THE GODDESS INCARNATES

At midnight, on a seat of five skulls
I worship the slayer of illusions,
The Maharaja (King) gifted me thirty – three
Acres of rent – free earth, (1)
I have planted seeds of your devotion (Bhakti)
In the soil of my bones to perform corpse rituals.
The world calls me mother – crazy and love – mad,
Your status comes alive in my skeleton,
Oh, Mother Kali! Tell me
If the Goddess incarnates.

• – Ram Prasad Sen

 

COW DUST HOUR

I dwell on the ferocious cremation grounds
Yearning for my Mother Kali!
She carries waxing gibbous on her forehead,
The Sun grows larger in her right pupil,
The Moon drips from the two corners of her left eye,
She burns the demons in the catacomb of her three eyes.
You cannot carry her consort in your palm,
He keeps her love and fury in the ocean of his heart.

I am restless, this longing to meet my
Mother will swallow me.
Oh, Mother! I have transposed to a ghoul
Your disciples are my friends now.
They claim,
Between the day and night –
When twilight rises to the throat of the sky,
The hours of Sun and darkness make love,
There is no period of half – light,
I will meet you at,
The time of Union.

 

EMANCIPATION

My eyes brim with the weight of dusk,
Emotions conflagrate in my heart
Burning the corpse without fuel.
This dawn I am returning to my house
To constellate my belongings.

The entrance is clouded by the
Scattered scars of my childhood,
Every drawer is sealed with the secrets of
My disappointments.
Today, I let go of my failures and rise
From the floor,
As soot rises from the throat.
With every effort to clean the house
My spine travels to the nucleus of my brain
Showing me the way to the bedroom.

At the bedroom’s door,
I stand startled by the view.
The Mother Goddess is coming together
With the God of Mountains,
Consuming my form and liberating me
From prison.

Andria Williams for The Wrath-Bearing Tree:

I was honored to read Tom Keating’s memoir, ‘Yesterday’s Soldier,’ an excellently written and sensitive account of his time as a non-combatant servicemember during the Vietnam War. Tom had been a noviciate in the Roman Catholic priesthood, but when the priests at his seminary deemed him a not-ideal candidate for that calling, he enlisted in the army, which caused him a massive change in his state of mind. His responses to some of my questions are below, and the link to the full interview is embedded. Please come watch — Tom is a great speaker, and his thoughts on how various cultures of religion and obedience play into military service are interesting.

Good news:  Tom is now happily married and lives in Massachusetts.

 

*

 WBT: Can you explain your path from seminary school into the military?

Tom Keating: I am the first son of my family of Irish Roman Catholics. Back then, to be a priest was admirable. I attended an all boys’ catholic high school taught by priests, the Congregation of Holy Cross. They were young priests, and they were great role models. The idea of being like them grew as I went through the four years. In my senior year, I sought their advice and declared my intention to be one of them. The next five and one half of my life I was one of them.

WBT: You mention that there were 27 novitiates in your first-year group, but only 5 remaining when you left. What do you think made them leave?

Tom Keating: I was a young seminarian full of the aggiornamento of the church, full of the idea to be Christ’s apostle for the flock, so to speak. That flock included the young men who wanted to avoid the draft. I saw my role as ministering to them. Hell, I even co-signed a loan for my friend, a coed who needed money. Of course I had none myself. That action and my activities did in fact affect my future as a priest. The men who were in charge of the seminary were afraid of the liberal trend in the church that I embraced. I originally wrote in the EPILOGUE of the book “And Father’s world? The world he lived in, one of order, Latin masses, strict obedience to a hierarchy, Gregorian Chants, celibacy, black cassocks and clerical collars, a world he treasured and tried to protect? He was right to be afraid. That world had been turned into—dogshit.” A reference to the dog poop on the previously spotless corridors of the seminary (Cat, my editor, thought I should change that, so I did make it milder.)

My Dad and I watched the demonstrations in Chicago during the convention. I was home then from the seminary. We shared our shock and disgust at the police in the riot. He was from the World War 2 generation, respect for authority, etc. It cemented our relationship.

There were violent incidents where I didn’thave that aversion, mostly in-country. A monument to Army training/brainwashing. In the book, I described a vehicle accident that happened when I was on my way to the elephant factory. That violence was accepted by me and the jeep driver. The dead bodies on the wire after a sapper attack elicited no aversion, just acknowledgement of our firepower. I was bothered by that but could not show it.

Seminary life in 1963-64 was harsh. Monastic rule meant sparse meals, rule of silence except when in class, early morning prayers before breakfast, work on the property after class. No social life, parental visits once a month, poverty chastity and obedience. The social dynamic of 27 mostly teenage boys in that pressure cooker of conformity and strict rules was tough. The novitiate year, where we spent working and praying on a farm in Vermont was very strenuous. It was a pressure cooker, like military basic training, only it lasted one whole year. Our farm was located outside the town of Bennington VT, and we could hear the music playing on car radios that drove by. The world was driving by us, and we were anchored in a centuries-old system. Desertion from the novitiate was swift. We finished the year there with 10 newly sworn in religious.

War and peace today? Of course right now the Ukrainians are being assaulted by Russia. Peace is harder to find. I don’t have any great thoughts on war and peace except to say countries are fighting for lithium and rare earths now, and resources like water and iron and salt and sugar. It is insane. I try to have peace around me, so I work with my church and the local veterans’ community to help them. I can’t do much for nations and their wars, but I can give peace to my friends and social circle.

*

Watch the full interview with Tom Keating here:

 

 

 

I went home to Jersey only once since the enlistment. I had to see my Ma. Back in the summer of 2011 I finished Basic and Advanced Individual Training for Cav Scouts and thought I’d officially become a real patriot now. The son of Filipino immigrants transformed into a proud, government-paid U.S. Soldier. A real Soldier, though, I was not. Drill sergeant said that me and the rest of my squad back at A.I.T wouldn’t experience anything too bad in Iraq or Afghanistan by the time we got in it. The War was almost up. When we deployed overseas, it would be like a vacation to Thailand, too easy. “Y’all are the lucky ones,” she said. “You’ll never see anyone die violently in your lives. You can thank Obama for that.” Joke’s on her, though. By the time I was thirteen, I’d already seen a few dead people in my life. My Pops for example. I don’t need to speak on that, though.

I showed up to Newark airport looking like a civilian, not in my ACU’s or my shiny class A’s like the Budweiser commercials have you believe we all come home looking like. Only pogues wear their uniform at the airport. Nah, I wore a grey fitted tee that felt snug and showed off my brown, ripped arms, and some boot cut jeans I picked up at the Fort Benning PX that were too baggy. It was like I was stuck in the early 2000s. Still, I had this image that Ma was going to be real proud of this new look on me. What I expected was love and admiration for the work I accomplished, the money I made, and the simple truth that I did it all on my own. Grown man now, no Pops needed, no bullshit. But when she saw me at the pickup gate with my assault pack and my Class A’s in a garment bag, she stayed in her ’93 ruby-colored Corolla as if she were a goddamn cab.

Woman who popped me out almost twenty-one years ago wouldn’t even get out of her car. She unlocked the passenger door to let me in and only glanced at me once before she drove off. Ma was about five inches shorter than me, a light-skinned woman with black hair that stopped at the back of her neck. She always wore light turquoise blouses, even when it was shy of being cold as hell. In the winter she’d switch between three turquoise hoodies all the time and never anything else, even if the heat was on blast. Two cars in front of us, this college-aged Latino boy was coming out the gate with his mother, girlfriend, and whole extended family in tow like a Pharaoh had just arrived. I wondered about that dude for half of the ride until Ma spoke up.

“Have you eaten anything, Jason?” First thing she said to me.

“Pretzels–”

“What?”

“I had pretzels on the plane. They gave me that and a Sprite.”

“Sugar they put in those sodas will kill you. Do you want to have your heart burst so young like your father?”

I had no answer for that. The main thing on my mind at the time was this: Big Jason Zobel was back in town, looking the part of a Cav Scout. There was a time when I did the whole college thing for a stint—even tried ROTC once—but enlisting turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did. When I completed Basic I went on Facebook and posted my graduation photo. My Facebook Likes lit up (104 to be exact) from a mix of people I never talked to before: high school people, Ma’s side of the family, and even this one girl, Rebecca, who I crushed on all of my junior year but who never gave me a second glance in the hallways of Saint Barnaby High. Rebecca didn’t just like my pic–she commented. She did more than just say, Congrats! She added: “You look so handsome, Jason.” You best believe I saw that shit and sent her a message. I asked if she wanted to chill at Flannigan’s Pub the day I got back to Jersey. Rebecca messaged back, “sure, let’s hang,” and yo, who am I to turn her down?

“You have to eat, Jason,” Ma said. “I’ll cook adobo for you at home.”

I tried to turn the radio on, but she told me not to touch the dial or the air con. She claimed it would kill the battery. I tried to explain that that wasn’t how cars worked.

“Those crooked mechanics changed my oil, and now half of the things don’t work,” she said.

“This is an eighteen-year-old car, Ma. That’s what happens when things get old.”

Ma immigrated to the Land of The Free in the middle of the Philippine dictatorship: President Marcos, military crackdowns on dissidents, drug violence in Manila—all kinds of shit. When I was about seven, she told me about a dude who owed this other dude a bunch of pesos and was straight up shot on the street. Not to say my family’s blood country is Apocalypse Right-The-Fuck-Now but I’d trade Jersey smog over getting gunned down for bad debt. I’m fifty grand in the hole since I dropped out of undergrad and I ain’t paying shit because Uncle Sam said he’d wash it all away if I went off to War in some place he felt like sending me to. Some men have the option to get their slates cleaned after pushing enough paperwork; others have the option to run away from it and never look back. I chose to give myself up to a cause—if you could call it that—and if I get lucky I’ll never even deploy. If I did, I’d deserve what I signed up for. Right?

When we got home, Ma ordered me to pick up groceries since there were no chicken thighs and vinegar in the apartment for the adobo she promised me. I would’ve said sure and gone off, but I got distracted by the horde of boxes stacked throughout the living room. They stretched from the front door all the way to her shrine of the Virgin Mary facing the parking lot. It was a warehouse. One side near the living room couch was stacked with cardboard boxes labeled by QVC, Amazon, and a bunch of stores I’ve never even heard of before. Cases loaded with questionably-made jewelry cushioned by styrofoam packing peanuts; old hardcovers from libraries across the country that rotted at the spine; vinyl discs from bygone musicians I didn’t even know. A brown maze of receiving and no shipping.

Before Benning, Ma had checked out a bunch of books from the library on entrepreneurship and reselling crap on Amazon to turn a profit. She got really into it, first time I’d seen her happy in years. I didn’t stop her. Her ‘business’ had gone on for so long, I almost felt guilty whenever she told me to just wait until “the money comes in.” But we’re both still waiting.

“Where did you get all of this stuff?” I said.

It had been a little over six months since I drove a civilian car, so instead of going to the Wal-Mart five minutes down the road, I plotted for the Target in Lawrenceville, a good half hour away. Some alone time was in order. First, I went to the Wawa for gas, a hoagie, tall can of Monster, and a pack of Marlboro Reds; wouldn’t be a trip home without the essentials. Pops used to smoke a pack of Reds a day, they turned his heart black. Course he never knew about it until it was too late to quit. Unlike some fathers who change and give it up the day their child is born. I figure if Pops could live until the end of his days with tobacco and bad diets, why shouldn’t I?

All him and Ma used to talk about was me being independent and successful one day because they were hard-working immigrants, but what did that mean? When I dropped out of college and told Ma I wanted to enlist, she pretended like she didn’t hear. Instead she avoided me by praying to Momma Mary’s statue plus her whole holy gang. Sometimes she’d leave me for hours at a time: lost in prayer or driving to different churches throughout the county as she never stayed at one parish for too long. I’m amazed I got through high school without asking for her help—like SAT prep, or which college I should go to, or how to interview for a job. That kind of small shit that adds up to big shit after a while. Sure, physically she was there, and she signed checks and authorized payments on bills (sometimes with my money), but on life advice or what I should be doing—she was a ghost.

As I drove, I tuned the radio until I landed on a public station. Two British women were in the middle of a discussion about troop drawdowns in Iraq and what that meant for Afghanistan. I tuned it up to a sound that was slightly short of max. They spoke in gentle voices about the history of The War on Terror. They sounded as if they were reviewing a television show, and not their topic: the wedding massacre in Mukaradeeb by coalition forces. One of them asked, What happens to our children during a time of War? out of nowhere. The other lady paused for a bit and that’s when my fingers turned the knob left, right, and back again before I tuned it off. I struggled to pull one of the Reds out of the box, but I yanked it out and smoked it until it was a brown stub.

—

When I got back with fifteen or so bags of groceries wrapped around my fingers, Ma was still on her laptop. As I stocked the groceries, she called me out.

“What took you so long? You’re putting miles on my car.” She clicked away without looking up. “Took your uniform out. So dusty! I cleaned it up a bit.”

My blue Army Service Uniform was unpacked, hung up on the frame of her bedroom. She wanted me to explain it all to her. Last time I’d worn it was for the AIT graduation party.

Ma stood by me and touched the uniform’s lapel. I explained what every trinket stood for: the name tape, the rank, the flimsy ribbons I sort of earned just for being a living soldier. Ma’s head shook once. Twice, maybe? There was a semblance of recognition I needed—balance, I guess. Part of her eyes got really big then super small, staring at the cross and silver on my upper left chest. When I told her it was a marksmanship badge, meaning I was a good with a rifle—the badge that I’m proud of the most, being a small town Jersey boy with no history of handling a gun, let alone an assault rifle—there was no wow or pause to congratulate me. She asked: How did I pay for this (out of my government stipend) and when do I wear it (things graduation, weddings, or military funerals.) Ma wasn’t too pleased with that last statement. She went straight to bed. I put the ASU back and took her car keys.

“I’m going out, Ma,” I called.

“What did you say?”

“I’m going out. See what’s changed around town for a bit.”

“Do not destroy my car.”

I arrived at Flannigan’s off 295 in Ewing shortly after 1800. By the time I got there, happy hour had started, an hour before Rebecca would show up.

Flannigan’s was a remnant of a New Jersey bar that once was—a replica of what could’ve been a local’s hub straight from a television sitcom, but the idea was scrapped after years of just trying to get by. Bartender didn’t even look at me when I sat in a corner section, far from the Rolling Rock lights and the empty crimson red booths cushions that sunk and tore where your ass was supposed to be. Last time I came around, I was just shy of finishing off high school at eighteen. They didn’t have a guard at the front checking ID’s, it was up to the bartender, but everyone in school knew that no one checked; it made ‘em more money that way. Now the staff changed, the only person still around was one of the regulars: a crusty-looking bald dude with blue eyes and dry skin. Didn’t recognize me though. I ordered a High Life on draft and finished half of it before five minutes passed. The bar’s floor hatch opened from below, and a white boy about my age with a short blonde crew cut emerged. He wore a fitted black tee with the pub’s logo on the front and back.

“Kowalski, can you go back and bring up two more Miller kegs,” the bartender said as he changed the channels from ESPN to Fox News, “they’re tapped out.”

The barback didn’t say a word as he marched back down. I tried to listen to his voice to make sure it was him; but when he came back around to face the door, we stared one another down. Ben Kowalski was a junior when I was a freshman and he used to harass me and other kids in school for the fun of it. We were on the wrestling team together but never got along as I was the most out of shape in the group, chugging behind while he led the team in sprints, suicides, and up-downs. Outside of the sport, he’d pick me out in the cafeteria and chide me, asking if I needed any food today or he’d say something to his group in the hallways whenever I’d pass by, something that made them laugh when my back was turned. It went on for a few months until he got a DUI one semester and he couldn’t act a fool anymore, he’d become one.

At the bar we scanned each other for signs of life’s wear and tear. The Marine was three years older than me, but looked twenty more.

“No shit,” Ben said as he leaned against the bar. “Hey sir, I thought you were trying to be an LT? Least that’s what Facebook said.”

“And I thought you were in jail for selling pills,” I said.

“Murray’s dad helped me out on that one. The Corps a hand in it too.”

“Good for you.”

The two of us slapped hands and hugged, like all that past didn’t make a difference. Ben had developed into a sturdy, wood-colored deck of a man, polished with pink along the edges you can expect—the neck, the ears, and the side of arms. Once he got that DUI, he spent his senior year brawling with people over his ex-fiancé and doing pills with a couple of other oxygen thieves who were either in AA, in jail, or on house arrest now. Sometime after he signed up for the Corps and deployed a few months later.

Ben was getting off work in a few, so I told him I’d wait around. Rebecca was late anyway, I figured she was stuck in traffic or something. I thought about texting her or sending her a Snap, but I didn’t. On the TV, a Fox News reporter in Manhattan said that a former Marine fractured his skull at a California Occupy Wall Street Protest and when I finished my third High Life, the bartender shut it off and called them all a bunch of communists who got what they deserved.

It was Ben’s war anniversary, and also around the time he got out of the Corps, so he was thrilled to tell someone about it. After four years and two deployments on him, he got out so he could work a second shift job at Flannigan’s and third shift at the Buffalo Wild Wings on Route 1, slinging boneless fried chicken and watery beer.

“What about your G.I. bill?”

“What about it? Who needs college?” Ben said.

In the Marines, his role was in signal operations between the various services. He claimed to be a master of the phonetic alphabet, and when I called bullshit, he bought three shots of whiskey and drank them in a row—waited five minutes for it to settle—and proceed to utter each letter backward and forwards, twice. It was like putting together Legos for him.

I was so impressed I offered to pay for the shots, but he kept saying no, no. “It’s OK, brother,” Ben said. “Too fucking easy. It feels like tricks like that are the only thing I’m good at anymore.”

I bought us a round of Miller Lights and he talked about Afghanistan, his last deployment. “We dropped so many rounds on the enemy, but I never got to see any of it up close. Pissed me off. They’d relay back to command how many targets they supposedly took out, or the LT’s on the ground would radio back if they could engage a fucker, and I was pretty much the link between the green light and the action and—” Ben stopped to take out a Marlboro Red and offered me one too. “It was all indirect, never up front, you couldn’t see them. I know I got ’em because I’d hear the report on the comms or watch the video a few days later. Every shot hit home. One minute a dude is running for his life in a poppy field and then out of nowhere…his remains are painted all over the flowers. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Hey man that’s sick you went enlisted man, you’ll fucking love it and then hate it a few days later. What did you sign up for in the Army?”

I told him about the cavalry.

“You went Cav? Cav? Why the fuck would you sign up to be a bullet sponge, homeboy? You should re-class and go M.I. They got the hottest chicks in the Army. Bar none.”

I offered to drive Ben home but he said, “I’m Good to Fucking Go.”

He got in his green Jeep and swerved out of the parking lot while I waited past twenty-three hundred for Rebecca to show up, except she didn’t. She didn’t text or nothing. About an hour in, ex classmates from high school came into the pub and passed me by—they looked at me, squinted, and walked away. Few people remembered me, can’t blame ‘em. I only had about two hundred or so friends on Facebook, perhaps eighty percent or more of them I didn’t even talk to. It could’ve also been the beer and Ben’s shots that must’ve given me some kind of funk for people to keep their distance, but by midnight the buzz went away, and I started sipping on another light beer minding my own until this brunette approached me to say hi and she called me Eduardo, and when I said I wasn’t him, she apologized, turned, and went to her friends by the pool tables. I finished another pint and drove to Ma’s with the windows down. The night’s chill pressed against my face and tickled my scalp. A Statey followed my ass on Route I-195 from Trenton to Robbinsville until it zoomed around me to pull over a speeding Camaro. An ambulance roared by in the other direction. Where it went, God knows.

I got home a quarter past one. Five thick red candles flickered along the apartment’s window sill. The Venetian blinds swung in a lazy, steady motion, guided by the wind. I unlocked Ma’s the front door and listened to the soft murmurs of prayer in a mix of Tagalog and English. She was in a nightgown, her knees pressed against the carpet, praying to the Virgin statue; tiny candles lit around Mary’s ceramic feet like beggar children. Her eyes remained closed as her index fingers clutched the red rosary beads, her lips lost in the movement of The Lord’s Prayer. She didn’t stop or look over until I locked the door.

“You took my car without permission,” she said.

“You said I could take it.”

“No. I asked where you were going,” she took a deep breath and turned back to the statue. “Come here. Pray with me, Jason.”

My walk must’ve been awkward, gaited even, but I got on my knees next to her. It must’ve been the smell of candles that had me all fucked up still. It had been a while since I’d done this. I tried to recall how to pray and what to pray about; Hail Mary, or Our Father, or The Apostle’s Creed. They all sound the same. Ma tapped my closed fist. “Pray,” she said.

Prayer is an eerie and intimate feeling with another person next to you. When Pops was still around, we went to Saint Barn’s as a whole family. We knelt in the rows at the front, not too far off from big Jesus himself looking down upon us. We recited the rosary, bead for bead. When it was done, Ma went up to the rows of candles and lit one up for her sister, another for her home in Manila, and another for Pops. Come up, Ma said to me, and I lit one up for my future, whatever that looked like. Another for Ma. Another for Pops. The light glowed in front of me as if it were a power that only I could hold; a thing that I could control.

After extinguishing the candles, I helped her to the bedroom. Her body felt grainy against my shoulders, light in weight but uneven and hard. I laid her down upon the mattress, stacking the pile of self-help magazines and business textbooks on her bed to the floor. As I tucked her in, she grabbed my wrist.

“When are you leaving me, Jason?”

“Soon. Back to Texas. Army life. Afterwards, maybe I’ll deploy. I don’t know.”

She rubbed my wrist. “You’ve always had dry skin problems,” she said, “you need to put on some lotion. My boy. God, you’re my only boy. My only boy is going away.” Her hand flowed down onto the bed in a slow, fluid, motion like a fat droplet of Georgia rain water off an up-armored Humvee’s roof. I closed her bedroom door with my body upright, my neck tight and my eyes salty with sweat from the whiskey or the candles or I don’t know. In the darkness of her warehouse, I sat on the couch and wrapped my left hand around the straps of my assault pack and tapped my fingernails against my knee with the other.

Part I: The House, circa 1977

The house in Uganda was red brick with a metal roof, a rusted water tank, and a screened-in verandah that had once been painted green. My mother spent most of her day on that verandah. She read Psalms to us there in the mornings, combed our hair afterwards, and then wrote let­ters to my father’s family in the States or to her own in Finland. She was struck by how different the world was, how isolated each person was in their reality. It’s strange, she wrote my grandfather, that you’re skiing and otherwise getting in shape. Here the weather is usually so exhaust­ing that you cannot get enough exercise.

The house sat at the top of a hill and was surrounded by jungle. Monkeys gathered in the trees, and such bright and peculiar birds flew through the clearing that my mother later regretted that she hadn’t started birding yet. The house had three bedrooms and a bath. With the exception of the verandah, it looked like an average American house, maybe a little older, maybe a little shabbier. By Ugandan standards, it was palatial. It wasn’t just the space, more than a family of four needed, it was also the amenities: running water, electricity, a fridge, a stove, a washing machine, and cupboards filled with items you could no longer buy in Uganda.

We lived a mile from campus, a mile from all those grievances. Our closest neighbors were unaffiliated with the school and lived in what we called “the village,”  even though the  collection of mud huts belonged to a single Ugandan family: a patriarch, his wives, and their children. The wives and daughters collected water from our spigot every morning and carried it down to their communal kitchen. When my father was home, he would help hoist the pails onto their heads. One girl complained to my father that her neck hurt. “No wonder,” my father later said. He could barely lift the pails.

My parents were missionaries at Bugema College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution. The campus was twenty-one miles from the capi­tal, Kampala, but the trip could take over an hour, depending on the conditions of the road or the number of military checkpoints. The dis­tance suited everyone on campus just fine. The school had a dairy and a poultry farm, and beans and bananas were still available in the coun­tryside. Whenever one missionary family eventually drove into town, they set aside personal grievances and ran errands for all the other mis­sionaries.

The wives and daughters saw our house every day and had their own relationship with it. They walked past the screened-in verandah, the glass panes on each window, the light on the porch that turned on and off when the generator was working. They saw the external trappings of privilege and could only imagine what the interior held. We didn’t think we were privileged. My mother worried because she couldn’t buy toothbrushes in a store or children’s vitamins. To supple­ment our iron, she threw a nail in with the beans as they boiled.

My mother disliked the patriarch because he beat his wives, and she assumed he also disliked us and waseven spying on us for Idi Amin or someone high in the government. These were paranoid times. Bugema’s principal had been warned that “the American” was being watched, and my father was the only American on campus. When the patriarch asked my parents what they thought of Uganda, their answers were repetitive and chirpy: wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. They were on edge with every interaction. Yet when we were under house arrest, the patriarch was not the person who accompanied the soldier.

Part II: The Missionaries

My parents, Gary and Kaarina, met in 1966 at an Adventist univer­sity in Michigan. My father, tall and skinny, had grown up surfing in Hawaii and had a fondness for practical jokes. To my mother, he seemed like the all-American boy. Later, she learned that my father and his sib­lings had spent their childhood bouncing around foster homes. During the last such interlude, an Adventist family took in the three children. My father and his siblings converted, and then his mother, who came for visits, did as well. My father found stability in the church and worked his way through Adventist boarding schools, eating only two meals a day because that’s all he could afford. When my mother met him, he was studying for his Master’s in Theology because he wanted to serve God and because he believed Jesus was coming soon.

My mother ostensibly came to the United States to study for a Mas­ter’s in English. Like my father, she’d grown up poor, but hers had a different texture. She was born in Finland at the beginning of World War II and was raised during the harsh austerity that followed. Her father, a Bible teacher at an Adventist boarding school, gave his salary too freely to needy students and to missions, leaving little to support his five children, the eldest of whom was handicapped. My grandmother was so anxious about finances that she tried unsuccessfully to induce miscarriages during her last two pregnancies.

My mother lived with her family in a house without indoor plumb­ing or running water. As she later told us, an outhouse in winter was no joke. For washing dishes and clothes, she and her siblings carried up pails of water from the Baltic Sea. It was a decent walk even without the weight of water. My mother and her siblings were always busy with the task of subsistence. In the summers, they foraged for mushrooms and berries, which they either ate or sold. My grandmother, who had never been to the United States, wanted her children to aspire to a future out­side of Finland, telling them that in American even the telephone poles were higher than anywhere else.

My mother was the daughter to leave. She received a scholarship to study abroad, but more to the point, she had no marriage prospects in Finland. Despite being raised among all those potential Adventist suitors, she was, when my father met her, a twenty-six-year-old spinster who looked sixteen. The eligible bachelors had dismissed her as the Bible teacher’s bookish, less captivating daughter. In a black-and-white photograph taken before her departure, my mother stands beside all her worldly goods, three small suitcases and a bundle. Her hair is tied up, her eyes downcast. What seemed lost on everyone in Finland, especially herself, is that she’s strikingly beautiful.

My father noticed immediately. He walked into the library looking for a date. Everyone knew that if you wanted to be hired as a minister, you had to be married. Earlier that day, he and his friends had planted books on each of the library’s study tables. The plan was to sit at the table with the most attractive woman, gesturing to the books. The hitch, for my father, was that my mother was a student librarian. Stripped of pretense, my father approached her directly and asked her out.

My parents got engaged four months after their first date, got married in Finland, honeymooned in Lapland, and settled in Indiana where my father pastored two churches and where my mother taught fourth grade, and where they rented their first house, a two-bedroom with wood panels and shag carpet. When Sonja was born, my mother quit teaching and spent her days photographing my sister and sending pictures to the beautiful baby contests advertised in the back of ladies’ magazines. My mother found America strange and lonely. People would say, “Come over any time,” but when my father drove her over, they looked confused, and she felt embarrassed in front of her new husband. She tried to get her driver’s license, but traffic frightened her, and she kept failing the exams. Church members critiqued her parenting. When I was born, my mother was ready to leave Indiana. She was tired of the winters, which she said were windier than those in Finland. She was tired of corn. When my father began talking about the mission field, she didn’t say no. In 1976, they moved to Uganda.

Part III: The Dictator

Idi Amin came to power in a 1971 military coup that was welcomed by most Ugandans. The deposed president Milton Obote had made him­self unpopular by marginalizing Uganda’s largest tribe, banning opposi­tional parties, detaining dissidents, and declaring himself Life President.

The West supported the “regime change,” as coups we approved of were called. Milton Obote was a socialist, and Idi Amin wasn’t. Moreover, Idi Amin appeared malleable. Before Ugandan independence, he had served in the King’s African Rifles and had ruthlessly fought with the British against the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. He boxed and played rugby. He was charming. He had a wonderful laugh. Western leaders considered him not too bright, despite the four languages he spoke.

Idi Amin preached an Africa for Africans, and then, in 1972, he expelled the Asians who ran the economy. It was not a small thing. There were 40,000 Asians, as the expatriates of mostly Indian origin were called, living in the country. After business hours, so few eth­nic Ugandans walked the streets of Kampala that the city could have been a suburb of Bombay. The Asians had ninety days to leave, each taking with them only two suitcases of personal items. Their houses, furniture, appliances, cars, livestock, shops, pharmacies, coffee planta­tions, cotton farms, and factories were given to Idi Amin’s supporters.

Their bank acconnts were absorbed by the National Treasury. Uganda’s robust economy, a model on the continent, crashed hard. By 1976, you couldn’t buy oats in a store. Yet that one move helped mitigate Amin’s legacy with his countrymen. There might be nothing to buy in Kampala, but at least that nothing belonged to Ugandans.

The West came to view Idi Amin as a buffoon, and in private meet­ings, world leaders questioned his sanity. A popular theory was that he had syphilis-induced psychosis. Amin was surely aware of his repu­tation and might have seen it as an advantage. In any event, he was a man who liked a joke, particularly one where the West was the punch line. You laugh at me; I laugh at you. His official title-read in full before radio addresses-was “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE,” with the CBE standing for Conqueror of the British Empire. My parents laughed at that. They also laughed at the outrageous telegrams he sent world lead­ers. In a correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, he sympathized with England’s economic woes and volunteered to send “a cargo ship full of bananas to thank you for the good days of the colonial administration.” In Uganda, the killings began nearly as soon as Amin came to power. Concerned about a coup, he purged the army of soldiers from Acholi and Langi tribes, two ethnic groups allied with Milton Obote. He established the State Research Bureau, an intelligence agency infa­mous for torture. He killed those who threatened his power. He killed those who might threaten his power. He killed those who didn’t threaten his power at all. Bodies were tossed into the lakes, and the crocodiles grew fat. After fleeing Uganda, one of Amin’s former aides told Time magazine, “‘You are walking, and any creature making a step on the dry grass behind you might be an Amin man. Whenever you hear a car speeding down the street, you think it might suddenly come to a stop — for you. I finally fled, not because I was in trouble or because of anything I did, but out of sheer fear. People disappear. When they disap­pear, it means they are dead.”

Humanitarian organizations were unsure how many Ugandans had been murdered. Some groups estimated that 80,000 had been killed. Other groups estimated that 300,000 had been killed.

Part IV: The Archbishop

On February 16, 1977, Janani Luwum — the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Boga Zaire — was murdered. The world had to notice.

Janani Luwum was a rare man, a warm individual — taking time to write letters to those he had met — and an innovative, effective leader. He encouraged theology students to take classes in Developmental Studies, and he promoted a Christian practice that looked African, not European. He was the most influential religious leader on the continent, and the first Ugandan to hold his position.

If Luwum had lived long enough to have a full career, he likely would have changed the Church. Instead, he became linked irrevoca­bly with Idi Amin. They both were Ugandan men shaped by colonial­ism, both dynamic leaders, both capable of dazzling the camera with their smiles. These two men initially had a cordial relationship, despite the fact that Luwum came from the Acholi tribe, an ethnic group with sympathetic ties to the deposed president. The Archbishop used their friendship to temper the dictator’s excesses. Parishioners came to him with names written on slips of paper, and he would carry those names with him, cajoling Idi Amin into releasing someone’s brother, someone’s husband.

At the beginning of 1977, Amin survived yet another coup attempt, or invented one. Observers weren’t sure. What’s certain is that in response, he ordered the slaughter of everyone in Obote’s hometown. An entire town murdered and the world looked away. In the same fit of spite or fear, Amin purged the army of the remaining Acholi and Langi soldiers. A witness described the carnage to Time magazine. “You would hear a short cry and then sudden silence. I think they were being strangled and then had their heads smashed. Next day the floors of rooms C and D — the elimination chambers — were littered with loose eyes and teeth.”

It was too much. The Archbishop wrote Idi Amin an open letter and sent copies to government officials. Seventeen bishops signed the letter and Archbishop Luwum personally delivered it to Idi Amin. With the candor of an Old Testament prophet, he wrote: We have buried many who have died as a result of being shot and there are many more whose bodies have not been found. The gun which was meant to protect Uganda as a nation, the Uganda citizen and his property, is increasingly being used against the Ugandan to take away his life and property.

Few in Uganda were surprised when the Archbishop was arrested for “smuggling weapons,” fewer still when Radio Uganda reported that the Archbishop had died in a car accident on the way to the interroga­tion center. It was whispered that he had been shot. Some claimed that Idi Amin had pulled the trigger.

Part V: The Trip

After the Archbishop’s murder, even expatriates were anxious. The thing to do, the missionaries all said, was to be unobtrusive. Don’t make waves. It went without saying that you shouldn’t travel unless you had to. Any time you drove, you risked getting stopped by soldiers or by carjackers, soldiers being preferable of the two, but with the country on edge, who knew? It felt melodramatic to speak about getting killed. It felt presumptuous to clutch your passport and assume you were above it all.

For months, my father had been planning to drive into Kenya to attend church meetings. My mother had always intended to stay with us on the hill because it was safer and because she had little patience for the border crossings. She had created a shopping list for my father that might as well have said: buy all the things. Now this.

“No one expects you to still go,” my mother said. “No one.”

“I’m not that kind of missionary,” my father said. It was his favor­ite line.

My mother could feel the tug of their old argument. She sometimes veered away, setting her mouth and saying nothing further. More often, she railed. Why can’t you just once put your family before the church?

On the morning my father left, she was cheerful. My mother might shout during a fight, but she didn’t stew. As my father dashed through the house — “Where’s my Bible? Where’s my passport? Have you seen my glasses?” — she pointed him toward the items  he needed, and when he was ready to leave she handed him a stack of aerogrammes that had accumulated on our table. For the past week, missionaries had been dropping off letters for my father to post in Kenya. Mail sent from Uganda was opened and read by someone, we all knew.

My father said goodbye to us in the yard. I sat in my mother’s arms and watched him go. It was a familiar sight. He left, and then he returned, often with presents. The best were matchbox cars. Sonja and I loved them because we loved him. At night, he would get on the floor with us and push cars around the legs of the dining room table.

“You better get going,” my mother said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

She didn’t have to say that we’d be fine. Of course, we’d  be fine. If you didn’t count snakes and malaria, life on the hill was uneventful.

Part VI: The Press Conference-February 23, 1977

My father was in Kenya when Jimmy Carter held the second press conference of his presidency. Reporters wanted to know how Carter’s campaign promises were holding up to the realities of office. No one anticipated that Uganda would be mentioned or that the press confer­ence would have international consequences.

Halfway through, a reporter asked Carter: “What if anything, do you plan to try to do to help victims of political repression in these countries?” The countries in question were Iran and the Philippines, and the reporter noted that despite human rights abuses by both regimes, the United States was aiding their governments. Carter spoke vaguely about changes his administration was making and then pivoted to Uganda. Uganda was a small, politically inconsequential country, one the United States was not supporting either covertly or overtly; still, the Archbishop’s murder was shocking.

“Obviously, there are deprivations of human rights, even more bru­tal than the ones on which we’ve commented up till now,” Carter said. “In Uganda, the actions there have disgusted the entire civilized world, and, as you know, we have no diplomatic relationships with Uganda. But here is an instance where both Ambassador Andrew Young and I have expressed great concern about what is there. The British are now considering asking the United Nations to go into Uganda to assess the horrible murders that apparently are taking place in that country, the persecution of those who have aroused the ire of Mr. Amin.”

It was a throwaway line. The press conference, broadcast live on television and radio, continued for fourteen more questions, none of them about Idi Amin. Jimmy Carter didn’t mention Uganda again.

The next day, Idi Amin announced that Americans couldn’t leave Uganda and were to report themselves to Kampala on February 28 for a personal meeting. No one was quite sure what this meant. It could mean nothing. It could mean we’d be deported. It could mean we’d be impris­oned or held in Kampala. There were only 240 Americans in Uganda. Most were missionaries like us, who had ignored the State Depart­ment’s travel warnings. There were also a handful of airline employees, oil workers, and technicians. Sonja and I were some of the youngest Americans. With our father in Kenya, we were likely the only American children without an American guardian in the country.

“Goddammit. Why couldn’t our first crisis have been a more digni­fied one?” a White House adviser reportedly said.

Part VII: Singing in the Dining Room

News of the house arrest, as the missionaries called it, moved swiftly through campus. There was news, and then there was news.What were the Fordhams going to do now? Would they be deported or worse? What was Carter thinking? The other missionaries were relieved that the leaders of their respective nations — Australia, Canada, and the Phil­ippines – -had sense enough not to irritate Amin, and it was fortunate, they all said, providential even, that Gary was in Kenya. They knew my mother was Finnish, and they speculated on whether or not Sonja and I were dual citizens. We weren’t. That my mother was the last to hear the news said more about living on the hill than anything.

“Please, can we have some peace and quiet?” my mother said. “We’re trying to talk here.” Her voice was sharp, and I began weeping. “Oh, for goodness sakes,” our mother said. After the midday rain, a missionary hustled up to tell us. She called out “Hodi,” and my mother’s heart lurched. “Gary’s fine,” the mis­sionary said, as she sat  on the couch. In the dining room, Sonja and I were building a puzzle. We began singing because we liked to sing and because we finally had an audience, even if she was only a missionary. The women spoke as if we weren’t there, and so we responded in  the only way we could: we raised the volume. “God is so good. God is so GOOD. God is SO GOOD. HE’S SO GOOD TO ME.”

To the missionary she asked, “What does this mean? What’s he thinking?”

After we went to bed, my mother turned on the radio. She con­firmed the date and time we were to present ourselves in Kampala and wondered whether or not she should take us. Who would even drive us? Surely the Ugandan government wouldn’t seek out two children. Did anyone even know we were here? Who kept track of these things?

Termites flew against the glass with steady pings. A few had gotten into the house, where they fluttered on the floor, lattice wings propel­ling thick bodies. They were a delicacy. When they came flying out of the ground, children would leave whatever they were doing and run out into the fields to gather them. The termites were roasted and eaten. My mother carried the mugs into the kitchen and set them in the sink. She stood in the green darkness, water running through her hands, and cried.

Part VIII: The Letter

My father sat down to write his mother and stepfather. Despite attend­ing meetings all day, he must have felt like he was on vacation. No teaching, grading, or lessons planning. And the food! In Uganda, we only spoke of such meals: toast with marmite, potatoes and green beans, spaghetti and peas, cake.

My father dated his letter February 24, the day after Jimmy Cart­er’s press conference. Either he hadn’t heard the news or the detention hadn’t yet been announced.

Dear Mother and Gordon,

Wanted to let you know all is well with us. There is trouble in the land, but we have not been bothered.

He filled the front page of the aerogramme with the minutia of our daily lives: mail in Uganda was censored, the dairy farm was down to six cows, wages for Ugandans were only fifteen cents an hour, fellow missionaries were requesting transfers.

Four days later, my father, fully aware of the events in Uganda, returned to the letter. He had left the back flap empty and so he turned to it and wrote in the date. February 28. So much could happen in four days.

I am still in Kenya (Union Session finished yesterday) and Americans are detained in Uganda. We are not sure what to do because Kaarina, on a Finnish passport, can leave more easily if I’m not there. We expected to get an indication today, but now the meeting [with Idi Amin] is postponed until Wednesday. I may go in tomorrow to be there for the appointment with the president and I may wait.

I wish I could contact Kaarina, but the phones are cut at the border. We know the Lord will watch over us, but feel it may be wiser to see what’s going to happen before complicating matters. The Lord Bless you. Love, Gary

My father was a phlegmatic man who liked to say, “Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.” After hearing we were under house arrest, he had continued attending meetings. He was a delegate, after all. Let the world burn around him, Gary Fordham would fulfill his duty. The letter to my grandmother, however, suggested that my father had iden­tified a mountain as a mountain. Over and over, he used the pronoun we, as if he and my mother were in consultation. We are not sure. We expect. We know. We feel. Unable to contact my mother, he was con­versing with her in his head.

Two decades later, after my mother died of cancer, he returned to this unconscious habit. We think. We hope. We feel.

“Who is this ‘we’?” I finally asked. “You and mom?”

“Yeah,” he said, and smiled. He never used we in the same way again.

Part IX: The Soldier

The soldier came in the morning. We were on the verandah when we heard the crunch of tires on a road that led to us and nowhere else. The rumble was a back and forth sound, a jostling of vehicle against washed out road, against mud, against potholes. My mother set down her Bible and the three of us watched the Land Rover jut out of the jungle, roll across the yard, and stop beside the frangipani tree. A soldier, dressed in green, sleeves rolled past elbows, climbed out, and there, from the pas­senger’s side, emerged Joseph, my father’s student.

“Good morning, madam,” the soldier said.

“Good morning, bwana,” my mother said. “Morning, Joseph.” The soldier was tall, or so he seemed to us, and dashing. His eyes followed our chickens, Rebecca and Sarah, as they snatched termites in the yard. “Can I help you?” my mother said. “If you came to see my husband, he’s not here.”

“Can we come in?” the soldier said.

My mother led them up the cement steps and through the verandah. She removed her shoes at the door and asked them to do the same. “All the mud,” she said. She motioned toward the couch and as the men sat, she asked Joseph how he was enjoying his classes. He answered that he was liking them very much.

Sonja and I scooted behind her. A soldier was sitting next to Joseph on our couch. Any other day, Joseph would have been the occasion. I would have climbed into his lap and demanded a story, but Joseph was not the point. There was a soldier in our house. He was wearing a beret and there were holes in his socks.

In the kitchen, our mother made cherry Kool-Aid out of water she had boiled the night before. We hadn’t had Kool-Aid in months, or as my mother liked to say, not in the memory of man. Sonja and I hoped the visitors wouldn’t drink it all. My mother hummed as she moved, reaching for our tall cups, then opening a Tupperware of dried finger bananas. She carried the Kool-Aid out first, giving a cup to both Joseph and the soldier. Then she brought out the dried finger bananas and held them out, and they each took one or two. Bananas were, well, bananas, but the Kool-Aid had made an impression.

“These are my girls,” my mother said. “Sonja and Sari.” We ducked and smiled. “What do you say?” she said.

Sonja stepped up to the soldier and said, “Hello.” The soldier took her hand and shook it. “You are welcome,” he said. I pressed my face into my mother’s waist, and they laughed.

“Okay,” my mother said. “You can go outside and play. Take the cat. Stay near the house, and for goodness sakes, don’t get too muddy.” And so we went, the reluctant Kissa looped through Sonja’s arms.

PartX: Inventory

Our mother frowned as we left, feeling what exactly, I shouldn’t know, but I’ve heard this story so often I can’t separate my memories from hers, my feelings from hers, and so I see her standing in our house, irritated. She was irritated at the excitement of her daughters, irritated at their father for being gone, irritated at Jimmy Carter for opening his big mouth, irritated at Joseph for accompanying the soldier, irritated at herself for not smiling more pleasantly, irritated that she had to smile. Underneath all her peevishness was fear. Quite absent was the triumph she later had while telling this story.

She sat in the La-Z-Boy we had brought from the States. It  had come in a great shipment of things that had taken a year to be released from customs and only then, after my father had overcome his scruples and bribed the custom official. Opening those crates had been like a bad Christmas. So much bounty, so little practicality. Better to have brought more soap, more children’s cereal, more watches for bribes. Instead, there sat our La-Z-Boy.

My mother now looked at the soldier with as much pleasantness as she could muster. Even if she could remember where my father kept the watches, she didn’t dare bribe an official. It might be exactly the wrong thing. She wasn’t going to give Idi Amin any reason to throw her in jail. “If there’s even a speck of mud outside, my girls will find it,” my mother said. “So today, forget it. Mark my words, they’ll be filthy when they come back in. Do you have children?” When the soldier nodded, she rattled off her Questions For Soldiers With Kids:  How  many  do you have? How old are they? What are their names? Are they attending school? Do you like being a father? If we had been at a roadblock, she would have concluded the conversation with a small present for the children (a pencil or a nub of soap), but today she was too anxious.

“Where is your husband?” the soldier asked. “Where is Gary Fordham?”

“Joseph didn’t tell you? He’s in Kenya.” It was not lost on her that the soldier knew my father’s first name. She was certain she hadn’t told him. “He’s attending the East African Union meetings.”

My mother hadn’t expected this visit, but now that the soldier sat across from her, his visit seemed inevitable. Of course, he was here. But what about Joseph? Why had he come?

The soldier explained that he had been sent with orders from Idi Amin Dada himself. All Americans were to appear before Idi Amin on Monday and couldn’t leave the country before then. He was here because the Ugandan government wanted a list of our family’s valu­ables. There was nothing menacing in the solder’s voice. It was the mes­sage itself that was menacing. Soon we would be separated from all that we owned. If we were lucky, we would only be kicked out of the country like the Asians. If we were unlucky, well, no one wanted to consider it.

“This is a misunderstanding,” my mother said. “I’m European, not American.” She excused herself and returned with her Finnish passport, which she handed to the soldier.

He flipped through it, giving the pages a cursory glance. “Gary Fordham, he is American? Your babies, they are American? Madam, why is your husband gone now? Why are you all alone?”

My mother smiled blandly.

“Thank you,” the soldier said, handing her the empty cup and the passport. He was polite. She was polite. “I must inventory your belong­ings now,” he said. He had brought a clipboard with him into the house.

“The furniture doesn’t belong to us,” my mother said. “It belongs to the school. A fine Ugandan school, as you saw driving in.That couch isn’t ours. The table and chairs aren’t ours. The refrigerator isn’t ours. If you take them, you’ll only be hurting the school.” She shot a look at Joseph.

“This one is Ugandan?” the soldier asked, nudging the La-Z-Boy.

“Oh, goodness,” my mother said. “Of  course, you’re right. That’s ours. Actually,  it’s mine, and  I’m not an American citizen. It’s not an American belonging.”

The solder looked at her, pointedly, though he didn’t write anything down. He walked into the kitchen.

“The stove is the school’s,” my mother said, “But the pots and pans and dishes are mine. The Tupperware is mine.”

The soldier began to pull open drawers. “Does the silverware belong to the school?” he asked.

“No, it belongs to me,” my mother  said. She claimed everything in the kitchen. She claimed the rice cooker my grandmother had sent from the States and the transformer that allowed it to work here. She claimed the cheese slicer, cutting board, and ceramic bowls (which actually were from Finland), and the can opener, dishtowels, and colander (which weren’t). In the back room, she claimed the wash­ing machine. She smiled and nodded. Mine. Mine. Mine. They went through the bedrooms, attempting to separate the property of the school from the property of the Fordhams. The beds belonged to the school, as did the mosquito nets, the dressers, and the bookcases. The sheets and blankets and books were ours. The typewriter was ours,  as Joseph pointed out. So were the matchbox cars, the Fisher Price toys, our Sabbath dresses, my father’s ties, a Swiss Army  knife, an old perfume bottle, the radio, our hens, the dog. My mother claimed them all.

The car, our most valuable possession, was in Kenya, but Joseph suggested that the bicycle should be here. “Pastor Fordham bikes to campus every day,” Joseph said.

“Yes, Joseph,” my mother said. “He needs the bike to get to cam­pus.” She wanted to hiss in his ear-Whose side are you on anyway, brother Joseph? “It’s in the garage,” she said to the soldier. Bicycles were impossible to buy in Uganda. Everything was hard  to come  by. Even our pots and pans would be snatched up on the black market. But the bicycle? Well, people had been killed for less. “I can show it to you if you think it’s necessary.” The soldier nodded. “But I think you should know, it belongs to me.”

“Your husband’s bicycle?” the soldier said. His incredulity sat between them.

“Yes,” my mother said. “I bought it, and I’m European.” Let them prove she didn’t own that bicycle.

“Madam, what is your husband’s? What belongs to him, eh?”

My mother said nothing.

Part XI: The Misunderstanding

Jimmy Carter set up a command center to monitor the crisis in Uganda and redirected a nuclear aircraft carrier to the coast of Kenya, along with five naval vessels. The ships, which had been cruising the Indian Ocean on routine missions, were not prepared to rescue us. Time later reported that between all of them, there were fewer than 200 Marines. Still, the message was delivered. “The President will take whatever steps he thinks are necessary and proper to protect American lives,” the White House Press Secretary announced. So much promised effort, so few endangered lives. Of course, every life is precious to its owner.

Idi Amin must have felt conflicted. When a British professor had insulted Idi Amin in 1975, Queen Elizabeth had apologized personally, and Eng­land’s Foreign Secretary had come to Uganda to secure the professor’s release. After a much more public criticism, President Carter was offer­ing nothing but a show of force. Moreover, if Amin had seen the inventories taken by his soldiers, he must have been happily considering the political support he could secure with all those washing machines and cars.

But Idi Amin had learned what even a small country might do for its citizens. A year earlier, Palestinians had landed a hijacked plane at the Entebbe Airport and held Jewish passengers hostage. Idi Amin had played host to both terrorists and hostages. He was a Big Man, courted daily by Israeli negotiators. And then the raid happened. Israeli commandos freed most of the hostages, killed the terrorists and the Ugan­dan soldiers on duty, destroyed the Ugandan air force, and left Idi Amin looking weak and inept. He might not survive another such fiasco.

Idi Amin sent Carter a telegram stating that “the Americans in Uganda are happy and scattered all over the country” and that “Uganda has the strength to crush invaders.” He postponed meeting the Americans and then a few days later, canceled it. The fun was over. Idi Amin assured us we could leave the country if we wished. But why would we? Uganda was a beautiful country, and he had just wanted to thank us for our service.

My father was in the Finnish embassy when the final announcement wasmade. The clerks were creating counterfeit Finnish passports for Sonja and me, which they planned to smuggle into Uganda through a diplomatic pouch. It was as James Bond as anything we would be associated with. On hearing the news, my father thanked the clerks. Now for his errands. Of course, the Fordham family would stay in Uganda. The crisis was over. Why make a mountain out of a molehill?

My father walked to the nearest duka and bought two matchbox cars.

Part XII: The Foreign Government Dances

For years, the only accounts I had of the house arrest were my own memories and my parents’ stories. I looked for confirmation in Ugan­dan histories, but amidst the atrocities of the Amin years, the event was too small to matter. Then one day, I stumbled upon Time’s archives and discovered articles written in the midst of the crisis. Once I found one piece of coverage, I found more and more. I listened to Carter’s press conference and watched an ABC news report that was broadcast during the crisis. Experts called Idi Amin a “butcher” and said that while Amin didn’t usually kill foreigners, nobody knew what to expect. My Ameri­can grandmother likely saw the news story weeks before my father’s letter arrived.

For most of my life, I considered this my mother’s story. My mother stood in the living room and made a rash decision. She hadn’t known, until she claimed that first item, what she would do. She was angry and that was part of it. A soldier was informing her we might lose every­thing we owned. She had grown up poor, and possessions mattered to her, never mind that she was a missionary. She was also anxious about us, her American daughters. When we were born, she hadn’t wanted us to be dual citizens or even to learn the Finnish language. She wanted us to be fully American, unable to return to the land she had left and still missed terribly. Our US passports were to be talismans, offering protections and opportunities that we, as Americans, would never fully appreciate. As she stood across from Joseph and the soldier and claimed everything we owned, she felt utterly alone, and so she did what she did. She was courageous. I think this, still.

My mother stood across from a soldier who carried his  own  stories and fears. He held all the power in their interaction, and yet, he must have known that he was far more likely to be killed by Idi Amin than she was. Surely, there had been whispers about what had happened  to the soldiers at the Mugire prison. They weren’t just killed, they were killed with sledgehammers because bullets were too costly. If Idi Amin stayed in power, this soldier might join the disappeared, and if Amin was overthrown, he might be killed as retribution.

Standing beside the soldier, inexplicably, was Joseph. Joseph had no obvious reason to be at our house or so helpful. My father was a popu­lar teacher who often ate breakfast in the cafeteria with his students. He was a hard grader to be sure, but he was also funny and kind. I don’t think Joseph came because he was angry at my father. His anger — if it was that — was probably broader. Why should expatriates have so much and Ugandans so little? Upon graduation, Joseph would likely be hired by the Adventist church and assigned a district that covered hundreds of miles and included multiple churches. He would work more than forty hours a week, but he wouldn’t be able to afford a car, and if he owned even a bicycle, it would be through charity. A rural church in Ohio or North Carolina might send money for one as their “mission project.” They would expect a thank you note and photographs. Where was the dignity for the Ugandan? Where were the opportunities?

My Finnish grandmother knew that some people were more valued than others. The church might teach that God loved everyone equally, but in this world, citizenship determined worth. My grandmother had tended cows as a child, and as she stood in the dung, warming her bare feet, she decided that if she had children, she would urge them to move away and to matter. In Uganda, an entire town was murdered and my parents didn’t hear about it. How many residents lived in that town? There were surely more than 240 people, but they had no advocates. Even today, the only record of their existence is their annihilation.

After the detention of the Americans, Time put Idi Amin on the cover, titling their piece “The Wild Man of Africa.” One of their sources, a Ugandan who bad self-exiled to Tanzania, described Idi Amin’s for­eign policy: “He always acts the same way. He threatens a group of foreigners, and then he says everything is okay. Then he threatens them again, and then he says everything is okay. The foreign government dances back and forth-and everyone forgets about the thousands of Ugandans who are dying.”

Part XIII: The Matchbox Car

We were the foreigners, or some of them. We weren’t thinking about political dances or how Idi Amin might be using our presence in Uganda. Officially, my parents were thinking about God. In addition, my father was thinking about teaching, and my mother was usually wondering whether there would be any letters in the mail. We were all thinking about food. And with my father gone, I was thinking about matchbox cars.

Believing my father would be home soon, my mother used the last of the whole-wheat flour to make piirakka. It is a Finnish pastry, and for months, Sonja and I had been begging her to make it. She had waved us off, saying it was too hot here or that we didn’t have enough powdered milk or that piirakka wouldn’t taste right without rye flour. She stood over the stove, stirring the rice, stirring the rice. If she let it burn, she would feel even more foolish than she already did. “We’ll see,” she told us. Who makes piirakka in Uganda? Well, she was making it now, and we would see.

My father had originally planned to return that day and my mother expected that he still would. “He has class tomorrow. He’ll be back,” she said. Sonja and I spent the morning arguing about who would tell him about the soldier. We sat for a while on the patio steps, giving each other shoves.

“I’m telling.”

“No, me.”

Our mother poked her head out the door. “Daddy’s probably sitting at the border right now, just wishing he could hear you two fight. Oh, boy. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.” And then, “As long as you’re out there, keep the monkeys off the tomatoes.”

By the afternoon, Sonja was building a puzzle and I was pushing my matchbox cars around the kitchen floor. “Daddy’s bringing me a car,” I told my mother. “Maybe orange.”

“Don’t count on it. We’ll be lucky if he brings flour. And, good grief, if I step on one more car, I’m taking them away.”

By supper, my father still hadn’t come. My mother set the table. “Never mind, he still might come. Or he might stay the night in Kam­pala and come in the morning. We can wait another day, right, girls?”

She put the piiraka and some finger bananas on the table and told us that it was probably the first time they had  been served together in the history of mankind, making us feel very important indeed. The piiraka had a salty, creamy bite, and though my mother had been com­plaining about their looks, she smiled after trying one. “This is a nice change of pace.”

We were almost done eating when we heard a car. We ran for the door. My mother was out of the house first, bare feet even, but once she got outside, she slowed to a walk. She kissed my father and asked how the border went. Sonja and I were jumping and shouting, soldier, soldier, soldier, and also, Kool-Aid.

“What’s this about a soldier?” my father asked. “Did you have any problems? Did you get to meet Idi Amin?”

“Nothing like that,” my mother said, “Someone came to the house to find out how rich we are. The girls are dying to tell you. But,” and she lowered her voice, “you’ll never guess who came with the soldier. It wasn’t Idi Amin, I’ll tell you that.” She turned to us.”Okay, girls, let’s go inside and you can take turns telling. Let’s not talk out here.”

My father picked me up, and I whispered in his ear, “Did you bring me something?”

“Do you mean oil?” he said.

“No,” I said. “A present.”

“A present? Like a matchbox car?”

I nodded.

“Oh, man! I just knew there was something I was forgetting. I was driving all day today, trying to remember what I had forgotten. At least, I think I forgot it.”

Each time he came back from Nairobi, he did this. Sometimes, he said he forgot to buy matchbox cars and other times that he forgot to pack them. When he finally found them in some obscure corner of his luggage, I would be near tears or full out crying. “Gary,” my mother would say.

“This is just terrible,” my father said now and smiled at me.

I looked into his eyes and believed him. I was sure that it was the worst thing in the world.

That night, we sat at the dining room table, the four of us. Sonja and I were still damp from our bath, and my mother was still cheery from my father’s arrival, though he had already confessed that he had been unable to bring back flour or oil or any of the other staples on her list. Never mind, that was tomorrow’s problem. Sonja described the Kool-Aid and how the soldier had drunk it, glass after glass. I nodded my head, as if it all meant something grownup and important and that I had noticed it, too. In my lap, I held an orange matchbox car. I ran my thumb over the silver chrome. My father asked what flavor the Kool­-Aid was and if there was any still in the fridge. It was past our bedtime and soon our mother would send us to bed. She would tell us that our father had to teach tomorrow and that we would see him at breakfast. He would carry us to our rooms, one by one, and  have prayer with us. Then, we would lie in bed and listen to our parents talking, to the hushed turn of their voices.

The house in Uganda was red brick with a metal roof, a rusted water tank, and a screened-in verandah that had once been painted green. At night, I would pretend that we lived in a boat. The jungle was the ocean and the thrumming frogs were the waves and we were far away from everyone else in the world. I would close my eyes and listen for the water, and I would imagine that we were completely safe.

“House Arrest in Thirteen Parts” originally appeared in the print journal Isthmus Review No. 5, 2016.

 

I. Esses

The warmth of his voice makes us wary of his intentions. He bears our sin of greenness like a precious burden, our softness like a direct order from God to transform us in his image.

A helmet fits his skull like the mold from which it was cast. When he removes it
his bare head glistens in the sun. We pretend not to look, as though he were a woman undressing, feeling almost queasy waiting for him to put it back on. His skin is fair and something childish in his face does not relieve it of an old mortality, which is what one feels when caught in his stare. Under the kevlar brim crouches some secret in eyes, level as a landless horizon. He takes in the world as if in the path of some vast, righteous burning.

“Without death,” he tells us, “there could be no beauty.” Behind us in all directions, warping heat weaves the sky and earth together like two banners in a low wind. He continues, “They had to consume death to know how to live.”

Had we not been standing around the smoldering carnage of a recent Apache gunship
engagement, talk might have remained speculative. The target was a small truck, now a skeletal remnant riddled with 30mm holes. We all lean on it and peer in. Of the reported three enemy kills, the charred remains of one are scattered in the bed. The way the body has come to rest, it looks as if his hand is trying to prevent more of his brains from spilling out. Esses fixes his eyes there while he removes one glove and probes gently around. He pulls at the partially coiled pink and black matter.

Standing at the tailgate he considers what he holds between his fingers like a sacrament.
He looks up, holds each of us in his gaze, searching our eyes as if for the words he wants to say.

He speaks warmly: “Even the light of a dead star can guide us.” He smiles, pleased by his
own insight. He says, “The past is always present but never as it was.” Then extending his hand: “Memory comes back in pieces, some of them not our own.”

II. Chrysalis

Upstream, an elk lowers his velvet crown to drink. A sudden gust tears a flurry of leaves from their branches and they flutter to the current like butterflies. He remembers being told as a child that before they could fly, they were caterpillars, and they ate milkweed because they knew it was poisonous to their predators. Some predators were too hungry to care and ate them anyway. Only one-in-a-hundred caterpillars would get to fly. But they ate milkweed anyway until they were fat, then they curled up in a sleeping bag called a chrysalis and hung from the branches of trees to wait for their second birth.

A storm rumbles off across the valley and sunlight breaks through in its wake. The dirt road is scattered with shining blue and silver portals. He remembers walking with his mother, holding her hand, imagining being pulled through them into that underworld and drifting weightlessly. He remembers her voice, excited to show him something beautiful. How she motioned ahead: “Oh, sweetie, look!”

Wing-to-wing, hundreds of Monarchs covered the surface of a puddle like a
burnt-orange blanket, undulating lethargically in afternoon warmth. He remembers crouching down and his hand recoiling to the sharp change in her voice, “No, no! Don’t touch! You can’t touch them, honey. They are very, very delicate.”

He remembers curling up on the couch early in the mornings and twirling her hair between his fingers while she leafed through the thin pages of her old King James Bible. She says it was the most obsessive thing he did. If he was crying in church it was likely because she wouldn’t let him claw his way into her long, brown, carefully styled hair. In the event of an outburst he would be escorted to the nursery and left with all the other criers. He learned to twirl his own hair and draw on the back of donation envelopes and prayer request cards, whatever it took to endure an hour of liturgy without causing a scene. According to the pastor there was an invisible war being waged inside of him and his soul was in the balance. According to his mother, his actions and even his thoughts could tip the scales.

When he walked through the sliding glass door, blood streaming from his scalp, holding a
fistful of his own hair in one hand and scissors in the other, her terror was quickly suppressed by rage. Following the swift and blunt force of her hand he was marched to the barber shop where for the first time he felt the cool, metallic pleasure of clippers vibrating over his skull and the feeling of wind moving over his exposed mind as they walked back home. They stopped on the sidewalk to speak with her friend who insisted on running her open palm over his new bristle. She cooed to the sensation and a mysterious pleasure fused him to that moment, to her touch, like a corridor of  heated light.

He remembers hiking to Fallen Leaf Lake in northwest Montana and his father giving him
what was in his metal-frame rucksack so his weary youngest sister could fit inside. The extra weight made his shoulders chafe and bleed, made him proud. It rained a warm summer rain and when they arrived they were all soaked through their clothes, except for his sister who emerged from under the top flap of the rucksack dry as a bone. They had a small fire and he remembers feeling almost magical as he unrolled his sleeping bag and sealed himself inside.