Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (26 page)

Mum

BALM IN THE
WOUNDS

We whitewash the walls, clean the carpets, curtains, furniture. Mum hangs pictures, puts out her books and ornaments, and cuts wild plants which she dries on the veranda and then sets about the house in vases and jars where they quickly become places for spiders’ webs. Adamson is issued new uniforms and a pair of shoes. Mum instructs him not to smoke marijuana in the house. The vegetable garden is dug up and replanted with tomatoes, rape, pumpkins, green peppers, carrots, potatoes, green beans, strawberries, and onions. The flower garden is watered, and spread over with tobacco scraps, and the roses are pruned into spikes. The bougainvillea creeper, which had become massive and unruly and threatened to drop out of its tree and onto the house (bringing the tree with it), is trimmed and thinned. The honeysuckle on the garage wall is coaxed back into life where its sweet, orange flowers hang like clusters of tiny trumpets over the entrance.

The dairy, which had been surrounded by a deep moat of cow shit, is cleaned up and the skinny, overmilked cows fed and pampered until their coats are glossy and their milk thick, sweet, and prolific. We adopt and buy enough dogs to clutter the space at our heels, we are given a white kitten whom we name Percy, and the Germans (as promised) purchase for us two mares, one of whom is in foal.

The farm succumbs to the gentle discipline of careful farming. Exhausted pastures are fertilized and then allowed to lie fallow. The cattle are dipped, dehorned, counted, branded, and inoculated, and the barren cows culled from the herd. The tobacco barns are patched and made watertight, airtight, and windproof. The roads are graded and, in places, crushed bricks fill in holes and sandy patches, so that tractors and trailers are not stranded on far reaches of the farm. The silt is dug out of the dams and their shores are lined with sandbags. Gordon finds work elsewhere and the farm’s vehicles run again.

We’ve been riding all morning, out across the vlei, where Dad has organized the planting of rows of young, thin-necked, gray-blue-skinned gums. It’s been a hot, high morning, the sun pale and intense, sucking the color out of the sky. Mum has found that the trailer, which is holding the rows of wilting gum seedlings, has broken down. When we get back from our ride, she drives up to the workshop to organize a mechanic. I am sitting on the veranda in my jodhpurs, horse sweat stinging my hands, my eyes burning with the heat. Adamson shuffles through from the kitchen with a tray of tea for me. A thick joint hangs from his lower lip and drips ash and fragrant flakes of weed onto the tea. I light a cigarette. “Thanks, Adamson.”

I watch the horses saunter out into the paddock. They find sandy patches and throw up clouds of dust, rolling the morning of hot riding off their backs, legs paddling the air. There is a singing chorus of insects and birds; yellow-feathered weavers crash out from the bougainvillea where their nests hang like tiny, intricate baskets. The dogs lie belly flat on the veranda, pooling saliva under dripping tongues. I push Percy off my lap. “Too hot, Perks,” I tell him.

I finish my tea and contemplate a trip down to the yard, where Dad is in his office and where I can usually find work to justify my luxurious life and my daily ration of cigarettes and beer. As I get up, I see Mum in the pickup, barreling back up the driveway from the workshop. There is a thin, sandy, two-mile-long road between the house and the workshop, and the funnel of dust has kicked up as far as I can see. Even from here, shading my eyes against the sun, I can see the pickup juddering over the ribby wash of the road. The horses startle and bolt at her approach. The dogs leap off the veranda and run tail-high to meet her.

Mum skids to a halt in front of the garage. I run out to see what has happened. She emerges awkwardly, kicking at the dogs, who are leaping up to investigate her lively parcel. She is holding, at a cautious distance, something wrapped in a sack. “Quick, Bobo, get me a box,” she says.

We call him Jeeves. He’s a spotted eagle owl. The Zambians here are deeply superstitious about owls. They believe that if an owl lands on a roof and hoots, an inhabitant of the house on which the owl lands will die. Mum found Jeeves at the workshop, legs bound together with coarse rope; he was being spun, helicopterlike, over the head of a young man while a circle of the man’s friends stood and cheered each time the owl crashed to the ground, his wings spread out and limp.

By the time Mum ran, screaming with rage and horror, into the cluster of jeering spectators, the owl was dust-covered, bleeding, with one leg and one wing broken.

The gardener is ordered to build an enormous cage in the garden, under the shade of the tree. Jeeves is installed in his new home; it boasts the thick branches of dead trees for a perch, a soft green carpet of lawn, and a small brick kennel with a roof for rainy days.

Jeeves is furious. He glares at us from his perch, his massive yellow eyes sliding over us eerily. When anyone approaches his enclosure he hisses and clacks his beak at us. Once in a while he calls,
“Voo-wu-hoo,”
and the Zambians shudder and hunch their shoulders, as if against a stinging dust storm.

Mum tries to feed Jeeves chunks of meat. “Come on,” she tells him, “it’s my best bloody steak.” But Jeeves hisses and glowers and the meat sits untouched on his perch, turning from red to brown to gray until it is removed. The staff observe Mum, slant-eyed and peripheral, and sulk at the waste of food. Some children who have come with their mothers for the daily clinic at the back door cover their mouths with their shirts and jerk quick, furtive looks at the bad-luck bird. Their mothers pull them closer and smack them.

It has been three days, and still the owl won’t eat. Mum rakes through her books and sees that, in the wild, an owl of Jeeves’s order would eat insects, reptiles, mammals, and other birds. She shapes the steaks into small-mammal and lizard sizes and tries to make them act alive, piercing the meat on the end of a stick and having the morsel jerk and scamper around the enclosure before coming to a shaky rest near Jeeves’s feet. He blinks and turns his head completely away from Mum and her offering.

So we drive off the farm, across the railway line and out toward the main road, to Barry Shenton, who was one of the earliest game wardens in the country: a legendary guide and tracker turned soy and maize farmer. We wait while Marianne, his Swedish wife, pours tea (she offers lemon
or
milk and for a moment we are stunned, overwhelmed by the idea that anyone would drink anything but strong black tea topped with strong thick milk). Marianne has a walled garden, like something I imagine out of England. She is slender and vegetarian and drinks hot water and lemon instead of tea. She has traveled to India recently. We listen politely, riveted, as she tells us of her adventures there.

This is the African manner. We must follow the ritual. There is no direct way to come to a point of business. Whether we have come for a spare tractor tire or some advice on feeding an injured owl, we skirt the point at issue. There are no reliable telephones in Mkushi, so all business is done in this way, over tea or sometimes over whisky and beer. Social contact is limited, precious. We milk it, luxuriate in it. We bathe in the company, the strangeness of another home’s smells and habits. We admire the flowers Marianne has grown against her redbrick wall; we accept a second helping of the dry lemon-carrot cake. Mum talks about the difficulty of finding decent flour. We agree to swap butter for flour. Meat for rice.

At last we tell the story of Jeeves and the now urgent problem of getting the owl to eat. Barry smokes thoughtfully and says, smiling gently, “No, he won’t eat meat like that. It must be covered with hair.” He tells us that the owl needs the hair on its prey to help it digest the meat.

When we get home, Mum (who has wavy, thick, shoulder-length bottle-auburn hair) sits in front of the mirror in her bedroom and crops her hair short, right up to the neck. The staff are scandalized into silence when Mum emerges from her room with hacked-off locks in hand and wraps them around chunks of meat. “Does that look like a mouse to you?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Not really.”

“Do you think Jeeves will know the difference?”

I say, “Probably.”

Mum grits her teeth. “You’re not being very helpful, Bobo.”

“I can’t believe you chopped off your hair.”

“What else could I do?”

“Catch a rat,” I tell her.

“How?”

“Steal them from Percy.”

Mum rolls her eyes.

“There are a couple in my room that shouldn’t be too hard to corner.”

“Why don’t
you
try catching them?”

“It’s your owl,” I tell her.

We let ourselves into the enclosure. Jeeves puffs himself up, clacks his beak, and hisses. His broken wing hangs like a heavy over-the-shoulder cloak, draping past his feet. Mum had tried to bandage the wing to Jeeves’s body but Jeeves had attacked the bandage until Mum, fearing Jeeves would harm himself, had removed the bandage. Mum impales the auburn-hair-wrapped meat onto her sharpened stick and waves the stick at Jeeves. “Gourmet,” she tells him, “come on, boy.” Jeeves shudders. I laugh. Mum scowls at me.

“He shuddered,” I point out.

“He was only shaking down his feathers.”

“Hair-wrapped meat. Yuck.” I tell Jeeves, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t eat it either.”

Mum sends out a message to the laborers’ children. She will pay five ngwee for mice, ten ngwee for rats. The rodents spill onto the back porch, where they are counted by Adamson, who pays the grinning children. He puts the limp rat bodies (like old small gray socks) one on top of the other into the fridge, where they startle a visitor from town who wanders into the kitchen searching for a cold beer.

Jeeves eats the rodents. He becomes diurnal. He waits for Adamson now, who is the only member of staff who will agree to feed the bird. In the morning and in the evening Adamson comes hunched out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of mice and rats, like a great, gray owl himself, a long, newspaper-wrapped joint hanging from his bottom lip. He squints through the sweet, pungent smoke of his joint and talks softly to the owl, who eats from the tray. Adamson waits for Jeeves to finish and then he shuffles back into the kitchen.

He is a man who has seen too much pain of his own to ignore the pain of a fellow creature. His third-to-youngest daughter was born with severe disabilities, and lives crawling in the dirt, head-jerking and prone to frequent infection; she is a constant source of worry to her father. And now his eldest daughter has been stabbed by the cattle man (whose name is Doesn’t Matter Dagga) and she is dead. She survived two days and two nights with a spear through her middle (we were away in town at a tobacco sale at the time of the stabbing) and she died when someone finally summoned up the courage to pull the spear from her middle. Adamson told Mum that the girl’s intestines came out with the spear and that she died screaming.

There is no more bad luck an owl can bring this man.

I tell Mum she has to do something about her hair.

“What about my hair?”

“It looks as if you’ve been run over by a lawn mower,” I say.

So the next time we are in town Mum, uncharacteristically, spends time and money on herself. There are some Zambian hairdressers in Ndola who Marianne tells us can cut
mazungu
hair.

Dad, Vanessa, and I find a piece of shade under which to eat our jam sandwiches and boiled eggs and to swallow our thermos of coffee (bitter with too much boiling and made palatable only by powdered milk and spoons of sugar). We smoke and Dad reads the paper. We keep half an eye on the hairdresser’ s.

When Mum emerges, we are momentarily startled into silence.

“Well?” she says, blinking into the hot midday sun. She has brought with her the flowery, powerful chemical smells of the hairdresser. The scent of the lotions used to straighten kinky hair, to perm and color
mazungu
hair, to cleanse and condition any hair, have wafted onto her clothes and skin and she is conspicuous against the hot, salty, dust-smelling African town.

Her hair is cut very short, elfin, up above her ears and spiky short on top. Its color is deep auburn, the layers of hair that have been hiding from years of sun and wind. Her eyes are pale and startling; they appear bigger and more piercing than I remembered them an hour ago. Her cheekbones are sculptured, down into a full mouth (freshly painted). Mum has always been small-boned, athletic, hard and muscled from years of riding and walking and lean farm living, but the short hair shows off her spare frame.

Dad slowly puts down his paper and clears his throat.

“What do you think?” says Mum.

“Very respectable,” says Dad.

“You look great,” says Vanessa.

I nod. “Smashing.”

Mum smiles broadly, shyly.

“Who’s ready for a beer?” says Dad.

By the time we are ready to leave town for the farm, in order to get back before dark, we are all gently, heat-of-the-afternoon drunk. Mum’s hair stands up well under the pressure.