Red Jacket by Pamela; Mordecai Page A

The attack on the twins’ father is all the talk at supper, for the tiny women are favourites with everyone. Also, as everyone knows, random assaults often presage larger conflicts: a man here, a man there, then twos, then tens, then pretty soon, a war. And who ever knows the plotters?
    By the next morning, things are back to normal. Though the twins are still absent, the other staff have returned. Breakfast appears at seven, and lunch and dinner at the appointed times, and the novices find snacks and juice in the refectory if they need refreshment during the day.
    Over the last day and a half, Jimmy has been uneasy, his mind disturbed by a series of small, unnatural events. Coming back from the laundry where he deposited Father Kelly’s clothes, he notices the dogs, a ragamuffin crew who had been growling at the priest up until then, wildly wagging their tails, leaping up to greet him and rubbing themselves against his legs. He sees mongoose-like mbuni, rodents who scrupulously avoid human contact, halting their lightning dashes across the yard to approach the priest’s feet. He notices presents of seeds and cones, select mbuni morsels, piled up near the retreat director’s door. Mabuli sand puppies, dedicated underground dwellers, peek from dirt hills that thrust up to form a quaint honour guard under his window.
    Surely, on the way to and from the director’s office, his brother novices must have observed the mbuni piling up their votary offerings, the sand puppies watching from their mounds? Jimmy doesn’t know about anyone else, but he needs to make sense of it. Has hysteria induced by the attack on the marabout rattled them all into imagining bizarre versions of the ordinary? Has the hunger for food and everyday conversation prompted mass hallucination? Or perhaps, and this is the interpretation he most favours, the animals sense the imminence of some type of geophysical phenomenon like an earthquake or a giant rainstorm or sandstorm, and this explains their behaviour. He decides to speak to Father Kelly about it. The man has come a long way: he deserves the satisfaction of earning his keep.
    There is mostly, though not always a homily at vespers. That night, the retreat director speaks about verses 28 to 31 from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12, which was the reading at morning Mass. “Jesus says to love our neighbour as ourselves. We keep forgetting that last part. He exemplified that proper self-love, daring to be who he was, the Messiah, son of God, and getting killed for it. Whenever we are rejected, we need to remember that and to remember too that he rises again and his resurrected self renews the sacred self of each of us, making each of us more lovable. Think of it as lungs, hearts, kidneys, corneas, revived, new cells, new organs transplanted from the risen Jesus into us.”
    Jimmy sits in the chapel, closes his eyes, and tries to meditate on the reflection, but the matter of his initial response to the director keeps intruding. What does he not love in himself that has led him to be hostile to the foreigner? Eventually he gives in and recites the Confiteor to ask forgiveness for his initial suspicion of the man, his arrogance at their first meeting, his glee at the sight of the white man in his kiloli , his scorn of the priest’s worn sandals and unkempt feet. He thinks of John Kelly’s easy good nature, his ready ear, of the fact that their hilarity at the sight of him in a kiloli seems not to bother him. He is ashamed.
    After half an hour, he walks back to his room, the night clear so it seems he can count the points of light in the great stars, the dry air a sculptor’s rasp scraping dust and detritus from his lungs. He lies in bed and thinks of Jesus and organ transplants and Africa. Adam and Eve are set down in the Garden of Eden in East Africa. The first heart to find its way from one human body to another does so in South Africa. Jesus lived up the coast in