The Immanence of God in the Tropics

by George Rosen

  Ross asked him if he’d stay if he had the choice. He said he would.

  Of course he didn’t have the choice. The Inland Mission Board was sending him home, nominally because the Mobleys had already been in Africa three years beyond the twenty the Board prescribed for their lay missionaries. But that rule had been winked in the past. The truth was they thought he had become too cranky and old for the job. And the constant taxidermy disturbed the Board. Mobley was dwindling off into privacy, and the missionaries no longer trusted him.

  The common wisdom was that Bob’s troubles had cracked him. Bob was Kigeli, an orphan whose parents had died of cholera when he was ten. He had relatives who had room and food for him but no money to send him to school. To pay his way he began to do odd jobs around the mission station, sweeping the bright red cement floors, saving the bottles that the missionaries were often inclined to throw away. Bob wore glasses. None of the other school children had them. They were large flat spectacles in a black metal rim that gave him a clerical, trustworthy appearance. The mission Americans all liked him and touted his talents back and forth to each other, even though he’d been raised as a Catholic.

  That wasn’t a serious matter. His older sister had been in a Catholic primary school at the time of his birth, so they had a father baptize him. The local African priest worked off an alphabetical list of Christian names, which he gave out in order. Bob’s real name was Balthazar.

  Hank Mobley had a distrust of that kind of Biblical name as somehow un-Christian, so he started calling the boy Bob. The two loved each other at once. Hank gave Bob a black elastic band to keep his glasses on, and for the first time in his life the boy could play soccer without the fear that the principal financial investment of his extended family would slip down his nose and shatter. Hank also sent away back home and bought Bob a bat, a mitt, and a ball. They’d go out into the fallow fields and knock grounders and flies to each other, chasing the ones they missed off into the banana groves. In the mission’s forty years Bob was the first African they let know about baseball.

  Bob spent his nights at home, but he walked in every morning, mud or dust, for work, and on Sunday he went to church with the Mobleys. He was the only young African there although there were a few older people—women in green dresses and men in World War II British Army raincoats.

  Both the men and the women were old enough to have long drooping earlobes which had been pierced and stretched when they were children to hold large ornamental plugs. Now they no longer wore the jewelry and some of the women folded the lobes up over the tops of their ears for neatness’ sake. The Mission Church didn’t represent all of Protestant Christendom in Kigeli. The largest group of Christians—fervent, devout, and distressingly puritanical—had broken off from the Americans and started a church with their own preachers on a lone hill behind the main market in town. They still helped support the Kigeli Mission hospital and school, but they preferred their own spiritual direction, setting the hymn texts to Kigeli melodies and accompanying the songs on goatskin drums rather than the mission’s tubercular organ.

  But Reverend McCall, the minister at the American chapel, still preached as if the white stone hall was full of untutored heathen rather than the families of earnest medical missionaries who actually sat before him. His face was wrinkled, his body stooped and savaged by time. Nothing of his youth was left but the thick head of Arthur Godfrey red hair that bushed off his scalp. His sermons were insane parables in a 400-word vocabulary plucked from Longman’s Simplified English about how the Kingdom of God is a hut that never leaks. They were filled with Aesopian animals from every possible continent—lions, monkeys, kangaroos, raccoons—leading strange cautionary lives that at the end of the story always sucked them into the whirlpool of salvation. Most of the time he was completely unintelligible. During the week he subsided to a quiet life saying graces and leading the moments of joint doctor–patient prayer that were required before operations at the hospital.

  When the service was over, Bob went to the Mobleys’ for Sunday dinner. After a week of corn, beans, and millet cakes, on the Sabbath Bob gorged on meat. In the eyes of the Kigeli, the missionary homes were built on meat, their basement freezers filled with the cold carcasses of pigs and cattle. It wasn’t that the Kigeli minded the killing. They wrung the necks of chickens and roasted goats for feasts. But the scale of the Americans’ slaughter amazed the people—bacon in the morning, mutton for lunch, a roast for dinner, all the fine fat platters dripping scraps for the cats and dogs. Bob respected the linen napkins and the translucent china, the smooth strong curves of the Mobleys’ walnut table, but nothing held for him such wonder as the plates full of flesh. He got to like ham and pork, which he’d never before eaten. “Have another slice,” Martha would beam, the pink slab wedged between the bright knife and fork. “Go on, it’s good for you.”

  Bob always had the extra slice, and the potatoes with fresh butter, the beans from the Mobley garden that they ate pods and all, the dark sweet iced tea without milk. After the meal they would set the chairs out on the lawn. Hank would take off his shirt and dangle his head over the back of the chair in the sun while Martha read out a Bible lesson. When she finished she’d put the pressed rose she used as a marker back between the pages and snap the book shut. Hank would straighten and call Bob over to him, dress him right up face to face, and look hard in his eyes. “Now you remember every word, son, every word.” The sunlight poured around their faces, glinting in Hank’s white hair and brows, doubling itself on the big flat circles of Bob’s glasses. Bob, his stomach full, lazy in the heat, knew this was supposed to be an important moment, that Hank was trying very hard to mean something. Every Sunday he answered the same, what Hank wanted, his mind full of “Yes, sir,” and confusion.

  Then he would help Hank go on his rounds. Hank was the missionary for the machines. He took care of the mission’s vital organs, the pumps that fed the faucets, the big electrical generators. There were two generators, one for the hospital that ran continuously and one for the missionary homes. The home generator ran only at night, part of its energy recharging the giant battery packs that kept the lamps, freezers, washers, and dryers going through the day and that nestled against the porches and sides of the identical houses like huge hearing aids. Hank also maintained the hospital apparatus—the sterilizers, x-ray machines, and oscilloscopes. His gift was uncanny, God-given. He could fix anything. In the operating room he would kneel by a wounded respirator, poke around for a minute, his eyes tight and intent. Then he’d pull back as though it were a ‘52 Ford and he a Tennessee mechanic sliding out from underneath on his trolley. “That’s it,” he’d grin, “over there.” He’d pluck out the tube, solder the wires, and the thing would purr. The nurses and doctors, the patients padding by in their long gowns, all would stand amazed. None of them had any entrance to the mystery of Hank’s talent. None could pierce its perfection.

  Bob tagged behind carrying the two toolboxes, one filled with tubes, plugs, and wire, the other heaped with wrenches, springs, and bolts. He caught the sparks of glory that trailed Hank as he tended his mechanical garden. Bob wasn’t quite an apprentice, though. No one could be. Hank was something of an idiot savant. He couldn’t explain what he was doing. When he tried, little flashes of intuition bounced about with no discernible connection like loose bolts in a hubcap. He would try to tell Bob how a burning wick in a kerosene refrigerator could make things cold, but it never made sense. So Bob, who was always clever at school with neat handwriting, accurate sums, and a gift for English, never really understood how Hank’s mind worked to do the things of which the man was most proud.

  Sunday evenings in the short twilight, Hank and he would toss the baseball back and forth on the lawn while Martha stood watching. The couple was getting old, Martha’s pear-shaped body falling down in a slow mortal sag while Hank’s, once that of a big, muscular man, still fought to maintain its uplift though it pudged at the center, spilling over his stomach and unguarded flanks.
But it wasn’t the age that separated Bob from them so much as the screens that hid the workings of their minds. Inside the old man was a wizard who could make the material world dance, and behind Martha’s eyes lay some beautiful Baptist garden where bright birds sang of prophecy and discipline in voices that she could never translate. Bob tossed the baseball out and back, again and again, like a spider shooting out its threads to catch hold of something. And Hank tossed the ball right back. They never made the connection.

  When Bob was fourteen and starting secondary school, Hank arranged to get him a job in the market with V.S. Patel, the hardware and sundries dealer who was the school’s principal outfitter. Bob could use the money to help the Mobleys pay his school fees. Patel, an Indian, was not keen on the idea of having an African schoolboy working for him. But he agreed to the idea to placate the missionaries, his most substantial customers.

  Patel was an extremely fat man with excited tiny features that rolled around his face like peas on a plate. But his fat was deceptive, like a weightlifter’s or a Japanese wrestler’s—there was strength underneath it. The missionaries considered him a pagan. The Kigeli thought him an outlander. But for twenty years he had ridden through their distrust and secured his tin roof and stone walls and the courtyard full of flowers. However narrow the frontiers of his vision, he was still lord of all he surveyed.

  Which is why he minded particularly when Bob started stealing from him. Bob had learned a manic generosity from the Mobleys. They had surrounded him with gifts—sneakers, a raccoon cap, nylon fishing lines, fresh white shirts. In turn Bob opened his employer’s storeroom to his classmates. Within a few months the boys all had black belts with “007” buckles, the girls, new ribbons in their hair. Under their beds they kept piles of extra writing supplies—blue Chinese pens and exercise books with “ADVENTURE!” printed across the cover, rays of light shooting off it, and underneath, a small boy and girl holding hands and looking at the shining word. Bob, who kept the inventory and delivered Patel’s bills, added the goods he spirited off to the account of the Catholic secondary school at Kimbwa, a few hills over toward the lake. The Kimbwa school clerk was a small, very dark man from one of the western tribes. He had prematurely white hair, always wore a suit and tie, and wrote the school correspondence in an ecstatic Victorian longhand. He started sending letters to Patel, writing across the front of the envelope, “ATTENTION! In re accounting errors! Please refer to chief bookkeeper! Immediately!” Patel was in the habit of rejecting all such claims as scurrilous and let the letters go unanswered until the Kimbwa clerk sent over two priests to Kigeli to address their inquiries personally. Patel hemmed and hawed the fathers until they left, then called over Bob, who was standing behind the counter talking to three school friends who all had identical pink plastic combs sticking out of their back pockets.

  There was little Bob could do. The combs were on the list of mysterious items sent to Kimbwa. He confessed and Patel started slapping him in the face. Bob, nearly fully grown, already had the body of a large man, but his instincts were still a child’s. He took the blows passively, clutching at his spectacle frames to protect them from the Indian’s huge hands. Then he stood by the glass counter shaking while Patel plucked the pink combs out of the schoolboys’ shorts and yelled them out of the shop.

  It was Kavulu, the new policeman, who told Hank about the arrest. He came from the dry eastern part of the country and frequently got lost in the Kigeli forests. He was a tall man, always very tired, with a long head that often seemed about to fall off to the side. He carried himself delicately, like a juggler trying to balance a plate on a long stick. Still he shared a reputation for cruelty with all the non-Kigeli policemen. As he climbed up the hill to the mission and asked the women digging in their gardens where the Mobleys lived, their answers were cautious and afraid.

  “You are Mr. Mobley, the friend of Balthazar Chacha?”

  The missionaries did not generally let adult Africans into their homes, and Hank and Kavulu stood on the veranda talking while the cloth of the policeman’s baggy blue shorts snapped in the breeze. His English was slow and careful.

  “Patel, the merchant, the one who has complained against the boy, he says we should talk with you before going further. You gave him a reference for Chacha, isn’t it?”

  Hank said that he had.

  Kavulu smiled. “Then you have excuses?” But Hank said he had no excuses.

  “You know—” the policeman sighed, then grinned. “Thank you, madam.”

  Martha had come out with cups of hot white tea.

  “You know, this is a young, ignorant boy, and this Patel, he is an angry man. The people do not like him much. Even myself, I do not like him. If you went to him, to stop him from the prosecution, it would be good.” Hank agreed that it would be a good thing.

  Kavulu wanted Hank to go talk to Patel as soon as possible, and the missionary promised he would go into Kigeli the next morning. Then they shook hands.

  “This makes me very happy, you know. If this thing went on, the boy would go to jail for a long time, even though he is only a boy. The President has told us to be cruel with thieves. He has said they should all be hanged by the neck until they die. But myself, I think that is too much.”

  Hank said he thought so, too.

  They finished their tea silently. Kavulu put the teacup down, stretched, and wiped his lips with a starchy handkerchief. He was just about to leave when Martha came out again, asked him if he read English, and handed him a bunch of mission pamphlets. Everybody thanked everybody, and Kavulu walked on down the path to town until his head teetered out of view.

  “Goddamn it,” Hank said, about to swear louder but then thinking better of it. All his speech was a constant battle against profanity, a battle led by his wife, who quiet in her armchair knitting could grow terrible at the first breath of an oath. “I don’t see how this could have happened, I never. . . .” And he sputtered off. They both shook their heads.

  The next day Hank drove into Kigeli in the Land Rover. The police wouldn’t let him see Bob until he had talked with Patel, so he went quickly over to the market and the wide shop washed in blue paint. Behind Patel’s shop was a lush courtyard lined by a triple row of yellow flowers. In its center was an old, strong avocado tree, twice as tall as the low-ceilinged rooms around the yard. Its lower limbs stretched across the whole space from flowerbed to flowerbed, and its crown vibrated with the dark shapes of weavers and long-tailed widowbirds hopping and stumbling among the leaves and heavy fruit. Tied to the lowest limb by a thin brass chain was a large grey parrot with an old woman’s eyes. Patel sat at a small table breaking cashews and feeding them to the bird.

  “I am practically alone now, Mr. Mobley, except for my mother, who is old and ill. My children are away. You have not met them, I think?”

  “No, I haven’t, Mr. Patel. I can’t say I have.” Mobley sat with his back straight and taut, his old fishing hat crumpled in his lap.

  “Then you must see them.” Patel got up from his chair, avoided a sleeping cat who mewed in slight irritation, and retrieved two photographs from behind the counter inside the shop. The pictures were elaborately framed in black with wreaths of tiny fresh flowers around them as if they were portraits of the newly dead.

  “This is Bimla. She is studying at the university in Dar, political science. She is engaged to a polyglot. The man went to Oxford and can speak nine languages. I don’t even know the names of all of them.

  “Besides his knowledge,” Patel waved his finger, “he is healthy and quite rich.” He rested his hands on his thighs, the fingers turned inward. “We are all quite satisfied.

  “My boy, Dev, is pursuing studies in your country, Las Vegas.” The photograph on the table was of two dark, blurred men wearing tee shirts and leaning against the wing struts of a Piper Cub with “The Rennie Landers School of Aviation” painted on the fuselage.

  “He will be a pilot. There are many opportunities these days for pilots. But you know
,” Patel leaned over toward Hank, “such studies are expensive, very expensive.” He shook his head and laughed a coughy laugh which the grey parrot picked up and softly echoed.

  “I’ve come to talk about Bob, about Balthazar . . . ,” Hank started, then stopped. When he talked he was always either silent or direct. He knew it cut down his room for maneuver, but he could never manage subtlety. “The police said you wanted to talk with me before continuing the case. I thought maybe if I could repay, if . . .”

  “You know, sir, this is a serious matter.” Patel stood up and began to circle around the table with his hands clasped behind his back, sliding against the white silk of his kurta. “This is a prison matter. These were not trifles. The goods themselves, 1500 shillings, perhaps more. How can I tell? The boy himself, you know, kept the accounts. You see I trusted him very much, on your say-so, Mr. Mobley, on your say-so.”

  Patel stood behind Hank’s back, declaiming over his head toward the parrot and the tree. “Well then, 1500 for the goods plus the cost of reordering, the petrol, the deliveries, the loss of future accounts from Kimbwa.” Patel moved back around the table and sat down again.

  “And my own aggravation and suffering, Mr. Mobley, my own suffering. These are not easy things to repay. These are not easy things at all.” He slumped his head forward on his hands. Hank was surprised at the fervor. He thought Patel might cry and he wouldn’t know what to do. His fingers ached for a tool.

  They sat there for some minutes, the two men with their broad shoulders and large heads—Patel’s hair black, thick, and straight; Hank’s, white and shaggy—staring around each other across the little table while the widowbirds chirruped in the tree.

  Then Patel’s mother wandered into the courtyard mumbling a torrent of Gujerati, her head wreathed in smoke. She carried an old Lyle’s Golden Syrup can in her hands with holes punched in the top to form a shallow brazier. In the pan were lumps of hashish, glowing faintly and sending billows of thick white smoke up to swirl around her smiling face and cling in her hair. The smoke was extravagant, solid, puffing everywhere like an orange-grove smudge pot. She seemed quite happy in her private atmosphere and nodded greetings to Hank and her son.