by Jessica Yu
A speckled white hen appeared at the patch of greens near the side of the house, a line of chicks darting and peeping in her wake.
“Unfortunately, Susan died when the old lady was not around. Alex had been sitting with a candle, watching her, getting very little sleep. His mother was now fighting, struggling to breathe her last. The poor boy was trying to bring her arms down, to get a hold of her. She was too heavy for him.”
Gladys sighed and looked down, taking no notice of the procession of hen and chicks. When she spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper. “I think it’s the worst experience, watching someone die. You always hear of people dying in their sleep, peacefully. But watching someone fighting . . . she fought for her life. And Alex was there.”
“Eh-eh-eh!” a voice sang out. It was Nabukonde. She came waddling up the path, arms weighed down by grocery bags, her gomesi a shade of light blue favored by born-agains. As she knelt in greeting at Gladys’s feet, her shopping bags spilled matoke and tomatoes onto the ground, prompting peals of bright laughter.
“I’m so happy to see you! I was so annoyed because I did not see you here!”
“I’m so happy to see you. God be praised!”
As Nabukonde gathered her groceries, Gladys handed her a bag of sugar and a loaf of bread, pleased to have something to offer this time. On her last visit she had been so broke she hadn’t even been able to bring sugar.
The old woman accepted the gift with flustered gratitude. “In my house, there are no chairs. We must sit outside,” she apologized, slipping through the door. A moment later she emerged with two plastic jerry cans to sit on.
Gladys considered them doubtfully. “It must be for someone light. Otherwise the jerry can will be . . .” She made a flattening gesture with her hands, as though she were squashing a mosquito.
The jerry cans disappeared back into the house. Mike, Esther, and Gladys perched on some large rocks in front of the house while Nabukonde dragged out a mat and sat on the ground.
Gladys stretched out her right leg, slipping a shoe off a swollen foot. The sun was dropping, the air growing cooler. For a moment the two older women simply smiled at each other. The speckled hen and her chicks took advantage of the peaceful interlude to parade boldly through the open door of the house.
“Where is your daughter?” Gladys asked Nabukonde.
“She got married. And now she has moved away.”
“So whom do you stay with here now?”
“Nobody.”
A stranded chick appeared, crying piteously at the sound of his brethren in the house. He scurried back and forth in front of Gladys and Nabukonde, having spotted the open door between them. Inside, the hen clucked shrilly back at him: Come in already.
“Have you ever gone to visit Alex and the girls, now that they are with Pastor Fred?”
“Three times. And during the end-of-term holidays they will stay here.”
“Good, that’s good.”
Gladys felt reassured by the old woman’s response. There was no need to press her into future commitments. It was enough to know that Alex and his sisters were still welcome in this home.
The hen in the house was still clucking loudly to her errant chick, who dashed about at the women’s feet. Finally he emitted a mighty peep peep peep and sprinted through the doorway, his small act of bravery unnoticed by the women. And then all was quiet.
NABUKONDE WALKED her visitors back down the lane. “Thank you for coming all this way to see me,” she repeated to Gladys. “You like me so much, God be praised.”
As they reached the car, the old woman again dropped to her knees. Gladys looked down at her in surprise.
“So you have seen the children now and they are fine,” Nabukonde began, reaching for Gladys’s hand. “Now will you help me finish my house? I’ve handed those three children over to you. Build my house for me.”
Around them, neighbors stood on their verandas, idly watching. Gladys resisted the urge to pull her hand away. “I’ve seen the kids, and I’ve seen you, so I’m ready to go,” she said simply. “We are leaving now.”
As soon as the doors of the old Volvo were shut, Esther and Gladys erupted.
“Can you imagine?” Gladys cried. “She wants me to build her house for her now. My goodness. Ai-yi-yi!”
“‘I turned over those children to you. Now what about my house?’” Esther mimicked.
“Oh my God!” Gladys’s voice descended three octaves in those three words, the last one landing with a thud. “These people are mad. And what I know, none of them thinks of Gladys living in a rented room. They imagine Gladys sleeping in a big house with some huge wall around it. With a very large gate, where you have to reach up and ring a bell.”
They shared a laugh, but in truth Gladys’s disappointment was deep. The chatter was tinged with embarrassment for that woman kneeling in the dust. Had Nabukonde adopted the born-agains’ “prosperity doctrine,” the belief that good deeds should bring personal benefit? Did Gladys’s token gifts of sugar and bread make the recipients see her as a rich woman?
When Gladys introduced herself to the parties in a new case, she often told them, “I’ve come to see how I can help these children.” She had begun to wonder whether help, that friendly word, labeled its user as “one with money.” Had things become so bad that everyone—even this kind Nabukonde—believed that a person giving assistance would do so only if she had great wealth herself?
All this complicated the situation of Alex, Annet, and Mercy. If Freddy could not keep Alex at Young Hearts, could Gladys be assured that Nabukonde would take the three children back into her care? It might just be a matter of money, of course, as such matters so often were, but Gladys had hoped for more. She had hoped for family.
If Alex was adopted and sent to America, money would be no problem there. School fees, clothes, transportation, soda, Kentucky Fried Chicken—he could have anything, anytime. He might even have his own room.
Alex’s chances for adoption, at ten years old, were already slim and would diminish every year. Was this, as Pastor Freddy asserted, his one great opportunity? It would be hard to find prospective parents interested in a teenager, and it would be harder for a teenager to adapt to a new home, a new culture, a new country. A baby like Charity of the pit latrine could easily accept America as her world. She hadn’t even opened her eyes yet. But Alex had seen so much.
Alex should be given a say in these matters, but it didn’t seem right to force the decision on one so young, so recently orphaned. The boy needed time to breathe.
How much could she give him? How long would he need?
THEY HEADED WEST back to Kampala. The car rumbled along, its passengers silent. Full night had fallen, and they had not eaten a meal all day. Between Gladys’s feet slouched a plastic sack containing a carton of biscuits, but no one expressed any hunger.
At the wheel, Mike stared out at the road. With his strong cheekbones and long chin edged in the red glow of taillights, his profile was intimidating. It was hard to imagine him as a boy.
“Mike, you went through Alex’s experience,” Gladys began. “You lost your parent when you were young. How long did it take you to come out of your grieving?”
Mike paused, shifting in his seat. “I was thirteen when my father died. He was Festus Wawuyo, a senior police officer who investigated some very prominent cases. There was the murder of Brigadier Okoya. This man was shot dead by Idi Amin. My father investigated that case in 1970, so naturally when Amin took over the government, he came after him.”
“Eh . . . ,” the women uttered in acknowledgment of Amin, the bogeyman of many such stories. This tale would be as long and dark as the drive back to Kampala.
Mike began. “It was January twenty-fifth, 1971, the day that soldiers attacked our home. My father had just left on the road they came in on. So my mother went to the doorway to talk to the soldiers. The neighbor who led them to our home didn’t like my father. He thought he would be malicious and show the
m where our house was. But as soon as he stepped out of the soldiers’ VW, he was shot spot in the chest.”
Gladys gasped. “They shot the neighbor?”
Mike nodded. “The guy died. I was standing in the window looking, and that scared the hell out of me. I ran back into my bedroom. My mother was screaming. They shoved her into her bedroom, banging her with the gun butts, shouting, ‘Where is your husband?’ Two soldiers pushed my mother toward the bed. My bedroom was next to that bedroom, and the door was open. They were kicking my mother so brutally. Then I could see those guys dropping their trousers. I was just horrified.
“The maid was in the bedroom. She tried to resist, and the men pushed her down. One guy stepped on her with such force, he stepped on her thigh and broke it. So when I saw this happening, I slipped through the window. You know those old government houses, they had those old-fashioned windows with the space in the middle of them, and I squeezed through one of them. The dead neighbor was lying there in our compound. The man who shot him was outside, with another guy who was shooting all of our dogs, all of our chickens. They didn’t see me.
“I ran to all of our neighbors. No one would open the door for me. But there was one American neighbor, Mr. Howard, a lecturer at the university. I banged on Howard’s door. And he opened it!”
Gladys and Esther exhaled as though they had been holding their breath. If that door had not opened, would Mike be with them in this car tonight?
“When the gunshots stopped, I went back to the house. I found the maid crying—she was in the kitchen, wriggling on the floor with her broken leg. They had taken my mother away. Maybe they raped her more. I don’t know.” Mike paused. “She lived to be an old woman. But we never discussed that day. Ever.”
Oncoming headlights shone in streaks on the bug-splattered windshield. Mike took one hand off the steering wheel and touched his temple. “Do you know what it means when you are the only boy who was at home at the time? When you know and your mother knows that you know what they did? You understand that kind of feeling? Men taking turns at your mother. That really traumatized me.”
The women sensed the grown son’s enduring shame. “If they had known there was someone watching, they would have killed you,” Gladys pointed out.
“While I was in the house, they returned with my mother,” Mike went on, not pausing for solace. “I saw the car. They shoved her out and she fell. And they said, ‘We are coming back this evening. So your husband had better be here when we return.’
“After they left, my mother said, ‘Okay, we’ll sit here and wait.’ I was young, but I said, ‘We are not going to wait. We are going to get away from here.’
“I went back to Mr. Howard. He said, ‘It’s five forty-five p.m. And curfew is at six o’clock. How can I take you anywhere?’ But this guy was so courageous.” Risking arrest or worse, Howard agreed to drive the family to a safe place.
“I went and got the maid. I got this piece of wood and tore a sheet and tied her thigh to the wood. We wrapped her thigh and tied it as tight as we could, but all the same, the ties were so flimsy I could see the leg shifting around. And how the girl cried!
“There was a eucalyptus forest nearby, where there was a small cave near a pond. I knew that place, because we used to play there. So Howard dropped us there, and we stayed at that cave for three nights—me, my baby sister, my mother, and the maid.”
“And you had no food?” asked Gladys.
“Well, the day the soldiers came, my mother was baking a cake. And the cake was in the oven. So the next day I went back home, climbed through the window, and picked it. It had almost burned. But I brought it back and we ate that.”
In the pause that followed, the image lingered: the ragged family huddled in a cave around a burned cake. The three travelers looked out into the darkness through different windows.
“I was at home when the soldiers came because I had just finished primary school. So I saw everything that my brothers never saw,” Mike continued. “But I also saw my father one last time.”
“Eh! You saw again your father?”
“Yes. He turned himself in. He asked for permission to return home to take me back to school. So they let him come, but Idi Amin put some plainclothesmen to follow him. My grandmother asked him, ‘Why don’t you just escape across the border?’ And he said, ‘If I do that, they will come back and kill everyone. Let me go back to Kampala and see if I can work it out.’ My father gave me a hug, told me to study hard, and got into the car. That’s the last time I saw him.”
MIKE VEERED LEFT to avoid a stalled Toyota, expertly riding the road’s crumbling edge. Night intensified the usual hazards of driving: the potholes and bad drivers and reckless pedestrians and wandering animals, most rendered invisible save for the shining coins of their eyes. But Mike did not falter in his narrative; on the contrary, each distraction seemed to tighten his grip on the thread of his past.
“Two years after my father had been pronounced dead, a certain man came. From Kenya. He told my grandmother, ‘You know something? Your son didn’t die. Your son is in Nairobi! I met him!’ So he gave us some ray of hope.
“In my village there is a rock. A small, funny rock. But when I was a kid, I thought it was a very big rock. After that man’s visit, I would sit on that rock and I would look toward the Kenyan border, saying, ‘My father is going to come back.’ When I lived with my grandmother, I sat there every day. I would sit in the morning, at least two hours, and in the evening until the sun went down. I would be looking, looking, imagining that I could see my father coming from there, that I would run and give him a hug. I had so many plans about it! But each day I would walk back home alone.
“My grandmother, she knows I’m going to the rock to look out at the border. And every time I came back, she would look at me. And I would look at her. And my eyes would say, ‘He is nowhere to be seen.’ And my grandmother’s eyes would say, ‘I told you.’
“I didn’t want to give up on my father. I sat on that rock for about six years.”
For a long moment there was no sound in the car but the wind from the open windows.
“The last time I sat on the rock, I was angry. I yelled from that rock, ‘Stupid man! Stupid man!’ I was cursing and screaming at the border. ‘If you are out there, if you are in Kenya and you haven’t bothered to come back after this long, don’t come back! Don’t ever come back.’
“I never sat on that rock again. And he never came back.”
Gladys let out a heavy sigh. The boy had turned into a man, waiting on that rock. But it had happened too soon.
“My grandmother died from my father’s death. He was her heartbeat. My father had joined the police because my grandparents were so poor. His whole life, he devoted it to try to better their circumstances. He built them a house, got them cows. He would bring them to the city, to Kampala. My grandmother watched the TV for the first time, you know?” Mike half smiled. “My father lit up her life. And so when he was gone, she cried for nine years. Nine years. She stopped digging, all her gardens perished. She stopped caring for the cows, all the cows died.
“Every night, after I would come in from sitting on the rock, after we would look at each other, she would go inside and sing from her hymnbook and cry for three hours. And then she’d get into bed with her waragi. Five-liter waragi, with a tube coming up to her bedside.”
“Eh!” Gladys uttered in sympathy and alarm. Waragi, the “war gin” that British colonials had used to control their Nubian conscripts, regularly felled grown men, leaving them curled up on the ground like victims of sleeping sickness. One could only imagine what such a quantity could do to a grieving old woman.
“She would drink that poisonous liquor until she fainted out. I’d go to her room, drop a cover on her, and wait for the next day.” Mike shook his head. “It was a long, long suicide.”
Gladys knew that feeling of pain and impotence, of watching the person responsible for your welfare retreat into oblivion. Even no
w her own father could go for three days consuming nothing but alcohol.
There was a brief pause as Mike gunned the engine to pass a lumbering fuel truck. The air through the windows buffeted the passengers’ ears, then subsided.
“After the overthrow of Amin, I said I would hunt for every killer of my father. I had so much anger. I joined the army, just to take revenge. I was taken to Nigeria with some of those elite forces, and I trained so hard! In training I met four men. They heard my name, Wawuyo, and they said, ‘Wait a minute! There was a man named Wawuyo in Mutukula Prison. He was a very talkative person, and he kept up our morale. He kept fighting for us and fending for us, making sure we were not mistreated. He was so, so, so assertive.’ I knew immediately: ‘That was my father!’ That’s when they gave me the whole history of what happened.
“My father was taken to Luzira Prison, where he was kept for one full year, 1971. At the end of the year they took fifteen hundred detainees to Mutukula Prison, including my father. They transported them in trucks. Threw them in, hog-tied, like sacks of grain. In Mutukula, the orders were to kill all of them. They were killed systematically over two months. Sometimes, for the guards’ amusement, they were made to fight each other with hammers. Sometimes guards threw grenades into the ventilators of the cells. Out of fifteen hundred prisoners, only forty survived. The four men I met in training were among them.
“Those men said they couldn’t believe that my father would stand by them, by whoever was in his cell. That woke me up. That he tried to stand for them in those hard circumstances. But eventually he was done. My father was brutally murdered. Chopped to pieces. He was thrown into a mass grave.”
Gladys could hear the pain in Mike’s words. It was not only that his father had been butchered. His family had not been afforded the dignity of burial.
