dressed in their December new wears and romped pea-cockishly up and down the road and I watched them enchanted. The high pavement in front of our house was my favourite sitting position; where I and my elder brother Johnson watched the other kids on Christmas parade throwing their fireworks in the air and they filled the air with smokes and the awful smells that caused some sicknesses for fowls in January. The 25^th of December, 1997 was very significant. I was barely nine years old. Johnson and I sat on the pavement watching families move their luggage up the street in a bid to travel to the country side for Christmas celebration. Daddy had warned us severally, to stop milling at the pavement while he was alive; but it was the order we never obeyed. We sat there and kept watch; to run back into the house at any sight of him. Now Daddy was no more, we sat freely. We had helped our neighbours get their bags into the brown Mitsubishi L300 saloon bus that took them to Ohaofia as they travelled a day before. They gave us some money and waved us bye and called us “ala wu otu” as the bus joined the traffic. We never joined in the Christmas frenzy. We never travelled during Christmas. Daddy never bought us new clothes during Xmas; he never bought us toys; and neither did he allow us to use fireworks nor partake in the street’s Christmas Carol. It wasn’t that he did not love us like other fathers liked their kids. It wasn’t that he didn’t want us to be happy. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses. We didn’t celebrate Christmas because daddy said Jesus Christ was not born on the 25^th of December. He said Christmas celebration was borrowed from Roman pagan celebration of the birth day of the Sun god and that Jehovah’s people should not allow themselves to get contaminated with disguised satanic celebration of any sort.

In the morning of 25^th December 1997, the weather was cold and dried with the harmattan breeze rocking the leafless tree branches and blowing dust in the air. The breeze was making a whirling pool of dusts and cellophanes and dried leaves in the air when Ojee came to our house. The breeze swept passed him in a gust and he covered his face with both arms and ran into the shelter of the veranda where I sat with Johnson.

 “Ghosts are heading for the market”, He said and smiled at us as he crossed over to the pavement where we sat. We laughed and greeted him; “Otete good morning”.

“Ehe… good morning,” he responded and said “this kind of dust will cause Apollo if it gets into one’s eyes”. My elder brother looked at him and said it was not Apollo season and smiled shyly. I did not smile. I never liked Ojee as much as my mother disliked him. I turned to look at him as he brought out a handkerchief and scrubbed his face. His eyes were red like he had Apollo already. The strands of hair in his nostrils were brown with dust. He must have come from afar. Ojee was one of my father’s apprentices. He was the one Mama rejected the first day he came to ask for a job with my father.

“Sam, we can’t take this boy” Mama had said to my daddy.

“Why?” daddy asked

“There is something in me that doesn’t want this man here”

“Do you know him before?”

“No but can’t you see the scars on his head? He can’t be a good person to have such big scars. We can’t risk bringing in a thief here”, mama warned sternly. Daddy had turned Ojee back the first day till he came again with his aged father. Though daddy later accepted Ojee, mama continued complaining that there was something sinister about him. That it was only robbers, pickpockets and motor park boy that were known to have such scars in Aba. After eavesdropping into my parents discussions about ojee, I came to dislike him too. I liked everything my mum liked and hated everything she hated because I loved her.

As he stood there behind us at the pavement cleaning his dusty face and the brown nostrils, I didn’t want to turn and look at him again. He wore a fluffy dark brown jacket that reeked of a mixture of cigarette and beer and some other unidentifiable pugnacious smells that upset my stomach. After cleaning his face he walked into the yard and my elder brother followed him to unlock the shop. We never expected that anybody would be coming to work on a Christmas day. There was no other person at home. Mama had gone out for preaching. I was still on the pavement when Johnson came out and asked me to join him, that Ojee had sent him to buy five bottles of water so that I would help him carry them. All the shops in our street were closed. Many of them had travelled to the village for Xmas celebration. Mama Adaobi the grocery woman opposite our house didn’t open. She went to church though she was a Seventh Day Adventist. So we had to go as far as Etchie road to get the bottles of water.

25^th December 1997 was a Thursday; the kind of Thursday that looked like weekend because it was a public holiday. We half ran and half walked and played along the lonely Street of Okezie as we headed towards Etchie Road. At the cross road that led to Abam Street was a black heap with strings of burnt tyres on it and white smokes ascending sky high like the kind of smoke I saw in the kitchen the day mama’s oil burnt. The smell from the heap was like that of a roasted goat meat; the kind of smell that made me run away from Musa, the Hausa boy that roasted suya beside our house. I disliked the smell because it upset my stomach. I blocked my nose with my palms as we ran passed it. There, I saw what was like a burnt human head and the roasted hand jutting out under the heap. Johnson blocked his nose too and said it must be a thief that was killed the night before. People crossed freely without looking at the direction of the burnt thief. Nobody cared. It was not a strange sight. At Ndoki Street another corpse was still burning with smoke ascending sky high. Mama Obi’s shop at Ndoki besides our primary school was closed. It was the shop where we bought kpof kpof at break times in school. So we crossed over to Etche road near the primary school field and bought the bottles of water. Johnson suggested that we shouldn’t pass through Okezie again so as not to see the burnt corpses again. We followed Abam Street opposite Riverside primary school. At No1. Abam was the big lorry that had a monkey jumping around in it. Johnson threw a small stone at the monkey, it ducked and charged after us. We ran from there till we got home.

We came home breathing like lizards that had fallen from the top of an iroko tree. We expected to meet Ojee waiting for us at the entrance. We expected to hear him say “well done boys” and laugh throatily like he did whenever we bought him his lunch, but he was not there. The workshop door was ajar with the harmattan breeze rocking it back and forth. The back yard gate was also widely open and making some creaky sound as it obeyed the dried wind. Johnson searched for him at the back yard but he was not there too. There was no sign of life towards the toilets. We dropped the bottles of water on top of his sewing machine in the workshop and went back to our position at the pavement.

We sat there watching people pass by and waiting for Ojee to return till the afternoon when Johnson caught sight of Mama turning into the street with her preaching bag strapped to her left shoulder. Immediately, we ran back into the house. As we heard her foot step in the passage, we ran out gaily and greeted her. I collected her weighty bag containing bibles and many other publications of Watchtower Bible and tract Society and slung it over my shoulder like a hunter’s gun and ambled behind mama as she led tiredly.

‘Did anybody come here?” she asked with jammed brow as she struggled with the padlock of the door to our sitting room. The padlock gave way and fell on the floor and separated into two pieces.

“mmm…,” I replied affirmatively with locked lips and nodded.

“Yes ma, Ojee came and…”

“Where is he?” mama jerked interrupting Johnson.

“He sent us to buy pure water for him and when we returned he was nowhere to be found. The water is in the workshop.”

Mama didn’t seem to be listening as Johnson reeled out the story. She turned the knob of the door gingerly and worked into the room. There the drawer of the room divider was pulled out and its content over turned on the center table. The video player that used to be on the room divider was now on top one of the single sitter sofa. Mama dashed towards the opened drawer and shuffled the papers in there frantically. She looked up with wide eyes and let out a loud cry like she was stung by a bee.

“ojee e gbuo m’!” she screamed and turned and jabbed Johnson's cheek with the left hand. Johnson screamed and held his cheek and fell backwards on the red three sitter sofa besides the standing fan. He didn’t cry. She stood up calmly and worked towards the door where I was. I held my cheeks and bent my face so as not to look at her face that now looked scary. Her eye balls were near red and glassy with tears. Her lips quaked the way they did the day she threw an empty milk bottle at me and smashed the wall mirror in her room. She quietly walked past me and tied her hair scarf around her waist just the way Mama Kalu our neighbour did whenever she fought her husband. I looked at Johnson. He was seating now on the sofa. There was no drop of tears in his eye. He was looking at Ojee’s dirty slippers that lay on the red and black flowered rug and they disgusted me. Then we heard the sound of the front gate and ran out to see who was there. The gate returned and hit the frame again and again and again and stopped ajar. There was nobody in the entire yard of six rooms facing each other in threes. Mama had just left angrily. Johnson went searching the back yard again and the toilet and the bathroom. I sat in front of the seating room waiting aimlessly.

Mama returned with two men in black. On their breasts were the lapels tags that said NPF and their names. The fair one had what was like a cap attached to his shoulder. He picked up the broken padlock pieces and put them in black cellophane. The dark one pushed open the door and went straight to the room divider drawer.

“How come you put that kine money inside a drawer, you no get bank account?” the police man asked and mama looked away without saying a word. I leaned on the wall and watched as the police men wrote something on a piece of paper and the two of them left and Mama followed them out of the gate. They didn’t come back again. Mama didn’t say a word to me and Johnson. She didn’t cook any food. The night was cold and quiet as we slept on empty stomach.

It was a calm night till mid-night when we heard a big bang in the neighbourhood followed by a horrid scream; “ewo! Ewo! Isi m’ o!” the scream tore through the cold wind of the night and died out as abrupt as it came. I froze with cold mingle with fears. I was lying on the floor in the sitting room and Johnson was snoring heavily on the red long three sitter sofa. “Boom!” came another deafening sound; the sound I could not tell if it was a gunshot or the sound of Christmas fireworks; those long fireworks that came with a picture of boxing glove on their packets. The bang came again for the third time. This time it was louder and nearer; louder than any banger I ever heard. I felt cold run through my spine and I covered my ear with the small pillow that was on the single sitter sofa behind me. Then the door between the sitting room and mama’s room creaked and I peeked from under the pillow. Mama’s hand slide in through the door to the wall switch and turned off the light. And the door creaked again and shot. I felt like jumping up to follow mama to her bed because I was afraid, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I felt mama was still mad at us. Sleep did not come to my eyes till the light came up again and I heard mama’s voice;

“James, you are not sleeping?” she said and shook me up. I jerked up and threw off the pillow rubbing my two eyes limply. Mama took me to her bed and covered me with the new blanket she bought the week before.

To be continued….