Also, there wasn’t much Mum could do about the frogs, skinks, geckos, centipedes, and insects that had managed to sneak in through the wide-open veranda, and the bits below the tin roof where the shade cloth had run out. “They don’t do any harm,” Mum said. “But we always shake out our towels and shoes. Just a precaution, nothing to worry about.”
She showed Sarah the table where she’d left the sorts of books any young person might enjoy—volumes of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, The Burgess Bird Book for Children by Thornton W. Burgess, and an old copy of H. E. Marshall’s 1905 Our Island Story. Everything was smothered in Blue Death.
“I know you’d never lick your fingers to turn the pages,” Mum said, but she’d glanced at me as if not trusting my parenting skills to have extended as far as they should. “People who do, and who borrow my books, have reported feeling sick.” Mum paused to let this sink in for a moment. “From the Blue Death,” she clarified. “Apparently it makes their throats close up.” Mum paused again. “Whoever borrowed my copy of My Life Was a Ranch must not be a finger licker,” she said, giving me a knowing look. “Or I’d have been blamed for their near death by now.”
To this day, I know I remain one of two chief suspects in the filching of this esteemed memoir; the other being an ex-neighbor from thirty years ago who is now about eighty, maybe older, and who can’t remember my mother, let alone borrowing a book from her. I think Vanessa has the book, though, stashed away with all her Beatrix Potters. “It’s not Vanessa,” Mum said if I ever brought up this line of defense. “She doesn’t read anything except Hello! and South Africa Fairlady.”
At supper that night my parents sat in rapt awe and admiration as they asked Sarah to describe in detail the premise of the thesis she was working on. They had to be told the title more than once: “The Role of Women in Revolution in Mexico and Cuba.” “Oh, I love that idea!” Mum cooed. “No one thinks of women in combat, but they can be very useful.” Mum blinked at me in meaningful reproach. “Very protective, and very accurate. May I read what you’ve written?”
By breakfast the next morning, Mum had read the entire thing twice. “Oh, it’s very good,” she said to Sarah. Sarah was battling her way through a plate of food—eggs, bacon, toast, bananas, papaya, lemons—larger than her head; my father had declared a terror she’d float away otherwise. “It’s quite brilliant, really. You’re a very good writer.” Mum glanced at me. “Very good. Not everyone has your natural talent. You could write for a career if you wanted. Maybe you should?”
On the strength of this startlingly good review of her work, Dad had taken Sarah to the pub to join him for his elevenses after breakfast. He insisted she drive the new Ford down to the bottom of the farm, as a treat. “Go as fast as you like,” he exhorted. When it became obvious she wasn’t accustomed to a stick shift, Dad offered to change gears for her. All Sarah had to do was press the clutch and yell “Gear!”
At the pub, Dad made it clear that he assumed Sarah had come to Zambia with the primary goal of remaining in a mild alcoholic fog the entire time. “My usual, please, Shupi, and let me introduce you to my granddaughter. It’s your job to make sure the picanin madam doesn’t die of thirst under our watch.”
A round of drinks was ordered and poured. Boss Shupi turned up the music. Harry bossed around the resident Jack Russell terriers, but he was in too good a mood to battle them off the guests’ chairs, the way he usually did. Instead, he stood at the edge of the pub and greeted the hippos.
“Your very good health!” Dad toasted.
Everyone raised glasses. Someone asked what Sarah did in America.
“I’m a student,” Sarah said.
“She’s a suffragette,” Dad said.
“I’m studying political science,” Sarah explained.
“The lesbian parade,” Dad clarified. “We’re very, very proud.”
Sarah blinked at Dad.
“Right!” Dad said, seeing the conversation was in danger of stalling out. “Let’s have a party!” I’d predicted this moment, at least. I’d warned Sarah never to try keeping up with my parents when it came to partying; dancing on bars, coercing would-be nondrinkers, breaking curfews, even military ones, these had been my parents’ specialties their entire lives. “Drink up!” Dad told Sarah. “That’ll put hairs on your chest.”
* * *
—
WE WERE THERE THREE WEEKS; in retrospect, I’d have stayed longer. I’d have stayed until Dad died and until Mum was over the shock. In my ideal world, I’d have stayed on even then; I’d never have left the farm. In my ideal world, my three children would leave America and live with us, Vanessa’s children too; I wouldn’t have to choose between the generations and neither would my parents.
In my ideal world, my children’s American father could visit, a tent or guest cottage of his own at the bottom of the garden; he’d always preferred a spot of his own where he could dream. In my ideal world, we’d never have divorced; it wasn’t out of the question here, the farm threw people together. It had been my parents’ secret to a long marriage, or part of it; they always had something larger than themselves to focus on, there was always chaos to keep at bay, they didn’t bore each other, or bore through each other.
In my ideal world, the farm would pass down from one bunch of people to the next, from Mr. Chrissford and Mrs. Tembo and Comrade Connie to their children, and their children’s children; all of us meeting under the Tree of Forgetfulness next to the outdoor kitchen for meals, and always, a new generation of dogs under the table, waiting for morsels.
And if that’s what we’d wanted, Dad had given us all a place to call home as long as you didn’t need too much comfort, as long as you were happy with cold water, no walls, and the constant busy intrusion of life, tumbling, insistent, demanding life. In the end, he’d done that for Mum and for anyone who’d tolerate his brand of existence: gritty and hilarious, spontaneous and hard won, chaotic and routine.
“Someone will have to deal with the pensions office when I’m gone,” Dad had said. His strategy had been to hide when they came around, or he sent Harry out to greet them, with Mum. “Too bad they show up in posh four-wheel-drive SUVs,” Mum said. “Instead of bicycles. It would be tactful if they did show up on bicycles. It would prove they weren’t siphoning off the funds, and it would give Harry an incentive to go after them, wouldn’t it, Harry?”
Dad, having learned to his personal cost what happened to money once the Zambian government had managed to garner it, couldn’t be moved to comply with the pension scheme. “But it’s a nationwide scheme, Mr. Fuller,” the pension people from Lusaka had pointed out.
“Comrade Fuller to you,” Dad had replied coldly. “And when I see a single kwacha of these funds going toward the working povo in the rural areas, and not toward the fat cats in the city, I will happily contribute the hard-won funds of my fellow comrades to your scheme, but not until then.”
Dad had tailor-made the place for Mum, it was easy to see now: There was the pub at the bottom of the farm, and an ongoing battle with the pensions officers, it gave a person reason to drink. There was a wild tangle of garden, in which dogs could roam, snakes and lizards could sunbathe, wild monkeys could clatter and shriek. And there was a brand-new Ford pickup. “They keep going for years,” Dad assured Sarah. “Not like computers. Have you heard of built-in obesity? Is that what it’s called? It’s an idea invented by the Chinese and perfected by that computer bloke who wants to castrate us all. Shupi can tell you all about it.”
There were three meals a day; tea all day, baths before dinner, two walks with the dogs. There was weeding in the bananas, harvesting; the fish were fed morning and afternoon. The farm’s schoolchildren left the compound for their lessons at dawn, their chattering like so many birds. We missed them until late afternoon, when they returned from school to shoot pigeons at Mum’s ponds with homemade catapults; that always gave everyone their aftern
oon exercise, Mum chasing after the schoolchildren, the schoolchildren taunting the dogs, the dogs having an uproarious time. Life churned on and on and took us all with it.
“Routine,” Dad said. “It’s nature’s antidote to disappointment.” After dinner, accordingly, he insisted Sarah go to the fishponds, crocodile shooting. “Every evening before bed,” Dad said. “It settles the digestion to take a potshot at your enemies.” So Sarah held the flashlight and tried to direct it toward anything that looked like two red eyes gleaming back from the water.
“Don’t worry,” Dad reassured Sarah. “I hardly ever manage to hit anything, you’re quite safe.” The shotgun was Turkish, a terrible weapon with a kick like a mule, and the sights didn’t line up with Dad’s one working eye. Also, crocodiles are very smart. “We didn’t need the Frog Croc Bird to tell us that,” Dad said. “They have a very good brain, they can easily outthink a white man any day.”
Mum’s dogs hopped and barreled ahead of us, flinging themselves into the fishponds. “Just to give the crocodiles fair warning,” Dad explained. Then there was a whole performance while the dogs were persuaded to get out of the line of fire. Sarah shone the light on the pond; it wasn’t easy to stop the Jack Russell terriers from going after the beam. Then seemingly randomly Dad fired off a couple of shots in quick succession.
“Oh, missed again,” Dad said. “Never mind. Better luck next time.” Then he held the cracked shotgun over his forearm, staring up at the moon for a moment, a silver sliver tonight, waxing crescent. Shooting stars rained down through a sky so black it looked like a time before time. “Right, Harry. What do you say? Should we call it a night?” So we’d all called it a night; we’d taken a crack at the enemy of the fish farmer, and we all felt better for it, our digestion settled, our routine honored.
* * *
—
I LOVED THOSE NIGHTS in the guest cottage, Sarah in the room next to mine. Dogs sprinting between our beds, looking for the best deal, the most room under a mosquito net. Insects buzzed and battered against the security lights. They rained down onto the concrete floor, their little bodies clattering.
The tin roof heaved and sawed in the wind. Frogs chorused in the wetland between the house and the bananas. Short, scuffling disagreements broke out among the vervet monkeys roosting in the Tree of Forgetfulness. The Jack Russell terriers Mum had thrown into bed with me burrowed under the sheet. “Have a couple of dogs, Bobo,” Mum had always said when she was tucking me into bed. She didn’t trust everything to Blue Death. “Sleep tight.”
Perhaps this was the childhood my parents had been aiming for, when they’d envisioned raising children in southern and central Africa. They’d so nearly got it perfectly right. We’d had this happy chaos, a lot of it; we had a world of endless pets. Our beds were smothered like William Morris wallpaper, a friendly face poking out from behind the fronds of our mosquito nets.
There had been wide-open spaces; we’d had music when the generator was on. We’d had a library stuffed with books that Mum had harvested from fleeing white families over the years; raked out of secondhand bookstores. As a matter of routine, we’d been encouraged to read the sorts of books that are supposed to enrich, entertain, and evolve us. Our Island Story was such a classic; David Cameron had cited it as one of his favorites.
Mum’s shoulders slumped when I’d told her this news. “But he’s so boring,” she complained; David Cameron was not Mum’s idea of properly conservative. He was nouveau right wing; a laddish, overgrown schoolboy, she thought. She hadn’t even named a dog after him. She’d had a Maggie, a Winston, and a Boris. She’d even had an Aung San Suu Kyi—“House arrest did wonders for her complexion,” Mum had observed at the time—but never a David Cameron.
I’d had that mother growing up; articulate, impossible, strong, and sometimes so wrong she was right, but not always. Sometimes she was just wrong, but it didn’t devastate her, or not for long. She’d marched on anyway, and in the meantime she’d shored us up, comforted us with dogs, inspired us with art, stunned us with her own life’s brilliant performance. She was an act to follow, a flame to read by, she was a fighter.
“Mum will be okay,” Dad told me one night on that visit; a mellow moment before dinner, Mrs. Tembo teaching Sarah how to make rice in the kitchen, Mum in the bath catching up on world news. “She likes a bit of a challenge; she loves a proper dustup. I’m a natural coward. I’d far prefer to hide under the bed, but your mother . . .” Astonishingly, Dad’s eyes had suddenly welled. “She’s stronger than anyone I know. Remember that, Bobo. Your mother is a survivor. She makes it look easy.” He shook his head in wonder. “She makes it look like a piece of cake.”
A solid sense of dread hit the top of my stomach. I knew then I wouldn’t be back here. Or some part of me knew Dad was telling me what I needed to know for the road ahead, because he wouldn’t be here much longer. He must have known he’d soon be a shadow along that road, and then some few months and a day later, not even that.
“The routine will carry Mum along, Bobo,” Dad said. “And once she gets her sea legs under her, you just watch her sail! The farm will turn record profits when I finally pop my clogs. You mark my words.”
CHAPTER FOUR
A Widow’s Farm
Mum never tires of telling anyone who’ll listen, and some who won’t, and still others who don’t care, that she’s the majority shareholder on the farm. “Not everyone realizes, I’m the majority shareholder on the farm,” she explains. She doesn’t exactly throw her weight around, that would be unseemly and exhausting, but after so many years of unrecognized toil, she’s making sure to get a bit of the spotlight for once.
“Dad had the idea for the farm,” she says, giving credit where credit is due. “He had the flash of inspiration, and the energy to stagger down here week after week to negotiate with the headman, but I had the bucks for it.” Mum thinks “bucks” sounds filthy rich, like an American. She uses the word when she’s being deliberately vulgar, which it always is to talk about money except surprise money, insignificant-seeming money, incidental money, you could mention that, sort of.
“Egg money,” Mum used to call it when there was a little spare cash; that was when she had lived on farms with more chickens and fewer snakes. Or “Cheapie-sale money,” Mum said of the days when you could still competitively sell your shabby worn-out clothing to people even less well-off than you. That had been during the era of Kenneth Kaunda’s so-called Zambian humanism; everyone had been cash-strapped back then.
“At least everyone was poor together,” I’d argued. I should have known better. I’d costarred in my high school’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm; I’d played Snowball to Amelia Davidson’s Napoleon. Mum, who’d come to nearly all my school performances—“Bobo needs a dramatic outlet; she has an overactive imagination”—had boycotted this one on the grounds she was a current victim of Marxist-Leninist politics, and didn’t need to have her nose rubbed in it by the kids at my posh private boarding school in Harare.
“No, I’m not nostalgic for socialism, Bobo,” Mum had said. “It was a heck of a strain for those of us making it easier for the rest of you. Dad can live off baked beans, tobacco, and tea for months and claim to enjoy the weight loss. But someone still has to wrestle open the baked beans and serve them by Chinese-made paraffin candlelight. Someone had to come up with the fees for your posh private boarding schools. No, the novelty of poverty wore off for me a long, long time ago.”
She knew all the lyrics, or at least the chorus, to quite a few songs about money. Above all, she loved Tevye the Dairyman’s famously rousing reverie, “If I Were a Rich Man,” from Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock’s 1964 Fiddler on the Roof; she’d seen the musical performed at Reps Theatre in Harare. She’d bought the video starring Chaim Topol as Tevye, and watched it until the wasps’ nest in the VCR had put an end to that.
“The problem with your father and money,”
Mum had said, “one of them, is that he’s prone to get overexcited whenever he has any. He lays it on with a trowel for everyone: champagne, escargot, cigars, then we’re back to starvation rations and panic over your school fees. Not that I minded the sacrifice.” She gave me a quick, sour look. “It was worth every bead of sweat and blood.” It’s true Mum had strained every sinew—she’d literally scalded her hands in vaults of fermenting eggplants; she’d rustled cattle—to get the money together to send us to the best schools possible. Anyway, it wasn’t the cost of our education that bothered Mum so much as what Vanessa and I had done with it; my Awful Books, Vanessa’s artistic rendition of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. We’d been given the best start possible, and behaved ungratefully in return.
Vanessa and I had been educated with politicians’ kids; the Zimbabwean minister of transport’s exceedingly young wife was in the form ahead of me; royalty went to our schools; so did the children of wealthy white farmers. “Bobo’s been affecting a posh accent ever since Form One,” Mum explained.
At the beginning and end of term, and during the half-term break, the politicians’ chauffeurs arrived in Mercedes-Benzes with tinted windows. The rich white farmers were in Mercedes-Benzes without tinted windows. Everyone acted like they owned the place. Mum and Dad always arrived memorably and late; belching diesel fumes in the 1967 Land Rover with the back door swinging open and dogs plopping out onto the school driveway, seething around the parking lot.
“Well, at least we’re not like everyone else,” Mum said approvingly, looking around at the fleet of Mercedes-Benzes; black and white were the two most popular colors. Our dogs leapt up on people’s gleaming paintwork. “Oh, dear, is that a run in my stocking?” Mum would become preoccupied with ignoring the chaos around her. Dad would light a cigarette and look the other way.
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