Chopchair

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight P eter Nwolefeck developed very fast, do fast that by the fifteenth month he could walk. This made life a lot easier for Rosa who could them take him along with her to her more distant farms. She would allow him to sit and play in the furrows while she did her planting. Some times he sat on leaves on a shade of palm fronts and plantain leaves while she weeded or harvested. All along even though she got a pair of ear-rings which she stuck to his eats and continued to wear him girls clothes, nobody else but herself knew that Peter Nwolefeck was a boy and not a girl. Once in a while Ngwika would visit them, bringing gifts. *** The burden which Rosa, Nkem-Fuo and the Mvoa Health Centre attendants had taken on themselves was not as easy as they thought. It was easy to convince the Chief about what he was seeing and turn him back happily. But for how long were they to keep such a secret. So long as the Chief lived the truth was bound to filter in to his ears one day. The traditional Lebang/Lewoh animosity was intensifying everyday. Most of the attendants at Mvoa were from Lebang and so the Lewoh women could not trust them to keep their secret for too long. The possibility was always there, that if only to embarrass Lewoh, those attendants could let the cat out of the bag at any moment. “When Nkem-Fuo and his friend were persuading the midwife to co-operate with them, one of the attendants 32 Linus T. Asong was overheard saying;” they are Lewohs. If they want to throw their babies into a pit latrine, let them go right ahead. After all, what has a rat got to do with a bottle?” A more serious source of worry was the child from whom it could not be kept forever. They had not considered all possibilities. The decisions they took at that moment were short-sighted. Ngwika would visit Rosa and her son as often as possible and offer any kind of assistance they would need. Rosa would also visit her daughter in the palace whenever she wanted. Ngwika would manage to obtain money from the Chief and give to the boy to settle on his own in Kumba or anywhere else in the Coast. When he was big enough to know things, they would tell him the favour they did to him, how they had saved his life and theirs. It never occurred to them that he would do anything else but express gratitude to them. What the Chief saw when he came to the hospital was mere make-belief. Problems started right at the Health Centre. The boy would not suckle Rosa’s breast, neither would Rosa’s daughter suckle Ngwika’s breasts. When in the end the infants were forced to accept the breast milk from the women, the two women could not give them enough motherly care/ the thought that her own child was being nurse by some other person far away in the palace disturbed Rosa. It did not matter that the girl was in very good hands. She wanted to take part on her child’s development, especially because she was the one thing that reminded her of her late husband. This lack of love affected Peter Nwolefeck’s state of mind as he grew up. It was as if he were an orphan. This, coupled with the fiery behaviour he inherited from his father made him a very strange being. In fact, so strong was this feeling that at one time when Ngwika visited them and the boy’s fate was the subject of conversation, Rosa told her to take the boy away and damn 33 Chopchair the consequences. She told Ngwika that she had run out of lies, and Peter Nwolefect asked far too many questions which she was unable to answer sincerely and satisfactorily. *** He was very fast learner, but even at the tender age of four, he had one unmanageable problem: his temper. Rosa reared fowls but was not bold enough to cut the throat of a chicken. Peter Nwolefeck gave notice of what king of person he would be in future by either wringing the neck of the chicken or cutting the throat by placing his left foot on the wings and the...