Even so, nothing could prepare us for what we would find on the day we went back to Two Tree and Crofton.
As quickly as the mobs came, they moved on.
A few weeks after the looting had stopped, I received a call from the Commercial Farmers’ Union, telling us that the crowds were gone and that, though we must be careful, it was now safe to return to Crofton and assess the damages. On Palmerston, Pat and I woke early and sat silently at breakfast. The day ahead loomed long and large. Neither of us wanted to know what we might find.
We drove north from Palmerston, stopping at Anchorage Farm to collect Carol Johnson on the way. Though I was glad she was there, not even Carol’s joie de vivre could distract us from the day ahead. We banked left off the highway, into familiar fields of grain. The same sun beat down, and the same wind moved over the fields, but nothing was the same or ever would be again.
We reached Two Tree first. From a distance we could see the farmhouse sitting on the hill above. Pat nosed the truck around to climb the track to the farm gates. As I looked up at the facade of the house, I remembered the snatches we heard across the radio: the shots fired, Tertia taking the children deep into the house to lock the doors and wait for death. What had happened on that day hung across Two Tree like a pall.
“It’s the work of the Antichrist,” Carol whispered, stepping out of the car beside me.
Unlike Carol, I had never believed strongly in gods and hells, but perhaps she was right.
Only half a building loomed above us. The rest was gone, gutted. All that remained was a shell. Two Tree’s farmhouse no longer had a roof, any windows, any window frames. We began to cross the yard, making for the open maw of the house, but momentarily I was distracted by a stirring of movement in the corner of my eye. As Pat and Carol ventured through the blackness of the missing doorway, I felt myself drawn to the shell of a motorcycle propped against the far side of the yard. Tied to the chassis with string, three tiny puppies huddled together. I bent down, reached out my hand.
They were the only farm pets we were to find living on Two Tree that day.
At the side of the house, we found the stains where Charl’s Boerboel had been shot dead. As Carol took photographs of the nothingness left behind, Pat and I drifted on. And there, behind the house in the dam paddock, we caught sight of Grey, the half-Arabian.
His eyes rolled when he saw us, as if to say: Where have you been? Pat approached gently, in case he had been spooked by the mob, but all seemed well. After the pictures we had seen of other farm horses doused in gas and set alight, we could hardly understand. Pat looked over each of the Two Tree horses in turn, but none had been hamstrung or axed. After making certain that they had access to water and good grazing, we gathered again outside the farmhouse.
“Let’s get it done,” said Pat.
Collecting the puppies, we climbed back in the truck to make the solemn drive to Crofton. Along the way, we looked down on the dam, its waters as clear and glittering as they had always been.
Even up close, Crofton was unrecognizable. We climbed out of the truck beneath the same mango tree under which Kate had climbed out all those years ago, but the tree itself was the only familiar thing to which we could cling.
This was not a home. All that was left of Crofton was the walls, and even these were soon to be pillaged, our old lives torn down brick by brick to build the huts of settlers out in the bush. Everything else had been ruined, ransacked, or stolen. As Pat went to find Deja Vu, Imprevu, Toffee, and the rest, Carol and I dared to venture through the empty doorway. No roof hung over our heads. No windows sat in the walls.
With the stark memory of the way the Geldenhuyses’ pets had been butchered, Carol and I moved from room to empty room, calling out for our old housecat, Kitty. Our voices echoed in empty chambers; our footsteps resounded dully from bare floors. The cold light of day spilled in through the place where our roof used to be, illuminating nothing: only Carol and me, standing in the place that had once been a home.
I heard a metallic ring and looked down to see a single object skittering across the naked stone. When it settled, I saw a napkin ring with a single word etched into it: Kate. I lifted it and marveled at it in the intruding light. It was all that was left.
At the window of what had once been our kitchen, I stopped. Looking through a frame of ragged brick, I saw my son Paul’s old white car overturned and destroyed by fire. I think it was the waste that made me choke. If these “war vets” had stolen the car, perhaps I could have understood. That they hated us enough for such wanton destruction, I could barely comprehend. I wandered from one room to the next, my fingers trailing the places where my beloved family photographs had once hung. I heard the ghosts of the children’s voices and the spirits of dogs barking as they played on the lawn.
At last, I found the place where our shelves had once stood, lined with albums of old photographs. Only days before, a trunk had sat in front, filled to the brim with bundles of Paul’s and Jay’s and Kate’s school reports and the letters they had so regularly sent home from school. Now, in front of my feet, there was nothing. Every photo, every keepsake, every piece of our lives had been taken.
From outside, I heard Pat calling my name. For a moment, I was in a daze. I held the napkin ring close to my heart.
Carol and I followed the sounds of Pat’s voice, retracing our steps through the barren halls. There, outside, Pat crouched over the mangled mess that was all that was left of Kitty. A shotgun had opened her side. Spent cartridges littered the garden.
Beyond Pat, two of our domestic workers stood, heads bowed. Our cook, Future, and our gardener, Oliver, could not meet my eyes.
“They slaughtered all the chickens,” Pat said, lifting Kitty from the ground. “Stripped the gardens, too. The lemon trees . . .”
At this, Oliver finally looked up. He opened his lips to speak, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. In the end, Pat had to explain.
“They took them off,” he began. “Rounded up all the laborers and dragged them to their pungwe . . .”
I had heard stories of the same. If the war vets could not coerce a farm’s labor force into joining them—and more often than not, they could not; Mugabe had not foreseen how loyal farm workers would remain to their farms—they would, instead, corral them and force them into meetings where they would be made to dance and sing songs for days, without food or sleep. Looking at Oliver and Future now, I could see that they had done all that they could; their eyes burned with fear and exhaustion.
“Boss,” Oliver tentatively began. “I turned out the horses, boss.”
Pat was still crouching over what was left of Kitty, but now his eyes revolved to look at Oliver. For the first time, mirroring Pat’s own expression, the corners of Oliver’s lips twitched.
“Where?”
We followed Oliver along the trail that dipped down behind Crofton, in the opposite direction from Two Tree.
“There,” said Oliver.
On the edge of the field stood Deja Vu. Her head was hanging low to graze, but as we stood and watched her, she lifted her eyes to return the gaze.
I took two faltering steps, but Deja Vu must have sensed the urgency in the way that I moved, and her ears turned, as if sensing danger. After that, I moved more cautiously. When we reached her, Pat ran his hands up and down her flanks, checking her for injuries.
“They didn’t touch her,” he said, almost bewildered.
There had been horrific brutalities against horses on farms we had heard about, but Deja Vu appeared untouched. Farm horses were not being butchered for meat, the fate of so much livestock lost in the land invasions, but only for sport, to incite and inspire hate in the farmers. I knew what the men who had come onto Crofton were capable of—the evidence was spread, in blood red, across the steps of our home; the only reason they had not done the same to Deja Vu, it seemed, was that she had been cut loose and was too difficult to catch.
“Bring a halter.”
Oliver had managed to save some of our horse gear as well, and he rushed to come back with a halter in hand. After Pat had fitted it to Deja Vu, we led her back to the ruined farm. Horses know the world by sight much more than they do smell and sound, and there seemed to be confusion in her eyes. She considered what had become of Crofton and seemed to have little idea where she was.
In the stables, some of our other horse gear had survived. Pat watered Deja Vu and, certain now that she was in good health, saddled her up.
“Imprevu and the rest have to be out there.”
Pat and Deja Vu disappeared along the trails, while Oliver, Carol, and I remained at Crofton, trying to see if anything could be salvaged from our old life. Carol’s ride arrived to take her back to Anchorage farm. She hugged me tight, knowing that their days on their beautiful farm were numbered, and I could feel her despair. Pat returned an hour later, followed by Paul’s horse Imprevu, wearing a halter and lead rope. Like her daughter, Imprevu did not seem to have sustained any injuries during the attack.
“She was down by the dam. The others are there, too . . .”
Though Imprevu rarely took to a rider that was not our son, we saddled her up, and, somehow, she let me onto her back and nuzzled my hand reassuringly. Together, Pat and I returned to the bush path, taking with us more lead ropes and halters to fit the horses.
We found our other horses grazing along the edge of the trail, the bush climbing high on one side of them, with the glittering waters of the dam hanging in the distance behind. They did not spook or scatter at our approach. I urged Imprevu forward and we rode past them, while Pat reined Deja Vu down in front. With the horses corralled like that, we climbed down to fit halters and led them in procession back to Crofton, where Oliver could look after them until we could move them on.
“Come on,” said Pat. “There’s nothing here for us now.”
Back at Palmerston, Paul was waiting. As we climbed out of the car, I did not know how I would tell him of all the things we had seen. I hoped he would never have to see them.
“It’s coming here, too, isn’t it, Pat?” I said. “There’s nowhere it isn’t coming.”
Pat looked at me, but he did not want to reply.
Chapter 6
I WAS IN the office at Palmerston Estates when I knew that something was wrong. Perhaps Pat was too engrossed in his work to notice, but through the walls I heard the rumbling of a car engine. When I looked up, I could see a black car winding its way up the farm track.
In front of the farmhouse, the car ground to a halt. The engine died. A single figure emerged, quickly joined by three more men. The driver was dressed in the uniform of the Zimbabwean Air Force. He held himself at the side of the car for a second; then he turned, and his eyes fell on mine through the window.
He strode toward us, and the three other men approached in his wake. The one closest to him, sinewy and lean, was dressed in a slick suit, and I felt certain that he belonged to the CIO, the Central Intelligence Organisation—nothing less, I knew, than Mugabe’s secret police.
My eyes flitted between Pat, his head still buried in his work, and the advancing figures.
I decided to step out of the door.
In front of the farmhouse, the four men enveloped me in a broad semicircle. It was the driver who spoke first, his shoulders rising and falling beneath the big pads of his air force uniform.
“We’ll need to see the maps,” he began.
Silence lingered between us. I tried to see, in the corner of my eye, where the farm workers were, but all around me was stillness. Paul was somewhere on the farm, but I had no idea where. There was only me and, in the office, Pat, obliviously hunkered over his books.
“Maps?” I ventured.
The CIO man shuffled from foot to foot, but it was the air force officer’s eyes that remained fixed on my own.
“Where,” he said, “are the borders of the farm?”
“It isn’t my farm,” I began.
At this, the air force officer’s eyes seemed to glow. “No, it is not—”
“We’re leasing it,” I interjected, knowing what that strange inflection in his voice meant. “We don’t have maps.”
After a few chilling moments, the air force officer broke away and paced around the farmhouse yard, looking out over the fields.
“What are you irrigating here?”
My reply stuck in my throat. I knew exactly why he was asking the question; he was weighing the farm up, thinking about what might be done with Palmerston Estates once it was his.
“Tomatoes,” I finally breathed. “Paprika.”
“You do well with tomatoes and paprika.”
He had a withering look in his eyes, and I understood, at last: I was a mouse in a trap, and he was playing with me. He began to ask more questions about our work on the farm: the extent of our irrigation system; how we rotated the crops; what our labor was like and how much turnover we made each season. They seemed to stand closer to me now, the semicircle closing in to trap me. Unable to answer their flurry of questions, I risked a glance back, over my shoulder, at the farmhouse and the office inside.
I didn’t seem to have any other choice.
As soon as I told them I would take them to Pat, they seemed to lighten. Even so, as I led them to the office, I registered the looks they shared and had the unshakeable feeling that even though it was they who were following me, it was I who was walking into danger.
In the office, Pat was waiting. As I pushed through the door, he acknowledged me with a mutter, a gentle exhalation of breath. I hovered there, knowing it could not last.
He looked up. I have often imagined what it must have looked like to him, me standing there, dwarfed by four of Mugabe’s men. He seemed to take it in with one sweeping look. He barely moved.
I thought I could see every muscle and sinew in his body tense, up and down his arms, his face, his neck.
He was opening his lips to speak when the air force officer pushed bodily past me. In three strides he had crossed the room. Trapped in his seat, Pat froze—but it was not in fear. I saw him level his hands on the desk, his fingers straining. After all these years, I knew the signs: he was trying to restrain himself.
“Where,” the air force officer barked, “are the boundaries of the farm?”
Pat breathed, long and slow.
“Why,” he began, “would you need to know that?”
“I know your kind,” the air force officer went on. “You think because you sit on this land, because you have your house and your crops, that it’s yours. You don’t dare think who this land really belongs to.” He stopped. “Tell me, who do you think owns this land?”
“We lease it from—”
“This land,” the air force officer uttered, lifting his forefinger to stab it at Pat’s chest, “belonged to my forefathers—”
In an instant, Pat’s grip on the desk disappeared. He threw himself up and out of his seat. The only thing separating him from the officer was the desk. His face grew purple.
He brought his hand up, curling it into a fist. In the office, everything seemed to slow. I took a step forward, opening my mouth to cry out, but I was too late. Pat brought his closed fist down on the desk with a reverberating thud. I thought I could hear the bones in his hand crunch.
“We’ve had enough,” Pat thundered, his voice hoarse with rage. “Had enough of you, everyone like you . . .”
On the other side of the desk, the air force officer seemed to back off. I saw it all written on Pat’s face: the day he and Jay had been shot at from high in the bush; Dave Stevens and all the other terrorized farmers whose stories we had seen and heard; the images of butchered family pets, of horses doused in gas and set alight. It poured out of him. He had been holding it in too long.
“Don’t you understand?” Pat seethed. “Are you really too blind to see what you’re doing to this country?” He checked himself, fixed his eyes on the officer. “To my country?” he went on. “I’m sick of being t
reated like this. We—all of us—are sick of being treated like this.”
The men around me closed ranks. Pat lifted his closed fist, and, in the doorway, I could barely catch a breath. I tried to catch his eye, to plead with him to stop. Once, I had loved him for this, his fire, his willingness to walk into a fight when he could just as easily have walked away. Now there were no words to stop him. Cold fear gripped my stomach. I understood now: We were going to die. Our names and bloodied pictures would be seen across the nation in the evening news and, like those murdered farmers who had gone before us, we would leave our children to face this new, corrupted world alone. Paul and Jay and Kate would have to pick up the phone and hear the world-shattering news: their parents were gone, and never coming back.
At the desk in front of Pat, the air force officer turned around. If I had any resolve left, it evaporated. My body gave up. Now stuck between the three other men, I crumpled to the ground, my legs refusing to function. I lay there between them and felt the first flush of warmth between my legs. I did not move as the pool spread around me, soaking me and everything I wore.
I did not fully understand when the footsteps marched past me. I lay prostrate, eyes half-closed, body curled up, as the air force officer stepped over me and out of the office. One after another, his henchmen followed, until only the CIO officer was left. As he departed, he crouched at my side, his big, expressive eyes level with mine.
“You must watch your husband,” he said. “Otherwise, he will be no more.”
Whether he meant it as warning or threat, I did not know. He stepped over me, and then only Pat and I remained.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 8
