Garden of the Lost and Abandoned

by Jessica Yu

  Rose’s merry prattle was interrupted by her discovery of a bag of orange hard candies by her feet. Mike had picked it up for the children at Early Learning School, but Rose was given permission to take some for the day’s journey. She piled some onto the skirt of her school dress. Loud crunching sounds soon filled the car. Rose was clearly not one to savor a sweet, especially when she had a lapful!

  “Don’t eat all the candy,” Gladys called over the seat. “Save some for tomorrow.” She suspected that such self-control was out of reach for sugar-obsessed Rose, but she voiced the warning out of respect for Agnes. As a trained dentist, Agnes would surely object to molars being used as grindstones for hard candy.

  Rose merely laughed, offering a glimpse of an orange-streaked tongue. The day was starting out well. Crunch crunch crunch.

  LUCKILY, GLADYS AND Rose would be accompanied at Luzira Prison by a powerful escort: Kawempe CPU head officer Carol Kushemererwa. Many officers of her rank would not take the time to assist in such a tangential matter as a parental visit, but Carol valued Gladys’s efforts, and she was fond of Rose. A bond had formed between the little girl and the “big boss” during the weeks that Rose had stayed at the station.

  “Auntie!” Rose had squealed when they picked Carol up at her office. It was fortunate that the girl weighed only about forty-five pounds, or her wild hug might have toppled the woman.

  Officer Carol had laughed, feeling the familiar warm push of Rose’s tiny fingers into her palm. It was as though the girl had to grab her hand before someone else took it.

  Prisons were intimidating, capricious bureaucracies, and Luzira was Uganda’s largest. Originally built in the 1950s for six hundred inmates, it now housed more than six thousand. A sprawling, hilly complex outlined by miles of razor wire, it included several prison facilities, a training academy, schools, shops, housing, a chapel, a mosque, and a tantalizing view of Murchison Bay. It was hard to gauge whether the last served as salve or torture for Luzira’s inmates.

  As the Volvo began the journey from the main gate to the lower prison and then to the upper prison, Officer Carol’s presence proved invaluable. One glimpse of her uniform and Carol’s party was greeted collegially at each gate and station and office and waved to the front of the line. How different the journey might have been if Carol had not been with them. At the lower prison, Gladys, Rose, Carol, and Mike were given prime space on a shady bench as they awaited confirmation of their prisoner’s location; across from them, in the open sun, an endless procession of visitors waited with supplies for loved ones. Guards rifled through loaves of bread and packages of soap and sacks of beans and rice and matoke, probing for contraband. A man carrying a live chicken was pulled out of the line and handed a short knife. Moments later, returning with the headless dead chicken, the man was allowed to rejoin the queue. In twenty minutes the line barely moved.

  Even with Carol’s assistance, the journey to the upper prison took well over an hour. Finally their group was led into a narrow office, with two long benches facing two desks. Carol handed over the paper with Rose’s father’s name on it. “Samuel Bwanika. Aggravated defilement,” it read. The charge, a capital offense, could carry a sentence of twenty years.

  Officers shuffled papers and tapped on keyboards as inmates filed in and out of the space, performing errands. At the end of the room the grated windows were closed, but every pane was broken, allowing an occasional breeze to drift through the crowded room. Outside, Gladys could see prisoners milling about, a glum lot in their incongruously bright yellow uniforms.

  As they waited, Rose nestled between Carol and Gladys, swinging her skinny legs above the floor. It was already midafternoon. The girl must be hungry, Gladys thought, with so little meat on her bones and nothing to eat since breakfast except a few candies.

  An inmate was escorted to the desk officer closest to Gladys and Carol. The new arrival was a slight, dark-skinned man in his thirties, with stick-thin calves poking out of his short yellow pants. He glanced around the room, his eyes landing on Rose’s tiny figure in the corner. His head jerked backward as the rest of his body froze, like he’d walked into a wall.

  The officer beckoned the prisoner to approach. Carol and Gladys introduced themselves, but the man’s eyes stayed fixed on the girl. “It is you?” he said.

  Rose slid off the bench to stand in front of him, a shy smile on her face.

  The man knelt nervously by the window, lowering himself to look directly at his daughter. As his face came closer to hers, Rose’s smile faded, then disappeared. He reached for both of her hands, but she kept one to herself, a finger held to her mouth.

  “I did not think I would see her again,” her father said in a trembling voice.

  As he spoke softly to her, Rose began to cry. She pulled up the collar of her school dress to cover her eyes but seemed unable to remove her hand from her father’s grasp. A thin whimper rose from her, a mosquito whine of distress.

  Officer Carol turned her around, whispering and pointing to a chair at an empty desk in the office’s opposite corner. Rose moved away without a word.

  At his daughter’s departure, the prisoner now absorbed the presence of his other visitors. He held Carol’s gaze, then Gladys’s. Looking into his wary eyes, it was impossible not to think of the crime with which he was charged. At nine, Rose was a wisp of a girl; at six she would have been a mere toddler. That a man—her father!—could have hurt her in that terrible way . . .

  Gladys opened her notebook. To get what she wanted from this man, she could not let the poisonous image take root. She began confirming the man’s basic information: Samuel Bwanika. Casual laborer. Worked unloading trucks. Confined to Luzira Prison for over a year.

  “Now,” said Gladys, “I don’t know when you are coming out of this place. But what are you planning for this child?”

  “I am in here. How can I plan for outside?” Samuel gestured with upturned palms.

  “What about family? You must have some family.”

  His headshake was more a dismissal than a denial.

  “Do you have any relatives I can reach?” Gladys pressed matter-of-factly. “Because I would like to let them know about this child.”

  Samuel rubbed his nose and looked out the windows. Gladys waited, pen poised, eyes unblinking. Maybe the man was trying to decide how to win some concession. Maybe he was trying to remember. Behind him, two officers laughed, pointing at something on a computer screen.

  Whatever the prisoner’s thoughts, he eventually released them out the window. Turning back to the women, he mumbled something about some siblings who lived outside Kampala.

  “Okay, I will try to locate them.” Gladys kept her tone neutral, as though her insides were not twitching with excitement at this information. “What message do you want me to take to them?”

  “I need to get out of prison before anything else.”

  Gladys gave a nod of acknowledgment. “I understand, you want to be free of this place. But what I want is for Rose to have some connection to her family. You say you have relatives . . . which ones?”

  His offerings were slim: the names of two sisters, whose phone numbers he did not know. “They have not visited me,” he complained. “Tell them to help me get out of here.”

  On the other side of the room, Rose was dwarfed by the desk at which she sat. Too far away to hear anything, she watched the conversation absently, like a student hiding in the last row of the classroom. Her tongue, which protruded slightly from her slack mouth, was still stained orange.

  After Rose’s mother died from AIDS, Samuel said, “I was taking care of the child by myself.”

  Gladys registered the man’s sallow skin, patchy lips, and reddened, cloudy eyes. The room was still crowded with people, so she leaned in to ask, “Have you been tested? And your daughter?”

  He was HIV-positive, Samuel replied. At the time of his arrest, Rose had tested negative.

  Gladys filed away a note of worry; she did not trust that th
e girl was safe.

  He had been sick a long time, Samuel lamented. Too sick to commit any crime. “When police came to arrest me, I was laid up in bed. I could barely stand; I felt like I was dying.” His words brought tears to his own eyes. As he dabbed at them with a hankie of yellow prison cloth, he stole glances at his audience. The women’s expressions were attentive, if impassive.

  “I kept asking the police, ‘What have I done?’” Samuel went on. “I had no knowledge at all of what was happening.”

  While it was not Gladys’s role to determine the father’s guilt or innocence, she had come a long way to have this meeting. It cost her nothing to hear him out. “So you are saying that you did not commit this offense.”

  “How could I sleep on such a young child?” he protested, chin raised in wounded defiance. “A child that is my own? How could I do such a thing? ”

  His theories came tumbling out, loose change that he hoped would add up to the bill. There were other men living close by. There was the landlord. What about that neighbor who had quarreled with him? Many kids running around, too. And there was the time Rose had reported that a playmate had kicked her. Who knows what might have happened?”

  None of the father’s theories explained one crucial fact. “Isn’t it true,” Gladys cut in, “that Rose told the police that you were the one who defiled her?”

  Samuel admitted that when he was arrested, the police put him on the phone so he could hear Rose accuse him. “Maybe a neighbor woman gave her that idea,” he said, sounding aggrieved.

  The yellow hankie reemerged. As Samuel leaned forward to blow his nose, light from the window entered his breast pocket, revealing the silhouette of a razor blade.

  “I think we are finished here,” Gladys announced, closing her notebook.

  Rose’s father glanced up, eyes moist and expectant.

  Gladys said only, “Pray for us, that we can find your relatives.”

  As they exited the office, Rose held tightly to Carol’s hand. Samuel stood by the door, staring down at his yellow prison slippers.

  “Do you want to say goodbye?” Gladys asked quietly. The girl had asked so many times to see her father.

  Rose shook her head stiffly and pressed her face to Carol’s side. She began to wail again as the women led her down the hallway, a soft keening like a distant siren.

  Her father did not look up.

  “SOME PEOPLE HAVE a hard time telling the truth,” Officer Carol commented as they made their way down the dusty path to the car.

  Gladys agreed. While she was not there to wear a white wig and sit in the high judge’s chair, she believed the child more than the man. Why would a girl accuse her own father of a crime as monstrous as rape if he was not the one who had done it?

  The car was oven-hot, but Rose hopped in eagerly. She unwrapped another orange candy and began crunching noisily on it. No one scolded her.

  As the Volvo trundled back down the hill, past guard stations and checkpoints and the final perimeter of razor wire, Gladys considered the day’s mission. In a way it had been a success. She had gotten what she had come for: some names of Rose’s relatives. These leads could connect the child with her family.

  On the other hand, the encounter with Rose’s father had obviously distressed the child. Gladys hated to see kids cry. Adults might shed tears over nothing—sentiment, or slights that they should be able to handle as mature beings—but children lacked both autonomy and armor. They cried because they could do nothing else.

  In the back seat with Carol, Rose explained her reaction to seeing her father. “I remembered when I was little,” the girl said simply. “I remembered what he did to me and I cried.” She played with the empty candy wrapper in her lap. “One day Aunt Agnes asked me, ‘Have you forgiven your father? Even bad sinners are forgiven.’ Now I love him,” she said, twirling the wrapper between her fingers. “When I grow up, I will buy him a car.”

  Could a child understand what it meant to forgive so big a sin? Especially a child like Rose, who displayed the maturity of a six-year-old?

  “We will come back again tomorrow?” Rose asked. “I want to see my friends at police.”

  Gladys shook her head. “It’s time to return to school. We will get you something to eat, and then Uncle Mike will take you back.”

  “What food do you like?” Mike inquired.

  This question instantly silenced the girl; she stared out the window at the storefront for Martyrs’ Supermarket, her expression almost dreamy. “When Deborah came back from visiting her family, she had chicken and chips,” she said finally. “She brought some to school, but I did not get any. I would like to eat chicken and chips too.”

  “Will you bring some back to your friends?” Officer Carol asked.

  “No! I will eat it all!”

  “How about the candy?”

  Rose grinned and popped another piece into her mouth.

  Carol laughed. “And what will you tell your friends about today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Rose’s voice fell to a level just above the noise of the traffic. “I don’t want you to tell the other kids that I saw my father,” she said.

  “You don’t want anyone to know.”

  The small head shook firmly.

  “She doesn’t want the others to know that she saw her dad,” Carol relayed to Gladys. “Did you get that?”

  “Yes, I get it,” said Gladys.

  Carol patted Rose’s hand. “We will keep it a secret.”

  “You will tell only Aunt Agnes!” Rose announced with sudden authority.

  “Okay.” Carol looked at her. “What will you tell your friends about where you went today?”

  The girl’s brow knitted and her mouth puckered, the lump of candy tenting her slender cheek. Then her expression relaxed. “I will tell them that I went to the beach.”

  “The beach!”

  “Yes,” the girl said, giggling.

  Carol and Gladys laughed. “Who took you to the beach?”

  “Aunt Agnes took me to the beach. And she gave me candy and I played all day.” She leaned her head against the window as the car turned north. Sunlight rippled across her face in waves. “It was a fun time.”

  House with No Roof

  They could see it even before they turned down the driveway: a clean rectangle of red against green. For so long the foundation’s brick outline had only suggested a building. Now the idea lived in three dimensions. The walls were going up.

  Some Americans had sent a donation to the garden project, which Gladys decided to apply to construction. It was not enough to complete the house, but after three months of setbacks and no harvests, she felt the urge to see progress in tangible form. She strolled from the car, savoring the view. A crew of four men was bustling around the structure, ferrying bricks here and there.

  “It is going up!” Gladys sang, aiming the beam of her smile up at the workers on the scaffolding. “Now there is something to show.”

  Esther looked almost merry on her friend’s behalf. “The house is looking so nice already, even without the roof.”

  “You workers are doing a good job,” Gladys declared, her gaze sweeping up and down to include all the men. Their skin glistened, almost metallic with sweat. “When it is finished, it will be a fantastic house.”

  A fellow on the scaffolding called down, “We want it to be an eye-catcher!”

  Gladys turned at the sound of a rattling wheelbarrow. Two men began to shovel dirt into the tray, each deposit shooting a puff of dust into the air.

  “Hey!” Gladys put her hands up to her glossy new bob. “Do you know how much I spent on my hair?”

  “We are used to this kind of dust!”

  “So you are going to wash my hair again, boy?” The men joined the women’s laughter. “Eeee!”

  Gladys and Esther wandered through the half-built structure, looking at the layout of the rooms. Ezra and a couple of the other boys had recently v
isited the garden. Next time they would be able to stay in the room on the left, which was a decent size for two, a manageable squeeze for three. There was a middle room for storage or additional beds. On the far right, Gladys’s room would have its own door. She wanted to make sure that she could check on those young ones while maintaining her privacy.

  She and the builder chatted about the next stages: the plaster, the roof, the ceiling, the veranda. There was no money yet for any of it, but she wanted to be prepared. If the projected costs made her knees wobble, the surrounding progress kept her upright.

  She looked up at the walls again. “Okay, so I don’t know when we can afford a roof. But at least we have reached somewhere.”

  IN THE GARDEN, however, progress was less evident. There were bright spots, like the passionfruit vines, whose white-and-purple flowers now intermingled with young green fruit, speckled like weavers’ eggs. The rows of cassava plants were waist-high, with a fair portion of tubers ready for harvest. But there were many shortcomings to point out: the bananas still tangled in overgrown bushes, out of reach; gouges along the edges of the cassava field where tubers had been pulled up and spirited away.

  Zam appeared, wearing a soiled yellow skirt and a pink tank top with cracked lettering down the front reading LOVE YOU. Her hair was uncovered. Her loosened plaits and solemn expression gave her an air of dazed alertness, like someone startled out of sleep. She looked not unlike baby Maria, who clung to her mother’s shirt, judging the world with her usual stern befuddlement.

  For a moment Zam lurked on the periphery of the group, in apparent anticipation of disapproval. With good reason, thought Gladys. It was high time they had a talk, and not just about the gardens.

  “How are you doing here?” she asked.

  The girl laughed uneasily. “Okay.”

  As the party moved to the planted areas beyond the house, Gladys stopped to point. “Why are those trees not yet made into charcoal?”

  As Zam had suggested, Gladys had paid a man to cut down the cluster of “unuseful” trees. Two months later the stumps and branches still lay in an enormous pile on the very spot where they had fallen, forgotten corpses on a battlefield.