CHAPTER TWO

I actually was a very quiet person. I didn't talk much among my peers or older people and I usually kept my thoughts to myself. My humble background somehow accounted for that and it wasn't something I bothered about much since I knew when to speak but briefly and when not to speak at all. All in all, you'd say I was the regular kid who wasn't usually taken notice of among his peers but still coexisted and I was content with that.

Oh yeah! I haven't talked about my family. My dad was a farmer. He worked in a very big maize farm which belonged to Mr Fern. A big, oversized man who was always sweating. His cheeks were always full, even when he was not eating and I usually wondered why but I never got the courage to ask him directly or his son, who was in my class and also looked very big like his father just that his face always red and he also sweated a lot- especially whenever it was time for Miss Betty's math tests. He always had sweets enough to be shared among all the boys in the class but never gave anyone just as his father always had enough money in his pockets to feed my family for three months but he only gave them to the priest- Father Bob.

I forgot, I was talking about my dad. He's called Joe by mama but only by her and other elderly people. We called him daddy and it was not out of our acknowledgment to him as our father, it was out of fear of what could happen if we didn't. There was one time Abe replied with "yes Joe" to his question and the next thing that followed was a hard knock on his head. He was very strict, especially with us, especially with our homeworks and class scores. Abe and Dan were usually among the top in their class and they always got rewarded with an extra chicken or egg on their food while I usually got nothing for being in the middle of class scores. I never minded though because I always stole Dan's extra egg or chicken which always led to a fight and a scold from mama but I never cared because I ended up getting what I wanted. The win there mattered more than anything. So that's my dad and my two brothers Abe is actually Abraham and Dan is Daniel. My dad had the habit of shortening names to just the first three letters of the word which made me wonder if Joe is really the appropriate shortening of Joel which is actually is his name and if Abraham had an "e" in it.

Yes, mama! She always smiled, something daddy didn't do often. I loved every food she cooked for us and she always listened to us speak about school but if we said more than enough, like the day Abe fought his classmate and let it slip to her hearing, we were sure to get into big trouble. We feared her anger, but not as much as we feared daddy's own. His was worse and we dared not made him angry.

Mama liked to pray a lot and always woke us up early to pray, something we always grumbled before doing but actually helped us to never get to school late.

She was home whenever we returned from school and everyone liked her. Even those who did not like daddy. I remember Mr Stuart once told her, " you really are not meant for your hard man of a husband" and she only laughed it off and replied " he's not hard, you just don't know where he's soft" which actually made Mr Stuart also laugh. She was simply everyone's favorite until she got angry. For some reason too, she never directed her anger towards anyone except us. Whenever we went for mass, she made sure daddy didn't skip the communion as he sometimes did when he was in a fight with someone. In all, she was a person everyone loved.

The rest were Abe, Dan and myself- daddy's proud three boys as he sometimes called us.