God’s Plan for Dr. Gaynor and Hastings Chiume

Dr. gaynor was on the move again, walking briskly into town on her lunch break, just what she did most days in the dry season. She wished to pick up the blouse being made for her by Mr. Pherri, who held two jobs, one as tailor running his old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine on the raised wooden porch of Mrs. Tsembe’s general store, the other as scrivener, or mlemba, who, moving to a rickety table at the other end of the porch, wrote letters or filled out documents for those illiterate.

As Dr. Gaynor moved along, wondering if Mr. Pherri had finished her blouse as he so earnestly promised to do, she had no premonition that today in town, on the way to her tailor, she would have a brief encounter with the young man who would kill her two weeks later.

Some of Dr. Gaynor’s staff, watching her leave through the small hospital’s back gates—gates seldom used because of the morgue next to them—also had no premonition of their boss’s impending death. At best, they had noted some blackbirds chattering in a tree, which might mean visitors coming, and that could include death and his minions. However, since the three-times-a-week bus was always dropping off visitors or relatives in Chitipa, these sightings of blackbirds seldom reached an ominous level. On this day, no one saw anything unusual about Dr. Gaynor’s decision to go into town; they only thought her quite crazy as usual, quite kerezeka, to want to walk anywhere when, as boss, she had at her disposal the hospital’s Land Rover, her driver growing fat as he sat in the tiny transport office eating and drinking and waiting to take her somewhere.

The very fact her staff members made these same remarks about their boss and her noon walks into town showed how, in general, nothing much did happen in Chitipa, this the last district town in the mountainous northwest corner of Malawi before the Zambian border, a town reached only by a wide and winding bulldozed-dirt road the government kept promising to pave.

In truth, it was this main dirt road from the lakeside town of Karonga to Chitipa, high on a plateau, that offered the best chance of excitement, because even during the rainy season, when bushes and wild grasses sprang up in its middle, the three-times-a-week, blue-and-white government-owned bus always got through—sometimes on time, most of the time not, but it got through. Gears grinding, up it made its way, goats, sheep, and suitcases piled on its top, batteries and auto parts packed inside, as well as expensive items, like toilet paper, for the local elite. There were also the days-old newspapers both in English and Chichewa, the cooking oils and salt and sugar, the many cartons of cigarettes and matches that vendors bought to resell in allotments of one, two, or three, the large bars of yellow lye-looking soap sold in wholes or halves, and always at least two sacks of incoming mail, for electricity was still too irregular for people to depend on the new cell phones used in the cities or even the old land phones, of which the hospital had three.

Most importantly, the white-and-blue bus brought people, people returning from matoling, from visiting relatives or friends elsewhere, or from attending marriages and funerals—especially funerals, because all government and privately employed workers got three paid days off for any family funeral, wherever in the country. It also brought people the police might be looking for, or people who could turn dirt into gold, and its arrivals and departures were pretty much the biggest events of the week, coming Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; leaving the next day on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Usually the same bus, usually the same driver.

Of course events happened locally, too, people being born, people dying, people getting sick, some brought immediately to the hospital, but most waiting it out at home or seeing Mr. Chimbalala...