Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (4 page)

“
Ach
!
Don't
do
that, mad girl.” Then, as the dawn light struggled into the room, “Is it today, Will?”

“Yes! Today! Today,
today
!” Today there would be unlimited time, unlimited sun, unlimited food. Will leapt into the air, seized her ankles, somersaulted.
“Today!”

On days like these, when the fields were silent and the horses needed little guiding, they could trespass wherever they pleased, jumping over billycans of water and stone walls.

Will rode ahead on the broad back of her own brown Shumba, calling back, “
Faga moto
, boys!” Which meant, “make fire, let's go, move faster.” She could feel her lungs
in her chest—beating-beating-beating in time with her heart—and she was suddenly giddy, drunk with the day, high-pitched in hilarity.
“Faga-faga-moTO!”

Simon kicked his horse into a burst of speed—“
Ja,
faga moto
yourself, girl!”—and they raced, too fast for safety but never quite fast enough, across the
vlei
.

“Faster! Come on, Shumba, faster!” Will shook the sweat out of her eyes. It was impossible to be sweet and humble when the wind whistled like this through her ears. “Come on, Peter! Come on, Si! Calypso'll go faster'n
that
.”

Will dropped her reins. She couldn't, couldn't stay calm under that mad chaos of speed and sun. She was wild to show off, and she rose with deliberate wobbles to stand on Shumba's wide back. With her gums exposed to the early-morning air, she whooped and gave the horseboy's call, “Ai-ai-aiyah!” and Simon, a length behind, called back, “Ai-ai-
aiyah
!”

Peter, a nervous hump on the brown nag, blind to the thundering beauty of the day, pulled his mouth down into his chin in panic. “Look
out
, you idiot!” Will wobbled again—not on purpose this time—and laughed. “I am, Peter. I
am
. Oh, Peter. I know you're an angel, but you're a fool, Pete. Look!”

Intoxicated with her success and his awed eyes, and with
the way the wind rushed by and flicked delicate strands of saliva across her cheeks, Will spread out her arms, spun in a pirouette. Shumba chose that moment to stumble over a rabbit hole, and with a terrific crash that sounded and resounded over miles and miles of
vlei
, Will fell into the long grass.

“Whoa!” Simon pulled to a halt, tugging at Calypso's mane, dragging him round, tense with shock. “Will?
Will
?”

Peter had been unable to stop, fumbling with reins and nearly tipping over the neck of the nag. Now he trotted back, and the two boys waited, uncertain what was needed—laughter or bandages?

“Will? You okay?”

“All well, Will? Will . . .”

There was a pause, with only muffled gasps and expletives from the grass—but Will was a
fighter
. She was proud of that, a fighter, and she worked out which way was up in the mass of green and stood, shaking and covered in grass seeds.

“Ja.”
She panted. “Of course I am. Course!”

In fact, she wasn't sure what was happening in her chest, and her elbow was grazed and bleeding, and she was only half-breathing, and half-crying and half-laughing, but she seized Shumba's mane and swung up again, scrabbling against his sturdy sides, and ran a tongue over her teeth. “All
well!
Ja!
All, all, all well!” And, lying low on Shumba's neck, Will galloped, still dizzy, out into the bush.

The boys, racing after her, heard singing on the wind.

When Will sang, she smiled at the same time; the corners of her mouth reached outward, into her ears, and her eyes changed color, to amber with bits of gold. This was Will's world, and it was her joy.

I
F YOU WANTED TO SEE
will's world at its best, you went out at sunset. You had to put up with the swarms of mosquitoes, that was true, but in return you got the toads singing, and the air tasted of excitement. The African witching hour, the men called it. And it was true, Will thought, looking round at the circle of horseboys and the cobs of roast corn scattered on the ground; everything was strange in this light. Even the men drinking leftover beer from the gala two days before looked stronger and wilder than usual. It was like the world was carved out of expectant silence. Will sniffed and tucked her legs under her chin. Her knees smelled the same as the air, of woodsmoke and earth. Had anyone ever been as happy as her?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a colossal crash. It was Simon, back late from mucking the horses, pushing through the other boys, tripping and swearing, throwing a stick at someone's head, stealing someone else's corncob and collapsing to sit beside Will. She grinned. Simon had never done anything quietly in his life.

“
Manheru
, hey!” He took a handful of the gooseberries by her side and crammed them into his mouth.

“Manheru!”
Will leaned toward him. “Hold still.”

“What?”

“Tick.” She pulled at the black insect on his arm, and it came away, complete. “You got to keep the head on—see, this one's good.” She held it out to Hector, who was two years younger and desperately in awe of her. “If it stays in your skin, you're finished,
ja
. You froth at the mouth and die.” She smiled her most beatific smile. “Truly.” She put the tick between her teeth and bit. Blood squeezed down her lips.

“Eugh! Will, that's horrible! Now you'll get rabies,” warned Peter.

Will grinned at the expressions of horror on the boys' faces. She kissed the back of her hand, and the blood on her lips left a lipstick-like mark. “It won't hurt me.”

Simon laughed. “Nah. Will's immune to
everything
.”

Will made her rabid-dog face.

Hector rolled his eyes into his head and dribbled. “I've got rabies! Look!
Look
, Will! I've got rabies too!”

•  •  •

Biting ticks was one of the very few things forbidden by Captain Browne.

“But they bit me first,” Will had said, trying to look sullen when the captain had first caught her. “And”—this was daring—“I bet you bit ticks when you were a kid? Didn't you, sir?”

“Eh?” The captain had growled low, like a lion with a blocked nose, and swiped at the back of her legs with his walking stick. “Eh? Whatasay?” The captain was deaf only when it was convenient. “Run off and play with those boys of yours.” She had heard him snorting with laughter as he'd gone round the corner. In fact, that had been the day she'd realized you could be as rude as you liked to the captain—or you could be mute or say stupid things or be awkward and dirty and scratching—so long as you loved him at the same time. It was a thing worth knowing.

The other things that the captain had forbidden were (1) playing near the compost heap, where there were scorpions and some of the smaller snakes—which Will and Simon did anyway, and were duly bitten, but by a grass snake, no more
dangerous than a wasp—and (2) eating the dark red berries that grew along the veranda. Will only tried that once, and then never again, after the foulest fit of diarrhea she had ever had. “I thought I was going to die, but I would have hated to die in a toilet. So I went out into the bush, without any pants . . . and it was beautiful, and there were duiker by the stream, and it was so still. . . . I think it was the beauty,
ja
, that cured me.” And above all, it was forbidden to wear clothes that had not been ironed—even vests; even
socks
. Ironing was the only way to kill the putsi fly that laid eggs on damp clothes and burrowed into your arms and legs without you feeling it.

Will had no real wish to have flies laying eggs under her skin, so the next afternoon she dragged the heavy ironing board outside, bumped it against her shins, cursing, and up the steps, and out on to the veranda, where she stood in the open air, ironing her father's socks.

She had already done all her own scraps of clothing—jeans bleached grayish-blue by the sun, T-shirts worn into flopping flapping softness, brightly patterned shorts that she'd made herself with clumsy stitches, and a khaki skirt she had made from the top of her father's trousers. There were dresses, too, that Captain Browne brought back as gifts from town. Most felt pointless in a house with no mirrors, and
they were too tight, with bows that tangled at the back, but she could cut off the ribbons and use them to tie back her hair, and with one particularly fussy one she had sewn up the arms and neck and used it as a sack for stealing bananas.

Will should have worn a hat—children in Harare, she was told, wore wide-brimmed cloth or American-style caps—but the horseboys did not, and so Will did not. Nor did she wear socks herself; she didn't wear shoes. But her father did, and she wouldn't have worms burrowing into her father's feet. She loved him too extremely. Though she couldn't have explained why, around him it was never difficult to keep her temper; around him there was never any need to tense up and contract into herself.

She could hear him now, coming in through the back door. The door was in two parts, like a stable door, and the bottom half squeaked, but Will stubbornly refused to let anyone oil it, so that she would always be ready, like this, waiting on tiptoe to welcome her father. All the men who worked for Captain Browne—and in truth the captain himself—were a little afraid of Will, so the door remained unoiled.

She knew exactly what her father would do; this was the only bit of a day that never varied. Hot and tired (the tired that comes from a long day at a job at which he was
magnificent
, she thought, and felt a butterfly-flicker of happy pride), he would stride to the fridge, take out a glass bottle of beer, pry it open with his nails, and put his head under the single tap in the big tin sink.

“Hello? You in, Cartwheel?” he called.

He wasn't like other fathers, Will knew. He was taller and braver. She gave her owl hoot, as loud as a shout, so he would know she was by the avocado tree on the veranda. (A hoopoe call meant she was in her bedroom, and a parrot screech meant the rock pool.)

Her father always did everything hugely. With a lion's roar, he burst through the insect curtain and snatched Will up round the waist, and they spun and whirled, giddily out of balance, and water droplets flew from William's face and the iron wobbled dangerously and the dogs barked, leaping and excited, and scratched at Will's spinning ankles, and William bellowed his great happy laugh—a laugh that only came out around Will, which she knew, and loved him even better for it—and hundreds of birds took off, chattering, from the avocado tree. Will glowed.

“Good day, hey, Dad?” she said when, set the right way up, she had picked up her iron from the floor.

“Good day. Long day . . . but good day.” He spoke in the way of the African evening, slowly, with long spaces. “Lazarus
said one of the goats had twins. One is too small . . . a runt. I said if he gave it to Tedias, Tedi would give it to you and you'd look after it.
Ja
?”

“
Ja
. Of course.” She looked at her father, and her slow, drunken-love smile, the one she reserved for him, took over her face. “I'd love that, Dad. We could call it Nguruve, hey, to encourage it.”

“
Nguruve
” was Shona for “pig,” and “
Shumba
” was Shona for “lion”; and the captain's terrier puppy was called Bumhi, which was the fiercest kind of wild dog; and Will was called wildcat. “Everything has parts of other things,” she'd told Simon. She'd been trying to say, nobody is just sweet, or just cruel. Simon had said, “
Ja
. You've got eyebrows like chongololos.” He had crocodile, she reckoned, and leopard and horse in him.

As if he'd followed the last part of her thought, her father said, “I found Simon upside down on duty, hand-standing in the veggie patch. I hit him on the head with a cabbage.”

Will laughed. She could picture it.

“And Lucian Mazarotti's back from Harare.”

“Oh! Is he better?” Lucian had had cholera.

“Better. As healthy and strong as a lion. As strong as
you
, little Cartwheel. And he brought back six sacks of mealie porridge, and a drum of oil, and a bull calf for his heifer
tied up in his truck like a chicken.
Ja
”—and her father's smile was slower than his speech, deep and satisfied—“all is well with him. He's got that gleam back on his skin, like a god.”

“Good! I'm glad.
Good
!
” Will felt her stomach blaze with pleasure. Lucian owned the land on the outskirts of Two Tree Hill Farm. He was Will's hero. There were diviners on the farm who could find boreholes with two sticks and a strange, inborn feeling for water, and Will reckoned Lucian was like that with people. It was as though he dug out goodness from the hard unused centers of souls. He'd taught her to swim, and had held a large finger under her spine for her first backbend, and had picked her up bodily when she'd fallen off her horse, and he was generous with food. It was always Lucian who started off the singing when the men worked in the fields. “That's good, Dad.” She would have said, “Send love for me,” but Lucian would have been embarrassed.