Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  “Didge, you really think they’ll burn?” asked Lulu.

  “I’ve told you,” said Damien, impatiently. “John’s dad said they work underwater.”

  John’s dad, Hal, ran the VOA – the Voice of America radio broadcasting station in Phikwe. Mum and Dad thought there was something that didn’t make sense about Hal: that he was too well qualified, too well travelled, and knew too much about certain things to be running the Phikwe VOA, even if it was the centre of the VOA for Southern Africa. (The only centre Phikwe was of anything.) “A front for the CIA,” they had speculated. “And, Damien, don’t you dare tell him we said that.” Damien hadn’t. But ever since then he had believed, without question, everything Hal told him.

  For a moment, as the creeping, sparkly point on the fuse reached the water in the horses’ bucket and spluttered, it seemed that Hal had been wrong after all. But the sparkle had only dimmed; it kept going, all the way along the submerged wire, brightening suddenly as it climbed out into the air again.

  Damien became obsessed with the underwater fuses. He would demonstrate them to anyone who was – or pretended to be – interested: Grandpa Ivor and Granny Betty, Matthews, Ruth, Mr. Motswagole, or Granny Joan, when she came for tea. And when he could no longer persuade anyone to watch again, he just lit fuses by himself. Soon he was returning on many-hour missions to the dump, excavating for fuses several feet beneath the surface.

  Mum said, “I do worry about him scrounging around in that pit. Must be riddled with snakes.”

  “Well, there re snakes everywhere,” said Dad, sipping his tea. “He knows to watch out.”

  Dad had just got back from work, and we were having late-afternoon tea and rusks in the lounge. Outside the window, Damien was crouched over the horses’ water bucket, lighting fuses. Glenn Nevill, one of Damien’s friends from Phikwe, stood behind him, peering at the bucket.

  Dad began talking about his clinic, and I sucked the end of my tea-soaked buttermilk rusk, dunking it again and again until the tip became too soggy and had to be bitten off.

  A loud crack shook the window.

  Glenn was standing in a cloud of dust, looking surprised. Damien was stumbling away from the dust, bent over, hands clutched to his face.

  A second later, Mum was standing up, overturned tea seeping across the carpet. “Shit, Keith! Damien.” Her voice was hollow. It made me feel sick. Then Mum and Dad were both running through the kitchen door at the same time, banging into each other, calling Damien’s name. Lulu and I ran after them, not knowing what else to do.

  Damien was eerily silent. He was still clutching his eyes. Blood and dust covered the rest of his face. There, was more blood on his arms and legs. Glenn was crying. Lulu and I were crying. Mum said, “God, Keith, his eyes.” Mum held Damien. Dad knelt down in front of him.

  “Come on, lad,” he said. His voice was horribly calm. “Give me your hands.” Dad pulled Damien’s hands back. His eyes were screwed shut. There was blood on the lids. “Now, come on, lad, open your eyes for me.”

  Damien let out a small sob. Then slowly, he opened his eyes. The whites and two big green centres were still all there. Mum sat down silently on the dirt.

  “Come on, chaps,” said Dad. “Let’s go and have a cup of tea and get you cleaned up.”

  Later, when Damien lay on the bed and Dad picked out shrapnel and grit with a hypodermic needle, no one laughed. Afterwards, Damien helped himself to as much chocolate as he wanted from the special-occasions cupboard. Mum said Lulu and I could have as much as we liked too. She wasn’t really listening when we asked. For a few hours that day she just sat on the sofa in silence, biting her nails and staring out of the window with a faraway gaze.

  But Mum never dwelled on the negative side of anything for too long. “It could have been so much worse,” she was soon reminding us. “Finding out now might have avoided a tragedy in the future. Maybe it’ll even put Damien off explosives…”

  Glenn, who had been standing a few feet back when the detonator cap had gone off, was unscathed. Damien had small pieces of detonator shrapnel between his eyes, above his eyes, in his cheeks, and in his arms and legs. Damien had been leaning over the end of the fuse, where it had been attached to the small detonator. He hadn’t known what it was, hadn’t expected a detonator. It was illegal to put fuses with their detonator caps still attached in the dump. Hal was as shocked as Mum and Dad, and the dump became off-limits to Damien and his visiting friends alike.

  I soon forgot to worry about AIDS. With so much else that could hurt us – snakes, wild horses, illegal detonators – that often did hurt us, invisible threats, however deadly, did not persist long on the list of daily concerns.

  ♦

  Stories from Dad’s clinic were the only reminders. For it was then still several years before painfully thin bodies, and faces and necks with their unmistakeable bulging cancers and skin disfigurations, were to be seen on every crowded Phikwe pavement. But for doctors, AIDS was known to few – talked about by still fewer.

  Botswana had reported its first AIDS case in 1985, and by 1989 doctors were beginning to regularly see cases of full-blown AIDS. Yet there were still virtually no government education campaigns, no prevention strategies, and certainly no treatments available at government clinics. It would be several years still before the ubiquitous ABC billboards – “Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise” – towered beside Botswana’s roads and border posts, and more than a decade before the drugs became widely available.

  A group of private doctors from the BCL mine asked for a meeting with a government minister. The minister agreed immediately and listened attentively to the worrying observations of the doctors, their concerns about the rising infection rate and the resurgence of TB, and the critical importance of acting immediately to educate people about the disease and condom use.

  “Now is the government’s chance to avert a catastrophe.”

  When they had finished, the minister nodded. “Gentlemen, you are right,” he said, “I agree with everything you say. But I cannot help you. Nothing will be done. You see,” he continued, with a sigh, “in Botswana, we have an old saying: ‘When you are in the bush, you don’t talk about the lion.”

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  Twelve

  The Clinics

  At his busiest clinics, Dad saw more than one hundred patients a day. After payday at the end of the month, the number could reach one hundred and fifty. To get through the long queue of patients before nightfall, Dad worked almost continuously. Sometimes, when he returned home late in the evening, his lunchbox was barely touched – a banana, blackened by the fierce heat of the clinics, oozing across uneaten sandwiches.

  If one of Dad’s nurses was on leave, or sick, or away at a funeral, he couldn’t cope. This didn’t often happen. But when it did – when the carefully choreographed five-minute consultation system stood to otherwise fall apart – Mum, as well as Dad, would kiss us goodbye in the unfriendly, four-thirty-in-the-morning darkness, and as we drifted back to sleep they would set off together for the airport. Lulu, Damien, and I would spend the day shuttling bet-ween our house and Grandpa Ivor’s, where Granny Betty would give us breakfast, lunch, and finally dinner, after which we’d curl up on the sofa, where we’d half watch TV, or half doze. With the other half we’d listen, first for the aeroplane, and then for the car.

  Waiting for Dad, with Mum safely there to reassure us, was bad enough. Waiting for both parents, somewhere out there in the darkness, was almost unbearable. On these agonising evenings, the later it grew, the more awake we’d become and the harder we’d strain our ears for the unmistakeable revving of the car rounding the last bend in the driveway where the huge termite mound bulged out onto the road and the stiff boscia tree branches clawed at the side mirrors.

  By the time the sharp clicks of the cattle grid rang through the night, we were off Grandpa’s sofa, yelling good night, running out into the darkness, and waving at the bright headlights as they swept a
cross the dirt and blazed against the walls of the unlit cottage.

  The lights died as the car stopped, and the cottage disappeared once more into blackness. The doors swung open, and clinic smell – disinfectant, latex-rubber-glove powder, sweaty bodies in 104-degree heat – poured out into the night. I breathed deeply of the sweet-sharp mix, letting it wash over me as I kissed Mum and Dad and followed their outlines inside. I loved that smell – the smell of relief at a safe return; and anticipation of the breathtaking stories Dad might have brought back with him this time.

  Still in darkness, a Coleman water cooler, two untouched lunchboxes, and Dad’s medicine bag clattered onto the dining room table. Then someone reached the kitchen light switch, and bright electric light flooded the room.

  At once, I felt terrible for enjoying the smell.

  Dad’s eyes were bloodshot, his smile tired and weak. But Dad’s after-clinic expression I was used to. Mum’s I was not. Her lively face had turned numb, and a day of frowning had creased deep lines between her eyebrows. She caught me staring, and smiled. It was the smile you make when an aeroplane hits bad turbulence, and someone looks at you, and you smile to pretend everything’s fine, when all you really want to do is throw up.

  Dad made hundreds of trips ayear to his four village clinics. Mum made just a handful. But it was through Mum’s stories that I got closest to understanding what working in the villages was really like.

  Although Dad gradually made improvements to these clinics – painting, plumbing, replacing warped doors – they remained a hot, hellish world away from the Phikwe clinic that Lulu, Damien and I knew so well.

  And of his other clinics, Dad told us just the broad facts and the best stories: the number of patients; the time patients took; the sequence of events in the consultation; and, most of all, the amazing tales about the bewildering and funny things patients did. The grim details of the place, he mentioned only if they made a good story.

  Like the extraordinary fate of the loos at his clinic in Tonota.

  There were three of them, flush toilets instead of the usual long-drops, side by side, their doors set in a concrete wall in the courtyard. Dad only ever peed, entering and exiting the grimy, stinking cubicles as quickly as possible. Then one day, taking a deep breath and flinging open the door, he stopped – transfixed by the sight of an old man, sitting under a lush fig tree, slowly chewing a roasted mealie. The back wall of the loos had disappeared altogether, swallowed up, one day, into a hole created by the badly built septic tank leach field. After that, Dad was forced to use the even filthier subsiding long-drop toilet. He referred to it as the Leaning Bog of Tonota when he gave us progress updates on its decreasing angle to the ground.

  About how he actually felt – having to use the filthy loos, working in the stifling heat, seeing the horribly sick patients – Dad rarely spoke. When Dad wanted to forget something unpleasant, he forgot by never giving words to his thoughts. Mum did the opposite. She purged unpleasant things, talking about the horrors until she had nothing left of them inside her. Which sometimes meant that when they argued, they actually had the bigger argument afterwards, about the first argument, going round in circles: Mum saying, “Let’s talk about why we fought, Keith,” Dad saying, “There’s nothing to talk about. It’s over. What’s the point in talking about something you can’t change?”

  So it was through Mum’s accounts of the clinics that I felt the vicarious exhaustion of working for uninterrupted hours in the airless, fanless consulting and dispensing rooms. It was Mum who told us about the smell of too-long-neglected festering sores; about the women with AIDS, clasping their babies with AIDS, who still managed to smile and laugh; about the babies that peed all over the examination couch; about how she’d hold in her own pee for hours till she wanted to burst before braving the disgusting fly-swathed long-drops.

  And it was Mum who said how she wanted to weep when, midaf ternoon, the cramped, pungent waiting room was still overflowing with hours’ worth of patients. She wanted to weep for the patients who’d travelled for hours to see Dad; for herself, for having to be there now; and most of all, for Dad, for having to do this every week. “I don’t know how your father does it,” she’d mutter for several days afterwards. “How he manages to give every patient his full attention, no matter how knackered he is. Let me tell you, Robbie, there are moments in that place it feels like hell on earth.”

  The hands on the kitchen clock pointed to just before ten, which was a late return, even for a busy clinic. “How many today, Dad?” I asked.

  “One twenty or so,” sighed Dad. “Lost count.”

  “Why are you so late, then?”

  Dad turned to Mum. “Lin, do you want to shower first?”

  “You go,” said Mum.

  “Mum, why are you so late?” I persisted, as Dad disappeared to the bathroom.

  Mum stared silently at the windowpane, drying her hands on a dishtowel. The uncurtained glass seethed with insects. Occasionally, one thudded against the glass and plunged, stunned, back into the darkness.

  “Mum!”

  Mum started to giggle. At first, it was just a few choked hiccups, then, her shoulders shaking, she laughed in long, loud wheezes. Shocked into silence, Lulu, Damien, and I watched quietly as tears rolled down her cheek.

  “Sorry,” spluttered Mum, wiping her eyes. “It’s terrible of me to laugh…terrible…It’s not funny. It was so awful.” She stifled another half laugh, half sob, and walked to the lounge, where she collapsed on a chair. Lying back, she put a hand over her mouth and shut her eyes. When she opened them, a few moments later, any trace of laughter was gone, her face suddenly just tired. “Oh Lordy,” she said, “what a day.”

  That day, Mum and Dad learned that the forty-year-old landlord of Dad’s clinic had died.

  The cleaner told them when they arrived at the clinic in the sparkling early-morning light. He’d died, suddenly, just a few days before, and as Dad only visited each village once a week, this was the first he’d heard of it.

  It was early evening before Dad saw his last patient and Mum dispensed the last batch of pills and ointments. The landlord’s home was not far from the clinic building, and Mum and Dad set off on foot along the clear sandy paths winding between the hedges that surrounded many huts in the better part of the village.

  Outside the large thatched rondavel, about fifty men sat on low wooden benches, chatting and smoking. Sporadic howls emanated from the doorway to the dimly lit room. The men greeted Mum and Dad with hearty dumelas. When Dad explained that they wanted to pay their respects to Mma Maoto, the eldest man smiled and indicated that Dad should take a seat. Then he turned to Mum. “Mma, the women are inside,” he announced. “You can go in there,” he continued, pointing to the doorway of the cavernous rondavel.

  Mum didn’t move. “Keith,” she hissed, “I don’t even know this woman. You’ve got to come with.” Dad just shrugged and squatted down on the nearest bench.

  The only one left standing, Mum reluctantly made her way to the entrance. The nearly sealed room still held the worst heat of the day, the air thick with the smell of smoke, soap, sweat, sand, and paraffin. Over twenty women sat in the gloom, on stools or cross-legged on the floor. No one seemed to notice Mum, standing hesitantly in the doorway. Some of the women were weeping softly, others wailing in loud bursts, some just sat quietly.

  The most sorrowful howls came from a large woman lying, alone, on a mattress at the back of the hut. Mum picked her way in between the other women and knelt down beside the mattress.

  Seeing Mum, the woman’s cries subsided, and Mum introduced herself as Linda, Dr. Scott’s wife. “I’m so sorry, Mma, about your husband,” she said, not sure even that Mma Maoto understood English. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  The woman stared at her, tears rolling down her cheeks, motionless but for her large, heaving bosom. Then, just as Mum began rising to leave, the widow flung her arms upwards around Mum’s neck. Mum, unbalanced, tumbled onto the mattress and san
k into a pile of blankets and a tight embrace. When she tried to pull herself up, Mma Maoto, who had started to howl again, grabbed her arm, and Mum collapsed back down beside the distraught woman.

  Not knowing what else to do, Mum did what she’d done so many times before with Lulu and me when a beloved pet died, and we lay in bed sleepless with tears. She rolled close beside the shaking body, clasped her arms around it, and pulled Mma Maoto’s head to her heart. The young widow clutched Mum back, and for the next ten minutes didn’t let go as she sobbed and sobbed, and soaked their shirts in tears.

  ♦

  That night was the first time AIDS became more to me than just a sporadic, selfish fear fomented by imagination and a collection of terrifying facts. I didn’t know Mma or Rra Maoto; I didn’t even know, at the time, that it was AIDS. But imagining the young, lonely mother of six weeping on the mattress in the dim room, it was impossible not to feel shaken – by sadness at the loss, and horror at whatever grim thing had brought such unfair, unexpected death.

  Rra Maoto, tall, plump, and strong, was an unusual case. He regularly visited Dad for what he called his ‘tune-up and service’, which Dad gave him for free. A few weeks before his death, he’d come to the clinic complaining of weakness. He was not nauseous or feverish, he had no sores, and his appetite was still good. Dad told him to go to the hospital for some blood tests. And, just in case, for an HIV test.

  The next week he was feeling worse, and he had still not gone for the tests. Dad repeated his instructions. The next week he was dead, from heart failure. The heart failure was a consequence of a type of cardiomyopathy, a rare heart condition sometimes caused by the virus before the infected person progresses to full-blown AIDS.

  Dad said at least Rra Maoto was not yet gaunt and wasted, which spared his wife any whispered speculation about why a relatively young man died so suddenly. Mma Maoto, herself, didn’t believe the diagnosis. Dad told her to get tested, but she didn’t want to know if she was HIV-positive, and never came back to Dad as a patient. By the time she, too, might have been showing symptoms, Dad had another landlord in another clinic, and we never found out what became of her.