The Nightmare (1)

The urge to cough was so strong that it was hard for Abong to resist. It was quirky. In the situation he was in now, it was an unforgivable sin for him to make the slightest sound, say, with his feet walking or closed lips. His hands only brushed the leaves dangling on his path.

Abong did everything possible to suppress his cough. With his palms, he covered his mouth to prevent any sound escaping from it. Then, the urge made him wriggle his feet about and he knelt down where he would not meet dead sticks or dry leaves to make them snap or rustle. With the back of his cupped hands on the ground, he coughed into them.

Done coughing, he was somewhat relieved he had been able to muffle the sound as much as he could but he was perplexed at such an occurrence. It never happened to him before during any of his escapades. He sat down on the ground and stared at the bumper bunch of plantains with a few bitten by bush babies and pecked by the birds.

One mind told him it was a bad omen while the other told him to ignore the wimpy thought coming from the deep recesses of a coward. 

Naturally, Abong wasn't a coward. So he rose to his feet and his hand pulled out his machete from the soil as his ears keenly listened to be certain there was no danger lurking around.

For every farm he targeted, Abong chose apt time based on the distance from the village or tent and the frequency of the farmers going there. Where there was a tent and the farmers were regularly around, he knew almost every farmer here would want to stay back in the village during the weekend to relax with friends and family. It was the time too they set aside small sums for themselves in the ubiquitous thrift societies. He exploited the farmers' leisure moments to pilfer from their farms, using the daytime to survey the farms and shift the goods from them at night.

Abong used to hear the country was (and still is) rich in crude oil. While growing up, he saw parents working hard, clearing the bush and tilling the soil, to send their children to school and then pushed them later to leave for the big cities where the oil money abounded. Most of his mates left and never ever let their feet stray to the village again. The conditions of some parents later changed to reflect their children's progress in life and there were rumours that others whose parents were still wallowing in dirt could have hit the big time but as the big cities are full of trials and temptations, must have lost their way in the maze. Abong never had the opportunity to go and see what the realities were like living in the big cities. His father had a dozen of them and died when Abong was barely eight. They were all raised by his hardworking mother.

While his mates during the weekdays would go to the primary schools and later secondary schools near and far, he and his siblings were being taken from one farm plot to another across the many streams of the village to clear, till and bury seeds that would form the edible things they would eat and sell. As his mates graduated from schools, Abong graduated from working on the farm into foraging the adjoining jungle for a living. He would split the bush mangoes to garner their valuable kernels, pick the periwinkles from the beds of the torrents during the dry season and later set snares for animals. The food and meat he could produce (and he was good-looking too) had plenty of girls frequenting their compound. The big boys in the tents had taught him all the tricks on how to seduce the girls. Abong got a girl impregnated just turning nineteen and was saddled with her as his wife. In sixteen years, they had seven kids.

Abong had always thought if his father was around, he could have gone to school. But he and his wife had been around, young and agile, but their children struggled through primary school and the first and second who could have been in secondary school had not been given the opportunity. Oil was not selling anymore or was selling and the money was going elsewhere. Life generally was tough and even proper feeding for a farmer's family was not assured. Unlike his mother's time, Abong realized he had to work extra hard.

Life was tough and what or who exactly to blame he didn't know. Abong heard money from oil was being misused and the advanced countries might not even buy oil from the country in the nearest future as they were producing vehicles that might not need it. Because of this, he heard, the government was now looking inward for other ways they could make money to spend on the citizenry. Loans were being given to farmers for large-scale farming. Abong believed this story was true.

He had seen new faces come into the village and penetrate the jungle which they hacked down for their plantain and banana plantations. Actually, the timber merchants were the first to arrive here. They felled the mammoth trees and hewed the tractor -paths to cart the timber away. When the forest was devoid of big trees, the young set of farmers arrived to create their plantations. Depending on who was telling the tale, the young men owned the business or were fronting for some government people who were the actual beneficiaries of the agricultural loans from government.