Ibadan, 1998 Before Dayo learned to fear the sound of his father's key in the gate, he learned to tie his shoelaces from the same man. He was six. Saturday sunlight lay across the sitting-room floor in long yellow rectangles. The television was on, unwatched. His mother was in the kitchen humming a hymn and frying plantain, and the whole house smelled of onions, hot oil and the powder she put on after bathing. Dayo sat on the rug between his father's knees with one white school shoe in his lap. “Again,” Baba Afolabi said. “I did it.” “You made a knot.” “A knot is tying.” His father laughed. At six, Dayo believed his father's laugh was the loudest safe sound in the world. “No. A knot is a problem. We are solving a problem.” He loosened the lace. “Watch. Cross. Pull. Make the ear. Around. Through.” “That's too many things.” “Life is many things.” “I'm six.” “Exactly. Start early.” From the kitchen his mother called, “Don't mind your father. He is turning shoelace into seminar.” Baba Afolabi raised his voice. “Madam, please allow serious men to work.” Mama Afolabi laughed, and the sound travelled easily through the house. There was no temperature to read then. Or if there was, Dayo had not learned to read it. He tried again.
Cross. Pull. Ear. Around. The lace slipped. He groaned and threw the shoe onto the rug. “I can't.” His father bent forward, forearms on his thighs. “You can.” “No.” “You will.” Dayo looked up. There was no impatience in his father's face. No glass on the side table. No softness around his eyes that meant the evening had already gone somewhere the rest of them could not follow. Only a thirty-three-year-old man in a white singlet and shorts, smelling faintly of shaving cream, looking at his son as though failure were temporary. “You will,” he said again. Dayo picked up the shoe. Cross. Pull. Ear. Around. Through. The bow held. His father slapped both hands against his knees. “Ah! You see?” “I did it.” “You did.” Mama Afolabi appeared in the doorway with a plate of plantain. “What happened?” “Your son has joined the league of men who can tie their own shoes.” “My son? When he couldn't do it, he was your son.” Baba Afolabi pointed at Dayo. “This is marriage. Observe carefully.” Dayo laughed because they were laughing. Later that afternoon his father took him outside to wash the car. Dayo sprayed more water on himself than on the bonnet. His father pretended to be angry, then turned the hose on him until Mama Afolabi came to the veranda shouting that both of them had lost their minds. Dayo ran around the car, shrieking. His father chased him badly on purpose. That memory survived too.
Not because nothing bad came after it. Bad things did. Years later, memory would become unfair in the opposite direction: it would place the worst nights under bright light and let whole months of ordinary goodness blur at the edges. Dayo would sometimes wonder whether the man on the rug had truly existed, or whether childhood had invented him because a child needed his father to have been good once. But there were witnesses. His mother's laughter from the kitchen. The wet footprints on the veranda. The white shoe left beside the sofa until evening because Dayo kept taking it off just to tie it again. Before dinner, he untied the laces again and made himself repeat the steps without help. The first attempt collapsed. On the second, his father reached toward the shoe, then stopped himself. “Do it.” Dayo frowned in concentration. Cross. Pull. Ear. Around. Through. The bow came out crooked, but it held. His father nodded as though Dayo had completed something important. “See? Your hand has to learn what your head already knows.” Dayo did not understand the sentence then. He only understood the pride in the man's voice. At bedtime he carried the shoe upstairs. “Why are you taking that?” his mother asked. “I can tie it now.” “I know.” “Daddy taught me.” She smiled. “Yes.” He placed it beside his bed like proof. Plantain. Sunlight. Water on the bonnet. His father's hands. You will. Long before those words became complicated, they were simply a promise.