Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1) (32 page)

Saturday, 14
th
December,

The Thika Catholic Church had a vocations workshop. One Father Peter Muema from Kitui Diocese who had been in Rome for ten years was back in the country having completed his doctorate in theology. He wanted to talk to the youth about vocations and the understanding of God’s call in their lives. The day was to start with a Mass at eleven o’clock.

I was in the vestry cleaning the chalices and ciboriums in preparation for the Mass. I heard the sacristy door open. I did not turn to look who it was. I already knew it was Sister Rose, the nun from the congregation of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who used to help me with work in the sacristy.

“Hi, Sister. Good morning,” I said, dipping a brush in a brasso container without even turning to look at her.

“Good morning to you; in the name of Maria.” The voice was honeyed, totally different and unfamiliar. It was not Sister Rose Wanjiku, and I turned unceremoniously to check who the stranger was.

I came face to face with a Mona Lisa Smile countenance on a perfectly sculptured chocolate complexioned face of a young girl whom I guessed her age to be barely over twenty. She was short and plump with a mass of shiny black curly hair which indicated some sort of crossbreeding in the genealogy showing from the centre of her head where a white veil had not swathed. Her round hazel eyes bore into mine with a rare confidence, straight in the eyeball. She was not shy. Her nose was thin and impeccably planted on her cute face and had a cupid-bow mouth with thin sensuous lips. She was shapely for her age with an unexaggerated steady gait. She wore a long immaculate sky-blue dress swathed with a white veil from the centre of her head to the lumbar region. Her bust was endowed, exceptionally noticeable. She smiled encouragingly at me, and I was lost for words. The Madonna with
out
the child.

Several seconds elapsed before I said, “How are you?”

“I’m fine. How do you do?”

“How do you do,” I answered.

An embarrassing moment of silence seemed to invade the room, the moment I feasted my eyes on her, before I asked, “What can I do for you?”

She told me that she was just passing by to check on the Christmas program and know whether she could be given any task do on that day.

“And you are?” I asked her.

“Hedwig Sanzi Joe. I’m a Chagga, from Kilimanjaro.” She paused briefly as though she had said that by mistake any had realized it was too late to check herself.
“Mi’ ni Mwanashirika wa Shirika la Bikira Maria.”
Her Swahili was perfect.

“I see,” I said, but she had lost me. She was speaking Cantonese. “I’m Ken, by the way, the sacristan.”

Hedwig went ahead to explain about this
Shirika
thing to me.

She was a devotee of the devotional group of Mary the Immaculate Conception, according to her, to protect herself from the unbridled hedonism, culture and globalization, things that have scourged the world today, because the devotional group helped guard them from the temptations through prayers. Guarded like the Vatican guard, I thought. From the very word go, I liked her. All this time her eyes were on me, unblinking, unfaltering.

She talked of the Immaculate Virgin Mary and the Son of Man, that is, Jesus. This made me remember the day I met Susan, and Susan herself.

“You new around here?” I asked Hedwig.

She told me that her family had just moved from Kitui. Her father, an accountant in the district commissioner’s office, had been transferred to Thika, their home place.

“Oh, welcome to Thika then. I’m sorry we don’t have that devotional group over here.”

I turned to my work, but still talking to her.

She answered the questions I asked her briefly and straight to the point. She was well versed with the organization of the Catholic Church. I told her about the day’s program and she offered to help me in preparing for the Mass. I was naturally exhilarated listening to her.

Quite oddly, a terrific weight dropped from my mind and say, my heart. Louche thoughts lingered, bugging like a headache. 

She could make a good wife, I thought. Here she has come, at your doorstep. Manna from heaven. Go ahead. She has come for you. A chance lost is never seen again. Never. The devil on my left shoulder whispered dearly.

No son, you are an instrument of the Lord. She is your sister, remember! Furthermore, she is just a kid, laden with innocence. Corrupt not the young mind. She is still in school. She is more of a little sister to you. You can’t do this. Not to her. You can go to jail for just thinking of defiling her. Paedophilia is a mortal sin besides a crime punishable by law.  The angel on my right shoulder countered.

I was confused, felt like a ball being tossed by the footballer from left to right. The devil on my left shoulder seemed to win; and I stopped what I was doing and observed her movements.

A sadistic, not only sadistic but sexual, thought and feeling crept and penetrated into my veins, thinking that her coming to the sacristy was not a coincidence, or God was telling me something.

I started having fancies, forbidden fantasy.
I would love her genuinely, I won’t cheat on her, I would respect her decision even if it’s till marriage, I would treat her sensitively, I would…
These and others were the thoughts that besieged my now holier-than-thou mind. I shook my head vigorously to clear it of all the amorous worms crawling into it. I wondered whether older women had such thoughts about pubescent men.
I like her, but where on hell would I start. Not in the sacristy. No, not with her clad in those Immaculate Virgin Mary dresses. No, I do not want to fill her chaste mind with emotions, with the evil of love. Not yet.
I could not help thinking of her one day in another man’s arms.

An hour later, I gonged the church bell to tell those who had not entered the church that it was time for the Mass.

I took my usual place at the nave. Hedwig sat next to me. She was a distraction enough for me.

And God said, ‘… it’s not good for man to live alone. I will make a suitable companion to help him… woman is her name because she was taken out of man.’
She could be mine, I convinced myself.

I found myself deducing what could be her plans for her life in my mind. Maybe, she wanted to join the convent. She was the type who could bear with the convent life. Still she was the type with lots of things to be in her life. She was in that age of confusion when we want to be everything, anything.

When the Mass was over, I cleared the altar and set up the pulpit for the facilitators of the workshop to take over. I surprised myself when I asked Hedwig to keep me company in the sacristy when ironing the priest’s vestments as the workshop was on-going. She said, “Why not?” and she offered to help with some work.

I told her that I was not a priest, neither was I in the seminary, nor was I contemplating the ridiculous idea.  I tried to tell her this and that, sacristy stuff, only to find that she already knew. “That’s the good thing in being a
Mwanashirika.
You get to know things known only by boys,” she told me.

At the Cathedral of Our Lady of Africa, Kitui, they were even pushing to have them girls incorporated in serving Mass with their male counterparts in the St. Aloysius Gonzaga devotional group. In other words they wanted to introduce girls’ Mass servers alongside the boys in the diocese.

She helped clean the vestry and later on the whole church. I liked her company.

“May I get personal with you?” I asked, fearing that she might explode and start exorcising the devil in me, but to my respite, she was calm, and… stoical.

“Why not?” she said, shrugging as if to relegate what I had asked to non-importance.

“Ahem... what would you like to be in future?”

She did not answer forthwith. She seemed to ponder on my question for a moment as though it was a question in an English class.

“Or I’m I getting too personal? I don’t intend to. I mean you are utterly attractive…” I checked myself before I said something stupid.

“No, you are not. On the contrary. I just don’t know what to tell you. I haven’t given it a thought yet.”

“Forgive me, but I’ve to say this...”

“Speak your mind, pal.”

“You’re utterly attractive to be a nun. I was just wondering how you would cope especially in...”

For a moment she avoided my eyes. “What makes you say so?”

“The fact that you’ve grown up guarded like the Vatican Guard by...”

“Sure,” she interjected nonchalantly. “But that I leave to God’s plans. Man proposes, God disposes.”

“What would you like to be? Some nun locked forever in some secluded nunnery or caged in marital bliss?”

“Point of correction. I might be young but believe me, marriage is a permanent contract with the devil,” she said. “And whoever gave you the idea that nuns are ugly? Or are they not happy in their vocation?”

“I would answer the last two questions – that’s not what I meant.”

“Aha…”

“Would you like to elaborate?”

“Vocation is a call, may it be marriage or the convent, the call to the order is another case,” she ignored my question indifferently. “It entails more than sees the eye – sacrifice. That I leave to God, as I’ve said.”

I tried many times to rephrase my earlier question, but she kept avoiding it. At last, she said, “Sure, I would definitely like to be a nun, but I would not force myself to live a life I can’t meet its standards or live a double standard life. God knows.”

“But what about your choice?”

“I would prefer matrimony. But why would you ask such a question anyway? I am way too far from that, you know. I have to study first before such thoughts find a place in my mind.”

“No perceptible reason. Just curious because you look like a mystic, to me – just like St. Theresa.”

“Even marriage is a holy vocation where God continues His creation work through the married. No marriage, no more Catholics, the largest church in the world. Plus, St. Bridget was married, and her husband supported her very much; he was devout, God-fearing and faithful. Today we venerate St. Bridget, and other pious men and women who are great in the church and play a significant role in the Catholic spirituality and were married. Why would you think serving God devotedly is for the clergy?”

I smiled at that.

“I know that, but I was beginning to think that girls who join that devotional group gradually become nuns. And the boys in the Saint Aloysius Gonzaga devotional group – the equivalent of you for boys – become priests. My mistake.”

“Not really. It’s just like a nursery. After the seedlings are mature enough to be transferred to the garden, the farmer plants them elsewhere. In the devotional group we are like the young seedlings in a nursery, being taken care of and taught the right way of life and then later on be planted on the gardens where we can yield the fruits of our tending by the mother church. These gardens are different. They are either the seminaries or the convents, or religious homes, or lay families. God knows where to plant us. We’re just being prepared.”

“I think you have explained it to me vividly,” I said.

“Do you have to do it?” Urbanas asked as he took a sip of his hot coffee. “Say whatever you like, Ken, but I’m not letting you out. You’re a loss we can’t afford. It is a mistake. You don’t wanna do this, not yet.”

I had to. My mind was made up. I bit my lower lip. “I told you, Urbanas, I’m opting out. I won’t take anything else from you.”

“Well, you took something from me today. You took yourself from me when you said that you’re quitting. You know this isn’t my way of doing things. Ideally I shouldn’t be here persuading you not to leave but I am doing it anyway because of the duty of care I have for you. Why else do you think I’d do this?”

“I don’t give a damn about anything about you now.”

“That sounds quite out of the way. You’re trying to get the better of me. It won’t be that good if you push me. I think you understand what your decision means, to you.”

“I wouldn’t waste my time trying. Your threats will do you no good. For Chrissake, I have a mind of my own. I choose what I want.”

“Oh, really!” his hands clenched into fists. I could see that his hackles were rising. I was piquing him. “You know I’d do anything to make you regret this.”

“So much threat. It’s a good thing you’re not in a position to do so.”

“Better than being out there, Ken. I would get to you no matter what. Please, don’t do this, come back home.”

“Either way I am in danger. Which is better, be always on the run running from the law or be a law abiding citizen caught up in a society where insecurity is the order of the day?”

“The life out there won’t offer you what I’d. Morals aren’t better either. Would you for once see it my way? The whole world is fucked up, everything, everybody.”

“So I have heard.”

“Everything out there is dirty – even the church you want to run to. It’s a house of nincompoops and hypocrites.”

“Something should be dirty for it to be cleansed. Since time immemorial it has been said that no one is perfect. It’s all part of the divine plan.”

“How smart of you to see through it, Ken.”

“My name is not Ken. I am Paul. Get used to it or...”

“It’s not hard to get used to your faking. I don’t know why the hell the priests in that church you want to go don’t see what a faker you are. You’re still you, Ken. Let them call you whatever you want, but you’re still you, Ken.”

“There’s nothing to see of me, and I am truly a wondrous faker.”

“You admit it?”

“Why not? You wouldn’t believe anything else, Urbanas. What shall it do to have you see in vision so clear that I am not in your canoe?”

“Why Paul?”

“I like Saul of Damascus. After all he’s a saint today.”

Urbanas looked puzzled.

“Hey Paul, don’t you remember the oath?”

“I must have grown too old to recall the past.”

Urbanas was watching me. “I see,” he said. “You’re weak of spirit, without power to overcome temptations, until you fall into them. Then you become disillusioned and finally put on a tag of Christianity around your neck. This won’t do you any good.”

“I am not weak. In fact, I am stronger than you who thinks is indefatigable and invincible. I pray that one day you come to realize what a wreck you are.” I stood up. “I am going now.”

“Yes, it’s time,” Urbanas said. “Come back to the family, we need you, and you’ll one day live to thank me for this.”

“I don’t need it. If it’s being a vagabond let me be, but I won’t. I am not coming back. Why don’t you see that? I am done with you, Urbanas.”

“That’s right, you told me that. But come back anyway. Don’t you ask yourself why I am begging you? I am trying to save your neck, Paul.”

“No, I won’t. I wouldn’t dare think otherwise. You’re leading me to the gallows next time. I am not ready for that.”

I turned to go.

“Don’t be too proud, Ken. Don’t you know that arrogance and pride seldom do any good to those who harbour them?”

“Why are you doing this? I was very clear to you.”

“Not out of kindness. I am not a kind guy. I have never been. Perhaps I want to convince you that it isn’t safe out there. I am afraid you want out but winter is coming.”

“Urbanas, I made myself very clear. Turn on me and let loose all the bitterness for my betrayal of the gang and ferocity that’s bottled up inside you. I have never seen anyone with all that stored bitterness and violence.”

I stared at him. I saw it in his eyes. The violence, bitterness, revenge and hope mirage away. He couldn’t break me, not with his empty threats.”

“Go away, Ken. I hope you know what you’ve done, what you’ve chosen. You want to go out there where I got you, poor and impoverished, you’ll think you’ve done what is best for you, and you’ll pray. Such a waste of time. Then I’ll come for you...”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe. I’ll come for you, Kennedy Paul Maina...”

I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness. I hadn’t dreamed about Urbanas for years. Not since I quit Mavis. Why now?

I got out of bed and moved to the window and threw it open. The air was cool on my naked body and I took a deep breath.

The moon, like a shining benignant face, broke through the clouds.

There was light behind the clouds.