Epilogue
The Lamp
I have been asked to add a page, so here is a page.
It is a year later. I know because I have counted, out of habit, on the wall, with the nail, though the wall is a different wall now. I moved in September. It's two rooms at the back of Mama Joyce's compound, behind a mango tree, in the kind of lane where the children play football in the road. The tree drops its fruit on the tin roof all through the rains. Each night is a series of small hard knocks, like someone patient asking to be let in.
I leave the door unlatched.
I have a record. I can't get a passport. A man with a conviction for arson causing death does not find it easy to be hired. Joel doesn't ask, and over the past year he has taught me to read the water and mend a net the way his father did. I earn what a fisherman earns. It is not much. It is enough.
I still wake at two. Not every night. Perhaps once a week, now, perhaps less. It's usually Daniel. He doesn't speak any more. He sits in the corner in the green jersey, and I say, I know, and I'm sorry, and the Lord has you, and sometimes that is enough and sometimes I put on the lamp and read until it's light. I still wash my hands more than a man ought. I did it this morning. The pastor says it may never stop and that this is not a sin. He says it is a scar of the kind that doesn't show.
I have a record. I can't get a passport. A man with a conviction for arson causing death does not find it easy to be hired, and I'm grateful to Joel, who doesn't ask, and who has taught me, in the past year, to read the water and to mend a net the way his father did. I earn what a fisherman earns. It is not much. It is enough.
It doesn't need an answer. It needs only to be asked.
I write every Christmas and every anniversary. I don't expect a reply. I send a card with two lines, one that says I'm thinking of his mother, and one that says that I'm sorry, and I put no return address because I think he would burn it. I've given up wanting to be forgiven by him. I find I want something stranger. I want him to be well. I want his arm to ache less. I want a good wife for him, and a child who gets his mother's laugh. I pray it every morning. I think this is what my mother meant by keep.
It doesn't need an answer. It needs only to be asked.
On Thursdays I go to Port Bell.
I take the early minibus taxi, with Joel, and we sit on the end of the pier. Miriam is there at four, with her basket of doughnuts. She sells them to the fishermen, and gives me one, with a look, as one gives bread to a dog that has been told to behave. She doesn't speak much. She sits on her stool with her feet in the sun, and I sit on the planks with mine hanging over the water, and Joel tells her about the fish. After an hour she gets up and goes.
Last month she said, as she was leaving, "My second daughter is to be married."
I said, "God bless her."
I meant it more than I had expected to.
Miriam has not forgiven me. I have stopped treating that as a debt she owes me. On Thursdays I sit at the end of the pier, and sometimes she gives me bread. For now, that is enough.
I sent a goat.
I tell you this because I think it is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in my life, and because I think I've been as close to grace on that pier as I have ever been in a church. Not because she forgave me. She hasn't. She will not. It is not what she does. But I have been given a place, at the end of a pier, on Thursday afternoons, and sometimes an old woman gives me bread. It is the whole world.
Hope is eighteen.
She started at Makerere in August. She's doing literature, which will surprise nobody, and lives in a hostel with three other girls and a fan that does not turn. She rings me on Sundays. Sometimes she doesn't, and I don't ask. Last term she came to Jinja for a weekend, and sat in the back of Mercy Hill with her arms folded and a face like a closed door. At the sermon she stirred. At the singing she did not move. At the end she walked out, and stood beside the red road with her back to me, looking down at the river, and said, without turning:
"I'm not a Christian."
"All right."
"I'm just saying."
"I know."
"It's interesting. That's all." She put her hands in her pockets. "I'm not saying it isn't."
"It isn't a thing you're supposed to decide on a Sunday," I said.
She laughed, once, shortly. She did not look round.
I'd given her the blue book at Christmas. I'd been afraid to. I'd put it into a plastic bag, and wrapped it in newspaper, and put it into her hands in the yard of the guesthouse, and said, "There's nothing you have to do with it." She'd said, "What is it?" I'd said, "It's what happened." She'd looked at me for a long while with her head on one side.
She brought it back in January.
She'd read it in a week. She was very formal about it. She stood in my doorway with the bag held in front of her in both hands, as I'd held the stone, and said, "I'm giving it back. I'm not sure I'm allowed to keep it." And then, quickly, before I could say anything: "I wrote in it. At the end. You can rub it out."
I did not rub it out.
It's on the last page, under the final line. She had used a different pen, a green one. Her handwriting is round and quick and slightly slanting, like Sarah's. It says:
I read all of it.
I am still angry. I think I will be for a while. I want you to know that I am not angry because you did these things. I am angry because they are true, and because I wish you had been somebody else, and you weren't, and you are the only one I've got.
I think I'd like to meet the one who kept you.
Not yet.
But I'd like to know his name.
I've read her note a good many times. I have not shown it to anyone. It sits in the drawer under my mother's Bible, beside the brown exercise book. I take them out on Sunday evenings and put them side by side: one that begins with Prayers for Jonah, and one that ends with a daughter asking to know the God who kept her father.
I think about a woman on a mud floor who wrote fifteen years of mornings and evenings for a boy who would not hear her. I think about the daughter who is angry and still curious. I think about Timothy, who waited without promising me that waiting would make him forget. This is what my life is now: unfinished, but no longer empty.
I've read it a good many times. I have not shown it to anyone, not even the pastor. It sits in the drawer under my mother's Bible, with the brown exercise book, in the dark. I take them out on Sunday evenings and put them side by side, the two counter books, the one that begins Prayers for Jonah and the one that ends I'd like to know his name, and I think about a woman on a mud floor who wrote fifteen years of mornings and evenings for a boy who wouldn't hear it.
And I think: It's started. It's started again.
On Saturdays I teach the children.
Pastor Wasswa asked me. He said there were forty boys at Mercy Hill with nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon, and a field behind the church that could be made level, and that I was, he understood, a person who had once been good with a ball.
"I have a bad chest," I said.
"You have a left foot," said the pastor. "I saw you kick a stone on the road."
So I teach them. We play on the red earth. We have two stones for each goal. I show them how to bend the ball, and how to see the whole pitch in your head like a map, and how to know where the others will be before they get there. They are quick, and rude, and bad at listening. The smallest of them, a boy of seven called Ibrahim, follows me round the field holding my water bottle against his chest, and shouts, "Mr. Jonah! Mr. Jonah! I'm still here!"
I always answer. Every time.
"I know you are," I say. "Stay close."
I do not tell him why.
I gave my testimony in October.
The pastor asked me. I said no, three times. I said I would have to say it all, and that there were people in the church whose sons were the age Daniel was. He said, "Then say as much as is true." So I stood at the front of that tin church on a Sunday with forty plastic chairs filled and the cracked cymbal and the woman at the amplifier, and I told them in eleven minutes what I have taken eighty pages to write.
I did not tell it well. I stumbled. I lost the thread. At one point I stopped, and stood with my hands on the lectern, and could not speak. The whole church waited. No one coughed. And in the third row, an old woman I did not know, in a blue head-tie, with a face like a walnut, said in a clear, carrying voice, not loud, but without hurry, "Go on, my son."
I went on.
When I had finished there was a quiet, and then a sound I didn't expect. It was Sister Agnes, at the back, ululating. She had her arms above her head. She did it in her huge round voice, the sound that Ugandan women make at weddings and at births, and it went up into the tin roof and rang there.
Afterwards, people came to the door. Some wept. Some shook my hand without speaking. A young man of about twenty stood a little to one side, in an ill-fitting shirt, and waited until the others had gone. He had a thin moustache he was clearly proud of. He did not look at me directly.
"I did some of that," he said at last. "A bit of it. I'm — I'm in a crew. In Bugembe." He rubbed his neck. "I came to see what the pastor's got. I wasn't going to stay."
"All right."
"I don't know if it works. For someone like me."
I said, "Sit down."
He sat on the step. I sat beside him, on the red earth, with my back against the cold tin wall, and we didn't say anything for a while. Below us, the whole of Jinja lay in the afternoon haze, and the river beyond, a wide bright blade.
"It's a long story," I told him. "I'm going to tell you the first part. Then you can decide."
"Where does it start?"
"Under a bed," I said.
It is evening. I'm sitting at the table with the lamp lit. The lane outside is full of children. A woman is calling someone's name across the compound, and a radio is playing hymns, and the mango tree is dropping its fruit on the roof, one at a time, a gentle insistent knocking.
There's a candle on the shelf above the door.
It's Mama Joyce's custom. She lights it every evening at dusk, in a saucer, and leaves it burning. I asked her once why. She wiped her hands on her apron and said, "In case somebody is coming."
I used to think a light was for someone who already knew the way home.
Now I think it is for the person still trying to find it.
There's a candle on the shelf above the door.
Mama Joyce lights it every evening at dusk, in a saucer, and leaves it burning.
"In case somebody is coming," she once told me.
"Who?"
"I don't know," she said. "That's the point."
I did not find grace.
Grace found me.
Grace found me. It had been searching for me in hell the entire time.
And when I finally looked up, it was already there.
THE END