The night Adrian died, nine full moons ago, a shooting star zoomed down the empty sky in a long line of fire; the people of Kufi heard the bought of an iroko.
The meaning of all these were very clear to Rose; Adrian had been accepted by his Maker. His spirit had gone straight to Heaven, not missing the way!
Kelvin's eyes twinkled. he did not know whether to begin to shed tears of sorrow or tears of gratitude. But because his parents had left him alone to the wicked world, just like that, and without a word of farewell; he quickly made a choice; It must be tears of sorrow. Sorrow from the abyss of a troubled heart! Kelvin's face instantly was shadowed in deep misery, and the whole world imediately went blank before his eyes.
He made efforts to console himself, even as the distrustful eyes of "sympathisers glared from helms of garments, secretly castigating. Kelvin wondered....
His father certainly did not die a disgraceful death.
For this, he told himself, he must be thankful! Adrian did not die an abominable death. No, He did not drink poison out of frustration with life, and he did not fall from the slippery chips of the palmtree on a rainy day. He was not struck by lightning, not bitten by a cobra and not crushed to death between the falling walls of the village mud buildings. Ofiso did not hang himself with a rope on the kolanut tree like the Stick of firewood cutter whose dead body the people had cut down and had buried at the iloro with indecent haste, inside a shallow, nameless grave filled with loose soil and porous sand. No suicide for Adrian. He lived like a man, and died like a man. Kelvin was thankful.
But the tears now rolled in torrents down his face, streaming into the corner of his mouth and tasting like salt. The temporariness of man's passage on earth was a certainty! Kelvin, at once, surrendered himself to the design of destiny and to the agony of, what seemed to him, an irreplaceable loss.
He was the last human being Adrian saw when his eyes were finally closing up in death. What a great honour! His father gave him that last-minute parting stare... quick, penetrating, and meaningful...There was an expression of hurt and disappointment in Adrian dying black eyes. Kelvin got the message. And with all his heart he tried to communicate to Adrian, not only sorrow and solidarity, but also deep apology for all the wrongs he probably had committed. Something told him he must have offended his father deeply, to be shot at and be wounded with such strange, reproachful glare. he was just ready now to beg, ready to atone, and ready to apologise!.The painful finality of Adrian's last minutes on earth rang in Kelvin's head, splitting her brain with remembered images.
He stumbled as he stepped out into the sun to pick up his tie which had fallen on the ground during the course of prolonged wailing. he was scanned by mourners in all directions. All eyes followed every footsteps he took with hostile closeness.
And all ears listened, ready to catch him every word in a set-trap. These, obviously, were not people merely sitting in silent sympathy in the presence of death, but people who were fully bent on humiliating him and destroying his reputation.

These were lonely days indeed. Kelvin felt thoroughly abandoned, like a stone at the bottom of a lake. Silence sank like sad music in his heart, and descended on his soul in pitiable layers. One by one, the mourners had left, leaving her to sulk the anguish of a private sorrow, secretly. Then followed, after a few days, the extended family's mockery heaped on his like the strange showers of a January rain..... And now, loneliness....... Kelvin's days dragged lazily on, in a haze of solitude and lonesomeness. he had never learnt to be able to be alone in his life!. But loneliness had now pitched a tent, and had become, to him, a deep black colour like the night; eternal night, thick and tangible, with no glimmer of light and no trace of life; dark lonely days and lonely nights-unending, sombre, gloomy and desolate-where only the winds played freely alone in the air.
Kelvin's two Anties, who used to keep his Mother company had long been given away in marriage; Maria to Miguel, the richest business man from China, who bought the biggestest plot of land with the highest cost; Wura to the blacksmith at Apon who owned a granite anvil, and two bellows of baked clay-the 'lron Man' as they called him, with the fiery furnace". Wura's husband was nicknamed Sokoti, the 'Blacksmith of Heaven," welding gongs and salvaging scraps of metals to create shovel and axes of local design, to earn a living.
Linda's only brother, Charles, was an expert furniture carpenter who now lived in Texas, far away from his sister. ln town, Charles had become more than just a carpenter. He had become urbanised, as a result of his long stay. And now, he hardly remembered the little village of his birth. Kufi, to him, was becoming a lonely settlement at the very end of the earth; a small un-mapped hamlet inhabited by a handful of people, where time was measured by the length of shadows, the movement of the sun, the direction of the wind, and the throaty call of the cock with the big red comb; a village where silence reigned, broken only by the hooting of owl, the coo-coo of the dove, and the yapping of wild dogs.
Now alone in the world, Kelvin was left to prepare heaps and raise crops, all by himself-labouring hour after hour, under the sweltering heat. he had to cut the bushes around the family compound, and appeal to the village men, especially to Uncle Samuel, Charles bosom friend, to assist in mending the leaking roof and rebuilding the falling walls of her mud house. It was his habit to trek to distant farms, his grandma's farms, to uproot cassava tubers to feed her goats with. he would linger all day, alone in the sun, to dry maize grains for an evening meal of delicious porridge and melon stew. But Vivian her grandmother main job was dyeing taffeta cloths in indigo solution at her yard to secure ready cash. These taffeta products she would carry inside a large wooden tray to the market at Sagbe, three miles away for a sale to willing customers.