The old man got off from the bus. The sun was heavy burning everything down. There were no clouds to shade. No trees nearby, and he didn't even look up. He hurried towards a faraway tree, to rest before starting again for the long walk to his home. By the time he reached the tree, two big globs of sweat started to fall down from his sides over his cheeks. He swept them away with a napkin. A napkin which was old, looks older than himself. That old piece of cloth reminded him of his wife. Since the year she passed away the napkin went with him, everywhere he went.
He leaned the tree closed his eyes; rest was there for a few minutes. He wasn't the energetic man he was few decades before. Yet, he wasn't dependent, still with strong arms, although they lost half of their power, his muscles were like strong fibers made of iron. There is enough evidence to say how much he has been a hard worker.
He started the walk home, there was only a mile to go. The mile he took ever since he bought the land. The land since it became his land. The land which was rich in everything. There was water, fertile soil, that kept growing everything he saw. The land which was filled with happiness, with his children running laughing, playing around the house he built with his late wife. It took them five years of hard work to complete the house ground up. Yet he was happy when he saw the children growing in the house. Forty-five years of memory behind that land, he was thinking, and still he could hear the laughter of his children, in his mind. And he hurried home.
He took the brown dusty rusty road, away from the main, which penetrated deep into the country alongside wild bush. Few houses here and there came to vision on his long walk home. These houses, he could see just as his, forty years ago, men, women children, he could see. Some of the men, were friends of his children, when they were there. And everyone in the mile down the road, knew him, respected him and stopped by him for a chat, a word or two, and they had gratitude for the old man. But today, he hurried, he didn't want to meet anyone on the road. He didn't want to have a chit chat with Neighbours. There was something changed in his manner, something dramatic about his old, hurried walk.
He walked halfway down the road, occasionally he met a man on a cycle, ringing the bell, saying hello. He just smiled with a lump in his throat and carried on. Carried on the same old road, same same walk that he took every day. Same old walk he took his children to the school, Same old walk he carried his wife when she fell down bitten by a snake. Same old walk he carried her dead body from the hospital to his home. And faster his footsteps, faster became his heartbeat, faster his thoughts came crashing down from the past. By the time he was halfway, he crossed the stream and there were two big globs of tears filling the empty sunken eye sockets and started getting bigger and bigger every footstep. He was never a crying man, he did not cry when she left him ten years ago. Those tears, were there ever since, she was buried on the patch of land by the home. He smiled to himself, when finally tears came flying down on the sun burnt road. They just evaporated to the air, like water on a frying pan.
He didn't know how he walked the rest of the way home. He was walking only in his mind. He remembered his children, well educated, well respected, who left his home one after the other, leaving them ever since. They are far away, and he couldn't leave the land, his home, his wife and join the prospects and adventures of his own children. He was too stubborn for that, there was no happiness, his home is still in his mind, in his mind his children are still there playing as ever, eternally. His wife still waiting home as she has ever been waiting. In his mind trees still bloom around his house and, life still there. Yet, it is not true. He was there now, in front of his house. It looks like an abandoned house. He is the only one living there. It is kept tidy, yet empty. There is no reason, to paint the old walls, there is no-reason to battle with the weed which tries to gulp the backyard. The evergreen forest was counting hours to engulf and reclaim his land.
Even though one corner he kept well away from the forest, cleaned and cleared from every weed, where his wife is, still waiting. His feet took him there. He sat down in tiredness. Tiredness he has never felt, he was so tired that he felt his heart stopped for a moment. And he remembered what his doctor told him before he left the hospital.
"I am so sorry father, you have a terminal cancer, and we are unable to operate, it has gone everywhere in your body."
Thank you for reading, the last mile home.
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