“Whoa!” Simon pulled to a halt, tugging at Calypso’s mane, dragging him round, tense with shock. “Will? Will?”
Peter had been unable to stop, fumbling with reins and nearly tipping over the neck of the nag. Now he trotted back, and the two boys waited, uncertain what was needed—laughter or bandages?
“Will? You okay?”
“All well, Will? Will . . .”
There was a pause, with only muffled gasps and expletives from the grass—but Will was a fighter. She was proud of that, a fighter, and she worked out which way was up in the mass of green and stood, shaking and covered in grass seeds.
“Ja.” She panted. “Of course I am. Course!”
In fact, she wasn’t sure what was happening in her chest, and her elbow was grazed and bleeding, and she was only half-breathing, and half-crying and half-laughing, but she seized Shumba’s mane and swung up again, scrabbling against his sturdy sides, and ran a tongue over her teeth. “All well! Ja! All, all, all well!” And, lying low on Shumba’s neck, Will galloped, still dizzy, out into the bush.
The boys, racing after her, heard singing on the wind.
When Will sang, she smiled at the same time; the corners of her mouth reached outward, into her ears, and her eyes changed color, to amber with bits of gold. This was Will’s world, and it was her joy.
IF YOU WANTED TO SEE will’s world at its best, you went out at sunset. You had to put up with the swarms of mosquitoes, that was true, but in return you got the toads singing, and the air tasted of excitement. The African witching hour, the men called it. And it was true, Will thought, looking round at the circle of horseboys and the cobs of roast corn scattered on the ground; everything was strange in this light. Even the men drinking leftover beer from the gala two days before looked stronger and wilder than usual. It was like the world was carved out of expectant silence. Will sniffed and tucked her legs under her chin. Her knees smelled the same as the air, of woodsmoke and earth. Had anyone ever been as happy as her?
Her thoughts were interrupted by a colossal crash. It was Simon, back late from mucking the horses, pushing through the other boys, tripping and swearing, throwing a stick at someone’s head, stealing someone else’s corncob and collapsing to sit beside Will. She grinned. Simon had never done anything quietly in his life.
“Manheru, hey!” He took a handful of the gooseberries by her side and crammed them into his mouth.
“Manheru!” Will leaned toward him. “Hold still.”
“What?”
“Tick.” She pulled at the black insect on his arm, and it came away, complete. “You got to keep the head on—see, this one’s good.” She held it out to Hector, who was two years younger and desperately in awe of her. “If it stays in your skin, you’re finished, ja. You froth at the mouth and die.” She smiled her most beatific smile. “Truly.” She put the tick between her teeth and bit. Blood squeezed down her lips.
“Eugh! Will, that’s horrible! Now you’ll get rabies,” warned Peter.
Will grinned at the expressions of horror on the boys’ faces. She kissed the back of her hand, and the blood on her lips left a lipstick-like mark. “It won’t hurt me.”
Simon laughed. “Nah. Will’s immune to everything.”
Will made her rabid-dog face.
Hector rolled his eyes into his head and dribbled. “I’ve got rabies! Look! Look, Will! I’ve got rabies too!”
• • •
Biting ticks was one of the very few things forbidden by Captain Browne.
“But they bit me first,” Will had said, trying to look sullen when the captain had first caught her. “And”—this was daring—“I bet you bit ticks when you were a kid? Didn’t you, sir?”
“Eh?” The captain had growled low, like a lion with a blocked nose, and swiped at the back of her legs with his walking stick. “Eh? Whatasay?” The captain was deaf only when it was convenient. “Run off and play with those boys of yours.” She had heard him snorting with laughter as he’d gone round the corner. In fact, that had been the day she’d realized you could be as rude as you liked to the captain—or you could be mute or say stupid things or be awkward and dirty and scratching—so long as you loved him at the same time. It was a thing worth knowing.
The other things that the captain had forbidden were (1) playing near the compost heap, where there were scorpions and some of the smaller snakes—which Will and Simon did anyway, and were duly bitten, but by a grass snake, no more dangerous than a wasp—and (2) eating the dark red berries that grew along the veranda. Will only tried that once, and then never again, after the foulest fit of diarrhea she had ever had. “I thought I was going to die, but I would have hated to die in a toilet. So I went out into the bush, without any pants . . . and it was beautiful, and there were duiker by the stream, and it was so still. . . . I think it was the beauty, ja, that cured me.” And above all, it was forbidden to wear clothes that had not been ironed—even vests; even socks. Ironing was the only way to kill the putsi fly that laid eggs on damp clothes and burrowed into your arms and legs without you feeling it.
Will had no real wish to have flies laying eggs under her skin, so the next afternoon she dragged the heavy ironing board outside, bumped it against her shins, cursing, and up the steps, and out on to the veranda, where she stood in the open air, ironing her father’s socks.
She had already done all her own scraps of clothing—jeans bleached grayish-blue by the sun, T-shirts worn into flopping flapping softness, brightly patterned shorts that she’d made herself with clumsy stitches, and a khaki skirt she had made from the top of her father’s trousers. There were dresses, too, that Captain Browne brought back as gifts from town. Most felt pointless in a house with no mirrors, and they were too tight, with bows that tangled at the back, but she could cut off the ribbons and use them to tie back her hair, and with one particularly fussy one she had sewn up the arms and neck and used it as a sack for stealing bananas.
Will should have worn a hat—children in Harare, she was told, wore wide-brimmed cloth or American-style caps—but the horseboys did not, and so Will did not. Nor did she wear socks herself; she didn’t wear shoes. But her father did, and she wouldn’t have worms burrowing into her father’s feet. She loved him too extremely. Though she couldn’t have explained why, around him it was never difficult to keep her temper; around him there was never any need to tense up and contract into herself.
She could hear him now, coming in through the back door. The door was in two parts, like a stable door, and the bottom half squeaked, but Will stubbornly refused to let anyone oil it, so that she would always be ready, like this, waiting on tiptoe to welcome her father. All the men who worked for Captain Browne—and in truth the captain himself—were a little afraid of Will, so the door remained unoiled.
She knew exactly what her father would do; this was the only bit of a day that never varied. Hot and tired (the tired that comes from a long day at a job at which he was magnificent, she thought, and felt a butterfly-flicker of happy pride), he would stride to the fridge, take out a glass bottle of beer, pry it open with his nails, and put his head under the single tap in the big tin sink.
“Hello? You in, Cartwheel?” he called.
He wasn’t like other fathers, Will knew. He was taller and braver. She gave her owl hoot, as loud as a shout, so he would know she was by the avocado tree on the veranda. (A hoopoe call meant she was in her bedroom, and a parrot screech meant the rock pool.)
Her father always did everything hugely. With a lion’s roar, he burst through the insect curtain and snatched Will up round the waist, and they spun and whirled, giddily out of balance, and water droplets flew from William’s face and the iron wobbled dangerously and the dogs barked, leaping and excited, and scratched at Will’s spinning ankles, and William bellowed his great happy laugh—a laugh that only came out around Will, which she knew, and loved him even better for it—and hundreds of birds took off, chattering, from the avocado tree. Will glowed.
“Good day, hey, Dad?” she said when, set the right way up, she had picked up her iron from the floor.
“Good day. Long day . . . but good day.” He spoke in the way of the African evening, slowly, with long spaces. “Lazarus said one of the goats had twins. One is too small . . . a runt. I said if he gave it to Tedias, Tedi would give it to you and you’d look after it. Ja?”
“Ja. Of course.” She looked at her father, and her slow, drunken-love smile, the one she reserved for him, took over her face. “I’d love that, Dad. We could call it Nguruve, hey, to encourage it.”
“Nguruve” was Shona for “pig,” and “Shumba” was Shona for “lion”; and the captain’s terrier puppy was called Bumhi, which was the fiercest kind of wild dog; and Will was called wildcat. “Everything has parts of other things,” she’d told Simon. She’d been trying to say, nobody is just sweet, or just cruel. Simon had said, “Ja. You’ve got eyebrows like chongololos.” He had crocodile, she reckoned, and leopard and horse in him.
As if he’d followed the last part of her thought, her father said, “I found Simon upside down on duty, hand-standing in the veggie patch. I hit him on the head with a cabbage.”
Will laughed. She could picture it.
“And Lucian Mazarotti’s back from Harare.”
“Oh! Is he better?” Lucian had had cholera.
“Better. As healthy and strong as a lion. As strong as you, little Cartwheel. And he brought back six sacks of mealie porridge, and a drum of oil, and a bull calf for his heifer tied up in his truck like a chicken. Ja”—and her father’s smile was slower than his speech, deep and satisfied—“all is well with him. He’s got that gleam back on his skin, like a god.”
“Good! I’m glad. Good!” Will felt her stomach blaze with pleasure. Lucian owned the land on the outskirts of Two Tree Hill Farm. He was Will’s hero. There were diviners on the farm who could find boreholes with two sticks and a strange, inborn feeling for water, and Will reckoned Lucian was like that with people. It was as though he dug out goodness from the hard unused centers of souls. He’d taught her to swim, and had held a large finger under her spine for her first backbend, and had picked her up bodily when she’d fallen off her horse, and he was generous with food. It was always Lucian who started off the singing when the men worked in the fields. “That’s good, Dad.” She would have said, “Send love for me,” but Lucian would have been embarrassed.
“And . . . Cynthia Vincy drove by West Edge,” said William. “Again.”
“Oh.” A syllable can express a great deal. Will’s sounded of resignation but also of swear words, and the smells of rotting vegetation, and wary amusement and bitten fingernails.
Captain Browne had met Cynthia Vincy on his last trip into Harare. She was a widow, much younger than the captain and much, much better-looking. She was not the typical farmer’s wife, who were leather-skinned and masculine; Cynthia Vincy was well-dressed, strong-jawed, long-legged, conscious of her power over men: formidable.
Will had taken just one look and had known that the captain—who was usually stern and a little forbidding—was a goner—scribbled, head over heels, a smitten kitten. And Cynthia Vincy must have known it, because now she often drove along the road that bordered the farm. She never stopped when Will’s father was there, because she’d taken a hissing dislike to his wary eyes and massive, rough frame, but when it was only the captain and the men, she would clamber out to ask his opinion on some problem, wriggling and cooing admiration. And, William said, she was as false as plastic flowers, like air-conditioning against honest wind, margarine against butter, false as “dammit.” “She asks him about tobacco,” William said. “Simple things, storage, harvesting times—with big eyes, nodding with those open lips, ja—but she knows about tobacco. Her husband was a tobacco farmer, for pity’s sake.”
Will had never seen Cynthia up close, but that didn’t stop her from hating her, intensely and by instinct. Thinking about it, Will put down the iron and ran her fingers through her hair, gripped at the roots and tugged at the tangled mass and scowled. . . .
“Will!” Her father was laughing. He kissed her on the forehead and reached for the iron. “You’re burning a hole in my sock, Cartwheel.” He poked a finger through the hole and wiggled his finger at her. “What am I going to do now? I’ll have to wear it as a glove, hey, chooky?”
“Oh! Sorry, Dad!” As suddenly as it had come, Will’s anxiety disappeared. All would be well. “Sorry-sorry, hey.” She spat on the iron so that it would fizz, as a sort of full stop. “Come, Papa. Lezzgo,” she said.
She took hold of his sleeve, scrunching it in her fingers and sniffing its earth-and-oil smell, and led him out into the evening air, her chin and stomach thrust forward to the dimming light.
• • •
That night, Will’s father came into her room to say good night, which rarely happened. He un-looped the curtains, which had been tied up in a knot, and he fingered the material. They were made of sacking—most curtains were, that Will had seen—but her mother had embroidered these with flame lilies, the national flower of Zimbabwe. Lilibet had enchanted things with her needle. When Will touched the delicate spiny red petals, they felt real—and when the curtains billowed out in the wind, it was as though the flowers were blooming.
Will knew that sometimes, while she was supposed to be asleep, her father would open the door, touch the curtains, and watch her, breathe her sleeping-African-child smell. She did not open her eyes beyond a crack—because if it helped him to believe she was asleep, she didn’t want to spoil it—but in the light flooding from the corridor behind him, she had the impression of strong shoulders stooped, and waves of sadness, and protective love. Protection she felt sure she didn’t need and couldn’t always accept.
And he whispered, as he turned away,
“Sweetest, sweetest Lil.”
Lil was what her mother had called her—Will, Lil, Lilly, interchangeably. Her mother’s name had also been Lil—Lilly, Lilibet, Elizabeth.
WILLIAM AND LILIBET—WILL AND LIL—HAD married young.
William Silver had been born in England but bred a Zimbabwean. He loved the English hills but not the English weather. “Full of gray drizzle,” he told Will. “ ‘Grizzle,’ we called it.” He sang without noticing, to his intense embarrassment, in a bass baritone. He was, said the Harare women, “as plain as a pikestaff,” “you wouldn’t look twice in the street,” with a large nose and large ears and a large mouth, and large hands and feet. But in spite of that, they went after him, whitened-tooth and lacquered-nail, because William was courteous, never brutal, and because he was unlikely to give, or get into, trouble. “I’d look after him,” they told each other at tea parties.
But William did not intend to be looked after. He wanted to do his own looking in life. He wanted to look inward and outward and sideways, and so when, as a young man, he had thus looked, and had seen an advancing line of smooth-plucked skin and leather handbags, he had widened his large eyes in terror and boarded a boat for England. And there he had met Elizabeth, whose skin had not been smooth and whose breath had smelled of greengages and lilies, sharp and sweet.
William Silver had sent a telegram to Charles Browne: HAVE FOUND WIFE. Farmers were used to poverty, and William economized on everything, including the word A.
Browne was sitting on the veranda, looking out at his beloved trees, when the telegram was handed to him. “Thank you, Lazarus.” He read it, nodded, and without turning round replaced it on the tarnished silver tray Lazarus held at his shoulder. His face was suddenly stiff. “Mr. Silver is bringing home a missus, Lazarus. There is going to be a madam.”
“A madam?” Lazarus sounded dubious. And then, with new formality, he added, “I see. A madam. Yes, boss.”
“Tell the men, will you, Lazarus?”
“Yes, boss.”
“A missus, Laz.”
“Yes, boss.”
“A woman in the house! Have to change our ways, eh, Lazarus?”
&nb
sp; “Ah, yes, boss.”
“Lazarus—” said the captain. He seemed to have trouble clearing his throat.
“Yes, boss?”
Browne turned creakingly round in his chair, and rubbed his pouched old eyes, and saw his house afresh. The veranda ran along the length of the main wing, giving a panoramic view of the farm, but the windows looked suddenly dirtier, the paint was more chipped, the elephant-ear plants flapped across the windows more boisterously. To him, it was perfect—but . . .
“Everything covered in dust, Lazarus.”
“Yes, boss. Sorry, boss.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Not blaming you, Lazarus. But—look at this . . .” And Browne allowed himself one final, rather pleasurable, shiver of sadness for what had been, just him and his men—and it was a shiver that clattered his bones together. Then he straightened in his chair, ramrod straight, and he shook his military head. “Not fit for a woman.”
So the Great Scrub began. For two weeks before Elizabeth Silver’s arrival, Browne and his men, headed by an ever-frowning Lazarus, washed and scrubbed as if the queen of England or the chief of Mashonaland (the two ranked more or less equally in the captain’s estimation) were coming, rather than one awkward, hopeful young woman.
Browne fretted over fabric and worried over the washing late into the night. He struggled to understand the intricacies of salad forks and fish knives. He bought secondhand a book called An Easy Guide to Etiquette, and then burned it in a rage. “Load of old piffling finicking fossicking bloomin’ rubbish.” He walked around the bedrooms in the moonlight, touching things, reciting like a young boy at his times tables, “Blankets, ja. Headboard, bedspread, bolster . . . ja. . . .” He surveyed with creaking anxiety the range of female delicacies laid out on the dressing table, murmuring, “Ingram’s Camphor Cream, Pepsodent, toothbrush, Pears soap, talcum powder . . . Is that it? Is it right? And is it enough now? Is it?”
Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms Page 3