Chapter 8
Grace
Mama Joyce found out what I was writing.
It was my own fault. I left the blue book open on the table this morning when I went down to the tap, and when I came back she was standing over it with the tea in one hand, not reading, I'll give her that, only standing, with her eyes on the open page and her mouth pressed shut.
"It isn't school work," she said.
"No."
She put the mug down very gently. She looked at me for what felt like a full minute. She's a big woman, as I've said, and I have been afraid of fewer things in my life than I was of her expression just then.
"Is it your testimony?" she asked.
I said I didn't know what it was.
"Pastor Wasswa said you would write one." She nodded slowly. "I said no, not that one. He doesn't talk." And then she did something I wasn't prepared for. She reached out and put her large, warm, work-hardened hand on top of my head, as you would on a child, and held it there. She said nothing at all. When she took it away, there were tears running down her face and she had her chin up.
"Eat," she said. "You'll be hungry. This part is the hardest."
She went out.
I don't know how she knew. But she was right. This part is the hardest.
I've been dreading it for two weeks. I have written you the darkness, which I thought would be impossible, and it was only difficult. Now I have to write you the light, and I find I don't know how. Because I told you at the start that I wouldn't make it neater than it was. And the truth is that grace did not arrive like a sunrise. It arrived like a thaw. It came in places, and went back, and came again, and some of it I didn't see until it was already behind me.
So let me begin with the church. And with how I nearly didn't go.
Timothy stayed three days.
On the second night we sat in the Gateway Guesthouse yard till late, drinking sodas out of the bottle, and he told me about the church he'd stopped attending and the one he'd started again. He said it was small, on a hill, above the town, in a tin building the size of a classroom, and the pastor was a former bus conductor with a limp, and the worship was out of tune. "You'll hate it," he said, cheerfully. "It's wonderful. Come."
I said I wasn't ready.
"Nobody is," said Timothy. "That's the whole point."
I went on the Sunday. I wore the one clean shirt I had, which Joel had washed in the river and dried on a bush, and a pair of trousers belonging to his absent son. I walked up the hill with my brother on one side and Joel, to my surprise, on the other, in his best white shirt and cap, carrying a tin of biscuits.
"You're not coming in," I said.
"I will sit on the step," said Joel. "It is an honour to guard the door."
"You haven't sung in that old church of yours for twenty years."
"No," said Joel. "But I am a fisherman. I guard what needs guarding."
The church was called Mercy Hill Fellowship. It stood on a bare red ridge at the top of a dirt road, with the whole of Jinja laid out below it, and the river beyond, a wide bright blade in the sun. It was exactly as Timothy had said: a tin box, painted blue, with a cross nailed over the door and a hand-lettered sign on a board. Inside it was cool and dim and smelled of paraffin and soap. There were forty plastic chairs in rows. A drum kit stood in the corner with a cracked cymbal. A woman was fiddling with an amplifier.
I stood in the doorway and I could not move my feet.
I have to explain, because it isn't what you think. It wasn't fear of God. It was fear of the people. There were perhaps thirty of them already seated: old women in headscarves, young men in pressed shirts, children kicking the legs of their chairs. They were ordinary. They were just ordinary people, with their hands in their laps and their Bibles open. And I thought, looking at them: they're clean.
I mean it exactly. I thought it, almost in those words. They are clean, and I'm not. I looked at the faces, and I was certain every one of them had spent their life doing small decent things. Selling vegetables. Paying school fees. Washing the dishes. Not one of them had ever knelt in a pool of someone else's blood. And I thought that I would walk in among them like a stain on a white cloth, and the whole room would feel it.
"Jonah," said Timothy quietly, at my shoulder.
"I can't."
"Yes, you can."
"They'll know."
"Know what?"
"What I am."
My brother looked at me. Then he said something I've never forgotten. "Jonah. Look at the cross."
I looked. It was a plain wooden cross, hung on the back wall above a table with a white cloth, a little crooked, made of two planks.
"Do you know who they think they are?" said Timothy. "In that room? Do you know what they believe about themselves? They believe they're forgiven. Not good. Not clean. They'd laugh if you said it. They've simply been told that something was paid. And they've said, thank you. That's all. That's the whole of it." He looked at the old women. "Half of them have done things you couldn't print. Go in."
I went in. I sat in the back row, on the end, next to the door.
I remember little of the singing. It was loud and off the beat and the drummer kept dropping a stick. A woman in front of me wept with her hands raised. A boy of five climbed onto the seat beside me and stared up at the scar on my face until his mother pulled him away. It was warm, with a heavy smell of bodies and polish. I sat with my hands between my knees, staring at the floor, and let it wash over me like weather.
Then the pastor stood up, and the noise dropped.
He was a small man in a brown suit that didn't fit, about sixty, with a grey beard and a heavy limp. He walked to the front with a stick, slowly, and put a worn Bible on the lectern, and stood for a long time without saying anything. His name was David Wasswa. I'd learn that he had been a conductor on the Kampala–Mbale buses for twenty-two years, and a drunk for eighteen of them; that he'd been hit by a lorry on the Jinja road one night, coming out of a bar, and spent seven months in a hospital bed, where a Gideon Bible fell open on the blanket; and that he'd preached in that tin building every Sunday for fifteen years.
I knew none of that. I saw a shabby old man in a wrong-sized suit.
"I'm going to read you a story," said Pastor Wasswa. "You all know it. I am going to read it anyway, because I don't think we have heard it yet."
He opened the book.
"A certain man had two sons."
I stiffened.
"And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living."
He read it in a flat, slow, ordinary voice, without drama, one verse after the other. I knew the story. Everyone does. The younger son goes into a far country and wastes his substance in riotous living. A famine comes. He feeds pigs. He is so hungry he'd eat what the pigs eat.
"And when he came to himself," read the pastor, "he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants."
I did not move.
"Now," said Pastor Wasswa, and closed the book on his finger. "I want you to notice something about this young man. He has a speech. He has prepared it. All the way home, he practises it. Father, I have sinned. I am no more worthy. He has worked out what he will say, and what he will ask for, which is a job. He doesn't want to be a son again. He wants a position. He wants to earn his bread." The old man smiled slightly. "Perhaps some of us have prepared a speech."
A woman near the front said, "Hm."
"But listen to what happens. Listen." He opened the book. "But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him."
He stopped.
"Yet a great way off," said Pastor Wasswa. "Do you see? The boy is not at the gate. He is not in the yard. He is not even in the road. He is a speck on the horizon, in rags, stinking of pigs. And the father sees him. Which means that the father has been looking. Not at the house. Not at the fields. At the road. At the very place the boy left by."
I was gripping the plastic chair so hard my fingers had gone white.
"And had compassion," the pastor read, "and ran."
He laid the book down.
"I want you to think about that," he said gently. "A man of standing, in that culture, does not run. It is shameful. He gathers up his robes, and he shows his bare legs, and he runs down the road like a child, with his arms out, in front of the whole village. He does it without thinking. He does it before the boy can open his mouth and say the speech." He leaned on his stick. "And fell on his neck, and kissed him."
There was a silence in the tin church.
"The boy says it anyway," said the pastor. "Father, I have sinned. But the father isn't listening. He is calling to the servants. Bring forth the best robe. The best one. Not the second best. And put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. Shoes. He's a son. Servants go barefoot. And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry."
He looked up, at us, all of us, and then, I swear it, straight down the aisle to the back row, to the end by the door.
"For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."
I didn't hear the rest.
I remember the sound my chair made as I stood. I remember a hand on my sleeve, Timothy's, and shaking it off. I remember walking out through the door, into the white sun, past Joel sitting on the step with the biscuit tin on his knee, who looked up and said nothing. I remember walking round the side of the building and sitting down on the red earth in the shade of a mango tree, with my back against the trunk, and my head down on my knees.
Yet a great way off.
I thought of a lane in Kawempe. A lantern in a window. A woman at a table with her hand on a book, who stayed up till eleven because there was nothing else she could do, and who had written, in the margin of a psalm, he is not looking up, so I look for him.
I thought, She was the father.
And then, because I'm slow, and because it took me a long minute, I thought a second thing, which made me put my hands over my face.
No. She was only pointing at him.
He found me there after the service. I'd been sitting for an hour. The congregation had gone, and I'd heard them go: chairs scraping, voices, a car, children laughing, and then a stillness. A shadow came and stood on the grass.
"I hope you don't mind," said Pastor Wasswa. "I'm not good at getting down. May I sit on the root?"
I said he could.
He lowered himself carefully onto a thick root of the mango tree, with his stick between his knees, and he didn't look at me. He looked out over the town, at the water. A pair of kites were circling above the roofs.
"My father is dead," he said, after a while. "Twenty-six years. I did not go to the funeral. I was drunk in a bar in Tororo. I will tell you the name of it if you like." He smiled slightly. "I mention it in case you were thinking you were the only one."
"I killed a man," I said.
I said it flatly, to the grass. It came out as a short plain sentence. I'd said it in the Gateway yard to my brother, and he had not recoiled; I'd said it to the wall. But I had not said it, until then, to a stranger, in the open air, in the daylight, in front of a man in a brown suit.
Pastor Wasswa didn't move. After a moment he said, "Yes. I thought it might be something like that."
"You thought—"
"You look at the cross like a man who is measuring it." He shrugged. "People who've done small things look at it and feel nothing. They've never needed it. People who've done big things sometimes look at it as if they're asking: is it long enough?" He turned to face me. "It's long enough, Mr. Kizza."
"You don't know what I did."
"No. Not yet."
"If you did—"
"If I did," said the old man, "I would still be sitting on this root."
I looked at him. He had a small, tired, lined face, with a scar through one eyebrow, and a missing tooth, and clear grey eyes that did not blink. It was not a face that was shocked by much.
"Tell me when you're ready," he said. "Not today. Not next week. I'm not in a hurry. I'm an old bus conductor. I've waited in worse places."
He pushed himself up on his stick. "One thing. May I?"
"Yes."
"I saw you leave when I read about the father running." He nodded. "Most people leave at the part about the pigs. They can't bear it. They think, I'm not that bad. But you left at the part about the ring and the shoes." He smiled gently. "That's the part that's hardest to take. Not that you were lost. That you're wanted."
He limped away. I sat there a long time. The kites went round.
I want to tell you that I went home, and gave my life to Christ, and it was all over.
I didn't. What I did was go back the following Sunday, and the one after that, and sit in the same chair in the back row by the door with my fists clenched. I did not sing. I did not raise my hands. I listened. And between the Sundays I read, at night, in the shed, by the lamp, a little at a time, from the black book with my mother's pencil in the margins.
I read the Gospels first. They were shorter than I'd thought, and stranger. The man in them did things no one would have predicted. He touched lepers. He ate with the kind of men I'd worked for. He let a woman with a bad name wash his feet with her hair, and when the respectable people complained, he said that she loved much because she'd been forgiven much, and he said it with a look that I could almost see. He wept at a grave. He drove out the money-changers with a whip of cords. He went into the houses of tax-collectors and sat down.
It was not the Christ of my mother's church, the pale one in the window, with the sheep. This one had dust on his feet. He was angry sometimes and tired sometimes. He didn't flinch.
And I began, slowly, in the way that a man who's been in the dark for a long time begins to see the shape of a room, to wonder whether I had ever known him at all.
Now I'll tell you about the failure.
I'd been reading for about eleven weeks. I was sober. I was working. I was going to church, and Pastor Wasswa and I had begun to talk, on Thursday evenings, in the tin building, with an oil lamp between us. I hadn't told him about Daniel, not the details. But I'd told him enough, and he had listened, and I had begun to think, God help me, that I might be all right.
It was a Wednesday in November. The rains had begun again.
My phone rang at nine at night. I had a phone by then, a cheap thing Timothy had left me, with a pay-as-you-go card. I looked at the screen. It was a number I knew by heart, though I'd never saved it, because you don't save the number of a man like that. It rang four times. I let it. Then I answered.
"Jonah," said the voice. It was Ssebo.
He was older. Hoarse. He said he'd heard I was alive. He said he was sorry about the river, that he'd had nothing to do with it, he'd been in Kenya. He said that Walu was old now and sick and sorry, that he'd lost his wife, and that he wanted to see me. To apologise. To make amends. He had something to give me. Money, or a house, or something. He couldn't say on the phone.
"Where is he?" I said.
"Kampala. The old place. He'll see you tomorrow."
I said I didn't want anything from him.
"Then come and tell him that," said Ssebo, very gently. "To his face. That's all he wants. A man should be allowed to hear it."
I put the phone down.
I want you to know the truth about what happened next, and I'm going to tell it badly, because I'm ashamed. I went outside. I stood in the rain, in the dark, and I knew what he was doing. I knew it was a trap, or if not a trap then a hook. I knew every word of it. I could have recited the whole speech. And I stood there, with the water running down my neck, and I felt something rise in me that I had not felt for a year.
I want to see his face.
It wasn't about forgiveness. I'd like to say it was. I thought of a boy of nineteen in a green jersey, and of a woman in a nightdress, and I thought of what Walu had said to me across a plate of goat and chips, and I thought: I want him to know what he did. I want to stand in that office with the plant and say: you made me. I wanted to see him afraid. I wanted to put my hands on his throat, I think, if I'm honest, not to kill him, but to feel what it was like for him to be small.
It was the heat. The old heat, behind the lid. After a year, it was as strong as ever. It came up my neck like a hand.
I took the last bus to Kampala at ten.
I did not tell Joel. I did not tell Timothy. I did not tell the pastor. I took the black Bible from the cot, and then put it back, because I could not walk into that place with it. I told myself I'd be back by morning.
It's strange to write the next part. I have it in pieces.
I remember the bus station at midnight, a cold concrete hall full of dozing people. I remember walking, for an hour, through streets I'd known as a young man, past shuttered shops and flickering signs. I remember a bar on Kabalagala hill, one I'd drunk at for ten years. The light was green and the music was loud. The door was open. And I remember standing in front of it with my hands in my pockets, and thinking, I'll only go in to ask the way.
I drank.
I'd like to say it was a lot. It wasn't. It was one glass of cheap gin, which I took in two swallows standing at the bar. It burned all the way down, the old burn, and it hit me like the shock of cold in the river, and I stood there with my hand on the counter and my eyes shut, and I swear to you I felt the hum begin. The hum that I'd chased for twenty years. It came up from my stomach to the back of my skull and it said: Ah. There you are.
I had a second. And a third.
I don't remember how it started. There was a young man at the end of the bar in a red cap who bumped my elbow and spilled my drink. He said something, a joke, I don't recall. He laughed. And I turned round.
I saw myself do it. That's the horror. I seemed to stand a little way behind, up near the ceiling, and watch. I saw a man with a scar through his eyebrow and a long white seam down his right arm pick up a bottle from the bar, calmly, by the neck, and smash its base against the edge of the counter. I saw the young man's face change. I saw it go grey with fear and then open into the O of a child's. I saw the jagged glass go back.
I heard someone shout, "Jonah!"
It wasn't a voice from the bar. It was in my head. It came from a long way off, a woman's voice, high and cracked, and I knew it was my mother's, calling me to dinner across the football road. And between the two things, the glass and the voice, there was a gap, perhaps half a second. I used it. I don't know how.
I dropped the bottle.
It burst on the concrete floor. The young man ran. The barman was shouting. Two other men had me by the arms, and I was struggling, and someone hit me in the face, and I went down, and there were boots, kicks, in the ribs, in the back, in the kidneys, black boots with the toe-caps worn through. I lay curled on the floor with my arms over my head and let them.
Good, I thought. Good. Good. Good.
I woke in a ditch.
It was dawn. It was raining, a thin cold drizzle. I was lying on my back in a trench of brown water beside a road with my face swollen shut and my shirt in rags. One eye wouldn't open. My mouth was full of blood. I could taste cheap gin, and under it a deeper, older taste, the metal of shame.
I lay there and looked at the sky.
It was low and grey and wet, with a bird moving across it. The water in the ditch ran past my ears. And I thought, with a slow, flat, terrible clarity: Well. That's that.
That's all of it, then.
I thought: Twelve months. A Bible. A sermon. I thought I'd changed. And a man says one word, and I'm in a bar with a bottle in my hand. I'd nearly done it again. If a half second had been a quarter shorter, there would have been a boy on a floor with his face open. I had stood in a church. I had said a prayer on a cot. And I was exactly the same animal I'd always been.
He gets a girl, and runs. He gets a friend, and sells him. He gets a mother, and doesn't come home. The voice was mine, and it was reasonable. Why would it be different now? What makes you think you're a prodigal? He had a father to run to. What have you got? A dead woman and a book.
It's a pretty story, said the voice. But you of all people ought to know there are some men it doesn't work for.
I lay there, in the ditch, in the rain, and I believed it.
I want to tell you that, because I think it's the part testimonies leave out. After the first light, after the first prayer, there comes a morning when you wake in the mud and you think: it was only a mood. It was a feeling. It's gone. And you are as far from home as you have ever been, and you are certain that this time it's final.
I did not get up for a long time.
I got back on the Thursday night.
I don't know how. I walked, and I begged a lift on a lorry, and I think I slept in a bus shelter. By the time I came down the path to the shed I was filthy, bruised, hollow-eyed, and sober. And I had decided what I was going to do.
I was going to pack my things. I would leave the Bible on the cot. I would leave a note for Joel, thanking him, and go. Somewhere there was a place where a man like me could vanish. I didn't care where. I'd stop pretending.
But Joel was sitting in the doorway on his stool. He'd been sitting there, I think, for two days. His white cap lay on his knee. He looked up at my face, at the swollen eye, the split lip, the torn shirt, and I saw him take it in, all of it, in a single glance, the way he'd have read a net.
He didn't say a word.
He got up. He went into the shed and filled a basin from the water jar. He took the cake of soap and a clean rag, and sat me down on the stool, and knelt in front of me on the mud. And he began to wash my hands.
I tried to pull them away.
"No," said Joel.
"You don't understand."
"No," he said again, quite calmly. "I do not. And I do not need to. Give me your hands."
I gave them. He turned them palm up and washed them slowly, in the lamplight, one finger at a time, the way you wash the hands of a child, and the water went brown, and then grey, and he emptied it and filled the basin again. He washed the scar on my wrist. He washed the knuckles, which were split and swollen. He washed the lines of my palms. He went on until the water ran clear.
I sat on the stool and wept. I've never wept like that. I made a noise like something being torn.
"I tried to kill a boy," I said. "I didn't. I tried. I was going to."
"Yes."
"I'm the same. I'm no different."
"Brother," said Joel, drying my hands on his shirt, "there is a thing I know about the river. It does not wash the bank clean. In the rains it brings down mud and rubbish and dead trees and the bank is a worse mess than before. And in the dry season it goes back. And the bank is still there." He put my hands back in my lap. "I am not a clever man. But I think you look for a day when you will be clean forever, and there is no such day. There is only a man who washes."
I looked up at him.
"I will tell you what my wife said to me," said the old fisherman, "the day before she died. She said, Joel, you are not good. But you are mine." He laughed, a thin dry rustle. "I thought about it for years. I did not understand. And now I think perhaps that is what God says to all of us. Not you are good. I think it is you are Mine."
The pastor came that evening.
Joel had sent a boy. I heard the stick on the path, tap and drag, tap and drag, before I saw him, and I was sitting on the cot with my back against the wall and my arms round my knees. He came in, lowered himself onto the stool Joel had left, and looked at my face. Then he put down his stick across his knees, and folded his hands, and waited.
I told him.
It took three hours. The lamp burned down and Joel trimmed it and lit another. I told him all of it, in order, as I've told you. I told him about Daniel. I told him the whole of the godown, the swinging bulb, the green jersey, the word, the weight of the heart under my hand. I told him about Teopista Ssali, and the light in the kitchen window, and the eight seconds on the road. I told him about the tailor. I told him about Sarah. About the gap in her teeth, and the window, and the toy, and the child with her name. I told him about Brian. I told him about the bottle the night before. I didn't spare myself. I didn't spare anyone.
He did not interrupt. He did not flinch. At one point his lips moved, and I thought he was praying. He sat with his face turned a little to one side, as though he were listening to music, and at the end of it he was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, "Thank you."
I stared at him.
"It's not an easy thing to carry that in to a person," said Pastor Wasswa. "You've been carrying it a very long time. I'm honoured you put it down in front of me."
"Aren't you going to say anything?"
"I'm going to say a few things." He rubbed his eyes. "May I?"
I nodded.
"The first is that I am not shocked. I want you to hear that. I'd like to say I am, as a matter of piety, but it wouldn't be honest. I've sat in this seat across from a lot of people. I've been a bus conductor. I know the Kampala roads. There is nothing in what you have said that is outside the reach of what Christ died for." He paused. "Do you know who Moses was?"
"The one with the sea."
"A murderer. He killed an Egyptian and buried him in the sand. Do you know who David was? A king who sent a man to the front line to be killed so he could have his wife. Do you know who Paul was? A man who held the coats while they stoned Stephen. He was there. He consented." He tapped the stick on the floor. "The Bible, Mr. Kizza, is not a book about good people. It is a book about what God does with the other kind."
I said nothing.
"The second thing." He reached into his jacket, with some difficulty, and took out a small worn paperback, and opened it to a page he'd marked. "I want to read you a verse. It's from John's first letter. I don't need you to believe it. I just need you to hear it said, in this room, tonight, by someone who knows what you've said."
He read it slowly.
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
He closed the book.
"Faithful," said the pastor, "and just."
"Just?" I said bitterly.
"I know. People hear that word and they think, just? I deserve to be condemned. You do. So do I. That's the thing I'm trying to tell you." He leaned forward. "God is just. The debt is real. Daniel is real. Teopista Ssali is real. God does not say these things don't matter. He doesn't wave them away. He says: it has been paid. The justice has been done. It was done on a Friday, outside Jerusalem, in the afternoon, to a man who had done nothing. That is why He can forgive you and still be just. Because He didn't skip the price. He paid it."
I put my head in my hands. "That's too easy."
"Yes," said Pastor Wasswa.
I looked up.
"It is too easy," he said. "For you. It's not easy for Him." He opened the book to another page. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast."
"I haven't done anything."
"Exactly."
"Then what do I do?"
"You receive it," said the old man. "That's all. It is the hardest thing in the world, because we want to earn it. We want to make up for it. We want to be punished first. We think if we suffer enough, it will count." He held my eyes. "You have suffered enough, in a way that most men never will. And it hasn't paid for one shilling. Do you understand? Not a shilling. All your years. All your prison. The river, the bullet. None of it bought anything. That's what grace means. It means He was never waiting for you to pay."
I couldn't speak.
"Do you want to?" said the pastor. "Not to feel it. I'm not asking you to feel it. Do you want to take it?"
I said, "I don't know how."
"You said it to the wall, I think. On the night you read the Psalm." He smiled. "Say it again."
I knelt.
I didn't mean to. My knees went, and I was on the earth floor with my arms across the edge of the cot, my forehead against the grey blanket, and the smell of paraffin and tar and old rope, and the river running outside. I felt a hand settle on my shoulder. I think it was the pastor's. Another, lighter, rested on my back, and I knew it was Joel's, and I didn't care that he was an old man who sat at the back of church and never sang, or that the three of us were kneeling in that shed together. I had no strength left to care about anything.
I said it aloud, in a rasping whisper.
"Lord. I am Jonah Kizza. I killed Daniel Ssekandi. I killed Teopista Ssali. I broke Kasirye's hand. I left Sarah. I left my daughter. I sold my friend. I left my mother to die. I hated You, and I blamed You, and I went into hell on my own feet and I stayed there. I have no excuse. I'm not asking You to excuse me.
"I'm asking You to take it.
"I can't carry it any more. I don't know how to put it down. They say You paid. I don't understand it. But I'm giving You — everything. All of it. I don't have anything else.
"Please. Wash me."
I stopped. I was weeping so hard I couldn't breathe.
And then, because I remembered it, I said the last thing.
"Don't let go."
I want to tell you what happened. I've turned it over so many times, and I know you may not believe me, and I will say only what I can.
Nothing came down from the roof. There was no light and no voice. I didn't see a hand. I knelt on the floor of a fisherman's shed, in the lamplight, with two old men beside me, and I cried, and my nose ran, and my back shook. Then, slowly, over a period I couldn't measure, the crying stopped.
And I became aware of a quiet.
It was not the quiet I'd known in the cell, or the quiet of the room in Kabalagala, the dead stillness at the bottom of the pit. This was a different thing. It was warm. It was as if a pressure that had been in the room all my life, a hum, a tension, a note held too long, had simply ceased. The air was clear. I heard the river outside, and the frogs, and the soft tick of the cooling stove, and I heard them as though for the first time, each one separately, like beads on a string.
I felt as I had once as a child, after a fever. When the heat breaks, and you lie there, drenched and weak, and everything is gentle.
I lifted my head.
"Is it —" I said. "Did it —"
"I don't know," said Pastor Wasswa quietly. "What do you feel?"
I thought about it.
"Not clean," I said slowly. "I don't feel clean. Not exactly." I looked at my hands, which were open on the blanket. "But I don't feel — alone."
The pastor smiled. Tears were running down into his beard.
"That," he said, "is a very good place to start."
I don't want to leave you with the impression that it was over.
It wasn't. The next morning I woke at two, in a sweat, with the green jersey in my head. The next week, I dreamed of the fire. I thought, in the middle of the second Sunday service, they'll find out. They'll look at me and know. I felt the guilt come back like a tide, and I wondered whether I'd been tricked, whether I had said the words and nothing had happened.
I told Pastor Wasswa on the Thursday. He didn't look troubled. He said, "Of course."
"Of course?"
"You've been carrying that thing so long, your arms don't know how to be empty," he said. "You keep reaching for it. It's habit. Every time you reach for it, say what you said that night." He tapped my chest with his finger. "Lord. Take it. As often as you need. A hundred times a day, if you must. He never gets tired."
"What if I don't feel it?"
"Then say it anyway. Feeling follows. It always does."
And I discovered that he was right. It took months. I won't pretend to you it was a clean line. For a long time I'd say the words and feel nothing but the dry wind of my own doubt. But there came a Tuesday in January when I was knotting a net, and the old weight came up in me, the green jersey, the smell of petrol, and I said under my breath, Lord, take it, and something in me did, quite distinctly, loosen. A knot undone. I put down the needle. I sat there with my eyes open, watching a heron stand on one leg in the shallows, and I thought, with a kind of wonder: it works.
Not magic. Not an erasure. The memory was still there. But the sting had gone out of it, a little, the way the sting goes from a wound when you stop picking at it.
I was baptised in March.
It was Pastor Wasswa's idea, and Timothy's, and Joel's, in that order. I said I wasn't sure I should. They said, in one voice, that I'd been in the river already.
We went to the Nile at sunrise. It was a Sunday. A pale gold light lay over the water, and a thin mist rose from the surface and hung in the trees. The whole congregation had come down from the hill, forty people in their best clothes, with their shoes in their hands, and they stood in a line along the bank, singing. Timothy was there, with Esther, and their daughter Rebecca on his shoulders. Sister Agnes was there, in her cap, with her big arms folded and a face like a lamp. Mama Joyce, whom I'd not yet met, though I was to rent her room in a year, stood at the back with a tambourine.
And out on the water, just beyond the reeds, sat an old man in a long black boat, with a white cap, who had not come ashore, because he said a baptism was no place for a man who smelled of fish. He was holding the oars across his knees. He lifted one hand.
Pastor Wasswa waded in beside me. He was in a white shirt, rolled up to the elbow, with his stick left on the bank. He walked with a dreadful limp through the soft mud, and the water came up to his waist. It was warm. It was brown. It moved against my legs like a living thing.
I stood in it up to my chest, my feet sinking into the silt, with the sun coming up behind the trees. It was the same river. It was exactly the same, the water that had struck me like a wall, and carried me through the dark with a hole in my chest. I looked down at it. I could see, through the brown, my own hands.
I felt no fear.
"Jonah Kizza," said the pastor. His voice carried over the water. "Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who died for your sins and rose again?"
"I do."
"Do you give your life to Him?"
"What's left of it," I said.
Someone laughed on the bank, softly. The pastor smiled.
"That's all He wants," he said. "Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life."
He put one hand on my back, and one over my folded hands, and he said, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
I went under.
I'll tell you what I saw.
For a moment, there was brown darkness and a roar in my ears. I felt the current take my body. It was gentle. It was almost fond. I opened my eyes, and above me the surface was a trembling gold plate, shot with sun, and I thought, quite distinctly: This is where I was. Nine hours. I was here. And I wasn't alone.
Then the hands lifted me.
I came up out of the water into the light.
It was so bright I couldn't see. The air was cold on my wet face. I heard a great sound, the congregation, shouting, singing, the tambourine, Sister Agnes ululating in her huge round voice, and my brother's laughter. I gasped. The sun hit my eyes, and ran through the water in them, and for a second the whole world was a sheet of gold.
And I heard, very faintly, from the black boat on the water, the old man's voice calling across: "Jonah!"
I stood in the river with my arms hanging. I was thirty-seven years old. I was soaked. My shirt clung to the scar on my chest. And I put my head back, and I laughed, a loud, cracked, astonished laugh that I'd never in my life heard come out of me.
It was not the laugh of a man who has been made clean. I want to be exact. I had not been made into something else. I had the same hands. I had the same scars, the same memories, the same blood on my name. I was exactly what I had always been.
I was only, now, held.
It is evening. The light's gone. Outside, on the hill, the church is dark and the bell is quiet, and I have written a long way tonight.
I said at the beginning of this chapter that I'd tell you about grace, and that I didn't know how.
I think I know now. I think the best I can do is this.
I spent twenty-five years looking for a door out of hell. I tried football, and money, and drink, and violence, and women, and silence. I tried forgetting. I tried burying. I tried being so busy that the dead couldn't catch me.
And all that time, I was looking in the wrong direction. I thought hell was a place you escape by running. I thought the way out was away.
It wasn't away. It was toward.
There was someone standing at the far end of the road, in the dust, with his robes gathered up, who had been looking at the horizon since the day I left. And when I finally turned my face to him, he did not wait for my speech. He didn't want my résumé. He just ran.
That's grace. I'm sorry that I can't say it better.
He ran.