by Jessica Yu
“We are passing through this,” Gladys answered, pointing ahead.
“We go straight through here?” Mike nosed the van through the brush, which was as tall as he was, expecting it to lead to the mouth of a road on the other side. But there was no other side. There was only more brush. “Whaaat?”
Mike rolled ahead, moving toward a flatter area where there were indentations in the foliage, like hair that had been parted after yesterday’s bath. “This one?” he asked.
“No, branch there, on that road.”
“What road?”
“Your road.”
“What?”
“This is a place where the car makes the road.”
Mike gamely plunged forward, charging through bushes and branches and bouncing over rocks and in and out of holes.
“Oh!”
“Eh!”
“Seriously!”
A maize field provided a temporary edge for Mike to trace, followed by a series of footpaths to straddle. But soon they were again floundering in a sea of overgrowth mined with boulders.
“Br-branch here!” Gladys called out as the car tossed them back and forth like beans in a skillet.
“How are you sure to branch there?” Mike shouted back.
“I have been here before.”
“What? You have been to this place before, and now you are back?”
Gladys giggled. “I have been to this place several times.”
“I am sorry to tell you, Gladys, but you need your head examined.”
She refrained from mentioning that she had made the last trip with malarial fever.
Suddenly a huge crater appeared before them, flanked on all sides by bush, like some kind of big game trap. “Whaaat?” Mike protested again, his voice rising siren-high.
He steered hard to the right, drove a few feet straight into the bush, then angled back toward the road, crushing his way back to the other side of the crater. Toyota van as bulldozer.
“Y-you see now, Mi-ike, why I insisted y-you should get a stronger vehicle,” Gladys called as they lurched back onto solid ground, her voice cutting in and out like a poor mobile-phone connection.
“If I had taken my own car, it would have fallen apart. Right now I would be standing in the road with only a steering wheel in my hands.”
Their laughter mixed with the thwack thwack smack of reeds and branches whipping the windshield.
“I’m starting to fear you, Gladys. You’ve come here before, and you continue coming here? I didn’t know you were such a mad person!”
“I run through jungles to get to my cases!”
THEY JOSTLED THROUGH the bush, jaws clacking, for the better part of an hour. Or in Mike’s view, the worse part of an hour. He seriously doubted that Gladys knew where to go, especially when one section of foliage appeared as indistinct and impenetrable as the other. Some holes in the ground were so deep and close to each other that he had to stop the van and get out to determine how to navigate around them. He’d be damned if he’d get his tires stuck out here in the middle of nowhere Muddy Place.
Occasionally they would emerge at a clearing where paths led to huts, and Mike would wait for Gladys to shout, “We are here!” But again and again Gladys pointed instead to a break in a maize field or a flattened section of grass, insisting, “The road is there!”
“There is no road,” Mike would protest.
“If you need a road, you make the road!”
Besides the huts, the only reassurance of civilization was the occasional villager, face frozen in surprise at the sight of a vehicle. It was probably like seeing a long-horned steer among the matatus in Old Taxi Park. Not unthinkable, but a little absurd.
“There he is!” Gladys pointed. They were approaching an intersection of sorts, where two makeshift paths crossed. There was a teenager standing next to a bicycle, and a bald man in his late twenties wearing a light-blue polo shirt. The bald man waved. “That is George Number Two,” Gladys said. “He will lead us the rest of the way.”
Like the first George, the second George carried a thin staff. He greeted Gladys with a small wave and a look of mild concern.
This George possessed a deliberate, serious manner. He insisted on riding in the van’s cargo space rather than taking a proper seat. Perhaps he was conscious of his body odor, which faintly scented the van’s interior. While Mike and Gladys and Esther had laughed and shouted and yelped on the trek through Rwebitoomi, now they fell silent in order to hear George’s quiet directions.
Overhead, gray clouds had started to form, and the sky turned the color of wet newspaper. “It is going to rain soon,” Mike warned. “We need to head back as soon as possible.” If darkness fell on them out here, they could be stuck for the night.
After fifteen minutes of obeying George’s soft commands to “turn here,” “go left,” and “straight this way,” they crashed through a stretch of weeds that culminated in a thicket of grass ten feet high.
“Here is the gate,” Gladys announced.
“What gate?” Mike asked.
“The gate. The gate is here.”
“Here? Where? There is no gate here!” Mike swiveled around in exasperation. George climbed out of the back of the van and disappeared into the green.
“George will show you the gate.”
It started to rain, the drops sparse but ominously heavy, hitting the windshield like warning shots. Foliage shrouded the car on all four sides. The afternoon felt like midnight with a full moon. “Gladys, I do not see how the vehicle can pass through this place.”
“George will open the gate—he just needs to get another person to help him.”
“I’m sorry, I am not going to drive the car any further.”
“But the house is just there, through the gate!”
“There is no gate!”
They argued the point like priests of opposing religions until Gladys surrendered. Gate or no gate, Mike was right: Muddy Place was about to get muddier. They needed to get back on the main road before it started to pour. Gladys and Esther would dash through the bush to the house, see the quadruplets, and run back. Mike would stay with the van.
When Gladys and Esther popped through the weeds, they found George and a neighbor starting to lift the long branches that made up the “gate” behind the massive wall of grass.
“Don’t bother,” they told George. “The car is not coming.”
AFTER A FEW minutes of walking through the bush, the group reached George Rwakabishe’s homestead, a collection of several mud huts on an island of open space. The grounds outside the huts were immaculately swept and circumscribed by a tidy fence of branches. Even the sky brightened a bit above this clearing, the clouds withholding their showers.
An older woman came out of one hut to greet them. Once George’s sister-in-law, she had now taken the role of his wife. Usually stepmothers aroused Gladys’s suspicion, as they rarely cared for children who were not their own. But this aunt was the only mother the quadruplets had ever known, and she appeared to dote on them.
Unlike the leaky, smelly hut of the first George, the huts in this compound were well thatched and spotless inside, with clean mats in lieu of beds. The family had fewer possessions than George and Mary, but what they had was neatly kept.
The stepmother beckoned to the children. The three girls and their brother appeared wearing a vivid assortment of clothing, unlike the matching outfits sported by Mary’s quads. On their feet they wore identical sandals, but in different colors.
They were small for four and a half years. Some Bahima fed their babies only cow’s milk for the first few years, and as toddlers the quadruplets had weighed only half what doctors said they should weigh. It took some time to convince the family that their diet could lead to health problems, especially in such vulnerable infants.
Gladys cooed over the children and handed each a sweet, which was hesitantly accepted. They were less responsive than the other quads, having inherited their father’s solemni
ty. Three of the four noses were runny, she noted. But they had come a long way. For a full year now they hadn’t fallen seriously ill.
As raindrops began to spot the ground, Gladys quickly snapped some pictures and followed George and Esther back to the van. After hours of driving and battling the brush, they had visited the family for about six minutes.
Gladys knew it seemed mad to make such a trek for so short a visit. “Why don’t you just call them?” friends and coworkers had asked her. But she needed to see everything with her own eyes. She couldn’t trust what was reported to her over the phone. How would she know that a child’s clothes were clean? That a stepmother was being kind? That a house was not falling down?
MIKE HAD MISSED the good part, so anxious was he to return to civilization. The “road” he had made on the way to the quadruplets’ homestead had largely disappeared, but George again crouched in the back of the vehicle to help guide them through the thickest part of the bush.
George hopped out just as the clouds began to break open. He thanked Gladys for her visit. In the rearview mirror, they could see him standing there, watching the van drive away until the curtains of rain and reeds erased him completely.
“What happened to George’s cattle business?” Mike asked, then clarified, “This George, George the Second.”
Gladys explained. “With many of those multiple births, if one gets sick, the others will follow. And the fees for medicine are a problem. You must buy it yourself. Mary and George the First would never get the medication for their kids. George the Second did, and it used up his funds. I kept calling him and asking, ‘How is the business?’ And he would say, ‘I haven’t started yet—the children are in the hospital again.’ So the business didn’t have a chance. Can you imagine taking those four children to the hospital every month from that remote place? They would all go on two boda bodas.”
As he was presently attempting his escape from the morass of Rwebitoomi, Mike could only nod with respect.
Gladys had taken out a loan to send George the Second money for a third time, but only for his children’s expenses. “I want to empower this George so he can build his own house someday. I think he can do it.”
“You did not see it,” Esther told Mike. “But George the Second made a second homestead, three huts on the compound, to accommodate his mother.”
“The good thing is, this George is willing to work, not like George the First,” Gladys added. “George the First is hopeless! He wants everything to be done for him.”
The mention of the other George set Mike’s head wagging. “George the First has no ambition. You can’t change his mind.”
“For George the First, looking after people’s cows is okay,” Gladys said. “He’s seen his grandparents do that, maybe his father did that.”
“But now those pastoralists have changed,” Mike said. “They have fences. They don’t need a guy hiding behind the cows like that George the First.”
“Yeah. Put your cows inside the fence, and you do other work!”
“George the First is just lazy. He is sitting down there, empty. Just empties his mind as the cows graze.”
“By the way,” Gladys began. She had heaps of kindling to add to this fire. “When I started on the foundation for Mary and George the First’s house, I thought the builder could hire George as a porter. George refused. ‘Auntie Gladys, I can’t lift cement. It’s too heavy for me.’ Do you know what he said? ‘If you want somebody, go hire a boy in the neighborhood.’ Can you imagine! You are telling me to pay for someone when you are sitting there with no money to buy soap? What I was trying to do was to make sure he could get some daily income. Working on his own house! And he says he can’t carry sand!” Gladys’s nose twisted up as though smelling spoiled milk. “George the First is so annoying.”
The car rocked with laughter, Mike’s deep bellow filling out the lower registers and Gladys’s cackle hitting several octaves above.
“George the First is a waste of space,” Mike said, snorting. “He needs to stay with the cows—they are his colleagues. They don’t ask too much of him.”
Rain pounded the roof like applause. “George the Second is a man of purpose. He has a compass. A direction. With George the First, the direction is . . .” Mike cupped a hand to his mouth, hollering, “‘George! Just run to the lake and keep going! Don’t stop!’”
AS WITH SO many journeys, the way back seemed shorter than the way there. After miles of rock-studded terrain, the tires of the van suddenly rolled over tarmac. It felt like floating.
“Here we will get back to the main road,” Gladys announced. “And Mike will call it a day!”
“Yes, now that Gladys has taken us to the end of the world,” he complained.
The rain continued to fall. Mike didn’t mind. Once they reached Kampala, a downpour would clear the streets of pedestrians, peddlers, panhandlers, and boda bodas. For those in a car, it would be smooth sailing down the wet streets, presidentially nicknamed “the River Museveni.”
Gladys giggled. Mike glanced in the rearview mirror inquiringly.
“You know . . . the gate?” she asked. “Back at George the Second’s place?”
“The gate that was no gate?”
“It’s like that story with that king who says he has expensive clothes but he looks naked. Everyone says, ‘Yes, we see your new clothes.’ And do you remember there is only one who is not seeing the new clothes, who is saying, ‘But where are these clothes?’”
“‘But where is the gate?’” Mike threw up his hands, exaggerating his earlier confusion.
The women howled.
“The gate is the bush!”
“The bush is not a gate!”
“If you say it is a gate, it becomes a gate!”
AND IT WAS that way with so many things in life. Something became something when you declared it would be so.
“This is a place where the car makes the road,” Gladys had informed Mike as they had crashed through Muddy Place. Wasn’t the whole world just an extension of that tangled expanse? There was no clear and easy path. “If you need a road, you make a road!”
Gladys had made so many of her own roads. Some had proved dead ends, or reached impassable junctures—the bookshop that was twice ransacked, the fish business that mysteriously burned down. Those failures hurt, of course, but she had not sat down to cry or pound her fists. You needed to be creative, to find another way forward. Eventually you would get somewhere. In her case, all those setbacks had led her to this, her vocation.
She thought back to the morning, to the comment George the First had made as he watched Gladys stumble over puddles on the path from his house. “Can you make for me a road?” It had shocked her. Did he really expect someone else to pave a road to the house others had already built for him?
You needed to make your own road. Gladys firmly believed that. But she was not so naive as to believe that everyone could. Just as there were George the Seconds, who endured tragedy and rose to the challenge, there would be the George the Firsts, who would make no effort. It was for that reason, as much as any other, that Gladys could not abandon the Kakuru quadruplets. George the First would never make his own road. But his children had a chance to try.
It had stopped raining by the time they reached the taxi park; bodas and pedestrians began to crowd the streets. The exit from Kampala and on southward to Entebbe would be slow.
But she had seen these eight of her children, and they looked fine. Perhaps on the long ride home she would sleep.
The Children of Strangers
It was not a fact that she broadcast to her colleagues, but Gladys was descended from a distinguished lineage. Her great-grandfather, Michael Kawalya-Kagwa, was the first prime minister of the Buganda Kingdom, still the largest of the country’s traditional kingdoms. He was credited with bringing electricity to the country in the 1950s. In Uganda, though, pedigree is no protection against misfortune.
In the half century since the lights came
on, the country had witnessed turbulent times: the violent power struggles surrounding Milton Obote, Idi Amin (“the Butcher of Uganda”), Obote again, President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army, and Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Survival was a precarious business for everyone, from the grand to the humble.
In the early 1960s, when Gladys was born, her branch of the family tree was educated but not well-to-do. Her father was a government clerk; he was also an alcoholic with many children by many women. Six of those children were born to Gladys’s mother, a primary school teacher who struggled to run her household. With little salary and no spousal support, she sent four-year-old Gladys and her two-year-old brother Godfrey to live with their grandparents.
Thus began the storybook chapter of Gladys’s life. As an Anglican minister, her grandfather, Obadiah Kaweesa, lived on church grounds. Everything the family needed was right there: the house, the garden, the playing field, and the church, which seemed to young Gladys the biggest and most beautiful in the world.
With fourteen children of the Kaweesa clan running around, it was a bustling compound, but a tidy one. Each child had a role: sweeping the yard, fetching the water, washing the bedsheets, feeding the dogs, who were always named Simba. After their chores and prayers and homework, they would play. Gladys was young, chubby, and the only girl, but she jumped right in with the boys. The scar on her left knee was a testament to her enthusiasm for netball, if not to her skill.
Her grandfather, who had once been a teacher, believed deeply in education as the key to a full and independent life. With studies given high priority, the children, including Gladys, performed at the top of their classes.
In her grandparents’ home they had sugar in the porridge, flowers on the table, and paraffin after dark. Early on Sundays the children were allowed to beat the two big drums announcing morning services. What joy, to pound out that noise, to feel the sting and thrum under one’s fingertips!
People were always coming into the home—parishioners in need of counsel or assistance or a place to stay for a while. While Reverend Kaweesa encouraged resourcefulness, he was generous to those who struggled. Gladys regarded him as a real man of God, not like so many of the fake preachers she saw these days, selling religion like lottery tickets.
