THE COFFIN OF ERRORS
(Still To Ishilove) The old and bad-tempered Pa Jimoh was dead, to begin
with, but he did not go to his grave. And this
deprivation of proper interment prevented among
mourners any thought of planting over his head a
mango tree. The real cause of his demise, however, if
brought to focus, would result in an esteem more mirth-inducing to any spectator at the sight of the
incident than to the actual victim on whom such
tragedy befell.
Pa Jimoh had already hoisted himself to the apex of a
rather lofty palm tree before he met his end. His
intention behind this ascent was merely to tap in the early wine, but instead, he found his own hand tapping
on the delicate nest of snoozing hornets. Not many
mortals, if placed behind a judgemental desk, would
put too much blame on the piqued wasps for their
collective efforts in the attack on the feeble
curmudgeon. And it would be unfair if this little but fatal brawl between insect and man was not elucidated
in full detail.
The kind of irritation this swarm fostered could only be
imagined after putting oneself in their thorax. Just
imagine yourself a wasp making passionate insect love
to your spouse in your apartment erected feet high on the branch of a palm, then suddenly poof! your castle
was demolished by the single stroke of a hand. And this
destruction came not just from any hand but from the
hand of Man; that specie with whom you have never
been (and possibly will never be) of benign
companionship. In this instance, the last thing a patriotic wasp would care about was decency; no male
wasp would scramble to a wardrobe searching for a
pair of trousers to cover its privates, and neither would
a female scream for her pants and bra. What would
they do? They’d call on immediate neighbours whose
mansions had also been reduced to rubble and launch immediate attack on the human intruder.
Initiating the divide-and-conquer techniques, some
wasps made their own attack on the human’s skull;
thereby, in the process, reshaping the dimension of the
tapper’s occiput into that which was totally different
from the Creator’s initial design. But this was not what resulted to the old man’s demise; of course, something
more brutal sufficed. While some wasps families were
busy assaulting the old man’s skull, others lodged
themselves into the dark comfort of his rather
oversized pair of trousers. The poor man wouldn’t have
launched into that extraordinary wail even people far away had sworn hearing if those bees had shown
kindness on their intruder. The offensive had found it
incubent to sting him on the delicate tissue of the sac
dangling between his thighs, while some were satisfied
by only sticking their probosces on the flesh of that
tender rope that always come with the sac. The agony could only be best described by someone who’d
experienced a nearly equal attack. So, it could be
deduced that the latter attack was more brutal than the
former, for it was at this moment that the old man
forgot about the precarious position he was in; he’d
disremembered that he was still perched against the stem of a tall tree. And because the pain was getting
unbearable, Pa Jimoh let go. Witnessing the brutal
event could cause one to see only figuratively the
morals behind the anecdote that ‘the higher you fall
the higher you bounce’, and the old man literally
bounced when his slim body came in contact with the earth. And these mean insects returned to build another
nest only after accompanying their victim to his final
destination. A rather eccentric writer may be inspired to
coin a catchy title from this tragedy: ‘Death by Sting’
would go the title.
Pa Jimoh was really dead. There was no doubt whatsoever about that, for he truly and undeniably died
from half a thousand stings and a broken vertebrae. He
knew about his own death? Of course he did. How could
it ever be otherwise? Because Pa Jimoh died a virgin,
there was really not wet eye for his funeral. The reason
behind his decided celibacy would forever remain a mystery even to the most seasoned of all detectives
alive today.
Now, the mention of Pa Jimoh’s funeral brings the
magic of the pen back to the first line of the immediate
paragraph before this. Pa Jimoh was really dead. This
must be distinctly assimilated or there would be nothing of consequence to fathom from the
extraordinary sequence of events that succeeded his
demise. And when a man dies and is still refused the
peacefulness of a grave, then most people will agree
that there is something still amiss with the world, as it
has always been. Jimoh, being the last of his race, was of no known
family member to claim his corpse, let alone rewarding
him with a befitting burial. It was only the kind
indegenes of Ogbomosho that took it upon themselves
to plant the loner, but they refused to do it without a
coffin available. It was part of their culture in the remotest part of the village not to bury any corpse in
the soil without first locking it in a casket. But the only
coffin-maker they knew had his shop in the city, which
was many kilometres away from the village. Having no
other known maker of coffins, the village elders
gathered together their resources and employed the service of Saka, a gifted coffin-maker. These elders
exhibited their generosity over the tapper’s corpse to a
commendable degree. If they’d allowed themselves the
pleasure of considering Pa Jimoh’s manners in his life
they wouldn’t have made any step at burying him;
they’d rather have watched the corpse rot and become meat for fowls of both air and land, for Pa Jimoh was
known to be tight-fisted in his life; a squeezing,
wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old
man. He was a well from which no bucket had ever
fetched a generous water. No beggar who knew him
implored of him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman in the
village ever once in all his life inquired the way to such
and such a place, of Pa Jimoh. Even the blind men
appeared to recognize him; for when they sensed him
coming ahead, they would tap their canes and make
their ways to their doorways. It almost seemed as though whenever it came to situations pertaining
Jimoh, they revelled in their affliction. Some of them
would console themselves by saying, ‘No eye at all is
better than an evil eye!’
But even Jimoh himself did not give a trifle care to this
obvious neglect; it was the very thing he liked, and he always defended himself by preaching about how he
was the oldest inhabitant of the village at seventy-five,
and that every other villager should always accord him
the respect for an elder. Although he always
emphasized how he was a year older than any other old
man in the village, everybody knew that he was never an hour richer. And to have such an evil-embodiment
die in the village without the benefit of a burial might
spell misfortune for the growing generation of the
village.
Saka worked round the clock to make a presentable
coffin for Pa Jimoh, and when the work was ready the next day, Saka was impressed at his own achievement;
because he’d never, until now, completed a casket in a
single day. It was as though the spirit of the dead palm-
wine tapper urged him to hasten up. He knew quite
well that his client would likewise be duly impressed at
the rapidity with which he completed the work. He also knew that the villagers could not wait to inter Jimoh
and get it done with. But in the modern world, there
was always Murphy’s Law that could not be avoided.
And in this case at hand, everything worked together to
make sure that the coffin built for Jimoh did not arrive
Ogbomosho in time. Pa Jimoh had chosen the wrong time to die; he kicked
the bucket when fuel scarcity was rampant in the city
yonder.
With his faithful work of art beside him, Saka waited
impatiently at the bus-stop, but the road was
practically devoid of vehicles. The very few that plied the quiet road didn’t give the carpenter a second
glance, and even those who gave were shied away at
the sight of the corpse apartment. Most motorists
believed that the presence of a coffin in their vehicles
could cause doom to their journey, with or without
corpse. Sometimes though, some braver ones would adorn their automobiles with leaves of unknown
botanical nomenclatures, believing therefore that this
action was enough to ward off both potential evils and
evil potentials. Besides, everything in life has always
boiled down to faith; but faith itself is limited. Would
you believe so much in faith that you’d take a bold step to the middle of a rail track with the firm belief that the
speeding locomotive would bounce off you at impact?
And it is not unusual to find that it is only readers who’d
not misplaced their mental gadgets would find the
mission an extremely ludicrous one. And if you trust
otherwise, then the writer can only shrug his shoulder and urge you to prove him wrong.
Saka was already at the verge of giving up and
returning home when he sighted an approaching lorry.
There, he decided within himself that this one vehicle
would not pass him by, no matter what it took. This was
the perfect six-wheeler to transport him, coffin inclusive. He was determined to make the driver stop,
and hand-flagging might not achieve that. When the
vehicle was closer, Saka suddenly leaped to the middle
of the road. There was no one at the bus-stop to stop
him from engaging in this suicidal mission. Everywhere
was silent, as if the situation was not only inflation in fuel price but also an imposition of curfew. Although
this feat was not unlike that of the demented incipient
already mentioned in the former paragraph, Saka was
one of the sanest people in all of humanity; because it
takes a large degree of sanity and ingenuity to build
such a remarkable coffin. Fortunately, Saka was not flattened by the wheels of the truck, though almost.
The driver had managed to repair the brakes the day
before. The vehicle stopped at only a few inches from
the carpenter.
‘Are you crazy?’ Screamed the driver in a thick Yoruba
language. As he poked his head out through the window Saka could not help noticing the brutal tribal
marks on the man’s cheeks. Whoever had carved this
tally on his face had not intention of bestowing
pulchritude. The lines were not even symmetrical; the
driver’s ugliness was classic.
‘No, I am not crazy, just desperate. There’s a difference between insanity and desperation.’ answered Saka in
like language.
‘What do you want?’ The facially-challenged man asked
impatiently.
‘My name is Saka and I urgently need to get to the town
of Ogbomosho.’ ‘How does that concern me?’
‘You are going to drive me there.’
‘And a dozen beauty queens would fight over me.’ Spat
the driver, whose name was Dawodu; an ugly name
among ugly names.
‘Listen carefully to me, Prince Charming, I’m not leaving here unless you agree to transport me.’
Dawodu scoffed amusedly, ‘And you think your rigid
presence here is a threat to my tipper? I can just run
you over.’
Maybe Saka’s sanity had reached such a boiling point
that a regular prefix had been added to his ‘sanity’, or the spirit of the deceased client was influencing him
negatively, because the coffin-maker’s reply was
sensationally inane. ‘I’ve memorized your plate
number.’
The truck-driver stared at Saka for a long moment;
what was running through his mind could be explained by only him, because he quietly but firmly replied, ‘My
fee is ten naira.’ Of course, the amount charged during
this prehistoric time was a direct equivalent five
hundred times its value fifty years aft.
‘What!’ screamed the wide-eyed Saka. ‘That’s a fortune!
I can only afford five naira.’ ‘Deal.’
‘Come and let’s hoist that to the back of the lorry.’ Saka
pointed at the coffin he’d left at the site of the road
prior his maniacal bound before a moving engine. It
was at this moment that Dawodu noticed the wooden
object. ‘What’s that?’ he asked incredulously.
‘It’s a spaceship.’ Saka replied absent-mindedly.
‘It looks like a coffin.’
‘Wow, that’s very brilliant of you. You’re right, it’s a
coffin,’ Saka said impatiently, ‘Now come and assist in
lifting it.’ ‘You are not planning to put that in my lorry, are you?’
The coffin-maker looked at the driver as if he had just
said something incredibly silly.
‘No,’ he answered in anger, ‘I’m planning to string it on
my waist like a bead.’
‘I’m not putting a corpse in my car!’ ‘The coffin is empty, genius!’
‘Prove me wrong.’
It was only after Saka had opened the coffin to show
that it was truly empty that Dawodu assisted in lifting.
Then the journey began.
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