When Tomorrow Comes To Us

In my part of the world, only a few things mattered. Family was first, the stomach was second, and Papa’s will was the third.

Every year in our small town was always like this. We ended the year’s festivity with a little party and get-together for every family in the community. Our town was a bit different from the others. We rarely had visitors, and this was simply because everyone who got out of the village never sought to come back. It was like a cemetery where only dead bodies were brought to.

You really couldn’t blame any of them. The village was super small with little access to quality education, light, or water. We had schools with dilapidated buildings and A few NYSC corpers who couldn’t wait to get out after the year’s enslavement was over. I, for one, saw it in their boring lectures and tired eyes every morning when they addressed us.

School was an option. I liked the option because it was an excuse to escape hard, excruciating farm work that Papa always enforced on us. It was a beautiful excuse that allowed me to sit pretty and read about women and men doing extraordinary things outside of our small community.

I enjoyed it every time Mr. Devo came into the class to teach us. He would tell us stories, stories that did not sound false, exaggerated, and overtly twisted as the tales told under the moonlight at night in the town square. His stories were not fables. He told stories about real-life people.

One day he looked at all of us and asked us in clean impeccable English if we wanted to be anything in the future.

I always hated such questions, so I told him so.

“Sir, only God can determine the future. “

He had looked at me curiously like I had said something strange.

“Is that so?”

I had no answer and did not know what to say, because my English was not so good. So, I crossed and closed my eyes and looked back at him again. A trick I had perfected with my parents everytime I wanted to avoid Papa’s questions.

“My mom tells me this every morning when we have the morning devotion. The pastor also says it in our local church. He says God is the only one that knows tomorrow.” I replied sincerely, making an attempt to express myself to the best of my abilities.

Mr. Devo looked at me and smiled wryly.

I liked it everytime Mr Devo smiled. He was amongst the young corpers who had been posted to our tiny cemetery-like village. . He was a corper well respected by everyone because he was surprisingly wise in his dealings. For someone so young, he made anyone believe that wisdom could also be found in youth.

Corper Devo was also very kind, with a smile that could sell and buy anyone over without a transactional bargain.

I looked at him and watched him smile at me in a curious manner again. I wanted to know what his answer would be, and so I sat impatiently in my half broken chair and heavily dented table and waited to hear what he had to say on the matter.

Before answering the question, he had gone round the tiny classroom and asked everyone else if they agreed with what I had just said

They had all shook their heads in confusion. They did not understand these things they said.

Mr. Devo had quickly replied. “The seeds of the future are planted with every deliberate decision of today. God expects us to rely on him, as much as he expects us to have a plan for tomorrow. The tomorrow that only he knows. “

It didn’t make much sense at first. The English had to be broken down carefully to accommodate the existing knowledge that I had savored over the years on the matter.

Mr Devo was like that. Always reading big books and speaking big, big English.

After that day, it started to make sense. Everytime I thought about what Mr. Devo had said, I started to think differently.

To dream differently.

To see the future as something that I could control. Something that I had a bit of power over.

That was when I knew I wanted to leave the village one day, and become a lawyer. I wanted to be a lawyer because I loved the pictures I saw in the books that Mr. Devo made us read in school.

The big overcoat they wore felt right, and I knew for certain that when I was a bit bigger. I would look just as splendid in it as well.

That year when we said the prayer under the moonlight to celebrate the birth of Christ, I prayed that I would be a girl with big wisdom like Mr Devo, and also be a lawyer when I was older.

I said this prayer with my eyes closed, and my hands tilted fervently towards the sky. I knew that it was only right to dream, and anything else that stopped a person from dreaming about their future was a bad thing.

The next year came with strong wind from the north, and our crops began to dry up drastically in the village. Papa’s smile began to dwindle as well, so did his time and levity for new year frivolities.

I watched him become a shadow of himself with every passing day. It was always a shocking thing to see how something as important yet as trivial as the ability to put food on the table could dry up a healthy man.

Indeed heavy was the head that wore the crown of responsibility. But this was not a sensible thing in itself. I wondered what it would be like if we didn’t have to bother about food.

What would the world be like without food?

What would it have been like if the one true God had created us with a natural satisfied belly that did not crave for momentary mouthful satisfactions?

What if we were just like the angels and spirits? The types who did not eat any food to survive in the folktales and fables?

Surely we wouldn’t have to bother about going to school, and working so hard all day. Or would we?

I know that every day papa got up in the morning to go off to the farm, he had only one goal in mind. To provide food on the table by the time the day was over. Mama’s duty was to make the raw materials edible . And this was how almost all families in our village sustained themselves in a structural manner.

I too, had a different dream. A goal not too different from Papa’s. It was simple, yet not very achievable.

I wanted to have plenty of food when I grew up, and I also wanted to be a lawyer as well, because I loved how the robes looked on the lawyers.

It was surprising how food had so much control over the world.

And presently, how the thought of food absence was going to ruin us in our little village before the famine itself came.

“I need all hands on deck now more than ever or else how shall we fend for ourselves in this new year?” My father told my mother this while they assumed I was asleep. Father was always never this nervous. But I could sense a new type of fear in his voice. As he spoke quietly to mother, nodding his head in a manner that foretold the nervousness within.

It was not only about my family. I saw it in the eyes of every villager as they tilled the soil with more zeal as if begging the gods to spare us this season.

Spare us and take the famine away. As if to say, don’t let the invaders come for our crops before we are able to gather enough.

The famine was approaching, and it was approaching too soon.

What that meant was that all and every crop had to be salvaged before the invaders began to steal them from everyone’s farm at night.

To till the soil, Father would require all hands to ‘be on deck’ and that included all of his children, and I, would clearly be no exception.

Being no exception meant I would have to ditch school to cater to the family’s needs.

I would have to not see Corper Devo for a while.

Everyday, I would pass by the school on the way to the big farm that papa kept his barn, and I would wish to be with the other kids, flipping through picture books of people in cars, and airplanes, dressed as lawyers with big glasses.

But I couldn’t. In my part of the world, only a few things mattered and Family was first, the stomach was second, and Papa’s will was the third.

I would catch Mr Devo smiling down at the other kids as he told them stories of real life people, and I wished to be there sitting pretty in a neat uniform as opposed to the farming rags I had on.

Everyday I prayed that the famine would go away very quickly so I could go back to daydreaming about lawyers in oversized coats and weird looking hats with big glasses.

The day the invaders came, we had been in the farm as usual when we heard the loud piercing scream. It was one of the women from a nearby farm… she had just been butchered and cut into pieces with the matchet of the enemy alongside her child, a four month old.

Pandemonium broke as Father commanded in a loud roar for us all to run back to the village to safety.

The invaders were everywhere, and the village guys were being put on fire as the invaders entered and looted our prized possessions and barns.

All of the invaders were young men, and none of the old men in our village could match the skill and dexterity of these young bloods as they brandished their cutlasses and went about violating lives and property.

We were at their mercy and I felt cold fear grip me as a woman was slaughtered before my eyes.

Was this what the lack of food could cause?

I was terrified and beyond doubt I wanted to run away and hide inside the soil. I begged for the ground to swallow me and my family as we scurried to safety.

There was no safety anywhere. The screams filled the air from both the north, south, east and west.

There was nowhere to run to.

A war was starting and we were all going to be sore victims or casualties. That was when I saw one of the men indulging in an argument with Corper Devo.

Corper Devo looked like he had bodily advantage over his opponent. But he had no weapon on him. The only thing he held in his hands were the dust remains of the white chalk he had used to teach his students earlier.

I watched in horror as the cutlass connected with Mr. Devo’s neck, sending him into a pivotal shock as he landed on the floor in a heap of dust.

“No…!!!!!”

I screamed out loud running towards his direction, wanting to save him.

He was not one of us, he did not deserve to die in our community conflict.

Why? Why?? Mr Devo.?

The next morning, after the night of the incident. Corper Devo was pronounced dead. He was the first of many victims that were casualties of the infiltration.

At that moment I questioned what it meant to dream. Was it really worth the effort when everything could be snuffed out by a terrible undeserving blow before one could negotiate?

Maybe it was not a good thing to dream after all.

Maybe Corper Devo was wrong about the future after all.

Anyone of us could be snuffed out of life and tomorrow would not even matter anymore.

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