Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (12 page)

Mum says, “Stop whinging.”

“I’m not whinging. I was just
saying.
”

“Start looking for mombies.”

The cattle that have stayed up this high are wild. As quickly as we cover their fresh tracks, they move on, staying ahead of us, out of sight and almost beyond earshot. Mum says, “I’m going to go around. You stay here, and catch them if they come down.” She pushes Caesar forward into the thick bush with the dogs scrambling behind her, and soon disappears from sight. For a while I can hear her and the dogs as they make their way through the bush, and then there is silence. I hold my breath and listen. I am surrounded by the high, whining noise of insects—their frantic spring singing in dry grass—and by the occasional shriek of an invisible bird. Burma Boy puts his head down and starts to pull at the thin, bitter dry grass. It is very hot and still and I am enveloped in the salty steam sent up by Burma Boy as he sweats; my fingers sting against the leather reins and my eyes burn. Sweat drips down from my hatband and flies swarm onto our stillness to take advantage of the moisture, crawling over my eyes and lips until I swat them away. I am very thirsty now.

“Mu-um.” My voice sounds high and thin in the heat.

I wait. There is no answer. I hold my breath and then call again, louder, “Mu-uum!” Still no answer. I look around, suddenly imagining that terrorists might crawl up on me at any moment and take me by surprise. I wonder where Mum has gone; she has the gun with her. I wonder if she will hear me if I am attacked by terrorists. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. What will Burma Boy do if we are suddenly surrounded by terrorists? Bolt, no doubt. And I will be scraped off on a tree and lie winded and wounded on the ground waiting for Mum to come and rescue me. I wonder how she would find me again in this thick bush. I’d be dead by then. Shot. Eyelids chopped off and fried, no ears, no lips. Dead. Burma Boy would be home. They would have a funeral for me, like the funeral we had for Olivia. They would say how brave I was. I start to cry. I would be buried, next to my fried eyelids, lips, and ears, in a little coffin. There would be a hump of fresh earth, crawling with earthworms, piled over me in the little settlers’ cemetery. Tears stream down my face. The
Umtali Post
will write a moving article about my death.

“Mum!” I shout, genuinely frightened.

Burma Boy throws up his head at my alarm.

“It’s okay,” I say shakily, crying and running my hand down his wet neck. “It’s okay.”

I start to imagine that perhaps Mum, Caesar, and the dogs have been caught by terrorists themselves. Maybe Mum is lying in a bloody puddle, eyelidless and lipless, with the dogs licking helplessly, lovingly at her lifeless hands. I will be brave at Mum’s funeral. The
Umtali Post
will write an article about me, lost and alone in the bush, while my mother lay dead surrounded by her faithful dogs and loyal horse. I turn Burma Boy around. “Do you know the way home?” I ask, letting him have his head. But he, after looking around for a few moments, placidly puts his head down and starts to eat again.

It feels like a long time during which I alternated between quiet, dry panic and noisy, copious weeping before I hear Mum and the dogs coming through the bush. Mum is singing, like the herdsmen taking the cows to the dip, “Here dip-dip-dip-dip dip! Dip, dip-dip-dip-dip dip!” And in front of her there are a dozen multicolored cows, running with heads held high, wild and frightened, their eyes white-rimmed, their long, unruly horns slashing at the bush. Burma Boy throws up his head, startled, and shies. I pull up the reins. Mum says, “Get behind me.”

I start to cry with relief at seeing her. “I thought you were lost.”

“Out the way,” she shouts, “out the way! Get behind!”

I pull Burma Boy around.

“Come on,” says Mum, riding past me, “let’s herd this lot down.”

I say, “You were so long.”

“Catch the cows as they come through.”

But the cows are not used to being herded and are unwilling and frightened participants. They break loose frequently and Mum has to circle back to bring the herd into order. She has identified the leader, a tall-hipped ox with a very old, almost worn-through leather strap around his neck that once must have held a bell. All the cows are dripping with ticks: their ears are crusted with small red ticks and their bodies are bumped with the raised gray engorged adults, which look ready to drop off. Mum says, “If we can keep the leader going, the rest might follow.” But it still takes us more than an hour to move the cows less than half a mile. I start to cry again.

“What’s the matter now?” says Mum irritably.

“I’m thirsty,” I cry, “I’m tired.”

“Well, you go on home, then,” says Mum. “I’m bringing these cows down.”

“But I don’t know the way.”

“Fergodsake,”
says Mum between her teeth.

I start to cry even harder.

She says, “Give Burma Boy his head, he’ll take you home.”

But Burma Boy, given his head, is content to follow Caesar and graze happily at this leisurely pace. “Look, he won’t go home.”

“Then
ride
him.”

I kick feebly. “I’m thirsty,” I whine.

Mum is unrelenting. “So let’s get these cows home. The sooner we get these cows home the sooner you’ll have something to drink.”

We ride on for two more hours. I slouch over in my saddle, letting myself rock lazily with Burma Boy’s tread. I make no attempt to herd the cows.

Mum scowls at me with irritation: “
Ride
your bloody horse.”

I flap my legs and pull weakly at the reins. “He won’t listen.”

“Don’t be so bloody feeble.”

Fresh tears spring into my eyes. “I’m not being feeble.”

Mum says, “If you would help, we’d get home a lot sooner.”

We ride on in hostile silence for another half hour or so. Then I say, “I think I have buffalo bean.” I start to scratch fretfully. I am so thirsty that my tongue feels dry and cracking. “I’m going to faint, I’m so thirsty.”

Mum circles back to catch a stray cow.

“Mu-uuum.”

She isn’t going to listen. It is no good. It is clear that I am not going to get home until the cows are safely fenced up in the home paddocks. I pull Burma Boy’s head up and circle him back to the lagging cows, straggling at the rear of the herd. “Dip, dip-dip-dip-dip dip,” I sing, my voice dry on the hot air. “Dip, dip-dip-dip-dip-dip-dip.”

One of the cows tries to run out of the herd and break for the bush. I dig my heels into Burma Boy’s sides and spin him around, catching the cow before she can escape.

“That’s it,” says Mum. “That’s better. Keep it up.”

It takes until late afternoon to get the cows down to the home paddocks, by which time the cows’ flanks are wet with sweat, their horn-heavy heads are low and swinging; they are tripping forward without thought of a fight. I have stopped sniveling, but am hunched over the front of my saddle trying not to think about how thirsty I am.

“There,” says Mum, wiping the sweat off her top lip as she shuts the gate behind the wild cows, “that’s not a bad day’s work.”

I shrug miserably.

“Don’t you think?”

“I s’pose.”

Mum swings up on Caesar again and pats him on the rump. “You know, we’re descended from cattle rustlers, you and me,” she tells me, her eyes shining. “In Scotland, our family were cattle rustlers.”

I think,
At least Scotland is cool. At least there are streams of fresh water to drink from. At least Scottish cows don’t lead you into buffalo bean.

The next day Mum sends the cattle boys into the nearby villages. She says, “Tell the villagers I have their cows. If they want their cows back, they can come and get them.” She pauses. “But they’ll have to pay me for grazing,” she says slowly. “Understand? Lots and lots of money for grazing and for taking care of their cows. Hey?
Mazvinzwa?
” Do you understand?

“Eh-eh, madam.”

No one comes to collect their cows. Mum dips the cows, deworms them, brands them with our brand, feeds them up on the Rhodes grass until their skins are shiny and they are so fat it seems as if they might burst, and then sends them on the red lorry into Umtali, to the Cold Storage Corporation, to be sold as ration meat. With the proceeds, she buys an airplane ticket for Vanessa to visit Granny and Grandbra in England and she pays for the rest of us to drive down to South Africa on a camping holiday where we are flooded out of our tent on the second night on the West Coast and subsequently spend a damp, drunken fortnight in a gray fishing village trying to avoid hostile Afrikaners and waiting for the sun to come out.

That is the year I turn ten. The year before the war ends.

Violet

VIOLET

Pru Hilderbrand is like a mum out of a book. When we go to her house we get homemade lemonade and slices of homemade whole-wheat bread with slabs of homemade butter on it. Her three little boys do not have itchy bums and worms and bites up their arms from fleas. Pru doesn’t like to drink beer or wine and she hates the Club. Her children have finger painting and Lego and the house smells of disinfectant and clean sheets. There are always fresh-cut flowers from her soft-green, rocky garden in the summer and dried flowers cut from the highlands in the winter. Next to the fireplace, there are clay pots with newspapers and magazines and big, cushioned chairs, and there are soft, secret places in that house for a child to feel comfortable and safe. There are quilts on the beds and tea is a proper meal on the veranda with a bowl of brown sugar and the salt is in a little pottery pot in the middle of the table and it is in little granules, not grains, and you sprinkle it on your food with a tiny wooden spoon. Pru plays cricket with us on the lawn.

So, we have spent all afternoon at the Hilderbrands, who have a squash court and a pool which is in the belly of some rocks and held in by a small concrete wall which is invisible because the pool is fed by a small spring and the water is allowed to slosh over the concrete wall like a waterfall. After we’ve been swimming, Pru makes us dry ourselves (she has fresh-smelling crisp towels in the changing rooms, which rub our skin raw) and she lets us play on the lawn until it is almost time for the sun to set and then she says to the mums and dads that we should leave now because of the curfew.

We have the farthest to drive, all the way to the other side of the valley, so no matter how fast we drive we’ll break curfew, we’ll be home after dark.

We shudder up the washboards on the ribby Mazonwe road in the dull light of a thick African sunset and then, as we turn up the Robandi farm road, it is dark. African night comes like that, long rich sunsets and then, abruptly, night. The cooler night air is releasing the scents trapped by a hot day; the sweet, warm waft of the potato bush; the sharp citronella smell of khaki weed; raw cow manure; dry-dust cow manure. We bump over the culvert at the bottom of our road (in which the big snake lives) and head up toward the house, which is a pale, unlit mass in the evening light.

Dad stops at the security gate, which is locked; he gets out with the FN slung over his shoulder and stops, listening, for a moment before making his way to the gate. Today he hesitates longer than usual.

“Everything okay?” says Mum.

“Just thought I heard something.”

“Did you?”

Dad doesn’t answer.

The cook has instructions to lock the gate when he has fed the dogs, before he knocks off for the night. Mum slides over into Dad’s seat, she has the car in reverse, ready to fly backward down the driveway and leave Dad to his own devices if we find ourselves under attack. It takes Dad a long time to get behind his own shadow from the headlamps of the car and unlock the padlock. He opens the gate and Mum drives quickly into the yard. Dad follows us on foot to the house.

Mum says, “I’ll see what July left out for us for supper.”

Dad still has a sweaty shirt on from his game of squash. He says, “I’ll change my shirt before we eat.”

But when he goes to the cupboard, he has no shirts.

And when Mum goes into the kitchen there is no supper. And the pots and pans and plates and knives have been pulled onto the floor and there is the chaos of a recent scuffle among the debris.

Now we all have candles and we run around the house shouting to one another the growing list of things that are missing.

“All my clothes!” shouts Vanessa.

“And mine.”

“Oh shit, Tim, they’ve taken everything.”

We hold candles up to all our cupboards. They are all bare. Our clothes, food, bedding.

“My rings!” shouts Mum. And there is real panic in her voice. “Tim, my rings!”

At the beginning of every planting season Mum has to give her rings to the tobacco man who lets us have money to grow another crop and he gives Mum back the rings at the end of the season when we have sold the tobacco. Now we have no rings and we will not be able to plant tobacco at the beginning of the rains.

Then Dad says, “Wait.” He says that he heard something when he was unlocking the gate. “Remember?”

“What kind of sound?”

A moaning sound, he says. “I’m going to see what it was.”

Mum says, “Get backup. Don’t go in on your own.”

But Dad has already hurried outside.

Mum says to Vanessa and me, “Take a candle and go to your room.”

We go to our room and Vanessa says, “I know, let’s play cards.”

We play twos ‘n’ eights.

Dad is outside and we can hear him shouting, “Nicola!”

Mum runs outside and the dogs scrabble down the length of the shiny-slick cement floor after her. We abandon our game of cards and follow the dogs.

Dad has Violet, our maid, in his arms. To begin with it looks as if she is not wearing any clothes but then Mum holds up the paraffin lamp and we see that Violet is wearing a dress that is stuck perfectly to her body and that she is viscous and shiny with blood, as if someone has poured oil on her, or wrapped her tightly in black plastic.

“Is she breathing?”

“I don’t know.”

Her blood looks so gleaming, it doesn’t seem possible she can be dead. Her blood is running and alive and keeps replenishing itself over the sleek lustrous skin of her dress, like a new snake’s skin.

Mum says, “Here,” and opens the back of the Land Rover. Dad slides Violet’s body into the back; it makes a noise like a wet sponge. Mum has rolled out a gray army-issue blanket and slid it under Violet. The blanket is soon black with blood.

Mum says, “Go inside, you kids.”

Vanessa says, “Come on, Bobo.”

Dad says, “I’m going to catch the bastards that did this.”

“Call for backup.”

“Come on, Bobo,” says Vanessa again.

Dad goes inside to get more ammunition and Vanessa goes inside so that she won’t have to watch. But I want to see what Mum is doing. I want to see everything.

I say, “Mum, can I do anything?” but she does not answer.

I have a special Red Cross certificate from school. I can stabilize a broken limb or a broken neck and bandage a sprain. I can dress a bullet wound. I can make hospital corners on a bed. I know how to find a vein and administer a drip, but I am only allowed to do this if All the Grown-ups Are Dead. I can do mouth-to-mouth and CPR, and I have practiced on the kids at school who are also signed up for the Red Cross class.

Red Cross first-aid classes are held in the old music room at the end of the kindergarten block. I practice giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It is the closest I have ever come to someone’s mouth, having it open like that, breathing into the soft, red, ripe cave of someone else’s body. I practice on a small girl called Anne Brown. My tackie lips feel as if they might suffocate her, hovering above hers.

“Close her nose, tilt her chin.”

I feel the way her nostrils stick with mucus as I squeeze them closed. The skin on her nose feels sweaty, greasy, and bobbly.

It’s very hot in the small classroom where we have pushed the desks aside to make room for a hospital bed and bandages, bodies, stretchers. I lean over Anne. Small beads of sweat have sprung up on her top lip, like a mustache.

“Have you checked her mouth for vomit?” asks the nurse teacher.

Anne opens her mouth obligingly. I scrape my finger around her mouth.

“Don’t forget, you’re supposed to be unconscious, Anne. Don’t help Bobo.”

Anne sinks her teeth unhelpfully onto my finger.

When I have resuscitated her, she looks flushed and breathless, closer to death than when I started. My finger is purple with perfect Anne Brown–shaped teeth marks.

Mum has scissors from her first-aid kit that she keeps in the back of the Land Rover. She is cutting the dress off Violet. In the bright, white hissing-blue light of the paraffin lamp we can see that Violet has been sliced, like rashers of bacon, all the way up her thighs, across her belly, her arms, her face.

Mum slaps the inside of Violet’s arm, looking for a vein. She says over and over again, under her breath, “Hold on, Violet. Hold on.” She has forgotten, or has stopped caring, that I am watching. Dad has come outside again. He has his FN rifle strapped across his back and he says, “I’m going down to the compound.” He gets on his motorbike.

Mum looks up from Violet’s body and pushes hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, which means a smudge of blood up her nose and above her eyebrow. She says, “I wish you’d wait for backup.”

But Dad kicks his motorbike alive, and I watch the red taillight wind down the hill and around the corner, humping as it goes over the big culvert at the corner, and then the sound of the two-stroke engine is absorbed by the night.

“Hold on,” says Mum to Violet, into the silence left by the disappearing roar of Dad’s motorbike. She says, “Don’t die. Hold on.” The lamp hisses and there are the usual singsong, rasping calls of frogs from the pool. The dogs scratch and whine as they stretch and recurl themselves into comfortable positions and there is the rhythmic, slip-slap, of some of the dogs licking their balls. Usually Mum says, “Hey, stop that!” when she hears them licking their balls, but not now.

Dad comes back from the compound. Mum has emptied one drip into Violet’s arm. While the drip has been emptying into the nearly flat vein, Mum has scrambled to the front of the Land Rover and turned on the mobile radio. She has called for backup. She says, “HQ, HQ. This is Oscar Papa 28, do you read?”

There is a small, crackling pause. Then, “Oscar Papa 28, this is HQ. Reading you strength five. Go ahead. Over.”

“We need mobile medics. We have one African female in critical condition. Over.”

“Have you been under terrorist attack? Over.”

“Negative. It appears to be . . . domestic in nature. Over.”

There is a hissing pause of disappointment, and then the voice comes back at us. “Sending mobile medic team to Oscar Papa 28. Over.”

“Thank you. Over and out.”

Dad comes back. He says, “It was July.”

Mum straightens up and stares at Dad. “What?”

“The boys haven’t seen him since this morning. He’s not in his hut.”

“Fucking kaffir,” says Mum.

“The boys are coming with me. I’m going to catch him.”

“The boys” are Dad’s most loyal laborers. Duncan is the boss-boy. He has a handsome open face, with a long nose and wide-set eyes. Cephas is a small squat man whose father, Chibodo, is our witch doctor. Chibodo has very long nails and is very, very old. He smells as old as an ancient tree, like burnt bark. He doesn’t talk very much, but when he opens his mouth he has only a few teeth (black and brown pegs) and his tongue looks very pink, thin and alive and wet. He sits at night in the watchman’s hut, right up against the hills, and watches the maize, scaring off the baboons that come to steal corncobs. He has an old plow disk hanging from a tree which he beats with a simbe, like the old woman in the TTL who warns terrorists when a convoy is coming. Cephas has learned secrets from his father: he can track animals that have passed by days before. He can smell where terrorists have been, see from the shift in the landscape where they are camping. He can put his mind inside the mind of any other living thing and tell you where it has gone. He can touch the earth and know if an animal has passed that way. But he can’t tell you why. Philemon, the cattle boy, can read tracks, but he can’t read tracks as well as Cephas. Philemon is the one who can quiet a cow in labor and sing the calf into life when it is born too sick to stand. Cloud is the man from the workshop who whittles wood with a lathe into salt and pepper pots, spice racks, eggcups. He smells of the shiny paint he sprays onto the wood and his eyes are always burning red from the ganja he smokes.

“I’m going into the hills. He’ll be trying to get to Mozambique.”

“He’s armed,” says Mum. July has stolen knives. “And he’s not alone. He couldn’t carry all that stuff on his own. You’ll need backup.”

Dad says, “I’ll be okay.”

“At least call.”

Dad radios for backup but no one will come with him. This is not a military emergency, it’s only a robbery. We have not been attacked by terrorists. Dad’s friends tell him not to go into the hills. There are terrorists in those hills, and the hills themselves are unsafe: they are edged by minefields.

Dad settles on his haunches and smokes. Violet moans.

The men—Dad’s “boys”—arrive on foot. I see them running steadily up the hill to the house; they have lit the branches of a tree for light. They have a conference with Dad and decide to wait until just before first light before leaving for the hills. They don’t want to run into a terrorist camp by mistake. Dad gives the men a packet of cigarettes each. They are talking in low, intense voices to one another in Shona; their words are like water over rocks, bubbling, soft, incessant. Dad packs food and water, a shovel, a hatchet, matches, and a gun. They will drive as far as they can into the hills and then walk toward Mozambique from there.