The Bed Book of Short Stories

In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata

23 In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata Lauri Kubuitsile This tale begins at the end; McPhineas Lata, the perennial bachelor who made a vocation of troubling married women, is dead. The air above Nokanyana village quivers with grief and rage, and not a small amount of joy because the troubling of married women, by its very definition, involved a lot of trouble. But, maybe because of his slippery personality, or an inordinate amount of blind luck, McPhineas Lata seemed to dodge the bulk of the trouble created by his behaviour, and left it for others to carry on, on his behalf. He had after all, admitted to Bongo and Cliff, his left and right side kicks, that troubling married women was a perfect past-time which was ‘all sweet and no sweat’. Women in the village of Nokanyana, named after a small river that no one had yet been able to discover, were notoriously greedy, and, without exception, surly. Husbands in the village were all small and thin with tight muscles worked into knots because they spent all of their lives either working to please their wives or withstanding barrages of insults and criticisms for failing to do it up to the very high expectation of Nokanyana women. For Nokanyana men, it was a lose-lose situation and, as a result, each and every one of them despised McPhineas Lata merely for remaining single – he had made the right decision and they had not. McPhineas Lata, though thus despised by most husbands, was adored by most wives. His funeral was full of dramatic fainting and howls of grief echoing as far as the Ditlhako Hills. Tears fell by the bucketful and nearly succeeded in creating the village’s missing namesake. The husbands stood at the back of the gathering wearing variations on the theme ‘stern face’ while the minister said his last words. When it was 24 LAURI KUBUITSILE time to pour dirt on the coffin of McPhineas Lata, the husbands rushed past their crying wives and grabbed up the shovels. Some even came prepared with their own to make the work faster. Indeed, no one could remember a burial that had lasted for so short a time. No sooner had the wives heard that first shovelful of soil hit against the wooden coffin, as they were still organizing themselves for their final grand crescendo of wailing, than the soil was seen to be heaped into a great mound over the grave. The men then piled stones on top, of a great number sure to keep McPhineas Lata firmly in his eternal bed. The men stacked the shovels by the grave, slapped the soil off their hands, and led the way back to the village leaving all their McPhineas Lata problems in the cemetery for good. Or so they thought. As the husbands made their happy ways to Ema Rengwe Bar, MmaTebogo, one of McPhineas’s greatest fans, lingered behind looking longingly at McPhineas Lata’s grave. She wondered how the women of Nokanyana would manage without such a talented man. She also wondered what the women would do with all of their spare time. There was only so much husband haranguing a woman could stand. She thought about how much she personally would miss McPhineas Lata and without so much as a warning her mind floated away into McPhineas Lata Land. Naledi Huelela stopped on the thin lane leading from the cemetery to the village and looked back at McPhineas Lata’s grave and spotted MmaTebogo. ‘What does she think she’s doing?’ she asked with indignation. The wives stopped and turned to see MmaTebogo lying on top of McPhineas Lata’s grave. ‘She can’t do that!’ Naledi said. She felt quite proprietal over McPhineas Lata since he had died in her bed in the middle of one of his more gymnastically performed sessions. It really had been quite extraordinary what he could get up to. People said he read books. * * * ‘Read books?’ Bongo responded with a sceptical air when asked by the husbands who had gathered at Ema Rengwe Bar after the funeral. Though they had left the cemetery in a jovial and confidant mood, a comment by Zero Maranyane put paid to that. He had looked up from 25 IN THE SPIRIT OF MCPHINEAS LATA his first beer and said, ‘I doubt our wives will forget him as quickly as we will.’ It was...