Listening for Lions: Chapters 1–2

Father treated sleeping sickness, plague, smallpox, and leprosy.

When Father removed their cataracts, they walked home on their own.

Later, when I had to live in England’s bleak winters, I wished for my own miracle to give me back Africa’s brightness.

All day long you could hear the Kikuyu chattering to one another and smell the smoke of their fires as they roasted a goat or cooked their maize porridge, posho.

When the Kikuyu came to work at the hospital as nurses and assistants, the men wore khaki shorts and shirts and the women plain white dresses and caps. They were like birds who had shed their rich plumage.

Their huts were made of straw and looked like half-opened parasols.

There was not much to see inside the huts, only a pot or two and a few drinking gourds and perhaps a wooden bench.

Outside the huts the women with their long wooden pestles pounded maize for posho.

Sunday after I turned twelve, Father told me to listen closely to his sermon. He chose as his text the verses in Ephesians in which St. Paul admonishes us to follow the Lord in good works.

I didn’t like the hospital, with its smell of disinfectant and all its misery, and asked why Father had not chosen as his text the part in Ephesians where St. Paul says by grace are ye saved and not by works. Father said I was being pert.

She showed me how to coax the patients into taking their medicine, which they often refused, and how to give them goat broth with a lot of salt to treat the dehydration that came with cholera.

It was especially difficult to watch over the Masai patients, who were so tall and regal herding their cattle but who collapsed when they had to be hospitalized.

The man would be allowed to join the congregation, but Father insisted there must be no third wife.

The orphans had to listen to someone reading from the Bible or some other edifying book during meals and could not talk with one another.

Father did very well and thanks to a kind benefactor was sent to university to study to become a doctor for the missions.

A meeting was arranged with Mother, who had stayed on in the orphanage to teach little children at the orphanage school. On a Sunday afternoon they were invited to take tea together at the vicar’s home.

“It was a small miracle,” Mother said. “In five minutes I knew I liked your father, but I thought it immodest to appear eager, so I insisted on two more teas at the vicar’s.”

“I had to sit there in a stiff collar,” Father said, “talking nonsense. I have heard how in the times of chivalry men had to joust with sharp lances for their women, but I don’t believe they ever had to eat so many of the vicar’s wife’s biscuits. Like rocks they were.”

There had been a drought, and a train of little puffs of red dust followed along behind them and settled like a powdery rain on the leaves of the acacia trees.

The roof was nothing more than sheets of corrugated iron with heavy stones to keep the sheets in place.

It was midnight before Mother came home. Her shoulders sagged and her dress was wrinkled and soiled. Her hair straggled out of its neat bun.

I was awake most of the night, persecuted by a yellow house bat that had found its way into my room and was ricocheting from wall to wall.

The Masai and Kikuyu families crowded about the hospital grounds. Because of the contagion they were not allowed to care for their families in the hospital.

It seemed unfair to me that everyone else was fighting the epidemic and I could do nothing.

Trembling at my audacity, I stood at the pulpit where Father always stood.

Trembling at my audacity, I stood at the pulpit where Father always stood.

I read the fortieth Psalm, which always frightened me at first and then made me feel better, “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”

He asked in a gruff voice, “Rachel, what are you doing here?”

The churchyard was small, with only two wooden crosses to mark the graves of Kanoro’s father and a missionary preacher who had come long before us. The grasses had been scythed, and a few flat-topped acacia trees made loose circles of shade.

I returned with a bouquet of the flowers that grow wild in the bush, spikey blue thistles and red and yellow aloes. I thought them too garish for their sad purpose and wished I had the soft English flowers Mother longed for.

The girl’s eyelids fluttered and she made a small moaning sound. All her plumpness was gone. Her face was tinged with blue, and there were brownish spots on her cheeks.

Mother was a conscientious housekeeper, but Mother had not been in the house for several days and dust had blown through the open windows.

A tear fell into the pitcher, and I recalled a children’s book in which a child’s tears curdled the milk.

A starling chattered on a tree, its gaudy purple, red, and yellow feathers out of place in so much sadness.

A starling chattered on a tree, its gaudy purple, red, and yellow feathers out of place in so much sadness.