Likely Story

I am pretty sure he paid his taxes and ate all his vegetables. Hell, I am even sure he tithed and gave to those in need too. Wreathed in smiles, he was often seen outside playing with the small children that he took care of. It was his duty as the steward to take care of us and to ensure that we were “safe”; a word I quickly learnt meant nothing. People often referred to him as a fatherly figure who took good care of both his kids and the kids in the orphanage that he himself had started from scratch. Even his name, Noel, sounded like a melody. One had to lean over and keep very still when talking to him as he spoke so softly that you could possibly miss what he was saying altogether if you so much as looked the other way. Some said he was soft spoken; I found it unnerving that one could speak the meanest things with a calmness that resembled that of the sea. Once, in the middle of the night, on one of the many visits he paid to the girls’ dome he had whispered that if I so much told a soul about our “activities”, he would see to it that what my mother had started would be done successfully this time. For what novice starts to murder three of her children and successfully kills the two and gets interrupted by a drug selling person who wants to collect the money she owed for the cocaine, pays part of the money then negotiates to get more on credit, forgets she has one more child to kill who is keeping as still as she possibly can in the hopes that by some stroke of luck she will be spared, starts to take the cocaine again and overdoses thereby ending her own life as well? It was then I learnt that sometimes all you have to do is keep still and it will soon be over, so that’s what I did, day in and day out. His saliva, tasted like vinegar and I know that a carpenter needs a good hammer to bang the nail as the old adage goes but in this case his hammer was far too big for my six year old body, except this carpenter didn’t care and all I could do was keep still until he moved to the next bed and the next, not all at once of course, just as many as he could do in one night. The description of a good night was one he didn’t come to your bed. No one spoke about it in the mornings or any other time for that matter. What was there to talk about? Who to tell? His wife who helped to run the place and was fully aware of what was going on? The Pastor whose adoration of this tithe-paying man was obvious to all? And say what? Such a cliché story? Likely story, huh?