What happened to All-weather?
short fiction about ordinary people how perceptions change
Nobody knew his real name because as long as anyone in the city could remember, he had always been called All-weather. Even he did not remember his real name. His earliest memories of himself were being called that and with other street kids picking plastic bottles from the trash heaps. He used to exchange them for a few coins that put food in his stomach for the night. No one knew his parents or where he came from. Nobody also knew his exact age; he was either in his late thirties or hard life had just darkened his skin to a charcoal shade and creased his face like crumpled paper. He was stout with thick arm muscles, a square face and a flat head top like he had started carrying heavy things even before his head was formed. He didn’t talk much too or perhaps it was because no one ever spoke to him directly.
He was called All-weather because he was the handy-man of New Layout. All-weather was the man they called to get rid of the trash, he fetched water for the town’s people and he cut the wild Bahamas grass. All-weather was the man for the nasty jobs and his pay was never much. Sometimes they gave him a hundred francs, other days, food. There were days when he was rewarded with ‘one man’ the local name for a bottle of beer that quenched his thirst. On even better days, he got to drink ‘white stuff’ or sweet palm wine from the palm wine parlours offered by generous drinkers. There were other days when he had a warm place to lay his head, even if it was in the fireside kitchen where he had finished splitting wood for someone and they allowed him to rest.
All-weather was also the man who brought laughter to New Layout. They loved to invite him to ‘alah’ or neighborhood parties. He knew how to dance and entertain the town’s people and as usual, he was well fed later. After the parties, he would go around gathering the leftover food into ‘should in case’ or black plastics wrappings before the hosts had time to dump them and he would pour the left over drinks into plastic bottles then take to the uncompleted building where he lived and store them like a man used to days of lack.
…
The town’s people never thought of it that way, but they had an unspoken vow to protect, provide and feed him. Like a stray cat, he was everybody’s and nobody’s responsibility.
So when All-weather disappeared, the town noticed. There was no one to empty the trash for such a petty pay. The towns’ people started to pay actual money to fetch water from the public taps. They had to split wood themselves or pay someone a bit more. What had happened to All-weather?
A few years passed and soon large garbage disposal trucks began to come into the city. The people of New Layout gathered at City hall to hear the new innovation that could take trash from their doors and recycle. When the mayor introduced a stout man as the innovator of the project, they cheered at the hero who spoke with such eloquence.
So when the man told them he was once a low life who came upon treasure in a heap of dirt, they still did not recognize him. When he smiled at the beauty by his side and thanked her for believing in him even when he struggled through school at an advanced age, they praised him for being so lucky. When he told them of his plans to educate street kids of New Layout because he was once like them, they cheered his philanthropy. He marveled at how success could mask someone that no one could even remember the man he once was. How money could easily change people’s perceptions in a second.
So that day as the towns folk went home, some said he looked like All weather and others still asked what happened to that strange man of New Layout.
THE END
Ta’ndi H. NCHINE