Fingers’ wife was pregnant, and I believed that this time the baby would get it: our leper could not be lucky forever. My prayer was for her to deliver in the hospital, in the company of nurses and midwives who had medicines to combat the disease. Every time I saw the woman, I would look at her in parts, beginning with the head or the feet and moving my eyes up slowly in the hope that by the time I got to her midriff she wouldn’t be pregnant anymore; but the belly would appear only to have grown. Once or twice she asked me about a certain herb, and I gave her two kinds, hoping that they would speed up her delivery. I should have been so lucky.
The messenger arrived one afternoon. All day I had entertained plans to go to my favorite tree and look out for Uncle Kawayida’s blue-bellied eagle. I was hankering for his stories. Now I was trapped and paying for my procrastination. To make matters worse, Grandma dismissed the messenger with the news that we were on our way.
“I am not going to participate in delivering a baby with no fingers.”
“Who told you that?” She was taken aback.
“Look at its father’s hands.”
“He was cured, that is why he is back in the community.”
“Are you not afraid of catching leprosy?”
“No.”
“Well I am. If the leprosy was totally eradicated, the fingers would have grown back on, wouldn’t they?” I said, feeling and looking very clever.
“Stupid boy. Fingers and toes do not grow back on, and if you cut off your finger while knifing a jackfruit, that will be the end of it. You will be like him, with young boys developing theories about you.”
“Still, I am not going.”
“Get that bag quickly. Check the razor blades. Do you want to be held responsible if something happens because you’ve wasted time with your useless questions?”
The baby was born intact, without any missing fingers or toes, without holes in the face or stomach. I expected something to happen within a month or two. I spied on the family. In the meantime I got a boil, as Grandpa and Serenity were wont to, and had a load of nightmares. My fingers and toes rotted in front of my eyes and dropped off in my bed. Fingers bent over me and asked me how it felt to be without fingers and toes. He laughed long and hard, the sound echoing in a dark corridor. I woke up with the feeling that I had lost my sense of touch and smell. The relief of finding everything intact!
Nasty post-natal cases now and then fell into our laps. A baby’s navel could become gangrenous, oozing a sullen yellowish-green pus which worried inexperienced parents a great deal. Grandma provided herbal cures and exhorted the parents to practice more rigorous hygiene. Women who did not dilate enough might have to be cut open, and in some cases would take a long time to heal, as Dr. Ssali’s sensitive penis did. Some would come weeks after, leaking, their loose stitches poisoning every sitting and walking movement. Some women, fed up with the pain, would ask Grandma to remove the stitches and concentrate all her healing powers on closing the cut. This was a disastrous idea, and Grandma did her best to explain what would happen to their sex lives if she did what they asked her to do. She would even go to the extent of citing songs hummed by men about “buckets,” women who were so wide that a tree could grow down there. She often succeeded in convincing them to return to the hospital to get the stitches redone.
By the time our stint ended, in 1971, we had delivered more than fifty babies, ten of which had died, mostly of measles: three at birth, seven in infancy. Four women had also died during or after childbirth, three of whom had been strongly advised by doctors at the mission hospital to stop breeding. The fourth case was a freak accident, and it turned ugly on us.
The husband of this dead woman came at Grandma with a panga raised in one of the blindest rages I had ever witnessed. Grandma, however, delivered the performance of her life: she did not move a muscle, and to top it off, she bent her head the other way, exposing her neck to the flashing blade. When the blade could not rise any higher, I closed my eyes for a moment. What was going to come off, her head or her arm? I imagined Grandma’s head bouncing round the courtyard and blinding everyone with blood in a dramatic show of power which would be immortalized in song. At that moment I wet my pants.
No one knows what brought the man to his senses. Maybe it was Grandma’s fearlessness; maybe it was the mechanics of a miracle; maybe murder was beyond him, and the panga was just a token of his cowardice. He was a notorious brawler. I had seen him once in a fight with another man. He was not the kind to care much for his wife, and we heard that he often beat her. My guess was that she died of meningitis, exhaustion or something instigated by his violence, but whatever it was, I was too scared for Grandma to care anymore.
In 1967, at the age of six, I took my first crack at school. The 1966 state of emergency had passed without inflicting much damage on our area. Our school was perched high up on Ndere Hill and had escaped molestation. Serenity had been to the same school, and so had Tiida, Nakatu and many of our other relatives. Every morning children from the villages trekked to Ndere Hill to drink from the well of knowledge. If you stood on top of this hill and watched hundreds of these large and small creatures emerging from milky clouds of morning mist with their breath pluming, geometry kits rattling and feet crushing the pebbles, you could think it was an apocalyptic locust invasion visited on the hill by some angry deity.
I joined the ranks of these green-shirted creatures, bemoaning my fall from the pedestal of my lone status into the abyss of student anonymity. The price of this humiliation was walking five kilometers every day, wheezing and sneezing in the cold for good measure. To ease my pain, I would dream the gigantic church tower anew every morning. Sometimes I saw it flashing in the morning sun; sometimes it stared morosely through the clouds of mist; sometimes it disappeared as if it had toppled and fallen, making me wonder how large it looked flat on the ground, but it was always there, laden with its terrible majesty, steeped in its power, encased in its inviolability. It was fifty-five years old, five years younger than the church in whose shadow our school nestled.
Both the church and the tower had been built by a French priest. Moments after adorning the top with a black cross, some women who believed he could do supernatural things thought they saw him actually flying, impersonating an angel, a bird or Our Lord Jesus, in fulfillment of a promise of a big miracle to celebrate the completion of the tower project. The promise had been made because the tower had collapsed twice during construction before he got the idea of using corrugated iron sheets instead of bricks. People started clapping and singing “Hosannah in the highest” when they saw him spread out in the air, white cassock billowing like full sails, hammer dangling precariously from his belt. It was the parish catechist who first realized what was going on and hurriedly linked hands with another man to break his master’s fall. Fr. Lule (a local corruption of Roulet) fell with such force that he broke the four hands trying to save him. His brains oozed out, his back snapped and he died without saying a word. The ladder, which no one remembered in the commotion, followed Fr. Lule down, killing a woman and breaking her daughter’s leg. Two months later, a catechist from one of the small subparishes fell from the pulpit and broke his spine, his pelvis and one arm. Some said he had been drunk. Some said he had always been afraid of heights. The majority believed that all the deaths and accidents were linked: every large building had to have a blood sacrifice before it opened to the public, and since no bulls had been slaughtered for it, they said, the church had decided to take its own sacrifices.