Michael, on the other hand, had to return to his mission house in Migwani to share a communal grief that simply would not accept that a father could kill a son. And he too had lost a friend, a partner and a collaborator, one with whom he had shared much of himself. Perhaps most important of all, John Mwangangi had come to personify much of what it was he hoped to achieve through his own mission within the Church in Africa. He was a man whom the Church had moulded, a mind that the Church had nurtured and created in its own image, and ultimately his own family had rejected him as alien, an act that not only destroyed the family but also now had split the community. Where could he start to heal that rift? And what might he say to the next eager parent prepared to suffer years of hardship and sacrifice so that a child might have the opportunity of an education? Yes it would change the child’s life. Surely it will affect the whole family, but are you aware of how much it will change you if the child succeeds, and can you cope with having your own values, your life’s very assumptions questioned and then remade? Later, much later, it would all be clearer.
***
“So that’s what you think.” O’Hara does understand Michael’s point of view, but he sees it as being at least in part a criticism of his own work and opinions. Michael’s implication is that from the very beginning the emphasis of the Church’s involvement has been wrong, has done little more than enforce new forms of injustice, the exact opposite of its professed ideal. O’Hara accepts that locally the direction of that work has been set largely by himself. If things have gone wrong, then he is responsible, but he does not yet accept this pessimistic analysis. Nevertheless, he gives it credence by dealing with Michael’s opinions seriously and not dismissively. Though it is clear he does not agree with Michael, he is still respectful through his clear impatience. “So, Michael, you want to leave us?” His tone is serious and resigned, as if his mind is already made up. For once he looks directly at Michael as he speaks. He is perhaps asking for Michael to resign here and now, to state his desire to leave, formally and irrevocably.
O’Hara continues to stare throughout the unexpected silence which follows. Michael’s eyes are looking blankly into the space before him. He seems reluctant to speak now. It seems, as he sits apparently precariously on the very edge of the settee, that he is unsuccessfully trying to find the right words. He is struggling to find a compromise between yes and no, both of which he wants to use, without either being correct. It is eventually O’Hara, however, who speaks again. He is conscious of Michael’s dilemma and tries to offer him a starting point. Throughout he maintains what he believes to be an expression of open reassurance, but the uncharacteristic directness of his gaze lends an air of confrontation to his words, causing Michael to grow nervous and choose to interpret his manner as an expression of criticism. “Now Michael we’ve covered a lot of ground while we’ve been sitting here. Four or five times you’ve told me that for one reason or another you have concluded that you have no respect for your own work. You seem to have a very clear idea of what you think you ought to be able to accomplish and you seem to be saying that your objectives are impossible to achieve while you remain part of the Church. Now I don’t really care about your reasons. They are your business and yours alone.” O’Hara’s voice hardens a little, betraying a hint of suppressed anger. “I don’t care if it is the lack of what you consider to be worthwhile results in your work or simply your love for Janet which has persuaded you to leave.” This last phrase seems to sting Michael with its directness. He has never before heard these words expressed as if they were part of something outside himself and it is a shock. “What I want, what I demand from you and what your faith also demands is commitment to your mission. That, I remind you, is first to the Church and secondly - and I stress secondly - to your work outside it.”
Here Michael’s impatience shows again. How can O’Hara make such a distinction in an age where the true ministry of his Church lies in the achievement of social justice? O’Hara continues without a pause, however. “Since you seem to have lost that commitment, you force me to consider removing you from your position until you can either commit yourself to it with renewed vigour or embark upon some other course. I cannot ignore what you have said. It is now up to you to state your position once and for all. Is it to be the Church and its work, or another life, either with or without Janet Rowlandson?”
O’Hara is immediately offended by Michael’s reaction. He expects the priest to answer solemnly and unambiguously and with the overt seriousness demanded by his precarious position. When Michael falls back onto the settee in a fit of apparently uncontrolled ironic laughter, O’Hara’s anger overflows. “For God’s sake, Michael! This is not a game. I’m beginning to think I have been wasting my time...”
Michael interrupts. “Oh Jesus!” He shakes his head dismissively. “I’m sorry, John. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m laughing at myself - no disrespect, no joke intended. How could I have been so utterly stupid? I’ve behaved like a child.” He sits upright again and his laughter recedes. “Look, let’s finish the important stuff first. Let’s get back to this morning and finish that once and for all before we change the subject yet again. I’ve been trying all along to find an excuse for myself, but there isn’t one. All I can do now is admit my mistakes and accept responsibility. I’ve been careless, thoughtless and immature, and it’s about time I came clean. Now where did we get to?” He thinks for a moment. His now relaxed air contrasts sharply with O’Hara’s continued agitation, which betrays an unspoken but fuming anger. “Right. I was on the way to Kitui to tell you I wanted to leave. Boniface came and asked me to take his wife to hospital. So I went off to Thitani. Obviously there was no point going back to Muthale from there so I decided it would be quicker to stay on the main road and come to Kitui. Selfishness justified again, you see? It was me that wanted to come here. Maybe Muthale might have been quicker, but it was in Kitui mission that Janet’s letter was waiting for me.”
***
Michael was driving too fast. The car lurched and banged over the eroded ridge that marked the end of the dirt and the beginning of the tarmac road. They had reached Kitui town, much to Boniface’s surprise, in one piece. The numerous skids and slides during the trip had frightened him to the bone. Several times he had called out to Michael and gripped the dashboard with both hands, fearing the worst. Michael had simply ignored him, like he had ignored everything else this morning. The priest’s head lolled nonchalantly on one side and, as he drove like a man possessed, he sang quietly to himself. Boniface uttered a deep sigh of relief as the noise of the dirt road was apparently switched off. The sight of smooth tarmac disappearing under the car reassured him greatly. For the very first time, he saw fit to turn round to ask his wife in the back seat if everything was still all right. She, however, offered no reaction to his glance. She remained silent with her face set, but without expression. By this time they had climbed the hill and passed by the prison. At last they were getting near the hospital.
“I’m just going to call at the mission on the way,” said Michael. These were the first words he had spoken since they had set off.
“But, Father, the child is very serious. There is no time to spare.”
“I’ll be less than a minute. It won’t make the slightest difference.”
Michael drove past the road that led to the hospital and on up to the mission. He parked the car in the cathedral forecourt and, without bothering to switch off the engine or close the driver’s door behind him, he ran inside.
“Jambo,” he muttered mechanically to the clerk who sat, as ever, behind the typewriter in the reception.
“Jambo sana, Father,” replied the young man with some surprise, for even before the short phrase was complete, the whirlwind which was Michael had gone, having first reached over his desk and plucked a letter from one of the pigeon holes on the wall behind him.
Having then slammed the front door shut behind him, Michael sprinted back
to the car to take his seat like a scrambling fighter pilot. Boniface was looking round to face his wife in the back and they were talking, almost shouting in their frustration. Michael completely ignored them and immediately drove off down the short steep hill onto the road.
“Father! Stop! Stop!” shouted Boniface and grabbing at Michael’s arm, causing the car to veer off course toward the deep roadside gutter.
Michael braked instinctively and immediately the car skidded to a screeching halt in a cloud of dust, half on and half off the tarmac. As Michael turned angrily to see what the problem was, Boniface’s wife opened the back door and got out, moving briskly and determinedly.
At first without leaving his own seat, Boniface began to shout at her. His voice conveyed shock, not anger. Then, when she reached back into the car and took the child which still lay on the back seat, still without offering her husband any reply, he too got out of the car to join her. For a moment the two of them anxiously bent over the child as it lay on its mother’s breast, but then, as the anxiety melted to resignation, Boniface turned to Michael and said quietly, almost with relief, “Thank you, Father. It is finished.” Without another word Boniface watched his wife strap the baby’s corpse to her back in her wrapper and then together the two of them set off walking stoically, but with obvious dejection. Neither gave Michael a single backward glance.
Michael beat the steering wheel with his fist in frustration. “Oh shit! Shit!” With his head in his hands, he sat there alone with the car engine ticking over and two doors swinging open for what must have been several minutes before he began to think again of himself and what he might do. He closed the doors and then returned to his driver’s seat.
Though it would later seem futile that he should blame himself for the baby’s death, his mind began to flood with a catalogue of his own errors. He should never have tried to drive all the way to Kitui. A health centre on the way - at Kabati, say - might have been able to help. He could have stopped there. He should never have made the detour to get Janet’s letter when he knew that every minute was precious. Every thought seemed to heap more blame upon his own shoulders and, though he knew it was futile, he could do nothing to avoid this vicious self-recrimination. Even the admission that if the baby were so sick, a minute or even an hour either way would have made no difference in the long run was only partly admitted by his guilt.
Eventually he reached across to check the passenger door was shut and knocked the car into gear. It was then that he changed his mind. There was no point in going to see John O’Hara with half a story so, without switching off the engine, he returned the gear stick to neutral and opened Janet’s letter. His intention was to read it quickly. As he tore open the envelope, he suddenly felt his expectations begin to crystallise. During recent weeks when his eagerness to receive this letter had obscured, even devalued everything else in his life, the last thing which had concerned him had been the news he expected it to carry. What he had envisaged all along and what he now explicitly sought in it was something within himself, some reassurance which would provide the final push over the brow of the hill he had been threatening to climb. He had proposed to Janet. She had not believed him, saying that she knew how important his work was to him, that she could never accept the responsibility for parting him from it. Then, in his own letter, he had tried to deny her image of his devotion to duty. He had told her with blunt clarity that he was ready to leave the priesthood. His reasons, he had said, were many, but she, herself, was by far the most important among them. Now in this long-awaited reply, Janet would mend the last flaw in the fabric of his resolve.
He read it many times. It wasn’t very long, much shorter than many of her other efforts on his behalf. But under the circumstances it was perhaps understandable. His concentration on it rendered him completely oblivious to all else.
From beside the large new post office building on Michael’s right a lank bent figure shuffled unnoticed across the road. When only a few yards from the car he paused to look at Michael, but the priest did not look up from the letter he was reading. Thus, still unnoticed, the old man continued on his way. Some minutes elapsed. A large herd of cows then appeared on the brow of the hill ahead of the car. A troop of boys had the animals well marshalled. They were town boys. They knew that roads were used by vehicles whose drivers became impatient if ever they had to wait, even for only a few seconds. They knew that a blast on a car horn could send some of the animals running and if that happened they might lose control of their herd and have to spend an hour or more collecting their animals together. Thus, the boys worked hard to keep the animals on one side of the road, always allowing enough room for a car to pass on their outside. Their herd was large, however, and the column of bedraggled, almost sleepwalking animals stretched over forty yards from head to tail. Soon they had reached the place where Michael’s car stood askew, itself almost blocking one side of the road. At this point, as the cows loped slowly past Michael’s car, a white Mercedes turned into the road and found its way barred by a combination of Michael’s car and cows. The driver automatically sounded his horn impatiently, giving three long sustained blasts.
Michael looked up for the first time in some minutes. A glance in his driving mirror revealed the faces of James and Charles Mulonzya, father and son, in the front seats of the family’s trademark limousine. Mulonzya senior was gesticulating impatiently at him whilst still sounding his horn. “Get out of the way!” He heard the shouted words clearly through his open window, despite the horn blasts and the rustle of the passing herd at his right shoulder.
Michael’s face set hard, infected by the other’s impatience. “Oh piss off, you stupid whore,” he muttered. His own engine was still running, so in one quick movement he knocked the car into gear and set off, his foot impatiently hard down on the throttle. Immediately he knew something was wrong. A low-pitched thud of impact came from the front of the car and a group of people walking towards him down the hill began to shout and wave him to stop. He slammed hard on the brakes and the engine stalled. What was it? A rock? A goat? The possibilities raced through his mind in a meaningless jumble as he sprang out of the car and stretched to peer over the bonnet. He saw nothing at first, but then as he walked forward, his heart sank and his senses raced in shock. Doubled under the front of the car was a man, an old man, wedged between the road and the underside of the car’s bumper.
Before Michael could react, the group of onlookers arrived on the scene. Pushing him aside they hauled the old man free of the car and laid him at the side of the road. He was not yet dead, but obviously close to it. Mulonzya appeared at Michael’s shoulder to look on and was immediately engulfed in a fit of rage. He began to shout in Kikamba at the others, too quickly for Michael to follow every word of what he said. The odd word, however, was enough to convey the entire meaning.
As Munyasya gave out long blood-wet groans from deep within his crushed chest, Mulonzya publicly accused Michael of murder. The priest was still too shocked to react, too upset to offer any defence as the other explained to the small crowd that had by now gathered that Michael hated this poor old man. He personally had seen Munyasya spit at Mister Michael and everyone knew that the old man, demented though he might be, had recently set fire to the mission house in Migwani. Even though everyone knew him to be mad, everyone also made allowances for him, would help him to his feet, walk with him to wherever he wanted to go and even let him travel for free on a bus, as he must have done that very morning to reach Kitui town. Everyone knew that the old man often lay down in the road. Surely this priest should know as well?
For some minutes there was complete mayhem on the road before the cathedral. As the pathetic old Munyasya lay in a heap at the roadside dying, but still receiving what all judged to be Michael’s hollow concern and futile attentions, James Mulonzya continued to make a politician’s speech to the fast-growing crowd. Meanwhile a hundred or more cows blocked the road, or pushed their random way be
tween the blocks of people, one almost treading on Munyasya as Michael placed his rolled-up jacket beneath the old man’s head. When two of the now uncontrolled animals, buffeted by others reacting to the noise of a lorry passing by on the main road, walked sideways into the white Mercedes, they rocked it on its suspension, causing Charles Mulonzya, who was still inside, to grow visibly agitated. After opening the window of his car, he shouted at the boys who by then were much more interested in what was being said at the side of the road than in what their cows were doing on it. Though Charles shouted his stern and even angry command to the herdsmen, neither they nor anyone else heard a word of it above all the other commotion, now caused mainly by the continuing speech of Charles’s father.
And then suddenly, dangerously, the white Mercedes moved off, at first only to cover a few yards before coming again to a screeching halt as it hit a cow. Then, as the frightened animal panicked, pushing two others and then a group of people off balance, a woman to the left of the car, well away from the main site of commotion also fell to the ground at the side of the road, unnoticed except by just a few of the onlookers, who assumed that she too must have panicked on seeing the frightened animal charge away from the car. And then the white Mercedes screeched into motion again, this time turning to the right and forcing a path through the scrambling herd. And then, in a plume of dust as it left the tarmac on the inside of the corner at the bottom of the hill, it was gone onto the main road and to the left and out of town. Though many may have turned momentarily to look, few noticed it had gone, being still more interested in the fate of old Munyasya and James Mulonzya’s merciless interpretation of it.
Mulonzya’s speech continued for some time until it was interrupted by the dying man’s loud gravelly laugh. This brought a short pause when everyone looked in his direction. Mulonzya then continued, his words tinged with a tragic, almost theatrical bitterness.
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