Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart (19 page)

“Oh, my God. Did people actually do that? That’s terrible.”

“Exactly. So, Mrs. Wall, this is how we lived.”

I saw the water racing toward her on our tabletop at lunch that day. I was just beginning to understand the horror she had faced all this time—the suffocating grief, fearing for her own health, imagining how a beloved child who left lightheartedly in the morning might return the same day under the weight of accusation, a leper-by-proxy and an exile.

Bienta said, “So many times I felt I should tell you, but I always lost my nerve. Many times, I have tried, knowing it was wrong to keep this from you.”

I shook my head in sympathy. “It wasn’t wrong to keep it from me. I had no right to know. But now that I do know, I can help more.” Bienta’s degree of isolation was difficult to comprehend. If only I had been more attentive. More inclined to look beneath the surface. “I’m so sorry, Bienta. I knew there was something wrong, but I was so caught up in my own problems. I should have asked more questions instead of making assumptions. I even thought at one point that you didn’t like me, and that you resented my help. Meanwhile, you were going through such torture, and all alone. I hope you can forgive me.”

“You are our friend,” Bienta said, her voice warm with compassion. “You have been steady on an awkward path. And as my husband says, we’re going to need you more than ever, going forward.”

G
iles poked his cane along the ramp into his house. The neighborhood was decorated for Halloween, with ghostly flags and black-and-purple wreaths and tiny blinking orange lights in windows.

Giles’s friend Blake helped him in as I held the door. Bienta carried Giles’s suitcase in. Giles was home from a brief stay in the hospital, where he’d agreed to participate in a study providing experimental treatments to patients suffering from HIV-AIDS. Bienta was happy for Giles to participate. “It is this type of research that may lead to better treatment,” she said. That thought seemed to buoy Giles as well. We’d both noticed how his mood had seemed to brighten with a renewed sense of purpose when the volunteer came to take him to the hospital.

The circle of trust had expanded, if only slightly. I’d been given permission to tell Dick, and Giles and Bienta had told Blake and Sarah as well. Among us, we tried to lighten their load. While Bienta raced off to her second job, Blake headed out to do their shopping, and I stayed behind with Giles. I had brought a small stack of papers to grade, and felt guilty once again that I complained about my burdens when other people bore up under such awful things, and without a whimper.

Giles and I settled into the living room and took turns exchanging optimistic words about the other’s future.

“Your scan last week was normal,” Giles reminded me.

“But I have to have another one in six weeks,” I said. “My doctor says that everything looks fine, but the scans must continue as long as the markers are increasing. Let’s face it. Worry never ends. At least it seems that way for us.”

“Yes, we are doomed to constant vigilance,” he said.

“We have our own club,” I said. “The downside is that it’s a club no one wants to join. The upside is that we can talk about anything we want to, and no one can accuse us of being morbid. And it’s oddly liberating. No one chides us about our weight or our triglycerides. There’s no one to impress, and nothing else to be lost.”

“It’s very true,” Giles said. He picked up a sky-blue leather book from his TV tray. I had seen it before, when Giles was hospitalized for his stroke. It was a small New Testament, in Luo, with a simple gold cross stamped on the front. He handed it to me and I opened it. Paging through, I marveled that the letters
grouped so strangely to my eye translated more or less exactly into the words of faith so familiar to my heart.

“Giles, I feel like I may be failing this part of our seminars. Some days I have a difficult time maintaining my optimism. I tell myself not to, that it’s self-defeating and pointless, but still sometimes I can’t keep myself from standing in front of the mirror, just to check one more time. It’s like I’m looking for trouble.” I flipped through the pages some more. “Let’s see if I can find the part about the lilies of the field. I’m in sore need of some inspiration.”

“Let me read it to you,” he said. “I find it restores my spirits.” He read the first few verses in his mother tongue, and then, with equal ease, he finished the passage in the English language of the Kenyan schools where he easily excelled as a child. “‘Therefore take no thought, saying, “What shall we eat?” or, “What shall we drink?” or, “Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” For after all these things do the Gentiles seek, for your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things.’”

“That has been my problem,” I said. “I worry too much about things I cannot control.”

“Father Matthews came to see me yesterday,” Giles said. “He brought Communion. I spoke my heart to him. He’s such a good man. Very, very good.”

“He did the same for me when I was in the hospital,” I said.

“I spoke to him about how I have struggled with regret. I find myself wishing I could live to see my grandchildren. But such is not my lot.” His voice was simple and steady, though his words
were filled with sadness. “I have been thinking about how it’s all gone by so quickly, and I was so impatient as a father. When my youngest was ten or eleven years old, he had a terrible fear of spiders. He’d wake up in the night screaming with terror. I used to scold him for being frightened of something so silly. Now I realize what a sensitive person he is, and how I wouldn’t wish him to be any other way.”

“Giles, you mustn’t torture yourself with the times you made mistakes. We all have those. Please don’t forget all the wonderful things you did, too. Think of all the hours and hours you spent at soccer practice and swim meets.”

He smiled, even laughed a little. “I used to love the swim meets. I loved watching them cut through the water. I’d sit right up close to the edge of the pool with my timer. The water would splash over my feet and legs, but I didn’t care. So long as my boys were happy with their performance, that was what mattered to me.”

“And that’s what matters to them, too. They love you, Giles, the same way I know that my children love me. We all make mistakes. We just have to pray that the ones we made with our children were small ones. Only time will tell.”

I mentioned an old Methodist hymn, “My Times Are in Thy Hands.” I sang a few of the verses.

My times are in Thy hand; My God, I wish them there;

My life, my friends, my soul I leave entirely to Thy care.

My times are in Thy hand; Whatever they may be;

Pleasing or painful, dark or bright, As best may seem to Thee.

My times are in Thy hand, I’ll always trust in Thee;
And, after death, at Thy right hand I shall forever be.

I glanced around Giles’s living room at the many books on his shelves. I wished they held the answer to my questions about time and death and what came after. But I would have to accept the uncertainty.

The silence that descended around Giles and me was comfortable, as if our priest had called for prayer. I cherished the moment and it occurred to me that friendship itself could be a kind of church.

“I have thought of you as my best professor,” I told Giles at last.

“And you have been my most promising student,” he replied. Our matching brown eyes burned with tears.

A
few days later, Giles made his final visit to our yard.

We both were aware of this, but it remained unspoken. His elder son came with him and we watched as Naam planted a shrub under the ancient dogwood by the creek. Giles told me it would bloom in the spring, and he surveyed the bank as if to commit it to memory.

Joining him by the fence, I saw he was weary, though I could still sense the fundamental luminosity that made him so different from anyone else I’d ever known. He paused for a moment as we watched the churning waters of the creek that swept past us, swollen from a recent spell of autumn rain.

Giles said, “Can you picture the cattle that must have grazed here in those long-ago days when this was a working farm?
Flowing water is essential. And many on the planet go without it.” He walked around the fence, his labored steps unsteady on the creek bank. I imagined him falling in, and in this vision, I’m dismayed to watch him being swept downstream before my grasping hands can catch him. With careful steps, I joined him on the bank. It seemed there was something on his mind, and now he spoke of it, his eyes focused on the rolling water.

“Do not be too hard on your parents, Carol. The harm they brought into your life was unintentional. Many of us would like the chance to go back in Time, but such things are not possible here. Not even Einstein could arrange for such a thing.”

I thanked him. It was the first and only time he’d ever called me by my given name.

•   •   •

The long-awaited good news from Nairobi came at last. Meanwhile, though only a few days had passed since his visit to my yard, Giles had entered into an irreversible decline. He clung to life, knowing that Lok was on her way. Bienta called to ask if I would drive her to the Raleigh airport to pick up Lok.

When I arrived at their home, Giles greeted me from his seat in the wheelchair by the picture window in the living room. Bienta had been detained, he said, but would be arriving momentarily.

“Why don’t you go back and lie down?” I said. “I’ll help you. Then you’ll be stronger for Lok’s arrival.”

He shook his head. “If I lie down, I will not get up again.”

A single tear spilled onto his cheek. I knew he was frightened of dying before Lok made it home. I gave him a tissue so he could wipe his tears.

For a moment, I had a horrifying flash of anxiety—I wondered if it might be possible to catch his disease from a tear-stained tissue. Just as quickly I knew it was ignorant and idiotic—shameful. That is what fear of illness does to people—to me. It takes away our powers of logic and compassion and separates us from each other. The specter of death and decay brings an impulse to turn away. I of all people should have known better. I still had so much to learn.

Some moments passed. Giles wiped his tears away and I wiped mine. I recalled the words Giles offered me that evening of my cancer diagnosis when I had impulsively confessed my illness to him in the Foodland parking lot. “You are not responsible for this disease,” he told me that night. Now I tried to find the right words to comfort him.

“You are not alone, Giles,” I said. “And there is no point in blaming yourself, or feeling ashamed. Bad things happen to the good. There are people who drown on summer vacations. There are even babies born with cancer. Many people had the right-of-way. Yet they lie smiling sadly in their coffins.”

Giles nodded. “Let’s not forget innocent victims of war, famine, and earthquakes. And though many advances have been made toward treatments of HIV-AIDS, the stigma has lingered for more than twenty years.”

“There’s nothing fair about it,” I said. “And no disease on earth is reserved for guilty people.”

He bowed his head, receiving this absolution. Receiving it myself, I did the same.

•   •   •

When Bienta and I first saw Lok, she was in the luggage area poised by a pay phone. As we descended the escalator, it seemed she was rising toward us like an earthly angel entering our lives. After all these years of dreaming about this moment, she had come to symbolize a sort of guardian angel to me—or a blessing.

She had Bienta’s prominent cheekbones, and her father’s brilliant smile flashed back in response to my own. She was just over five feet tall, but her hair, swept up into a bun and intricately braided, made her seem a bit taller. She wore jeans and a white linen shirt, and had slung a denim jacket over her shoulder. It slid off as she rushed toward her mother, and I picked it up. Bienta folded Lok into her arms and they spoke in either Swahili or Luo. They were so excited that it was hard to tell which.

On the drive home, a cold November rain began to fall. In the backseat, Lok fell asleep on a pillow. Bienta sat in the passenger seat and acted as navigator. From time to time she turned to watch the shadows shift across her daughter’s face.

Fog descended and road signs were obscured along the winding route. Bienta had assured me that she knew the way, and had traveled these roads many times while driving the boys to their
soccer games. But I wasn’t at all sure where we were. I glanced at the gas gauge and noticed that it was near empty. I should have filled up before.

Bienta seemed uneasy also. Finally, she turned to me and said, “Mrs. Wall, I’m afraid I have misdirected us.”

I should have remained calm. I knew well enough that panicking when you are lost only makes the situation worse. But I thought about Giles, and his terror of dying before he could see Lok. I couldn’t bear the thought of arriving at their home only to find out that we were too late. My heart raced and I thought I might cry.

Then I thought of one of Daddy’s favorite war pictures that he kept in his room. In it, he is driving a jeep and smiling wide for the camera. I remembered the story of how, after the war, he visited the parents of a young soldier who had died from his battle injuries while being transported in the back of Daddy’s jeep. Daddy didn’t know the parents and would never see them again, but he made the long drive to Belvedere, Maryland, he said, because he wanted to let them know that their only child had not died alone. He had died a hero’s death, and slipped peacefully away, covered by a blanket in the back of Daddy’s jeep.

It was comforting now to think of Daddy, a leader and protector, friend to those in trouble. I felt him within me, and heard his voice in my head, telling me that it was going to be all right, that we’d find our way home.

And we did. We arrived at the Owitas’ house just after midnight. The wheelchair was empty, but light glowed from Giles’s bedroom. The boys greeted their sister, and they all hurried back to see Giles. I heard his cry of delight at the sight of his beloved Lok. In English, he told her that he would bring her roses in summer. As she answered in another language, I prayed for it to be true, and that all of our tears would be wiped away one day.

•   •   •

The next day, Bienta called to say that Giles had asked for me. The time for parting was near.

When I arrived, Giles was lapsing in and out of delirium, often confusing names—all except for one, Lok. He held her by him, insisting she must remain at his side.

At last, I knew it was time to speak the words of my heart, the ones I’d been dreading having to say out loud. “I will help take care of your family, Giles. Because you would do the same for me.”

His lids fluttered. There was a fleeting moment when I saw them open, and it seemed to me that he used all his energy to look directly at me one more time. He didn’t say anything. But he looked into my eyes, and the final agreement of our friendship was sealed. It rested on the purest, most beautiful and logical of foundations.

In the bedroom doorway going out, I paused for one last
look. His hands lay atop the crumpled sheets. Their veins suggested the powerful confluence of many tiny rivers.

“Wabironenore,”
I whispered. “Do you remember the day you taught me the Luo way to say ‘farewell’?”

We would see each other later; it was true. He couldn’t respond, and yet I heard him promise.