A Spear of Summer Grass

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  They said there was a curse on us and maybe there is. Maybe we were born under bad stars or maybe for us there’s always a bad moon on the rise. But if it’s true, if sorrow and loss follow us around like mean stray dogs, then that means somewhere, some fighting angel decided we were strong enough to take it. So shine up your dancing shoes and pinch your cheeks and lift your chin, child. Because if we’re on the road to hell, we’re going to dance the whole damn way and give them something to talk about when we’re gone.

  And below that, she had signed it, using a word that at her insistence hadn’t crossed my lips since I was five years old.

  All my love, Mama

  I folded the letter and put it under my pillow and turned out the light. And in the darkness I heard it, the quiet green stillness that comes when the rains end and all the world is limp and soft and ready to begin again. I turned my face to the window where a slender new moon was rising and I slept.

  * * *

  I had nothing to pack, so I was empty-handed when I strolled down the main staircase of the Norfolk. My bill had been settled by Quentin, and I walked out to find Ryder’s ancient battered truck idling at the curb. I ran to it and wrenched open the door.

  “Memsahib Delilah! How good it is to see you! I have come to take you home.” Mr. Patel was wearing his motoring goggles, as was his little monkey. The monkey hopped up onto a hamper and chattered angrily at me.

  “Do not mind him, he does not like the city,” Mr. Patel advised. “Come, come! Get in before the reporters realise I have come to take you away.” He beckoned and I slid into the seat.

  “How kind of you to come and get me,” I murmured.

  He ground the gears to powder and the truck lurched away. “Think nothing of it. The sahib sent word and told me to do this.”

  “You’ve heard from Ryder?”

  Mr. Patel said nothing for several minutes as he negotiated his way out of the heavy traffic, weaving through ox carts and rickshaws and long, smooth touring cars. Finally, we turned onto the damp murram road out of Nairobi and he spoke.

  “What was it that you asked me? Oh, yes, yes, Memsahib Delilah. I have heard from him. He cables me to come to get you, and I am happy to do this thing.”

  “He cabled you?” There were few dukas farther out than Patel’s and none were in the direction he was supposed to have taken Gideon. “From where?”

  “Egypt.”

  “Egypt! What the devil is he doing there?”

  “This I do not know. He says he has business and he will come when it is finished.”

  I hesitated. “Was there anything else?” I didn’t dare ask about Gideon directly. I didn’t know how much Ryder had told Patel and the fewer people who knew Ryder had taken him, the better.

  Mr. Patel’s brow furrowed. “No, memsa. All he spoke of was the package you had entrusted to him.”

  “What did he say about the package?”

  “That it arrived safely and you were not to worry. He would tell you more about the package when he returns. This is all that I know.”

  The monkey began chattering again and it was impossible to talk. I slumped back against the seat, letting the weight of the last weeks roll away with each mile that unfurled over the thin red ribbon of road.

  * * *

  The drive was long and sticky and I was drooping with fatigue when we arrived. But the smell of the earth after the short rains was intoxicating. Bushes were thick with green leaves and gladioli and wild orchids burst from ripe buds. Everything seemed heightened, the colours brighter, the sounds sharper. The scent of Africa hung in my nose and mouth, the tang of the freshly saturated earth, the green smell of new grass, woodsmoke and dung and that peculiar smell of Africa itself, unlike any other. It was evening when we arrived at Fairlight, and to my surprise, Mr. Patel stopped just inside the gate. He turned off the engine, and in the silence I heard it, a steady pounding, like a great beating heart within the land.

  “What is that?”

  He gestured for me to get out and I did. We walked the last quarter mile, and as we came around the curve where the jacarandas stood in full bloom, I saw them. From every tribe who crossed Fairlight—from the Masai, from the Samburu and the Kikuyu, from other, smaller tribes. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, some of them enemies from the womb, and yet there they were, stamping their rhythms into the soil of their common mother. They were dressed for celebration, wearing their finest skins or kanjas, decked in beads and bracelets, copper wires and necklaces. They lifted up their voices together, a mixture of tribal tongues and Swahili and English, a new Babel, but with one meaning. In every gesture, in every face, I saw the same emotion, and I felt the weight of it so hard upon my shoulders, I almost fell to the ground.

  I moved forward and the people gathered about me, closing around like a fist, fingers cradling something precious within the palm. They chanted and sang and stamped, and at length one figure broke forward. It was Gideon’s babu, guided by a moran. He put his hand to my head and blessed me, and when he spoke in his high, reedy voice, it was loud enough to carry over the stamping of a thousand feet.

  “Nina mjukuu.” It was Swahili, and his words were halting but I understood them. I have a granddaughter. He carried on, speaking and blessing, but I heard none of it after that first pronouncement. The chanting and stamping was a buzzing in my ears, as if a thousand bees had come home to nest. When he stopped, I took his hands in mine and acknowledged his blessing.

  “Nina babu,” I replied to him. I have a grandfather. The people gave a great shout, and I saw that some of the women wept. They came forward then, these aunts and sisters of Gideon, and they enfolded me, smearing my clothes with the red ochre and the grease that they used to make themselves beautiful. They touched my face and hands and embraced me and called me sister. The men stood back, chanting a song of one who would not be forgotten, of loved ones lost and returned to the earth, and of the land itself which does not die but is always born anew with each fall of the long rains. They chanted of life, which is short as a spear of summer grass or long as the heart of the Rift itself, and of the silent land that waits beyond. They chanted of Africa.

  They were still chanting when I began to crumple, long after night had fallen and long after the fires had been lit, and when they carried me to my bed and tucked me in as tenderly as a child and left me, it was this song of Africa that was my lullaby.

  * * *

  When I went to the window the next morning I saw that there was no sign of them save the bright green grass that had been trodden under their feet. After I had eaten a simple breakfast, the Africans came again, but this time it was the farmworkers, neglected after my stay in Nairobi. They came as if I had never left, bringing their wounds and ailments, offering up their pain. I applied ointments and powders, bandaged and gossiped, taking from them their suffering and their stories and giving them relief in return. They told me of two babies born while I was gone and an old man who had died and been given to the hyenas, his bones crunched to nothing in those powerful jaws. Africa had borne him and in the end, Africa had taken him back. There was nothing left to show he had been except the memories of those who knew him, and these they shared with me.

  I traded them—salves for salvation because, as I worked, I felt peaceful for the first time in a long while. I gave them food and milk and when they left, I sat on the veranda for a long time, thinking of them and how little of the promise of Fairlight was actually fulfilled.

  In the afternoon Ryder came, walking his slow-hipped walk, and I stood in stillness, watching him come near. He stopped a foot away from me.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  I followed him without a word, and he led the way out of Fairlight and onto the savannah. He took a different track, a path beaten hard into the earth and leading to a high rock outcropping. We climbed it together and he gave me
his hand to bring me up the last few feet to where he stood. We settled down on the rock and he pointed across the savannah. There, on a termite mound, sat a cheetah, slender and watchful.

  “He’s beautiful,” I murmured.

  “She,” he corrected quietly. “She just left her cubs two days ago and she’s hunting for herself now.”

  “How do you know so much about her?”

  She didn’t move as she surveyed the savannah. Only the lightest of breezes ruffled her fur as it did the long grasses. A small herd of Thomson’s gazelles grazed nearby, unaware of her presence.

  “I’ve been keeping tabs on her for months.”

  “Why? You don’t hunt cheetah.”

  “Because something that beautiful and dangerous is worth watching,” he replied.

  Just then she darted out, launching herself straight at a small patch of quivering grass. A young tommie huddled under the grass, waiting until the last possible moment to run. Too late, its mother saw the danger and circled back, bleating her distress and throwing herself between the cheetah and her young.

  But the cheetah would not be diverted. She circled back, cutting sharply and seized the tommie, carrying it off in triumph. The mother sniffed the air and let out another soft cry before returning to her herd. The cheetah took her trophy back to her mound, suffocating it quickly and beginning to eat.

  “She doesn’t waste time,” I observed.

  “She can’t afford to. She seems fierce but there are lots of things out here bigger and meaner than she is. Any one of them would take that tommie from her and go after her, too. She’s a lot more vulnerable than she looks.”

  I sighed. “Did you bring me out here just to show me metaphors for my own life?”

  A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “No. I wanted to talk to you where we wouldn’t be overheard.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly onto the wind. “How is he?”

  “Poor. I took him to one of the outlying villages near the Ugandan border, too far for the officials in Nairobi to bother with. He has no cattle of his own and he can’t claim his babu’s property when the old man dies. Without either of those, he can’t take a wife. And he won’t accept handouts from me.”

  “So I did it for nothing.”

  “He’s alive.” Ryder turned on me fiercely. “And that’s all that matters right now. He will work hard and he will make his own way. Don’t underestimate him, Delilah. He’s stronger than you know, and right now he is walking on his own two legs—a free black man in a white man’s Africa—because of what you did. Don’t ever forget that.”

  I said nothing. Guilt was sitting too heavily on my shoulders to talk about it. I had acted impulsively, rashly, as I always had. And while it might have saved Gideon’s life, it also made it impossible for him to have the life he wanted. Once again I had acted from the heart rather than the head, and there were consequences. Only this time someone else was bearing the weight of them.

  “Have you thought about what you mean to do?”

  I watched the cheetah tearing happily at the throat of the little tommie. Survival was a bloody business. “I mean to leave as soon as I can. Nothing’s changed, Ryder.”

  He went very still, but I felt the change in him. Anger shimmered off him, sparking the air between us.

  “I should have known. Tusker warned me not to rely on you. She swore you wouldn’t stick it out, but I defended you. I told her she was wrong, that there was something fine in you, something that would see this place for what it was and be changed by it. But you won’t change, and do you know why? Because you never stay anywhere or with anyone long enough to let them in.”

  I let out a ragged breath. “Do you know what a cicatrix is, Ryder? It’s a scar, a place where you have been cut so deeply that what’s left behind is something quite different. It doesn’t heal, not really, because it isn’t the same ever again. It’s impenetrable and it’s there forever, to protect you from hurting the same place again.”

  “You get maudlin when you philosophise.”

  “It isn’t maudlin if it’s true.”

  He grabbed my wrist, twisting it hard where the black ribbon bow folded on itself like a mourning flower.

  “Can you feel that? Can you feel anything? Christ, Delilah, I thought I was damaged, but I have never in my life met anyone so afraid of feeling anything as you are.”

  “You know why,” I said with a shrug.

  “No, I don’t. You told me what’s happened to you, but guess what? Bad things happen to everybody. I’ll give you that. But you can’t just shut down and refuse to keep living. Do you think that’s what Johnny would have wanted? You might as well have jumped down into that grave with him and pulled the dirt over you like a blanket for all the real living you’ve done since then.”

  He turned and took my face in his hands. “Delilah, this may be the last chance you have to wake up. Life is giving you a new chance every goddamned day that you wake up and you’re throwing it away. Wake up, Delilah. Wake up.” He punctuated his words with his lips, pressing his mouth to my eyelids, my temples, my cheeks, my jaw, and with every touch he murmured, “Wake up.

  “Wake up,” he said. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.” An invocation, an invitation, an incantation, but I pulled away from him and shook my head.

  He dropped his hands. Silence stretched between us, heavy and thick. He settled back and pulled a cigarette from his case. Wordlessly he lit it and passed it to me before lighting another for himself. We smoked them in silence but I could feel him thinking, planning his next move. He was playing a chess game, trying to win, convinced he could keep me if he could just hit on the right strategy. He just didn’t realise I wasn’t playing the game.

  He spoke quietly, weighing his words. “You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met, Delilah. You are the most appallingly selfish person I have ever known. I thought once that there might be something good in you, something worth saving. But now I think there isn’t, there can’t be, if you could look at this place and how wretched it is and turn away. There is real good we could do here if you would only stop feeling sorry for yourself and have a care for anybody else. But you would rather dance off and leave it all behind, let someone else clear it up. Well, what if no one else will? What if you’re the only one who could make a difference and you don’t? It’s sinful, that’s what. And I don’t use that word lightly. I’m barely religious. I hardly say my prayers and I almost never go to church, but I do believe in God and I believe some things are flying in his face. Walking away from here now is one of those things.”

  I opened my mouth to answer him, but I never got the chance. A cloud of dust was rising on the savannah, and as we rose and watched it started moving closer. Whatever it was, it spooked the tommies and they hurried on, dragging their gangly offspring with them. By the time the cheetah had left, picking her way delicately across the savannah, the apparition was almost upon us. It was the motorbike. Mr. Patel was riding it, his eyes shielded by his motoring goggles, his robes fluttering behind him like a knight’s pennant. We descended from the rock as he skidded to a stop and jumped from the bike, heading straight for Ryder.

  “This came and it was most urgent,” he said, proffering a telegram. Ryder went to take it, but Mr. Patel shook his head. “For Memsahib Delilah,” he corrected, nodding towards me.

  I stepped forward and took the envelope. The ripping sounded unnaturally loud in the wide emptiness of the plain. Ryder had moved behind me, shielding me from Patel with his body. It was an exquisitely considerate gesture and a futile one. There is no such thing as privacy in Africa.

  I read the lines twice, then three times.

  “Who?” Ryder said quietly. I turned to him and he was staring at me intently. I don’t know how he understood. Cables bring good news just as often as bad. But not this one.

>   “My stepfather, Nigel. He suffered a heart attack at his club in London. He died almost immediately.”

  Ryder said nothing. He opened his arms and I went into them. There was nothing in that embrace beyond what a parent might offer a grieving child. It was comfort and solace, and after a long moment he released me.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m taking you home. To Fairlight.”

  But he was wrong. Fairlight was part of Nigel’s estate. It belonged now to his eldest son, Edgar. It would never be my home again.

  We made our way slowly back. There was nothing to hurry for. I could not make it to England for Nigel’s funeral in any event. I sent cables via Mr. Patel to Mossy and to Edgar and turned my attention to the scenery itself. I did not expect to come this way again, and I found myself staring at the horizon, memorising Africa against the day when all I would have were my own sepia recollections.