WHAT THE NANNY GOAT TOLD HER KIDS (CHAPTER 2)

 CHAPTER 2

 

THE RANSOMS’ COMPOUND was on an uneven path off the main road and had a large signboard emblazoned with the words SITE FOR CASSAVA PROCESSING PLANT tagged with SPONSORED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION WITH #6,000,000. The figure obviously did represent the amount expended or about to be expended by the sponsor. But what was not clear was the specific currency, whether dollars, euros, pounds or the local naira.

Grace suspected someone deliberately asked the signwriter to use the hash sign instead of the symbol of the actual currency to frustrate petition writers. If someone wrote a petition to any quarters and quoted a wrong sum concerning the project; that would readily put a big question mark on the petition and paint the writer as a false accuser and one may ask, a false accuser of what?

Grace for the past three years had seen that signboard standing out there and the little ceremony she could associate with its erection was of a group of four men driving down here in a jeep and strutting, clad in suits and embroidered matching elegant attire, to watch Mr Ransom and two familiar menial workers put it up and then, Mr Ransom and the visitors strolled into his parlour, cracked a bottle of expensive wine and drank to their good health and wealth. Nothing else had happened since then.

But Mr Ransom had carried on with what he and his neighbours had been actively doing long before the signboard was put up. They had continued going to their farms to plant and harvest their cassava, peel and put the tubers in sacks which they loaded on motorcycles which hauled them and dumped them near polythene sheets spread on the sides of the path near the Ransoms’ home.

Transporting the sacks of cassava down here was a spectacle just like milling them. In some cases, two large bulging sacks would be tied behind the motorcycle rider with a fellow sitting atop the sacks and another squeezed at the front between the handlebars and the rider. Sometimes, the motorcycle rider squeezed himself between sacks of cassava, one at the front and another behind him.

The tracks followed were long, tortuous and rugged and only the stout-hearted motorcyclist plied them. The reason for conveying pretty heavy loads at a time was to see if the few motorcyclists willing to ride here could cart home the many passengers early enough.

The last-minute rush was unavoidable for one outstanding fact: the soaked cassava ferments and turns smelly over time and the measurable quantity of the flour depreciates. If it is not preserved and turns bad, the produce is sold at a loss. The farmers here did not want that to happen to them.

A frightful thing happened to Mr Ransom once with the motorcyclist that conveyed him and his sacks of cassava home. He had his own motorcycle which any of his three grown-up sons would ride to and from the farm and which he allowed for light loads to be carried on it. His youngest son just back from school had assisted in taking home his wife and other workers and their farm implements as a commercial motorcyclist was carting their ten sacks of cassava home.

When the son left with the last set of workers (three in all) and dusk had started colouring the land with its black hues, he had told him not to come back as he would join the commercial motorcyclist which he had expected to return soon to pick the last two sacks and ride them home.

There was a threat of mosquitoes and also rain as the evening matured.

The motorcyclist did return and when he was done tying the hefty sacks with the assistance of Mr Ransom who helped him lift them and which the weight every time almost pulled the two men with the motorcycle down, the journey home began. With Mr Ransom squeezed in at the front, the headlamp covered the track with brilliant light enabling the motorcycle rider to find his way home. Blades of grass and leaves of plants whipped their limbs and faces as the motorcycle roared towards the village.

They moved into a makeshift bridge across a big torrent (Mr Ransom had forgotten his usual practice of dropping down at the entry point to walk across and meet the motorcyclist at the other end, maybe because he had too much trust in this motorcyclist than in his sons or because he was scared of crossing the swirling noisy torrent in the dark though he would never openly admit that to anyone) and on a hilly part of the interlocking planks, the motorcycle stalled and frighteningly rolled them backwards.

Mr Ransom could not tell what crossed his mind exactly at that point. But it later surprised him he did not panic and leap down.

His eyes had kept staring ahead at where the headlamp pointed and his ears keenly listened to hear the eventual splash (as he had concluded) that would signal they were hitting the surface of the torrent. But the motorcycle man found his brake as the sacks brushed the parapet of the bridge and the motorcyclist asked Mr Ransom to jump down. He agilely responded and helped push the motorcycle forward. That timely intervention saved Mr Ransom, the motorcyclist and everything with them from plunging into the raging torrent.

Grace eavesdropped on the tale when Mr Ransom was recounting it to his family which kept saying, ‘God forbid bad thing!’

Grace realized that day that Mr Ransom could not swim and the torrent was full of big rocks exposed during the dry season when the water would normally and drastically go down. The nanny goat realized the best way its owner would enjoy water was in a cup and the bathing bucket.