The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  ‘You mean she must go?’ The colour fled from Clara’s cheeks.

  ‘I’m sure she knows she must return to Moeti sooner or later.’

  ‘Why must she? Dear God, Robert! Moeti hit and raped her.’

  ‘Dearest, please listen. She’s shamed him by running away. He’ll behave well now. He’s sure to.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ cried Clara. ‘He’ll be angry enough to kill her.’

  ‘Not with everyone watching him.’

  ‘Herida still loves Mponda. It’s not as if she’s properly married. A third wife!’

  ‘We’re not in England, Clara. Her father’s gone. A woman starves here without a husband.’

  ‘We could feed her.’

  ‘Along with all the other discarded wives of men who become Christians?’

  ‘Yes,’ she shouted.

  ‘All right,’ he murmured, frightened by her anger. ‘If he misbehaves again, we’ll look after her. But she must give him one more chance. Mponda insists on it.’

  When Robert had left for the chief’s stronghold, Clara ached with anger. Why wouldn’t he insist that the chief take Herida away from his brother? Robert had the courage to stand up to anyone. The problem was that he valued Mponda’s friendship more than his own wife’s wishes.

  *

  It was two in the morning, and Clara had lain awake for hours, listening to the rain in the thatch and the ceaseless cacophony of the frogs. Robert had been gone since the late afternoon and had not returned. She told herself he was sure to be safe, for who would dare kill the devil incarnate?

  At the same time, Clara could not help hoping that Robert was still absent because he was close to persuading Mponda that Herida had a right to choose her destiny. Just after two o’clock, she went into the yard and watched Herida sleeping calmly in the lean-to room next to the kitchen. At that moment, she believed that if Robert brought back good news she would love him as much as she ever had.

  But the minute she saw his figure framed in the black square of the doorway, she knew her hopes had been vain. Unaware of her presence, he rested his forehead against the doorframe and began to sob. Such desolation could have only one cause, she thought. Mponda had abandoned his new faith. For an instant Clara’s hopes leapt again. Herida would be taken back by the chief, Nashu and Makufa would be forgiven, the Christians would no longer be seen as the tribe’s enemies, and Robert could become a teacher of ordinary things. She lit a lamp and led him like a child to the bed.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We must leave.’ His voice was small and numb.

  ‘Leave?’ She could not believe it.

  He looked at her despairingly. ‘The Matabele are killing whites near Bulawayo. The Venda will soon join in. There are Matabele warriors here with Mponda’s blessing.’

  ‘Will Mponda kill women and children too?’ She was too shocked to think of anything else. The folklore about Matabele murders in the ’93 rebellion haunted every white in southern Africa.

  ‘How can you think that of him? He’d rather die. But when troops are sent to punish the rebels, he’ll fight them.’

  ‘Couldn’t he stay neutral?’

  ‘He hates the hut tax as much as anyone.’ Robert bowed his head very low. ‘It’s the end of everything I’ve worked for. The ngangas are in charge now. Nashu invited the Matabele here. Mponda’s a dead man if he doesn’t join the rebels.’

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ she cried. ‘If he takes back Herida as his wife, Nashu will forgive him.’

  ‘You’d ask Mponda to deny Christ?’ Robert stared at her with absolute incomprehension.

  After a silence, she said quietly, ‘In these circumstances, yes.’ His eyes filled with tears, but he did not speak. She said gently, ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘A week or two. Mponda’s taken a great risk in warning us.’

  ‘Can we take Herida with us?’

  His gaze was pitying. ‘Remove her from her own people for life?’

  ‘Just for the present.’

  ‘We won’t come back. Haven’t you understood that, Clara? Herida’s place is with her own tribe, not in some white town.’

  Tears were running down Clara’s cheeks. She tried to think how she might protect Herida, but nothing occurred to her.

  *

  Two days later, soon after dawn, there was a commotion in the yard.

  Robert sprang out of bed and ran out, with Clara following. Herida was being dragged away by two men.

  ‘Don’t hurt her,’ yelled Robert.

  Herida’s confusion was painful to see. ‘Must I go with them?’ she asked several times, looking to Clara as if begging for some contradiction. But all Clara could think to do was kiss her. Like Judas, she thought. She slipped a garnet ring off her own finger and pressed it into Herida’s hand. Seconds later, Herida was led out into the lane. Clara followed for a few yards but then could bear no more and ran back into the house.

  *

  Later that week, Robert learned from one of the boys at the mission that Herida had once again run away from her husband. He said nothing to Clara but hurried up the steep path to Mponda’s kraal to question Moeti and the chief. He learned nothing more than that Herida had left two nights earlier and had not been seen since. The bush had been searched around the village, but the rains had washed away Herida’s tracks. Whether her father had returned for her or she had attempted to travel on her own was unknown. Robert could not even establish whether she had taken food and clothing with her. It was clear to him that Mponda had many things on his mind and was deeply unhappy.

  At the chief’s kraal, Robert saw many more Matabele. When he inquired how many of these strangers had arrived, the chief refused to say. His manner was so brusque that Robert did not ask again. But before he left, he did manage to take Mponda aside for a moment.

  ‘My friend, let us pray together.’

  Mponda shook his head, not angrily but with great sadness. ‘There is a stone where my heart should be. I cannot think of Jesus.’

  The following morning, several hours before dawn, Robert was awakened by someone calling his name very softly. Clara stirred but did not open her eyes. Outside, Robert found Mponda, waiting alone close to the wall of the house. The missionary took the chief around to the kitchen door. In the blue darkness, Robert could see Mponda’s head like a bronze sculpture, the scoop of his eye sockets and wide cheekbones just discernible.

  The chief touched Robert’s hand. ‘There is a plot to kill you, Umfundisi. You must go without delay. Makufa has returned.’

  Robert’s hand shook as he lit a candle with a spill from the stove. As he placed the light on the kitchen table, he saw that the chief’s face was wet with tears. ‘Mponda,’ he said, ‘do you really think Makufa would kill me?’

  ‘Not while I am with you, but, my friend, I leave very soon.’ He reached in the pocket of his old black coat and produced a crumpled photograph. Robert held it up to the candle. Three black men had been hanged from the branches of a tall tree. Their heads and necks were twisted at odd angles; their feet were tied together at the ankles. A dozen or so white settlers were looking on. Most wore slouch hats and smoked cigars. They struck deliberately negligent poses. ‘They put a noose around their necks and order them to climb up and tie their own ropes to a high branch. Then they shoot at them with buckshot till they can bear no more and jump.’

  ‘How can men be so evil?’ groaned Robert.

  ‘We should look in our own hearts too, Umfundisi. I have terrible news.’ Mponda held out a ring, which Robert recognized as one of Clara’s.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  Mponda’s mouth puckered. ‘On Herida’s hand.’ He covered his face and said brokenly, ‘She killed herself with a knife.’

  Robert murmured, ‘Will you pray with me … for her?’

  Mponda shook his head. ‘We killed her.’ He dropped the ring on the table, and as he did, Robert heard someone behind him.

  Clara was gazing at him. ‘You sent he
r away.’ Her words were quiet but fiercely accusing.

  Mponda said, ‘I told him she must return to Moeti.’

  Clara picked up her ring and handed it to Mponda. ‘It was my gift. Bury it with her.’

  Clara wept for a long time after Mponda had gone. She thought of Herida’s vivacity, her smiles and her courage, how bewitching she had been. And I let her go. I recognized her misery and did not cling to her when the men came. Despair washed through Clara like a great river, in which she wished to drown.

  CHAPTER 15

  Now that the rains had come, people were busy in their gardens outside the village, hoeing down the weeds and heaping earth about the roots of the growing maize. They drank beer in the fields and danced in the evening to celebrate the return of the cows from the cattle posts.

  Several days after learning about Herida’s death, Robert and Philemon were sitting on the rocks above the well, listening to the gurgle of water as the women filled their jars.

  When Robert asked Philemon whether he thought everyone at the mission should leave at once for Belingwe, the old man shook his head. ‘What could we eat in a strange place? We have planted our maize. How could we harvest it if we go?’

  ‘But should the young ones come away with me?’

  Again the grizzled head moved in dissent. ‘They would be in greater danger among the miners at Belingwe. The Matabele will only murder whites and the blacks who serve them.’

  Robert was distraught. If the friendship of white people was going to endanger Africans, ought he to take Simon with him? The thought of leaving the boy behind caused a physical pain in his chest.

  Philemon said in his soft, rasping voice, ‘When you are gone, master, they will think we are helpless. Why should they hurt us then?’

  ‘Who can read evil minds, Philemon? What good did it do them to kill Paul?’

  ‘That is true, master. But if Mponda lives, he will protect us on his return. Far from here, who will care if we live or die?’ Sunlight speckled his deeply lined face. ‘And tell me this, master: if we go away, how will you find us again?’

  ‘My dear friend,’ said Robert, linking arms with him. ‘While you are here, Christ will be here too.’

  As Robert entered the mission with Philemon, he no longer felt a traitor. To take these people away with him would be as dangerous as to leave them here. When everyone had lined up to say a personal farewell, Robert saw them through a blur of tears. Matiyo gave him a Christian cross made of new leaves, woven cleverly together, Serame had cooked him some sweet maize cakes, Mabo had sewn a flannel shirt, and Dau had decorated a calabash. Clara arrived as three children from the school presented a posy of wildflowers. A small group of invalids whom Robert had treated arrived with a fish from the lake.

  A more poignant leave-taking took place early the next day, just before dawn. After handing over his first copybook and his best drawings of animals, Simon clung to Robert for almost half an hour before agreeing to release him. Clara could not endure the sound of his sobbing and went outside. Robert was more than a father to the boy, having been benefactor, friend, and teacher. But at last, after much muted talk, Simon mastered his grief sufficiently to face the inevitable.

  As dawn broke, Mponda and most of the men in the village were also preparing to set out. They would go north, while Robert would head east. The stars were still glowing, and light from many lanterns shone palely through the canopies of the chief’s wagons. His men all carried spears and axes, and their bodies were daubed with white clay. Their voices rose and fell in harmony as Mponda prepared to brave the future. Clara was sorry she had not had time to make the lionskin suit he wanted. Instead she gave him a silk scarf. Robert’s gift was a small leather-bound New Testament – proof that he would teach Mponda English when peaceful times returned. The chief’s memento for Clara was a necklace of leopards’ claws, and for Robert, an ivory cane. The two men embraced before Mponda climbed on to the box of his wagon. ‘You must go soon, Umfundisi,’ he warned.

  When Mponda touched the leading oxen with his whip, Robert cried, ‘God bless you, my chief.’

  He stood alone, gazing into the blue-grey bush for a long time after the wagons had rumbled off. The singing had become very faint when he finally turned. Out of loyalty to his friend, Robert had made a point of not asking where he meant to go. By remaining ignorant of such things, he could never betray Mponda if soldiers came.

  Soon after the chief’s departure, the Haslams clattered across the khotla in their Cape cart. Clara, though sad, was relieved to be leaving a place where she had lost many illusions. Their first objective was to warn the French count and his wife at Mungora. Like Clara, Robert felt guilty to have said nothing to them about the rumours of rebellion. If anything had happened to these settlers, their blood would be on his conscience.

  Along with food and water, Robert and Clara took spades, ropes, and sand in case they became bogged down. In this light vehicle, drawn by a pair of mules, they expected to travel in the morning and to rest during the afternoon storms. Yet from the first day, mud sucked at the mules’ hooves and adhered so thickly to the wheels that they had to be scraped every few yards; and after showers the ground became so sloppy with unabsorbed water that the cart slithered on the slightest slope.

  The world was astonishingly greener than the parched terracotta landscape of a month before. The mopane trees had put out tender pinkish-blue shoots, and extraordinary aloes displayed spikes of waxy red. Even the huge gouty baobab trees, with their broad distended trunks and spindly branches, had struggled into leaf.

  By midday, clouds began to throw dark shapes over the land. Choosing their moment and moving fast, Robert and Clara could often pitch their tent and find the mules some cover before the first rain came whipping down. Despite the discomfort of their low and leaking tent, Robert wanted to make love on their first night. Clara pleaded exhaustion. In fact, Herida’s death had bled away all her sexual feelings for him. She thought: If I could only believe that Robert’s work offered something positive to the Venda, I might still be able to forgive his betrayal of Herida. Even his best qualities had become warped for her – his determination seeming to be obduracy and his courage fanaticism.

  At night, their campfire was meant to keep wild animals at bay, but Clara feared it would attract humans. In this flat and almost treeless country, an enemy would find it child’s play to follow them by day and strike by night. But Robert still trusted in God’s protection. Because he sympathized with African anger, he could not imagine it directed against him. African custom decreed that land could never be sold, but only be loaned. Yet whole tribes to the south and west had become squatters on their own land. Since the new ‘owners’ were settlers whose farms had been ‘granted’ to them by the British Chartered Company, Robert thought it natural and inevitable that the Matabele and the Venda should have decided to fight.

  In the evenings, when the rain stopped, Robert lit a fire with dry kindling from the cart. He boiled water to make maize porridge and shot guinea-fowl to roast. They slept in their clothes, and when a lion roared or a jackal yelped, Clara was conscious of being separated from the savage world by only a width of canvas. Shadows cast by the firelight made her half expect to see the silhouette of a man. Their female mule was in heat and had to be tethered apart from the male, whose braying disturbed their nights.

  On the third day, they reached a swollen river and took several hours to find a drift where the water was shallow. The river ran along a valley between hills with crumbling sides, like cake cut with a blunt knife. A track followed the stream’s course, and they passed along it between thorn scrub matted with bur grasses. The possibility of ambush made Clara beg Robert to load a gun. Although she had little confidence in her marksmanship, it comforted her to have the weapon on her knee.

  The following morning, in open country, she thought she saw a family of warthogs through the shimmering haze. As the cart came closer, the hogs looked more like impala and then like no animal
at all. Doves were cooing gently in the heat. Clara began to shiver. Twenty or thirty people were approaching. She lifted the gun.

  ‘Just country people,’ Robert told her, placing a restraining hand on her weapon.

  ‘Why are there no women among them?’

  ‘I expect they’ve been hunting.’

  Clara longed to believe him. The sun glinted on the tips of spears and flashed on armlets and bits of finery. When she clearly saw the warriors’ lean and scarified bodies, she tugged hard at Robert’s arm. She recognized Nashu and again struggled vainly to release her gun. The nganga’s men started to chant and shake their spears. As some ran forward, Nashu raced in front and gestured with his wooden staff to hold them back.

  By the time the tribesmen reached the cart, they were walking again; and though they still looked menacing, with their spears and axes, Clara sensed that the danger was over. An hour later, she was still shivering as if she had a fever. Nashu would have spared them only because she had begged Mponda not to kill him. Just chance, blind chance, she thought. If she had arrived on the khotla ten minutes later, her appeal would never have been made and she would be dead beside the cart. She could find the hand of God nowhere.

  *

  Their brush with Nashu persuaded Robert to travel in the rain, when no natives cared to move about. As the mules crawled through a slanting downpour and flinched at zigzag lightning, Robert said that the Venda thought lightning was a bird with a tail like a cock’s.

  ‘A woman recently told me she saw this bird. It landed in a puddle and then ran up her hoe and scratched her.’ He smiled at Clara. ‘As a domestic fowl, the greatest forces of nature can seem manageable.’

  Until you destroy their beliefs, she thought. If death could be held at bay by charms, and a strong enemy defeated with the help of his own nail clippings, even a weakling might brave life’s perils.

  As they came closer to Mungora, Clara looked forward to sleeping under a watertight roof and being warmed by a fire that did not smoke. There would be mosquito nets, chairs, lights in the evening, even edible meals. Some years earlier, Robert had visited a mine in this region, and now he recognized the massive escarpment to the east. It was crowned with great piles of granite, like a giant’s toy bricks. They passed a burned-out pump house and a mine shaft with the windlass smashed. Whether the miners had fled or been murdered, there was no means of knowing.