I Had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back.
It all started the Thursday that Father Ezekiel came from Immaculate Conception in Kitgum. The old women wore their Sunday frocks and the old men plucked garlands of bougainvillea from the fence and stuck them in their breast pockets. One old man would not leave the dormitory because he could not find his shikwarusi and when I coaxed and badgered, he patted his hai r and said, "My God, do you want the priest from Nairobi to think that I look like this every day?"
I arranged chairs beneath the ovacado tree in the front yard and old people sat down and practised their vsmiles. A few people who did not live at the home came too, like the woman who hawked candy in the stagecoach bus to Mathari North and the man whose one-roomed house was a kindergarten to in the daytime and a brothel in the evening, and the woman whose illicit brew had blinded five people in January.
Father Ezekiel came riding on the back of a bodaboda, and after everyone had dropped a coin in his hat, he gave the bodaboda man fifty shillings and the bodaboda man said, "Praise God," and then rode back the way he had come.
Father Ezekiel took off his coat and sat down in the chair that was marked, Father Ezekiel Okello, New Chaplain," and the old people gave him the smiles they had been practising, smiles that melted Luke ghee, that oozed through the corners of their lips and dribbled onto their laps long after the thing that was being smiled about went rancid in the air.
Father Ezekiel said, "The Lord be with you," and the people said, "And also with you," and then they prayed and they sang and they had a feast; dipping bread slices in the tea, and when the drops fell on the cuffs of their woollen sweaters, sucking at them with their steamy, cinnamon tongues.