Tough was Zechariah’s father’s name. It started out as an accolade given by members of his farming co-operative after a powerful merchant from the capital arrived in their part of the countryside with an army of articulated trucks to buy maize at source and outfox his competitors. It had been a bumper harvest for the members of Zechariah’s father’s co-operative but sales had been slow.

The merchant pulled up beside the bald earth in front of the wooden shack that was the co-operative’s headquarters, emerged from his four-wheel-drive jeep with a wide smile and offered them a thin price for their produce. He had colonies of sweat marking his dark nose, which he repeatedly wiped with a blue check handkerchief. Zechariah’s father, as head of the co-operative, tried to negotiate but the man was as unyielding as his barely visible neck. Eventually Zechariah’s father shook his close-cropped head and cast an ultimatum into the humid air between himself and the merchant.

“You buy at our price or we keep our maize.”

The merchant’s smiling teeth disappeared momentarily, “My friend, you cannot take your own maize to the market. I’m here to help you.”

The fake philanthropist smile reappeared.

“No, you are trying to cheat us. These are hard times, we can’t live on what you are offering.” He placed one hand on Zechariah’s head as he spoke, the other on a brown pouch that he always carried strapped to his body. “We have families.”

The merchant turned to look at the long line of trucks behind him hugging the edge of the dirt road leading to the co-operative’s shack. They gleamed alongside the long fingers of vegetation like burnished grasshoppers frozen in contemplation. It was obvious what he was thinking; his trucks were already here, he had paid for fuel and he would have to pay his drivers. He couldn’t afford to go back to the city without a load.

He turned back to Zechariah’s father with a reluctant smile. “Hmm, you are tough, my friend, let’s talk”

After the merchant left the farmers, brandishing their cutlasses and whooping, carried Zechariah’s father home on their shoulders, chanting, “Tough, Tough, Tough.” Stopping occasionally to raise dust by scraping their cutlasses along the footpath or to tell a passer-by the entire story before resuming their chant.

Zechariah followed barefoot, dragging a car he had made from an old milk can behind him, his father’s cutlass clutched in his left hand. Tough became his father’s name. He always thought of his father as he was that day. Held aloft and revered. And inscrutable; Tough’s joy was always noticeably measured but if he was sad he never showed it. Not even when Zechariah’s mother died.

When news of his mother’s death reached him Zechariah had come home from law school to find Tough tottering about the kitchen, looking after himself with a mournful song vibrating from his closed lips. No tears. Just a steady “so you’ve heard,” and a quick hug. In later years when Zechariah had to flee the country, he asked his father whether he wanted to come with him. Tough’s answer was in the same even voice he used with the merchant when Zechariah was a boy.

“My place is here where I was born, where my ties are”

In that small moment, Zechariah felt a twinge of regret for speaking out against the government’s disregard for the rights of indigenous tribes when awarding concessions to multinational oil companies. He wondered what repercussions his frankness would lead to; what would become of his father and Sarah, his new wife.

“Pa, you know what happens here. As soon as they come looking for me and I’m gone, they will make your life miserable.”

“Nobody will touch me. I am seventy-three years old, a respected senior citizen. Nobody will touch me. Besides, things will get better. The government has promised improvements.”

Zechariah looked at his father. Tough’s steady gaze was filled with quiet assurance, his hand steady on the edge of his narrow reclining chair.

If Zechariah could go back he would return to that moment, that mid-afternoon bluish-orange window of time, tell his father that he was wrong and insist that he leave with him. But how was he to know what would happen two years after he left? How was he to know that the wife of an oil company worker would be waylaid, her dog murdered and its entrails strewn all over her face? Who could tell that the governments response would be to take every male aged 17-35 in the vicinity to boot camp to be lashed? What could have heralded the fury to follow?

Protests became riots; riots became planned attacks on the military. Suddenly the people became aware of the needle sucking blood from their veins. The life president declared war on the guerrillas: incensed young men whose buttocks were still smarting from unprovoked lashings. After that the country had drifted more and more towards the seams of full-fledged civil war. Zechariah had written to his father to ask him to leave and join him in exile, but Tough adamantly refused. He stayed after the government possessed his farm on the grounds of illegal farming methods. He stayed through the protests, and he stayed through the riots. For years he held onto an ever-thinning spool of hope that things would get better. Then out of the blue Zechariah received a phone call informing him that his father was on his way to London. A week later Tough called him to say he was at Heathrow Airport waiting for him.

Tough was carrying nothing but the pouch from which he used to fish pocket money and sweets for Zechariah as a kid. He seemed to have become more hardened than the man Zechariah had left behind seven years ago still working on his farm at the age of seventy-three. Zechariah wasn’t surprised. Without the high Elephant grass of his farm to crouch within, without seeds to sow, maize and vegetables to harvest, Tough was exposed. He had nothing. The usual channels for his grief had been stolen from him. His sadness now seemed more pronounced. His mouth was firmly set in the shape of grief. Zechariah took in the walking stick snug in Tough’s left hand as he walked towards the tall, sinewy, grey-haired man in threadbare khaki trousers. In Tough’s right hand was the pouch, which he held against a brown and cream vertical striped shirt. He was alone.

“Sarah?”

Tough shook his head with a slow, sad tilt that needed no explanation.

“What happened?”

“Ambush.”

Zechariah hugged him and felt the undulating surface of the pouch biting into his back.

Even in the spacious ground floor room Zechariah provided for his him, Tough never let go of his pouch. On the odd lunch time when Zechariah came home to see how Tough was doing, he found him sitting on the edge of his bed rocking back and forth with his back straight and his eyes closed; one hand on the peeling leather of the brown pouch, the other on the sweat-smoothed handle of his walking stick. The light combed in and out of his greying hair drawing psychedelic patterns on his head; making him look angelic one second and devilish the next.

Zechariah noticed that he often attached the pouch to his belt when he needed to use his hands. He never directly questioned him about the pouch but he teased him about it.

“Pa, are you going to carry your treasures with you if we have to go dancing?”

Tough breathed out a long raspy laugh. “Of course, a man always needs to carry something he owns.”

Increasingly, Tough grew frail. Their discussions about the situation back home, which had deteriorated into full-scale civil war, seemed to make him subdued and disconsolate. Eventually, he began to forget things.

Zechariah failed to notice the subtle signs. He mistook the requests for food only hours after a heavy meal for an extremely healthy appetite. He smiled at the repeated statements and questions. Even when Tough asked him what his last wife’s name was, he took it for braveness; his father’s way of telling him that he was getting over his loss. He only became aware of the true nature of his father’s erratic behaviour when he returned from his telemarketing job one day and opened the front door to find his father approaching him with menace. Poised to strike him with his walking stick.

“Who are you?”

Zechariah closed the distance between them, reached up and eased the raised stick down. “Oh, Pa, it’s me your son.”

“Which one?”

“Pa, you only have one son.”

Tough grunted and tightened his grip on the pouch.

Zechariah led him to his room where he sat on the edge of the bed and started rocking.

Their local doctor confirmed that it was Alzheimer’s. Zechariah reasoned that Tough had to have some weaknesses. All he remembered was his father being strong, reliable and unbreakable. Just before Zechariah had fled and he had lost his farm, he had been diagnosed with asthma and given an inhaler. Tough only used it once; shaking it with a farmer’s vigour and conscientiously holding it poised two inches away from his mouth and between two sides of the angle his open lips suggested before he sprayed, inhaled and held his breath. Afterwards he had looked at the L-shaped device, nodded his head and stashed it in his pouch where it had stayed since.

Tough’s grip on the pouch became tighter as the Alzheimer’s progressed. Patches of leather peeked hopelessly from between the prison bars of his long, eloquent fingers. Zechariah spent as much time as he could with his father but his job meant that he couldn’t be with him all day. Neither could he afford to pay for someone to be with him. Besides Tough was too proud, too independent; nevertheless he worried about him.

In between scheduled phone calls Zechariah stared at the partition that divided him from the rest of the call centre staff and imagined his father at home clutching his pouch; opening and closing the zip, listening to its music like the chords of a familiar song. He thought of how much his father must have suffered without the farm, without his cherished role as a leader in his community, as he waited patiently for the decision to give his farm back. Perhaps knowing deep down that he wouldn’t have lost it if his son hadn’t spoken out against the government. Knowing that he had never planted Indian hemp although the government had announced that he had cultivated two acres of it. Zechariah shook his head at that. Sitting alone in the house with those memories must have triggered the Alzheimer’s. Maybe his father’s forgetfulness was a shield, his way of blocking out the loss of his wives. His way of pretending that his house hadn’t mysteriously burned down with almost everything he owned in it, making believe that his young wife’s body hadn’t been carried home to him riddled with wayward bullets.

Zechariah’s conversations with his father had become an exercise in tolerance. Tough often referred to things Zechariah knew had never happened and insisted they were true. He was stubborn when he wanted something and wouldn’t talk to Zechariah for hours when he didn’t get his own way. Occasionally he would take out the hand-sewn notebook in which he used to tally his crops and loudly calculate the value of the harvest that had been stolen from him, telling Zechariah that he would get it all back someday.

“That will be yours when I’m gone. It won’t be long now.”

Chuckling with the tenor of those accustomed to loss, Tough would put the notebook back and fumble for the keys to the house that had turned to soot along with his memories of Zechariah’s mother and Sarah. Zechariah would sit on the edge of his father’s bed, feeling emasculated and weighing his part in creating the current condition of his father.

It all came to a head one Saturday. Zechariah woke up and went downstairs to find his father crying on the edge of his wooden bed. He had his sheets wrapped around him and he held a dull gold watch face with the remnants of one torn black strap tightly in his hands. He rocked back and forth and mumbled a name Zechariah didn’t recognise – Titi.

“Pa?”

His father waved him away with jerky movements.

Zechariah went to the kitchen to make some tea. As the kettle boiled he wondered about the name. Titi. Maybe his father was imagining things again, but it wasn’t like Tough to cry. He hummed sad songs, but he didn’t cry. Zechariah thought about his childhood, his time in boarding school and university; all the times he wasn’t with his father. He had never really taken the time to get to know his father; never asked him about his past, about his own childhood. He took two teabags out of the bumper pack he had bought and put them in empty cups. You never really knew anyone, he thought; people are like teabags, you get their flavour but you never quite get everything out of them. He felt a wry smile cross his face. He missed making comparisons, something he had done daily in court when he was practising back home. He hadn’t really had time to think about what he had lost: his law firm, his ambitious girlfriend who was still working for the government in the throes of the civil war, his house… His father, on the other hand, was home alone most of the week with his memories and whatever he carried in his pouch. He had to find a way to spend more time with him.

He carried the two cups of tea in matching blue saucers back to his father’s room and held one out.

“Pa?”

Tough reached out and took one cup from him.

“What’s wrong Pa?”

Tough patted the space beside him on the bed.

Zechariah sat down carefully and balanced his cup of tea on his knee.

Tough passed the watch to him. It still worked. Zechariah held it to his ear and listened to the steady tick of the watch. He weighed it in his palm and studied it closer. It was a kinetic watch. In spite of its dull appearance, it ticked along on faith and pre-programmed habit; as long as it moved everyday, its weighted round body stored kinetic energy and kept telling the time. When he handed it back his father put it in his pouch then silently passed the brown mass to Zechariah.

Zechariah looked at him quizzically. “Pa?”

Tough nodded.

Zechariah unzipped the pouch slowly and peered inside. To the right was the pale blue inhaler he remembered, and, beside it, a pipe made of mahogany Sapele wood, aged to dark brown where Tough’s lips would rest if he still used it. He lifted the pipe and smelled it. It still carried the faint tobacco smell that he associated with his father’s hug when he was a boy. He smiled at Tough then peered back in the pouch. The strapless watch lay to the left on top of a picture of him as a boy held in a crude wooden frame. His father had always believed that one should never buy what one can make oneself. He had built the co-operative’s shack. He had constructed his own granary. He even made the cart that he had used to ferry his produce to market. A sealed envelope caught Zechariah’s attention and he pulled it out carefully. It was yellowed and had adopted the shape of its contents. He looked up at his father.

Tough nodded again.

A pair of intricate beaded earrings fell out as soon as he broke the seal. He held onto the bottom of his father’s walking stick as he bent to pick them up. The beads matched the large beads Tough had always worn around his neck.

“Pa, were these for Ma?”

Tough shook his head. “There was a woman before your mother.”

Zechariah was still as the news sunk in. For as long as he could remember his father had carried this pouch around with him. He had fought every battle and thrown himself into every celebration with the pouch on him. Zechariah felt a pang of jealousy that he knew he shouldn’t feel. He flirted with the slight hope that the story was one of Tough’s muddled tales, but the physical proof of earrings that his mother had never worn suggested otherwise.

“Is that who Titi is?”

Tough nodded.

“I loved her very much.”

He paused and took a deep dry breath and looked at the pouch nestled in Zechariah’s hands.

“She died giving birth to our son.”

Zechariah’s cup rattled in its saucer as he sat straighter.

“You mean I have a brother?”

Tough nodded.

“I couldn’t raise him. When she died I hated him. His birth took her away. When I looked at him I saw death. I couldn’t…”

He held back a sob and took the pouch from Zechariah.

Zechariah placed his tea on the floor, shifted in his seat and put his arm around his father. He was still unsure whether Tough’s grief was due to a stab from his past or his muddled memory.

Tough conjured a folded bright red bank note and passed it to his son. On the back of it was an image of men working hard on a pineapple farm. It was an old note that would barely buy a litre of cooking oil back home.

Zechariah took it and opened it. “Pa, why are you still carrying that money? It is worthless here.”

Tough retrieved the note from him and pointed to the front, which bore the easily recognisable image of the dictator Zechariah had escaped eleven years earlier. His prominent forehead and stubborn lips were illustrated in a delicate criss-crossed red like a rose coloured game of microscopic noughts and crosses. Below his image his date of birth was printed: a strictly enforced national holiday.

Zechariah took the note back and peered at it, trying to read the message he imagined his father had inscribed there for him.

While he squinted, Tough slipped his hand into the inner lining of the pouch and retrieved a birth certificate, which he handed to his son. Placed side by side with the bank note the message jumped up to embrace Zechariah like a long lost love.