Sands, Stones and Stuttering Rhythms (2)

That was yesterday, an event that made students of Azagba Community School stay in their homes on a school day. The school has given the rest of the week off to mourn, a needless gesture, which will welcome the beginning of the midterm's test. Others will be happy by this development, but not me. Staying at home on a school day was inviting lizards to feast on ones noon food. It is like the young otter forced to explore the ways of a god by day, with the knowledge that within the awry, tenebrous caves, lies a python, boorish in form, waiting to be awakened. The latter is Idehen, my father. 

Idehen is an ordinary man, who works from Monday to Friday as a labourer at the new quarry located at the flowing waters, bordering towering rocks and two cities. Spanning more than a decade, the people still referred to the site as if it were recently born because the site not only signalled a mark of development in the land but also served as a landmark between the town and other adjoining towns. As a result, everyone sought pride in the canyon. Everyone, including Idehen.

I have never asked how he managed to collapse those huge rocks into scrawny stones, but every day, I imagine him lifting his huge forearm and bringing it hard upon the jaws of an uncooperative rock, scattering its jagged teeth into waiting trucks, as his co-workers cheer him on. 

Idehen has been working at the quarry before I was born. He was one of the young men who had taken government jobs as labourers when they decided to fulfil their promise of developing the town. 

Mothers, who could not send their sons to the city, sent them to the quarry alongside mothers whose sons did not learn "book" like Òdé. Fathers whose backs yearned for life beyond the touring sun and farmlands sought retirement at the quarry. As expected, those who were a bit educated got the office chairs and the job of administrators. The less vigorous elderly ones were picked for the ties and uniforms of supervisors, while the young men, who possessed neither weak limbs nor education, got the pickaxes.

For more than a decade that Idehen has worked at the quarry, its friendless essence sticks to his lithe muscular body every night, accompanying him through our four-cornered door. 

Some nights, he appears as the rough pumice, his face brightly coloured by the dregs of wine bottles as he swings his abrasive knuckles. These were the nights when Urbi's mornings met friendly bruises and stifled weeping. Once, he came as the dark obsidian, black-eyed from a comely blow - a gift from a fellow bar citizen. That night, he was unstable as a frizzling fish while brandishing a sharpness Urbi endlessly told me to avoid. Other nights, he was the quartzite, extremely tough and hard-hearted. Nights like these sent muffled screams from the enclosure of the bedroom, through the cold kitchen, sneaking onto the walls and blanket security of my bedding and dripping steadily into the sanctuary of my dreams - a mercy from Urbi as she endured the pounding of her supple flesh.