It was the same grim resignation with which she had faced the death of her father, and then her two eldest sons, and then her husband, all in rapid succession. It were as if death were an unwanted friend who barged in freely at will, and brought with it unprecedented disaster, and grief, and yet you are forced to accept this friend. And so in the silence of her heart she had held many discussions with God, and with the spirit world, bargaining in futile hope of delaying the inevitable. to make matters worse, it was not as if the causes of their deaths were some complicated cancer that could not be cured even in more privileged locales, or some long standing chronic malady; no, they had all died from simple treatable diseases, which if discovered in a timely fashion could have allowed it's victims a chance at a reasonable life expectancy.
And so when the young men had knocked at her door in the middle of the night she had known what it meant even before they spoke, she had thought that surely the boy must have died like everyone else before him, that to have heard that the boy was still in this life, although in an injured state had been good news. For this last boy she had begged God, to take her first before her last born son, as she could not, indeed would not imagine a world without him. " If he dies," she had said, " Then I may as well be dead, as there will be no joy left for me in this world. When I see his face, my life brightens, when I hear his voice, then I am consoled."
It seems as if providence had heard the prayers of the widow, for the boy had been spared from a bullet to the heart by an inch, and it certainly was not his own prayers that had purchased his escape from a wanton death. But ,where the world all too often fails the poor man and the destitues, time and time again, God sends his mercy and His pity where he will, when he wills, and lightens the burden of the rejects of society. And so, the widow, Mrs. Obiageli, sat in her nice starched ankara wrapper, with a neat white blouse and gingerly dabbed the sweaty fore head of her beloved son, the armed robber. To the casual observer it would have been impossible to have ascertained upon looking that this was a man who ran around at night with guns, as a aura of peace and tranquility surrounded the pair. On his chest sat a small picture card of the sacred heart of Jesus, and by his side was a picture of the Blessed Virgin. He opened his eyes and looked upon his mother, " mama I am sweating please wipe my forehead."
And she obediently continued with her motions.
In due course the constable from the police station arrived to investigate the gun shot victim and whether there was sufficient evidence to apprehend the man who presumably must have been involved in some illegal affair.
" No, officer," he answered mildly, as his strength was diminishing with the fever that was ravaging his body and he spoke in a barely audible whisper." No, it is not me, I was shot by robbers in Asata on my way home.'
" You were on your way home from where?" the constable queried him with his eye brows dancing in his fore head " You have just said you have no job, so if you have no job where do you go that you get shot, Eh?"
The boys mother shook her head but said nothing. Then after a pause, the boy responded, again with difficulty," Constable, I went to the market and stopped at a bar before I went to return home. And it was in the bar that I think the armed robbers saw me and followed me out.."
"If you have no job how come you are in the bar buying beer? E jo, you be thief, only thief wey get money to spend in bar."
The boy shuddered, but as he was too sick to argue his fate, and he had just been medicated with a pain killer, he fell into a deep sleep and the constable not seing himself able to make any more headway at the time, left to return to his other investigations. It had appeared to him that the boy was a liar, but then no crimes had been reported the night the boy was shot and as such there was really nothing to charge him with.
