The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ♦

  Patrick is tending his father’s herd of goats, following their gradual flow all morning as they move across the river bank, their heads down, tearing and chewing at the grass. He is only ten years old but he knows how important his job is. As he told his friend Denys yesterday, his grandfather is Chief Wadsango, one of the two headmen who first came to live on Baba Cripps’ farms. As such, his grandfather is one of the most important men in the area and as his youngest grandson, Patrick is one of the most important sons. When Denys asked him why he is so important Patrick simply answered, with the certainty of one possessed of great knowledge, because his lather had told him so. No other proof was required.

  At first Patrick does not see Reverend Smith’s car, just the dust it disturbs behind it, a pale plume dispersing as it rises, hazing the clear morning air. Still, he knows it is the sign of a car, so he stands from where he has been crouching against a tree and moves the goats further from the side of the road. Holding out his stick he shoos them on with short barks from the back of his throat, the bells at their necks sounding a tremulous percussion to their movement. The goats settle at their new patch and it is when they are grazing again, the sound of their bells trickling out to the odd hesitant ring, that Patrick hears the other noise. At first he thinks it is the car, then maybe one of the new planes the farmers use to spray their crops, their fabric double wings fragile against the sun. But it is too low, too near to be a plane. A droning hum gathering in volume, a ball of sound rolling down a hill.

  Suddenly the sound hits the trees and becomes physical, a thousand tiny thwacks and clips as it streams through the leaves and branches of the bush. Patrick looks about him, trying to see what he can hear. At first there is nothing, just the same still morning, gathering heat, the tall trees at his back, a clear sky. But as he looks up at it the clear sky develops dots of darkness which grow like cells dividing. And then Patrick sees the swarm. A tower of bees, rising out of the foliage from the direction of Baba Cripps’ church. A dark plume mirroring the plume of dust behind the Reverend’s car, that also disperses as it builds, but then tightens again, a black lung of air, swelling and contracting above the treetops—waiting.

  Patrick doesn’t move. His father has told him stories about Baba Cripps and the bees. How, like the most powerful n’angas, Baba Cripps can control their flight, move them about the air as easily as he moves his goats across the river bank. When he wants to be alone, or if there is a storm at night and the rain is slanting into his hut, then the bees come and gather at his doorframe, covering it right across, a moving, buzzing curtain to keep Baba Cripps warm and undisturbed. Patrick is sure these are the same bees and as he stares at their gathering mass he tries to think what he might have done wrong. But then he sees the Reverend’s car coming around the corner of the road, hears the rattle of its engine under the bonnet, and he realises that the bees may not have come for him after all.

  ♦

  Reverend Smith cannot hear the sound of the bees above the car’s engine and the clatter and bumping of its chassis as they drive over the pock-marked road. He is staring so intently through the clouds of dust rising past his window that he does not see them either, and the first time he is aware of their presence is when he feels the sun pass away from his lap, as if a large cloud had blocked out its light. He glances up at the sky through his side window, confused. It is clear, as it has been all morning, with not a cloud to be seen.

  Suddenly the car stops, jerking the Reverend forward so he hits his head against the edge of the window frame. Rubbing his temple he turns to reprimand Peter, but stops, his mouth open, half-way through the first word. Peter is staring, white-eyed, through the windscreen with both his hands on the steering wheel and his chauffeur’s cap tipped to the back of his head. And it is then, as the Reverend follows Peter’s locked gaze, that he sees the bees: a broad swarm of them, hanging in the air above and just in front of the car, blocking out the sun, rising and falling as if on the currents of the sea.

  ‘Please, sah, your window!’ Peter is looking at the Reverend now, winding his hand in rapid motion in an impression of the window’s mechanism. But the Reverend cannot take his eyes off the bees. A thick dark stream of them is still rising out of the trees, flowing into the swarm, bulking it out by the second. Peter reaches across him and winds the window himself, then, shifting the car into gear with a grating noise that is hidden under the white noise of the swarm, he accelerates forwards, the car’s tyres skidding and sliding on the dusty, pebble-strewn road.

  ♦

  From where he is crouched with his goats under the red and gold leaves of a seringa tree Patrick watches the sleek black car jerk forward and begin its charge towards the swarm. As if they share a symbiotic relationship with the machine, the bees move at exactly the same moment, contracting their mass into a darker, tighter ball, before dropping to the level of the car and streaming towards it. The swarm and the car meet with the sound of pepper shot fired through iron, the bees enveloping the bonnet in their darkness, driving through the shiny steel grille of the radiator, flowing up into its undercarriage. The car continues accelerating, but then slows again, faltering against the onward avalanche of the swarm. The engine chokes and coughs, vibrating with the bees in its system, clamming its pistons, drowning in its oil, until suddenly the vehicle comes to an abrupt, jolting halt.

  The car does not move, as if stung into stillness, beached on the dusty road like a boat on a sandbank. Its engine, though, is still running, battling for its life, shaking under the chassis as the bees swarm into it through the silver grille until Patrick is sure he can see the hinged black bonnet move and shake with the pressure of them, clouding under its steel. Then with one last grinding, metallic screech the engine dies. Seconds later, as if they had known the exact mass with which to clog its workings, the last of the bees flies into the body of the car.

  And suddenly there are none left. Where moments before a multitude had hung in the air, buzzing, droning, there is nothing, just the sudden silence of their disappearance. The day is still again. Almost.

  Shuffling forward until he is crouched at the edge of the road Patrick can hear the tick, tap and drone of the few insects still alive under the bonnet of the car. He can see the faces of its passengers too: one white, one black, ghosted and faint behind the dun-dusted windscreen. He stares at the car, waiting for the bees to re-emerge, but they do not. Behind him, his goats carry on grazing, unperturbed, tearing at the grass with rhythmic efficiency, tinkling the bells at their necks. Patrick, meanwhile, who still cannot believe his eyes, puts his hands over his mouth and laughs into his fingers at the wonder of what he has seen.

  ♦

  The Reverend Smith did not reach Maronda Mashanu that day, and he did not get the opportunity to try again. When Bishop Paget heard about his activities in the area he immediately dismissed him from his post and travelled down to Maronda Mashanu to apologise to Cripps himself. In a symbolic gesture which he knew would not be lost on the priest or his African parishioners he offered to accompany Cripps on a preaching tour of the burnt mission stations. Cripps accepted and for the next week Paget and Cripps visited the charred remains left in the wake of Reverend Smith’s passing, the Bishop standing by as Cripps preached from the blackened altar stones, his old boots dusted grey with the ash of burnt thatch and wood. The African congregations gathered around the old priest, intent on his sermons and singing out the Shona hymns with an energy that Paget had never witnessed in his own services in Salisbury. He watched Cripps preach and could not help but feel that these shattered mission stations, open to the veld, were perhaps the most suitable churches of all for this maverick priest. Here, there was no partition between the church and the land, no entrances, no windows, the birds flew above them and the wind moved through them. And, Paget noticed more than once, the crucified Christs behind the altars, having passed through Smith’s flames, were coloured a deep, charred black.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧
<
br />   1 AUGUST 1952

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  Noel has left him. He made his farewells and Arthur listened to the whirr of his bicycle’s wheels through the grass and his cheery ‘Masikatf over his shoulder. It wasn’t addressed to him, he had already said goodbye to him, but to someone else. Fortune perhaps. And then he was gone, taking the words of the poets with him.

  And then Fortune’s hands, gently pressing through the threadbare cotton of his jacket. He is so thin now he feels her fingers cupping the ball joints of his shoulders, as if she were holding the bone itself. She is talking to him, easing him up and moving him back under the shade of the rondavel’s roof.

  The day is already older. He can feel the changing quality of the light in his eyes. He cannot see it, but he can feel it, a warm darkness cooling in the crucibles of his sockets. The sunglasses are heavy on the bridge of his nose. He hears the single cry of a bird, a young hawk perhaps, trying its wings for the first time.

  And now Noel has left him. But then, they all leave eventually. Like the neglected thatch that falls from the hut’s pole, like his flesh fallen from the bone. This is how they have left him. His mother, his sisters Edith and Emily, William, Frank Weston, John White, Edgar Lloyd, falling away like sheaves of grass, leaving him like the lonely pole, dry and trickling with ants. The letters would slow, ebb and then finally stop. For a fortnight or so he could pretend the mail had got stuck somewhere, a broken Scotch cart wheel, a forgetful boy, but then notice would reach him. Another letter, written in a strange hand: a sister, a wife, a colleague or a nurse. But more often now, the direct speech of the telegram: ‘PASSED AWAY STOP’.

  He would write in reply, he always did, making carbon copies in blue ink on skin-thin paper and sending them out—his elegies and tributes, a final wreath of words following them to their graves. It had happened like this so many times, why should it ever stop? The leaving, the word so suitably cutting both ways: those that leave us and that which they leave us.

  Legacies, memories, a resonance of their selves living on in the thoughts of those they have loved.

  ♦

  He had once left himself. In both senses, in 1926, but it had not worked out. He remembered steaming away from the African shore and thinking it would be the last time he would ever look on her trees, her purple hills, her towering skies. But of course it was not. In Africa he had missed the countryside of Essex, the England of his youth, but once there, back in his Ford End living, he had missed Africa even more. Missed her with the violence of another loved one died. He was the in-between man again and within four years he was back. England had moved on in a way that he did not understand, and in a way that meant she no longer understood him. There had been unease and then mild outrage in the town when he gave over his vicarage as a shelter for the vagrants and moved into a one-room lodging for himself. And the skies, the heavy skies seemed to weigh down on him with their low, dense clouds. Cars were everywhere.

  And of course, there was Ada and Theresa. They were there too. Again, he did not go and see them, for the whole four years. He wrote to them both, but he did not visit. He suspected that they too would have moved on and so he lived instead with just his memories of Ada and the one memory he had of Theresa. She was four years old when he last saw her, the only time he saw her. Blonde hair and blue eyes like her mother, peering up at him from behind the folds of Ada’s skirt as he stood there, saying goodbye to them without words.

  And what of Ada? Had she left him yet? No, he didn’t think so. She was younger than him and he cannot even imagine her old, let alone dying. And anyway, he feels sure that she could not leave without him knowing. Not by way of a letter or a telegram but by another kind of communication. She could not pass away without the current of her going somehow touching him. He was sure of that.

  It was like the baobab tree. The ancient two-thousand-year-old baobab with its massive gnarled trunk, its branches like roots and its flower, so transient, so delicate that it opens just once in the evening and is dead by nightfall the following day. But however brief the flower’s passing, the animals still know it is there, the bats and the bush babies all drawn to the scent it releases in the one day and night of its existence.

  Sitting here now, under the shade of the rondavel’s overhang with the light dying in his blind eyes, he sees his eighty-three-year-old life as the great trunk and branches of the baobab. Rough, long-lived, enduring. And the years he shared with Ada are the tree’s brief flower, opening and closing in a day. And like that flower, she can not pass him, her life can not open and close without him knowing. Her death will release a scent that he will feel, even here, in Africa after so many years. It had to be so. Two people could not share like they had shared and not feel each other’s passing. He would not believe it to be any other way. She is still here, still alive. She has not left him.

  ♦

  Now Fortune is telling him that he must leave. The doctor has sent his orders and he has been encouraged by his friends in Enkeldoorn and by his friends in Maronda Mashanu to listen to them. They are all telling him he must leave, that he must go to the hospital. They are saying he can come back when he is well, but he knows he will not. He knows he is leaving.

  Thomas, who helps Fortune look after him, is here to guide him into town, and Leonard has returned from teaching at the school. He heard the rattle of his bike as he arrived, and then, later, the chatter of the children coming home. Leonard has come to take care of his letters, to pack up his unanswered correspondence.

  Suddenly, after the quiet of the afternoon, the solitude of his darkness, the sound of Noel’s lone voice reading Keats, there is activity all around him. Mothers are trying to feed their children in the huts down by the river. Fortune is talking quickly at Thomas. Not to him, but at him, telling him what he must do for Baba Cripps in the hospital as she packs his few clothes into an old leather suitcase. And Leonard, in the rondavel behind him, sorting through his papers, chattering away to him, speaking loudly and clearly, telling him about his newborn son, who, as Baba Cripps recommended, he has named Horatio. His tone runs the full range of his voice, his low, serious conversation peeling off into high laughter as he describes how his son eats, walks, looks. And then, as he brings some piece of correspondence to Arthur’s side, his voice is suddenly low and respectful again:

  ‘There are two letters from Oxford University Press, Baba, shall I bring these, yes?’

  Arthur answers but he feels this activity, the commotion, as if it were at a great distance. He is far away inside his blindness and his memories, thinking about leavings and how Ada is still alive, still in his world. He wants her to know that he has not left her either, never, however far away he has been. That, although they were never married, he has never stopped thinking of her as his wife. He calls Leonard to his side and tells him to open the trunk in his rondavel and find the blue folder.

  ‘Which one, Baba? There are very many folders in the trunk.’ Arthur tells him it is not a folder of letters or poems but another folder, a folder of personal papers. He will know which one it is because it will hold a piece of paper with ‘Last Will and Testament’ written across the top.

  ♦

  Fortune and Thomas have moved Arthur inside so he can dictate to Leonard in peace. He is lying on his mattress again and Leonard is sitting on the old metal trunk, Arthur’s old typewriter on his lap. Arthur listens as Leonard feeds his will into the roller: the crunching of the ratchets as he turns the handle, the metallic spring as he releases the lever to secure the sheet in place. As always he indicates he is ready by saying, ‘Yes, Baba?’

  Arthur speaks slowly and clearly. His own voice coming to him as if spoken through a sea shell, spoken through a sea.

  ‘Centre page, capitals. Underlined. Codicil. C-O-D-I…’

  This, then, is what he will leave. Not a letter, too easily dismissed as the romantic despair ot a dying man and too easily lost, but a statement. A statement of his mem
ory, written in the one document that assures careful, considered thought. His Testament. Not legal, not financial, but emotional. She will know that he did not forget her. She will know that he did not leave her because of this, what he will leave her. Not the money, but the words.

  ‘I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps (comma) do hereby give and bequeath to (underline) Mrs Ada Neeves…’

  And when she reads this statement, she will remember him, however briefly, perhaps as transiently as the baobab’s flower, opening and closing overnight, but she will remember him and know that he remembered her. And for that moment, when she remembers, he will live again, resonating in her thoughts the way she has resonated in his for the fifty years since he last saw her: standing at the door of another man’s house with their child by her side looking out at him from behind the folds of her mother’s skirt.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  20 SEPTEMBER 1930

  Hampstead Heath, London, England

  Theresa is sitting on a bench on Parliament Hill waiting for her future. She is wearing her Sunday tweed jacket and skirt, her best ankle boots and a cloche hat given to her by her best friend, Dina. She sits with her bead handbag on her lap, and her hands on the bag, looking out over the grass, parched blond in patches by a late-flowering summer. Lifting her head slightly she looks out further, over the trees below, their pale and dark greens punctured by the fine yell ow stone of two church spires.

  The bench Theresa sits on is engraved along the back rest: ‘For Albert, who loved this view’ carved into the dark wood. As she studies the land before her she tries to imagine who Albert was, and who engraved this bench in his memory. A wife? A daughter? There is no indication, just his name, living on in the place he made his. She remembers a line of Byron’s, or rather part of a line: ‘Livewho you are.’ Perhaps that is why Albert’s name is here, because this is where he lived who he was. And yes, she thinks, that should be celebrated, because living who you are is not as easy as it sounds, she knows that.