Padlock was not wholly dim: she realized that even the most terrible brutalities pale with overexposure. She abruptly abandoned the horror epics and dived into the slimy waters of the psalmist. She dredged up lines which portrayed her as the good, suffering believer. Her hope was that subtlety, self-pity and a dose of good old-fashioned sentimentality would succeed where bone-crunching violence had failed. Pandering to the myth that the sight of a powerful despot on her knees was enough to unhinge hearts and move mountains, she dipped into the schmaltzy psalms, a tender girlish mask on her nunly face.
The pathetic crassness of it almost made me laugh. After ruthless bombardment, now the slimy kisses! All to extract a suicidal confession which would be rewarded with ruthless punishment. The schizophrenic seed at the heart of her logic made me quite sick with disgust and made me wish I had stolen ten bobbins.
Save me, O God / I am weak and poor / Hurry to my aid / My God rescue me from wicked men / From the power of cruel and evil men / I have trusted in you since I was young / I have relied on you all my life / My life has been an example to many / My enemies want to kill me / They talk and plot against me / May those who try to kill me be defeated and confused / May those who are happy because of my troubles be disgraced / I am terrified and gripped by fear / I wish I had wings like a dove and could fly away / I see violence and riots in the city / Filling it with crime and trouble / Protect me, O God / Punish all my enemies / You know how troubled I am / You have kept a record of my tears / Help, help, help, O God!
The manipulative cow!
In order to remind the thief that her sickening pleas for God’s help had not changed her attitude toward the crime, Padlock introduced the notorious crime-solver St. Jude Thaddeus, detective, protector and rescuer of desperadoes. This man was reputed to put both dead and living sleuths to bitter shame. Among devout Catholics, he was fondly called an “automatic rifle.” All you needed was faith and a novena, and the magician would patch up rotten marriages, find dead bodies floating in rivers, make paupers rich, cure frigidity, impotence, gonorrhea and syphilis, and give desperately barren women those dreamed-of wrinkly little monkeys and greased piglets.
Eventually, the hype got to me: I quaked under pressure. I had seen with my very eyes magicians making coins disappear in one’s palm and then plucking them from one’s neck. What if this guy was a more powerful version of our taxi park magicians? I remembered that Moses had a very hard time with Egyptian magicians who did all the tricks he did. Now all this dude had to do was to give Padlock a vague dream or a crude hunch to turn the garden over, and the bloody bobbin would be hers again. Vengeance too. My immediate plan was to dig up the bobbin and hide it elsewhere. I started waking up in cold sweats. If I got itchy at night, I would wake up with a start and rush to the light, hoping that the sleuth had not given me leprosy. When I cut myself with a razor blade as I trimmed my nails or sharpened my pencil, I feared that the bleeding would not stop till a river had formed and a confession been extracted.
It was my Treasure Island friend who came to my rescue. He too was a Catholic. He had an aunt who had once been a fanatic devotee of St. Jude. She had traveled to his shrine on endless pilgrimages. She gave to the poor like crazy. She invited cripples to her home. She offered frenetic prayers every day, prayed on her knees till they got thick calluses, but this was her tenth year of barrenness and bitter disappointment. She had now turned furious critic of the notorious sleuth. She felt taken advantage of. I sympathized.
The first novena passed without anything happening. Padlock’s psalmic sentimentality worsened as she introduced another nine days of St. Jude’s prayers. She no longer searched in curious places morning, noon and night. The steel manna which she expected to fall from heaven lay safely buried in the garden where she walked every single day. The third novena was a plain embarrassment. The psalms had dried up. Padlock looked deflated. Serenity enjoyed the drama. At the beginning of the daily novena, he would flash his wife an indifferent look, as if to say why bother, and then turn away.
Fully convinced that not even God Almighty would retrieve the bobbin, Serenity bought black-market dollars and asked a friend to import a bobbin for him from neighboring Kenya. Ninety days after the disappearance of the old bobbin, the new one arrived. Padlock was overjoyed despite the initial embarrassment caused by the failure of her prayers.
A few women whose work never got done because of the stolen bobbin had given Padlock a piece of their mind, accusing her of not wanting to help them. They swore never to return, but now some crept back, and Padlock served them without reminding them of their harsh words. The monotonous roar of the machine massaged all the madness in her head and restored her peace of mind. Her train was back on track, and she looked cheerful, her tremendous fits of depression gone. I knew that she was still dangerous, waiting for the thief to go on a spending spree and land himself in her lethal trap. Not me. The bobbin remained buried, like gold bullion awaiting the arrival of a pirate ship.
I was thirteen and it was approaching time to change schools. I didn’t want to go to a Catholic school. I wanted to know what plans Serenity, the despot in charge of education, had in store for me. I could not ask him directly, because despotic secrets were never divulged that way. The only way was to spy on him. I asked my faithful shitters to shadow him and listen to his conversations while he watched television and generally do everything they could to get the information I needed. I waited for weeks, asking them every other day what they had heard. There was not much to tell. One day Serenity began to talk about schools just before news time, but the news reader cut him short. Weeks passed. Finally a loyal shitter clinched it for me. He overheard the despots discussing the issue in the Command Post one afternoon.
“It would straighten him out,” Padlock said.
“They offer very good education. On the other hand, you can’t imagine how bad government schools have become. Pupils go to school with knives, some with guns, and threaten both teachers and headmasters. The children of soldiers have really messed up our schools. Mugezi needs a quieter environment.”
“My parents would love to have a grandson who is a priest. He can end up a parish priest, rector of a seminary or even a bishop,” Padlock said.
“The church is very rich,” Serenity declared. “A clever priest can become very rich indeed.”
“You are only thinking about money,” Padlock rebuked.
“I do not want my children to suffer. They should be able to drive big cars, live in big houses and have what I could not give them.”
“They have to survive these times first.”
I was restless for days. I visited the taxi bowl every day for a whole week, losing myself, my blues and my impotent anger in the tumultuous waves of activity there. I dreamed of an earthquake to end it all. I listened to hear if the ground was quaking, preparing us for the next apocalyptic explosion, but alas, only the steady grind of the vehicles and the eternal calls of the van boys, the snake charmers and the hawkers filled my head like an infernal ache.
What use was a priest? And those ludicrous cassocks! Celibacy was definitely not for me. I had already decided to marry three wives in the future. With the earnings of a lawyer, I was sure that I could easily give my trio a comfortable life. The Church, in my estimation, needed ball-less people like the shitters, not me, who was ready to follow General Amin’s calls for self-advancement. Amin did not like the Church, and accused the clergy of meddling in politics, as they had done in the past, while doing nothing about the corruption inside the Church.