The Colours of Her Rosary
Farawe · 1988
On Wednesdays the small Christian community met at whichever house had the most chairs, and in the long rains that was Kerubo’s, because Mokaya had made six and the mud had made the road too heavy for anyone to carry their own. She swept the floor after lunch, borrowed a second lamp from the shop, and before the light went she lifted the rosary down from its nail above the bed, where it hung beside the cooperative’s calendar.
It was not like the other women’s rosaries. Theirs were black wood or brown seeds, or nothing, ten fingers and a good memory. Hers had come from Italy in Father Angelo’s luggage, the gift of an old woman in his home parish who had heard there were Catholics in Africa without beads. Every decade was a different colour: green, red, white, blue, yellow. When he gave it to her he had explained the colours, holding each decade up to the window of the border school. The green was Africa. The red was the Americas, the white was Europe and the Holy Father, the blue was the islands, the yellow was Asia. A priest in America had designed it, he said, so that a woman praying in one village would be praying for all of them.
“Even for the Americans?” Kerubo had asked.
“Especially for the Americans,” said Father Angelo, and laughed until he had to take his glasses off.
That afternoon, an hour before the women were due, Mokaya’s elder brother came up the path from the road with the dust of two buses on him and a bunch of green bananas on his shoulder so large that he walked bent, like a man under a sin. Kerubo saw him from the door and knew two things at once. Nyakundi had not told anyone he was coming. And nobody carries bananas that size across the country for a visit.
She gave him water to wash his feet and tea with a great deal of sugar, because he was her husband’s brother and because the sugar would make him slow. He asked after the maize, the cows, the boy. Demo stood in the doorway with his hands behind his back and answered for himself: Standard Four, first in class, not including Wafula, who had been first twice. Nyakundi gave him a ten-shilling note and sent him to the shop to buy nothing in particular, and Kerubo understood that the visit had begun.
She took the cups to the kitchen and did not close the door.
“It is a big farm,” Nyakundi said, in Ekegusii. “Eleven acres. At home our children are cutting one acre into strips you could jump across. Our father had three houses, Mokaya. You have one, and one son.”
“I have three children.”
“You have one son. The girls will go to other men’s homes. Who will this land go to when the boy goes to school in town and does not come back? And he will go, that one. He has the look.”
Mokaya said nothing. In the kitchen Kerubo found that she had poured the milk for the evening tea into the sugar tin.
“There is a girl,” said Nyakundi. “Nyanchama’s daughter, from beyond the ridge. Standard Seven. Strong. Her father is not asking for much, because her father is not a fool and he has heard about Farawe.”
Kerubo had been a girl from beyond a ridge once. She remembered the cattle going out of Mokaya’s father’s gate towards her father’s, eight of them and a heifer that would not walk, and her mother’s sister weeping for joy in a way that frightened her. That was their wedding. When Demo was born and Father Angelo baptised him at the outstation, the priest had written a second line in the register, below the child’s name, and turned the book a little away from her as he wrote it. She had learned what the line meant only later, at the first Mass after the baptism, in the border school’s classroom, when the line of women went forward to receive and the catechist’s wife touched her elbow and shook her head, kindly, once. A woman married with cows and not before the altar could pray, and lead the prayer, and found a community, and sweep the floor for it. She could not go up.
She had asked Mokaya about a church wedding twice. The first time he said there was no money for a feast. The second time he said nothing, and his silence had been an answer of a more complete kind. A man who marries before the altar has one house for ever. A man married with cows can still be a man with three.
Outside, the first women were coming up the path, calling greetings from a distance so as not to surprise anyone. Nyakundi got to his feet. He looked at the chairs in a circle and the lamps and the rosary on the table and understood, too late, where he was.
“You will sit with us,” Kerubo said, coming out of the kitchen. “It is not long.”
He sat. It would have been ruder to leave than to pray.
Mama Wafula came first, a Bukusu woman with a laugh that arrived before she did, carrying her youngest asleep in a kanga. Then the Sabaot widow from the slope, who knew all the responses in Kiswahili and none of the words to any other prayer, and two sisters from the far side of the dam, and the catechist’s wife, who sat by the door because she always left early to cook. Mokaya stayed on his stool by the doorpost, half in and half out of the house, as he did at every gathering where a woman was in charge. Demo came back from the shop with ten shillings’ worth of sweets and was sent to the back of the room to share them with nobody.
It was Wednesday, so they prayed the Glorious Mysteries. Kerubo announced each one in Kiswahili and the room answered. The Resurrection: the green decade passed under her thumb, ten Salamu Marias, and Mama Wafula’s voice ran slightly ahead of everybody else’s, as it did at funerals and at the bus stage. The Ascension: the red. Somewhere in the red the baby woke, considered the lamp, and went back to sleep. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: the white, and Kerubo heard, under the women’s voices, a man’s voice, low, from the doorpost. Mokaya’s lips were moving. He had learned the prayer as a boy at a mission school in the hills and had not, as far as she knew, said it since. She could not tell whether he was praying or counting. With Mokaya it had always been difficult to tell.
The Assumption: the blue. Nyakundi had his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor and his mouth shut, like a man at someone else’s clan meeting, respectful and outside it. The Coronation: the yellow, and the Sabaot widow began to sing the last Hail Mary instead of saying it, which she was not supposed to do and always did.
At the end each woman offered her intention aloud. Rain that stopped before the harvest. A son in the army in Nairobi. A cow with a swollen udder. The catechist’s wife prayed for the priest’s motorbike, which had broken twice on the road from the town. When it came to Kerubo she said, “For this house,” and nothing else, and the room said Amen, and did not ask which part of the house she meant.
Afterwards, while the women drank their tea and the sisters from the far side of the dam argued about whether the Holy Spirit had come as a dove or as fire or both and in what order, Nyakundi picked up the rosary from the table. He held it the way men hold a baby that is not theirs, away from the body.
“Why does it have so many colours?”
“Each colour is a part of the world,” said Kerubo. “You pray one decade for each.”
He found the green with his thumb without being told. “This one is us.”
“That one is Africa.”
He turned it, and the colours came round one after another in the lamplight. “So even the beads keep more than one house,” he said, and laughed, and nobody else did, and after a moment he stopped.
That night Mokaya lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest, the way he lay when he was awake and wished to be thought asleep. Kerubo listened to the rain decide whether to come back.
“When does the priest come again?” he said.
“The first Sunday.”
“What does he charge? For the other thing.”
She did not pretend not to understand. “The priest charges nothing. It is the feast that costs.”
Mokaya was quiet for so long that she thought he had chosen to sleep after all. Then he said, “So it is not the priest who is expensive,” and turned over to face the wall, and she lay looking at the dark where the nail was, and could not tell whether he had made a joke or a decision. With Mokaya it had always been difficult to tell.
Nyakundi left in the morning on the first bus, with an empty sack folded under his arm and a chicken from Kerubo for his wife. Mokaya walked him to the road. Demo walked behind them both, because he was ten and could feel that something had happened, and wished to be near the place where it was still happening.
Kerubo cleared the cups. The bananas sat on the floor by the table, green and enormous, and would be yellow by Saturday whatever anyone decided. When she had swept, she lifted the rosary from the table and hung it on its nail. It swung a little, and turned, and the colours came round in the grey light from the door one after another, green, red, white, blue, yellow, and green again.