When Rain Clouds Gather

by Bessie Head

  He stopped talking awhile and turned and looked at the women to ask them a few direct questions. The experimental plot would be ready for harvesting in about three months’ time. If the women harvested, cured and dried this first batch together, they would gain the necessary experience and be able that much sooner to cultivate, harvest and process their own tobacco. Therefore, it had been decided by him and Gilbert that the first tobacco curing shed be built in the yard of someone who lived nearest the farm.

  “Who lives near the farm?” he asked.

  The women all turned and looked at Paulina Sebeso, Makhaya also followed the direction of their glance, and a faint, quizzical expression flitted across his face, as though he knew the woman but could not remember under what circumstances he had met her. Certainly, the gaudy-hued skirt was familiar. Certainly, he remembered the big, bold eyes. Paulina bent her head in alarm and embarrassment.

  “I live near the farm,” she muttered.

  It was only when they had collected the equipment and walked in the direction of the sunset house that Makhaya recalled the brief incident of two nights ago when a small girl had approached him and touched his hand. He was very fond of children, and as they walked into the yard he turned to Paulina and said, “Where’s the child?”

  “She’s at the home of Mma-Millipede,” Paulina replied, but she averted her head, as the unexpected question made her feel strangely vulnerable and exposed.

  They set down the equipment for building the shed – pickaxes, spades, tar matting, and pitch – and Makhaya walked about the yard looking for a suitable site. In a secluded corner of the yard he stumbled upon a gigantic operation. It was the work of the little girl. She was in the process of building a model village, all carved out of mud. There were mud goats, mud cattle, mud huts and mud people, and grooved little footpaths for them all to walk on.

  He stood staring at it for some time, a look of pure delight on his face. Then he turned and chose a site as far removed as possible from this sanctuary of genius, and with lengths of string marked out the shallow foundation for the tobacco curing and drying shed.

  The women, with pickaxes and spades, scraped out the foundation. The plan of the shed itself in no way resembled the instructions sent to Gilbert by the tobacco research station, as the curing sheds too had been scaled down to a measurement of ten feet by ten feet and were to be built with materials that were easily available in Golema Mmidi – like lots of mud. Makhaya divided a twenty-foot square into two chambers. One was to be a closed shed, with no draughts, which would provide the warmth and humidity needed for the colouring stage of the tobacco leaf. In this shed the leaves would be placed on the floor in single layers, on sacks. The other shed was to contain the curing racks for drying the leaf and was to have a removable roof to control the amount of sunlight received by the leaf. To prevent the white ants from rising up the mud wall, a layer of pitch and tar matting was placed in the foundation. This would also serve as a flooring for the closed shed.

  Maria also appeared and assisted in the building of the thick mud walls. It was her intention to cultivate a patch of tobacco for her father, whom she also wanted included in the scheme. For some time little could be heard except the soft padding of women’s feet as they walked to and fro with piles of mud and the tap, tap of Makhaya’s hammer as he worked on preparing the curing racks. Paulina had deliberately chosen the job of mud-mixing. It called for more vigorous exertion and was also a lookout post during the brief pauses when no mud was needed. But she never saw much, in spite of her elation, because the object of her brief devouring looks kept his head bent at his own task, and so quiet was he that after a time even the women forgot his presence and began to chatter and gossip loudly.

  Towards noon Maria washed her hands in a pail of water and approached Paulina.

  “I’m going home to prepare some food,” she said, quietly. “You must tell Makhaya that I shall put aside some lunch for him.”

  Paulina rested one bare foot on her spade. “Why can’t Makhaya eat with us?” she said haughtily. “After all, he’s working with us.”

  “But he doesn’t like goat meat and sour milk porridge,” Maria explained mildly.

  “Did he say so?” Paulina demanded.

  “No, he hasn’t complained,” Maria said. “Gilbert doesn’t like it either, although he has said nothing. I can just see by their expressions that they dislike it.”

  “Goodness!” Paulina said in a fierce whisper. “So you encourage foreigners to stick up their noses at our diet? Haven’t you heard the saying: When you are in Rome, you must do as the Romans do? If people don’t like our diet, they must starve. There’s nothing else.”

  Maria looked at her steadily. “Don’t get mad now,” she said. “I was just explaining a fact.”

  She shrugged and walked away quickly, as she disliked a word battle with Paulina, who always managed to get in the last punch. Paulina waited until she had left the yard, then she dropped her spade to the ground as a signal to the other women to stop work. The walls were five feet high and complete; only the rough surface had to be smoothed, and this would be done more easily after the mud had had time to dry a bit. One of the women immediately walked over to the fireplace to start a fire to warm up the goat meat while the rest filed to the water bucket. Paulina walked determinedly over to Makhaya. He was still crouched down on one knee, on a sack, and had almost completed the curing rack.

  “Will you eat food with us, sir?” she asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said, without looking up. “My name is Makhaya. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Paulina Sebeso,” she said, making it sound an important fact.

  But she did not move away and Makhaya looked up, slightly amused, slightly inquiring. She looked down at him with a haughty expression.

  “Perhaps you don’t like goat meat and sour milk porridge?” she queried, in a somewhat penetrating voice, mostly for the benefit of her friends, who had stopped abruptly and were staring.

  “I like goat meat,” Makhaya said quickly and untruthfully.

  But privately he loathed it. The meat was tough and had a weird taste, like thick squeezed-out grass juice or wild herbs. Paulina instantly sensed the lie and decided to rub it in.

  “I just wanted to know,” she said, still using that penetrating voice. “Goat meat is all we eat. Sour milk porridge is a daily diet. We Batswana even sometimes eat rotten meat through which the worms crawl. We just wash away the worms.”

  Makhaya turned his head and found himself faced with the riveted glances of ten pairs of keen, thrilled eyes. And there was this loud-mouthed woman whose, long, straight black legs dominated him in his crouched position. He rose quickly, relieved to see that he was a whole foot taller than she was. He stared at her with a look that said, So, you want something from me, do you?

  Aloud he said, “Well, don’t wash off the worms for me. I won’t notice them.”

  The ‘don’t wash off the worms for me’ brought a shriek of laughter from the gallery and also from Paulina, who rushed away in confusion to one of the huts. But it served to permanently break the ice between Makhaya and the women. Once they had washed their hands, they crowded near him, asking him all sorts of questions, which he answered in a carefree, casual way.

  “Tell us about your country,” they said.

  “But it’s just like yours,” he said, amused. “There are people there and the same kind of stars.”

  “But our country isn’t the same as yours,” a voice piped up, boldly contradicting him. “You have electricity and water and we don’t.”

  “I don’t know anything about the water and electricity,” he said.

  “Why?” they all asked at once.

  “It belongs to the white man at present,” he said. “He’ll tell you so, if you go there. I think the country even belongs to him.”

  The women all stared at each other with wide eyes. Hmmm, so he was a politician, as the rumour had it in the village? These politicians were s
upposed to be feared in Botswana. But he was nice. They smiled at him, to reassure him, which amused Makhaya very much.

  And this ‘Tell us’ went on for the whole length of the lunch hour, and no doubt that quiet, brotherly attitude of sympathy was very sincere, because Makhaya had an infinite capacity to attend to the details of life, and it often pleased him to turn careless or insignificant ideas into something quite their opposite. But only one woman sat a little apart, with a thoughtful look on her face. She was curious about the man behind the brother because, when she had come right up close and looked him straight in the eye, she had found almost nothing there, just a blank, calm wall; and since she was so acutely aware of him, she was also aware of the significance of that wall. You see, it said, I’m quite safe. No one can invade my life.

  Yet it was not so much the privacy of his inner life and the wall he had built around it that troubled Paulina. She was first and foremost a physically alive woman, and she was also physically frustrated, and what she needed most of all was someone who would end this physical frustration. So intense was this need that it had made her very sensitive to men, especially the type of man most likely to fulfil it. It was only an equally blind and intense desire to own and possess a man to herself that prevented her from having any lovers, and this latter need always asserted itself over her physical desires. But in a society like this, which man cared to be owned and possessed when there were so many women freely available? And even all the excessive lovemaking was purposeless, aimless, just like tipping everything into an awful cess-pit where no one really cared to take a second look. And Paulina was too proud a woman to be treated like a cess-pit. But she wasn’t sure either of anything morally definite. In fact, the word ‘moral’ was really meaningless to her. She simply wanted a man who wasn’t a free-for-all. No doubt, the other women longed for this too because intense bloody battles often raged between women and women over men, and yet, perversely, they always set themselves up for sale to the first bidder who already had so many different materials in his shop that he was simply bored to death by the display.

  And she liked this reserved man and the quiet about him, as though he could pick and choose a bit and use his discrimination, but what troubled her, when standing quite close to him, was that this calm, blank wall applied not only to the expression of his face but to the feel of his body as well, as though it did not exist, as though it was not there at all. Yet he seemed a man who was very conscious of his appearance. No doubt, in his own country, he had spent a great deal of money on clothes, for the different changes of black sweaters that he wore about the farm were expensive ones. There was a gay life that had gone hand in hand with those expensive clothes, she thought. Perhaps pretty, perfumed women too, those who wore red high-heeled shoes and stockings and painted their lips. She stared at Makhaya intently, trying to see all those women and how they had laughed and talked to him, because in Golema Mmidi there was no perfume, red shoes, and lipstick. But Makhaya sat there talking to the barefoot, illiterate women of Golema Mmidi as though he had done this all his life, just as throughout that morning he had worked side by side with them, like a brother.

  He makes us feel at ease, she thought, because he has no feeling. He takes away the feeling in us that he is a man. But my heart tells me it’s not true. Mma-Millipede was right when she said the man needs studying.

  Once Paulina became thoughtful, she also experienced her most sane moments and placed a curb on the rash, impulsive gestures she continuously made. Also, a little humility entered her life, making her less sure that everything in the world ought to belong to her. It was in this subdued mood that she picked up her spade to work again. There was not much mud to mix, only a little for the smoothing of the walls. Two women delegated themselves for this job, while the rest sat along the jutting mud foundations of the huts and, in pairs, began weaving the long smooth, dried river reeds into roofs and doors for the sheds. Maria also returned and teamed up with Paulina, who had just put down her spade. Makhaya, who had by this time fitted in the curing racks in one of the sheds, seated himself alongside Maria. He had a few short sticks in his hand and took out a pocket knife and began slicing away at the wood.

  “What are you doing?” Paulina asked, after a time.

  “The village has no trees,” he said, and held up one of the pieces of wood which he had shaped into a tall, slender palm tree. “Do you think the child will mind if I interfere?”

  Paulina kept her head bent, and when she replied it was barely above a whisper and very polite: “She will appreciate it, sir.”

  Makhaya took one of the reeds off Maria’s lap and split it up into the shape of palm fronds. These he dipped into the pitch bucket nearby and then carefully clustered the ends on to the top of the trees. He also placed the foot of each tree into the pitch bucket to prevent its future damage by the white ants; then he curled a finger around each tree and walked over to the village. Gilbert walked into the yard a short while later and stood gazing at the almost complete tobacco sheds with the same delight in his eyes as Makhaya looked on the minute village of mud people and animals. To Gilbert this shed meant the difference between having no money and the capital to set up a network of boreholes and reservoirs in Golema Mmidi. It meant water for every household, for vegetable gardens, for irrigation schemes, for cattle grazing grounds in the village, and for improved methods of crop production. He walked over to where Makhaya was crouched down on one knee beside the miniature village and removed the last tree from his hand. Then he stood back and surveyed the layout of the village. Once he had decided on the most suitable spot for the tree, he crouched down beside Makhaya.

  “Each household will have to have a tap with water running out of it all the year round,” he said. “And not only palm trees, but fruit trees too and flower gardens. It won’t take so many years to turn Golema Mmidi into a paradise. Look, Mack, do you think we could get a hundred of these sheds done before the rainy season? If so, we’d be able to get the tobacco growing off the ground this year.”

  “There’s only one person here who can supply the answer to your question,” Makhaya said. “She’s wearing an orange and red skirt and she’s sitting next to your wife. But I’d advise you to just hand her those one hundred membership cards and let her work out the details for herself. She seems to run this whole village by sheer will power and even tried to get me to eat worms for lunch.”

  Gilbert laughed and looked round in the direction of where Maria was seated. He saw the bold coloured skirt and the equally bold-looking eyes as Paulina turned her head in his direction. He turned and looked at Makhaya. He’d noticed Mma-Millipede approach this very women on the previous day and also, like Mma-Millipede, had noted the way in which she had stared at Makhaya.

  “What makes the world turn round, Mack?” he asked, smiling.

  “I don’t know,” Makhaya said, as he was absorbed in studying the future needs of the tiny village, and Gilbert wanted to say something, but had an abrupt change of mind.

  “It’s polythene pit dams,” he said. “We’ll need water right away to help the tobacco along, and I’ve figured out a way in which we can trap the storm waters in a deep pit lined with polythene.”

  He stood up as he had noticed that one of the roofs was complete and that Paulina and Maria held it together and were approaching the pitch bucket. He picked up the tar brush and walked over to them, as he wanted to get to know the woman in the bright skirt. He was also in a mood of quiet elation, gathering in a number of scattered details all at once. The village to him these three long years had really only meant Dinorego, so much so that he knew every corner of the old man’s mind, and Dinorego was like a patch of cloth that had grown on Gilbert. Everything had its start there, but once the start had been made so many others, like Maria, Mma-Millipede, Pelotona and the silent, reserved men who sold cattle to the co-operative, had grown on him too until his whole outlook was entirely Botswana, until the day would never arrive when he would be able to extricate
himself.

  Since there was no way out, the only other alternative was to get to grips with a whole life in a narrow, confined space. Because it was a harsh and terrible country to live in. The great stretches of arid land completely stunned the mind, and every little green shoot that you put down into the barren earth just stood there, single, frail, shuddering, and not even a knowledge of soils or the germinating ability of seeds or modern machinery could help you to defeat this expansive ocean of desert. And people, mentally, fled before this desert ocean, content to scrape off bits of living from its outskirts, where a few roads had been built or where a lonely railway line hugged its way along the eastern border area. This fleeing away from the overwhelming expressing itself in all sorts of ways, particularly in the narrow, cramped huts into which people crept at the end of each day, and those two bags of corn which were painstakingly reaped off a small plot.

  It was his understanding of this mental flight that gave him a different outlook on subsistence farming. If a man thought small, through fear of overwhelming odds, no amount of modern machinery would help him to think big. You had to work on those small plots and make them pay. Once they began to pay you could then begin extending the production. But you had to start small, and because of this small start, co-operative marketing was the only workable answer, and its principle of sharing the gains and hardships would so much lessen the blows they had to encounter along the way. Maybe they could start with tobacco growing, scaled down to small plots, and cotton and millet and groundnuts and…

  He looked up at Paulina from his crouched position near the mat and smiled. It wasn’t really her he saw but that look in her eyes, not really boldness after all but the natural expression of a powerful and alert personality, and beyond that, all such a personality could accomplish. Why, one day there’d be some real family life and all the men would be back in the village again and the cattle would be right nearby behind enclosed, communally owned grazing grounds, and in summer the cattle would feed on grass that was three feet high and dripped with dew, and some of the men might like to engage themselves entirely in the business of producing high-grade beef and others might like to turn Golema Mmidi into one of the greatest tobacco producing areas in the country, and by that time some of the women would have become so expert in the tobacco business they might like to help along, or they might be a little rich and swanky by then and worry about the ladder in their new stockings or discuss their children’s ailments over dainty cups of tea.