A WALK AROUND THE NEW CHURCH AND A BABPTISM

While we waited for the priest to begin the baptism ceremony for three babies, Jason tugged me on the arm. He was restless and that meant he wanted to walk, so I thought a short jaunt around the new church, which had its own walkway would be fine. The new church is adjacent to the old wooden church, which they mostly use for the children for bible classes and playing games.

We didn’t get far because Jason pulled me back to something I had overlooked, a millipede. It was black with bright orange legs that were moving rather swiftly. As soon as one pair of legs touches another it moves, setting off a chain reaction of moving legs – like flicking the bristles on a soft toothbrush.

We got down on our haunches and had ourselves a serious look. I tried to poke the millipede with my finger to see if it would curl into a ball for Jason, but it was in too much of a rush to take any defensive maneuvers. Being outnumbered by us was not a concern. Jason’s foot, on the other hand, was.

“No,” I told Jason, to stop him from trying to step on it. I did try to get the millipede to climb over my foot, but it merely circled around and kept all those legs continually moving. Tired of trying to convince Jason not to step on it, I moved him along.

We peered into the drain that ran alongside the walkway, but there was nothing interesting except for a bright green star that may have belonged to a little girl’s hairclip. I know Jason wanted me to pull it out for closer inspection – it did look pretty – but I didn’t want to encourage him by fishing out miscellaneous articles found in drains. Besides the obvious hygienic reasons, toddlers and drains do not go well together. Sooner or later Jason will fall into one and cut his head or scrape some other part of his body, and I didn’t want to take the heat from his mother, especially since he was all dressed up. His older brother suffered the same fate in Penang when he was already in school.

Jason tugged on my hand to step down from our chosen path to a lower level that crossed over the drain to the adjacent old church. Since the side entrance had been left open, we ventured inside and had ourselves a peek. Greeting us was a strong musty smell and some very old church parapher­nalia, including candles of various sizes and several vases. One of the vases looked awfully familiar. In fact, we have one just like it; the color was a cross between dark mustard and butterscotch, and the size of an elongated football. Or an American football with both ends cut off. Ours had been in my wife’s family for generations. Her mother still uses one with a lid intact to store salt or preserved foods such as tempoyak, a strongly flavored dish made from durians.

We continued on our walk. In the back of the new church, I leaned on a wooden railing and pointed out to Jason the wooden cross and the other grave markers, including one that belonged to a Reverend Simigaat. Suddenly it dawned on me that this was Jason’s great, great grandfather! I had assumed he had been buried in the graveyard opposite of the old church along with the other relatives.

Near the grave markers were two frangipani trees, their white petals littering the ground. Frangipani trees were often found in cemeteries in Peninsular Malaysia. While I continued to peer over the railing, Jason walked on a head. He quickly ran back to me and shouting, “Ants! Ants!”

You can not walk anywhere on the island of Borneo without stumbling on ants, but these were acting different or perhaps strange for Jason. Instead of walking in lines or clustering around crumbs, these were concentrated into a big, tight circle. Upon taking a closer look I saw the skull of what appeared to be a gecko along with the rest of its skeleton that was being picked clean. We watched in fascination though with a tinge of disgust – at least I did. For Jason he was mesmerized. I had to make sure that the ants didn’t swarm all over Jason’s feet, or he could be next, so I decided to move him a long.

I pointed him to a fern-like tree that was small and slender with many branches. Competing for the branches were several sparrows. Some would fly toward a branch, and upon realizing at the last possible moment that it was taken, would hover as it looked for an alternative branch. Birds were constantly flying in and out and hovering. This time it was me who was mesmerized; I could watch them all day. But Jason found something even more interesting – to him. The roaring sound of a man cutting grass. He insisted that we go closer to get a better look.

Strapped to the man’s back were an orange motor and a plastic container filled with gasoline. He used what looked like a vacuum cleaner with two thin strips of plastic at the end, twirling around. Powered by the motor, they would slice through the grass, sheering it to the desired level. The white gas fumes that rose above the man’s back eventually drove us away from the railing. That was good for us, since it was time for Jason’s baby brother, Justin’s baptism to begin.

Now that all three babies, their mothers, fathers, godparents, relatives and witnesses – three were needed for each family, two men and a woman – were assembled, we took our respective places. Bidayuh prayers in hand, we listened to the priest. Jason and I couldn’t understand what the priest was saying, nor could we read the Bidayuh dialect that was used in Quop. Since we were standing close to the exit, Jason wanted me to take him back to the man who was cutting the grass.

He didn’t care that the priest took a hold of each of the babies, including Justin, held him over a font basin, scooped baptismal water and poured it over the infant’s head, running his hand in a backward motion. Nor was he interested in the lit candles that were passed to a relative of each of the babies. I remained firm, not budging, and that didn’t sit well with him. He only grew quiet when every­one joined in a hymn. Once the singing was done, his attention quickly faded. Not wanting him to further disrupt the proceed­ings, I edged him closer to the exit, where he was free to run away.