“No, he wouldn’t,” I’d said.
“He would.” She’d been firm.
“No, he’d never give it a second thought,” I’d replied. “Anyway, he liked Wen. They talked about nematodes for hours.”
“Well.” Vanessa had swallowed a couple of knockout pills from Mum’s Indian pharmacist. “Let me state for the record, I’m very angry with you. And I feel very wound up. I am not amused by you, or Wen, or anything about you.”
But Mum adored Wen. They stayed up well into the night, long after I’d gone to bed in the guest cottage, Wen riveted by Mum’s hilarious and entertaining stories. “She’s much wittier than you,” he told me. “She’s a lot of fun.” Wen and Mum agreed that I, on the other hand, was not a lot of fun. I was, they’d concluded, bossy and overbearing.
“Someone has to be,” I’d argued.
I’d also given up drinking after Dad died, the better to observe my grief. Mum and Wen had celebrated the coming New Year together in the pub at the bottom of the farm with Boss Shupi and a few of the local dipsomaniac farmers and a couple of fishermen from Lusaka. It was true they shared a joie de vivre that I currently lacked. “I love you,” Mum had reportedly told Wen at the stroke of midnight.
“Are you sure?” I’d said after Wen had reported this back to me. “She usually says that to her animals only.” But Mum and Wen shared a love of art, also a passionate, immodest love of the dogs; Coco took a special shine to him, she kept stealing his shoes. This amused my mother enormously. Wen had only one pair with him, and they’d been very good shoes, expensive quality; this made my mother even happier. “Coco has very exclusive taste,” Mum agreed.
* * *
—
THERE WAS NOTHING IN OUR TRADITION to shove and bump us along in the work of mourning, no ritual or ceremony that declared a lifting or a shift of our sadness. We were like blundering, disconnected, severed children, patching it together the best we could. I leafed through Mum’s Book of Common Prayer and drastically shortened the Order for the Burial of the Dead. I was thinking of us standing out there in the heat and humidity, the flies would be thick, and I was also considering the fact that Wen wasn’t a minister, really, so the service wouldn’t necessarily trip off his tongue.
“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” It was a reading from 1 Timothy 6:7. I’d shortened the part after the presiding priest says, “Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live.” Also, I’d hacked into the end of the declaration that begins: “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed.”
Since the New Year—I’d made only one resolution—I was trying to be less bossy, but organizing the Order for the Burial of the Dead was bringing out my bossiest nature. Also, if I’d been less bossy, Dad would have stayed on Vanessa’s bookshelf, perhaps forever. It had seemed important that he be laid to rest here sooner rather than later, on the farm, near Mum, under a baobab tree. The narcissism of early grief is blinding: I’d condemned Vanessa’s need to wallow, and indulged my propensity to speed; she’d never forgive me for hurrying her along in her grief.
There are three baobab trees at the end of the fishponds. A purple heron perches in the westernmost tree; the egrets roost in the central tree; wild African bees have hived in a hollow of the easternmost tree. It was into this hollow that Mum resolved to put Dad’s ashes.
Mum wasn’t squeamish. She put her whole hand in the bomb casing while Wen read my drastically edited Order for the Burial of the Dead, and Mrs. Tembo and Mr. Chrissford stood under the hot early-morning sun with silent tears running down their cheeks. I slipped my arm through Nastasya’s, and hoped the bees would leave us alone.
“Of course they won’t bother us,” Mum had said. “Anyway, I’m the only person who’s deadly allergic to them.” But Mum liked the liveliness of the bees in the tree; the protection they offered the site. “And Dad will overlook everything from here,” Mum had said. “It’s a very magical, very spiritual spot. It’ll terrify everyone.”
Baobab trees are iconic: They have smooth metallic-pink heavily folded bark. They’re not the tallest of trees, fifty feet or so, but they’re sturdy and wide, seventy or eighty feet in diameter. It’s said that old baobabs burst into flames by spontaneous combustion when they die or become very, very old. Also that a lion would eat anyone foolish enough to pick a blossom from the tree; spirits are supposed to reside in the flowers.
“Yes, it’s all very auspicious,” Mum had agreed.
She dumped a handful of ashes into a well made by the baobab’s enormous roots. The dogs hopped down to investigate. A couple of them returned with white ash on their noses; of course there was the usual leg lifting.
“I think this is probably exactly what Dad didn’t want,” I said.
“What about this?” Mum asked. She pulled her hand out of the bomb casing and presented for our inspection a piece of dental work; it too was pale grey with ash. “This wasn’t Dad’s.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m quite sure,” Mum said. “I was always telling him he needed a bridge, but he didn’t bother to get his teeth fixed, or his eyes. He said it was like putting new doors on an old pickup, expensive and pointless. And he made such a fuss.”
We all stared at the dental work. It was already very hot. The bees were getting restless, they were swarming a bit; I don’t know much about African wild bees, but I do know I’d run from them most of my life, especially when their buzzing started to take on an urgent, low hum. “Well, I suppose we should just bury whoever we’ve been given,” I said.
Mum didn’t say “I told you so.” She didn’t need to. She sniffed with all the dignity available to a resilient widow and dug back into the bomb casing for another handful of ashes. “Yes, I suppose we should,” she said. She looked solemn. “Whether or not it’s poor Dad, or a nameless Hungarian, or an unfortunate”—there was a significant pause—“refugee.”
She shook out the last of whoever’s ashes they were, minus the bagful Vanessa had reserved for her own private ceremony, onto the roots of the tree. Vanessa said she’d put the rest of Dad in the Zimbabwe highlands, where he’d loved to fish, and until then he’d get plenty of rest on the bookshelf. It was a soothing place, I had to admit, with the Beatrix Potters, the soft Persian cats, the climate control, the perpetually locked door and drawn curtains; not unlike a cozy, homey mausoleum.
The spot under the baobab was less restful; the sun baked down on us pale and yellow, the grass steamed, the fishponds boiled, the dogs hopped about and panted. We all stared at the ashes for a moment, not longer; each of us with our own thoughts of mortality, and thoughts about whose ashes were these, really? Then the bees started to swarm toward the dogs; that shook Mum into action.
“Right, everyone,” she said. “Grab a dog, let’s get everyone home before the bees lose their patience.” She’d been stung by this hive before, when Sarah had come out to stay; her face had swelled up like a soccer ball. “Look at that,” she’d said to Sarah at the time, quite thrilled. “Not a single wrinkle. Who knew? Bees are nature’s Botox.”
* * *
—
THE DEATH OF THE FORCE behind a family is not something the average family of Anglo-Saxon heritage will withstand; Shakespeare knew this, and wrote about it, it’s all over the Bible, so perhaps it’s a Judeo-Christian trait. The family falls, that’s inevitable; but it either falls together or falls apart. That isn’t a choice, though; it depends on the family’s fault lines.
Also, I don’t think you can predict which it is your family will do until it happens, although you might guess, and guess incorrectly that it’ll fall one way or the other. And in any case, nothing that happens after death is permanent, not even death—although it f
eels that way for a while; or felt that way for me for a while.
“Why can’t you and Vanessa just get along and settle Dad’s estate?” Mum asked more than a year after Dad had died. Mum and I had always tried to phone each other on Sundays, I in the morning, she in the afternoon. I felt the distance between us most keenly in the Zambian summer, all that lively life chattering through the phone to my deadened Wyoming winter.
“She’s not talking to me,” I said. “She says Bindi says I am bad for her. She says she is tired of me, and of everything about me.”
Vanessa and I had gone through so much, and it’s possible we’ll go through more, but there’s no law or rule that says we have to go through it together, or stay bonded, or loyal every step of the way. In retrospect, it was as if we were sisters who’d stayed together only for the sake of the parents, and now they were half gone, we couldn’t hold it together, we couldn’t hold it back, we couldn’t hold it in. Every untended wound, every ungrieved grievance, a lifetime of unspoken hurt, surfaced. There were terrible rows, and then a terrible silence.
“Well, that’s very inconvenient,” Mum said.
“Why don’t you try speaking to her?” I begged. “Go up to the Rock, and sneak in undercover with a tray of tea.”
“I can’t imagine what Dad was thinking making you co-executors,” Mum said. “I could have told him you’d be at each other’s throats.”
“But I’m not at her throat,” I said. “She’s at mine.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mum said; she was bored of our performances, I could tell. “I have a very good mind to leave my share of the farm—I am the majority shareholder—to the staff. It’s their farm in any case. They do all the work. I won’t leave my shares to you or Vanessa. You don’t deserve them.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. I could hear the dogs jostling about. Also, I could hear birds chattering and singing in the background; the North African and European migratory birds would be nesting in the wetlands and garden and all around the fishponds. “Mm,” Mum said.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right in the end,” I said. “If it isn’t all right, it isn’t the end.”
There was another long pause. “You stole that line from Dad, didn’t you?” Mum said.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
“Well, it sounded much more convincing when Dad said it,” Mum said. “Much.”
CHAPTER FIVE
If You Stay in the Middle of Your Suffering, You’ll Never Find the Edge of It
All things considered, I got through childhood relatively unscathed. I’d had the usual: malaria, bilharzia, worms, and a couple of attacks of amebic dysentery. I’d been put through my mother’s version of equine therapy. We believed in wearing helmets because we didn’t believe in buying calm, expensive horses.
“I hate wimps,” Mum said.
She admired people like herself, who were not wimps, and she attributed her own hardiness to the antics of Nane, her Somali pony. He was a little brute with an 8 branded on his haunches; he’d survived lions and the long, grueling trek from Somaliland to Eldoret.
“His early life had tested his patience to the maximum, obviously,” Mum said. “I think he hated his life; of course he took it out on me. He would only ever go fast backward, and upward, never forward.”
Nane’s specialty was slamming on the brakes in the middle of something else, and bucking. He knocked my mother out during morning gallops every day before school; it made it impossible for her to learn to count, but it toughened her up and that mattered more than arithmetic, at least in our lives it did. And in the wholesome, outdoorsy lives of the Huntingfords of Eldoret it had mattered a lot too.
“The nuns complained to my father, ‘We can’t teach Nicola anything if she’s concussed the whole time,’ but I learned more from Nane than I ever learned from those resentful nuns at their wretched convent,” Mum said.
The unspoken assumption in our family was that easy, pampered, expensive horses led to wimpy children. Difficult, wild, willful ponies gave character to children. I got character from my pony, although he was too poorly coordinated to buck, but he kicked, bit, bolted, and got me off his back every chance he got, every way he could imagine; for a pony he was very creative.
I loved him passionately; I rode daily. I wasn’t any good, not like Mum had been. “I was winning races on a much more difficult pony at your age.” Mum had nearly despaired. She had a Thoroughbred she’d rescued off the racetrack; he was scarred and had arrived covered in ticks. He wasn’t safe to ride either, but he was less creative than my pony.
One morning, my pony scraped me off on a tree and then returned to stomp on me. “He stomped on you?” Mum cross-examined me as best she could after the fact; she sounded like the plodding detective in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series, unconvinced and certain at the same time. “Are you sure?”
I was fairly sure.
I couldn’t move my arms and legs. My head was bashed in; my spine was crushed. It hurt to breathe; it hurt more to talk; it hurt worse to vomit. To take my mind off things until the telephone exchange could reach the family doctor, and until Dad could get down from the cattle dip, Mum tried to get me to see things from the pony’s perspective. “I think he was gelded too late,” she said. “Maybe he thinks he should have been a stallion. Anyway, Bobo, you’ll have to get back on him soon, or he won’t think much of you, will he?”
I didn’t care what my pony thought of me, but I’d never have let on. “Dismounting without permission,” Dad had concurred when he showed up from the cattle dip; Mum had sent a runner from the house. Once a month all the cows were plunged into a toxic bath against ticks and mites and mange. They hated it; it made them bellow. Dad smelled of the toxic dip and cattle, sweat and gun oil. He smoked, waiting for the telephone to ring.
“Cigarette?” he’d offered me. “Or are you trying to give up?”
Mum took the call from the family doctor in the little closet in the corridor where the phone lived; also mice were forever nesting in there, and snakes came after the mice. “She refuses to walk and she’s having difficulty talking,” Mum yelled into the crackly party line. “You can’t get her to shut up normally—and also she says it hurts during breathing.”
As if breathing were optional.
“I’m afraid Doc Mitchell says you have to go to the hospital.” Mum returned to the bedroom with a long face. “He’s spoken to the bone surgeon, and the bone surgeon isn’t very chuffed you won’t walk.” She paused and let me have the really bad news. “Actually, the bone surgeon is furious,” Mum said. “He said he doesn’t have time for National Velvet in the middle of a war.”
“Bad luck, Bobo,” Dad said.
There was nothing a Rhodesian child dreaded more than the hospital, except maybe the orphanage. Or to be sent to St. Giles, that would be the worst thing imaginable. St. Giles was the government school in Bulawayo for the Rhodesian reject kids, the cripples and redheads, the kids with hearing aids. I knew a girl at school whose brother had been sent there; it was worse than if he’d died. If I wouldn’t walk, I was headed for St. Giles.
It was a measure of the state I was in that I didn’t at that moment care. The pain in my back and lungs was off the charts, had anyone been interested in charting my experience. But Rhodesians would never have gone in for smiley faces from saddest to happiest. “Show me your pain,” no one would ever have asked. If anything we’d have been shown a chart of grimacing faces from brave to braver to bravest and we’d have been instructed to be manlier.
Except I was a girl, I was ten, and I was in the worst physical pain I’d known until then, although, of course, there’d been grief and terror and other forms of discomfort. “Grit your teeth,” Dad advised; he knew all about manliness, the shedding of self it required. “Don’t think
about it.” I gritted my teeth. I tried not to think about it, but I had been reduced, for the first time in my life, to the sum of my biology.
Or my body was a prison of pain from which I couldn’t escape.
Afterward, when people had warned me that childbirth was the worst pain I’d ever feel—it’s a social contagion upon seeing a pregnant woman, in my experience, to say things like this—I’d kept waiting for it to get as bad as that particular blinding pain, and it was there, but not even close to all the way there.
“Put everything in perspective,” Dad always said, unnecessarily really, when Vanessa and I were children. When we were children, everything was already in perspective; war does that, so does suffering, or everyone suffering around you does that, you learn to calibrate. You learn not to draw attention to yourself. “It can always be worse,” Dad said, because it could; we could see that for ourselves.
I could endure; Vanessa could endure.
We endured enough.
In the decades since our childhoods, though, something to do with our tolerance for pain became deregulated. Or I’ll speak for myself, my own pain. The the-rapists can give it a name or not; the cure’s the same for me either way, I’m certain. An untended pain accumulates; pain must be tended, and for it to be tended, it must be endured. But “Pull the plug for anything more than a stubbed toe,” I always told my three children. “I’m a horrible patient,” I reminded them. “You don’t want me lingering.”
I didn’t want to suffer unnecessarily; that was it, mostly. I’d seen suffering, I’d suffered a little myself; I’d watched what it had taken from people to suffer. It scared me; that, and I hadn’t wanted to be a burden to my children. I’d inherited the fear of outstaying my welcome from Dad, the way I’d inherited raucousness from Mum; it was a challenging combination to juggle. Also, it’s curious what skips generations, and what shows up in each generation in slightly different forms.
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