Chapter Eleven
Grace
Joseph Tumusiime came home on a Wednesday, and by Friday the whole of Ntinda knew.
I had this from Naomi, who told it standing in the yard of the church with her thermos clutched to her chest and an expression of complicated dread. Nobody had said anything outright. There had been no announcement, no scene. It was only that on Thursday, a woman from her father's church had passed the gate of their house at the exact moment the taxi pulled up and had stopped dead on the pavement, shopping bag in hand, and looked, and then gone on with great rapidity in the direction of a neighbour.
"By the evening," said Naomi, "my mother had four phone calls from people asking if she needed anything. Anything at all. In the voice." She imitated it, a low, throbbing, sympathetic warble. "You know the voice. The one that means, I would like to be the first to know."
"How is he?"
"He's quiet." She pressed her lips together. "He's very thin. He's cut his hair. He keeps saying thank you to everything, to the tea, to the door, and it breaks my heart. My father won't speak to him. He speaks near him. At dinner he says, please pass the salt, to the air, and Joseph passes it." She laughed unsteadily. "It's quite a skill."
"Can I do anything?"
"Come tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
"Friday fellowship. At Living Hope. The youth group meet at seven in the church hall, in the back, with a flask of tea and the worst biscuits in Kampala." She was looking at me intently. "Joseph wants to come. Pastor Lubega said he could. It's the first place he's been, apart from home, since the programme. I told him it would be nice to have someone there who wasn't, you know, one of us."
"Who isn't one of you?"
"A person who doesn't already know." She tried to smile. "A person he can meet for the first time."
I knew what she was asking. I knew that I was not, in fact, the person she thought. But I said, "Of course I'll come."
The church hall at Living Hope was a long concrete room behind the main building, with a corrugated roof and a tiled floor and a smell of damp chalk. On Friday nights they pushed the benches into a rough circle. A single tube light hummed above; a second one flickered, then went out. There were perhaps twenty young people on the benches: schoolboys in untucked shirts, a few university girls, Patience, in the corner, with a large notebook and the dignified air of a person who has recently been baptised. A tray of biscuits sat on a stool in the centre, protected by a sheet of newspaper.
Pastor Lubega was already there, in a plastic chair, with his Bible closed on his knee. When he saw me, he did not smile or wave. He only nodded, once, with the same grave courtesy he had shown me on the wall by the gate, and went back to what he was doing, which was listening to a small boy explain the rules of a card game.
I sat near the back. Naomi was beside me, tense as a bowstring. And at a few minutes past seven, the door opened, and a man came in.
I had pictured him differently. I had pictured someone worn and wild, someone with the hollowed look of the people who drift along the roadside in Kisenyi, with a bottle in a paper bag. Joseph Tumusiime was neither. He was tall, taller than Naomi, with her long face and her narrow hands, and he had been handsome once, and was handsome still in a thin, careful, stripped-down way. His shirt was ironed. His shoes were polished. He stood in the doorway, with his arms a little out from his sides, like a man who has been told not to touch anything, and looked at the circle of benches and the circle of faces, and I saw him swallow.
"Joseph," said Pastor Lubega, warmly, without rising. "You came. Sit. There's a place."
There was. It was beside Naomi. He crossed the floor with measured steps and sat, and folded his hands between his knees, and Naomi said, in a voice that was very nearly normal, "Joseph, this is Eli. Eli, my brother."
He looked at me. His eyes were hers, large and dark and quick; but there was something different in them, a kind of stillness at the back, like a pool after a flood. "Hello," he said, and held out a hand. "I've heard a lot about you."
"Not all of it good."
"Most of it. She said you do voices." A flicker of humour crossed his face and vanished. "I'd like to hear one sometime."
His handshake was dry. It trembled very slightly, and he knew it, and did not try to hide it.
I will not describe the whole evening. There were songs; there was a prayer, a long rambling one by a boy with a squeaky voice; there was an argument about the biscuits. Then Pastor Lubega opened his Bible, and said, "Tonight, Luke fifteen. Who knows the story?"
Everyone did. It is that sort of story. Hands went up in a small forest; a girl in a headscarf said, the prodigal son, and someone said, the lost son, and there was a brief quarrel about which title was right.
"It doesn't matter what we call it," said Pastor Lubega. "Let's just read."
He read it slowly, in his driving voice, the whole of it. A man had two sons. The younger one said to him, Father, give me my share. He took it and went to a far country and spent it all, living wildly. When he had nothing, a famine came. He hired himself out to feed pigs. He was so hungry he longed to eat what the pigs ate.
I listened. I had heard it a hundred times. But I heard it, that night, in a different way, as one hears a song one has known all one's life suddenly performed in a different key.
When he came to his senses.
I sat very still.
"He came to himself," Pastor Lubega read. "He said, How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am dying of hunger. I will go back to my father and say: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men."
He paused, and looked up. "Notice that. He's rehearsing. He's got a speech ready. He's not coming home because he thinks everything's forgiven. He's coming home because he's starving, and he's worked out a deal."
A small laugh went round the room.
"A deal," murmured Joseph.
"Let's see what happens," said Pastor Lubega, and read on.
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
I felt something happen in the pit of my stomach.
"Ran," said Pastor Lubega, laying his finger on the page. "I want you to notice that too. A man of that age and that standing, in that country, would not run. It was beneath him. It was undignified. A father would sit in the house and wait for the son to come to him, crawling, begging, with his face in the dust. But this one runs. He lifts up his robes and he runs down the road, and he arrives before the boy has even had a chance to start his speech."
And the son said to him, Father, I have sinned. And there it stopped. The father did not let him finish. Bring the best robe, he said. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Kill the fattened calf. Let us eat and celebrate.
"For this son of mine was dead and is alive again," Pastor Lubega read. "He was lost and is found."
The tube light buzzed. Nobody spoke. Somewhere outside a taxi hooted.
"I don't like it," said a voice.
I was surprised to find it was mine.
All heads turned. I had not meant to speak. It had come out of me abruptly, hoarsely, like something shaken loose. I felt Naomi stiffen beside me, and across the circle, Patience's pencil stopped moving.
"Go on," said Pastor Lubega mildly.
"It's just..." I stopped, and began again. "I can see it's a beautiful story. I'm not saying it isn't. But it's too easy." I heard myself pressing on, with a rising heat. "He wastes everything. He's wild. He spends his father's money on prostitutes, it says. And then, when it all goes wrong, he comes crawling back, and the father just forgives him? Throws a party? What's to stop him doing it again?"
"What's to stop him?" Pastor Lubega echoed.
"Nothing! That's the point. There's no consequence. He's supposed to earn it. He should have to work. He should have to pay it back, at least some of it, show he's changed. Anyone can say sorry. Anyone can say it after he's lost everything." I was aware that my voice had risen. "And what about the other son? The brother. Who stayed. Who did everything right. It's not fair. Some people go too far. That's all. Some people go too far, and when they do, there's... there's a line. You can't just cross it and be welcomed home."
The silence that followed was a very particular one. It was the silence of a room in which everyone has understood that the sentence was not about a story.
I looked at my hands. My face was burning.
"Can I say something?"
It was Joseph.
He had not moved. He sat with his hands between his knees and his head slightly bowed, the way he had sat from the beginning, and when he spoke it was in a low, unhurried, conversational voice, so mild that it was a moment before I understood he was speaking to me.
"I used to say that," he said.
"What?"
"Too easy. That's what I said. For years." He lifted his head. "I was raised on it, you know. This story. I knew it by heart. And I'd sit in church and listen to it and think, that son is a fool. He's soft. He goes back, and it's all forgiven, and then what? He does it again. They always do it again." He smiled a little. "I was very sure. I was nineteen. I'd just had my first drink. I thought I understood something the Bible didn't."
"And?"
"I did it again. That's the thing. I did it again, and again. I went back four times. I've been to the far country, Eli. Four times. You've never seen anything like what I became. I took a ring off my mother's finger once and sold it for a bottle." His voice did not change. "I stole from my own sister. She knows."
Naomi's hand, on the bench between us, had closed hard around her thermos.
"And every time," said Joseph, "I came home with a speech. Do you understand? I always had a speech. I'm sorry, I've changed, this time I mean it. Let me stay in the shed. Let me work. Treat me like a hired man. I rehearsed it on the bus." He glanced round the circle. "And what I want you to know is that it wasn't easy. That's what you've got wrong. It's not easy for the son. It is the hardest walk of his life. It is a hundred times harder than being starved. Because when you're starving, there's only the hunger. But when you start to walk home, you have to look at yourself the whole way."
I could not look at him.
"I'd have given anything," said Joseph, "for somebody to say it was easy. That I was making too much of it. But it wasn't easy, and it wasn't cheap, and nothing I did was ever going to pay for it." He took a long breath. "So you can say he should earn it. I did. And I'll tell you what I found. There's nothing you can earn. That's what grace is. It's the thing you can't pay for. If you could, it'd be a wage."
Someone in the room said, very quietly, "Amen."
"The father never let him finish the speech," said Joseph. "Did you see? He never gets to the make me like one of your hired men. He just gets as far as I have sinned, and the father is already shouting for the robe." He smiled, slightly, unsteadily. "I've been waiting for that. I've been rehearsing the last bit for years. Nobody's ever let me say it. Not once. Not yet."
He stopped. His hands, between his knees, were shaking visibly now. He looked at them, as if they belonged to someone else, and then at his sister, and Naomi, who had been weeping without a sound for some time, said in a cracked voice, "Joe, I..."
"It's all right."
"I'm so sorry, I..."
"I know." He put a hand briefly on her shoulder. "I know. I'm the one who should be saying it."
They went on without me.
I do not remember much of the rest. Someone passed biscuits. Someone sang. At some point Pastor Lubega closed his Bible, and said a short prayer, and I closed my eyes with the rest and did not hear a word of it. I was aware only of something large and slow turning in me, like an old wheel, gathering weight.
It's the thing you can't pay for.
I had spent six years trying to pay for something. The deal in the stairwell. The tea I had not drunk. The five minutes. I had paid with silence, and with anger, and with every grubby little act of self-punishment I had managed to devise; I had paid with a drawer full of lies and a body kept busy with other things so that it could not feel what it owed. And all that time the debt had stayed on the books, untouched, because it was not a debt. It was a gift. And I had been trying to settle the account on a gift.
I did not know that yet. I only knew that for an instant, with my eyes shut and my forehead in my hand, I felt the thing I had been bracing against for years, the great black pressure of the sentence you are not enough, ease very slightly, as a hand eases on a throat.
Then it came back. It did not go. But I had felt it ease.
The car was waiting at the gate when we came out.
It was a grey Toyota, old but polished, with a sticker from a church on the rear windscreen. The engine was running. A man sat at the wheel with the window up, in a dark suit and a plain tie, with a briefcase on the passenger seat. I could not see his face in the dim light, only a pale oval, a pair of rimless glasses, and his hands, gripping the wheel at ten and two.
"Daddy," Naomi said, in a flat, low voice. "He said he wouldn't."
"He came," said Joseph.
He did not sound surprised. He sounded, if anything, tired. He stood on the dusty verge outside the church, in the light of the one flickering streetlamp, with his hands loose at his sides, and looked at the car.
"Do you want me to..." said Naomi.
"No."
"I'll tell him to go."
"Naomi." He turned and looked at her. "Let me."
He walked across the road. It was perhaps fifteen paces. I watched him go, the long thin figure in the ironed shirt, moving carefully, with slightly too much deliberation, as a man walks across a floor he is afraid of breaking. We all watched. Pastor Lubega had come out behind us and stood with his hands in his pockets. The rest of the group had drifted into a small silent knot on the verge, and Patience was at my elbow, gripping my sleeve.
At the car, Joseph stopped. He bent a little, to the glass. I saw the window come down about a hand's width.
I could not hear what they said. I could see Joseph's mouth moving, quick and low. I could see the pale shape of Mr. Tumusiime's face, immobile, looking straight ahead. It lasted about half a minute. Then the older man turned his head, and said something short, two or three words, and the window went up again.
Joseph straightened. He stood for a moment with his hands at his sides. He looked back, once, across the road, and lifted a hand to us in a small salute. Then he opened the rear door of the Toyota, and got in, and the door shut, and the car moved away.
"What did he say?" Patience whispered. "Your father. What did he say?"
Naomi was crying openly now.
"Get in," she said. "That's what he said. Get in the car."
"It's not much," I said, gently.
"It's not nothing." She wiped her face. "It's more than he's said in a month." She laughed, a small, wrecked sound. "He came, Eli. He sat in the car for an hour. Mama told me. He came and parked and waited."
"He didn't run."
She looked at me sharply. I said, "I only mean..." and she smiled, a damp, understanding smile.
"No," she said. "He doesn't run. He's not made like that." She watched the tail-lights dwindle down the road. "But he came. And he's still the same man who wouldn't say Joseph's name. And I think it's possible for both of those things to be true."
I walked home alone.
It was a clear cold night. The stars were out, thin and white over the roofs, and the road was empty, except for a couple of boda men sitting on their bikes under a lamp and a dog nosing in a drain. I walked slowly. My head was full. I felt, all over my body, like a man who has been struck by something that has not yet hurt.
When I came in, the house was dark. My mother had left the bulb on over the verandah, and the little cloud of moths turned in it, and I stood a moment beneath it with my hand on the doorframe.
While he was still a long way off, his father saw him.
I do not know how long he had been waiting, in the story. The text does not say. I only know that to see someone a long way off, you must have been looking. You must have been looking at the road. You must have been doing it day after day, in the heat, in the rain, for no reason except that you could not stop.
I went into my room. I did not turn on the light. I knelt down beside the bed and felt under it, among the old exam papers and the broken calculator, and found the small black Bible with the zip. My name was on the cover in gold. Be still.
I sat on the bed with it in my lap. I unzipped it, slowly. It made a long, dry, tearing sound in the dark.
I found Luke fifteen with the light of my phone. I read it again, the whole of it, on my own, in the quiet. I read the part about the pigs. I read the part about the speech. I read the long road and the running and the robe, and when I came to the end, to the older brother standing outside the party with his arms folded, refusing to go in, I stopped, and for a moment could not see the page.
My son, said the father, to the one who had never left, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.
You are always with me. Not you have earned it. Not you deserve it. Just: with me.
I closed the Bible. I did not put it back in the drawer.
I put it on the shelf beside the bed, where I could reach it, in the dark, in the hour when no one is watching. And I lay down, with my shoes still on, and looked at the ceiling.
I did not pray. I want to be honest about that. There was a prayer in my chest, but it was too large for my mouth, and I was afraid that if I tried to say it, it would turn out to be another deal.
But I did not feel alone. And when I woke at two, as I always did, and lay for a while listening to the house, I found that I was not afraid of the hour.
Somewhere on the other side of the wall, my sister turned over in her sleep. Beyond her, in the front room, the bulb hummed faintly over the door, and I listened to it, as one listens to something that has been going on all one's life without being noticed.
Someone is still on the road, I thought.
I did not yet know whether it was me.