The hug called grace

In James Kengeni’s church group of nine, silence stamped the room when he shared that as a seven year old, he had killed his baby sister and his mother had hugged him after the fact.

She had been recently widowed.

He narrated that he and his baby sister Kuria, who was two years younger than him, had run to play in the sorghum field near their home. They both bolted forward through it, aiming for the mango tree with the swing, at the end of the garden. Kuria, the faster runner of the two reached there first and started to climb the tree to bring down the swing.

A few moments later, Kengeni arrived, breathless and full of laughter. He fell on the ground at the base of the mango tree, and turned to lie on his back, from which position he could see his sister. That was when he saw something else that caused his brain to freeze.

Behind her, a black shiny thing -a snake- moved its head from side to side. The rest of its body was rolled around the branch, its coils sliding against one another in a way that made Kengeni’s skin crawl. Each time Kuria climbed higher, Kengeni saw that she got closer to it. Meanwhile, she still giggled, out of breath and oblivious, with every climb.

Kengeni’s eyes bulged, and his upper body sprang up from the ground. He could not shout “snake!” as it would make Kuria lose her grip of the stem and fall to the ground, hurting herself. So he made the mad dash towards the tree where he grabbed Kuria by her ankles, pulled her off the tree and swung her away from it.

He swung her so strongly that he felt his own body make the round turn along with her. Kuria’s head landed with a muted but hard popping sound against the tree stem. She hardly got a moment to cry. James, now on the ground and still holding Kuria’s feet, felt the last waves of convulsion course through his own arms, as life ebbed out of her body.

Her last audible words were the faint call of Kengeni’s name, followed by mouthing “mama” over and over again, until all movement from her lips ceased. Her head had caved in on the left side. Two streams of cherry red blood trickled down her nose, and her eyes stared ahead, glassy and unstoried, past Kengeni’s trembling self. The serpent dropped on the ground and slithered away into the sorghum field.

At the small group meeting, James, whose eyes now trickled with hot tears, and whose cheeks and nose were now reddened from emotion, concluded his narration.

“Some stories have no humanly possible resolution. It is only by grace that they can pass. Grace- that capacity to not just forgive wrong but also go ahead and lavish blessings- is a capacity that only God can give, and my mother had that. Do you know that my mother, when she found me under that mango tree, shaken and riddled with guilt, with Kuria lying lifeless besides me, her first response was to hug me tight and tell me that she does not blame me for Kuria’s death? With tears filling her eyes, she whispered to me that she would not let me outside of her grip until I felt that I could trust her words that she does not blame me.”

At this point, the entire church group was in sniffles, dabbing their wet eyes with either handkerchiefs or the corners of their clothing.

“She said that only after then, would she ask me what had happened to Kuria. What kind of grace was that, except that only God has and can give?”

James stayed in his mother’s embrace for one hour.