The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  The sound of the maid clanging pots in the lean-to kitchen roused her and she looked about from where she sal in the corner of her brick dining room, lit by the one flickering candle on the dining table. She dreaded to think what her husband would say if he could see her now—his proud pioneer wife, drenched and despondent, the debris of her welcome dinner party spread before her, wincing at the sound of hyenas howling on the outskirts of town.

  ♦

  Mrs Cole had been the first European wife to enter Mashonaland. Mr Cole had sent for her from England as soon as Rhodes lifted the embargo on women in 1891. He met her and his two-year-old daughter at Fort Tuli with two mules and a battered old ox wagon, in which he took them a further 400 miles into the country to Salisbury. The wet season had not longed passed, and the journey was laborious and stilted as a result, with whole sections of the track simply washed away or turned into impassable mud. But Mrs Cole loved her husband, and she was pleased to see him again, and was even more pleased for him to be with their daughter, Anne. It was the first time he had seen her since her birth. Mrs Cole remembered with some irritation how her husband had departed for Africa again only days after she was born, just staying long enough to impose a name upon the child and to display a hint of dissatisfaction that she wasn’t a boy. On that journey, however, she’d watched him grow familiar with Anne. At first he handled her as he might a lion cub, with interest and slight trepidation, but over the nights that followed Mrs Cole observed her husband’s manner change towards their daughter. After the first week of their journey she often found him cradling her on his lap by the camp fire at night, telling her about the wonderful life of farms, crops, lakes and animals he would build for her in their new country. Perhaps Mrs Cole was seduced by these night-time tales her husband told, or perhaps she had lent too much credence to the picture painted of Rhodes’ blossoming young country at home in London. Whatever the reason, she could not help but feel the emptying of disappointment when they finally rounded a small kopje three weeks later and Mr Cole proclaimed, ‘There she is! Fort Salisbury, our capital!’

  She had followed the line of her husband’s finger, and at first thought she must be looking at the wrong part of the landscape. But there was nothing else to see. Just what her husband proudly pointed at: a line of tin shacks, their roofs glaring in the sun and a scattering of pole-and-dagga huts, cut through by a swamp that divided them from another, smaller scattering of huts. There were no other permanent buildings, just groupings of canvas tents, more huts under construction and collections of wagons covered with buck-sails. She had been travelling for over two months to get to this place, this town which promised so much on the map, its letters not only bigger and bolder than any other town’s, but underlined too. She had endured the concern of her mother when she told her she was leaving for Africa and the scorn of her mother-in-law when she expressed her doubts. She had travelled through storms at sea and through hundreds of miles of inhospitable country, all with her young daughter in her arms. She had lain awake at night, in ships’ berths and in the rocking wagon, dreaming of when the travelling would stop, of when they would reach their new life. And this was it. A frontier outpost of shacks and huts, the centre of their new world.

  As Mr Cole chivvied the mules before them and proudly rode his family into town, men appeared to greet them, their moustaches and beards trimmed, pulling on their best jackets in honour of their arrival. A woman had come to live among them, and with her, like Eve to Adam, she brought the hopes of new lives, companionship and a civilising influence. The small crowd threw their slouch hats in the air and cheered as the wagon drew up beside a long rectangular hut, larger than the others. It looked like a cattle shed but a newly varnished wooden sign told her it was the town’s police station. Mrs Cole smiled down at the crowd, holding Anne tighter than ever to her bosom and feeling a sharp stab of regret as she thought of her home in London, small and neat with furnishings, a world of culture outside its door.

  That night, for the first time since their reunion in Africa, Mr Cole made brief and awkward love to his wife on a bed of sacking cloth, then slept a deep sleep while she lay awake once more, listening to the crack and swallow of the frogs in the swamp and wondering what she had done. But she did not cry, not once. Instead she woke the next morning and rose to the challenges of her new home. She set about making curtains out of old wagon canvases, instructed the cook and the maid on the times for lunch and dinner, and rearranged the basic out-house kitchen. The next day she got the boy Marufu to help her start digging a vegetable garden at the back of the two-room pole-and-dagga house that was now hers to call her own.

  Many of the plans and projects she embarked on in that first week were to frustrate her in the months to come. The heavy curtains lessened the already slight breeze that the house badly needed and gave the rats another surface to climb. Both the cook and the maid left the same night after they had again been told that what they did was wrong. Until she adapted her gardening to the local method the vegetable seeds she had brought from England were either washed away with each heavy rain or perished and died under the heat of the African sun. But she continued to support her husband in every way possible, feeling that as the first woman in the community something was expected of her. If she showed weakness, it would be a sign of failure, and no one in Salisbury would let that word be spoken let alone admitted to. So when the total population of women in Salisbury numbered just seven, it was she who gathered them together to organise the town’s inaugural dance. Despite the lack of material or clothes shops she led them in making evening dresses out of limbo, the local calico, and made do with yellow leather working boots as dancing shoes which flashed into view every time Mr Cole spun her in the Lancers.

  She cared as best she could for Anne, though secretly she dismayed to watch her daughter growing up in such a rough environment. Anne, meanwhile, took to the country better than her mother, and was happy to play in the dust with the native children until one of her parents would find her and scold her, shooing away her playmates as they picked her up and carried her inside. As she grew older Anne’s increasing ease with the country and the pioneer lifestyle fed her mother’s corresponding unease. Eventually Mrs Cole persuaded her husband to send his daughter back to England; there she would live intermittently under the care of her aunt and the stern regime of a girls’ boarding house, where she and her fellow classmates saw out their months as discarded children of the empire, waiting for the precious sea mail letters that told of their lost lives abroad. And that was when Mrs Cole eventually cried: six years after her arrival in Salisbury when she saw the wagon carrying her eight-year-old daughter shrink in the tall grass and slip away behind the kopje that stood on the edge of her restricted world.

  Until then she had withstood it all: the lion attacks at the edge of town, the drunken behaviour of the prospectors back from the bush, the ongoing struggle with the natives to understand and be understood, and even the petty attempts to maintain London society in a ramshackle town of six hundred souls. This ‘society’ came complete with the hierarchies necessary for its existence. Administration men and their wives naturally assumed themselves a step above the prospectors and farmers, and did all they could to keep themselves there. Mrs Cole knew of wives who had starved themselves for weeks, eating only bully beef so as to be able to lay on the most enviable dinner in town, if only once every two months. But the departure of her child (her only child, she and Mr Cole did not produce any more in Africa, and she was not surprised, her womb felt as arid as the summer veld) was the trial that eventually broke the cast of her perfect pioneer womanhood. She did not, however, allow Mr Cole to see her cry, composing herself until she had walked around the back of the house to the new lean-to kitchen she had built. And it was in here, sitting on a sack of mealie meal with the white ants crawling over her broken yellow boots, that she finally wept. The tears came from six years deep, and each sob felt as though her soul was turning inside out. With the tears, somet
hing else left her as well that morning. Whatever it was that had been holding her up from the inside began to dismantle and fragment, as if she had been carrying a fragile egg within her which now was breaking, cracked as it was by the leaving of her only daughter.

  So as Fort Salisbury grew and assembled itself around her, as her own house expanded from mud hut to wood then brick, Mrs Cole did the opposite. As the dirt tracks became tar macadam roads, so the lines of communication with her husband disintegrated. With every new brick building and every new public office that asserted their civilisation a step further into the veld, she felt the veld counterattack in her, edging itself an inch further towards her heart. It was a sensation that was exacerbated by her husband, who disapproved of this change in his wife. Maybe he didn’t realise that he held the power to stem this flow away from herself. His kindness, his love, that she now had to convince herself had once existed, would have been enough to bring her back. But instead, he grew more distant, throwing himself even more into his work in Dr Jameson’s administration and the foundations of Salisbury, which continued to grow towards the promise of its name just as Mrs Cole continued to shrink from the promise of hers.

  And that is why she was disappointed tonight. Because it had been the first night in such a long time that she had felt herself abate this movement away from herself. It had been the first time for months and maybe even years that she had felt that movement reverse, felt herself wake and move again towards the Mrs Cole she recognised in her memories. She was not disappointed because the evening had gone badly, but rather because it had gone well, and because now it had simply gone. Passed. She wanted it and that feeling back.

  She had to acknowledge, also, that there had been anticipation beyond just the meal itself, and the relief it offered from her boredom. There had also been the anticipation of meeting Father Cripps. Over the last few months she had heard various reports about the young priest. He was up in Umtali living at a mission, undertaking language training while assisting the Anglican priest there. The opinions and views of him that trickled in with travellers coming in from the east were varied and confusing. That there were any at all was a mark of the man. Few would have much interest in another missionary picking their way through the country, but Cripps had attracted attention, and that in itself was interesting. Many of the men were impressed by him when they met him. He was a straight talker, and a physical man, like them. He seemed to be a suitable church man for the country, and they admired the distance and speed of the treks he undertook through the country of the Eastern Highlands. But then others thought him a trouble-maker, a liberal and a negrophile who let his ideas obscure the realities before his eyes. He was talented with the Africans, but too lenient. They thought he would soon be hoodwinked by the wily Shona. And then there had been the dispute with some farmers outside the town. Cripps and another elderly missionary at St Faith’s mission, Rusape, had been accused of moving the boundary pegs of a farmer’s land, little by little, over a period of nights. When he was confronted by the farmer, Father Cripps had openly admitted to moving the pegs, claiming the farmer was encroaching on land reserved for the natives. It was this story particularly that had caused a stir in the rumours and gossip that blew between the settlements like a trade wind. Nobody wanted an interfering missionary in their territory. For her part, Mrs Cole found the image of two priests moving land pegs under the cover of darkness an amusing one. But the story had caught somewhere deeper in her as well, as if a long-buried concern had been accidentally snagged and disturbed.

  The third view of Father Cripps that had excited her curiosity did not come from general gossip or opinion, but from one person, a woman. She was the wife of a travelling doctor who had met Cripps up country when he was on one of his treks. While her husband was setting up his stall in the high street, she recounted quite openly to Mrs Cole over tea in the hotel (a long open-fronted shack with a bar) the deep impression that Cripps had made on her. She spoke about his eyes a great deal and left Mrs Cole in no doubt that for a woman, beyond any other reason, Cripps was a man worth meeting.

  ♦

  His arrival was quieter than she had expected, though why it should have been any other way she couldn’t think. Maybe anticipation had led her to expect something else, a shift in the air when he entered her world, a noticeable change in her environment. But it was all the same, all so familiar. He had come in from Umtali that day by wagon, and had not long left his case at the Bishop’s lodgings when the two of them turned the corner of her house and walked up onto the wooden veranda Mr Cole had left half-finished when he departed for the war. She was sitting under the shade of the convolvulus that twined its way around the corner pillar, holding a glass of whisky and soda and reading a novel that had somehow found its way from England into her dusty outpost life. The sun was low in the sky and the light of the day had softened. She wore a red dress, her only evening dress, and a large opal pendant that her husband had given her on his first return from Africa. Out in the veld the under-murmur of twilight was rising to meet the encroaching darkness. It was her favourite time of day, and although the town had grown since her husband claimed this plot, there were still no other buildings to obscure her view. The ground beyond their house was too swampy and marshy to support the weight of foundations. She looked across it now, through a quivering cloud of flies suspended above the patchy grass and took a sip of her drink, feeling the tightening around her lower jaw that she always felt with the first touch of alcohol. And then they were there, silhouetted against the light of the dying day, the diminutive, stocky Bishop coming up to the taller man’s shoulder.

  She rose to welcome them, moving around them as she did to get the light out of her eyes, which is when she saw his, and when she realised what the doctor’s wife had meant. He looked down at her as the Bishop introduced them, and Mrs Cole looked back at him. They were blue, but she had seen blue eyes before. Her husband’s eyes were blue; but his were nothing like these. It was as if Cripps had been facing a low sun which had somehow left its evening light in his irises: an opal iridescence with flecks of fool’s gold around the pupils, floating, deep and black, adrift in their mineral waters.

  Mrs Cole had also invited the Reverend Holt and his wife, who arrived shortly after the Bishop and Cripps. She had never liked or trusted Holt, who was another missionary, but of a different breed to the Bishop or, she felt, Cripps. His work in Africa was funded by a group of religiomaniacs back in England whom Holt kept informed with a regular supply of exaggerated and skewed tales of Rhodesian life in return for his healthy income. He expressed his successes in figures: 800 Bibles distributed, 370 baptised, sixty more of those confirmed and 2,000 on the roll for mission schools. It made Mrs Cole suspicious of him, a man whose spiritual work read like balance sheets, but she could not have avoided inviting him tonight.

  They took their drinks on the veranda, Cripps taking a lime juice instead of a whisky and soda. Then they retired to the small brick dining room, where Mrs Cole’s maid and house boy served impala steaks that she had bought from a hunter just that week. To her surprise Cripps politely declined the steaks on the grounds of being a vegetarian, and accepted a hastily-cooked cob of mealie corn instead. Mrs Cole was momentarily thrown, her careful preparations shattered on the rocks of this bizarre preference, but she did take some enjoyment in the Holts’ raised eyebrows and shared disapproving glance. To follow, the maid served sweet wine and sour apples, which, Mrs Cole was relieved to see, Cripps did accept despite his earlier refusal of a drink.

  They ate, drank and the evening went as evenings like that always had done. A swing of conversation and silences, politenesses, compliments, a lot spoken, little said, and almost nothing which was not tempered by the situation. Father Cripps did not keep within these boundaries as much as the others, but he did not speak often either, and when he did it was with a soft, halting voice that did little to assert itself beyond the words that it carried. His thoughts appeared to come at him from many d
irections; he often stopped a sentence midway and jumped onto another and he peppered his speech with the phrase ‘I mean’, although he never seemed in any doubt about exactly what he meant.

  Mrs Cole observed him as they all went through the motions. He was not what she had been expecting at all. She thought him somewhat untidy; his khaki suit was crumpled and worn, and looked as though it needed a wash. He himself looked as though he needed a wash, although his clerical collar was a clean, brilliant white. Physically, he was obviously lit, and she noticed his strong neck, its mobile muscle and veins under a taut skin. And yet he did not seem at ease with his body, as if his arms and legs were just too long, and he did not know where to put them when still. The Bishop had said he was thirty-one years old, only four years younger than herself, but he could have been even younger again. His face was clean-shaven, and sometimes, when he was listening, it betrayed a youthfulness not apparent on first meeting. And he seemed shy. He was neither the trouble-maker nor the zealous priest he had been painted as, but appeared rather to be simply an earnest man who was still working things out.