In a dark room in Asata, a young man laid on a small six spring bed and beside him sat his friend who tended to him, as the man was injured. Then the young man on the bed turned towards his friend,“I went to a place, and I was surrounded completely by darkness, and I fell to the ground; and I must have lost consciousness. Because when I woke up, I woke up in this bright place, the brightest place I have ever been. I think I must have gone to the gates of heaven and have been sent back, because I remember thinking to myself, Oh! This place is so beautiful and so peaceful, I would not mind staying here forever. Then the next thing I remember, I woke up in the bush by the Asata stream, and I knew I had returned to this life when my nostrils were filled with the smell of rotting garbage and human excreta. And I tried to move my left arm and I had a sharp pain in my shoulder. The bullet missed my heart by a few inches! Ah, the life of violence takes it’s tolls: He who lives by the sword shall die by it! If not, for my mother’s rosaries and daily prayers, I too would have succumbed to the fire power.”
“ Brother, you are so hypocritical, you call on God to advance you in a life of a strife? You ask for your mother’s prayers whilst you are rampaging through town firing gun shots?”
“And if I did not ask for my mother’s prayers, then tell me whose prayers would I have asked for? She has little else to do than to spend all her widowed days in the church praying for mercy, for me and then for herself. Yes, it is a paradox; but then what is not? This whole country is little more than a paradox or a joke if you will, of the gods abandoned by our ancestors, in the long run it will amount to little more than a foot note in our history, just as colonialism already is. Are you trying to say that God does not listen to the prayers of sinners? If he does not hear the prayers of sinners, then who will be saved? Maybe now my mother has obtained the answer to her prayers, and I will be finally converted and abandon a way of crime.... I stop for as long as the money lasts, and I swear to give up this life, but then the same thing happens over again, no money, no jobs, and I go back to the streets to make a living.”
“I am telling you, I am converted now, I saw the great light, I am telling you, I was at heavens door, and I was sent back, and this is my last chance to abandon this life of evil.”
He then laid his head back on the dirty pillow which was stained by blood that had oozed past the rag that was placed on his shoulder to keep the bleeding in check. His brow was covered in sweat, and his body shivered despite the heat, and then suddenly he regained his strength and sat bolt upright in his bed and grabbed the collar of the man who sat beside him and with urgency declared, “I may be many things, Oke, I am a thief, a swindler, a liar. and will not hesitate to make money any way I can by fraud or cheating. but one thing I never did, and I drew a line, I never committed an act of murder; I drew a line, and I said I am not a murderer, just a thief, and to that God is my witness.” Then he fell back on his pillow as if the exertion had required super human strength and he continued, “ Oke, put my rosary around my neck, and take me now to the hospital because this wound is worse than yesterday, and when you have left me at the hospital find mama and tell her where I am.” Without saying anything,
Oke dutifully picked up a white plastic rosary that sat on the table beside his friend and he carefully guided it over his friend’s head trying to jar him as little as possible. Then he went out into the room adjacent where two members of the gang were sleeping on the floor. He nudged them awake, and said “brother is getting worse, we will take him to UNTH and after he has been admitted before the police can come and interrogate us we must leave immediately.”
The two who slept on the floor got up and did not seem to think the request unusual.
Not long after, under the cover of darkness, a body wrapped in a wrapper was carefully placed in the back seat of the car, and was transported to the emergency entrance of the hospital. He had hardly been placed on a gurney in the outside corridor awaiting the arrival of a doctor, when the friends hurriedly drove away.
By the first morning light the widow Mrs. Obiageli was already seated by her son’s side, and she was wiping his brow with a damp white handkerchief. From his left hand emerged an intravenous infusion being used as a vehicle to administer antibiotics to combat the infection which was ravishing his body through the shoulder. Wound. For the most part he slept, but when he awoke he would regard the vision of his mother with unparalleled tenderness, as if she were part of his vision of heaven. Her face betrayed no anger, but instead she sat with an aura of resignation at fate.
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