But now, from the magnifying distance of the United States, my family was beginning to seem even more careless, unbalanced, and mad than they had when we’d all been in Africa. Meantime, close up, Charlie’s family looked saner than I had believed it possible any family could be. For one thing, his Main Line Philadelphians turned out not to be heroin addicts at all. At least not many of them, and certainly not in the way I imagined. In fact, aside from a cousin’s brother by a failed marriage who shot his inheritance up his veins and died from a flesh-eating bacterial infection, Charlie’s people were heroically reticent and moderate. They buried generations in a single cemetery; they thought about their legacies in concrete and protective ways; they were not squanderers of life and money and health.
And from what I could see, when anyone in Charlie’s family did do anything at all out of the ordinary—running away to Woodstock at the age of fourteen as a brother had done, disappearing to Thailand to become a Buddhist monk as a cousin had done, or taking up extreme river guiding as Charlie had done—it was viewed as a lark, an experiment, a brief expression of the unconventional. No one expected anything like that to last forever, and mostly it didn’t. Sooner or later, his people returned to the mean, reverted more or less conventional. They seemed to follow uninterrupted, undismaying covenants. Their dead seemed to take their earthly desires, passions, secrets, and complications with them; names and dates were carved into stone, their inconvenient or immoderate impulses were immobilized, their legacies were entrusted as if time went only forward.
Until I came to the States, I believed I knew without any doubt that time could be linear only if you counted it not by the moon, or by a sundial, or even by a watch, but by the loneliness of your own relentless trudge toward death, as if yours was the only life to live and time was something to be endured until you had worn it out. “Time is only as heavy as the thoughts you have to push through it,” Dad told me in Malawi when I was fourteen and had been hit by buffalo bean at the lake and had to sit motionless for a couple of hours. “The less you have to think about, the less time matters.” By which I now know he meant that the demons, doubts, and guilt we carry fluster time and make it take on an unnatural, constructed weight.
It’s a wondrous plant, buffalo bean—Mucuna pruriens, or as Mozambiquans call it, feijão maluco, the mad bean. It has a cascade of purple blooms in the spring, and in the winter it carries seedpods with long golden beans covered in shimmering tiny hairs. The hairs contain a chemical, serotonin, that causes unbearable itching when they lodge in the skin. Local healers had long understood that the very plant that has the capacity to drive you crazy in one manifestation would almost necessarily have the capacity to heal madness in another. The healers dried the leaves; smoked, it settled the mind. They crushed and prepared the seeds; consumed, it calmed the spirit.
But if the hairs hit you, it was very important to stay willfully calm. Scratching and movement only served to spread the chemical and resulted in worse itching. To get caught in a current of windborne hairs, or to brush up against it, was to be sent into an involuntary crash course in conscious immobility. A person had to empty her mind of the possibility of relief. Suffer calmly. “Sit still, Chookies,” Dad said when I came crying out of the lake where hairs from the plant had landed on the surface, worked their way into my bathing suit, leaving no part of my body untouched. “You’re not alone.”
My suffering did not make me unique, it made me belong. The gust that had brought my maddening misery had not discriminated. When I looked along the lake’s beach that late windy, sunny afternoon, I saw a dozen fishermen and several other women and children sitting as stock-still as I was supposed to, only they were seeming to stare placidly into the wind-whipped water whereas I squirmed and resisted. Also, no one tended to them. Meantime, Mum fed me antihistamines and Dad brought me tea.
“A couple of hours is all,” he said. “And anyway, it’s all relative.”
Dad was a fan of throwing away watches. He always said time was something we invented to make people into money. Clock in, clock out. On the farm, Dad didn’t have punch cards. Work started at dawn and ended when it got too hot for plants, animals, or humans to endure movement. Then everyone slept in the middle of the day, dreaming through the stupefying heat. And in the late afternoon, when the sun loosened its grip, work started again until impending darkness finished the day’s business.
“Do you know how to empty your mind?” Dad asked.
I shook my head.
Dad sat next to me. “Well,” he said. “It helps if you smoke a pipe. There’s no definite end, and there’s no fresh start with a pipe, properly smoked. It’s all the same; the beginning, the end.” Then he lit a cigarette. “Not so much a cigarette,” he said, looking at the tip of his Benson and Hedges. “A cigarette comes to an end. You throw it away. Then you have to light another one. After that, all you have is a habit.”
“Are you drunk?” I asked, not unreasonably I felt.
“A little,” he admitted. So for a while we looked at the lake, the waves coming in and going out, the sun striking everything yellow and pale with its heat. The water appeared infinite here, disappearing into nothing, touching shores in Mozambique eventually, lapping back to us in time. I tried to take my mind off my itching, which had the effect of putting it more terribly onto it. Dad smoked, and other than lifting a cigarette to his lips he sat utterly motionless too, as if he had been covered in searing hairs also. He had been hit by buffalo bean often in the war; the Himalayas behind our house in Rhodesia were smothered in the legume. “But a little itching doesn’t matter so much when you’re worried about getting stonked,” Dad said.
I knew without being told that this wasn’t the worst suffering in the world. Not by a very, very long shot. And it wasn’t even close to the worst suffering I had ever felt. But it was the only suffering I had come across that required you to remain utterly still in its presence and do nothing else except be there, feeling it.
The sun slid down toward the lake. The chemical fire on my skin lifted. Now I could feel where the sun had scorched the back of my neck. Along the beach, the fishermen were beginning to move again. The women picked up their baskets of mangoes and fish and gathered their children around their skirts. Egrets billowed white over the hills behind the lake. Cooking fires shimmered orange from the villages. “Everything ends if you let it,” Dad said. “Good and bad.”
What I didn’t know then, but what I understand now, is that my father was giving me a mini crash course—a crammer—in time, suffering, and relativity. In some ways he had become like the rural southern Africans alongside whom he had worked for so many years; his beliefs had become less solid and certain over time, and therefore more fluid and fearlessly unsupportable. From them he had learned that if you wait long enough, time will circle back to you, and that to attempt to quash or deny trauma was to make a monument of suffering. Dad got to his feet and helped me to mine. “I always think it’s worth remembering,” he said. “Tobacco’s a fourteen-month crop.”
Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States. There seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights. I fumbled with my checkbook, I was unsure how to use credit card readers, I sat a beat too long at the intersection when red changed to green. I found time was jealously guarded too, as if to share any of it, or to take up someone else’s allocation, was the greatest crime. Ironically, it seemed obvious that most Americans had more time than almost any other humans in the history of the earth; they lived longer and more luxurious lives than had ever been lived before. And yet instead of slowing down to fill all the space of their extra years, they sped up and up and up.
In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest. We didn’t bother trying to hoard what could not be safeguarded, restrained, and stored. Sometimes things got all u
rgent and life tore through us, whether we wanted it to or not. And sometimes the rain wouldn’t come, or the heat would not abate, and there was nothing to do but wait. As a result we were emotional spendthrifts, feeling and living as much as was required from moment to moment, using time carelessly. But from what I could tell, most Americans—at least the people I met—were emotional conservatives, using time and their feelings frugally, selfishly. They believed time belonged to an individual. “Don’t waste my time,” they said.
True, I had been raised with my father’s impatience—“Don’t just stand there, do something!” he admonished frequently—but southern African time had nonetheless always seemed to me to stretch the distance of the sun, the length between seasons, the availability of light. Until now I had spent most of my life among people who dwelt in time, as if it were as unaccountable as air, or sunshine, or the wind, something that allowed life but that didn’t belong to anyone in particular.
Of course I changed and sped up. And in time, Africa changed and sped up too. Almost anywhere you go on the continent, synapses have quickened to accommodate communicating in 140 characters or fewer, to click efficiently through the hundreds of channels on television, to instantly like or dislike some fresh input, to endure the momentary flicker between e-mails sending and receiving. Even the churning slowness of the Internet during Zambia’s steamy rainy season is quick enough to allow Vanessa to bash off e-mails late at night so that they arrive in the middle of my afternoon, appearing as time-lapsed conversations, off by a whole season, and by half a bottle of wine. “Huzzit Al-Bo. It’s stinking HOT. We’re like in a Hoven in here. The kids have SPOTS from the heat. Need more rain like a cat on a hot tin roof. Lots of love, and hugs Van xoxoxox”
Most of all, coming to America, I didn’t understand the culture of where I had landed. When I opened my mouth, people knew I wasn’t from the United States, but I was white-skinned and blonde, and in every other way appeared to be what people considered a normal-looking, nonminority U.S. citizen. The truth is, though, as much as I spoke English with a noticeable southern African accent, I behaved with an invisible southern African accent. I didn’t understand the luxurious entitlement of choice; I couldn’t see the point of Saran Wrap, I was baffled by garbage-can liners, I was amazed by the idea of heated driveways and roofs.
Also, I had never been anywhere with a community so disconcertingly vigorous and restless as the western side of the Teton Mountains in the early 1990s. People we knew got sick, of course, there were a few deaths—a five-year-old girl whose anesthesia had been botched, a young mother lost to breast cancer, a climber swept to his death in an avalanche—and I knew there were ill, old people because I volunteered for Meals on Wheels in our valley, but such tragedies and misfortunes were an unintegrated intrusion. It was as if anyone not vibrant and relentlessly healthy was sequestered or quarantined into some shuffling sideline.
“What’s been the defining tragedy of your life so far?” I asked Charlie one night after we had put Sarah to bed.
He seemed impatient with the question. “What do you mean?” he wanted to know.
“The worst thing that’s happened to you,” I said.
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know.” And then, “Why would you ask such a thing?”
I couldn’t tell him at the time. Only long afterward, I realized perhaps I really wanted to know what had happened in my husband’s past, and to his people, because I believed that unless we are vigilant and aware, we are destined to repeat ourselves, generation after generation, more or less distilling the habits and accidents and triumphs of our predecessors and drip-feeding them forward. I wanted to know his family’s eddying sadness, their inescapable patterns not only because I cared about what Charlie’s history had been but also because I was curious about what our future might bring. Although when I saw where he had grown up—in Pennsylvania, with his gentile parents, their pleasant neighborhood, their understated ways, and on his grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming with its beaver ponds, and charming log cabins, and private access to world-class trout fishing—Charlie seemed the textbook recipient of white, male, middle-class American privilege. Nothing bad had happened to him. Nothing bad would happen to him. He would always be okay.
It took me two decades to realize that Charlie’s family had endured more than their fair share of troubles; they just chose not to exploit, exude, and air them. They were the most silent people I had ever encountered, artfully uncommunicative, deeply stilled, as if they had all taken a pact not to leak emotion—pleasant or not—or divulge their motivations. Even after years of acquaintance, it would be hard for an outsider to know that anything at all bad had ever happened in this family, now or in any generation. It was as if the Rosses had figured out the secret to the impossible alchemic wish expressed by the crippled-up Idaho cowboy: they had worked out how to reset their memories every ten years, to erase pointless nostalgia, to relentlessly pursue the future.
This was utterly foreign to me. Even glimpsing us Fullers very briefly and from a great distance, a person would realize we had encountered worlds of pain and we still wore that pain, as if we had swum in an ocean of it and had forgotten afterward to towel off the emotional kelp and the eccentric boas of woebegone seaweed. There was the immoderation, of course, the excessive insouciance, the unbridled bonhomie—all a tip-off that stick around long enough and hilarity would likely end in tears. It’s true that we had been raised to maintain a stiff upper lip, and sometimes we did. But also, perhaps because there were so few condemning witnesses to our behavior, it didn’t matter if we spectacularly dissolved.
Like most drinking families, we usually aired our feelings late at night. It was when someone sighed and warned the others, “Oh, careful now, Bobo’s getting tired and emotional.” It was when Dad sometimes leapt on the dining room table and roared, “Music, maestro! Music!” It was when Mum admitted, “Oh dear, rather too much excitement, I’m afraid,” and gestured that her legs no longer worked. And it was when Vanessa reached behind her and started to fling bottles at whoever was standing in the way, declaring in a voice of deadly calm, “Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough.”
Charlie’s family didn’t seem to get drunk, and they certainly didn’t speak of their losses and tragedies. They didn’t roar and battle and laugh, but neither did they harangue and confess and sob. It was as if they were terrified of losing control, but I could not imagine of what. And when they did speak of their deepest grief, they did so with such a civil overlay of commanding restraint, I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t hear them. Perhaps I willfully wouldn’t hear them.
In southern and central Africa, tragedy roared at us, and we roared back. We shared our dramas publicly, bled them on the corridors of hospitals, laid our corpses on the beds of neighbors, held our sorrows up in full light. We were volume ten about our madness and disorder, even if we were also resilient and enduring and tough. We survived magnificently, and pretended to qualities of stoicism, but actually, even the most silent of us shouted the disordered history of our lives in our bodies and habits.
On the other hand, Charlie’s inherited sorrows were spoken so softly and so reluctantly, I didn’t register them as ongoing torments. I barely registered them at all. It took me longer than it should have before I finally understood that his family too had had children carried off by disease, they too had had fatal accidents, they too had known the living waste of drunkenness. Most astonishingly, it took me longer than a decade before I realized that his family had endured a tragedy of such moment, it set the standard for such tragedies: Charlie’s great-great-uncle had been the victim of the first kidnapping for ransom in the United States.
On July 1, 1874, little Charles Brewster Ross, aged four, and his eight-year-old brother Walter were snatched from the front yard of their home in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Walter managed to get free and find his way home, but as far as anyone knows—and at least as far as the Ross family is conce
rned—little Charley was never seen again. Little Charley’s father, Christian K. Ross, was thought to be very wealthy, but he had been nearly bankrupted by the stock market crash of 1873, and the exorbitant ransom demanded by the kidnappers in a series of semiliterate notes was well beyond his reach. His friends offered to take up a collection to meet the kidnappers’ demands, but Christian refused, having been advised by the authorities that paying the ransom would encourage other would-be kidnappers to follow suit with other families.
Initially, having no precedent for such a crime, the Philadelphia police told little Charley’s distraught father that drunks had likely snatched away the child, and would return him as soon as they sobered up. When it became apparent it was not a drunken lark, but rather a kidnapping for ransom, the case became a national sensation, precipitating one of the largest manhunts of the nineteenth century. Seven hundred thousand flyers were distributed with a sketch of little Charley and a detailed description that reads as the agonized longing of a mother who has kissed and breathed every inch of her lost child’s skin. “He is about four years old; his body and his limbs are straight and well formed; he has a full, round face: small chin with noticeable dimple; very regular and pretty dimpled hands; small well-formed neck . . .”
Three weeks after the kidnapping, the mayor of Philadelphia announced a $20,000 reward for information that would lead to either the lost child or his captors. Telegraphs spread the word across the country, and pandemonium ensued. Impostors, do-gooders, spiritualists, and conspiracy theorists clamored to offer intelligence and their services. Parents dressed their children up—girls as well as boys, of every age—in the hope they would pass as little Charley and become absorbed into this illustrious and respectable family.
Leaving Before the Rains Come Page 16
