by Jessica Yu
“Did you ask about him at the trading center?”
“Yes.” Deborah nodded. “People said they had seen him passing through at about nine o’clock in the morning.”
“Did they say anything else?”
“They said he was carrying a new radio.”
No one spoke for a moment. Sheets of water strafed the tin roof. On the ground circling the veranda, puddles formed at time-lapse speed. Old corncobs listed, canoelike, in the overflowing trenches.
“Now I want to hear in his own words why he ran away,” Gladys said, gesturing from Deborah to Douglas. “Ask him. But not in Ruuli, because I won’t know what you’re saying.”
The woman turned to the boy. “Can you tell me what it was that made you run away?”
Douglas looked up at the trees, which were momentarily backlit by lightning. A rolling boom followed, so low that it was felt as much as heard.
“Tell me, is it the truth, what she has said?” Gladys pressed. “Or is your grandmother lying? Did you take that fifty thousand?”
The boy did not answer.
“Eh?” Gladys prompted.
His lips moved, but no sound came.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes!” Douglas had to shout over the storm, the very heavens compounding his humiliation.
“You took money out of her pocket?”
“I took it.”
“So now your pocket was healthy. Now what did you do with that money?”
“I bought a radio.”
DEBORAH HAD FOUND it hard to accept that her grandson had run away. The boy’s clothes were still at home, and no food was missing. But she could not find him in the village or the trading center, so she walked to the next trading center. She waited until nightfall, checking the bars to see if he was hiding somewhere. No Douglas. She returned the next day, and the next.
“I thought maybe he had hopped onto a ferry, or maybe he had drowned. Maybe he had been kidnapped and sacrificed. I went to the local chairman and the police. They took my report, but they only said that if we found the boy to come back and tell them.”
She continued looking, the scope of her search widening like a torch beam. She traveled to other villages, Ninga and Kapundo. She wandered up and down the lakeside. She interrogated children who claimed they had seen him looking after some cows. She tracked down the cattle herders. Still no Douglas.
He had moved with some hunters, someone told her. Deborah traced those areas but found no clues. She went to funerals, making announcements at burial sites about her missing grandson, but no one ever reported seeing him.
The boy had simply disappeared.
Months passed, then years. He was twelve, she would have to tell people, but he would be thirteen now. No, now he would be fourteen. If he was still alive.
“I was feeling so much pain in my heart. I kept searching for the boy, but after all that time, I could only pray that God was looking after him.”
Douglas pulled the neck of his yellow T-shirt up over his face and wiped his eyes.
All of this torment, Gladys thought, for one cheap radio. “What happened to that radio, Douglas?” she asked. “I never saw you with it. Where did it go?”
“I gave it away,” he mumbled.
“Come again?”
“I gave it away.”
“Am I hearing correctly? Oh my God. What friend did you give it to?”
“It was not a friend. A guy said he would give me food if I gave him the radio. So we traded.”
“Food for how long?”
“One meal.”
“Eh! Today I’m just getting shock after shock after shock!” She might expect such irrational behavior from Trevor or Rose, but Douglas? Steady, sensible Douglas? “So with all that damage behind you, you traded that radio for a meal. How much food was it?”
“Seven pieces of cassava.”
The bounty for his betrayal. His thirty pieces of silver.
The boy blinked at the yard, not bothering to wipe his eyes. He could as readily stop the rain. Around the house, the puddles had swelled and connected into a moat. It was three feet wide and growing; no one could leave the veranda now without stepping in the muddy water.
“Douglas. Stop crying. Right now I need the truth.” Gladys softened her voice as much as she could, given the surrounding din. “Let me take you back a bit. Why did you want to buy a radio?”
No answer.
Gladys shifted forward in her seat. “We don’t have much time. We need to get back to Entebbe, to get you back to school. So please answer me directly. Why did you want that radio?”
Douglas knew his auntie was not going to let anyone off this veranda until everything had been laid bare. After a trembling exhalation, he began.
THERE WAS A blind boy in the village. His name was Ibra. Ibra owned a portable radio that he would carry around the trading center. How cool he looked, strutting around in a fog of music, like the star of a movie. Douglas, who loved both music and radios, would follow the blind boy for hours. But it was Ibra’s radio and he chose what they would hear.
One day Ibra told him, “You must buy a radio like mine. That way we can move together, and each listen to what we like.” From that day forward, Douglas became obsessed with securing his own radio. Not one made from rusty parts stuck in an old jerry can, but a slick new one, with chrome knobs and an antenna that pierced the air like a blade.
“What backward behavior,” Gladys interjected, unable to contain her disapproval. “Douglas, did you think that was really swag, to have a radio on the street? Eh? Is that swag? Such swag that you stole money for it?”
Now she could imagine how it had played out. Douglas had been twelve years old at the time. As clever as he was, he was young. His blind friend’s treasure blinded him; he did not see that he was making a mistake he could not repair.
Once he held the new radio in his hands, the realization must have hit him: there was no way he could get away with such a theft. How could he play his new radio without explaining where it came from? Everyone would know that this “fine boy” was no better than a common thief. No, an uncommon thief—one low enough to steal from his own grandmother.
Such a crime could never be forgiven. He had to run away.
By nightfall he would have reached Nakasongola. Hungry, tired, and alone, he must have cursed the useless radio. He could never hold it up to his ear without hearing the echo of his betrayal. So for a few bites of food he gave it up. And he kept walking.
“Douglas, if I had heard all this when I found you at the police station, I would have whipped your bottom and sent you back home,” Gladys admitted. “But despite your lies, God was merciful to you. You were given a great chance in life. You still have that chance. But don’t think you should go forward and lie to people ever again.” She gave this warning its requisite weight, although it seemed unlikely that Douglas would need reminding.
“And now what you need to do is apologize to your grandmother. With a voice that everyone can hear. Whether she forgives you or doesn’t forgive you, I don’t care. Me, I’m not of your clan. That is her business. Stop crying and face her.”
There was precious little room to maneuver on the veranda; Douglas’s shuffling efforts to navigate around the tangle of legs were reminiscent of Mike’s parallel-parking struggles at Old Kampala Police Station. At length he was able to kneel before his grandmother. “I beg you to forgive me for all the wrong I have done to you,” he said. “Please forgive me for what I did.”
Gladys urged him on. “You must claim what you did. What are you asking her to forgive you for?”
“For the money I took. And for running away.”
“Grandmother, what do you say?”
Gazing at the kneeling boy, Deborah did not need to search for words. “I forgave him a long time ago.” She pressed a handkerchief to her eyes. “He has always been in my heart. All I prayed for was for him to come back to me.”
“So you have forgiveness. Give you
rselves a hug.”
At this, the two stood. The woman reached out with both arms, and the boy leaned against her, gulping with relief, as though she had just pulled him from the sea.
“I forgave you a long time ago.” The grandmother spoke softly, the way one would soothe a much younger child. “Now you know I forgive you. Whatever you did, I still love you.”
Douglas took a shuddering breath. His day of reckoning had arrived. He had feared it as the day when he would be forced to start walking again. Instead, two long years later, he could finally rest.
COULD GLADYS FAULT herself for failing to detect Douglas’s secret? No. The boy had been set on exacting his own penance. The self-containment he displayed had been a kind of imprisonment. Was there anything more isolating than shame?
Of course, the unprincipled were immune to shame, but a single dose could paralyze the decent. Douglas had almost given up his life to pay for one callow action.
Clasping the hand with the flawed pinkie, Deborah looked at Gladys. “Thank you so much for bringing this boy back to us. I am so grateful.”
“And Grandmother, I must thank you for having such a big heart. A heart that can forgive. Because children can make mistakes.”
The two discussed Douglas’s education. Deborah agreed that Douglas should remain at Early Learning, assuring Gladys that he would be welcome in her home for school holidays or any time he wanted to visit.
The rain had tapered to a drizzle. Throughout the meeting, the storm had punctuated the unfolding drama with uncanny synchronicity, and now, on cue, the clouds lifted. The moat around the veranda began to recede. A hen stepped daintily on the outlines of damp ground appearing between puddles. A pig snuffled through shiny grass.
Deborah turned back to Douglas and cocked her head at the yard. “Help me catch a rooster to give to your auntie.”
The boy followed his grandmother to the edge of the veranda, and together they stepped off.
Hope for the Helpless
It wasn’t supposed to happen again. But it had. The familiar nightmare with a different bogeyman. Zam. Robert. And now Byron.
Gladys’s nephew’s arrival should have signaled a turning point for Perseverance Gardens. The rains had come; the crooks had gone. At the end of the driveway, the beautiful sign stood tall.
Gladys should have been able to trust Byron. He was from her family. And he seemed earnest about his new job, telling her that he needed 1.5 million shillings to buy additional equipment and pesticide for the tomatoes. But after she gave him the money, it soon became evident that he had spent it all on himself.
Once again there was no harvest at Perseverance Gardens.
When confronted about his cheating, Byron didn’t run away. He did not hang his head in shame. In fact, he made rude remarks as Gladys stood in the doorway of the room, watching him pack up his things.
She locked the metal doors to the house, satisfied that he had not taken anything that belonged to the garden. But Byron must have been watching. After she left, he apparently climbed up the side of the house, squeezed into the gap between the wall and the unfinished roof, dropped into the room, and took everything inside. He stole the pump, the rubber boots, the panga, the hoes, the jerry cans, even the plates.
The brazenness of the robbery stunned Gladys. How could this be her own nephew? Her son, Timothy, was incensed. He had been the one to recommend Byron to his mother, and now he wanted his cousin arrested. Jail would teach him a lesson!
Once again, though, Gladys could not do it. This man was a relative. In the African way of thinking, it would be very hard to set the police on him even though he had done these bad things. Other people, especially relatives, might not understand. This was flesh and blood, they would say. Gladys must have mistreated him in some way. To be sure, his story would be very different from hers.
Anyway, Zam and Robert had been just as bad, or worse. And she had not thrown either of them behind bars. So how could she send the police after her own kin?
WITH THE GARDEN again unsupervised, Gladys wrestled once more with the problem of finding a trustworthy replacement. Eager to help, Ezra sent a message back home to his village, asking a friend to take the job. “He is a born-again Christian, Mommy,” the boy said, vouching for him. “And I know his father.”
The young man arrived with nothing, and as he was Ezra’s friend, Gladys allowed him to reside in the house and use the mattresses and bedsheets. But then two more young men arrived from Ezra’s village to work in the adjacent gardens. When the two newcomers moved in, Gladys felt there was no way she could refuse them the same hospitality. It made no sense to have them sleep outside on the ground when a room with mattress and sheets was standing right there. So the three men stayed in the house together.
The gardens were not producing much, and the trio complained of not having enough beans to eat. Whenever Gladys visited she would bring them food, soap, sugar, paraffin—whatever she could spare at the time. When one man fell off the bicycle, she paid his medical bills. She felt that she was building a good relationship with the new workers, but others did not share her charitable view.
Kiviri said, “When we bring in laborers, they sleep on mats. Why do you give them mattresses and bedsheets? After all, they are earning salary.”
Timothy said, “Two of them aren’t even working for you. Why are you providing housing for all three?”
Even Ezra sent urgent, disjointed texts: But mommy what I beg you don’t send money up to anyhow for them . . . Bye mommy, don’t spoil our money to him. Be careful.
“You know what,” Gladys responded, “there are times where you need to help such people, because they are from a different area. You never know, one time you may also need them.”
The ending of this chapter was predictable to everyone but Gladys. Shortly after receiving their monthly pay, the three men ran away, taking everything with them—all the supplies she had replaced from the last theft. Even the bedsheets.
This time her people seemed angrier with her than with the three thieves.
Timothy fumed to Esther, “The bad thing about Mommy is that she can’t adapt. She lets people get away with everything.”
Kiviri, who knew a thing or two about cons, expressed dismay. “Madam, I really don’t know. Everyone here is wondering about the way you treated these people. Giving them even blankets and even bedsheets and even mattresses? And whenever you come you bring them bread and you bring them sugar and you bring them soap?”
Didn’t she know that deprivation provided motivation, that fear ensured discipline? Everyone in the neighborhood had witnessed how she had let the crimes of Zam, Robert, and Byron go unpunished. What would keep the three new scoundrels from following in the footsteps of the old ones?
Gladys’s brothers even questioned her birthright. “You are too soft,” they said. “You need to become more Ugandan.”
In spite of everything, Gladys laughed—a long, sputtering laugh that evaporated into a sigh. “It is too late for me. I fear it is too late for me to learn.”
WAS GLADYS REALLY so soft? She had never thought of herself as a soft woman, and those she encountered in her professional life certainly would not characterize her as such. She had no trouble being tough when it came to threats against her children. She would ride on a boda for hours, in the rain, feverish from malaria, to the middle of cannibal country. She would face down an angry spouse, a hostile family, even a police officer. There was a clarity that came with fighting for a child’s welfare. The garden project, though, was for her own welfare as well. And that, perhaps, is what muddied the waters. She was not as tough on her own behalf as she was on the children’s.
Late at night her mind drifted and pitched, a boat unmoored on a roiling sea of doubt. She thought about the three young men from Ezra’s village. They had been given jobs, a place to stay, and provisions. What had caused them to toss it all away?
She pictured Ezra’s village. Although the building at Perseverance Gardens
was still unfinished, it was a grand structure compared to the small mud huts there. Those men may not ever have slept with blankets and bedsheets. They may not ever have received so much money, 150,000 shillings a month. Free accommodation, food, and salary? They may have gotten so excited that they thought they had already won the lottery.
For many who had had little in life, you did not invest in good luck, you cashed in. If you caught a chicken, you didn’t wait for it to lay eggs. Better to cook it and eat it before it ran away. Maybe these men did not trust that the kindness she had shown them would last, so they had traded it in for a quick payoff.
She had never had such an occasion to question the pros and cons of kindness. Her actions sprouted not from a conscious desire to be virtuous but from instinct. It was the way she was made, the way she had been raised by her grandparents: to help, to share, to empathize. Following that instinct had brought her much satisfaction, even joy.
Of course she did not expect the universe to kneel to her every time she extended a hand; she had come across many, many people who met goodwill with indifference. But this series of hostilities, this threat of ruin—this was new.
It was her fault. And her fate.
Even if she could go back in time, she could not have thrown Zam, Robert, and Byron in jail. She could not have refused to pay baby Maria’s medical bills. She could not have locked up the building and told the three young men from Ezra’s village to sleep on the ground. She could not have become vengeful or miserly or cold-hearted. She was who she was, and if the project’s success depended on her ability to change, then Perseverance Gardens would fail.
KIVIRI CALLED GLADYS to notify her that someone was attempting to steal the doors from the house. She rushed to the gardens, her heart plummeting into her stomach.
The lower hinges of all three doors had been pried away. One door hung by only a single bolt; someone must have been working at it all night, knowing that the building was unoccupied.
