Saah Millimono

May 2009 Fiction Contest Entry

Too Late for Flowers

Theresa was in her seventies, lean, gray-headed, with a wrinkled face and almost toothless mouth when I moved into her house as a tenant. She had suffered a stroke that left her right leg crippled and her left arm useless. Besides the meager rent Theresa received from me, she sold pepper and palm oil on a ramshackle table at Red Light market.

The house was built by Theresa’s late husband. It was a rickety zinc shack crawling with mice and cockroaches. Theresa, her daughter and her younger sister lived there.

Beatrice, Theresa’s daughter, was about eighteen, a frivolous girl who was never fond of helping her mother, except cooking whatever Theresa brought each evening. Then she would leave the house to loiter about the neighborhood, swaying her big hips, flirting with gronna boys, and basking in the attention they gave her.

Theresa had other children, prominent men and women who lived right there in Monrovia. One of her sons was the CEO at the Central Bank of Liberia, and another one was the chief accountant. Her daughters operated huge businesses. One of them owned a restaurant that catered exclusively to American and European clientele.

Theresa’s younger sister, Sarah, was short, full-breasted, with a tight face that made her looked younger than her thirty-eight years. She used to leave the house at night, dressed in fancy clothes, high heels, and makeup. Then she would return early in the morning, wads of notes stuffed into her pockets, disheveled beyond recognition, go into her room, and sleep for hours. No one knew what she was up to every night until one day I was washing her clothes and found a batch of condoms in her trousers pocket. Only then did I know she was perhaps a nightwalker.

One day it was raining heavy when Theresa returned from the market shivering wet, her teeth chattering with cold. Sarah took her into the room and lay her down on the mattress. She then ran to the local medicine store, bought a few paracetamol capsules and took them in to Theresa, who swallowed a couple of the tablets gratefully. That was all the medical care she received that day. It did her no good, though. In the evening her illness went from bad to worse.

At dusk, I overheard Sarah and Beatrice fussing with each other.

“Where have you been the whole day?” Sarah asked Beatrice.

Beatrice retorted, “I was at my friend’s house!”

“What were you doing at your friend’s house when you should have been here to mind your mother?”

“That’s none of your business!”

“All right, I will show you!”

“I dare you! You not woman enough.”

I came out of my room just in time to see Sarah grab a stout stick to whack Beatrice, who instantly dashed out of the house and into the yard. Moments later, she was shouting obscenities at her aunt, much to the amusement of the neighbors.

The next morning, Theresa’s cries for help rumbled through the zinc shack for hours. When Sarah eventually appeared from her night hustle, she heard Theresa’s screams and went berserk.

Kicking the front door open, she stormed into the house. “What the hell is going on here?” she shouted. “Theresa, I say Theresa, stop shouting in the house for God’s sake. You are not the only sick person in the world.”

But Theresa only sobbed.

“I say Theresa, can’t you keep your mouth shut? Oh, my God, what sort of trouble is this?”

“Sarah, please call Beatrice to help take me to the toilet,” Theresa said in a trembling voice. “My stomach is running and I can hardly get up from the mattress.”

“Beatrice isn’t in this house,” Sarah shouted. “I told the stupid girl to stay here and help you but she just won’t listen. She even had the nerves to abuse me. Now, you have got to shut up and let me hear my ears. I’m already sick and tired myself.”

Theresa’s sobs and groans only grew steadier. Disgruntled, Sarah spun on her heels and stomped out of the house.

Beatrice finally came home the following day. Instead of showing remorse for how badly she had treated her mother and aunt, she quarreled with Sarah once more. They fell into a violent fight until the neighbors eventually had to tear them apart, both of them pulling and nearly rooting out each other’s hair. Theresa, who hadn’t been taken to the toilet the day before, had already urinated and defecated on herself. Now she lay in her own mess, weeping as flies buzzed about her.

“Beatrice, you and Sarah should take your mother into the bathroom and clean her up,” a neighbor told them, disgusted.

Beatrice frowned and folded her arms. “She’s got cholera, and I am not going to catch it.”

“She would not have caught it if not for you, you idiot,” Sarah shouted at her.

“Oh, it’s you again, right? I see, you’ve just forgotten that I nearly pulled out all your hair,”

Beatrice yelled, stabbing her finger at Sarah. “All right, the next time I will scratch out your eyes for you!”

They would have dashed at each others’ throat again had the neighbors not intervened.

“What! This is craziness,” one old man yelled at them. “You both have sand for brains. Theresa is sick and instead of tending to her, you are fighting. And for what? Nonsense. Look, if you don’t get into your senses, I will take both of you to the police station. Understand?”

They both nodded their heads.

“Now, both of you go in that room, bring Theresa out, take her to the bathroom and clean her!” the old man ordered. “Those of us here will clean up the room.”

Only then did Sarah and Beatrice tend to Theresa. They went into the room together with the old man and other neighbors. Moments later, Sarah and Beatrice came out of the room, carrying Theresa between them like a sack of rice, and took her into the bathroom. Beatrice went to fetch water.

When Sarah and Beatrice came out of the bathroom, Theresa was shuffling between them, her emaciated arms draped over their shoulders. She looked terrible. Her eyes were sunken deep in their sockets. They carried her into Sarah’s bedroom and lay her down on the mattress. The neighbors had cleaned up Theresa’s room as best they could and taken her mattress, tainted with feces, out into the sun.

“Patrick, please write a letter to Theresa’s elder children,” Sarah told me. “Tell them that their mother has fallen ill and her condition is terrible. They need to come take her to the hospital now!”

“All right, sister Sarah,” I said, and got a pen and a sheet and then sat down to write. When I had finished writing the letter, Sarah sealed it in an envelope, and said she was going to take it to Theresa’s elder son, and then she left.

Sarah returned at dusk and much to everyone’s happiness, she said that she had given the letter to the elder son, who had relayed its contents to his brothers and sisters, and that all of them had decided to come the following day. That was Monday.

Monday came. They did not show up.

Tuesday. Growing anxiety. Still no children.

Wednesday. The elder brother’s houseboy came and told us that the children were sorry about their absence and that they would surely come on Thursday.

Thursday – and yet no luck.

Theresa died on Friday.

On Saturday, Theresa’s children eventually arrived and got out of their flashy cars – two BMWs, a Chevrolet, and a Continental, richly dressed, annoyingly pompous, chatting on cell phones.

They went into the house but soon came out with handkerchiefs over their noses, though Theresa’s corpse had not yet begun to rot.

The elder brother called St. Moses Funeral Parlor and requested a hearse. Moments later, the hearse drove into the yard and came to a stop. The group all went to the driver as he got out of the car.

The elder brother said, “Hurry up and get the body. I need to get the hell out of here. I should be at a meeting with a Swiss banker right now!”

“And I have a meeting with a big client from England to boost publicity for my hotel!” That was the elder sister.

“I just don’t understand why these people did not send the body to the funeral home,” the younger sister said. “They know that we are very busy business people.”

“They just want us to lavish our money on a wake,” said the younger brother. “Well, we will spend so that these people won’t tarnish our reputation and say we neglected our own mother.”

They all approved, whispering. I was leaning against the hood of one of the BMWs, and heard everything.

Theresa’s corpse, wrapped in a drab blanket, was brought outside and then put into the hearse.

Sniveling and dabbling at their faces, they all got into their cars, together with Beatrice and Sarah, and followed the hearse to the funeral home.

A week later there was a big wake-keeping attended by all of Theresa’s children. Both brothers wore expensive black coat suits, their shoes polished to a glitter, while their sisters and Beatrice and Sarah, were dressed in purple and white gowns that made the neighbors gawk in wonder. The extravagant wake lasted the whole night long, with people eating and drinking and fighting each other in their drunkenness.

At dawn, the coffin was taken to the Duport Road cemetery and placed in a tomb overlaid with expensive tiles, a door made of pure marble at the entrance. The following night, armed robbers descended on the tomb and robbed it. They ripped off the door, removed the corpse from the coffin, and stripped it of the several gold rings and huge gold chain round its fingers and neck. They even stole the coffin and left Theresa in a bush beside the tarred road. Theresa’s body was then put into another coffin, a very cheap one, and placed back into the tomb. Then the entrance was sealed with cement.

No more splendors. No more thieves. No more trouble.

Next day, I passed by the cemetery to pay my respects to Theresa and met the bouquet of flowers, which Theresa’s children had placed on the tomb, strewn over the ground and trampled on by robbers. Looking down at the flowers, I shrugged and said to myself, Theresa wouldn’t enjoy these flowers anyway. She’s already dead and gone.

Copyright © 2008 Saah Millimono