“Does it ever enter your skull that you have 6 kids to feed, clothe, and educate, wena, Baba Daniel?” Mavis said to her husband.
A lumberman at Chizengo Sawmill, Baba Daniel was a womanizer, drinker, and wayward character who would always blow his $400 a month salary at Hlabiso Rural Nightclub each time he got paid.
At 55 he remained truant. He never paid attention to his wife’s rebukes, stomping his lumberman shoes out of the lounge before beating the road to the nightclub each time he felt that his wife was getting talkative.
Mavis would always chide her husband after his long drinking nights, frying a stiffling bevy of bitter herbs and vegetables to sour his appetite. She tried to awaken his senses in the hope of making him a more attentive father.
“You can’t leave the kids without bread for tomorrow’s school run,” Mavis shouted one day.
“Borrow from Aunt Su’s tuckshop,” Baba Daniel shouted with his upper body frame well out of the family home’s door.
The ever-smiling lumberman would enter into local bars and ask the cashier to give everyone a drink—on his bill. Thus made him a darling of the neighborhood. Though loathed by his wife, Baba Daniel was a cherished customer at Hlabiso Night Club. Each month a credit book in his name listed his spending and escapades: “20 bottles of rum, 30 bottles Don Juan whiskey, 77 cigarettes – 10 packets of condoms.” On the 30th or 31st of the month when he usually got paid, he would settle the bill directly with his salary. It never crossed his mind that he was blowing a small but significant percentage of his monthly earnings on condoms and beer rounds.
“We missed you when you didn’t show up this weekend,” Yule the barlady said to him as she picked up his lumberman coat. She cordially placed the coat into her onsite bedroom. Baba Daniel was a special customer. The only one whose shirts were sometimes ironed by the barladies as a courtesy for a loyal client.
‘Really? You missed me? I was with my family,” Baba Daniel replied, while gulping two shots of whiskey in quick succession.
Yule poked his forehead with a plastic Coca-Cola straw and teased him with a whisper to his right ear. His ear had been damaged by years of noisy chainsaw machines milling lumber at the sawmill.
“You don’t give a damn about your family, we all know,” she said.
“Lord! I buy food, pay school fees, and provide a roof over Mavis and her kids. All I get is endless mouthing about my drinking. This morning she scratched my cheek with a hot porridge spoon,” he said, lowering his face for Yule to inspect.
“She’d kill you in a flinch,” Yule said, feigning concern.
“Mavis is the pits,” echoed back Baba Daniel, asking for two more shots of whiskey.
Yule was Baba Daniel’s known fiancee at the nightclub. She and Mavis knew each other. Mavis suspected Yule of blowing her husband’s salary each time he got paid—and it made her furious that a barlady was snatching bread from the mouths of her kids. Yule didn’t care about Mavis’s hatred toward her. As far as she was concerned, Baba Daniel was unhappy in his marriage and had told her that she was the one he wanted to spend his 60s with—not Mavis.
Today Baba Daniel was in a hurry. It was 24 December, and he needed to get back to the sawmill quickly. His $800 in annual bonus was due to be paid at the finance clerk’s office—in cash. The Christmas holidays were drawing near. He left his bag and coat with Yule and dashed out of the nightclub.
‘I’ll be back in a mo’…” He promised her.
“Bonus!” smiled Yule as she waved at him.
In her mind she was dreaming of dollars—praying that Baba Daniel would spend the entire Christmas week with her and not rush to be with his wife, Mavis. Apart from doing the nightclub cashier work, Yule was preparing goat stew and soup broth in the nightclub’s back kitchen. The dish was Baba Daniel’s bonus day special. He promised to return to the nightclub at 4pm, and together they would start their day.
But at 8pm, Baba Daniel had not been seen. Had he headed home straight to Mavis with his bonus? Yule was at pains to know Baba Daniel’s whereabouts. He didn’t go home straight to Mavis. Yule knew this from Jagidhi, the cattle herdman who lived next door to Mavis. Jagidhi was Yule’s spy—spying on everything at Mavis’s home in exchange for free weekly pints of Castle Lager beer. At 12 midnight—the action inside the nightclub was crazy. Loud music, merry ladies of the night, and dozens of lumbermen who were blasting away their bonus money, carefree. But, unusually so, Baba Daniel was nowhere to be seen.
Word went around at daybreak, 4:30am the following morning, that a nude, drunk man was lurking, crawling in the corn garden—200 meters away from the nightclub building. The nude man could not cross the main road because he was shy and didn’t have clothes on. It was Baba Daniel; schoolboys passed word around. He was begging for Mavis or Yule to send him clothes to wear so he could head home.
A lady of the night had made him drunk and slipped some unknown drug into his beer. She emptied his bonus money from his pocket and vanished. The mysterious lady took away his clothes—to ensure he wouldn’t run back home or to the night club to inform locals to mount a chase.
Yule refused to send him any clothes—and Mavis would have none of it. Baba Daniel spent Christmas Day in the garden—hiding his nudity and battling to clear his hangover—peniless.
