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Nine minutes’ walk from my father’s gate. He could have walked it in the time it takes to boil water, any day, any of eleven thousand days, stood in front of her and said the thing. Instead, he sent money. Thirty years of school fees, a roof, a shop and an old woman on a veranda holding my hands and weeping with gratitude for the man who killed her son.
If I don’t return, Akanda. Not a sentence nor an explanation. A frightened man writing down the only thing that would matter if he became a body that could no longer speak. The name of the person to blame. An arrow drawn by a dead hand, pointing across thirty years at the man they buried on a Tuesday.
A madwoman does not keep a garden like that. Everything tended, everything chosen. Thirty years the town said Iyabo lost her mind waiting for a man who ran to Lagos and she has been sitting in a clean house at the edge of the red road, in complete possession of it, waiting for someone from that family to be brave enough to knock.
“Your father did not kill Bayo.” I had not asked. That is the first thing you should notice. I had not said the word kill and here was my uncle answering the accusation before I had made it, which is what a man does when he has been rehearsing the answer for thirty years. Every word he told me was true.
That was how I knew he was lying.
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