Green City in the Sun (36 page)

     "It is wrong what you have done!" cried Father Guido. "You have committed an abomination in the sight of God!"

     Finally one of the elders spoke. "Does not the Bible tell us that Lord Jesu was circumcised?"

     "Indeed, it does. But nowhere does it say His blessed mother
Mary
was!"

     Several pairs of eyes blinked. One elderly aunt glanced over her shoulder.

     "Have we not taught you that the old ways are bad? Did you not embrace the love of Jesus Christ and promise to keep His laws?" Father Guido pointed a shaking finger toward the sky. His voice rang over their heads. "You will be cast out of heaven for what you have done! You will burn in the hellfire of black Satan for your evil sins."

     Grace saw the stony faces start to break. Then Mario stepped forward
and pleaded in rapid Kikuyu with his relatives to let the holy man and the memsaab into Teresa's hut.

     There was a moment of silence, in which seven Kikuyu elders matched the stares of the two white people; then the old grandmother stepped to one side.

     Father Guido and Grace entered the hut and found Teresa lying on a bed of fresh leaves; the darkness was filled with the drone of flies and the pungent scent of ceremonial herbs. Kneeling at her side was Wachera.

     While Father Guido knelt opposite, opening his small bag and removing the silk stole and holy water, implements for the administering of the final sacrament, Grace bent to examine the girl.

     The wound had been treated in what Grace knew to be the ritualistic way, a strict formula handed down through the generations. Special leaves had been dipped in antiseptic oil and bound between Teresa's legs. They had been changed recently, no doubt by the specially appointed "nurse," who would bury the old leaves in a secret, taboo place where no man might accidentally walk. Teresa would also have been fed special food of a religious nature, Grace knew, and she would have eaten it off a banana leaf.

     The whole process of initiation into womanhood was a sacred and holy thing, something few whites had ever witnessed, and it was as sacred and meaningful to the Kikuyu as the mass conducted at the altar was to Catholics. But it was a cruel and inhumane practice which caused a great deal of pain and suffering and blood loss and a deformity that created problems for the woman in later life, such as difficulty in childbirth. Grace had joined the missionaries in the fight for its abolition.

     Mario's sister was very pretty, Grace could see in what little light came into the hut. About sixteen years of age, she guessed, with delicate features and a touching innocence about her. Teresa's eyes were open. Grace gently closed them—because the girl was dead.

     While Father Guido solemnly murmured the prayers of the last rites, Grace bowed her head and felt the sting of tears.

     She was not praying; she was clenching her teeth in frustration and anger. Teresa was the fourth girl Grace had seen die as a result of blood poisoning after an initiation, brought on by the knife of the medicine woman
who had performed the operation. She had also heard of other girls dying from infections that might have been cured if a European doctor had been called in time.

     Grace looked up and met Wachera's eyes.

     For an instant the air inside the hut was charged; the energies of the two rivals—Wachera and Grace—seemed to clash within the mud walls.

     Then Grace said in Kikuyu, "I am going to see that your evil practices are brought to an end. I know the black magic you practice. I have heard from my patients. I have tolerated you long enough. Because of you and others like you, this child is dead."

     While Grace trembled with anger, the medicine woman gazed back with a masked expression. Wachera was still beautiful, tall, and slender, with her head shaved, rows of beads and copper covering her long arms, her supple body dressed in soft hides. She was an anachronism among Christianized Kikuyu; Wachera existed like a ghost from their ancestral past. She gazed at Grace Treverton in arrogance and pride. Then she rose and left the hut.

     G
RACE RETURNED TO
her mission to find Valentine pacing back and forth in front of the clinic building. When she saw what he had in his hand and the little boy who crouched in terror by the veranda steps, she knew why her brother had come.

     "Look at this!" Valentine shouted, flinging the object at her. It hit Grace in the chest and fell to the ground. She picked it up and saw that it was one of Mona's dolls. "I caught him playing with it again!"

     "Oh, Valentine." She sighed. "He's only seven years old." Grace walked past her brother and squatted beside Arthur, who, she saw at once, had received another parental thrashing.

     "I will not have you mollycoddling him! You and Rose are turning my son into a Percy boy!"

     Grace put her arms about Arthur, and he burst into tears. "Poor little thing," she murmured, stroking his hair.

     "Damn it, Grace! Listen to me!"

     She glared up at him. "No, you listen to me, Valentine Treverton! I have just seen a child who was
truly
ruined, and I will not listen to your shouting over something ridiculous. Another girl has died because of an initiation, and I was unable to save her. What are you doing about these initiations, Valentine? They're
your
people. You should care!"

     "What's it to me what a bunch of blacks do? My only concern is for my son. I will not have him playing with dolls!"

     "No," she said slowly. "You don't care what the Africans do. And you care more about yourself than about your son."

     A deep flush raced up his neck as Valentine glowered at his sister, then turned and walked away.

     Inside the cool thatch building that was her clinic, Grace comforted Arthur. He had bruises about his neck and shoulders.

     "Hello," said a soft voice as a silhouette filled the open doorway.

     Grace looked up. Her heart leaped. "James. You're home."

     "I got in last night and came straight to see you—Hello, what's happened here?"

     "Valentine again."

     James stepped inside and said, "Hello, Arthur."

     "Hello, Uncle James."

     "My brother thinks he can terrorize his son into manhood," Grace said quietly, trying to keep the anger out of her voice so as not to frighten the boy. "I'm going to stop these beatings if I have to ... You'll be all right, Arthur. You're not hurt badly."

     "Have you written to Rose about it?"

     "She should be arriving any minute now, in fact. Her letter wasn't very precise—you know Rose."

     "Then Mona is in school in England?"

     "Yes. At the academy Rose went to as a girl."

     "You'll miss Mona, won't you?"

     "Yes, terribly."

     Grace gave her nephew a kiss on the head, then set him down on the floor, a boy who was too small for his age and who had inherited his mother's dreamy temperament. "Go on now, love," Grace said gently. "Go and play."

     "Where shall I go?" he asked, bewilderment in his large blue eyes.

     "Where would you
like
to go, Arthur?"

     He pretended to think a moment. Then he said, "May I go and see the babies?"

     She smiled and patted him on his way. Valentine had forbidden Arthur to set foot in Grace's maternity hut, but she had decided not to heed her brother's orders.

     "James!" she said as they walked out of the clinic. "What a wonderful surprise to see you!"

     They stepped outside, and when Grace looked at the way the sunshine brought out the auburn highlights in James's dark brown hair, she felt the familiar rush of love and the ache that never left her. Each time he went away she felt a part of herself go with him. When he came back, she was whole again.

     "I missed you," she said.

     They followed the path toward her house, passing the thatch buildings she had added. One of them was the small maternity clinic where Arthur spent most of his time looking at the newborn babies.

     As James and Grace walked up onto the veranda of her cottage, she said, "What is the news from Uganda?"

     "The same as always. Sleeping sickness, malaria, blackwater. Nothing new, I'm afraid. And you, Grace? How has the mission been these past four months?"

     She went into the house and returned with two glasses of lemonade. Handing one to James, she said, "You've been gone
five
months. We have a new henhouse and a new blackboard for the classroom."

     He laughed. "Here's to chickens and education," he said, and they drank.

     James studied Grace over the rim of his glass. She looked as neat and crisp as usual. Despite the demands of running her mission school and clinic, Grace was always dressed in a clean white blouse and skirt, her short hair always in place. And she was even more beautiful, he thought, than when he had last seen her.

     "Is something troubling you, Grace?"

     "There's been another initiation. Mario's sister died." She sat in a wicker
chair. "I have to be firmer with these people, James. I've got to put my foot down and make them realize that the old ways are bad for them. This is the twentieth century. Modern medicine is reaching a peak that is unknown in all of history. We work miracles these days. But
still
, when they're frightened, they run to a tribal healer."

     "Traditional healing isn't all bad, Grace."

     "Yes, it is. It's witchcraft, plain and simple. Who knows what that woman puts into her concoctions!" Grace waved a hand toward Valentine's polo field and the hut at its end.

     Wachera's homestead was now, after so many years, such a familiar part of the scene that it no longer aroused comment. Indeed, many European farms were now peppered with "squatter" homesteads—the small plots of Africans who had come out of the Reserves and who chose to work for the white man and live as a tenant on his land—so that Wachera's presence at the end of the polo field was no longer the oddity it had once been. The young medicine woman, Grace knew, lived a strange, secret life, going silently about her ancient business like a shadow at the periphery of one's vision. But Grace knew what she did. Her patients told her.

     Mathenge's widow led the people on spirit hunts whenever an epidemic struck, she supervised planting ceremonies before the rains, she made magical charms to keep children safe, she delivered babies, she brewed love potions, she talked to the spirits of the dead, and she read the future. She also, Grace suspected, wielded the knife during the initiations of girls.

     "I think," Grace said quietly, "that the District Commissioner is going about it the wrong way. Simply making something illegal doesn't make it disappear. What we have to do is outlaw the perpetrators of such barbarism. Wachera and people like her must be removed, and then the old practices will die naturally."

     "How do you propose to get rid of her? Valentine tried without success."

     "I don't know. I shall go down to Nairobi and organize the missions into a more unified effort. The Africans must be made to see that traditional healing is bad and that the white doctor is the person they must go to."

     James took out his pipe and lit it. "I'm afraid I disagree with you, Grace. I still maintain there is a lot of good in traditional healing. Remember when
I had that outbreak of dysentery among my chaps and I was all out of Epsom salts and castor oil? It was the old Kikuyu rhubarb remedy that saved them."

     She shook her head. "We never took smears, James. We never did a microscopic analysis. You don't know for sure it was dysentery or even amoebic."

     "Not everything has to be diagnosed through modern medicine, Grace. You know, there is such a thing as being too one-sided."

     "You wouldn't be saying that if you had seen that poor girl this afternoon."

     Suddenly a group of boys came running around the corner of the classroom hut, laughing and looking back over their shoulders. When they saw Grace on the veranda, they immediately drew up to attention and presented serious faces. "Jambo, Memsaab Daktari," they said, and marched by like little black soldiers.

     "Merciful heaven," she murmured, rising from her chair, "what
are
they up to now?"

     At the rear of the long structure that was the school, she found a little girl lying on the ground, covered in mud. "Wanjiru," Grace said, going to her.

     Helping the nine-year-old to her feet and brushing the dirt off her dress, Grace said, "There, there, Wanjiru. You're not hurt, are you?"

     Close to tears but holding them back, the little girl shook her head no.

     "Would you like to go home?"

     She shook her head more fiercely.

     "Very well then. Go and find Memsaab Pammi and tell her I said you could have a sweet."

     The child mumbled a shy
asante sana
, then turned and ran to the entrance of the schoolhouse, where Miss Pamela was having a tea break between lessons.

     "Is she one of your pupils?" James asked as they walked back to Bird-song Cottage. "I didn't know you had female students."