No one was more nonplussed than the pilgrim, who had narrowly escaped decapitation in the storm. The rosary got lost in the process, much to his chagrin.
“God tests those he loves,” he said philosophically, wondering how he was going to pay his creditors.
Padlock, who would one day meet her end in the nearby forest, returned to the village to survey the damage and to see what she could do.
The natural disasters which were going to dog their family and their in-laws’ families had just begun to show their hand. Unlike the locusts, which had come in the thirties and had almost been forgotten by the villagers, the new disasters would leave scars that would last through the ages.
To begin with, though, the people fought the battle of reconstructing their village. Mbale spent the next seven years struggling to pay his creditors.
Holy masses were said copiously throughout the land, and if prayer alone were enough to turn things around, the country would never have undergone the catastrophes that dogged it in the coming years. At the seminary, we seemed to be attending one long, unending mass. Morning light seemed to be doing perpetual battle with stained-glass chapel windows, holding us hostage to a self-repeating drama. Seminarians, faces upturned in sublime boredom and lips moving somnolently, were like baby birds waiting to be fed. The rector, minus meter-long rosary, told and retold the story of his journey in apparent perpetuity. The Vatican, Jerusalem, Lourdes, or was it St. Peter’s Square, Jerusalem, Lourdes, or some other peripatetic configuration? Nowadays, when he caught defaulters, he called them to his office, asked them why they had broken the rules and then clinically passed sentence. “Give me one good reason” became his leitmotif and nickname. Some staff members were annoyed by this leniency. They openly wondered how long this road-to-Damascus conversion would last.
In the meantime, Lageau’s popularity waned, and we finally found him a nickname: “Red Indian.” He was ruddy, after all, but the name was actually a passing reference to the fact that, despite his Wasp roots and apparent wealth, to us he could have been a marginalized Red Indian on a reserve. We mostly called him Red.
In the midst of this teacup storm, the Agatha controversy arose and kept us on tenterhooks till the end of the year. It was as if Lageau were issuing a riposte.
The seminary was built on a hill three kilometers away from the nearest stretch of Lake Victoria, the same lake on whose eastern shores Kaanders had fought polygamy and contracted sleeping sickness. The lake provided good fishing and swimming facilities in these areas. The locals combed the waters with nets dropped from wooden canoes and caught both small and large fish, but did not think much of swimming. Seminarians were allowed to go swimming once a month, but the prospect of walking three kilometers to take a dip, get wolfishly hungry and then return to the hill for ghastly meals never appealed to many. The only people who made use of this dispensation were the die-hard truants; they used the chance to meet their contacts, and sometimes their girls.
Lageau gradually came to personify both swimming and boating. Whenever he was not in the mood for volleyball, he would get in his car and go swimming. On the weekend, he got permission for a few good swimmers to accompany him to the lake. It was to this select group that he revealed the imminent arrival of Agatha.
The news spread like a gasoline fire in a wooden shack. The materialists among us praised the man to the sky. They could hardly wait to cast their eyes on Agatha. Someone stole a picture of the boat, and it changed hands faster than porno magazines in a military barracks. Eyes devoured the swan-like contraption with a mixture of admiration, awe and cold envy. The Red Indian was sending a big message, putting everybody, including the rector, with his Vatican-Lourdes-Jerusalem stories, in his proper place. This boat, still hundreds of miles away, was like a Holy Grail full of elixirs for a national plague. The quick ones pointed out that our meals were finally going to improve.
“With all the big fish he will catch, we will certainly get a share.”
“God has remembered us at long last,” the optimists intoned.
Lageau basked in this glory without directly fanning it. He struck an uncharacteristically reticent pose and let the boys and a few loose-tongued priests do his dirty work. I kept aloof of the drama. At the time, Kaanders and I were busy nursing old books back to health: cutting, gluing, pressing, trimming the finished product and hallucinating on the fish glue. Normally, Kaanders’ hands trembled, as though little electric currents were passing through his veins, but inside the bindery, amidst mountains of paper, the odious paper guillotine and the tattered, needy books, he became steady as a surgeon. He worked nonstop for long stretches, disregarding mealtimes and looking almost frantic in his zeal. He kept a block of cheese in the drawer, nibbled it like a rat nibbling a cake of soap and returned to work. Nothing seemed able to break his concentration. We worked all week, including during sports time. He kept on saying, “Oh boy, this has to be completed, boy.”
By the time Agatha arrived, a gigantic swan edging uphill in the dusk, a white bolt of light in a gloomy evening sky, she was already community property, dripping with the saliva of communal speculation. A glossy twelve-footer, she sat on her dolly, awash with fluorescent light, and glowed like a new alabaster Virgin. As cameras flashed in the dusk, Lageau stood in front of her, fascinated, like an inventor awed by his invention. He beamed and glowed, as if to say priesthood was the best profession on earth, as if every ordained priest got a twelve-footer at one point in his career. He had waited for Agatha for a long time, and now that she was here, he felt a boyish impatience to try her out.
Weeks of expectation followed. Everyone was watching. An African priest famous for his sycophantism drove Agatha to the lake with his car, affixed the engine and waited for Lageau to arrive.
Sometimes Lageau took a boy or two along to help with the boat. Dressed in white gym shorts, white canvas shoes and a white T-shirt, Lageau resembled a debonair tennis player. He began fishing with rods, then turned to nets. He first caught tilapia fish, then he started netting thirty- to seventy-kilo Nile perch monsters. The fathers’ fridge and deep freezer filled to the brim, but rotten beans continued to be part of our daily diet, except once a month, when we got Nile perch.
I thought about attacking Lageau head-on to ask why he was not giving us more fish, but I held back. I wanted somebody else to make the move. I didn’t want to appear to be too food-minded. I did not have long to wait.