Chapter 1
The First Memory
My earliest memory is not of my mother's face or my father's voice. It is of a sound.
I was nine. It was the fourth month of the rains, in the year I would later learn to call the last good year, though nothing about it was good except that nobody had yet died. We lived in Kawempe, in two rooms at the back of a landlord's compound, behind a mango tree that dropped its fruit on the roof all through the season, so that every night was a series of small hard knocks, like someone patient asking to be let in.
That was not the sound I mean. The sound I mean came later.
I will tell it as I remember it. I need to say that, because I have already caught myself once, writing the sentence above, wanting to tell it better. In my head I have a version in which there was thunder at exactly the right moment and a lamp that flickered and went out. I don't think there was a lamp. I think we had a candle stub on a saucer. I know it rained. I know about the mango tree. The rest I'm going to put down only when I'm sure.
My father drove lorries on the Mombasa road. I have to start with that, because it explains the house. He was away eleven days of every fourteen, and on the three days he was home the house changed shape around him, the way a room changes when you carry a heavy thing into it. His name was Mukasa Kizza. People said he was a good-looking man, and I believe it, though I only ever saw him from below. He had a gap between his front teeth, and a laugh that came out through the gap with a whistle in it, and when he was in a good mood he would lift me up by the belt of my shorts and swing me, and I would smell diesel and sweat and the cheap sweet cigarettes he smoked, and I thought there was no stronger person in Uganda.
When he was in a bad mood, the laugh went away and the gap stayed.
I am trying to be fair to him. I have had years to think about it, and I have decided that I will not make him a monster, because then I would have to make myself something else, and I am not able to. He was a man who sat in a cab for fourteen hours a day looking at a road. He was paid late and paid short. He bought beer at the border posts because there was nothing else to do there at night. I don't say it excuses anything. I say only that he was a man, and a man made him, and I can see now the line running from the one to the other, and I am afraid of it.
My mother was Rebecca. She was small, with a long neck and a high forehead, and she walked as though she had a basket on her head even when she hadn't. She sang while she worked. I remember that it was always the same three hymns, in rotation, and that she had a way of letting a song trail off into humming when she heard my father's lorry in the lane, and starting it again, softly, when she heard the engine die. Years later I understood it was how she listened. She was always listening.
I had a brother, Timothy, who was four. He slept on the mattress beside mine with his thumb in his mouth and one foot hanging off the edge, as if he were considering whether to run away.
That was all of us.
On the night I mean, my father came home at the wrong time.
He was not due until Thursday. It was Tuesday. My mother knew it was him before I did, because she was by the stove with the saucepan lid in her hand and I saw the humming stop in the middle of a bar and not start up again. I remember watching her listen. Then I heard the lane too: the cough of the lorry, the gears, the engine dying badly, in two goes, as it does when the driver has had too much to drink and can't find the key.
"Jonah," she said. "Take your brother into the back room."
I took him. He was half asleep and heavy, and I dragged him across the floor by the arms, and he cried, and I put my hand over his mouth, which was how I had learned to do it. I laid him on the mattress and pushed him to the wall. Then I did what I always did. I went and lay down on my stomach and slid under the bed.
I should explain the bed. It was my parents' bed, the only real bed in the house, with iron legs and a mattress of coconut fibre my mother had restuffed herself. It stood in the front room, behind a curtain made from a faded cloth, and under it was the tin trunk where she kept the fees for school, the rent, and the money she had put aside for the clinic. When I was small I'd thought the bed was a great ship and the trunk was a treasure. By nine, I understood that it was the one piece of furniture in the house high enough for a boy to fit under and low enough that a man in a hurry would not think to look.
I could see the room from there through a gap at the bottom of the curtain. A strip of floor. The lower half of the door. The stove. My mother's feet in her brown plastic sandals, standing still.
The door opened, and the rain came in before he did.
I can see his boots. I have always been able to see his boots. Black, the toe-caps worn through to grey leather, a crust of red mud around the soles and a loop of wet grass stuck to the left heel. They stood on the threshold for what seemed a long time. Then they came in and made a track across the floor and stopped in front of my mother's sandals.
"Where is it?" he said.
My mother did not ask what. She said, "Mukasa, you're wet. Sit. There's tea."
"I said where."
I heard something that was not a word. It was the breath of a man who is deciding. I'd heard it before, but never from so close, and never with the whole house so quiet. The rain on the roof had changed. I think the wind had dropped and it was falling straight down, a heavy steady drumming that sounded like gravel being poured.
"The company did not pay me," my father said. "Do you understand? They said, wait until the end of the month. I drove nine days. I drove to Nairobi and back and I said, I have a family, and a man in an office with a tie told me to wait." His voice cracked, the way a boy's does. "So I am here. And you have money in this house."
"It is for school," said my mother. "It is for Jonah's fees. And for Timothy's clinic. Mukasa, please."
"I want it."
"No."
I want to say that it was courage. I've heard people call it that, afterwards, when I told them. But I knew my mother, and I don't think it was. I think she simply could not make the word come out any other way. She had said yes to him for eleven years and something in her, that night, had no more yes in it.
"No," she said again, softer. "Not this one."
The sound I have been trying to reach is the next one.
It was a flat, wet, cracking sound, like a wet cloth being slapped hard on a stone. I knew what it was at once, though I had never heard it so close. Her sandals went out from under her. They went out sideways, one after the other, and then I could see the whole of her, because she fell with her face turned toward me, lying on her side on the earth floor with her cheek on the ground and her eyes open.
She looked straight at me under the bed.
I want you to understand that I have seen many faces in my life that I wish I could unsee. Faces in prison. Faces in the dark, and faces in the light. I have seen a boy's face in the last seconds of his life, and I will describe it to you before I am done. But I have never seen anything like the look my mother gave me, lying there, with a thread of blood already coming out of her nose and spreading in the dust. She did not look afraid. She looked, if I can say it, careful. She looked at me the way you look at a glass of water you are carrying across a room. Then, slowly, so slowly that I'm not sure anyone but me could have seen it, she moved her eyes away from me, deliberately, to the other side of the room, so that he would look there too.
She was telling me not to move.
She was nine years' worth of mother in one look, and she was telling me, Stay under there. Stay where it is safe. I will keep him looking at me.
I stayed.
I would like to tell you that I did not. I would like to tell you that I crawled out with the kitchen knife and stood between them with my shoulders back, and that it made him stop. I have read that story in books and I've heard it in testimonies, men saying that even as boys they were brave. I wasn't. I lay on my stomach in the dust under my mother's bed with my fingers dug into the earth and my teeth chattering, and I watched my father's boots.
They kicked her. I will not tell you all of it. I'll tell you that when it was over, one of her sandals had come off and was lying beside my hand, and that I looked at it for what felt like an hour, the little strap, the sole worn thin at the heel in the shape of her step, and that I thought, with perfect clearness, she will want that.
I will tell you that the trunk was dragged out from beside me, and that the iron scraped the earth with a long ugly noise, and that a hand came down and grabbed it, and I saw his knuckles, scraped open and wet. I'll tell you that I saw him break the lock with the heel of his boot, and that the money, which was in a sock, and in a tobacco tin, and folded in a small blue handkerchief with my mother's initials, went into his pocket in a handful, and that a few notes fluttered down and lay on the floor, and he didn't pick them up.
I'll tell you that at some point my brother started crying in the back room, and the boots stopped.
I can't explain what I did next, and I have tried for thirty-two years. I think I heard Timothy crying, and I thought, he will go to him, and I came out.
I came out from under the bed.
I came out, I stood up, I was nine years old, and I said in a high cracked voice that did not sound like mine, "Dad, don't."
My father turned around.
I have thought a lot about his face. It was wet, from the rain or from something else. He was breathing through his mouth. The gap in his teeth was showing. And for one moment, I swear it on whatever I have left, he did not know who I was. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger who walks into your house in the dark.
Then he knew me, and the look changed to something worse.
He hit me with the back of his hand. It wasn't even hard, for him. It caught me across the left eyebrow with the heavy brass ring he wore, and I sat down on the earth floor with a ringing in my head, and when I put my hand up it came away black in the bad light. That is how I got the scar I still have above my eye. People ask me, sometimes, whether it was a fight. I say yes. It is the shortest answer.
He stood over me for a second, swaying.
"Look what you made me do," he said.
He said it to my mother, or to me. I've never known which. Then he stepped over me, and over her, and went out the door into the rain, with our money in his pocket, and left it open behind him so that the water blew in across the floor and ran in thin red lines toward the drain.
That was the last time I saw my father alive.
The police found him at six the next morning. He'd walked a mile and a half along the Gayaza road in the dark, in the rain, drunk, in black boots, and a trailer had come over the rise and could not stop. I was not told the details. I overheard them over the next three days, in fragments, from the women who came to sit with my mother. I put them together the way you piece together a broken plate. The trailer had been carrying cement. The driver was a boy of nineteen who didn't stop until the next town, because he thought he had hit a dog. My father was still in the road when it got light. A woman going to the market found him. She had to put her basket down to cover his face.
The money was in his pocket. Every shilling. The police gave it back to my mother in a plastic bag, with blood on it, and she washed it in a basin one note at a time and hung it up on a string across the room to dry, and for two days our house looked like a place where somebody was celebrating.
I didn't cry at the funeral. I want to put that down plainly, because I have never said it to anyone.
I stood by the grave in a shirt that was too big for me, and I watched the men lower the box on ropes, and I looked at the hole, and I felt something move through my chest that I did not have a name for. It took me years. I thought it might be grief. It wasn't. It was relief. A great, cold, shameful release, like a fist opening. He's not coming back. He is never coming back. I was nine years old, and I stood at my own father's grave and was glad.
And I knew, even then, that I shouldn't be, and I knew that God, if He was there, had heard me think it.
That is where I think it started. Not with the bed or the boots. With that moment, with the gladness and the shame mixed together, and the way I made up my mind about the second. I decided I would not feel it. If I couldn't stop being glad, I would stop being a boy who could be shamed. I put it somewhere, like the money in the sock, and tied it, and I didn't look at it again for thirty years.
The pastor said something at the graveside. I remember the sentence because I hated it.
"The Lord has taken our brother home," he said.
I remember thinking, with a nine-year-old's terrible logic, then why didn't He take him sooner?
I thought: if He can reach into a road in the dark and take my father out of it, why couldn't He have done it a day earlier, an hour, a minute? Why couldn't He have reached into our house and held a hand across the doorway? Where was He when the boots came in? Was He under the bed, with me? Did He lie there on His stomach in the dirt? Did He watch?
I did not ask it aloud. A boy who asks that gets slapped. I held it, instead, the way I held the rest. But I watched my mother, and my mother, who had a bruise the size of a plate down the whole left side of her face, and a front tooth gone, and a rib the clinic said was cracked, stood at the grave of the man who had done it, in a black dress borrowed from the neighbour, with her chin up, and she sang.
I couldn't believe it. The old hymn she sang by the stove. She stood at the edge of that hole, with her swollen mouth, and sang it, all the way through, in her cracked voice. And when the song ended she bent down, stiffly, because of the rib, and picked up a handful of red earth, and let it run out between her fingers onto the lid.
I looked at her and I thought, you are a fool. I'm sorry. I have to be honest with you. I thought that, God forgive me, about the best person I ever knew.
I'll tell you one more thing about that night, and then I want to stop for a while.
There was something I did not see. I only learned of it twenty-seven years later, and when I learned it, I had to leave the room.
After my father went out into the rain, and after Timothy had been quietened, and after I'd been put to bed with a wet cloth over my eye, my mother stayed up. I know this because I woke in the small hours and the curtain was open a crack and there was a light in the front room. A candle. And in the candle's light, on the earth floor where the blood had dried, my mother was kneeling.
I thought she was cleaning. She had a cloth in one hand. But she was not moving, and I realised after a moment that she was praying. She prayed the way she did everything, without fuss, without any show. She just knelt, with her bruised face turned up, and spoke, in the low voice she used for the Lord and for the sick.
I couldn't hear all of it. But I heard my own name. I heard it twice. I heard a few words around it that I did not then understand and that I do now, because I've since read where she wrote them down.
Keep Jonah, she said.
Whatever he does. Wherever he goes. Keep him alive.
I turned over and went back to sleep. A boy of nine with a split eyebrow, who had just been glad his father was dead, listening to his mother pray for him, and I thought nothing of it. I thought it was just something she did.
I did not know that it was the first of eleven thousand.
It's light now. I've been writing for I don't know how long, and the lamp has burned down and the room is the colour of weak tea. Somewhere below me a woman is beating a mat, and the cockerel has found the sun and is taking credit for it.
I've read back over what I wrote. It's not as good as I wanted. It's not as angry as I remember, or as quiet. Probably it's both, and the page can't hold both.
Look at my hand. It's steadier now.
I notice that I have written my father's boots eleven times, and my mother's only a few. I think that's true to how I remember it. I think a boy of nine under a bed remembers boots. The mother he kept for later.
Tomorrow I will write about the boy I was, before it all went wrong and after, and about the hymn she sang that I hated and would give anything to hear now, and about a football.
But I want to leave a note, for myself or for you, at the bottom of this first page, because I think I'll need it later.
The first person who ever prayed for me did it on a mud floor at two in the morning, with a broken rib, and I didn't hear it.
I'm hearing it now.