Precious and Grace

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She sat up in bed, staring directly ahead of her. Her neighbour had a jacaranda tree in his garden. What if…She swung her legs out of bed, stood up, and put on her dressing gown. She felt with her toes for her old felt house-shoes, found them, and slipped into them. A thought had come to her, and it had elbowed everything else out of her mind: her neighbour had a large jacaranda tree to the side of his house, in roughly the position that the tree in the photograph would have been. And his house was one of those old BHC houses, very similar to hers, with a verandah in the right place. It had been staring her in the face, and it had not even occurred to her that when Rosie brought them to Zebra Drive she was looking for her neighbour’s house and had mistakenly identified hers. His was set back further from the road and was largely obscured by the shrubs and trees that he never bothered to control. Of course, of course…

  The obvious, wrote Clovis Andersen, is often very obvious—not just a little bit obvious, but glaringly obvious. Yet we fail to notice it and, when we do, we are astonished that we did not see it much earlier…

  She made her way along the corridor and into the kitchen. The glowing red light on the cooker flashed out the time: 12:02. It was already tomorrow, and here she was proposing to go outside into the yard at the very time that was the preserve of snakes, out hunting for rats and mice and other prey, because this hot time of the year was exactly when snakes liked to move about at night. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had seen a cobra only a few days before, when he had come home later than usual and had gone to inspect his beans. It had been curiously oblivious of his presence, and had glided across the vegetable beds with all the confidence of ownership. Snakes did that; most of the time they kept out of your way but when it was very hot and they had business to attend to, the ground over which they moved was theirs, not yours, and you had to watch out for them.

  She went outside. She had with her a flashlight, but the batteries were coming to the end of their life and gave out only the faintest beam, which on the ground ahead of her was not much more than a half-hearted glow. The night was particularly dark, as there was just the faintest sliver of moon, a curved wisp of silver, and there were no lights in the surrounding houses. Only the stars shone, those constellations hanging over the Kalahari to the west, field upon field of pulsing white, the stars she had never really learned to name but one day hoped she would. But she could pick out the Southern Cross, which she saw above the dark treeline of the horizon, and felt somehow comforted by it.

  There was a noise, and she gave a start before she recognised that it was, of course, Fanwell’s dog, Zebra, for whom Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and the children had prepared a kennel of sorts—an old packing case upended at the end of his wire run. The children had accepted responsibility for Zebra, for the time being at least, feeding and replenishing his bowl with water. He was appreciative, and licked them from head to toe with his protruding pink tongue. “Not on your face,” she said. “Not on your face.” But the dog had ignored her, as had the children, who delighted in the dog’s moist displays of affection.

  She crossed the yard to where Zebra was half in his kennel and half out. In the dim light of the flashlight she noticed that one of his legs was sticking out at an awkward angle. Crouching down, she saw that the leg had become entangled in the cord that linked his collar to the running wire. She fumbled with this, trying to extricate him—he licked her hand as she did so—but the cord had wound round too tightly and had become a knot. The dog whimpered; he was not in pain, but he could not be left like this. They would have to make different arrangements and she would speak to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni about it later this morning. A pen of chicken wire could be the answer—a pen in which he could be untethered and could patrol in relative freedom.

  She attempted to disentangle the cord, but failed. She would need to release the dog before she could do this, and so she began to undo his collar. He licked her as she set about the task, as if to endorse her decision.

  “There,” she said, removing the thick leather collar. “Now we can—”

  She did not finish. Springing to his feet, the dog gave a yelp, shook himself vigorously, and then bounded away into the darkness. Mma Ramotswe had been bending down for the task; now she stood up and felt light-headed as the blood drained from her head.

  “Zebra!”

  Her voice was swallowed in the night. She thought she heard a bark, but already he was far enough away for it to be almost indiscernible. She dropped the collar. There was enough to think about without having to chase after an exuberant dog. He might return, or he might not; these creatures were headstrong and unpredictable.

  She sighed. The children would reproach her for losing him. She would have to reassure them that he would turn up, tail between his legs, when he became hungry. He might, or he might not; on balance, she thought that he was gone. He was a restless dog, one who was not quite sure where he lived, and he might not want to stay at Zebra Drive.

  She moved away from the kennel. She had come outside with a search in mind, and she was going to carry it out, dog or no dog. She started to cross the vegetable patch, heading for the fence that ran between her neighbour’s property and hers. The sticks that supported Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s beans made a small forest in the night; she stepped round them, playing the light on the ground before her, for what it was worth. It illuminated very little, but it was something. Without it, each step would be an act of faith that there was nothing waiting for her to step on it—no scorpion or snake, none of the small, scuttling creatures that had no name but that might sting or nip those who disturbed their nocturnal business.

  The fence consisted of four strands of wire, strung carelessly and sagging through neglect. Her neighbour, Mr. Vain Kwele, had declined to do anything about it when she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had offered to bear half the cost of new posts to replace the ones that had suffered the ravages of termites. “No need,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to keep out or in. And we both know where the boundary is, so we do not really need a fence.”

  He was mean, Vain Kwele: he owned a bottle store on the Francistown Road, and everybody knew that people who owned bottle stores made money. Although he could have afforded something newer, he drove an ancient car that he expected Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to fix at little or no charge. In spite of the undoubted profits of a bottle store, his wife was dressed in dowdy clothes and had no help in the house. His two children, though, were clearly overindulged. They sat at the window watching Puso and Motholeli working in the vegetable garden, and as they sat there they ate fat cakes and other delicacies prepared by their dowdy mother in her dirty kitchen.

  “They will explode one day,” said Motholeli. “Those fat ones next door will explode from eating too many fat cakes.”

  “Bang!” said Puso. “There will be a big noise and bits of them will be all over the place. That will be the end of them.”

  That will be the end of them. She had noticed that this was an expression that Puso used quite frequently, and in all sorts of situations. Usually there was an element of justice in it: people got their just deserts, and that would be the end of them. Or they would lose an argument, and that would be the end of them too. It was catching, and she found herself using it herself, telling Mma Makutsi that somebody she suspected of dishonesty would run into trouble one day, and that would be the end of him. Mma Makutsi had agreed, and added, “And not before time, Mma.”

  She hesitated at the fence, but only briefly. Bending down, she pulled two strands sufficiently apart to squeeze herself through. Am I really doing this? she asked herself. Is this really Mma Ramotswe, respectable citizen, climbing through a fence in the middle of the night? Is this what a traditionally built woman should be doing? She almost laughed at the thought—it was that absurd. But she had committed herself; she was now in her neighbour’s garden and had her task ahead of her.

  That task was clear enough. It had been a long time ago—over thirty years—but Rosie had said that she had laid stones around the grave of
Susan’s pet dog. Well, if these stones were sufficiently large—the sorts of stones used to mark the boundaries of flower beds—then there was a possibility that they would still be there. Her neighbour’s garden had been untended for years, with beds left uncultivated and plants allowed to grow unrestrained. There was even a clump of prickly pears that other neighbours had begged Vain Kwele to remove: once those got onto the land they could run rife. But he had done nothing, with the result that the prickly pears had colonised a whole section of his yard, making for an ugly and impenetrable corner. Down at the end of the garden, though, running along the front fence, was a line of random shrubs, self-seeded for the most part, that was less inhospitable than the rest. It was here that she would find what she was looking for—if it was to be found at all.

  Playing the steadily weakening beam of the flashlight on the ground in front of her, she made her way along the front of the garden. Something caught the light at her feet—an empty beer bottle, tossed across the fence by some passer-by; and something small and dark that moved—a dung beetle labouring with its trophy towards its home. She stepped sideways to avoid disturbing it and held the flashlight closer to the ground in the hope of getting a better view of where she was putting her feet.

  And there, not far ahead of her, to be made out in the fading beam, but only just, was a small rectangle of stones embedded in the soil. It looked like a flower bed, but was too small for that, and she knew at once that this was the place where all those years ago Rosie had made a grave for her charge’s dog. She bent down and examined the stones. One or two of them had become almost completely covered with sand, but were revealed when she brushed this aside with her hand. In a dry country, the bones of the land often remain visible for years—there is no mulch, no covering loam to obliterate the marks that people leave on the earth; they simply remain there. Nor is there the rain to wash those bones away—just the wind, which will eventually erode what lies on the surface, although that will take many years.

  Yes, she thought. Yes. This is exactly what Rosie meant. This was the proof that Mma Ramotswe needed to establish that what Rosie had said was true, and that however much she might have been motivated by the prospect of reward, this woman had been who she claimed to be, and, what was more, she had loved that child.

  She looked down at the earth. We cry over bits of earth; we fight over it; we take our monuments and place them upon the land to assert our claims; we make small patches sacred in some way, as happened here over thirty years ago when a much-loved animal was buried amidst a child’s tears.

  The beam of the flashlight now flickered and then failed altogether, the batteries finally drained of their weakening amps. She turned away; this was not the time to feel bad about how Rosie had been treated. She could rectify that over the next day or two when she would seek her out and apologise. Then she would bring Susan and Rosie together, and let them talk about whatever it was they would wish to talk about. She suspected that Susan wanted to say thank you, but she may wish to say other things too. In all of it there would be tears, she thought, but then tears had their place in the reliving of the past.

  She began to walk back towards the fence. Without any light to guide her, she trod carefully, making sure that her footfall was firm enough to give warning to any snakes that might be abroad. The steps of a traditionally built woman, she thought, would deter any snake except…except the puff adder, the sluggish, traditionally built snake that could hardly be bothered to get out of anybody’s way, and one of them was moving slowly across her path as she neared the fence. She felt it underfoot—a soft, giving feeling—and she heard the sound of its hiss. And then she felt something hit her ankle, as if she had trodden on a branch that had whipped up and struck her.

  She knew immediately what had happened, and although she jumped back instinctively, she realised that it was too late and that the snake, now retreating into the cover of vegetation, had struck her.

  She thought of her father, of Obed Ramotswe, and wanted to cry out to him, which she did. She screamed for him, as a child will scream for its parent. “Oh Daddy, Daddy!”…There was silence. Then she screamed again.

  A light came on in Vain Kwele’s house. There was a voice, thick with sleep: “Who is that? Who is that out there?”

  She called out, “Me! Me!”

  “Which me?”

  She started to cry, and hobbled towards the neighbour’s door, which was now opening to allow a square of light to fall outside.

  “Mma Ramotswe! What are you doing, Mma? Is something wrong?”

  She stuttered out what had happened, and her neighbour gasped.

  “I will drive you to the hospital,” he said. “I will take you there right now.”

  She nodded. It would be quicker going with him than going back to wake up Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. With a snake bite, she knew, time was of the essence. If it was a mamba that had bitten her, then she might only have a few minutes. What did people say about the bite of that snake? That you had four minutes at the most? In which case, she was now down to three.

  In the light from the door she looked down at her leg. There was no blood, no sign of a wound, and all she saw was a small scratch. Yet the skin could be broken and some poison may easily have entered her system—in which case she would soon feel the symptoms.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said.

  He invited her to sit down. “I shall fetch my car keys,” he said.

  She closed her eyes. Did she feel any of the symptoms? Did she feel a tightening of the chest as the neurotoxin took effect? That would make breathing difficult. And then it would go to the eyes, and vision would go, and the heart would race as it tried to pump blood about a body that sensed the venom the blood bore with it.

  She felt no pain. Nothing. She looked again at her ankle. There was nothing to see beyond the scratch. “I don’t think I am going to die,” she said, under her breath. And then added, “Yet.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE FAT CATTLE CLUB

  MMA MAKUTSI AND FANWELL looked at Mma Ramotswe with concern. She was seated on her verandah, her leg freshly bandaged just above the ankle; at her side, on a small, rather rickety table was a pot of red bush tea.

  “We were shocked, Mma,” said Mma Makutsi. “Very shocked indeed.”

  “Yes,” said Fanwell. “To our foundations, Mma. We were shocked to our foundations.”

  Mma Ramotswe laughed. They were her fourth set of visitors that morning, and everyone had expressed much the same sentiments of shock; this was flattering, but had made her feel as if she was making a fuss about nothing. She felt completely well and had now decided that the doctor who said she should rest for two days had been far too cautious. After this visit from Mma Makutsi and Fanwell, she would bring her convalescence to an end and resume normal life.

  “Tell us what happened,” said Mma Makutsi. “You were in your neighbour’s garden at midnight and…”

  Fanwell frowned. “Why were you in your neighbour’s garden, Mma—especially at midnight?”

  Mma Ramotswe made a gesture that implied that this was not a question they needed to bother about. “I’ll explain in due course,” she said. “It’s a bit complicated. I was there and my light ran out of power.”

  “So you were in the dark?” prompted Fanwell.

  “Yes, I was in the dark and couldn’t really see where I was putting my feet. And I trod on a snake—I think it was a puff adder.”

  Mma Makutsi’s detection instincts came to the fore. “How could you tell in the dark, Mma?”

  “I felt it,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You know how most snakes are thin and quite lean? Well this was fat and soft. That meant it was a puff adder—that is what they are like.”

  “She’s right,” said Fanwell, nodding in agreement. “Those snakes are like that. They are two or three times as fat as ordinary snakes.”

  Mma Ramotswe continued her account. “It struck, and I thought that I was dead. I thought: this is the end.”


  Fanwell drew in his breath. “Ow, Mma! I have heard that your whole life flashes before you just before you die. Have you heard that? Did that happen?”

  “She did not die,” Mma Makutsi pointed out. “So her life would not have flashed before her, Fanwell.”

  “My neighbour took me to hospital,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He drove very fast and we almost went off the road, but we got there in a couple of minutes, I think.” She paused. “They put me on a trolley and wheeled me in. I told them what had happened and they fetched a doctor straightaway. He looked at my leg and said that he could not find the puncture wounds of a snake bite. He said that the snake must just have grazed my leg with its fang as it struck. He said this sometimes happens if the snake starts its strike from the wrong angle.”

  “You were very lucky,” said Mma Makutsi. “If a puff adder gets its fangs into you, then it is very serious.”

  “Your leg dies,” said Fanwell. “Then you die. That’s what happens, unless they can chop it off in time.”

  “The doctor said that no venom had been injected,” Mma Ramotswe went on. “Although he thought it possible a tiny amount might have got in through the scratch. That’s why they said I should sit in my chair at home today and tomorrow—in case I developed any symptoms. But there is nothing. I am feeling one hundred per cent. I do not need to stay here.”