by Jessica Yu
The sight of those bent hinges broke something within her. People had stolen her crops, taken the bedding, run off with her tools and plates and charcoal and jerry cans. But the doors? Her beautiful red wrought-iron doors? It was like yanking the shoes off an accident victim.
Or a corpse. Wasn’t the place already dead? There was nothing left to protect. The house was empty. There was no one staying there, no one working there, no supplies, no tools.
Perseverance Gardens. Persecution Gardens was more like it.
For the first time, Gladys thought about walking away.
“No!” Esther slapped the notion away. “We have a goal, we have integrity, we will not give up.”
Gladys acquiesced to her friend’s exhortation, but the sense of defeat remained. She had tried again and again to plant trees for her children, but it seemed they would never have shade.
THERE WAS ONE person who possibly felt worse than Gladys. At the start of the school holidays, Ezra returned to the gardens.
The place was in wretched condition. It had been raining daily since the three men from his village had run off. Untended, the bush had returned in force, erasing crop rows and tangling plants. What little produce was coming up could not even be harvested because of the undergrowth.
The choked fields, the looted rooms, the broken doors: each dealt a blow. But what hit Ezra the hardest was the sign. It was not so very long ago that they had posed proudly beside the new marker for Perseverance Gardens. Now the bush had grown so tall around it, one could no longer see the fruits or read “Hope for the Helpless.”
The first thing Ezra did was clear the sign. He hacked with the panga and pulled with his hands, not pausing until every weed had been ripped away. When he returned to his village, he vowed, he would go looking for each of those three men.
OVER THE SCHOOL holidays, Ezra, Douglas, and Jeremiah, the quiet boy to whom Mike had given the yellow shirt, trimmed the overgrowth from the entire plot. The place began to resemble a proper farm. When Gladys praised their progress, the boys raised their chests like cockerels.
They had become quite an organized team, these three, maintaining their own schedule of prayers, chores, work, meals, and relaxation. And how neatly they kept the place! Gladys knew boys in Uganda to be very untidy. They would not know where their socks were; they would throw their shirts around like candy wrappers. But on Ezra’s watch? Banange! Their room was as neat as a teacher’s desk.
Admittedly, the boys had few possessions to manage. There was no bedding to arrange; Gladys was too broke to replace it. So resilient, these ones: six weeks with no blankets! They claimed not to notice the nighttime cold.
In the beginning they had asked for sugar. “You people,” Gladys would say with a sigh. “Not everyone who stays in rural areas takes sugar! As long as you have porridge to eat. And when the porridge runs out, get some cassava in the garden there. If you get tired of boiled cassava, you can fry it!”
Unlike the adults she had recently dealt with, the boys respected the precarious nature of the enterprise. Jeremiah lacked slippers, but he uttered no complaint. Douglas sought help only after someone stole his laundry: Mummy, I have wrote this letter in a humble heart . . . as you see me here I have only one clothing which I came with, and this is a secrete that even the inside body wear I have only one but it is gone. I tried to work for money in Nalongo but I felt the bush in our dear land was too much. These boys knew that Perseverance Gardens belonged to them. To them, its upkeep was more important than slippers or underwear!
But Gladys did not believe that frugality should come at the expense of every small pleasure. When she had been a girl in her grandmother’s garden, a morning of digging had sometimes ended with a treat. Handing the boys money for supplies, she slipped in an extra 2,000 shillings. “Go buy a couple of sugarcane stems, such that you can plant them around the house.”
On her next visit, Douglas proudly pointed out the slender green stalks next to the house. Soon the boys would get more stems from these two, and in no time at all they would have enough to harvest.
“Eh-ehhh!” Gladys chortled. After working in the gardens, there would be no better reward than sitting in the shade with a crisp, fat stalk, having earned every last every bit of sweetness one could gnaw out of it.
AFTER A FEW days Ezra made an announcement. Rather than returning to school, he intended to stay and manage the gardens.
The declaration caught Gladys and Esther off guard. Although no one held him responsible, this was clearly Ezra’s effort to atone for the thieves from his village. A noble gesture, but a reckless one. How could one student, a primary school student at that, maintain three acres?
Instinctively the women tempered their responses, offering thoughtful nods and neutral hmms. They did not want to make the young man feel small. Soon reason would dampen emotion, and he would see that his place was back in the classroom.
As the days went on, though, it became apparent that Ezra’s plan to stay at Perseverance Gardens was less a daydream than a decision. He insisted that he could live in the unfinished house and transfer from Early Learning to a local school in Luwero.
Gladys was alarmed. Academic standards were very low in rural areas. With his Primary Leaving Examinations just months away, surely this plan made no sense.
“Will you be able to pass? Which school can you join? Is it very far away?”
Ezra responded calmly. His worry was not over school or exams but “our home.” If their home was not protected, what future would they have?
If Ezra’s future did lie with the garden, was there anything wrong with that? “Harvest Money” had run several recent stories about university-educated people who had turned to farming. A couple of Mike’s nephews had quit their city jobs to manage land.
At sixteen Ezra had knelt at her feet, seeking her help in returning to school. But he had struggled in the classroom. Eight years of missed schooling had created an unbridgeable gap, and his stunted progress left him discouraged. It was hard to be the biggest bird in the nest yet still unable to fly.
When it came to farming, though, Ezra showed a renewed focus. He made valiant attempts to read “Harvest Money,” his eyes moving as slowly over the page as though he were tracking an ant.
From the gardens, he would send her texts. Sometimes they carried advice: Mumy we must spray this trees. The leaves growing funy they dont look fine. Sometimes they were just messages of comfort: Dont worry mummy everything is fine. dont mind mumy. Even if the news—and the punctuation—was bad, Gladys was delighted. This was a boy who had not been able to tell her the letters from A to Z. And now, to see him using English! All of those school fees had not gone to waste.
ON ONE OF her visits to the garden, Ezra invited Gladys to sit down on the veranda. He served her tea and roasted some maize. Then he announced that he wanted to build a structure for raising pigs. Pointing to an area he had cleared, he described the layout and showed her a drawing of the structure he imagined.
Gladys was astonished. First, Ezra had been raised a Muslim! When he started working at the gardens, she had bid farewell to her dream of a bustling piggery. Second, how did he know how to do such a thing? Smiling shyly, Ezra produced a book in which he had studied the plans for a successful pig farm.
“Ah, okay, we will be thinking of this,” she said, marveling over his neat drawing. At the moment they had no money for piglets or materials to build a sty, but what a plan!
Grand schemes aside, Ezra knew that the gardens needed hands to pull the weeds and sweep the grounds. He was still angry about all the damage that the place had suffered. “Now that I’m here,” he vowed, “nothing else bad will happen to this place. I will restore this place to its feet.”
And so Ezra began to take care of the gardens. As he attended class during the day and studied over the weekend, it was a struggle. He would run back from school to be able to dig a little bit before the sun went down. The gardens lacked the daily labor they needed to thr
ive and to keep the daytime thieves at bay, but at least the house did not suffer further nighttime break-ins.
Out of the last batch of trees Gladys had purchased back when Zam was still around, only about a dozen out of the forty-five were still alive. A loss of over thirty trees was nothing to be proud of, but the survivors were doing nicely under Ezra’s care. He attended to the sickly ones and kept their trunks clear of weeds.
Even though he was the compound’s lone occupant, Ezra always kept the front of the house well swept, cleared of bush. With all the negligent adults who had come and gone, Gladys had never seen the place look so good.
How balanced life’s ironies could be. From the day she and Ezra met, he had been the one who needed help. And now this boy whose hand she had held in the operating room was trying to rescue her, as she had rescued him. If she had ever doubted her instinct toward kindness, Ezra had erased that doubt. The Zams and Roberts and Byrons of the world were mere weeds in the land her goodwill had watered. Ezra was the tree.
Naguru
It was the same set of buildings, the vacant playground featuring a single slide, the perimeter wall spiked with glass shards. But to Gladys it was an unexpectedly welcome sight. Naguru Reception Centre.
For four months she had made countless phone calls and endured sleepless nights trying to find her way inside this gate. For four months she had not seen Trevor. She could not even obtain official confirmation that he was still at Naguru.
Her pushing and pleading enervated those around her. After the boy’s misbehavior, his rudeness, his wandering, his stubbornness? Their enthusiasm for the cause, more of a flicker than a flame to begin with, had all but fizzled out. These days when she approached her colleagues for help, some refused, some sighed, some stopped returning her calls. They misplaced their phones, they were out of the office, their batteries died. But Gladys persisted. “Everybody needs someone,” she would say. “That is my argument.”
That’s all fine and good, everyone seemed to think. As long as that “someone” is someone else.
She had tracked down the name of the probation officer who had referred Trevor’s case to Naguru, one Peter Lwanga Mayanja. “But this man does not know me,” she fretted to Officer Carol. “Even if I call him, he will not allow me to visit Trevor. I know they are strict.”
Then, late that evening, a miracle. The probation officer answered her call. He listened as Gladys explained her desperate need to visit the reception center to see if the lost child was still there. To her absolute shock, he replied, “Come by my office. I can escort you.”
So easy? Just like that? The call ignited hope in Gladys’s heart, followed by fresh spasms of anxiety.
At 3 a.m. she was still trying to email her column to her editor. Cursing the slow Internet, then praying, Please God, help me! I will not have time to go to the office. After two hours of fitful sleep, she stood in the bathroom pouring cold water over herself. Someone at Naguru could still refuse to let me in. Oh God, just help me. Even as she walked out the door into the gray-blue morning: God, help me to see my boy.
NATURALLY MIKE RECOGNIZED the probation officer. He and Peter Lwanga had met on a film shoot a couple of years back. In addition to working for Kampala Capital City Authority, Peter had starred in television shows like the soap opera Mountains and Valleys. As the two sometime actors clapped shoulders and swapped memories, Gladys marveled over the way life could surprise the persistent. The gate to Naguru had been locked to her for so long. And then suddenly the universe had delivered the key in the form of a sympathetic probation officer who happened to be a handsome TV star. God is really great!
Climbing the veranda steps, they could see that the facility had undergone some much-needed renovation. The brown fence had been replaced by rainbow-painted railings, and the floor was tiled. The cheerier atmosphere only penetrated so far, however. Outside the classroom they were met by a sullen, seated matron. She eyed their approach with the impotent hostility of a guard dog who knows too well the length of her chain.
“Do you know if Trevor Masembe is here?” Gladys asked, her voice low and pleasant.
“Masembe is around,” the matron answered flatly.
“How is he? Has he been very naughty?”
The matron shrugged. “He refuses to tell anyone what concerns him. He just cries.”
“Ah-hahhh,” Gladys agreed heartily, as though they were swapping stories about a favorite nephew. “One never knows what concerns Trevor.”
Stepping over, Peter Lwanga glanced around the veranda, then back at the matron, planted in her lone plastic chair like a sit-down striker. “Are you going to give us a seat somewhere? Or is there nowhere to sit?”
If the woman journalist had made such a request, she might be standing there until Museveni was no longer president. But at the dashing probation officer’s request, chairs appeared within seconds.
“By the way, he is as good-looking as we always see him on TV, eh?” Gladys quipped as Peter sat down. The matron said nothing, but the corner of her mouth dimpled just perceptibly.
As they waited several long minutes for Trevor to arrive, anticipation frayed Gladys’s composure. Her mind could not settle until she had laid her eyes on the child.
Of course they could not fail to produce Trevor now. Or could they? What about that time they sent me the deaf-and-mute girl to interview?
To distract herself, she asked the matron a half-dozen questions about the kids packed in the adjacent classroom. What were they all doing lying on the floor? Were they able to study with no chairs or desks? How was their writing? She greeted each of the matron’s monosyllabic responses as a gem of insight, forcefully infusing the exchange with collegiality.
Two figures crossed through the dark classroom to the veranda. The first was another matron, and behind her a skinny, familiar figure. Trevor’s expression was sulky, his feet bare, and his limp more pronounced than usual. He was still small for whatever age he was; the oversized yellow T-shirt he wore made him appear no more than eight years old.
Gladys’s face lit up. “Trevor Masembe, come greet me!”
The boy stopped, still a few paces from the group. Left eyebrow arched, he glanced past them, a celebrity ignoring his fans. He began to pick his nose.
“Who do you know?” Peter spoke to the boy in a cheerful, coaxing voice. “Eh? Who do you know here?”
Trevor gave no answer, not even a blink of acknowledgment. He continued to pluck at his nose with the concentration of a concert violinist. Peter and Mike glanced at Gladys. The reunion was not the stuff of which movies were made.
Gladys chuckled. In the boy’s mind, he had been forgotten in this place, and he was publicly declaring his displeasure.
“He is such a crybaby,” she said affectionately. “Everybody says he fights. I don’t know if he’s a fighter, but he is a crybaby. Trevor—come over here.”
The boy shuffled incrementally in her direction. Gladys laughed merrily, as though she were watching a baby take its first steps.
“Trevor. Trevor Masembe! How are you?” Impatiently she reeled him in with an arm, her hug so forceful it popped the finger out of his nostril. “What happened to your leg?”
He looked beyond her, casting his thousand-yard frown.
“Come on, tell me! Don’t make a bad face here.” She asked again, softly, “What happened to your leg?”
“I knocked it,” he mumbled.
“Were you playing football?”
“We don’t allow football here,” the matron interjected. “Because the kids break the windows. No football.”
Poor Trevor! He probably had not smiled for four months. In this crowded holding pen, a child like him would receive no attention, no protection from the older boys, no sugar for his porridge. All that he could survive. But no football? Football was his sun.
With her arm looped around the boy like a safety belt, she recounted Trevor’s troubled case history to her audience. Trevor still would not look at her, but
he did not move away.
Peter proved a thoughtful listener, his unblinking attentiveness no mere actor’s habit. When Gladys got to the part about Trevor flinging the dirty mop at the cleric, Mike let out a giggle. But the probation officer merely steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips.
When Gladys finished, he looked away for a beat, as though deciding something. In the distance, children shrieked like fighting cats.
“So do you want to take the child somewhere, or do you want to leave the child here? That is what I need to know.”
The directness of the question startled Gladys. She had never imagined that she would be offered such a choice, if it was indeed an offer. After a long pause, she admitted, “I don’t know where to take him.” She had exhausted her contacts with schools and doctors and homes. “Even the police are fed up with Trevor, because every time he runs away it puts them under a lot of pressure. They told me, ‘Gladys, don’t bring that boy back to us. We don’t want him anywhere near police!’”
There was still no place to put Trevor, the journalist and the probation officer concluded. They would have to keep looking.
As the conversation slowed, the matron grew restless. Eventually she stood and disappeared in the direction of the office, leaving the visitors alone.
Gladys wheeled around. “Oh my God. Eeeee!” she squealed. “This is an achievement, you know? We have seen Trevor. Hee-hee-hee! We have achieved greatly! Because of Peter. Thank you so muuuuch!”
The probation officer looked pleased, if a tad surprised. “The good thing is that we know where he is,” he said. “And from here we will see the way forward.”
“Ah-hahhh,” Gladys agreed, noting his generous use of the second person plural. “All of us know where he is.”
Holding Trevor at arm’s length, she inspected the boy a final time. He was too thin, but he did not smell of fuel or garbage. His shirt looked clean. Seeing him here, alive, felt like the first rain after a long dry season.