by Jessica Yu
This was true. So where was this father, this Sebutali?
“It is very unfortunate that I have not seen the father,” said Gladys. “Because from what I now hear, he did not care that this child was alive. That’s really bad. I never knew that someone had communicated with you people. That you knew the child was there, and you just sat down and didn’t even take the trouble to come and get her.”
The old woman winced. “I told my son when his wife took the child away, ‘Go and get money. Go and look for your wife.’ But as you know, a father can be lazy.”
A shout went up from the footpath, and every head turned to see a man approach, his hands waving in greeting. He was neatly dressed in a long-sleeved blue shirt, cuffed gray trousers, and black loafers. Deborah ran to him.
The man hugged her, patting her head affectionately. Then he looked up, taking in the visitors: the two well-groomed ladies and the tall, thin man. Gladys, Esther, and Mike returned his stare. If this was Deborah’s father, his manner was oddly restrained for such a reunion.
With Deborah clinging to his hand, the man started to walk toward the visitors. Then a wail rose up behind them. It was a wavering, squeaky sound, like the failing brakes on an old car.
Stumbling down the path was a thin figure carrying a radio. His brown pants were covered in dirt. As Deborah dashed up to meet him, he staggered toward her, weaving from side to side as though he were trying to corner a chicken.
This, Gladys knew instantly, was Misuseera Sebutali. “The father has come,” she said, her insides crumpling. “But he’s drunk.”
It should have been a happy scene. For Deborah, it should have been beautiful. The father should have been the first one to greet her, his embrace as wide as the wings of a crane in flight. He should have swept up his daughter in strong arms, full of gratitude that his two-year search was finally over.
Instead, this wobbling scarecrow gripped Deborah like a sack of beans he was about to drop. His face leaked. Tears streamed out of his squinting eyes. His nose dripped. A string of saliva dangled from his slack mouth.
“Why don’t you come bring the child here?” Gladys urged, pointing toward the bench under the tree. “Sit down.”
The father appeared not to understand. “My child, my child!” he wailed.
Deborah sagged on his shoulder, her silver sandals dangling above the ground, her smile faded like a dried flower. Off to the side, her brother turned away, his face hardening with reproach.
Mike glanced at Gladys. This was really bad.
“Yeah, he’s very drunk,” Gladys muttered to Mike. To Sebutali, she repeated firmly, “Sit down. I want you over here. Put her down.”
After a minute the father let Deborah slide down to the ground, the movement nearly toppling him. Still sniveling, he blew his nose into his hands, and in the next moment extended them to Gladys and Mike. “You brought my child . . .”
Gladys avoided the wet handshake and moved right to the point. “Two years ago, when the police called and told you that this child was found, what did you do?” she asked. “Did you come to get her?”
“How could I come?” He was instantly defensive, his speech shooting out in spurts. “I didn’t have money. How could I have come?”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a farmer. And a trader.”
“What do you trade in?”
“Beans, maize. But I have no capital.”
“What I want to know: why didn’t you go to get her?”
“I didn’t have money!” he shouted, eyes flashing. With anger as his lens, he suddenly focused. Indignation wiped the slur out of his words.
“Where do you think I got the money from to come here?” Gladys retorted. “Please answer that for me.”
Gladys had witnessed firsthand the ugliness of a parent’s surrender to alcohol, and she was not about to let this one off the hook. Mike looked on, marveling at the way she was nailing the man with her sharp, sharp questions. Sebutali was losing his cool.
“You want to lock me up?” The man thrust out his arms theatrically. His gestures were loose and abrupt, like the marionette of an unskilled puppeteer. His head bobbed as he yelled, “I don’t have money! Not even one shilling! You want to lock me up right now?”
“What happened with your wife? Why did she leave you?”
Gladys did not flinch, even as the man lurched toward her, his breath as toxic as car exhaust. “You know, I had money once. A lot of money. I was a businessman. I got money and I bought some land. I was trying to grow coffee. But then when I lost my money, I lost everything, she walked away on me. And I brought up the kids myself. Then she comes back and picks the child. What should I have done? I didn’t have money! Not one shilling to go and pick the child from the police station.”
“Huh,” Gladys scoffed. A man who had really raised his daughter by himself would have found a way to retrieve her.
The man dropped to the ground, his puppet strings severed. “I don’t have money! I don’t have anything! I am a poor man.”
“Get up,” Mike hissed, his voice low with disgust. “Get up. Stand yourself up.”
“I’m poor,” he whined.
“You have been drinking the money?” Gladys said mildly.
“I knew my child was dead. I gave up on her. That’s why I drink so much.”
How convenient to justify a vice through tragedy. But more likely the real reason Sebutali had declined to make any effort to retrieve Deborah was her hump. Even if he cared for her, he also cared for money. A girl with that infirmity would not fetch a good bride price, if she could be married off at all.
AFTER MUCH WRANGLING, Gladys managed to get the father, the grandmother, the young aunt, the brother, and Deborah to sit with her on the benches under the tree. Around them a few dozen people, probably the entire population of the village, sat in loose groups to watch the show.
“I need you to listen to me,” she began. “It’s been a long journey and we need to discuss. Now, I’m called Gladys. Gladys Kalibbala. I work with New Vision. You know New Vision?”
The aunt nodded her head.
“Ah-hah. Do you know English?” Gladys asked.
“I don’t know English.”
“It is bad that you are eating mangoes instead of studying.” Gladys sighed. “The newspaper is written in English. In my column, when I find a child who has been lost, I take her picture, and I put it in the newspaper. When someone reads about it and sees it? They come and collect the child.”
Gladys related her involvement in Deborah’s case and her efforts to help the girl over the past two years. The grandmother and aunt stared at her, struggling to absorb the improbability of a complete stranger offering such assistance. Only Sebutali appeared unattentive, his eyes as glazed as those of the fish dangled by the roadside vendors.
“I’m not a minister. I’m not an MP. I’m not anybody. So I don’t have money,” Gladys explained. “Still, I have come to this place with this girl. But she is your child. And now I know that one of the police officers who found your child called you.”
The grandmother started to reply, but Sebutali slapped at the air in front of her face. She flinched, her chin quivering.
“Shhhhh!” he sputtered, spittle flying from his mouth, before turning to shout at Gladys. “I don’t have money to take me to Kampala. The police should come here.”
“The police who work with children, they don’t have transport,” Gladys said, her exasperation flaring up again. “Pity them as well. It is irresponsible, as the parent, to say, ‘I don’t have money, I won’t come.’”
“I don’t have even one shilling.”
She gave him a stony look. “Don’t repeat that to me one more time.”
“Lock me up, put me in prison,” the man persisted childishly. “But the truth is, I don’t have money.”
Gladys’s silence ended the volley. He sniffed, raising his chin as though he had won. Next to him, his mother sat working her tooth-poor jaw as thoug
h she were chewing a piece of gristle that she could neither swallow nor spit out.
“With the children I work with, I do the best I can to look for the family. But when I find a person like you, who does not even show any . . .” Gladys raked Sebutali up and down with her eyes. “You want me to shake your hand when you have been blowing your nose in it.”
Sebutali thrust out his bottom lip and frowned, as though he couldn’t choose between self-pity and anger. “I’m going to leave, because it seems that you don’t want me here.”
“Don’t leave,” Gladys ordered. “You should stay here to discuss your child.”
He wobbled into a standing position. “Me, I’m going.”
They watched him stagger up the footpath, where Esther tried to intercept him. The neighbors witnessed Sebutali’s exit with interest but little surprise. Behind him a toddler in baggy men’s shorts waddled in pursuit of a ball made of rags and string. The ball rolled like an egg when he kicked it, his giggle the only sound in the village.
Mike glanced at Deborah. Disappointment veiled her face. As soon as she felt Mike’s eyes on her, though, she attempted a smile. Then she left the bench.
Many adults assumed that children, having little or no say in serious matters, were oblivious to such dramas. But this one saw everything.
“We would not have sent for him,” said Deborah’s aunt. “That’s how he is. He drinks all the time. He is a very angry man.”
“Has he always been this way?” Gladys asked.
“He has always been stubborn,” the grandmother replied. “Sometimes he even beats me.”
“Beating you! His own mother?”
Sebutali was gone, but the fumes of shame lingered. How one man could contaminate a family, even a whole village. Mike shook his head, muttering, “That one is in trouble with his creator.”
“That son is the eldest of my surviving children.” The grandmother’s voice was wistful, a breeze over a dry riverbed. “I had twelve children, but six died.”
Loss. It could make one cling to a rotten plank and call it a boat.
Gladys spoke gently. “Grandmother, you agree that your granddaughter should stay in school where she is? From what I see, it is not so easy here.”
The grandmother nodded, eyes moist. “Even if I said we should keep her here, I could not take care of her in the way she is cared for now.”
GLADYS INFORMED DEBORAH that she should begin her goodbyes. Down the footpath, Esther was still crouched across from Sebutali, having calmed him into conversation.
Suddenly Gladys felt a tug on her arm. She turned to find Deborah’s grandmother thrusting something into her hand. Gladys glanced down. It was a 10,000 shilling note. “Oh my God!” she gasped.
“I’ve been sick for one year,” said the grandmother. “I don’t have more money. Just take it.”
Surprise was not the word. Gladys was shocked. Maybe it would not seem like much to some people—you could not buy the newspaper for a week with that amount—but for a woman this poor, with no visible income, it was a fortune.
“Please take it,” the grandmother said, her tone almost pleading. “And before you go, I need to put some herbs on my granddaughter. For blessing.”
Gladys and Deborah followed the old woman to a line of dried maize stalks by the house. There, in a plastic basin, shredded green leaves floated in shallow water. The grandmother squatted by the basin and circled her hands through the mixture.
“What is this called?” asked Gladys, framing the scene with her camera.
“It’s called omwetango,” said the grandmother. “It’s used for when a person is found. Once a lost person is declared dead and you have cried for them, if you get that person back, you must do this to cleanse the spirit of the tears you have shed. So this person should never again be lost.”
With cupped hands, the old woman released the leaves over Deborah’s head, over the lines where her mother had cut her, over the swelling ridge of her back. “I used to cry so many tears for you. We thought that you were dead! I’m sending you these blessings, now that we see you are back. I just hope that this herb will give you all the luck through your life.”
She bent to the basin again, spreading more damp leaves onto her palms. Deborah held still as the old woman caressed her cheeks. A patient smile peeked through her grandmother’s trailing fingers, like the sun shining through clouds.
THE BODA LINED up to lead the car away from the tiny village. A farewell party gathered. There were shouted goodbyes and thanks and promises to call. Deborah pledged to visit again soon. Esther had managed to coax Sebutali out of his sulk, and when he appeared in the crowd, Gladys offered him a cordial, if not effusive, smile.
The people were still waving, the car just pulling away, when Gladys could contain herself no longer.
“Did you hear such statements? What the father was saying?” she blurted out. Quoting Sebutali, she whined, “‘The police called, saying come for your child. But I told them I didn’t have money. If they want, they can bring her.’ Oh my God!
“When I’m under such circumstances, there are times when I come to think twice. Am I really stupid? Because it seems I’m behaving differently from other Ugandans.”
Mike and Esther chuckled, but Gladys cut them off. “I’m not boasting! I mean, here comes Gladys, a stupid woman, she keeps on trying, tracking, tracking, tracking all the time, looking for opportunities to trace Deborah’s people, thinking that they didn’t know that the girl was somewhere. How do you feel if you are Gladys, coming here to find that people have known long ago? Am I stupid?”
Mike clucked sympathetically, but sympathy was not what Gladys wanted. “I am posing a question!” she insisted, her voice sharp with frustration. “I am asking! Maybe people look at me as someone who is not thinking right.” The words erupted from her, a lava flow gaining in speed and heat. “All along I’ve been so worried, and because I didn’t have transport, I couldn’t come and look for these people. At least to let the family know that the girl was still alive. But on reaching here the father says, ‘Yes, they called me, they said she was at the police, and I told them they better bring my girl here!’ And for two years he doesn’t give a damn. And this is Gladys, who has been thinking, praying hard, that one day I will get transport to reunite this girl, to look for these parents, to tell them Deborah is alive. How do you feel, if you are now Gladys reaching this place?”
There was a soft thump as Mike drove through a pothole too shallow to warrant diversion. He shrugged. “When I see the father, I just relax. Because I can’t waste my time even giving him a second thought.”
There was a pause. Then a giggle trickled out of Gladys, bubbling slowly into a belly laugh. “Eh-eh-eh-ehhhhh! Oh my God . . .”
Mike had given the right answer. You could not fight mud.
Through all of this, Deborah appeared unperturbed, calmly picking bits of her grandmother’s herb from her skirt. The adults had not censored their conversation on her behalf; after all, the girl had seen everything that they had seen, and she had lived through far more.
“Deborah, tell me. How are you feeling?”
The girl beamed instantly. “I feel very happy. I first saw my auntie. Then when she hugged me, everybody started coming out.” Her lilting words came out like a song. “I was most excited to see my grandmother and my brother. I was very happy to see my grandmom. I thought she died. I felt so good when she embraced me.”
“That moment was greeeeaat.” Gladys drawled out the last word, then fluttered her hand on her mouth, howling against her palm. “Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo! She couldn’t believe!”
“My grandmother said to me, ‘We thought that you were dead!’ And then she said, ‘Your mother is a monster!’ And I told her that even though she’s a monster, she is still my mom.”
After that, there was only the rumble of stones under tired tires.
Deborah leaned back, her head resting on the swell of her own back, her upturned face parallel to the roof
of the car. A few specks of herb poked up through her short hair like shoots in dark earth.
Within a few minutes the bumpy road rocked her to sleep.
“THESE KIDS. THERE’S a traumatic story with each one, but each one is different,” Mike observed. They were nearing the equator, heading back northeast on the Masaka-Kampala Road. “Each has got its own twist.”
It was true. In Deborah’s case, it was the two halves of her world rotating against each other. In the clockwise world, Deborah was a promising student. A leader among her friends. A girl who charmed visitors. She would go on to secondary school, certainly, and perhaps even college. In her old counterclockwise home, she was ostracized for her disability, tortured by her mother, and abandoned by her drunken father. There was no school for her there, and little future.
But this small girl had ballast. In the same way she had accepted the limits of her father’s love, Deborah had weathered her mother’s cruelty: with an innate understanding that she bore no responsibility for the failings of adults.
During the visit, Gladys had lined up the family in front of Sebutali’s unfinished brick house for a picture. It had not been the ideal reunion, but who knew when these four would be together again?
The father leaned against the wall, his expression as empty as that of someone dozing with his eyes open. The son stood stiffly, eyes hooded and intense. The grandmother glanced away. But Deborah looked straight at the camera, hands behind her back, her feet perfectly aligned in those glittery sandals, like one might see in a shop display. There was no shame or discomfort in her expression. Her face radiated the same serenity as when she was standing on the equator.
This is my family, she seemed to say. And I am me.
“TELL ME, DEBORAH,” Gladys asked. They were heading into Entebbe now, trailing a minibus bearing the window slogan NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. “When are you planning to see your family again?”
“After third term.”
Gladys cocked an eyebrow. “Then my question is, how will you come back after third term to see them? Who will bring you?”