WHAT THE NANNY GOAT TOLD HER KIDS (CHAPTER 14)

CHAPTER 14

 

THE PIVOT OF THE RANSOMS’ HOUSEHOLD was down and regular activities got drawn to a standstill.

Someone let out the chickens but forgot about the goats and Grace waited and waited, staring at the door to see who would open it to receive her headbutt.

She looked and listened hard but it seemed the normal activities in the Ransoms’ home were drastically changing for that day. Did someone eavesdrop on her chat with her kids or did they read her mind? She had resolved what to do and no one would change her mind.

Though it sounded like things she heard in her dreams but if they were real, she wondered too about the loud banging sounds.

Definitely, someone was up to no good and the facts she soon would know if she would wait a bit longer in the pen. But an uprising was about to happen in the stall and no one would dare stop her. She scratched her horns on the nearby wall to show what would happen soon to the scallywags.

She remembered too she had heard sounds like someone was hurt and Grace wondered if one of the naughty sons had gone playing with their father’s gun.

Still walking in the maze of her thoughts, her kids suddenly gave cries of hunger and she had to quickly feed them so they could stay strong to aid her in achieving her grand scheme. The small bunch of leaves left in the stall for her to manage in the night had finished and she too had started gradually feeling hunger.

The other goats in the other room had started raising the volume of their bleats to announce to the Ransoms they knew the day had broken and time had long passed when they should have been taken out to have their first real morning meal in the pen. Grace refused to join them as she had already mentally taken herself and her two kids out of slavery.

She had strained herself to catch the goings-on in the Ransoms’ compound. She heard something like a small group of people speaking and then leaving. Then the doors had been banged and someone had reached the courtyard, opened and closed the door, walked to the detached kitchen and cut a few logs. Grace could vividly with her imagination see he or she was warming the food. Another person had joined whosoever was around the fire and they now were gossiping.

The voice of the Ransom’s youngest daughter, Merit, had filtered into Grace’s ears as she and the other person, who sounded like a teenage girl too, were chatting.

‘So the guns were shot by armed robbers?’ the other girl had asked.

‘Yes,’ Merit had replied.

‘I learnt they shot your daddy …’

‘No, they did not,’ Merit cut in. ‘Daddy fell and harmed himself and had been taken to the hospital for a check-up.’

‘So it’s that serious. If it’s setting of bones, his friend, Oga Perempe, would’ve done it,’ the other girl said, clearly insinuating the harm could be graver than the daughter knew.

‘Oga Perempe was the one who asked my father should be taken to the hospital to be examined to know if he’s broken a bone or not and if he has any wounds inside the body which as he has no equipment and wouldn’t know, the hospital would treat them. But if there’s anything wrong with any bones and the hospital people are at a loss on the right thing to do, my father would return and Oga Perempe would work on him.’

‘Oh, sorry, Merit.’

Merit said: ‘It’s okay. We thank God no one died.’

‘But those who came to your compound earlier said, there was blood everywhere. It looks like Muscle and Bone bit them very well. If not that I was sure they’d been locked inside, I wouldn’t have come.’

And the dogs barked in response to hearing their names being mentioned.

‘But Muscle and Bone are your friends,’ Merit said.

‘That was before,’ the teenage visitor said in a funny tone. ‘I would be too scared to play with them now.’

It was there and then Grace got a clear picture of all that had happened last night. So Mr Ransom had been knocked out of the way already? Then, her escape would be as easy as a human peeling a ripe banana. She bleated out loud and started doing the countdown.

The other goats chorused in response to her bleats and she knew soon Merit would be thinking of getting them out to the pen. It would be good if she escaped from her hand to show her mother and her there was nothing wrong with her teats.

Grace was counting, not seconds but minutes and listening. ‘Nine minutes to go,’ she said and heard the visiting teenage girl mention that she was going to the farm. At the same time, there were voices outside yelling at her.

‘Tell your sisters to wait. I’d come too,’ Merit told her friend.

The visitor yelled the message across to her sisters and they yelled back something that sounded like the visitor and Merit should hurry up.

‘Eight,’ Grace counted and listened.

After opening and closing the door, Merit’s feet pattered into the main building and out again and then there was a sound like that of water being splashed and Grace could hear the fire sizzling out. Merit’s feet pattered in and Grace said, ‘Seven.’ Then she sent out a powerful bleat and the other goats joined in a dinning chorus. The tones were all larded with hunger.

Grace listened and heard the doors being banged and feet hurriedly pattering outside. Grace raised another powerful bleat that told the other goats to yell louder so that if Mrs Ransom or the sons were around, they would shout at Merit to get the goats out to the pen.

Grace was hopeful and still kept counting, ‘Five.’ She listened hard. The whole place was quiet as if everyone had gone out. It never happened before. The goats never missed a day moving into the pen where they gladly ate and received fresh air while the Ransoms would tidy the stalls and make the place neat for them to lodge in again at night. If everyone had gone out, why were the dogs not freed from the courtyard?

Grace being a chronic optimist still kept counting: ‘Four.’ She was hopeful before the last count something encouraging would happen. She was sure that naughty Merit would meet the brothers on the path and they would sternly drive her back. That one who would not want to touch the hoe to weed anything was now going to the farm with her friends because her siblings and parents were not home?

‘Nonsense,’ Grace said and listened hard but all the man-made sound that reached her ears was of a toot like that of a motorcycle’s horn in the distance.

‘Three,’ Grace counted and her instincts told her an epoch was in the making. The other goats bleated harder and to Grace’s dismay, the ravens which sat on palm trees around seemed to be jesting at the goats with their raucous cries: ‘Mock-mock! Mock-mock! Mock-mock!’

That slightly distracted Grace and she almost missed the next minute before the critical moment. Remembering what she was up to and the point she had reached, Grace said: ‘Bloody ravens, two! Mock but I’m proving to you all the goats now rock.’

The bleats had stopped and the big birds’ caws also. Grace was able to strain her ears to listen really far.

The seconds kept running and a virtual hush fell everywhere. All Grace had as encouragement was the thought itself that her enslavement physically was ticking to the point of being over as she had long emancipated herself mentally. With exhilaration, Grace thought and mouthed the word, ‘One.’

She raised herself up because she had long learnt the fruit of positive thinking could be plucked by actually reciting you are plucking it and then positioning yourself to receive it. With her mind‘s eyes, she saw one of the Ransoms running from wherever they had been and coming quickly to open that door. She had stared and stared and heard her inner voice call out the last digit: ‘Zero!’

Instead of any significant thing happening in the stall, she heard again up on the palm trees as the ravens brazenly called: ‘Mock-mock! Mock-mock! Mock-mock!’

Grace drew near the door, her kids tailing her and peeped through a crack at the outside. All she saw was the big plastic container receiving rainwater from the downspout and the vast concrete courtyard between the main building and the row of stalls. Grace saw the dogs lying on the veranda with muzzles resting on their forelimbs, one eye opened individually as if they were left there to police the goats.

Grace let out a powerful bleat that would remind any Ransom around the goats were still in the stalls. The others responded. Their bleats sounded to Grace’s ears like the caws of the ravens: ‘Mock-mock! Mock-mock! Mock-mock!’ It seemed like everything around her now was mocking her uprising. Grace swiftly moved back, kicking her kids aside, and stopped; then galloped forward and smashed her horns into the door; did that a second and a third time.

When she looked through the crack again she saw the dogs had left the veranda and were now standing directly opposite the door and curiously watching it.