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Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Samuel Sylvanus pulled the stained and ragged sheet over the girl’s face and made the sign of the cross over her.

‘God do for you what I could not,’ he muttered. ‘Rest your soul.’

He removed his mask and swept aside the sheet that covered the door. Sunlight streamed across the porch beneath the low eaves, casting stripes of light and shadow on the packed earth. From the rutted road that ran through the village a dust-devil swirled into the bush before vanishing like a ghost. The mood was sombre. They knew; the family always knew.

‘Vincent will come by and take the body at sunset,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Both parents looked at him without expression. Edriam gathered her younger daughter into the folds of her skirt and held her close.

‘Look-Eye?’ Gabriel said.

‘Yes. But she was weak to begin with. It always attacks the weak. Jemi is healthy. You do not need to fear for her.’ He stroked the little girl’s cheek as if brushing away the lie. Her dark, frightened eyes watched him from the shelter of her mother’s skirt.

Gabriel nodded and went into the room where his first-born lay dead.

Tenne Kaswe was the village’s third death in as many days. It was a low total, but every one felt personal to Samuel. Kpotama was a small place – a scattering of forty huts, maybe two hundred people, over an area of a couple of square miles. Samuel had been the doctor, priest, lawmaker, father and friend to the village since he turned his back on the seductive opportunities of Kampala and returned to his native country to do real good. He had watched his father, the previous village elder, die of the same disease four years ago. It was often just common malaria – or more rarely late-stage sleeping sickness – but with no medicines it was pointless to name it. The villagers referred to both diseases as Look-Eye because of the horrifying way the eyes of a patient in the latter stages often moved independently or trembled uncontrollably, as if seeing death stalking them among the shadows.

Samuel walked along the dusty road to where he had leaned his bicycle against a thorn tree. Every year was the same. Come late October, early November, the village already weakened by poor and inadequate food, the disease crept through them and he lost good people. Sixteen last year, nine the year before – and that excluded the regular swathe of death cut through the very old and very young by diseases so common even the villagers didn’t name them. When his father had died it had been an especially bad year; fifteen dead in under a week.

Samuel tied his medical bag to the bike’s rack and pedalled slowly back towards the church. For some of the way a little boy ran along beside him, his big flat feet slapping in the dust.

‘Good morning to you, Meki,’ he said. The child grinned back at him, revealing widely spaced bright white teeth in a face of pure innocence. As he ran, he held up his hand, showing the village elder a collection of four rounded pebbles. They looked to be just the same as every other stone that littered the path through the village, but what did Samuel Sylvanus know? They were special to the boy, and in Samuel’s opinion that made them special enough for anyone. He smiled and the boy’s grin grew even wider.

Meki didn’t say anything. He never did. His mother had contracted – and miraculously survived – Look-Eye when she was pregnant, and the child had been mute except for a few baby words since he was born. Although he was the most sweet-natured, placid child Samuel had ever known, he feared that the boy would only ever be a mouth in the village and never its working hands.

He rode on with a cheery wave. When he looked back Meki was squatting in the dust, digging at another stone with his nimble fingers.

Out on the horizon he saw a rooster-tail of red dust kicked up by an approaching vehicle. It was too far away to hazard a guess at whether it was a car or a truck (neither were common out here). Time would tell. At least the days of the visits from the Freedom Brotherhood were over. With the end of the war their kidnappings – or recruitments as the Brotherhood called them – had stopped. Most of Samuel’s generation of men had been lost to those recruitments. Samuel himself had only survived because his father had been able to hide him where the Brotherhood would never look. He had spent many days cowering at the bottom of the village well. His cousin Stanley had not been so lucky.