7.

Kanani parted with the family in the hospital foyer. “There’s nothing else for me to do here, is there?” he asked no one in particular. He took the back gate of the hospital, which opened into Namirembe Cathedral’s grounds. Faisi and the twins carried on walking through the wide corridors of Albert Cook Ward until they came to the main road that ran through the hospital. But Faisi walked away from the twins as if she did not know them. When they came to the main gate she said, “Gone to do God’s work,” without looking back.

By the time they got home, the twins had become indifferent to Ruth’s condition. It had only been a question of time before either followed into their parents’ sinful footsteps. Even then, getting pregnant was nowhere near as horrible as the twins had anticipated. As Ruth pushed the front door, which was stuck again, she said, “I’ve committed my worst sin but I didn’t kill any child.”

“Lucky you,” Job clicked his tongue. “Maybe I’ll kill them.” Ruth laughed as Job mimicked Faisi: I was so depraved I killed my parents, and for what?

“You need to be contrite about it otherwise it doesn’t count.”

“Then your pregnancy does not count: you’re not contrite.”

“It would count if I abort and then confess.”

“Like her?”

“Never.”

The twins fell silent as they contemplated the sins they would commit and confess on buses, in church and markets when they started to sow the seed. That night as they lay in their bed, they heard Kanani and Faisi whisper,

“It’s the Devil, Kanani. He hoodwinked us.”

“But my children?”

“That is how the Devil works, Kanani.” There was a hint of impatience in Faisi’s voice. “Remember Job in the Bible? When the Devil failed to make him denounce the Lord, he used his family against him.”

A week later, Faisi called the family to get together in prayer. Instead of Kanani, she led the prayer and beseeched God to give them wisdom so they would make the right decisions. When they got off up their knees, Faisi smiled as if she had had an epiphany. First she wiped the dining table with her hand even though it was clean, then she announced that Ruth was going away to live in Nakaseke-Bulemeezi for the time being. Kanani’s heathen cousin, Magda, had married there. Magda was heathen because she had defied her father. She had refused to be confirmed in church with the name Magdalene.

“Why was I named after a woman who leaked?”

Everyone in the family had expected Magda’s father to get omwenyango, a shrub with fiery leaves, and scrub her lips. But Magda’s father was a weak man. Instead he offered to name her Victoria, a beautiful name, which was not yet common in Uganda. But Magda would not have it either.

“The whole world is full of Victorias: the lake, the falls, and streets. Isn’t that enough?”

Then Magda had named herself Mukisa and asked the family to call her Blessing if they wanted an English version. But the family agreed that she was far from a blessing. In retaliation, Magda took Mukisa in its heathen form, Bweeza. The end result was not surprising; Magda fell away from the church and was living a heathen life.

Only Kanani accompanied Ruth to Nakaseke because Magda was his heathen cousin. Faisi could not bring herself to go the Devil’s lair. Besides, she had sowing to do.

When they arrived in Nakaseke, Kanani looked more lost than Ruth. Nakaseke was rural and traditional in ways Ruth had never known. They alighted at Nakaseke Hospital and took a narrow path up a steep hill. The path was stony but covered in dense vegetation. The world here was quiet save for twittering birds, the odd guinea fowl scratching frenziedly, or slithering lizards. As they came down the slope, they would stumble on a house here and there. The houses, sometimes as much as a kilometer apart, built with mud and roofed with corrugated iron, looked squat to Ruth. On either side of the doors to each house stood two large metallic barrels, sometimes dug into the ground with two long steel funnels on either side to trap and channel rainwater. Sometimes, skeletons of the houses showed through thin mud. Reeds looked like ribs and poles like bare bones where mud had fallen away. Doorframes were at wrong angles and made the houses look like a child’s careless drawing. The windows were small: Ruth was worried that it was dark inside the houses. Goats were tethered under trees near the dwellings. Children, especially boys in shorts whose fabric had worn away at the buttocks, played in the yards. Once in a while they came across a man wheeling a bicycle, women speaking in low tones, or a child rushing along the path. Villagers smiled and stepped aside for Kanani and Ruth to pass saying, “Seen you there,” or “Greetings.” Nakaseke looked and felt like a heathen world.

Finally, they joined a wider track. Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. Someone along this track owned a car: the track was made up of two permanent tire trails with an island of long grass in the middle. Shortly after, they came to an open field of green bulbs like poppies.

“What are these?” Ruth gasped the words before she could stop herself.

“Cotton,” Kanani said. “Look ahead, the other field has exploded.”

Ruth stopped walking. The miracle of cotton growing on shrubs had so lifted the dense air between her and Kanani that she skipped when she started moving again. The bulbs in the field that Kanani had pointed at had burst into fluffy balls of cotton. At the bottom of the field, women were picking the balls and throwing them over their shoulders into the baskets strapped to their backs.

They came upon Magda’s house suddenly. It was vast. Ruth had expected a small dark hut shrouded in an evil-looking bush. Magda’s home was a landmark in the village. Beside the main house, there were two other structures. One was built wholly from roofing aluminum. In front of it was a lorry. Men ferried sacks of coffee out of the structure onto the back of the lorry. Boys hung around excitedly. Just as Ruth and Kanani turned into the courtyard, the loading stopped. The wooden flap was lifted and the back of the lorry fastened. The engine started and some men climbed in the back and sat up on the sacks. When the driver pulled out, boys ran after the lorry yelling. They leaped and hung onto the wooden back for a while then yelped before leaping off triumphantly. Ruth shook her head at their audacity. She had turned to look at the men bringing in the cotton sacks when she heard excited girls calling, “Visitors! Someone open the reception room . . . go call Mother . . . Can’t you see they’ve come from the city? Take their bags!”

Magda’s home was bursting with so much noise and movement it was dizzying. Before she realized, Ruth’s bag was taken.

“I am not going to sit,” Kanani tried to stem the excitement. “Is the mother of the house in?”

The children stopped running. Clearly, they didn’t know what to do with a city visitor who would not sit down. An older girl said, “Bring a mat and folding chair outside,” but Kanani was firm.

“We’re not taking seats, I am leaving soon.”

The children stopped again. Ruth, who could see their concern, marveled at Kanani’s thick skin.

“Mother’s coming. She’s gone to a garden further away,” a girl explained.

The children started to greet them. They were numerous. It was awkward standing while the children knelt down.

“Bring a mat for her,” Kanani pointed at Ruth. “I’ll be fine.”

To Kanani, taking a seat even outside Magda’s house was like shaking a leper’s hand. You still catch the leprosy even though she is a relative.

When Ruth sat down she looked around. The whitewashed main house was elevated. Five steps led to a wide verandah, which together with its balcony, skirted the house. On the right was a massive concrete water tank with two taps. The funnels channeling rainwater were held up below the roof all around the house and then down into the tank. The windows, open, were large and wooden with closed screens of mosquito meshing. The roof was ridiculously high, like a church’s. The outdoor kitchen was as big as Kanani’s entire house. On the other side of the main building were the toilets and bathrooms. In front of the aluminum building, where the lorry had been, Ruth saw a wide concrete slab of at least twenty-five square meters. Spread on it were coffee beans, some still red-ripe, some grayish-dry. Children were sweeping and collecting the beans into heaps; older boys were packing them into sisal sacks and carrying the sacks into the aluminum building. The smell of drying coffee was everywhere.

“Stop staring, children. Have you no manners?”

Magda stepped from behind the house. She threw her arms in the air and hastened in joy, “Oh, whom do I see? My brother and, oh: is this our child Nnakato?” She was clearly overwhelmed. “My rude children have not offered you a seat?” She stopped in shock, looking at Kanani. “I’ll kill them today . . .”

“No, no, no, I told them I would not sit,” Kanani said quickly.

“What have I done to deserve this visit?” Before Kanani answered Magda pulled Ruth to her bosom. “I am sorry but I am a mess with happiness.”

Ruth stared. Magda was Kanani in a feminine form. Kanani began to say that he was not staying long but Magda, joining Ruth on the mat, turned to face her.

“Nnakato, how you’ve grown, my child!” Then she looked at Kanani. “Where is our wife Faisi and our son Wasswa?”

“They couldn’t come.”

“They don’t know me. My own children,” she looked at Ruth sadly. “You would walk past me on the street, wouldn’t you?”

“You look like Father exactly,” Ruth hoped to reassure her aunt.

“Aha, well said, child. He calls me cousin, the English way, to distance unwanted relatives. But blood speaks.”

“I need to whisper, Magda,” Kanani said impatiently.

Magda chided the still-staring children for lingering. The children laughed and scampered away.

Magda was only too happy to help but she enjoyed the tortured look that had replaced Kanani’s enduring righteous face. Finally, he and his crocodile of a wife had realized they needed blood relations after all. The fact that Kanani and Faisi could not handle a simple situation like teenage pregnancy made Magda feel validated: they had come to her. And then there was the snub—Kanani would neither sit down nor have refreshments in her home. He had talked to her standing like a tree. Hence, Magda could not help adding a touch of pepper to Kanani’s sores.

“Do you want it plucked?”

“No, no, no, all we ask is for you to look after Ruth until . . . she is . . . untied.”

“I am sorry I asked,” Magda said, clearly not sorry. “But you know, we’re family. No one needs to know.” Now Magda whispered, “I know someone who can pluck it out just like that.” She snapped her fingers as if flicking a speck of dirt and Kanani stepped back.

Even as he asked for her help, Magda noticed Kanani’s eyes darting around her home. She knew he was looking for signs of heathenry like traditional earthenware, barkcloth, herbs, or a prayer basket with smoked coffee beans and coins. Magda wished she had a traditional smoking pipe with three heads to puff and mutter beneath the smoke to confound him.

Yet, as Kanani bid his daughter goodbye, Magda could see his pain. “Ruth,” he said. “God is with us even in our darkest hour.”

Ruth nodded but she did not seem to see the darkness. However, Magda was not letting Kanani off easily.

“What do you want me to do with the baby when Ruth is . . . untied? I can keep the baby if you want.”

“I want to bring up my child,” Ruth protested quickly.

“Send me a word and I’ll collect Ruth and the child. I’ll send money every month with the Zikusooka bus driver. Give him any letters you want to send.”

“I was only checking. You never know with you civilized people. We don’t want our blood wandering rootless in an orphanage.”

Kanani turned away. Magda knew that her words had knocked him hard. For a moment, she wished she could call them back, but Kanani was walking away from her house, his stance discouraging any inclination to walk with him. As she watched him go, Magda wondered how thought rolled in that head of his. Christianity messed with the mind: how else would she explain Kanani who had frozen all his humanity to turn into a walking Bible? She turned to Ruth. “My name is Bweeza but you can call me Magda.”

“I will call you Aunt Bweeza,” Ruth smiled.

“Then, I’ll call you Luusi, your English name.”

Magda promptly put Ruth on a traditional antenatal regime of crushed herbs in her morning bath and an herbal mixture to drink. Ruth acquiesced without complaint, without enthusiasm. Magda grabbed every opportunity to pass on scraps of family history.

“Did you know we’re descendants of a great Ppookino in Buddu?” When Ruth shook her head she asked, “So you know nothing about Kintu our ancestor?”

“No.”

Magda decided not to divulge the information about the curse. If Kanani had chosen not to warn his children, then it was up to him.

“But you know that we don’t slap children on the head?”

“Yes, we have a medical problem in the head.”

“Is that what you were told?” Magda laughed.

Ruth nodded.

Now Magda’s face clouded. Three months of looking after her but Ruth would not discuss the man who owned her condition. She had asked a few times, but Ruth was not forthcoming. Magda was tempted to ask again but she let it pass. Probably it was another child who was as confused as Ruth. Instead she said, “I know your parents each have one foot in heaven already but what right do they have to take away your twin names?”

“I don’t know.”

“The day I meet a white man called Kintu is the day I’ll call myself Magdalene.”

“It’s all Christianity,” Ruth now knew the right words to say to Magda.

“It is, child. Our family dived too quickly, too deeply into Christianity.”

Magda told Ruth about their ancestor, Nekemeya, the first Christian in the family who became a teacher. “But ask yourself,” Magda said, “How was he a teacher around the 1890s? Christianity arrived in 1877: thirteen years later Nekemeya was a teacher? Sometimes I fear that we descend from the very first Ganda to sell the nation to the white man.”

“It’s hard to tell who was what back then,” Ruth said.

She felt no guilt for selling out Ganda tradition for Christianity. She felt nothing for naming, for culture, or for the grand patriarch Kintu. What she felt was a profound regret that she was born at all and had to bear her parents. Now, in the absence of Job, the only thing Ruth hinged her life on was the tadpole in her stomach. Lately, she had felt it swim noisily across her womb.

When Magda’s efforts to familiarize Ruth with family history failed, she focused on Ruth’s pregnancy. She showed her herbs to slacken her pelvic bones and ease birth, herbs to galvanize a newborn’s skin, and the clay, emumbwa, for strong bones and teeth. She woke Ruth up early every morning and sent her on a four-mile walk.

“Don’t let him sleep all day. You don’t want to work with a lazy child during labor.”

On her return, Bweeza would strip Ruth for a cold bath during which she rubbed herbs at the base of her belly with downward strokes. “The baby is properly aligned,” she would remark with satisfaction. In the evening, she would ask if Ruth had felt the baby move. When Ruth said that she had not, Bweeza would say, “Go down to the well and fetch water in a pan three times.”

Even the day that Amin took power from Obote, Ruth went to walk. That morning Ruth found all the repressed Ganda anger over Obote’s exiling Kabaka Muteesa II spilling in the roads everywhere in villages and trading centers in songs, dancing, and poetry. All this was new to Ruth. She had been unaware of the anger—her parents never discussed politics, as all worldly concerns were nothing but wind.

When she got back home, Bwanika, Magda’s husband who had spent the week with the family, was preparing to return to the main farm in Kapeeka where his first wife lived. Magda’s husband had three homes. Each home had a wife and a farm. Magda had coffee and cotton shambas, the first wife reared cattle while the third lived on the poultry farm. Bwanika spent two weeks with his first wife and a week each with Magda and the third wife in Ssemuto. During Bweeza’s week when he was around, Bwanika inspected coffee and cotton shambas, paying the workers. Then he went around the village talking to the residents.

Magda was a different woman in that week. Her words were few and mild. She wore her non-work clothes. She did not work in the garden and did most of the cooking herself. Bwanika was treated with reverence by the family whenever he came. When Ruth saw Magda kneel before him an image of Faisi kneeling before Kanani crossed her mind and she burst out laughing. Although Bwanika was friendly and tried to talk religion with her, Ruth preferred him away. She sensed a slight strain in the air, as if the children, not used to having him around, did not know what to do with him. As soon as he left, the air relaxed and the noise picked up. The pensive look on Magda’s face did not last. Soon she was vivacious again, her attention focused on Ruth.