I turned to Jay and Kate. They were almost at the water’s edge. Only then did I see what Frisky had seen. The dark eyes of a crocodile glimmered menacingly, just above the surface of the water.
Yelling for Pat, I hurtled down to the riverbank and grabbed Jay and Kate to drag them back. From the water, the croc looked at us, shifting its malevolent eyes.
Back at Frisky’s side, listening to her gather her composure, I shuddered.
“No swimming today,” I said.
Terrified at what might have happened, we hastily turned the horses from the river to make the ride back home, but for days afterward I could not stop recalling the look of terror in Frisky’s eyes: not that anything might happen to her, but that something terrible might befall one of our children. It is not for nothing that people say they can see keen intelligence shimmering in a horse’s eyes. If I had never seen it before, Frisky was the one to teach me that lesson: the horse sees, the horse knows, the horse cares and remembers. We think we are their guardians, but sometimes—just sometimes—they turn out to be our guardians as well.
It was a lesson we would keep coming back to throughout our lives, for reasons none of us could begin to imagine then.
The lands were cleared, plowed, and treated. The irrigation pipes stretched for long kilometers from the rivers that encircled us. The grading sheds were ready, the curing barns waiting eagerly for their first crop; the tobacco seeds were germinating in the seedbeds, waiting to be transplanted to the land.
All we needed was the rain, but the rain wouldn’t come.
Between 1993 and 1995 only fourteen inches of rain fell. The rivers disappeared, the game looked emaciated, and the waters in our neighboring Two Tree Hill Dam fell imperceptibly each day, until they were only a brown shimmer in the bottom of the basin, the dam wall standing high and exposed.
In those droughts, tomatoes were all that we had. The farm was telling us that she could do no more. They grew in the fields all year round, so all that year I was setting out after dark to sell them, running long circuits around Harare and, now, into the villages and townships, too. Along the way I could see other Zimbabweans selling tomatoes, maize, and bush fruits on the sides of the road. It did not come to this for us, but as I looked into the grading sheds and saw the poor, wilted leaves of tobacco we had managed to harvest, I wondered what we had done. Had we sacrificed our children’s future by gambling on clouds in the sky?
Those skies were endless expanses of blue, cruel in their blank simplicity. Beneath them, Crofton baked. I walked along the narrow channels between the tomato vines, lifting leaves and cupping each green fruit in my hand, turning them gently to look for signs of infestation or disease. Along the edge of the field, Pat and Frisky followed one of the trails, calling out to workers in the opposite fields. Every time I saw a mottled leaf or serrated edge showing the telltale signs of some hungry insect, I called out. Pat turned to acknowledge me. When he did not hear, I shouted louder. Here, I said. Here, and here. In silent fury, he swung from the saddle. He wanted nothing more than to ignore me, to go back to wrestling with blighted tobacco in the fields or opening another stretch of bush in the deranged belief that the rains would shortly come. Instead, he strode over to lift the same leaves I had lifted, to see the early signs of disease. He exhaled, his face breaking into a muted grin as he realized how full of fire he had been, and called over one of our workers. In minutes they were there to spray the vines.
Opening up a farm, I constantly reminded him, was not only about driving back the bush. There were smaller, more insidious enemies to beat back as well.
“I’m sorry, Pat. There’s nothing else for it. It really would be the kindest thing.”
We stood in the garden of Crofton farmhouse. Dave, one of our local vets, crouched beside me. In front of us, the little foal Deja Vu, only recently born to Paul’s mare Imprevu, lay with her head in ten-year-old Kate’s lap.
“It’s deep, Dave,” I said, “but isn’t there anything you could do?”
“With an injury like this, it’s often better to put them to put them to sleep,” Dave said.
Pat bristled. “No, David. Let’s give her a chance and see.”
As the vet said his good-byes, promising to come back if we needed him, Kate nuzzled Deja Vu. The little foal’s eyes revolved in their orbits and fixed on her. For a moment, the foal seemed to want to stand. Then, realizing the pain in her leg was too great, she simply laid her head back down.
She had been in the paddock with her mother when she had become entangled in a length of wire fence. By the time her panic had roused the attention of a passing worker, she had struggled against the wire so much that it had tightened around her front leg, cutting her so that the bone was exposed. When Pat arrived, Deja Vu was in a weak, depleted state. Her mother stood guard over the trapped foal, and when Pat got near, it was to find the foal spent from her exertions, torn muscle glistening where the wire constricted her leg.
After cutting her free, Pat had carried the tiny foal into the garden at Crofton, where Kate attentively lay down with her. When I called for the vet, I already knew what he would say. Deja Vu, I thought as I put down the phone, didn’t stand a chance.
Back in the garden, I saw Pat crouching over the ailing foal, dressing the wound.
“You wouldn’t let him, would you, Dad?”
“Sometimes it is the kindest thing.” Pat stroked the little foal’s head. “But not this time, Kate. Not for this little thing . . .”
“What do we do for her?”
Pat was silent for only a second. “We don’t give up on her,” he said. “You don’t give up on her, Kate. The bone isn’t broken. She’ll walk again. But the cut’s deep. Her leg’s torn up. She’ll get infected. She’ll get a fever. She’ll need us. Need you.”
Kate’s eyes were open wide, but her arm lay along the length of Deja Vu’s back. They both seemed so tiny together, shadowed by the mango tree.
“Dad,” she whispered with a defiance I had never heard in her voice, “where do we start?”
I opened the cupboard at the top of the stairs. Two eyes glimmered out, a round, feathered face looming in the darkness.
I simply placed the folded sheets inside and closed the cupboard. This wasn’t the first time that one of Jay’s birds had found its way into one of the cupboards and decided to take up residence there. In fact, I was so used to seeing one of his hawks or owls lurking in some crevice at Crofton that I barely registered any surprise. Ours, you see, was not just a family home; it was positively a zoo as well, and Jay was in love with birds.
“It’s your turn to take Jay out tonight,” said Pat, tramping up the stairs behind me.
As I followed Pat into our bedroom, I caught sight of another pair of eyes, these hidden behind Jay’s long blond mop, shining at me from the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t yet dark, and our thirteen-year-old son was already waiting. He had become a keen falconer since starting high school, and he plagued us incessantly to take him and his falcon, Buffy, out on night drives so that he could practice hunting with her. Buffy only hunted at night, and without this practice Jay was apt to become disgruntled, mischievous, and more taciturn than ever. And Pat or I had to go with them. But I really didn’t want to go out tonight.
I snatched up a deck of cards.
“I’ll play you for it.”
When we were at loggerheads like this, sometimes there was nothing for it but to play a hand of cards. The one who pitched the high card would get to sleep in the warm comfort of our bed, while the loser would have to drive Jay and Buffy out into the bush to go hunting. Sensing no other way out, Pat nodded.
I cut the deck and cut it again. I passed it to Pat, who shuffled it in his big hands. He cut it, I recut it, he cut it again, then he fanned it out and offered it up.
“Just deal it,” I said. The tension was unbearable.
Pat picked a card from the top of the deck: the seven of hearts. My hand hovered over the deck. I cut it again and li
fted the top card.
The three of spades.
“Sorry, darling,” Pat said.
Two hours later, I set out behind the wheel of our truck, swinging out of Crofton and up into the bush. The night was close around us, the stars hanging high above the mfuti and msasa. In the back of the truck, Jay stood upright, the falcon blinkered and leashed to his wrist. Eagerly, he urged me on.
I could never resent these midnight trips—Jay had never been a boy suited to school like his brother, and it was only out here in the bush that he had found real confidence—but I had been awake for eighteen hours already. At a high ridge Jay unleashed Buffy; she turned and dived in the headlights of the truck, her talons sinking into one of the tiny nightjars that made their home here.
Jay looked at me. “Let’s go higher.”
“Darling, aren’t we finished yet?”
Jay frowned. “I think we should go higher.”
This, I thought, must have been how Patrick’s father used to feel.
Though Pat refused to admit it, Jay had certainly inherited his demanding stubbornness from the Retzlaff side of the family. As a boy, Pat had built up a flock of more than one thousand chickens. He had known every last one of them by name, kept meticulous records, and even co-opted several of his father’s workers to oversee the chicken project while he was away at school. The young Patrick Retzlaff would run his father ragged, demanding feed and materials for the chickens at every available opportunity, and, over the years, cost the family a small fortune in the process.
Whenever Pat left for boarding school, the farm would breathe a sigh of relief not to be under his tyrannical chicken gaze for a few weeks. Yet, one day, they made a mistake that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. While Pat was away, they decided to slaughter a few chickens for the deep freeze, convinced that, upon his return, Pat would never know. The cook was dispatched with a large ax and selected a few of the plumpest specimens. Grisly business done, he returned with a brace of big birds for a banquet.
A few months later, Pat returned home for the school holidays and headed straight to the chicken house. In minutes, he had zoned in on the missing chickens and promptly thundered into the farmhouse to confront his father. The young Pat was so distraught that, at last, his father had to confess: son, he intoned with an air of genuine solemnity, they have been eaten.
It was the very last time that anybody touched any of Pat’s chickens.
Tonight, at the wheel of the car, I opened my eyes, realizing too late I had fallen asleep. The moon hung, beached in a reef of cloud, above the line of the bush, and I was thankful I had not driven us both off the road.
“Darling, are we finished yet?”
“Just once more,” Jay insisted, feeding a scrap of some suspicious meat to Buffy.
I could have sworn her eyes turned on me with a keen, knowing air.
“Once more,” I insisted. I knew it would mean at least three more flights.
It was hours later when I drove the truck back into Crofton, heavy bags under my eyes. I roused Jay, who had fallen asleep, careful to avoid Buffy, who pierced me with her stare.
We were tramping past the stables where Frisky slept when I saw Pat striding out of the darkness between the barns. The tomatoes were packed, the trucks loaded, and he looked exhausted.
“Just an hour until you have to deliver these tomatoes, darling,” he said.
I could have killed that man and his animal genes.
From Crofton’s window I watched Kate. She had spent the morning doting on Deja Vu. The foal’s leg was healing only slowly, for infection kept setting in, reopening the wound. Now, the wound was dressed and she was gamboling in the garden. Her scarred leg was stiff and she would always carry it heavily, but the sparkle in the young foal’s eyes told me she did not mind, and the sparkle in my daughter’s told me it had all been worth it.
As an exhausted Deja Vu settled in the garden to sleep, Kate sat in the shadow of the mango tree with her schoolwork spread around. Oliver, our gardener, kept calling to her from where he was working on the edges of the garden, and each time, Kate returned his call with a smile that, like Pat’s, took over her face.
When I looked up next, her schoolwork was abandoned, loose pages caught up by the wind and only rescued from disappearing into the bush by Oliver’s quickly flicking pitchfork. Now Kate was up in the leaves of the mango, hauling herself from branch to branch with the agility of any of the monkeys that made daring raids on Crofton to take the tree’s fruit.
I remembered standing in this same place only days after we came to Crofton, watching as Paul and Jay swung from the same branches. That day, Kate stood beneath, marveling at her brothers, forbidden herself from following. Now she could climb faster and higher than they ever would. That was the thing about Kate: she saw what braveries her brothers could accomplish, and she always went one better.
In the highest branches, she stopped dead. Then, from the corner of Crofton, came Jay and his friend Henry, the son of a neighboring farmer. Both of them were holding their pellet guns.
In a sudden scramble of limbs, Kate jumped down from the tree just as Jay and Henry were disappearing into the first fringe of the bush. Quickly, she made to follow.
From the kitchen window, I watched her go. Jay, I knew, was going to be furious. I had seen her do this before. Jay and his friend were going to take potshots at birds in the bush, but it distressed Kate so much that she simply had to do something about it. Rather than run and hide, she had taken to sabotaging their hunts by frightening off the birds they were stalking. She would clap her hands and sing loud songs—and it had been a long time since Jay had proudly brought back a feathery carcass to Crofton farmhouse.
Kate followed him from deepest gully to highest ridge, along winding game trails and farm tracks, down to the tall reeds on the shores of Two Tree Hill Dam and up along the rivers that held our home in their cradle. With every step that she took, she clapped her hands wildly, oblivious to her brother’s orders, his threats, his pleading looks. Every time she clapped her hands, the birds on which Jay had trained his pellet gun took off, a chaos of flapping wings and cries of alarm.
In this way, Jay was deprived time and again of his kills. At dusk, he tramped back into Crofton, dejected, his pellet gun still full. When he threw it down in disgust, Kate clapped again.
“Don’t worry, Jay. If Dad found you, you know what you’d have to do . . .”
Jay had been under strict orders ever since he unwrapped his prized pellet gun that he could shoot a bird only if he planned to eat it.
Jay looked at Kate.
“You’re just jealous,” he said, “that you can’t shoot, too.”
But when they lined up tin cans in the garden and took potshots at them, Kate won every time.
She took after her mother, you see.
In later years, Frisky began to wither. Pat had never known her true age, but the lines deepened in her face, she lost weight that she would never regain, and when she and Pat set out across the farm, driving what few cattle we had left into their crush for dipping or simply reliving the days of their youth, she lived up to her name less and less often. No longer was she frisky; now, she was stately, quiet, reserved. A gentle horse in her dotage, slowly winding down.
In 1998, she left the paddocks and moved into our garden. She liked to lie down on the grass, and Kate nestled contentedly between her legs, our daughter and our horse breathing in unison. She ate from our hands but was hidden away when guests came to Crofton. She was too old, now, skin and bones. Questions were asked when those who did not know her laid eyes on her: wouldn’t her passing, they wondered, be considered a kindness?
It would not be the first time Pat had lifted his gun to shoot an old friend. Children on farms learn, very early on, that death is a part of life. Livestock are culled, poachers’ dogs are shot, horses with tumors and disease might need their master’s mercy. But, every evening, Pat went into our garden to put his arms around his o
ldest friend, and I knew he would not, could not do it. Frisky just grew older and older. Neither one of them would let go.
Pat was away from the farm on business when I stood in the kitchen window and saw Frisky lying in the shadow of the mango tree, her chest barely rising or falling. I left what I was doing and went out to see her. Kate and Jay followed, but instinctively they knew and hung at a distance. For the briefest moment, Frisky lifted her head, eyes rolling as if to search Pat out; then she laid her head down, and the only movement was the twitching of her nostrils. I sat with her for hours, her head in my lap, teasing her ears, whispering to her. I knew there was no coming back; her time had come. Her breathing grew low and ragged. It slowed. Then it was no more.
Kate and Jay sat with her for the longest time, but Pat would not be back until after dark. I was putting Kate to bed when I heard the telltale stutter of an engine that told me he had returned. I left Kate half tucked in and went to meet him as he climbed out of the car.
Hanging above us, in a frame of lantern light, Kate watched from behind the bedroom curtains. Perhaps she had that old childhood terror of seeing your parents crumple, revealing themselves as mere mortals. She was watching, but she did not want to see.
I told Pat that Frisky was gone and he did not breathe a word.
When he went to her, Oliver and some of the other workers were trying to lift her from where she had lain. One by one, Pat waved them away. And then, almost thirty years after she first came cantering into his life, Pat knelt down beside her and put his arms around her for the final time.
He did not come to bed until late that night. He laid Frisky in the ground himself, gave her to Crofton. It is what she would have wanted.
The morning after Frisky left us, I woke early to find that the bed beside me was empty. Reeling downstairs and out into the morning sun, I saw Pat and Kate tending to Deja Vu at the bottom of the garden. Her leg was healed now, and Kate led her gently up and down on a lead rope. Her dark eyes glimmered.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 4
