A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  This land lies a thousand feet below the hills of Migwani. Here the heat is deadly and the breeze is light, but there are wells that never run dry, fed by the seepage that runs like sweat from the mountains, down through the faults in the rock, the wrinkles in this weatherworn land. It was here that John Mwangangi bought a hundred acres of desert, or so it seemed, determined to build a model of what could be achieved. It almost adjoined his ancestral home, but the difference in altitude between the two and the lack of a path made it virtually impossible to walk directly from the family shamba to this new experimental farm. Now almost two years after the purchase, through this August mist, Father Michael retraced the hike he had made with John in October’s heat on that inaugural day, and how different the place now seemed.

  On the edge of the plain, resting beneath the towering mass of Museve, where before there was only thorn bush, couch grass and euphorbia cactus, there was now a large concrete building surrounded by tanks to collect and store rainwater from the roof. Near the river bed, a small brick-built pump house with weld-mesh over its unglazed window next to a bright yellow door, provided the real marker, the true identity of this place, for without the water it provided, no part of this project would have survived. John’s firm belief that a borehole in this spot would yield year-round sweet water had been perfectly judged. Electric pumps and their associated diesel-powered generators had been in place for several months. Up to now they only needed to run a couple of hours a day, and that had been enough to irrigate a large tract of prepared land, which had produced its first crop of cabbages, tomatoes and onions enough weeks before for the same land now to show new seedlings in neat, ordered lines.

  Michael tried the door of the main building and it opened easily. Inside he saw a hallucination of life so convincing that he felt unnerved. His shoes squeaked on the newly polished floor. An oil lamp suspended from the ceiling seemed to be about to light itself, so perfectly did its highly polished steel reflect the daylight in the sudden darkness of the room. Curtains swayed gently in the breeze beside a barred window, whose louvred panes were left open, the barring in place perhaps only to test the resourcefulness of the thieves. Crooks could now come and go as they wished, he thought, but in fact none had tried to enter or even go near this place. The buildings, especially the areas set aside for residential use were effectively hallowed ground now.

  Not that they had ever really been used. Cupboards of clean linen, the incongruous and unused English-style front room furniture, the polished wood of the dining room, all dusted and shined, reinforced the illusion. It was like being in a showroom rather than a house. Had he really heard Lesley use the word ‘prison’ to describe the place? In that half-heard conversation between John and his wife, had Michael really understood her meaning correctly? Now he had to conclude that he had been right all along. She never wanted to come here. She felt trapped in this place. And now she would never see it again.

  Michael opened the door off the kitchen that led into the empty garage and from there took the connecting door opposite to enter the office. John’s papers were still on the desk. Someone had been into the house to clean and dust, but no one had come here, and a layer of red powder covered everything. When John left this office to attend Janet’s leaving party at the school, he had been working on the accounts and a large ledger was still open across the desk. The cabinets were locked, of course.

  And then he went through the office’s external door. A few steps more brought him to the large doors that gave onto the storage areas. These were all empty, apart from one which housed the tools of the trade, not the hoes, pangas and yokes of the small farmer but a tractor, several ploughs and harrowing discs. They were all still remarkably new. None yet bore any rust.

  Michael paused here to mount one of these mechanical beasts and sit in the driver’s seat. He smoked a cigarette, moving occasionally to look attentively at each piece of machinery in turn. His eyes scanned everything with great deliberation, but his thoughts were elsewhere, drifting to other places and times. Disbelief in oneself, in one’s own perception, in memories which one regarded as time-honoured truths – is this disbelief born of grief or of an unwillingness to grant an unavoidable yet unacceptable truth?

  ***

  “This is the land I will farm,” said John

  October on Museve. Here land rises rock-fallen out of desert. Standing with the hilltop church at one’s back, the earth becomes motionless sea. To the east an ocean plain, stark, flat and featureless, stretches to a line where it joins with sky in a union of opposites. There are islands. The hills of Endau and Zombe stand together but alone, hills that cannot meet across the vastness. To the west, mountains thrust from the plain in ribbed escarpments with a force the once young earth was too weak to resist. Far hillsides feel green when the eye has rested on the plain. On the summit ridges trees stand in ranks, apparently erect and motionless from this distance, but in reality lashed and swayed by the same gusting wind which holds the bateleur in its lazy tailless curves of flight. High in the sky he feigns indifference only to swoop in an instant to the ground where, in a flurry of dust, his talons clasp and pierce the skin of a ground squirrel, a snake, a rat or a hyrax.

  The Vinda is a sandy snake winding dry and yellow through the brown of the valley and plain. Keen eyes can discern the glint of sunlight on the steel of the bridge at Inyuu, the bridge that often seems redundant and is so often ignored, as drivers prefer to cross the apparently safer sand of the riverbed. But the river hibernates like this, ready to awaken in roaring torrents whenever there is rain, and then the bridge is the only choice. But those days are rare.

  John pointed towards the base of the hill where, a thousand feet below them, a triangle of flat land nestled across the riverbed.

  “That can be no more than desert…” said a disbelieving Michael.

  “No,” replied John, with eyes fixed on his land and on his imagined future. “Just a few feet below the surface of the river bed there will be water, sweet water, enough to irrigate that land all year round. The soil is deep and rich and the whole farm will be sheltered from the wind by these hills. I am going to bring a diesel engine from Nairobi to generate electricity so that I can use electric pumps by day and light the house by night from rechargeable batteries. With water, this land will be among the best in the district. Only a mile from here,” he continued turning to point along the mountain ridge toward a narrow valley, “there is a man who is lucky enough to have a small river bed running through his land. Not only does he grow all of his own food, but he can also crop sugar cane, bananas and even potatoes, which he sells for cash. What’s more, his farm is completely unaffected by the drought because his little stream collects water from all of those hills. He has succeeded because he has been lucky. My farm will succeed because of my engine and my pumps. I will farm this piece first and then expand each season until the whole hundred acres is productive.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” said Michael. “You seem to have no doubt that it will succeed. Why have other people not done this before you?”

  “No particular reason other than poverty, Michael,” said John. “Drilling for water costs money, as you know, and most boreholes are dry, and most wet ones are salt. But I know that river bed. I was raised in a farm just above it. I used to go down there as a boy in dry times, sent there by my mother to fetch water. I can remember digging in the sand. I only needed to dig a couple of feet and there was always water. And it was always clean, clean enough to drink. No one has the capital to exploit it, that’s all. Of course the place is almost uninhabitable unless you build a European-style house with fans and air conditioning. It’s fiercely hot and in the rains there’s a danger of flooding, but a house full of electric fans built above the flooding level will work fine. Again, no one has the money to invest. But I have.” John turned to face Michael, but said nothing for a while. “But I am going to make the investment for a public good, not a
private profit,” he continued. “The farm will make a lot of money. I know it will. I have done all the projections any bank manager might want to see. But I am going to make it a cooperative. The people who join me will become part owners, part employees. They will invest in the project via their labour and I will reward them with profit and ownership. I’ll recoup my money with a little interest and then I’ll move on and do the whole thing again somewhere else.”

  “Your father wants you to farm his land. Isn’t that so?” asked Michael, pausing to ensure that John was listening.

  “The old man is the one who is taught new words,” answered John glibly.

  “But the young cannot educate the old…” was Michael’s answer in kind.

  The words seemed to infuriate John. Michael was suddenly both shocked and surprised at the reaction. “I do things my way. I am no slave to tradition, whatever that word might mean. If poverty is our tradition, then we must break with our past and make a new life. I am no slave. I will do things my way.”

  “But you will need to take people with you for it to succeed…”

  “They will come with me,” said John with impatience. “Its success will succeed. It will be the tangible results that will win people over. There will be no need for me to offer a palliative afterlife to soften the pain of the present, unlike some philosophies that are promulgated hereabouts…” John eyed Michael with a hint of a smile. “The profits will fill bellies with food and through their stomachs it will win over their minds.”

  “But you are being very ambitious, John,” said Michael. “No one has farmed like this; no one has organized the activity around share ownership, and no one has ever tried to hand a successful business over to appointed managers.”

  There was no hesitation this time. “It will work,” said John.

  ***

  John built his house where he said, and built onto that the office and storerooms, in one of which Michael now sat. The project had been under way long before he took his new job in Nairobi and, as a family, the Mwangangis had lived in the place for only a few weeks before moving to the city. Since then, John and family, initially, and then increasingly John alone, had visited at weekends to supervise the ongoing work and project development. As predicted, his managers and labourers did all that was asked of them and the model farm soon became just that, a model to be emulated. But Lesley and Anna had not visited since the early days and any idea of the family living on the farm had been forgotten. For John, however, this project was more than just a farm to be made productive. It was nothing less than a vision of a new future. It was John’s plea to his own people that they should build on what they already had, should develop their homeland using the skills and knowledge that was held in common. But in the end, those who did not understand a complex arrangement such as this simply dismissed it, claiming that John Mwangangi had merely become another landowner, an absentee planter like the owners of the great tea estates up country. And, like all businessmen, the same gossip branded him an exploiter of people, an abuser of opportunity. And now, after she had left for home, only now had Michael understood that for some months it had been Janet’s presence in Migwani that had become the true lure that brought John to the bush with such regularity. How remarkable it was, he thought, that the apparent malice of gossip so often encrusted itself around a grain of truth.

  John’s vision, however, had been real. As Michael stared through the window at the results of nearly two years of John’s work, he found it hard to believe that this land had so recently been barren scrub, neglected for an age. Now the wilderness had been tamed. Radiating from the house, pathways defined by loose stone borders led to a matrix of fields hedged with neat lines of young sisal, as yet too small to crop. Near the house were the individually laid out beds of a vegetable garden that Lesley had planned and initially worked on like an English housewife with her rubber gloves and trowel. But of course, she had stayed away for months, unable to come to terms with either bush life or the demands of her father-in-law. The twig-built shades that had been intended to protect the young seedlings from the sun had been built, but nothing was ever raised beneath their shield. They now stood like skeletons guarding the few pockmarked cabbages that had gone to seed in the beds.

  But elsewhere it was a different story. The pumps and engine had done their work and a large patch of cultivated land had already produced its crop and new seedlings of the next already showed. Another large tract was levelled and ploughed ready for planting, and the machines had been at work clearing another area on the other side of the plot. At the rate he had been working, the whole farm would have been in production within two more years. It was – or would have been – a prodigious achievement.

  Michael was lost between memory and imagination when he heard the back door of the house open, the sound reverberating through the volume of the garage via the connecting door he had left open. A radio was switched on. Someone was in the kitchen. For a moment he was startled and did nothing, fixed to the spot by his own surprise. But it was only John’s sister, her familiar voice offering recognition, as she began to talk to herself as she busied herself with some now redundant domestic task.

  He left the store and approached the open door of the kitchen. He knew Mwikali’s voice and greeted her from outside, before she saw him. She was immediately silent, but it was not with the expected recognition that she greeted him. A look of distance and distrust is what he saw.

  “You have been coming here to clean the house?” he asked. Her reply was a simple nod. It seemed that there was no more to say, but while he stood before her, she did nothing, merely stood, rooted to the spot. “Have you been here every day?” he asked. Again she nodded.

  After a short silence she picked up the radio and placed it in her bag. She was clearly about to leave, but Michael was effectively barring her way since he had hardly crossed the threshold into the room. “Father, I must go…” she said.

  “But you have only just arrived.”

  His words made no difference. It was clear that she was not going to stay in the house while he was there and, without saying another word, she brushed past him and set off on her way. As this half-sister of John Mwangangi made her way purposefully along the path that led gently at first up the valley side towards her own home, Michael watched her progress unaware of the fact that he would never see her or indeed any other member of her family again.

  Michael wandered around the house, buildings and the farm for a long time before he decided to leave. He became lost to time, sauntering apparently aimlessly from one area to another, visiting some places several times, but seemingly inspecting them anew on each visit. Eventually he drank some water from the bottle he had brought in his haversack, and set off in the direction of Museve and its beautiful hilltop chapel, today shrouded in August mist. It would take him several hours to climb the steep paths to the top, but once there he would approach the altar like a pilgrim begging for guidance in this time of crisis.

  The climb sapped his strength. During his leave at home in Ireland he had spent too much time in an armchair putting on weight. Stopping smoking had not helped, since he nibbled more as compensation. But that aberration was now behind him. Nevertheless, as he made steady progress over the loose stones of the path, the ascent seemed easier that day than it had almost two years before under the October sun. Both he and John had sweated away every breath from their body to climb the hill in time to reach the top to keep their appointment with the priests from the district. Many had assembled there to celebrate the consecration of this small church by the Bishop of Kitui. For years he had promised Kitui Diocese a small chapel, both intimate and secluded, where true Christians might gather to share retreat. At last it had been built. A group of the more practically minded priests had spent three years designing and then building the small church with their own hands. The town’s Village Polytechnic had helped with advice and, more than that, had su
rprised everyone at the last minute by providing a complete stained glass window, when all they had been asked for was a welded skeletal frame. Though crude, its colour was to become a relief to eyes all too accustomed to the drabness of grey concrete inside and outside to the monotony of the scrub.

  That day the chapel was declared open and a sacred place by the words of a solemn mass spoken by Bishop John O’Hara. John Mwangangi, the only layman present, had been invited by the Bishop as a result of a donation he had made towards the cost of the building soon after he had returned to Kenya to become the Mwingi District Officer. John’s motives, as ever, had been beyond reproach. He personally wanted to do something to repay the debt he believed he owed to the church for his education and, of course, the even greater personal debt he undoubtedly owed John O’Hara, himself.

  The service was short and simple, an unadorned consummation of one man’s dream. Afterwards they retired outside to the hilltop to reflect, as only priests can, on a passage from the Bible, a passage specified by O’Hara in his brief sermon. The quiet of the hilltop, the gently wafting cool air and the vastness of the earth below captured the collective imagination and held all in silent melancholy for some time. John, like the priests, found his own solitude while sitting on a rock just under the leeward lip of the summit.

  Later, one by one, they all returned refreshed to the church, where a group of nuns had laid out food. Now it was time to talk, to eat and to congratulate one another on the success of the occasion. John, however, was incapable of adhering to such a rigid schedule, and still toiled with the issue he had contemplated during his seclusion. Now he could share it with the others. At his side, Michael spoke from utter innocence in the wide-eyed way that only Michael knew. Facing him, John O’Hara, inhibiting Michael a little by his mere presence, spoke from his intimate knowledge of John’s life, the vital quality of which Michael would forever remain ignorant.