THE PROMISE

THE PROMISE CHAPTER 3

The Promise I Kept for Ten Years

Chapter 3: Year One

The first year is the one that teaches you how to wait.

I did not know that then. I thought waiting was something you did with your hands folded, looking at the road. I did not know it was work. Real work, every single day, like carrying water. You get up with it in the morning and you go to bed with it at night, and it is still heavy.

After the last letter, I made myself a rule. I would not cry in front of customers. I would not sit idle. And I would not stop writing to Samuel, even if I had no address to send the letters to.

The first thing I lost was my place at nursing school.

I had passed my exams. Not with the best marks in the district, but good enough. The letter from Wau came in February, thin and official, with a stamp in the corner. I held it at the gate and read it standing, and my mother watched my face.

"Well?"

"They have accepted me, Mama. But classes cannot start. The school is closed until further notice."

She took the paper and read it herself, slowly, moving her lips. Then she handed it back. "Keep it safe. Schools open again. Everything opens again."

"When?"

"When God wants."

That was her answer to everything that year.

So I stayed at the tea stall. Every morning I washed the cups, lit the charcoal, and carried the kettle to the table. The old men came back one by one, a little thinner, a little quieter. Some of the faces I used to see were gone, and nobody spoke about them. We just poured the tea and said, "God is great."

I was not unhappy, exactly. I was busy. But when the work stopped in the afternoon, that was when it came. The quiet. The question that did not have an answer.

I kept writing.

Every Sunday after church I went to the mango tree with a sheet of paper and wrote to Samuel. I told him about the week. Who got married. Whose goat died. Which of the old men had finally admitted my mother makes better tea than the shop on the main road. I told him about the clinic.

There was a small clinic near our church, run by two nurses and a volunteer doctor who came three days a week. After the fighting, the line outside it never ended. Wounded people. Sick children. Women who had walked for hours. One Monday, Sister Margaret stood at the door and said to nobody in particular, "I need hands. Anyone with two hands, come in."

I went in. I did not even ask my mother.

I rolled bandages. I carried water. I held a child's arm still while a nurse cleaned a wound, and the little boy screamed and then, because I was talking nonsense to him about a goat that could sing, he started to laugh in the middle of crying. Sister Margaret looked at me over his head.

"You are good with them," she said.

"I want to be a nurse."

"You are one already. You just do not have the paper."

I went home that evening with blood on my dress, and my mother, instead of scolding me, put a bowl of warm water down in front of me and said, "Wash. Then eat."

That night I wrote to Samuel: Today I was useful. I think this is what you meant about roads. Not only the ones made of stone.

Then I put the letter in a tin biscuit box under my bed, with all the others.

By June, the box was half full.

I did not know where to send them. His aunt had no address for Moses. The university had been contacted by someone from church, and the answer, which came back after two months, was that there was a student with his name but he had never registered. A clerk had written: Not on the current list. The man who brought the answer did not know how to say it softly, so he just handed me the paper and looked at his shoes.

I folded the paper small and put it in my pocket. I did not read it again for a long time.

Because here is something nobody tells you about hope. It is not a feeling. It is a decision. You wake up and you make it again, even when the evidence is against you. I decided, every morning, that not on the list did not mean dead. It meant not on the list. A list is made by tired men in offices. A list can be wrong.

The neighborhood noticed.

In Munuki, nobody can hide anything. You hang your washing out and the whole street knows what you ate. So it was no surprise when the whispers started. They did not say anything to my face. Not at first. But I would walk past a group of women at the water point and the talking would stop, then start again in a lower voice.

"That is Mama Rose's daughter."

"The one waiting for the boy?"

"Sixteen months and no word. Eh."

"Poor girl."

"Poor? She is wasting her youth. A girl is like a fruit. She does not stay sweet forever."

I heard that last one clearly. It was Mama Grace, the same Mama Grace who had spread the news about Samuel's scholarship. She was standing at the tap with her yellow jerrycan and she did not lower her voice at all.

I filled my own can without looking at her. Inside, my face burned. Outside, I smiled and said, "Good afternoon, Mama Grace."

"Good afternoon, my daughter," she said, in the sugary voice of someone who has just said something unkind and wants credit for politeness. "How is your mother?"

"She is well."

"And you? Still... waiting?"

The other women went very quiet.

I could have said many things. I could have told her where to put her opinions. But I thought of my mother, who had been the subject of the same whispers thirty years earlier, and who had survived them with her chin up and her kettle hot.

"Yes, Mama Grace," I said. "Still waiting. God keeps us all."

I picked up my water and walked home with my back straight. It was only when I reached the gate that my hands began to shake and I had to put the can down.

My friend Nyandeng got married in September.

She had been my best friend since we were six. We had shared a desk, a lie, a hundred secrets. She married a young man who worked at a bank, a quiet, gentle person with big ears and a good job, and she looked beautiful in her white dress, with all her relatives singing around her.

I sang too. I danced. I put my arm around her and told her she was a queen. And when the singing ended and the guests went to eat, she pulled me behind the church into the shade and held my face in both hands.

"You are thinner," she said.

"It is the heat."

"Achol."

"I am fine, Nyandeng. It is your wedding. Do not worry about me today."

"Do you ever think..." She stopped. I saw her searching for a way to say it kindly. "Do you ever think that maybe he..."

"No."

"I did not finish."

"You did not need to." I took her hands off my face and held them. "I think about it every day. I think about it more than you can imagine. And every day I decide again."

She was crying. Her makeup was running. "I just do not want you to be alone."

"I am not alone. I have my mother, and Deng, and the clinic, and you."

"That is not what I mean."

"I know what you mean," I said gently. "But I made a promise."

She wiped her eyes, looking at me for a long time. Then she said something I have never forgotten. "Then I hope he is worth it. And if he is not, I hope you will forgive yourself for loving him anyway."

I did not know how to answer that. So I hugged her, and we went back to the party.

The anniversary came in the dry season.

One year since the bus park. One year since the dust. I did not go to the clinic that day. I told my mother I had a headache, which she did not believe, and I walked to the river with a mango from the market, because the ones on the tree were not in season.

The old tree looked the same. A little drier, maybe. The big root was warm from the sun. I sat in my place and put the mango on Samuel's.

"Happy anniversary," I said, feeling foolish, to the empty air.

The river did not answer. A bird called somewhere in the reeds. A fisherman I did not know paddled by with his net, and he nodded to me, and I nodded back.

I took the ring off my finger. The thread Samuel had wound around it had gone gray and loose. I held the ring up and looked at it in the light, at the small dent on one side, the place where it had once been hit against a stone. A woman I had never met had worn this. A woman who died too young. Her son had given it to me and said it was everything he had.

"I am still here," I told it.

Then I did something I had been thinking about for months. I took a piece of green thread from my pocket and replaced the old one, winding it carefully, tight enough that it would not slip. When I put the ring back on, it fit. For the first time, it fit.

I do not know why that made me cry. But it did. I sat by the river and cried for an hour, openly, loudly, the way I had not allowed myself to cry in front of anyone all year. When it was finished I felt empty and clean, like a house after the rain.

Then I ate the mango. All of it. And I walked home.

My mother was waiting on the veranda. She looked at my face, at my red eyes, at the sticky juice on my fingers. She did not ask where I had been.

"Sit," she said. "I have something to tell you."

I sat. The evening was ending and the lamp had not been lit yet.

"Today a man came to the stall," she said. "A respectable man. He is forty, maybe a little more. He has a shop in Konyokonyo, and a house, and a good name. His wife died two years ago." She paused. "He asked about you."

"What did he say?"

"He said he would wait too." My mother almost smiled, though there was no happiness in it. "He said he is a patient man. He said he will ask again in a few months."

I did not speak.

"I am not telling you to say yes," she said quickly. "I am only telling you, because it will not be the last time. You are twenty. You are healthy and kind and hardworking. People will come. You must be ready for them, and for the talk that comes after."

"Mama, I told Samuel..."

"I know what you told him. I was there." She reached out and held my hand, the one with the ring.

My mother squeezed my hand. She did not say that she was proud of me, and she did not say that she was afraid. She did not need to. I could hear both in the silence between us.