Thirty Seconds

Chapter One A Little Boy Named Patrick

It was still dark, the morning air cool and crisp, and sleep heavy in my eyes, when I heard the sound of my father knocking on our door. The firm knocking was to announce another new day was beginning. Without fail, my father was the motivator who, like an alarm clock, woke us up every morning. As one of the sons living on my father’s farm, even at the tender age of three years old, we young ones were expected to work. It was a bustling stream of commotion from the minute we rose from our huts. My father’s farm raises cattle, sheep, and goats besides growing many vegetables. Mostly, the animals survive on pasture land and it was my older brothers who took turns moving the herds to new land. My job at such a young age was to help watch over the goats and the sheep. I come from a very large family. I never thought anything about it, as none of us had ever gone hungry. The thick white porridge we call Sadza was always plentiful at mealtime. I worked in the fields with my brothers. And I never gave it a second thought that we all wore the same clothing. It was perfectly normal to wear just a single tattered cloth, covering only our front side. You see, I was born in a rural place, a beautiful place, in Africa. At a tender age, I heard my father at mealtimes telling stories to my mother. He loved to tell stories and he made us laugh, he was a funny man. I love my father. Our family was very competitive, jockeying for position to find favor with him, I suppose as most siblings do. But our family competitions were anything but friendly. It was clear that any mistreatment to me or my immediate siblings was done out of hatred. It was apparent that my mother found favor in my father’s eyes. This bred a strong jealousy amongst the other family members. I was extremely heartbroken when my father became ill. He was sent away from our farm, with the expectation of him returning back to us healed. I never saw him awake ever again. As a three-year-old boy, through the lenses of my young eyes, I was overjoyed to see my father come back to us again. But there was much confusion, because I had never seen anyone carried like they were carrying him on that day he returned. Still, my father was back! I had missed him so much. The farm hadn’t been the same without his dependable morning raps on the door. He was in a deep, deep sleep. Of course, he must still be sick and with much rest, I was confident he would eventually wake up. I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about when many visitors came to watch him sleep. Why are they all crying? This is supposed to be a happy time because he finally came back home! Won’t they all feel silly when he wakes up and sees them all crying. He will laugh and laugh at these people. What is this now? Why are they placing my father in this hole that had been freshly dug into the sand? Each one of us children, young and old, were brought to this hole where they had lowered my sleeping father. As the confusion grew, my anger grew. Why are they doing this? Why isn’t anyone doing anything to stop this insanity of putting my beloved father in a cold dark hole in the ground? Somebody stop this now! I lunged forward, closing my teeth into the nearest man next to me who was shoveling sand over top of my father, and I bit him. That was 1975. What was I going to do without the person that loved me and protected me from the jealous ones? Life from that day forward would never be the same. No more of his funny stories with the laughter that followed. No more of his knocks on our door in the wee hours of morning. He was not only the strong leader of our family, but he was the leader over our entire farm. This man is how we survived. And now he was now gone. I don’t understand. …