The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Cullen was aware that despite his views he was warming to Cripps. There was something refreshing about the passion with which he argued his case and there was no doubt that his love for the African was real. He spoke about the Shona as other men might speak about their brother or cousin. As if they were adults, not children. Cullen had never heard that before, in Rhodesia or England.

  What Cullen could not ignore, however, was what he considered the most crucial contradiction at the centre of Cripps’ situation. The missionary’s vision of the African world seemed Arcadian in nature (indeed, he had admitted as much when he confessed to Cullen that the Shona lifestyle reminded him of Theocritus’ Idylk), and threatening this vision was the white settlers’ corrupting influence. All of his ideas, his arguments, pointed towards this desire to defend the African way of life from the European. And yet, here he was, a missionary, bringing an alien faith to the Shona, performing a role that in its very nature was evangelical, exerting influence and change. However much he lived as an African, Cullen felt that Cripps could not escape the facts of his situation. But he didn’t press the point. It was getting late, Daisy was restless and he needed to return to his office. He also wanted to leave Wreningham on a good note, so, engaging his ability to please again, he took the opportunity of a lull in the conversation to ask Cripps about his writing instead.

  Literature was a subject on which the two men shared more common ground, and Cullen ended staying later than he had meant, discussing poetry, his own writing and some short stories that Cripps was working on. The missionary seemed especially pleased that Cullen had been writing about his African experience. ‘That’s excellent,’ he’d said. ‘Places like this need to be written about. Until they are, some people don’t seem to think they exist.’ Cullen thought he knew what Cripps meant and he agreed, remembering how Rider Haggard’s She had lit his own interest in Africa all those years before.

  By the time Cullen had mounted Daisy and Cripps had accompanied them down to the bottom of the hill the sun was already low in the sky, the clouds blood red on their undersides. After wishing him well and promising to come out again Cullen bent from his horse and shook Cripps’ hand before beginning his ride back to Enkeldoorn; but he found himself thinking about Cripps long after Wreningham had disappeared behind him, and particularly about the priest’s parting comment.

  He couldn’t tell if Cripps had been joking or not. He thought probably not; he had been smiling, no doubt thinking about their earlier discussion, but there had been a serious note in his voice as well. They were making their way down the kopje, Daisy picking her way between the granite rocks and Cripps sucking on his clay pipe, when suddenly he’d said, ‘People talk about the need for medical missionaries in South Africa but in a country like this, you know what the Africans really need?’ Cullen waited for Cripps to continue. ‘Legal missionaries, that’s what we need here. Not Christian, not medical, but legal. That’d put the cat among the pigeons, wouldn’t it?’

  Cullen had no choice but to laugh and agree. It really was late now and he had to get Daisy back to her owner. So he’d left without contesting Cripps’ point, but in many ways, as he rode back to town, he wished he had. Then perhaps he would have resolved what Cripps was getting at, and maybe resolved the comment in his own mind too instead of pondering on it all the way home. At least Daisy had been calmer on that return journey. Her trip into the veld seemed to have tempered her and it was on that day, when Cullen finally saw the first lights of Enkeldoorn in the distance, that he’d resolved to buy her. Damn the eight pounds he couldn’t afford; she seemed settled with him, and he with her. It would be a shame to say goodbye to each other now.

  ♦

  A well-built grey gelding ridden hard by a farmer canters towards the puissance fence, tossing and throwing its head. Cullen watches as it straightens its forelegs a couple of strides out, scuffing up the ground with its hooves, bringing its hind legs sliding under its belly. The farmer lurches out of his seat, losing a stirrup which flips over the saddle behind him. The crowd lets out another gasp, more urgent this time, as the farmer clings on around the horse’s neck and the gelding hits the wing of the fence before spooking and galloping off across the field, the farmer clasped to its side like a child to its mother.

  ♦

  Cullen shifted himself away from the tent pole and stretched his arms above his head. The day was getting hot and he could do with a drink, but thinking of that day with Cripps had made him even more anxious to talk to the priest today. Since April they’d become much better friends than could have been expected after that first discussion, but he still didn’t know him well enough to ask him the questions he had really wanted to on that first meeting. Did he get lonely out there on his own? How did he defend his position as a missionary? What did he think about on those week-long treks of his across the veld? No, he hadn’t asked those questions, but today, if he could catch him, then maybe he would. After all, if he was going to write about Cripps he had to know what made the man tick. What he knew at the moment, the facts, how he acted, what he thought, wasn’t going to be enough.

  ♦

  Another horse approaches the puissance fence, a bay thoroughbred ridden by an army officer. Again Cullen watches as the animal gathers its energy a couple of strides before the pole, now standing at over six foot, then launches itself into the air. With a twist of its hind legs it clears the fence, landing heavily on the other side in a cloud of earth and dust. Distracted by his thinking about Cripps, Cullen has only been half watching the event, but the loud cheering and applause from the crowds indicates this horse has won. The officer swings the thoroughbred around and canters up to the front of the tents where he brings her to some kind of a halt, the mare’s veins standing proud beneath her sweat-darkened coat. Her blood is still pumping hard and she jogs and fidgets under him as Charlie pins the blue first place rosette to her bridle.

  ♦

  After the puissance Cullen watches Cripps compete again, this time in the one-mile walk, lining up with a string of other men, distorted by the midday haze as if they were reflected in a fairground mirror. On the crack of the starter’s gun the line breaks and the men begin striding the three laps of the horse track. A mounted judge trots beside them, moving up and down the line, keeping watch on their stride lengths. Cripps seems in his element and is far out in front when another man suddenly gains on him in the final straight to pip him at the post. It is clear to Cullen that this man had broken into a jog to catch up with Cripps, and sure enough he watches as the mounted judge trots up to Cripps, leans down to speak to him, then canters up to the tents where he brings his sweating horse to a halt and announces Father Cripps as the winner. Cripps walks up to the tents, obviously pleased, to receive his trophy from Charlie. Charlie shakes the priest’s hand vigorously and leads the crowd in a round of applause. As the clapping dies down Cullen thinks this is probably a good time to corner Cripps for a chat, but as he begins to walk over towards him he is stalled by Charlie’s voice booming across the field, followed by more clanging on the milk churn.

  ‘Last call for entries for the high jump!’

  The high jump is the only event Cullen is entering today. He stops by the drinks tent, where he sees Cripps sitting with a glass of lime juice in his hand. The priest acknowledges him with a wave of the hand and Cullen is about to approach him when Charlie’s voice cuts through the chatter again;

  ‘High jump, Cul! Where the bloody hell are you?’

  Managing just a brief smile to Cripps, Cullen turns out towards the field and jogs over to where Charlie is standing with a group of other men, shouting ahead of him as he runs towards them;

  ‘All right Charlie! Calm down, I’m here.’

  ♦

  Cullen won the high jump, as he had expected to, and it was as he was receiving his own trophy from Charlie, its metal smelling of new polish and two thin blue ribbons tied to its handles, that the screams started.

  First a woman’s, a primitive
scream of fear, and then others, men and women, two, three, a fourth, joining in like a macabre chorus. The crowd around the tents stands frozen, a painting of the day, looking above each other’s heads as they listen for the next sound to reach them from the town. But it is another voice they hear, a man’s, an African’s, shouting and getting louder as he gets nearer. The first time he shouts, no one can make out what he is saying, but then the words find themselves on the air and they hear him crying out, over and over, ‘Shumba! Shumba!’

  The word ignites the crowd like a flame to touch paper. The men begin herding the women and children into the two tents, fathers picking up sons and daughters under each arm. Others drop their drinks and their food in the dust and sprint to meet the man running from the town. A large Boer farmer shouts at his boy, his booming Afrikaans voice laying itself down over the panicked chatter like a slab of granite over ants, ‘My gun! Get my bloody gun! Kurmidza! Kuru-midza! Quick now!’ The boy runs off, his pale soles flicking up behind him, puffs of dust touching off the ground with each sprinting step. The army officer is struggling with his horse, hanging off its bridle with both hands as it wheels around showing the whites of its eyes, panicked by the rush of people into the tents and the men into the town.

  ♦

  Arthur reaches the edge of the town shortly after Cullen, who he follows down the side of a house and through a gap between two stores where a group of men are already standing on one of the stoeps. They are all staring at the far end of the high street. Arthur joins them and follows the line of their pointing fingers.

  At the other end of the town, no more than 300 yards away, a lioness is padding down the empty high street, golden against the dun road, her head slung low between her powerful shoulders. She is thin and Arthur can see her angular hip-joints protruding, working mechanically under her skin as she prowls down the street and circles to face the post office. She stops and Arthur feels the group of men hold their breaths. McGregor, the police chief, whispers ‘Stay calm everyone, Charlie’s bringing a gun now, just stay still.’ As he speaks the lioness turns her head to face them. Her movement is fluid, slow, careful. Their smell of sweat, cloth and urine has reached her on the breeze and her impassive face breaks into a snarl, her upper lip retreating to bare her white teeth and the fleshy black skin of her gums.

  Arthur hears footsteps behind him, someone running towards them, and someone else say, ‘Here he is, here he is now, clear a space.’ But Arthur doesn’t turn to look at Charlie. He is transfixed by the lioness, by the dreadful ease of her body, the amber of her eyes and the way she moves, pneumatically, sliding under her own spine. She should look so strange, there in the street which is normally bustling with people. But to Arthur it is the buildings around her that suddenly look strange, out of place. He watches her move a little further down the street, and however unfamiliar the sight is, unnatural, disjointed, he cannot bring himself to see her as an impostor. She is of the veld, and she is reclaiming her territory, moving between the clumsy buildings of brick and wood, marking them ephemeral with every print of her paw in the dust.

  As she gets nearer, he can see that her coat is shabby and flea-bitten and she is short on one hind leg, as if she has injured her hip. More than likely, he thinks, another victim of the drought, forced to hunt for food in a town emptied of people for the day. She turns towards the knot of men standing on the stoep once more, her ribcage expanding and contracting as she breathes, then she looks away again, moving her head with the same slow deliberation. Movement behind Arthur indicates the arrival of Charlie. He can hear his heavy, panting breath and the sound of a gun breaking open.

  But now the lioness is moving again too, stalking towards the veranda of the post office. And it is then, as he watches her slouch nearer the post office steps, that Arthur sees the dog. A bull terrier, tied by its lead to a pole on the stoep. Until now it has been quiet, crouched back in the shadow of the awning, but as the lioness approaches, her shoulders hunched high in hunting position, it begins to bark, pulling its lead taut and letting out explosive yelps of fear.

  ‘OK, stand back, give him room.’ McGregor again. Arthur feels someone push him to one side.

  ‘Shoot, go on, shoot!’ someone else says, and then Charlie’s voice, clenched, quiet, ‘I’m waiting for a clean shot, you idiot. I want that skin.’

  But now the terrier’s yelps have become whines, and its lead has slackened as it retreats from the edge of the stoep. It’s what the lioness has been waiting for and with one sudden push of her hind legs she lunges forward onto the squealing terrier, crashing her heavy front paws, black claws extended, down on the dog’s body. In the same movement she clamps her jaw about the back of its neck and with one sharp tug breaks the lead from the pole. Spinning on her hindquarters she runs off the stoep and up the high street, the terrier in her mouth, its legs still kicking, and the broken end of the lead trailing in the dust behind her.

  As she turns a rifle cracks from behind Arthur and one of the post office windows blossoms into shattered glass. ‘Shit.’ Charlie’s clenched voice again. Then another man’s voice: ‘The second barrel, the bloody shot!’

  The lioness keeps running as Charlie fires the second barrel of the combination hunting rifle, firing a twelve-bore cartridge instead of the first .303 bullet. The lioness, at full gallop with the terrier limp in her mouth, corners around the last building in the street as the gun explodes again. A second later the rush and crackle of pepper shot streams through the branches of a tree like a plague of locusts. But the lioness has gone.

  And then there is silence. Just the echo of the gunshot reverberating between the wooden buildings, and the dust, blowing up in eddies of wind in the empty street. And on the stoep of the post office, a splash of blood and a broken lead tied to nothing but air.

  ♦

  That evening, as Arthur prepares for his evensong in the Dutch Reformed Church, he hears the men of the town outside making their own preparations, organising and setting off on a hunting party to track down the lioness. A rogue lion will not be tolerated, and he listens from his vestry to the yapping of the dogs, the clutter of ammunition belts being strapped on and rifles being shouldered. They are going to war with the veld, an invasion party to revenge the invasion of their own bolt-hole of civilisation.

  Later, he preaches to a small congregation of women, children and old men only. He tells the parable of Daniel and the lion, and Pastor Liebenberg bangs out the hymns on the old piano. The singing is not as lively or joyous as his services in Wreningham. None of the women here shut their eyes when they sing, sway, break from the pews and shuffle a dance. But it still lifts his spirits to hear the hymns sung, each note marking out a territory of his own.

  The men return with the lioness as Arthur is shutting up the church and padlocking the door to the vestry. The light has almost faded from the day and a streak of sunset lies across the horizon, setting off the trees and thorn bushes in sharp silhouettes. They return triumphant, the dogs barking at their heels and the body of the lioness slung across an old Scotch cart which they pull themselves, four at the front holding the shafts and two on either side, like a royal procession. Except in this procession, the queen is dead, shot through the heart, the stomach and the hip, dried blood caked on her golden coat. Her eyes are still open and her tongue hangs from the side of her jaw, a slab of pink flesh, shaking with the movement of the cart.

  As the men pile into Vic’s Tavern taking the body of the lioness with them, Arthur can’t help feeling that he is witnessing a defeat, not a victory. He shoulders his satchel, and begins his walk out of town back to Wreningham. Walking down the street he passes through the gold bars of light cast across the road from the windows of the hotel. From inside he hears the chatter of happy men, the clinking of glasses, a tune winding up on a gramophone, and, as he walks on into the darkness, the faint click and heartbeat of billiard balls connecting and rebounding off the soft baize of the table.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧
/>   3 JANUARY 1904

  Wreningham Mission, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  Although he is only eleven years old, Tendai has been waiting outside Baba Cripps’ rondavel all night, ever since the n’anga appeared out of the thick bush behind the schoolhouse and announced he had come to see the white mufundsi. Tendai’s mother told the n’anga that Baba Cripps was in Enkeldoorn, but the n’anga said he would wait, striding over to Baba Cripps’ hut and crouching on his haunches at the side of the compound where the beaten earth became bush.

  Tendai had seen the n’anga before at his aunt’s village. He’d once watched from outside a group of older men as he divined with bones and on another occasion he’d sat outside a hut where the n’anga was talking to a spirit that had possessed his uncle. The spirit had asked for goat’s blood and the n’anga had sent for a he-goat. Tendai remembered the white of its hair in the dim early morning and the sound of the blood gulping from a slash in its throat into a calabash bowl. Despite these occasions, he still couldn’t stop himself staring at the n’anga now: at the silver-grey baboon skin slung over his shoulders, the beads about his neck and the bangles round his ankles, his walking staff adorned with ostrich feathers and the skin pouches tied around his waist that jiggled on his hips when he walked.

  His mother had told him not to stare, and giving him a gentle tap around the ear she’d taken him inside their rondavel to wash. But later, when she pushed him out again to go to bed, Tendai saw the n’anga was still there, sitting motionless beside Baba Cripps’ rondavel. So he did not go to bed, as his mother had told him to, but crept over to Baba Cripps’ rondavel and sat against its wall, just on the other side where the n’anga couldn’t see him. He would wait there for Baba Cripps to come back, and when he did, he would tell him the n’anga was there to see him.