Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

by Alexandra Fuller

  Within a tall security fence near the entrance to the ranch, there are several houses for white people, although all but two are abandoned. The ranch manager and his wife live in one house. They kill leopards, and Vanessa and I skulk close to their house and see the stretched-out skins on wire racks at the back of their yard. We tell Dad.

  We say, “They’re poaching leopards.”

  Dad says, “Oh, hell.”

  “Oh, hell, what?”

  “Don’t say ‘hell.’ ”

  “You did.”

  “Do what I say, not what I do.”

  We live in a small, white house surrounded by bare sandy ground and, for shade, two acacia trees. In the garden, left over from the war, is a snake-infested bombproof bunker which is accessed through a heavy metal door in the floor in my room. There is a generator at the workshops, which provides a spluttering, surging electricity for us from six in the evening until ten at night. At ten o’clock the lights dim once, to warn us to climb into our beds or light candles, and then in a minute the whole place is plunged into darkness and the kind of shattering silence that comes after a generator has been shut off.

  To my relief, I discover that we do not have to rely on the rivers for water. We receive thin, saline water from a borehole within the security fence. There is just enough for baths and flushing the loo, and for pots of tea, but hardly enough to keep a few struggling vegetables in the garden. During the long, hot, dry months, we find miraculous isolated dams in the far reaches of the ranch. They are almost forgotten-about reservoirs constructed forty years earlier by the original cattlemen who settled this place.

  The house is surrounded by a gauze-covered veranda on which there is a meat safe to keep recently shot impala carcasses, and bins where we store horse feed. The meat safe is an old one, a wooden-framed closet with metal gauze on all sides to allow for a cross breeze. The carcasses grow an oily translucent skin, which protects the meat below from going off too quickly, although we must still eat the entire animal within a week.

  We eat impala at each meal. Fried, baked, broiled, minced.

  Impala and rice.

  Impala and potatoes.

  Impala and sadza.

  Tinned beans.

  Tinned peas.

  Tinned peas and beans with impala.

  Bran flakes for breakfast if we’re lucky, oats porridge if we’re not.

  We drink thin, animal-smelling milk, which comes from a small herd of skinny beef cows. These are cows caught and tamed from the wild herd. The milk they give is reluctant.

  We eat Mum’s cottage cheese, which hangs from mutton cloth dripping into a basin in the hot kitchen.

  And fresh rolls of bread made by Thompson every morning and baked in the woodstove and which we also sell to the ranch laborers from a little store in the compound. Five cents for a bun. Twenty cents for a bun and a Coke.

  Last thing at night we are allowed a glass of milk with Milo in it—a crunchy, sweet, supposedly chocolate-tasting powder. But nothing can disguise the taste of the reluctant milk.

  Mum and Dad

  MUTARE GENERAL

  The doctor in Mutare is old—old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn’t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren’t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don’t do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love. They can’t stop. As long as they are alive, they will never not be a doctor. They can be old, or alcoholic, or burnt-out, but they will always be a doctor.

  Even if a doctor decides to leave and stop being a doctor, people will still come to him from miles around to present severed limbs, laboring sisters, children flinging themselves backward, rigid with cerebral malaria.

  A shit, carefully wrapped in a mealie leaf, is brought on the back of a bicycle through October heat and presented with proud, agonizing care at a clinic. “Here look! I am with blood when I go.”

  This is the place where educated eight-year-old farm children are taught how to stabilize a broken limb, perform CPR, deliver a baby.

  “The mother should not push or bear down until the child is beginning to move down into the birth canal, and she feels she has to push.”

  Dr. Mitchell, the doctor in Mutare, is old and bent and very white, bordering on gray. No European African manages such white skin in Africa unless he is up before dawn, works in an office all day, and comes home after dark, seven days a week.

  Mum starts having problems with the pregnancy. She says her problems are caused by the stress of independence. Losing the war. Losing the farm. She has heart palpitations and she is carrying too much fluid in her womb. She has started to look yellow. Her red hair has turned black and then gray from all the medication she takes and all the stress she is under. She bleeds and cramps. And Dad says, “Let this one go.”

  “What?”

  We hear them fighting.

  “It didn’t have a good start.”

  Mum is sobbing, “He, heee, heeeeee.”

  “Come on, Tub. Maybe this one isn’t meant to happen, hey?” He sounds gentle with her.

  “Heeee, heeeee.”

  Dad gets up in the dark, lights a candle and a cigarette. I hear him sighing, walking down the corridor, and the bitter-acrid smell of tobacco smoke curls into my room. I shut my eyes tight and close my fists and want to hold on to the baby in Mum’s belly.

  “Let’s not let this one go,” I say to myself.

  Dr. Mitchell says that if Mum wants the baby then she needs to lie down all day and night and be close to a hospital just in case. If she wants the baby.

  Mum wants the baby.

  Vanessa and I want Mum to have the baby.

  So she goes into the hospital in Mutare with her too-much-fluid-in-the-womb and her heart palpitations which she says feel like butterflies escaping into her throat. She takes a pile of books. Her friends from the Burma Valley bring her magazines and chocolates and sometimes beer. She lies down for weeks and weeks in the hospital.

  Every day Mum watches from her window in the maternity ward.

  Here is the line of Africans with their sick, dying, malarial, malnourished children and their severed, broken, bleeding limbs. Here they have come with their swollen wombs. And they have brought their curled bodies like tadpoles, small on the drying lawn, where they leak dysentery and diarrhea. Some of them are Africans who would have come to our clinic. Or to the Mazonwe clinic. Or to any one of hundreds of clinics that used to be run by farmers’ wives on remote farms across the area. Now they wait for a lift into town and after that they wait in the slow, yellow, fly-crawling sun. There aren’t enough nurses or beds and there isn’t enough medicine for all of them. Mum sighs and turns onto her side and her face falls long and old and yellow into the government-issue sheets (left over from the days of Rhodesia, but beginning to thin and tear). She starts to cry again.

  Van and Bobo on a kopje

  LOO PAPER AND

  COKE

  Dad takes Vanessa and me with him while he’s out looking for stray wild cattle and fencing the vast, unfenced ranch. We drive for two days to reach this particular herd. Dad is in the front, smoking, alone with his thoughts. Vanessa and I are in the back of the Land Rover with the dogs and the African laborers, bumping with our skinny bottoms on the spare tire and singing against the loud scream of the diesel engine cutting through roadless land, “If you think Ah’ m sexy and you want my body . . .” The Africans are crouched, quiet, gently rocking with the sway of the Land Rover. We travel for two days like this, blowing out tires on camel thorns, climbing over fallen trees, churning through dried-out flash-flood riverbeds.

  “Come on,” Dad shouts, “everyone getoutandpush!”

  And we leap over the edge of the back, all of us tumbling, scrambling for earth under numb muscles, hurrying before the Land Rover loses what little momentum it has. And we shout in S
hona, “Potsi, piri, tatu, ini!” One, two, three, four!

  And “Push!”

  “Ah, ah, ah!”

  The men start to sing. “Potsi, piri, tatu, ini!”

  The Land Rover bites. The dogs are out, too, herding, barking at the back tires. “Yip-yip.”

  The Land Rover finds edible ground and surges forward; we cling to the tailgate, jostling for a place. Dad won’t stop in case he gets stuck again. We climb aboard while the Land Rover spins ahead.

  Dad stops on level, solid ground and we all get out to pee. The men congregate at the front of the Land Rover; Vanessa and I crouch behind the back wheels.

  She says, “Keep boogies for me. Make sure they aren’t spying.”

  So I keep boogies. And when she has finished I say, “Keep boogies for me,” and she nonchalantly climbs back into the Land Rover. “Hey, that’s not fair. I kept boogies for you.”

  “So?”

  “Then keep boogies for me.”

  “You’re just a kid, you don’t count.”

  I pee quickly, crouching, looking over my shoulder. The sweet smell of pee steams up to me from the burning sand, sand hot enough to evaporate pee on contact.

  Dad has a compass. He looks at the sun, lights a cigarette. He gets down on his haunches and looks through the trees for a straight passage, wide enough for the Land Rover to fit between the trunks of the thickly-growing mopane.

  The men, who have been saving their own cigarettes, stick by stick from one payday to the next, relight old stompies and take two or three drags, holding the smoke deep in their lungs before exhaling, and then carefully pinching the end off their cigarettes, saving them for later.

  Cephas has found impala tracks while we are waiting for everyone to pee and to stretch the kinks out of their bones. He shows Dad, without talking, his shoulders shrugging casually in the direction of the thick bush.

  “Fresh?” asks Dad.

  Cephas reads the ground the way we read a map or a signpost. “They passed this way within one hour.”

  “Can we catch them?”

  “They are moving slowly.” Cephas points to newly pinched shrubs. “Eating.”

  So Dad says, “You girls want to come or stay here?”

  The sun is starting to fall into its own fiery pool of color behind the mopane trees and the air is releasing night smells. Vanessa and I know that in less than an hour, we are going to be bunched-up, shivering cold.

  “Stay here, thank you, Dad.”

  “Keep the dogs, hey?”

  “Ja.”

  We hold the dogs by the scruff of the neck until Dad is out of sight.

  Dad shoulders his .303. He lights a cigarette. Cephas starts to run ahead, darting, ducking, zigzagging. It’s as if he’s sniffing the ground. Dad follows, his quick strides swallowing ground.

  Vanessa and I hunker down next to the Land Rover with the dogs. We have both brought books, but the books need to last us for weeks while we are in camp. We have been in charge of our own packing. Dad said, “You girls are old enough now to pack for yourselves.”

  We have packed teabags, powered milk, sugar, and bran flakes for breakfast. Zimbabwean bran flakes taste like barely crushed tree bark. We have tins of baked beans and fish in tomato sauce for lunch. We have brought two shirts, two pairs of shorts, two pairs of brookies, and a jersey each. We already realize that we have forgotten to pack loo paper.

  Dad has packed cigarettes, brandy, bullets, and his gun.

  Vanessa pulls out the packet of cards. “Want to play war?”

  “Okay.”

  She deals. We play in the failing evening light, which is going in fast stages from mellowing yellow-red into dusky gray, filtered through the trees. The sun sets below the horizon and it is suddenly dark-black. The moon has not yet risen. We put the cards away. The temperature drops from strangling heat to goose-pimple cold in a matter of minutes. The men climb out of the back of the Land Rover and build a fire, to the west of the vehicle, using the body of the car as a windbreak. They slump on their haunches and stretch out their hands to the fire, resting elbows on knees. They relight their stumps of cigarettes and start to talk, their voices rising and falling like wind coming from a distance.

  Vanessa and I hunch beside the men, arms outstretched to the warmth of the fire. The men shuffle aside to make room for us, offer us a pull off their carefully smoked cigarettes, and laugh when we shake our heads.

  We wait for Dad.

  When the men get hungry they boil water and add a fistful of cornmeal into a pot for sadza. Into another pot they throw beans, oil, salt, and sliced dry meat for the relish. One man gets up and fills a small bowl with water from the drums in the back of the Land Rover. The water bowl is passed around and we all wash our hands. Now we eat, squashing balls of hot sadza with the fingers of our right hands and scooping up a little of the gravy onto the ball of meal. The men eat communally from dishes that sit in the middle of us, everyone eating slowly, eyeing their neighbors, careful not to take too much. Each man finishes when he is full, washes his hands from the small bowl. The men relight their cigarettes.

  By the time Dad and Cephas return, the moon has risen in the east and is hanging low over the trees, sending a silver light over the faces around the fire. Cephas comes first. He is walking effortlessly with an eighty-pound impala ram slung over his shoulders, the little black-socked feet caught in his fists. Dad follows with the gun. The impala has been field-dressed; the stomach and guts have been left in the bush for hyenas, jackals, and the morning-circling vultures.

  Dad has killed the impala with one shot to the heart. I insert my forefinger into the passage where the bullet has gone. It is still warm and wet with quickly robbed life. There is a tinny smell of blood and there are animal smells that waft up from the carcass—the smells this ram carried with it in life: dust, rutting, shit, sun, rain. Live ticks still suck from the dead animal, clustered where the skin is most soft, near the animal’s ears and genitals and on its stomach. Its eyes bulge hugely under eyelashes as long as my finger.

  Cephas hangs the impala from a tree and slits its throat, and blood gushes out onto the ground where the dogs are waiting, tongues hanging.

  We pull out sleeping bags and set up to sleep around the fire. Dad heats up some baked beans for supper, which he washes down with brandy and warm, silty-tasting water. We can hear the hyenas starting their evening scour: “Waaaa-oooop!” “Waaaa-oooop!” The dogs, blood-spattered and bellies distended, growl and press themselves against our sleeping bags.

  “Waaaa-ooooop!”

  The next morning we are up before dawn. It is too cold to sleep. The men stoke the fire and boil water for tea. Dad smokes. We curl stiff-cold hands around our tin cups and suck on the milky sweet tea until the sun startles up over the horizon, flooding pink light through the trees to our camp. It is almost immediately warm. In an hour it will be so hot that sweat will run in stinging rivulets into our eyes and dust will stick onto fresh sweat. For now, it is cool enough. Food and tea, wood-smoke flavored, are sweet comfort. The mourning doves begin their sad call, “Wuwu-woo. Wuwu-woo.” The Cape turtledove is crying, “Kuk-KOORR-ru! Work hard-er. Work hard-er.”

  The men wash up from breakfast and Vanessa packs the breakfast food and tea back into Dad’s old ammunition box. We scramble up into the back of the Land Rover and sit in a circle, perched around the impala. The men begin to sing, picking up songs and tunes from one another. They are songs of work and love and war. They are the songs of men who live too long at a stretch without women.

  When we reach the permanent camp on the banks of the Turgwe River, Dad skins the impala and hangs it from the bush pole that holds up the tarpaulin under which we keep food, dishes, and the drums of water for washing. Dad points to the drums. “Don’t ever drink this water,” he tells Vanessa and me. It comes from the shrinking, slime-frothed pools of water, warm and green with stagnant life, that are all that remains of the Turgwe River’s last flood.

  During the day, Da
d and the men drive to the fence lines and continue to set stakes in the ground, stretching wire into which they will one day herd the wild Brahmans. Some days, Dad drives all day with maps to find the old, decaying dips and kraals. He leaves a span of men at these old cattle camps to fix the holes in the concrete walls and reinforce the old races. He leaves them with food, cigarettes, matches. “I’ll be back in two days,” he tells them, “you fix this place by then?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Then faga moto!”

  Dad wants to dip the wild cattle before the rains come in October–November.

  Vanessa and I stay in camp and read, or climb the boulder that overlooks the Turgwe River and sing into microphone–baobab pods, “If you think Ah’ m sexy and you want my body, come on baby let it show.”

  “Those aren’t the words.”

  “Okay, then.” I stick out thin hips and rock back and forth: “There’s a brown girl in the rain, tra-la-la-la-la! There’s a brown girl in the rain, tra-la-la-la-la-la. Brown girl in the rain. Tra-la-la-la-la. She looks like sugar in your bum. Tra-la-la!”

  “I’m telling Dad.”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘bum.’ ”

  I climb higher on the boulder until I am balanced precariously on the thin-shouldered top. “Bum!” I shout into the stunned midday heat. “Bum! Bum!”

  Vanessa says, “You’re so immature.” She goes back into camp and I am left with my bad word echoing around in the dusty quiet bush. Bum.

  That is a day Dad has gone with old maps to find a kraal and he is late coming back into camp. We have been in camp for two weeks and the drinking water is running low. We must use the drinking water carefully, only for brushing teeth and drinking. When the plastic containers of drinking water have run out we will have to turn to the tanks of river water pulled from the Turgwe. We are already making tea from boiled river water—boiled for ten minutes and strained to get rid of the lumps of dirt, hippo shit, the worst of the silt.