Everything kept on reminding Adeola of her man. His name touched a deep chord in her. Ajumobi’s heavy. familiar voice re-echoed in Adeola’s ears. She saw his face as clearly as the image on a crystal ball. Here was Ajumobi’s hunting dog pushing its warm muzzle against Adeolas legs, hoping for a loving pat.
The Lonely Days of Adeola – Chapter 2
On a number of occasions, the dog had howled all through the night, unsure of his master’s location, wondering why he had to stay out so late, and summoning him home with a bellowing call. The dog was not only Ajumobi’s good companion, but also his own silent shadow, probably his most important playmate in life.
The presence of rats searching for kegs of salted sprats and rolls of condiments inside the wooden vats also was one other quiet reminder of Ajumobi’s conspicuous absence. Several times before, Adeola had watched Ajumobi capture the rats, like flies, between his fingers, forcing dozes of sweets into their jaws and down their throats.
Ajumobi had set traps for the rats, baiting them with the juicy mango peels, perches of sweet-smelling locust bean seeds, and with sweets, locally made, from tubers of cassava and the deadly roots of oganwo. Ajumobi would crush all these into a pulp, mix them with ash and salt, to become so deliciously nutty to the rats – a deliciously nutty sweets! The rats would eat them and stiffen immediately.
Here now were the house rats, having a field day, with nobody to check their advances. Adeola watched them duck inside the grain calabashes, and hurtle across the floor to reach the soup pot. The rats leapt over the uncemented walls of Adeola’s room and started shrieking in sharps and flats.
Ajumobi had always been in absolute control of his household. Firm, at times, rigid. But he could be very pleasant too, and watching him you would say,
“What a vivacious man!” Adeola remembered the loud voice of her husband; his strong, glad, gay laughter, whenever jokes reached the peak among his friends.
Together, they would sit round the ketembe, filled to the brim with undiluted bubbling palmwine oozing a sweet dinning sound and an aroma that made the throat click thirstily and begin to gossip.
Under the dull light of the lamp, Ajumobi and his friends would gallop like frightened giraffes in the little palmwine room full of dust and the smell of sweating bodies. It seemed as if all they lived for in the world was to drink fresh palmwine! They would rent the air with fickle slogans and jive wildly to the beat of sakara music.
They felt they could do just anything! All things seemingly impossible would assail the imagination of drinkards and, in the flit of seconds, would want to fly to pull down the stars from the sky or journey to the moon with pillows and mats, for a good night rest!
Adeola and the other village women used to chuckle as they listened to their boastful husbands.
And they always wondered why men were so superb, and so magnificent, so splendid and so audacious, to be able to embark on all those impossibilities of life, and perfectly achieve them! Men must be special creatures descending on this earth straight from another planet!
At midnight, when the village men were done with the pleasure of palmwine drinking, Ajumobi and his friends would stagger from their wooden benches and began urinating palmwine wastes on the mud walls of the village buildings. Inside the turbid village gutters, they would vomit the excesses of their monstrous bowels. Thereafter, their appetite for more wine would return in full force.
“More wine!” They would shout, as they tumbled back to their palmwine room.
“Let’s bury our heads deeper into the aha and shake our heads jubilantly.”
“Let’s clean the milky dregs with our moustache, and drink again like thirsty camels in the desert!”
“Drinkers are the owners of the world!”
“We’ll drink palmwine with all its creamy scum and all its sweet sediment, and its gleaming foam.”
“We’ll drink like sieve and sponge – through midnight to cockcrow.”
It was the habit of drunkards to make boastful promises.
“I’ll make five hundred fat heaps on my farm tomorrow, by noon, before the sun reaches the centre of the sky.”
“I’ll carry heavy sacks of grains in one load on my head to Oyedeji during the next market day, for sale, and instantly become a millionaire in the land.”
“This year, I’ll put up a two-storey building with innumerable rooms and uncountable lobbies. I’ll peep from the building’s verandah above and spit on the poor people gazing stupidly at me from below!”
“I will snatch the leadership of this village. And after my installation as the traditional head – the Baale – I will begin to acquire concubines. I will begin to increase the number of my wives. I’ll give all of them, concubines and wives, accommodation in the rooms of my palace, and watch, amused, as they fight to secure my love and affection.”
“My voice will ring loud like thunder as I shout instructions and orders, which must be obeyed, to my subjects.”
“I’ll tow the hard-line. I will not accept any nonsense. I’ll blow the noses of my foes loud like the whistle; punch their faces brutally like ripe breadfruits.”
“I will become like king lion in the forest – all powerful and uncaringly dangerous.”
Ajumobi lad made promises in life too which he did not wait to fulfil. He had vowed, for instance, to replace, with new ones, the few rusty iron sheets through which water leaked from the roof, in the season of heavy rains. But, that was not to be. It was his plan to concrete the broken and dilapidated verandah of the house with gravel and cement.
He had resolved to put a stop to the menace of termites ravaging the doorframes, and eliminate the red ants chewing the window panes of Adeola’s room. It was Ajumobi’s intention to repair the old garden fence, which the goats were constantly breaking into.
He had promised to build a yam barn on his farm, placing strong branches of trees with forked tops securely in the ground, slanting them to meet the ground in a rough triangle, and then storing fat yam tubers into the raised enclosure covered with wattles and dubbed in mud. Ajumobi had planned to cut down the big orange tree in the garden upon which a strange yellow bird once perched, wailing all through the night.
It was his ambition to extend their mud house by two rooms, plaster the two rooms and marry a new wife.
He wanted a common room to link the two rooms from where he would stay, during nocturnal visits, to decide on which of the wives’ apartments to enter – Adeola’s or the new wife’s? He had told himself he would prefer to enter the room of the new wife for a drink of sweet ‘new wine.’
“A new wife is like an undiluted wine,” Ajumobi used to say, “refreshing and intoxicating. She’s a precious gold, out-shining those old silver and diamond you have as senior wives at home. Let silver and diamond go into hiding whenever beautiful gold appears. I won’t touch silver, and I will have nothing to do with diamond, when gold waits patiently for me for a warm embrace right there on a new ewele mat.
“The day a new wife arrives in my home will be a day to remember. A day of felicitation and great rejoicing. I’ll take my bath five times, that day, and apply heavy perfume to my body. I will be sparsely-clad – in readiness for the nuptial battle. A battle I must fight and win, waving a white handkerchief triumphantly to the anxious crowd.
“A new wife is a polished drum to be caressed with the fingers of a man’s hands, providing for the man a melodious music to dance to. She’s a fresh lily floating on the waters of a lake, reaching down, down, into the deep humus soil.
“Touch her, even once, and she ripens with new fruits like the banana tree on the river bank! She’s the joy of a man’s heart. Her presence at home calls for celebration, with gongs and rattles; with gourds and shouts of joy.”
Ahmad Nwabuzor is a Nigerian author and storyteller with a strong passion for writing and sharing meaningful stories. He is a graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), where he studied English and Literary Studies.
He writes across different forms of storytelling, including cultural narratives, emotional fiction, and moral stories that teach life lessons. His storytelling style is rooted in African life and shaped by a deep interest in how traditions influence people’s choices and emotions.