WHAT THE NANNY GOAT TOLD HER KIDS (CHAPTER 3) - A

 CHAPTER 3

 

THE DAY FOR MILLING CASSAVA was like a tug of war. Out of seven days a week, only one was set aside for the farmers to bring out their produce and the buyers to come and get it.

The arrangement was done to favour both parties, so the buyers would not come and go back empty-handed hence wasting their fares and for the sellers to jointly bargain and get good returns for their efforts.

The evenings the peeled cassava arrived in sacks, the nanny goat knew she would not hear any other sound in the area except that of the grating milling machines mounted on trucks.

Those who had their sacks of cassava ready would go call the millers. At night the area around the Ransoms’ frontage was like a mini-market with the cassava owners pointing their torches at the sacks littering the sides of the path and haggling with the millers the amounts they would pay for their produce to be milled.

Where a bargain was struck, the machines would roar into life and the deafening sound would echo around the neighbourhood and most times, it would last till the early hours of the morning most especially if one miller was at work.

There were other spots the itinerant millers went to work too and one or two attended to the cassava owners here as their homes were close by and there was a good number of those in need of their service. One was regular, the other was not. The irregular miller frequently had issues with his milling machine.

Kasablanka (people here were fond of bearing tongue-twisting nicknames and the miller, for the sound than meaning remembering his teacher mentioned a word like that just before he opted out of school to make a quick buck with the farmers as he was doing pretty well with his muscles than brain, attached his being to it) – yes, Kasablanka was rumoured to have a big-busted large-hipped mistress resident in the big town and who was steadily sucking him dry.

After the marathon milling of cassava for fufu, the fellow would be missing from the village for days and would return broke to help mill cassava for those making garri for personal consumption or retailing in the small daily market.

People did not like doing garri as palm oil and firewood were needed in addition to the time they would be roasting themselves around the fire, their eyes and nose getting stung by smoke, to fry it. And the income for a sack of cassava used was not better than the one used for fufu. But with fufu, after milling, the buyers would just take the flour away and sell it to the end users in faraway places.

Kasablanka was liked by the cassava owners for when his machine was in good condition and he was around and ready to work, they would call on him at any hour as he would respond and while milling would assist in tasks that would speed up the process. But he was always at a loss whenever a major part of his machine packed up and would keep wondering where he would get the money to replace it. And Grace had heard again and again from the cassava owners when they were mourning Kasablanka’s unavailability to process their produce (especially when the second miller was up to his lazy and cut-throat antics) that his mistress must have made him eat kopnomi (the listen-to-me love potion).

Here, people did not believe any sensible human could fall crazily in love, giving and doing all that a partner demanded. As the men just seemed to be promiscuous all over and would go around spending heavily to sleep with the women they fancied, women too who were tired of quarrelling and fighting other women and were bent on having total control of their men were said to be sneaking to traditional doctors who would give them potions that if they successfully made the men eat, the thoughts of these men would solely centre on them. To such men, their mothers, fathers and even siblings would become far removed from their minds as their wives or mistresses (the potion givers) loomed large in their eyes.

But Mr Ransom, who had stayed in the big town before returning completely to hug the land as he said it gave him the freedom he had tried and could not get in any other work serving bossy people, commented several times to his best friends (though behind his wife’s back) that with what he had seen in the cinema (in those days, black-and-white television sets were owned by a few upwardly mobile young men and video machine was virtually not seen in his neighbourhood) he doubted not the existence of a fetish for a woman to hook a man with her small finger but pitied greatly any naïve young man who would fall into the hands of an experienced prostitute.

‘You’d only return to your senses,’ he said, ‘when you are confirmed broke and another man walks in before your eyes to enjoy her charms.’

Mr Ransom suspected that was the issue with Kasablanka and assured those who worried about him that he would one day return to his senses.

But what Grace knew and which the villagers did not know was the fact Mrs Ransom once lived in a brothel and Mr Ransom picked her there while living in the big town.