Garden of the Lost and Abandoned

by Jessica Yu

  “What made you change your mind?”

  Phil sighed thoughtfully before answering. “If you own a business in America, you have resources. You have money, so you can do certain things. You can decide whether you want to have fancy cars, if you want to have homes elsewhere. What do you want to do with your money? And I felt, is there a better thing to do with your money than adopt children? We felt like these kids deserved a family who would love them, and a mother and father who would bring them back to Uganda to visit.”

  “You will be bringing them back.”

  “Yes. We need to keep bringing them back to see where they came from, to see their culture, to know their heritage. And to hopefully continue knowing some of the language.”

  “So we can expect to see you people once in a while when you return to Uganda?”

  “Oh, definitely. When we come back, we’ll visit the orphanage and maybe have a little party there,” Phil said, brightening. “We’ll make sure Freddy invites you guys.”

  Even the mention of the shifty pastor did not disturb the feeling of calm that descended on Gladys. The last two days had felt like a personal heatwave, and now it was as though a broken ceiling fan had miraculously kicked into life above her head.

  These mzungus understood what Freddy had not: the need for these siblings to stay together and to stay connected with the land and culture that had raised generations of their ancestors. Life was hard in Uganda, but from that hardship sprouted strength and pride and an appreciation for small graces and everyday beauty. Alex and his sisters should not be cut off from that part of their heritage, especially as they were transplanted into the Griffens’ bountiful new world, where every stare might remind them of their otherness and demand their gratitude.

  With the veil lifted, hosts and visitors relaxed together. As Phil and Michelle chatted on about their affection for the children, they displayed that distinct American friendliness, an extravagance of nature afforded to people who could expect the world to treat them well. They exuded not so much a naiveté as a confidence. Problems could be fixed. There was always the Bright Side of Things. Something to Be Done. A Way Forward. It was Gladys-style optimism, but with a full fuel tank.

  The kids wiggled in and out of their new parents’ laps, climbing the sofa as if it were a play structure. Annet chattered into Phil’s ear, eyes twinkling. “Mzungu!”

  “Just wait,” he teased, grabbing playfully at her hands. “Did you know that when you fly to America, when you land, your skin will turn my color? You will be a mzungu like me.”

  One had to marvel at the parents’ openness. How easily Phil slung an arm around Alex’s shoulder. How naturally Michelle and Mercy tilted their heads together.

  Gladys addressed the kids in Luganda. “What kinds of pictures do you have in your mind about America? How do you feel about going there?”

  “I feel great.” Alex grinned, wriggling on the leather couch like an eel on a riverbank.

  “When you get to America, will you be able to understand the mzungus?”

  Alex tipped his head to the side, his mouth twisting.

  “How are you going to respond to them?” Gladys persisted.

  “If I don’t understand them, I will just say yes.”

  “Ee-ee-eee!” Through hiccups of laughter, Gladys translated for the Griffens.

  “It’s true!” Michelle nodded vigorously. “I’ll ask him something he doesn’t understand, and he just nods and says yes.”

  “Alex, am I a cool dude?” Phil asked, looking at him through the pink sunglasses that Mercy had shoved onto his nose.

  “Huh?”

  “Is your dad really cool?”

  The boy screwed up his face.

  “You’re supposed to nod and smile!” Phil protested, throwing up his hands. Alex smiled, basking in the novelty of naughtiness. The room erupted with more laughter.

  “That smile,” Mike remarked, as though to himself. “I can’t get over it. When we saw him at Young Hearts, Alex couldn’t smile.”

  “Alex?” Michelle exclaimed, eyes widening.

  “He smiles all the time,” said Phil. “More than any of them.”

  “He’s a giggler,” Michelle attested.

  “The other day? He had me climbing the tree over there to bring a couple of guavas down.” Phil pantomimed his struggle to shimmy up the trunk. “So here’s this mzungu, I’m climbing the tree and getting the guavas, and he says, ‘Okay, now you wash it and eat it.’ So I said, ‘I just bite it?’ He says yeah, so I take a bite. It tasted like tree bark. I spit it out, and Alex goes, ‘It’s not ready yet! Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!’”

  “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!” giggled Alex.

  Gladys reeled with delight. “Such jokes, from Alex?”

  Phil raised his eyebrows, feigning indignation. “Now would a Ugandan child ever play a trick on their dad like that?”

  The answer, unequivocally, was no. No son would dare to mock his father. The Ugandan notion of parental respect was highly traditional, certainly, but in so many of the families Gladys encountered there were other factors that inhibited playfulness. Poverty. Illness. It was hard to imagine that Susan Nabugwere and her three children had had many carefree moments together.

  Mike could not stop staring at Alex. “I tell you, that boy could not smile. It made me feel really bad. Now he’s all radiant and smiling and cracking jokes!” The tall man’s voice, usually so clear, fogged up like a windshield during a warm-day downpour. “He touches me. He touches me.”

  THE CONVERSATION WENT on for a while, the pauses growing longer, in the way that cricket songs thinned in the cooling of an evening. The shadows now stretched from the glass doors to the far wall, and Gladys could sense Phil’s concern about his journey to the airport.

  “It’s nice meeting you people,” she said. What had been a perfunctory greeting was now a warm farewell. She chose her words deliberately, like steppingstones across a river. “I felt . . . that I needed to meet you. To see who are these parents who have come up to give assistance to my children? Because I always get many children like them.”

  She looked from Phil to Michelle, examining their attentive, earnest faces. These were caring people, she saw that. While no one could guarantee a good future for these children, these people exuded the fundamental kindness required to support the effort.

  But.

  Even as Gladys’s heart swelled at the thought of these children having a family again, it ached for Susan Nabugwere. The children had loved their long-suffering mother, but they were young and excited to start a new life. With every day in America, with every haircut and birthday party and outgrown pair of shoes, it would become harder and harder to cling to her memory. Would they remember the hollow-eyed mother who had fled the hospital to spend her last days with them? Would the sound of her cough echo through their dreams? Would they even want to look back?

  Gladys took one last opportunity to speak for Susan. “Before she died, what their mother told me was that she really wanted her children to get a good education. Because she couldn’t provide it.”

  Michelle spoke up, her voice as soft as her eyes. “They will get it.”

  Gladys nodded. That promise would be fulfilled. But the children would get more than that, more than the material luxuries of school fees and new clothes and chocolate and flat-screen TVs. They would get the playing, the teasing, the tickling, the silly looks and the patient instruction, the pranks and the hugs and the fits of laughter.

  “Look,” Michelle said, holding up a cell phone. “We caught him dancing at the store.”

  On the shiny screen, there was Alex, merrily shaking his slender hips like a gourd rattle. Gone were the stiff shoulders, the folded arms, the frown carved from stone.

  Not all wealthy families were kind, of course, nor were all poor families incapable. But in this case, no one sitting in this room could deny what money could buy: a chance at childhood. Something of which Alex had tasted very little. Now it lit his eyes. It swell
ed his cheeks. It unfurled his smile.

  MICHELLE WALKED the visitors through the courtyard, everyone exchanging words of mutual gratitude and promises to stay in touch. Gladys took pictures with the three children, who were sweetly affectionate but eager to resume their games. Their farewell hugs lapped at her like a tide ebbing out to sea.

  “All the shortcuts that Freddy does are for his own benefit,” Mike concluded, scanning the driveway as he backed up the car. Nearby, Alex and his sisters were rolling out the big tire again, steadying it with a half-dozen small hands. “But in the process of cutting corners and making himself a buck, these kids are taken care of. It is what they call a win-win situation.”

  “Win-win,” Gladys repeated thoughtfully.

  Behind them the kids pushed the tire faster and faster, giggling at its wobbly progress. Mike waited for them to pass, then announced with more surprise than satisfaction, “This is a good day.”

  “Yes.” Against all odds, it was.

  Maybe there were no real losers in the case of Susan Nabugwere’s children. Pastor Fred had not played fair, but it was of little use dwelling on fairness. One could complain that life was not fair, but what did that alter? In the end, being righteous mattered very little. At the moment it mattered not a bit.

  All that mattered right now was a black rubber ring bouncing down a long brick path and the three children who chased it just to see how far it could go.

  Yellow and Green

  The streets were noisy places. It was not only the vehicles, the buzz of the boda bodas, the music pulsing out from every car and café, the amplified sermons from outdoor churches, the scratchy movie soundtracks leaking out of thin-walled bibandas, and the hollering of vendors and pedestrians and neighbors and children over it all. Even the signs seemed to shout at passersby. At every intersection there were road signs, business signs, warning signs, district signs, and billboards claiming a patch of real estate in Gladys’s field of vision. Look here! the signs seemed to call out. Turn here! Slow down! We can do the job for you! Hungry? Thirsty? Come this way! You are entering our town, take note! Feel lucky? Make a bet! How about a new hairstyle? Step in! We are savedee, shop with the Lord! Watch out! Get tested! This land is not for sale!

  In a country as densely populated as Uganda, it was hard to get noticed.

  Even the calm highway to Luwero, with black-and-white cows nibbling at its green edge, was lined with business signs. Many were simple, displaying only a name: SUNNY RESTAURANT; PARADISE PHOTO STUDIO; NIMROD COUNTRY COTTAGES. Others contained too much information, with numbers and addresses crammed from edge to edge as tightly as the matatus in the Old Taxi Park. This visual chatter would normally command little attention, but Mike’s passengers noted each passing rectangle of words.

  Today Gladys would order her own sign. For the garden project.

  “There should be some designs on it,” Esther said from the front seat. “Some plants.”

  “Yes, plants. What kind of plants—fruits?”

  “You can put vegetables.”

  Gladys considered the possibilities. “Like a cabbage. And an orange . . . even a mango.”

  “What about colors?”

  “Maybe yellow. And green.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Green for a garden. For something growing. Yellow for the sun. Yellow is also for hope.” Gladys spoke in the high, excited voice of a girl picking out a new dress. “Yellow for some hope somewhere!”

  If yellow was hope, they needed this sign to glow like the yolk of an ostrich egg.

  Given the series of setbacks Gladys’s venture had suffered over the past couple of months, this sign would be less an advertisement than a sheet-metal flag staked in the ground—a declaration of the garden’s permanence.

  A casual observer might reasonably question that status. The garden had been sorely abused. It had suffered not only from pillaging and neglect but also from the drought. There had been a prolonged dry spell. Cattle farmers had begged the government for assistance. With no grass for grazing, no water for drinking, their animals were dying. On the TV news, Gladys saw images of emaciated cows, ribs as deeply corrugated as tin siding, wandering listlessly over expanses of dirt the color of ash. Her losses were less wrenching but nonetheless substantial. Out of the seventy coffee plants she had purchased, only one stubborn vine survived. The sun had burned all the rest.

  Bad weather was tough, but it was impersonal. It was fair in its unfairness. Gladys did not toss in bed at night wondering how she could have handled the sun better to make it shine on her garden less harshly. Every farmer had to endure the destruction of drought and floods and locusts and the swarms of tiny queleas, birds that could ravage a millet crop as fast as wildfire with their tiny red beaks. These natural difficulties Gladys could not control. As for the human culprits, those sly, wingless queleas pecking away at her garden, she was determined to shoo them away.

  THE DAY AFTER the fateful visit in which Zam’s “brother,” Robert, was revealed to be her husband, Zam departed for Kampala. She did not plant the new trees Gladys had brought to the garden. She did not even bother to water them. Accustomed to having her husband do the work for pay that went into her own pocket, she was not about to start working for pay that would go into her husband’s pocket. Let him tend to the trees and harvest the cassava. She would come and go as she pleased.

  Robert told Gladys that he had reminded his wife of her warnings, but Zam had only shrugged, saying, “You know Gladys—she can become very angry, but she is a simple lady. That one, I don’t fear her.”

  She did, however, fear Esther. That one looked at her with eyes of chipped ice. So Zam cut her losses. At the end of the week she returned to the gardens, accompanied by a man wearing a tie. They packed up all the cassava and hauled it away.

  Relating his wife’s shameful behavior, Robert sat down and cried. Zam had even stolen the beans and the maize flour that Gladys had stored with them. There were not even enough beans to plant the next crop. The only remaining “harvest” was the charcoal that Kiviri’s man had burned. The felled trees had yielded ten bags. There would not be much profit, as the charcoal was heavy and transport was expensive, but the sale would bring the funds to send Robert his monthly pay.

  When Gladys went to the gardens, however, there was no charcoal to sell. Robert had absconded with all ten bags. Husband and wife, well matched after all, had disappeared with the charcoal, the baby, and anything else four greedy hands could carry.

  At this, Esther lost patience. Her mild exterior provided thick insulation for life’s annoyances, but such transgressions pierced through. The police should grab Robert and lock him up. Such crimes must not go unpunished!

  As hot and sick as Gladys felt, she could not arrest Robert. It would make life harder for Maria, and she would not punish a baby for a parent’s crime. “No,” she said. “Let the matter be.”

  Others might be irked by Gladys’s decision, but plain revenge held no appeal for her. She salvaged a bit of solace in the knowledge that she was rid of the slippery couple. For all the trust she had placed in them, she had gotten nothing back save an expensive lesson in giving scoundrels second chances.

  That, and a name for her beleaguered enterprise. The only name that seemed to say it all.

  “PERSEVERANCE GARDENS.”

  “Perseverance?” The young man shot her a glance. Gladys gave him a firm nod, and he wrote it down on the order form. “Perseverance . . . Gardens.”

  The sign was for a farming concern, Gladys explained, and the colors and graphics should reflect its purpose. The eager shop proprietor quizzed her on the size, the material, the color scheme—green letters on yellow, or yellow letters on green?—and the selection of fruits and vegetables to draw the attention of passersby.

  The proprietor went off to chat with the welder, leaving his customers to enjoy the shop’s cheerful clamor of chatter and dancehall music, with the buzz of the circular saw hovering above it all like the whine of a mec
hanical bee. Gladys reviewed the invoice which he had started. Even with images of produce added to the design, its content seemed lacking. Uninspired.

  She turned to Mike. “You know how when you go to an inn, the sign may say, ‘For Better Meals and Rest.’ Or a garden might have a line saying, ‘For Better Fruits.’ What small words can we use here?”

  There was a long pause, in which Mike squinted toward the road as if he were trying to read the signs on the other side. “Let me say, for your kind of business it is different.” Her motto, he believed, should speak to the nature of the whole enterprise, not just the selling of produce. “Like, ‘Help for the Helpless.’”

  “Eh!”

  “You understand? Or maybe it’s ‘Hope for the Helpless.’ It becomes like your tagline.”

  Gladys’s response was immediate. “Put it on the paper. ‘Hope for the Helpless.’ That one sounds good.”

  “They are not hopeless, but they are helpless,” Mike went on, still pitching his idea. “All those kids, you’re giving them hope. As they are helpless.”

  Gladys gave a nod. Her children deserved hope. Not those ones like Zam and Robert. That was help for the hopeless!

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Gladys, Esther, and Mike headed back to the shop. The finished sign leaned prominently against the storefront. The frame was painted metal pipe six feet tall. Against a background of the same rich yellow as the national flag, green letters spelled out

  PERSEVERANCE GARDENS

  Nalongo Plot 115/116

  P.O. Box 856 Entebbe

  “Hope For The Helpless”

  “But should we have put the word welcome on there?”

  “No,” said Mike. “It looks nice. Very nice. You don’t need to say ‘Welcome.’”

  The shop proprietor came hustling over, slightly out of breath.

  “Hello, son.” Gladys greeted the young man coolly, sensing his nervous anticipation. Then she shook her head, sighing happily. “Woo-woo-woo.”