by Suzanne Popp
Gift and Myrna became closer in the way they saw their lives, and Festal was an important part of this. Royal once called him the Angel of the Seventh Seal, with his foot on the land and the other on the sea. Festal was straddling a changing landscape as the pastoral life gave way to commerce, his family grew, education became more widespread, and Copperfine was swollen with new residents, mines, and businesses. Festal had internalized the struggle between standing out, and fading away. Those of his fellow men who had once laughed at him for his antique ways were gone. But here he was, virile at 70, with wives and children who respected him. He was learning to conquer the fear and superstition that had controlled so much of his life, and accept that no disaster would overcome this child that was about to arrive. And so he took the Word and made it his. Each verse and story was translated into the life he led, or intended to lead.
With the birth of Rose, his faith was confirmed. He thought of calling the child Lily, but Myrna vetoed that. “We have loved our Lily; we can love this child as much wearing her own name. You give it to her, Festal.”
Myrna was undergoing a time of reflection. She was watering the plumeria, the nut trees, and the hedge of lilies along the front of the adobe wall that surrounded the front courtyard.
How is my life with Festal? I think about it more now that I have time to sit and write. I saw myself when I was very young as a sacrifice for my family, and not a very willing one I was a Christian girl, called to deny myself and my worldly pleasures and desires to go into the wilderness and take up my cross. In fact, when I got to Copperfine, it was more pleasant than I expected. The land was spectacular with its fertile river valley and the hues of light on the grasses and hillsides, the colors of the cattle and the softness of calves. I loved the adoration of the powerful hunting dogs, and how Festal made love to me. I felt more powerful and alive in my femaleness than I ever dreamed. Even before I discovered my husband, and came to admire his courage and tenacity, I had determined I would be happy.
I hoped for a beautiful inheritance. I didn’t want my sister to feel sorry for me or my-sister-in-law to despise the way I lived. Violet disparaged my husband and thought my life would be a total waste. I wanted to be somebody, and I claimed that. I would be the mother in a family that was a beacon to this community. We lived in a clean, simple home that my husband had built with his own hands. He had prized me; I would be a prize. He would know each day when he went out to the fields that no man was loved or respected more. He would be eager to return each night, and my education would be applied, not wasted. Otherwise, why had I been allowed to go so far in school? Of course, I knew I would teach my children. I also thought I would teach my husband. Not so. He was a new creature to me. I had never read about anyone like him, and I had no knowledge of him before we climbed on that oxcart together. I began to study him.
As I learned more about him, I began to respect him, then to love him. We had joy in our lives. I also learned about my inside self as I had never experienced it before. I learned I was capable of intense passion in love, and equally intense jealousy and rage; that I could covet and despise, and reject. I could also be passionately alive, fiercely nurturing, and domineering. Not all at once, nor did I admit to any of these until I saw my children and the second wife reflect these back to me.
I had little experience of men. Festal was unlike any I had known. My father was docile. He catered to my mother, provided for our family, and loved me. Bishop did what society expected of him. I think he would sometimes have liked to be more resolute, or go against the practical, such as refusing to marry me off to a stranger, but he complied and put economic security above everything else. He knew Dodge was a predator, but he never chased him off. Festal was not tamed. He took what he needed, and what he thought he had earned, but he remained an outsider. He never forgot that he had been raised in a wilderness where the forces of cruelty and violence were held back by taking a stand. Gift referred to him as a warrior, and she was right. He knew that he could easily be driven away again out of the circle that society drew and have to retreat to the wilderness.
Festal did not back off when he needed to protect us, and he was willing to sacrifice himself for his freedom to choose. He had chosen me and I came to know him and seek to become the woman he imagined me to be. As surely as the sun dries the pottery placed beneath it, my life solidified to Festal’s vision of me. He worshipped me, he feared me, and he loved me passionately. I don’t know if that is enough for any woman, but it was for me. Oh, I might have liked a few better manners out in public, but not when it was just the two of us and our children. They knew and adored us, and we raised them. Our best times were when we were fighting for their future, building a home for them, and seeing them exceed what we had hoped for in their lives. Our worst times were when we succumbed to what others wanted from us, and we recognized they did not value one of us. Maybe that is why Gift came to be part of our lives.
Gift was a woman who survived by her instincts. She was not bitter about what she had endured. She did not dwell on the might-have-beens. She had lost her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, her country, and her sexuality and her innocence. Her children, except for Royal Festal, died in infancy. She tried to have more. She also formed instant alliances with little consideration She cherished the woman who sold her for a barrel of beer into our lives. She admired Dodge for making it possible for her to join our family, even though he had lied about where she would be going.
Our children were our treasure. We coveted their safety, our connection with them in the future, and the bonds they were building between themselves and our community. Each of them was an individual, but they also bore the stamp of our family. They were true to their word. They spoke less than other children, but I think they thought more about what they said. They protected and were loyal to each other. If a team could not include Royal, they did not want to play that game. They loved me and they respected their father because I demanded it of them. In time, they loved him for himself. Festal had integrity. It might not be the same as yours or mine, but he held himself to a relentless standard of endurance and courage, in spite of his continuing fears of the spirit world and what he stood to lose.
Festal had been separated from his twin sister. He believed that he was cursed for this loss because he should have been the one sacrificed. This guilt controlled his inner voice for many years. He wanted control of his destiny, and to be justified for this failure to protect his sister. He did not flinch at protecting his family or his cattle from wild animals, the harsh environment, the soldiers, or the political winds that were blowing around the country. He was a warrior. Sometimes I defined myself in terms of his hardness. That was the literary student I was meant to be coming out in me. Because he was a rock, I could be a stream and nourish those around me. Because he was a wall, I could be a garden. Festal did not join me in my teaching, my ministering, or my speaking, but he was the source of what I knew and could do. My life was not shallow, nor was it pointless. Survival alone was satisfying at the cattle station. I was grateful that I had clear boundaries and a path to my future, even if I was unclear what that future would hold. And so we grew to respect and balance each other.
My sister Violet pitied me for the marriage I had entered. She had been the younger sister and that position kept her from expressing in words to me what she felt. Her absence and the way she would talk about her Joseph let me know what she thought I was missing. I did not like being patronized. When Lily died, this was the worst. The whole family would be sorry, and never realize that Lily had the best life a child could have. Yes, it was too bad that her life passed before she reached adulthood, but her life was sweet. She died without them ever knowing her, and what a loss her passing was to us all. This is what I would have told Violet, if she had been willing to hear me out. I listened to her condolences and did not share this insight with her.
I did not visit Joseph and Violet as often as I should have because she was never open to the idea that Festal
and I could have something of value between us. I regretted this lack of correspondence between us when Violet’s own children began to die. I had to check my own responses and make sure that I was genuinely grieving for her losses, and not thinking of my own vindication. When I was grieving and inconsolable, I went back to the verses about the Shummanite woman of the Old Testament, who realized the significance of hospitality, and is able through her faith to stand on the belief that “All is well,” even when all evidence is to the contrary. I wanted to get to know the children of Violet and Joseph, especially Bwalya and Benjamin, but seldom saw them. I do not know if they thought of me, or what they were told about Festal and me. I did not want to have to explain ourselves and risk being pitied or judged.
Festal found his way through the Bible and reflected what it spoke to him. We never really directed our children in what paths they should take as adults, but they were taught the principles from the Bible and by our example. We were learning about faith by living it and searching for God. The twins were a unit unto themselves as children, and the girls doted on them, but recognized their unity. How will this new child fit into the Phiri plan?
CHAPTER 41
LIVING WATERS
I am sitting on my small courtyard wall looking at the melons crowding each other under the arbor. Gift has lost another child, and I am not mourning, or even thinking about it. My life is a series of small gestures to prove I am even here. We, that is, Festal, Gift and I, have been battling a drought that does not seem to stop. The cattle drank from a watering hole because they couldn’t wait for us to purify water for them or put some iodine in it, and the cholera took about half of them. The heat and the lack of feed will probably take the younger ones in another week, if there is no change.
I am 40 years old, and pregnant, after a long spell of not being. My body tells me it is ready to have this child soon, but I am not ready. I just want something to change in my life. Gift and I have been working with the women and the well-baby project, but without enough clean water and food, what we do is give hope to women who know that they will not make it through this hungry time unless someone or something steps in to help. Why have the rains not come? We talk about nothing else. We no longer ask if Bwene’s baby is getting better. If someone doesn’t show up at our meeting, it usually means they have lost a child, or at least a cow.
Festal withdraws more and more from us, but I know he is not able to deal with pain in the same way Gift can, or I try to. He just shuts off, like the old buffalo that go off to the riverbed and just lie down waiting for the hyena or the lion to take them. I want to give my children a better picture of what it is to be an adult because they are watching to see how we manage. When I first came here to be a wife, I thought it just meant losing my dreams and hope. Being a parent meant always being at someone’s beck and call. Always being needed and tired to death. Now, I am not sure what I see myself as. I am a shadow at noon, looking for a person to attach myself to, I am a first wife, an over-paid bride price who no longer nurtures her family or can even tell you for sure where they are or what they need at this time of their lives.
Reuben and Samuel have gone into the ministry. Each of them has a fiancée and they are planning on getting married when the rains come and the drought is over. What happens if rain never comes? Do they wait on hold for weather that is changing? Is that what we did when the country was becoming independent and we did not know which group we owed loyalty to? I am afraid we did go on with our lives, disconnected with the larger picture as the politicians called it, but knowing that our function was to raise a family and stay close with our neighbors. We functioned in the way we knew we should and assumed the bigger picture of changing borders, governments, and parties would work itself out. What has put me in this mood of seeing myself as such a piece of clay?
I am a three legged cook pot that burns the food because the holes in me are getting too large to patch. I am a wilting zebra plant that needs water, and no one seems to notice my leaves are dropping. Can I not move and change my lot?
“Myrna, you are leaking. Has your labor started?” Gift asked.
“Oh. I was sitting here feeling that I was losing something, and I was. I will get to the doctor.”
“You are not going to make it to the doctor. I will go and get Lottie.”
Gift took off for the neighbor’s house. It seemed some time had passed and Myrna went into the house to lie on the bed. She could feel the contractions, but it was as though she was thinking about them, rather than experiencing them. She fell asleep and wakened with Festal leaning over her. Gift was nowhere in sight. Together, they delivered the baby, who was born with a flap of skin over her face. Festal trimmed it away, and cut and tied the cord, holding the wet baby girl in his arms and raising her up for Myrna to see. He was delighted in the child and that he had been there to save her and the mother. They spent the night in each other’s arms, none of the children being at home. That night, the rains poured down and the explosion of thunder, and water hitting the parched earth, could be heard even inside the rondavel. Both the hunting dogs whined to come inside, but Festal ordered them out. It was morning when Gift came back. She had spent the night at Lottie’s, she said, once she saw Festal approaching the house.
Myrna recalled how she had felt nothing before the baby came, and the pain of her delivery was a relief from the emptiness of not being present. Of course, she wanted this child to survive, as she nursed her and cleaned her. Festal took the flap of skin and the afterbirth and buried them in the garden, saying a prayer for another child who had been born with this same strange feature, his sister Whenny. He had not thought of her for some time, but this portent of the caul made him aware that all lives are connected, and his had been richly blessed with this birth.
Festal did more than he ever had with an infant. He carried the baby that he named Rose on his chest, and kept her clean so her mother could rest. He emptied the wash basin and cleaned it with boiling water, then cooled it and bathed the child, being careful to keep her naval dry and coated with charcoal. He would rub her forehead, which was healing. He put salve on it and covered it with a leaf and then the knit wool stocking cap to keep the flies away. His fellow cattlemen came to check on him and he had no embarrassment to have them see him with his hands scrubbing out the soiled nappies. No one laughed at him—they were celebrating the rain and the end of this season of dying.
The child seemed a portent that things would improve. Gift took to the child and was relieved to have another child that needed care. She still had milk from her recent stillborn, and Myrna did not press her to help with the chores, instead let her mother the child as much as Gift wanted, even nursing the lusty little girl.
They started new projects that they had talked about, but never gotten around to doing. Myrna had Gift take some letters to the post office and asked her to bring back a photographer. She posed all of the children and herself, Gift and Festal, Hen and Royal, in a picture, then asked the photographer to make copies so she could send them to Festal’s family and to Violet and Stephen, as well as her mother Beatrice. When the baby was a month old, they took her to the church to be baptized. Everyone agreed that she was the most beautiful baby ever, and Festal held her as the sign of the cross was made on her forehead. Royal, Hen and Gift were the god-parents. Myrna loved her but from a distance that was more objective and less anxious than she had been with any of the other children. She would sew her simple dresses and watch Gift put them on her, or let Hen take her for a walk in the morning. After Myrna bathed and dressed herself, she would pull a book from the shelf to read, or write in her diary. She had a row of books she had written, and when there was a question of what had gone on in the village, she could pull up the information.
She recalled when the soldiers had come to the door, demanding that the men come and join them. She had shown them Royal, and they had left her alone. Gift had gone to hide in the cistern which was empty when she heard the troops approaching. All
this was noted in her daily messages to herself. She had no plan to do anything with these writings, but they kept her grateful for the days that she had lived, and the changes that had occurred in the village. She noted the arrivals, the passings, and get-togethers. She also interspersed the letters from Violet in the pages, and knew one day, the sisters would compare their paths.
Economics were always a part of her life, but Myrna had learned to budget for the things that mattered or brought her joy. She was a woman who looked attractive in simple dresses and plain fabrics, and she could sew dresses for herself if need be. She had made clothing for Gift as well, because the woman was small boned and busty, and it was hard to find clothing in the markets that fit her figure.
As the years passed, fewer people wore the traditional clothing, or at least the embroidered tops. They bought the dead-white-man’s clothes the traders brought to the market, and mixed the knitted tops with the traditional wrapped skirts. Sometimes Myrna would see a shirt being worn by a man that said Barbara down the sleeve and wondered if they were meant for a woman. No one paid attention to this, as gender was part of their lifestyle and activities, more so than a color or choice of a garment.
When Myrna married, Violet had given her a brassiere. It remained the only one she had ever owned, and it was patched and repaired over the years until little of the original material remained. Other clothing also was vintage, such as the Dutch wax prints that she had maintained for her twenty years of married life. She wore the traditional petticoat with lace at the bottom that had been the fashion in the sixties, and continued to serve her to keep her legs covered from the insects. Myrna took pride in her figure, which had thickened some with the number of children she had birthed, but was still shapely and trim. She had never tried on or owned a pair of trousers. She walked and lifted constantly, and her muscles were firm and smooth.
