by Owen Sheers
Mrs Cole sensed a mothering instinct rise in her when she thought of him like this. Or maybe it was another instinct, because she still saw, despite his shyness and his dishevelled appearance, what the doctor’s wife had also noticed in him. A certain magnetism, an interest about him that held the eye, unlike someone like Holt, whom the eye slid off as easily as if he were just another stone on the ground. She also found an attractiveness in his serious nature that could suddenly break to a smile and laughter, in the conviction of what he said, and of course in his eyes, which seemed to speak of a longer life than he could possibly have yet lived. He was obviously close to the Bishop, and this friendship was in itself another attractive quality. Mrs Cole liked the gruff little Bishop, and she liked the way the two men worked together, almost like a father and son, with an unspoken understanding passing between them even when they were silent, listening to Reverend Holt recite his numbers game.
Above all, though, Mrs Cole liked Father Cripps because she liked herself when she talked to him. Once she had broken through his shell of reticence they had talked quite freely, and she found his views refreshing. There was none of the anxious arrogance she had encountered in other missionaries, the conviction that godliness was won through a white man’s way of life, and all the taxes that went with it. He seemed new, yet open to Africa, and especially open to her people. Mrs Cole found herself engaging parts of her mind that seemed stubborn and rusted with misuse. He made her think, and talk, and he listened to her. It was something a man had not done with her for such a long time, and for the first time in years she recognised herself again.
And that is why she was disappointed. That is why she had stood outside her house and looked out into the darkness long after they had all left, and why she stayed there as the clouds opened and brought the rain, sheeting down over the tin roofs of Salisbury. Not because the evening she had looked forward to and prepared for was over. Not because she would miss the Bishop or Father Cripps, or the general company. But because Cripps had made her recognise herself once more, and unless she could retain that feeling, she would miss that woman. She had enjoyed having her back.
∨ The Dust Diaries ∧
3 JANUARY 1904
Enkeldoorn Charter District, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia
Arthur watched from a distance as the young Mashona man gathered the loose skin of the bull’s throat. He pulled it taut with one hand while firmly pressing a thin-bladed knife into the hard hide and muscle of the animal’s neck with the other. As he did this he bent close to where the knife’s point made contact with the skin, his face fixed in a concentrated frown while his friend, who held the animal’s large, angular head in a rope halter, looked on. Its wet nostrils fumed in the early morning air. All three of them were still for a moment in this position, a frozen tableau, but then the elbow of the young man’s arm jerked forward a fraction and the bull flinched and raised its head in response. A pearl of blood grew at the apex of metal and skin. The young man kept his pressure on the knife, gently twisting the handle from side to side, as delicately as if he were piercing a loved one’s ear. Arthur could see the tendons and stringy muscle of his forearm working over the bone with each turn of his wrist. As he twisted the knife he bent down even closer to where the blade entered the skin, turning his head to the side as he did so, listening for the almost inaudible hiss which would tell him he has gone far enough. It comes, and withdrawing the tip of the blade in one smooth action he picks up the calabash bowl at his feet just in time to catch the first arc of black-red blood spurting from the punctured vein. He keeps his other hand at the wound, coaxing the blood through the skin. It is early morning and cold, the mists that have lain on the ground all night are still dispersing and the blood steams in the bowl as it fills.
Arthur has seen this cattle-bleeding before, but it still fascinates him. He likes to think of it as a kind of African Eucharist, a literal translation, although he knows it is more practical than that, performed for the body not the soul, gleaning the animal’s protein while keeping it alive for another day’s work. After a couple of minutes the bull’s eyes waver in their sockets and its knees give then recover like those of a dozing midday sleeper. The young man holding the animal’s head says something to the calabash holder. He speaks quickly and urgently. The other man places the large bowl on the ground in response. As he does this he tries to follow the pulsing arc of blood, which rises and falls with the bull’s heartbeat, until the bowl is at his feet again but still catching the hot liquid, which gulps and falls down the animal’s neck, red against its dun hide. His hands free, he bends and picks the leaf of a plant which he places over the wound, pressing it to the puncture in the bull’s neck with both his hands. The sound of the blood flowing into the bowl stops. A bird calls from one of the trees and somewhere a woman is singing. Only now do the two young men turn to Arthur, as if it is only in this new silence they have noticed him. They are both naked except for scraps of blue limbo tied around their waists covering their genitals. They must be no older than seventeen or eighteen. The young man pressing the leaf to the wound takes a hand away and waves to Arthur. ‘Mangwanani ishe.’
Arthur raises his own hand in reply. ‘Mangwanani. Makadii?’
‘Ndiripotnakadiwo.’
Arthur nods and smiles. ‘Ndiripo.’
The young men look back at him. Both have a little blood spattered on their arms and legs. They smile, and, in that way that Arthur has come to love, laugh and nod their heads, for no other reason than it is a good morning. Waving again, he turns away from them and continues up the narrow track that leads on in front of him, its pale dust cutting a ragged path through the patchy grass, boulders and low thorn trees of the veld and onto Enkeldoorn, ten miles away. Behind him he hears the chatter of the two men and the deep lowing of the bull. He likes the translation of that greeting he was given once. There is something in it that calls to the core of a very human need, the affirmation of one’s existence in another’s:
‘Morning chief.’
‘Morning. How are you?’
‘I am here if you are here.’
‘I am here.’
♦
It is three years since Arthur disembarked at Beira Bay to find Bishop Gaul waiting for him, and since then being ‘here’ has often meant walking the track he is on this morning, between his mission station at Wreningham and the small Dutch town of Enkeldoorn. The track is rough and narrow, no wider than the span of a hand. It has been made over the years by the feet of the people who walk this way, wearing away at the soil with their hard soles. It is an unremarkable track, a common footpath, and, to the infrequent eye, anonymous, like any of the thousands and maybe millions of similar paths that cross and intersect over the velds of Africa. But to Arthur it is his track, his path which he has claimed over the three years he has walked it, with his feet, his sweat and his aching muscles, twice every week. It is a journey that he has made so many times, in so many weathers, that now he can travel the path in the pitch dark of an African night, walking by instinct and familiarity alone. His feet know every bend and swell, his eye recognises every misshapen rock that looms out of the darkness towards him. Only his ears are still surprised by what he can meet on it: an unfamiliar breaking of twigs or undergrowth often bringing him to a dead stop, motionless, listening to his own breath loud and clumsy in his ear. Several times now he has thought he has heard a lion rolling a growl in its throat, and it has left him standing still for minutes, waiting for the sound again, hopefully receded, or, as he so often feared, louder and closer to him again. But now, after three years walking the track, he is even getting used to these noises. The howling of the striped hyenas, the static of the cicadas tit dusk and the whooping of the baboons in the trees are all as much a part of the veld for him now as the endless horizon and the towering clouds piled up in the sky. With every day spent out in its barren beauty he was growing into it, and so far it had not harmed him. Blisters and sweat rashes, not lions or rhinos, were h
is only regular discomforts.
He stops by a boulder and leans against it, feeling its pitted hardness against his hip bone. Bending his right leg, he holds it by the ankle with his right hand and, pulling down his woollen sock with his left, he examines his ankle, like a farrier passing his eye over a tricky hoof. The skin on his heel is hardened and calloused, but this morning it has bloomed again into a patch of rosy pink, laced with the darker red of broken skin. He spits on his left hand and wipes away the dust that has been sanding away at it as he walks. As he pulls his sock back up he notices that the piece of bully-beef tin he had nailed to the sole of his boot is coming loose again. There is little he can do about it here, so he just stamps his foot hard on the ground a couple of times, raising little puffs of dust from the path. Adjusting his satchel about his shoulders, he looks up into the sky. It is clear blue and cold. He watches a tawny eagle launch itself from a white thorn tree on a kopje off the path and slow-glide a spiral in the air. It beats its wings just once, the movement reaching Arthur with the sound of a breath. He follows its slow tour of the sky. Then he carries on.
Behind him, the track leads back through the scrubland to Wren-ingham mission station, where he started out at first light this morning and where he has been stationed since he arrived in the area from Umtali three years ago. In 1891 Bishop Knight Bruce, the first Bishop of Mashonaland, passed through this country, maybe on the same track that Arthur is walking this morning. The Bishop walked 1,300 miles through the veld that year, looking for ground on which to stake his spiritual claim for the Anglican church. At Wreningham he introduced himself to the chief of a nearby village, and requested an area of land. The chief gave him some, and the Bishop’s native boy marked the place with a tall white cross, planted on top of a kopje. Then the Bishop and his boy left, to find another chief and another area of land. On that trek Bishop Knight Bruce met more than forty-five Shona chiefs. All of them gave him some land and in all these places the Bishop planted a white cross until there was a chain of white crosses stretching out across Mashonaland. Over the next ten years these crosses attracted more white men and with their arrival, they grew, like magical seeds, into mission stations. Wreningham was one of these stations, named after a school in England of which the first priest to serve there, Archdeacon Upcher, had particularly fond memories.
The station itself occupies a low kopje that overlooks an expanse of tall yellow grass through which the wind, when it comes, blows shifting waves of shadow and light. Outcrops of granite and the odd thorn tree are the only features to break the immediate view on all sides, although just over the horizon there are scatterings of Mashona kraals, their conical rondavels dotting the ground down towards a dip in the land where a sluggish river ebbs and flows with the seasons. At the top of the kopje two huge gum trees stand on either side of a small compound. In front of these is the square thatched hut that serves as both church and schoolroom, and behind this another hut of a similar shape, but smaller, which is the priest’s quarters. The store room and kitchen stand a few yards further off again. Across from the church a ragged line of rondavels back onto a patch of scrubland vegetation that falls away down the east flank of the kopje. Their walls are made of a crude wattle and daub and their mud-clotted thatches reach almost as far as the floor. Goats, dogs and chickens wander freely about the area between these huts and the church, and the air is often languid with the heavy smoke of open or smouldering fires, lingering like incense.
Arthur stops again, this time by an acacia tree that he knows marks the half-way point on the track. Digging in his satchel between the books and the letters, his fingers find the cold steel of his water bottle. Pulling it free with a metallic swill of the water inside, he untwists the cap, and brings the bottle to his lips and drinks. The water is still cool despite the growing heat of the day and he feels it run down his throat into his stomach, tracing the route of his gullet with a chill sensation, coming to rest in a dark cold patch in the pit of his belly. He resists the temptation to drain the bottle, although he knows he needs the water. He has not long recovered from a bout of malarial fever, and he still carries the residue of that sickness in the shape of a vicious thirst. But he is only half-way, so he places the bottle back in his satchel, buckles its one strap and carries on again.
Ahead of him is Enkeldoorn, the only other significant destination on this path apart from Wreningham. It is a small place, no more than fifty or sixty people making it their permanent home, and its history is one of chance and accident rather than design. Arthur is not alone in considering it something of a lost town.
Enkeldoorn was established hurriedly in 1896 when news of the attacks by the Matabele impis in the south of the country reached the area of low veld and vlei country in which the town now lies. The stories of butchery and burning were enough to rush a scattered collection of pioneers together to form a laager around the one existing farm. When the rebellion receded these pioneers remained, naming their new home after a prominent Kamuldoorn tree that stood sentinel over the settlement: Enkeldoorn, the Dutch for ‘single thorn’. For a while they were the only white men and women to live under the tree’s long evening shadow, but gradually more came to join them, lured south by stories of gold reefs, rich for the picking, that were spreading through the country and through Europe like a virus. One reef was said to pass right through the hills outside Enkeldoorn, a glittering band of wealth embedded in the rock, just below the surface of the thin soil. And so they came, with their dynamite and their dreams, and Enkeldoorn was born again as a prospecting town. Bank clerks and shopkeepers became miners overnight, setting out in ones and twos on wagons loaded up with explosives, mining tools and a couple of native boys riding on the back, their legs dangling into the dust clouds stirred up by the wheels.
After weeks in the bush these men would return, pale with rock dust, smelling of dynamite and the earth. They went to drink in Vic’s Tavern, the only bar in town, but they weren’t there just looking for drink, or even for an hour with one of the handful of whores who had come down from Salisbury. They were also looking for other men and, more particularly, for other men’s dreams: for someone they could take aside into a corner after a few whiskies, and on whose shoulder they could lay their hand as they pulled out a lump of quartz from their pocket, which they’d spit on to reveal the specks and strands of gold hidden inside. With these waistcoat tempters many an administrator or traveller was persuaded to put up a share of capital in a mining enterprise. But all too often the prospector would then disappear, leaving them with their anticipation of riches dwindling by the day. Because the gold in the hills did not exist after all. But now Enkeldoorn did, and so it remained, washed up on its imaginary reef out in the veld, four days’ wagon drive from Fort Salisbury and a week’s at least from any other town of consequence.
In the years since Enkddoorn’s brief gold rush a spur of the railway had been promised to the town by Rhodes himself, but when Arthur arrived in 1901 Enkeldoorn was still waiting for it to be built, to come and lend a meaning to its lonely existence. At least with a railway the town could claim to be the end of the line. As it was it was not even that. It was simply a full stop in itself, a stubborn outcrop of European life set adrift in the heartland of Africa.
The railway spur never came, but in its absence Enkeldoorn made the best of its lonely position. Destined never to be a destination in itself, the town became a trading post, a supply town, a stopping and going place, supplying the farmers that surrounded it and the travellers that passed through it.
The geography of the town, like its character, was uncomplicated. Widely dispersed dwellings, lean-tos and huts spread out from a tighter concentration of buildings that lined the one main street. This street was a wide streak of dust flanked by wooden and brick buildings with clumps of veld grass growing in between them. On it stood the post office, Vic’s Tavern, the administration offices, the police station and a collection of shops selling pioneer equipment: tools, tents and general supplie
s. At the end of the high street was the town jail, a long squat iron-roofed block in which a dozen or so natives served sentences for offences that many of them never knew were offences, breaking, as they did, no code of their own. Early each morning a couple of native policemen overseen by a white officer escorted these prisoners out of town, chained neck and foot, to work on the Salisbury road. Apparently, somewhere to the south of Salisbury there was another group of chained men, also working on the same road, the idea being that one day they would meet, and Enkeldoorn would finally have a clean link to the capital. No one Arthur had spoken to seemed particularly convinced of this.
The only other building of any stature was the Dutch Reformed church, set back from the high street on the left as you approached from Salisbury. This is where Reverend Liebenberg preaches to the town’s Dutch and Afrikaans population, and where he also lets Arthur preach to the much smaller Anglican congregation. It was an arrangement the two men came to not long after Arthur’s arrival in the area, it being obvious to both of them that the question of denomination was a diminished one in comparison to the scale of the task they both faced. Liebenberg and his wife had since become good friends of Arthur’s, and recently Liebenberg had even been kind enough to play the church’s old piano in Arthur’s services, banging out the hymns on the yellowing keys with such enthusiasm that he often drowned out the singing of the small congregation altogether.
