“Probably,” he said.
I put down the gun. If this was the man I was going to love, I supposed I had better love his absurd, wild country as well.
“Then we’d better get on with the speeches.”
Our first son, Paul, was born in Pietermaritzburg five months after the wedding. I was twenty-three years old, Pat twenty-one, and we were ready to start our family life together. As soon as Pat graduated from university we prepared to return to Rhodesia permanently and forge a life there. There was only one complication: like all men of fighting age, on his return Pat would be called up to join the army. Members of the South African government had tried to persuade him to remain and commit his new training in animal sciences to the nation in which he had studied, but Pat was Rhodesian at heart, and Rhodesians never die. His country needed him, and I followed him into a country at war. Pat enlisted in the army and was stationed at a barracks in the capital, Salisbury (now called Harare), while Paul and I lived close by.
In 1980, the bush war drew to a bitter, negotiated end. Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party won a landslide election in March, and white Rhodesia began its transition into Zimbabwe. A sense of defeat hung over Pat and his compatriots, and across Rhodesia many families made preparations to leave and find some new corner of the world. For many, the thought of living in a country governed by one of the terrorists they had been fighting was too much to bear. Australia, South Africa, and Canada were richer countries for their leaving. Pat and I talked about finding a new life in Australia, somewhere for Paul and the brothers and sisters who might follow him, but I knew that, in his heart, Pat belonged in Rhodesia. And since Rhodesia was no more, Zimbabwe would have to do.
We sat together, late at night.
“I want him to have the life I had,” Pat said, bouncing baby Paul on his knee. “I want the same sort of childhood for him. Somewhere he can ride with game, go wild in the bush, be surrounded by dogs and cattle and duiker and baboons. If he can have just ten years of a life like that, it has to be worth it, doesn’t it?”
I looked at the way Paul gazed up at his father. That, I decided, was the life I wanted for my children as well. If they could look back on their childhoods with as much vivid nostalgia as Pat did his own, we would have given them the best possible start.
“What do you think, Paul? Do you want to be a Zimbabwean?”
Paul looked at me, then at his father. Stoutly, he nodded.
“The master has spoken,” I said.
So Zimbabwean we were, and Zimbabwean we would stay.
It was those thoughts that returned to me as, twelve years later, we unloaded our packs at Crofton to begin our new lives. As I watched Pat swing into the elderly Frisky’s saddle, and Kate and Jay tumble out of the barren house that would soon become our beloved home, I was thinking of the baby Paul, of those first days after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, of the hopes and dreams Pat and I had shared long into the night. We had spent the last ten years living in various places across Zimbabwe—the agricultural research station where Pat first worked, the rugged farm Lonely Park, where Pat’s brother kept one of the nation’s biggest dairy herds—but the land around us was finally ours. It was a place we could mold, a place we could pour ourselves into and live until our lives were done. Ten years before, in one of our earliest homes, we had buried a baby, Nicholas, only a few weeks old when he died, and the feeling of leaving him behind was not one we wanted to live through again. Here, this new land on which we now stood, could be a place to put down roots, a place to live a good life and never leave anything behind again. It was scrubby, untamed, with low jagged hills crowned in bush and red earth that seemed impenetrable to the eye—but Pat brought Frisky around and, as he gazed into the distance, I knew already what he was thinking. Here, he would build barns; here, he would build workshops; here, the irrigation channels; here, the grading sheds for our tobacco. Behind him, Jay’s eyes were on the hills. He listened for the sound of baboons and searched the shadows between the trees for antelope or signs of leopard. Kate reached up and wrapped one arm around a lower bough of the mango tree. She was scrabbling to pull herself up when Paul appeared behind her and gave her the lift that she needed.
In front of me, Frisky snorted softly. She turned her head against Pat’s reins, as if all she wanted to do was look me in the eye. She too must have been considering the land. It dawned on me that this would be her final home, just as I wished it would be mine.
The land was ours. One day it would belong to our children, and our children’s children. Our new life had finally begun.
Chapter 2
OPENING UP THE bush to set up a farm is like riding a horse; you cannot command the land to do your bidding—you can only ask it. Like a horse, the land has its own character. It can be willful. It can be defiant. But it can give great joy as well, unveiling its secrets for you as you come closer and learn to work together for a greater good.
As we gazed out over virgin bush, Pat and I shared a daunted look. The land was rugged, scrubby lowlands out of which grew the wild, rocky hills we called koppies. Though the farm was bordered by two rivers, one a perennial stream and the other flowing north into the great Zambezi, the soil on which we meant to farm was fertile yet difficult to handle, being very hard and compacted, the kind of land that was impossible to cultivate without heavy machinery and careful management. The thought of driving back the bush and seeing fields of green tobacco, acres of tomatoes, and the rich glow of Mexican marigolds was enough to buoy us for the moment, but there was no use denying it: this was land into which only somebody as determined as Pat would dare to pour his life. There is no doubt that my husband is the most determined and optimistic man I have ever met. Were he not that way, our lives today would be very different.
The land we had bought had been a farm once before, during the Rhodesian tobacco boom of the early 1960s. For decades, though, no crops had been cultivated here; only cattle had roamed from river to river. In their fields, the mfuti trees with their long feathered leaves grew tall again, and the bush had crept down from the hillsides. For all its wildness, the farm was exactly what Pat had been dreaming of: a place where we might test ourselves like the first African pioneers, somewhere he could use all his years of study, a place we could shape and leave for our children.
All the history books had the same wisdom to share. It was not the pioneers who benefited from the years they did battle with the land; it was those who came after: their children.
“Where to begin?” I asked. Paul, Jay, and Kate gathered behind us.
“It begins,” said Pat, “with tomatoes.”
This land could not be tamed by Retzlaffs alone. In the days that followed, we hired more than 250 workers, who began to build their homes here, too. Never and his wife, Mai Never; our driver, Charles; our gardener, Oliver; and Kate’s nanny, Celia—only once we were all together could we begin. Farms in Zimbabwe often had whole villages of workers living on the land, with their own farm schools and medical clinics, and our farm was to be no different. We would have a core of workers who lived here, and with the harvests, more would join us as seasonal contractors.
All over Crofton the rooms were dominated by big contour maps and plans Pat had drawn up: where best to build the grading sheds for some future crop of tobacco; how best the roads might run so that they were protected from natural erosion; how much of the land could be irrigated without resorting to building a dam. It was a broad, holistic approach to farming, a scheme Pat had been dreaming of since the first years of our marriage. To see it come to fruition was the culmination not only of a dream, but of decades of hard work.
Those first months were spent driving back the bush. It would take a man four days to carve a crater and fell one of the giant mfuti trees that flourished here, and four more to chop that tree into cords for shipping away. Even then the work was not done, for half the tree remained underground and would not truly leave the land until five or six seasons had passed.
S
ome days it was imperceptible, the farm changing as slowly as a glacier melts. Other days, the bush had visibly receded between dawn and dusk, and we would go to bed on a farm different from the one on which we had awakened. The children would go off to boarding school during the weeks and return for weekends to a farm that was never the same: only the same sheltering sky, the same herds of tsessebe, the same mother and father warning them about the dangers of the bush.
As the first yields of tomatoes were being harvested and packed into crates, Pat and I rode on horseback between the fields, with Frisky and the chestnut mare named Sunny. Tomatoes flourished on virgin land, and we knew how much they enriched the soil for different crops to come: tobacco, cotton, maize, and export vegetables and flowers.
Frisky whinnied softly underneath Pat.
“What next?” I began, watching the shadowed outlines of our workers move between the rows.
“I was thinking,” Pat joked, “that I might get some turkeys . . .”
It is a curious feeling when your heart swells and sinks all at once.
Years ago, when we had been married barely a year, I had come to understand the particular nature of Pat’s insanity, his desire to collect and hoard animals of just about every description. As Zimbabwe was being born out of the ruins of Rhodesia, Pat had worked at an agricultural research station called Grasslands, where company policy had been to slaughter the smallest lamb every time a sheep gave birth to triplets. Unwilling to accept this, Pat had taken to bringing them home, until our garden was heaving with his own private flock. While baby Paul crawled around the living room, he was surrounded by dozens of baby sheep, bleating out for their bottles. I became particularly skilled as a surrogate ewe, able to hold six bottles between my legs for the lambs to suckle while I fed another four out of my hands.
If this had been the limit of Pat’s madness, perhaps I could have written it off as a strange idiosyncrasy. Soon, however, Pat found himself the proud recipient of a gaggle of turkeys as well—and, as turkeys are usually very bad mothers, he insisted that each turkey have its own cage in which to lay her eggs.
Pat, of course, had to go to work during the day, so the management of the Retzlaff menagerie invariably fell to me. One of the most important of my duties was to move the turkey cages each day, so that they were on fresh ground and could be exposed to the very best sun and shade, dependent on which each needed. Often, I felt as if I was being watched over by Frisky, who would immediately report on my work to her beloved Pat when he came home from work. Those two, I had begun to understand, were as thick as thieves.
After grueling days of feeding lambs and horses—not to mention our very young son—perhaps I could be forgiven for forgetting to move the turkey cages in accordance with Pat’s regimen. One day, exhausted by the morning’s efforts, I decided that the turkey cages would have to wait. That evening, while I was cooking supper, Pat came home and conducted his evening inspection of all his beloved animals, the toddler Paul perched happily on his shoulders. I was stooped over the pot, breathing in the beautiful aromas of lamb—not our own, I hasten to add—when I heard Pat’s roar. In seconds, he appeared in the kitchen doorway, his face purpling in fury.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my thoughts turning to baby Paul.
Pat simply lifted an accusing finger.
“You,” he said, “haven’t moved a single turkey cage.”
At Crofton, as he brought up the subject of turkeys again, I looked away, trying not to acknowledge Pat’s wicked grin. I reined Sunny around, as if to make for home.
“This time,” I said, “Jay and Kate can look after them.”
In August the whole country would change color. These were the first stirrings of Zimbabwean spring. Across the farm, the msasa trees came into new leaf. Light pinks deepened into pinks and reds; reds softened into vivid mauves; mauves ebbed away, leaving a rich dark green in their wake. In the evenings we would ride from Crofton farmhouse and watch as the bush came alive in this new array of color.
On one particular morning, driving to pick up Paul at school, I was late. Even the traffic in the city of Harare seemed to know it, slowing down and jamming at every intersection I tried to drive through, as if deliberately trying to vex me. As I checked and rechecked the time, my only consolation was that Paul knew the kind of life we led too well; he wouldn’t be expecting me to be right on schedule.
He was waiting at the bus stop in a scuffed-up school uniform when I arrived, at five feet tall an image of his father in miniature. Like his father, he scowled at me, but, like his father, he didn’t mean it.
Also like his father, Paul loved all animals. My eye caught something squirming under the folds of his school blazer.
“His name’s Fuzzy,” Paul said, sliding into the front seat. The tiny head of a puppy, a Jack Russell crossed with a Maltese poodle, poked out of the top of his collar, inspected me with mischievous eyes, and then ducked back to wriggle against Paul’s chest. “He’s saying hello.”
“Darling, where . . .”
I had taken off into traffic, my eyes flitting between the road and this ball of fur to whom Paul was now feeding the end of an ice cream cone from his pocket. From somewhere, horns blared. I looked up, managing to correct my course just in time.
“Remember when school gave me Imprevu?”
Actually, we had paid a fortune for Imprevu. She was a beautiful bay mare, extremely eager, responsive, and exciting to ride, and she would be ridden by Paul and Pat regularly after Frisky died. She had belonged to the riding school, but they were only too pleased to send her to Crofton and receive a princely payment in return.
“Well, it was the same thing. My teacher gave him to me.”
“Just gave him to you?”
“He knows how much we like animals.”
I had to smile.
“Look over your shoulder, Paul.”
Paul looked over his shoulder, Fuzzy craning his neck the same way. On the backseat sat a crate with two little Scotties peeking out. Each of them wore a perfect little tartan bow, and their tiny black eyes considered Fuzzy carefully.
“I’ve just picked them up,” I said. “Aren’t they adorable?”
“Mum!” Paul exclaimed. “You’re just like Dad!”
“Don’t start on that. Your father’s much worse than me . . .”
Paul was fixated on the box of scrabbling pups. I had long been fascinated by Scotties. They looked perfectly adorable, with black eyes like the ones in the face of a teddy bear. Well, if Pat could go around collecting turkeys and horses and sheep, I had to be allowed a little indulgence of my own. Perhaps it was my husband’s madness rubbing off on me.
Fuzzy made a spirited squirm out of Paul’s arms and dropped into the backseat with the other pups.
“Have you told Dad?” asked Paul.
“Let’s keep it quiet for a while.” I grinned. “I’ve been promising him another Great Dane . . .”
Of all our children, Paul was the most eager to live a life in the saddle. Imprevu, the mare he had brought home from school, was similar to Frisky in many ways. She required an experienced hand and was ridden only by Paul and Pat. Paul experienced the same joy in saddling her up and exploring our farm as Pat had as a boy with Frisky.
Jay did not have the same passion for horses but loved the bush and spent his time roaming the farm with his best friend, Henry, hunting and birding—but I would often see Kate marveling at her father in Frisky’s saddle, or Paul as he took off on Imprevu, kicking up dust as they cantered along the winding farm tracks. Soon, it would come time for her to learn to ride, and she would do it with the very same partner with whom Pat had spent those idyllic years of his own childhood.
When Kate was on Frisky’s back, everything seemed to come together at Crofton. I would see her sitting in the saddle, her father just behind her, Kate’s hands nestled inside his, with the reins folded up in between. She would tug and tease at the reins, and in return, Frisky would obey the simplest commands.
Somehow, she seemed to know that this was Pat’s daughter on her back, and she treated her with such kindness, such simple charity, that it pulled at my heartstrings to see it. In her old age, Frisky had lost the mischievous, flighty temperament of her earlier days—but there wasn’t a thing she wouldn’t do for Pat, or in turn for little Kate.
Kate took to riding like her father and elder brother before her. She was a natural, and soon she would join Paul and Pat at the local equestrian events and paper chases. Seeing her in Frisky’s saddle, I often thought back to that cheeky little pony Ticky and how he had put me off horses when I was a girl. I wondered what I might have been like if I had had the same childhood as Pat, running wild on a Rhodesian farm with a beloved horse underneath me.
One morning, Pat and I saddled up Frisky and three other horses and set out with Jay and Kate to check the fences around the farm. The ride was long, and the sun was blistering overhead. As we approached the Munwa River, Jay reined in and gestured for Kate to do the same. They were looking, almost longingly, at the crystal waters. Jay gave me the same pleading look I’d seen before.
“Can we go for a swim?”
The horses, too, looked as if they needed a rest, so we dismounted and Pat held the reins of all the horses while I helped Jay and Kate undress.
As the children were preparing to run into the waters, Pat loosened his hold on the reins—but Frisky, covered in a sheen of glistening sweat, only looked nervously at the riverbank, refusing to go near. Pat and I exchanged a curious look and no sooner had we done so than Frisky released a desperate whinny and began to stamp her feet.
Pat, as he had done ever since he was a young boy, put his arms around Frisky, patting her neck and rubbing her flank, whispering to her so that she might calm down. Yet, no matter how much he consoled her, Frisky could not be calmed. As Jay and Kate scrambled out of their socks and headed for the water, she picked up her front hooves and smashed them back down. There was something desperate, almost pleading, rolling in the back of her throat.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 3
