Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  As no-nonsense as Mom was, she always knew when I needed her gentleness. If I smacked myself on something, Mom would give the injury a gentle rub, then reprimand the offending object: “You naughty chair! How dare you hurt my Boyd! You must go to the corner immediately.” I’d be fascinated, the hurt forgotten. “Here, take a bit of sugar water,” she’d say and rub my back, murmuring, “Oh dite, oh dite”—“All right, all right”—until I calmed.

  She let me, an eternally shy little boy, stay pressed up against her legs until I felt safe enough to explore. I was always needing her to ground myself amid the new faces of ever-changing guests, reaching up to grasp her index finger, or molding myself against her when we were in the Land Rover. She’d lay a blanket down under the knobthorn tree in the front garden and take a rare moment of repose while Bron and I raced around. Every now and again I would press my forehead against hers, my touchstone. She’d let me snuggle into her shoulder and she’d rock me gently, one hand stroking or tickling my back. Her hands were always so cool and soft, redolent of Anaïs Anaïs powder. I can still remember how wonderful they felt when I was running a fever and she would stroke my forehead over and over, gently pushing back my curls. I knew that when she was around, I was safe.

  They say that your home is a reflection of your life, an external representation of the inner workings of the house’s inhabitants. As monumental an achievement as the creation of Londolozi has been, the construction of our family home is equally a reflection of my parents’ spirit, its beauty the result of Mom’s sheer grit. My father claims he baked every brick of our house here and constructed it according to the feel and design of a drawing he made in the sand all those years ago when he and Uncle John took their first fateful decision. Our home is set on the riverbank amid the foliage of the ebony trees, the porch overlooking a riverbed where the elephants stroll serenely, feeding off the wild date palms, and the nyalas and kudus peer in your windows. Our house lacks the veneer of money but holds all the warmth of a beloved work in progress. Like our safari business, it runs with a rhythm that creates its own soul comfort, with my mother as the engine that keeps it ticking along.

  It moves a few inches left every year, the cracks appearing as if by magic in the muddy plaster—adding charm, or so we say as we stare up at them while drinking beer on the front porch, trying to placate my mother, who takes those cracks very personally. As bush people, we make light of the cracks just as we make light of other things that go wrong. We’re primed to simply pop open another beer and say cheerily, “Oh, well now, it’s just gone to shit.” Pioneers find a philosophical nature in many heartbreaks and sweetness in an unexpected victory. That house is Mom’s victory, and she means to maintain her preeminence over nature within it.

  Bush houses require more maintenance than any city dwelling; they are always under attack. Home maintenance is a common source of friction between my parents, since my father comes from his own mother’s tradition of “it’s perfectly all right.”

  “Gran, there’s mold in the jam.”

  “It’s perfectly all right.”

  Once she knocked her glass of wine into her plate, bathing her entire dinner in a pool of Burgundy. “Gran, let’s get you a new plate.”

  “Nonsense. It’s perfectly all right.”

  Mom does not accept this. Something is either right or she is going to make it right. Dad gets to soar above it all like a bateleur eagle; it falls to Mom to mire herself in the mundane details of home repair. Whenever we have the occasional rat outbreak, our house looks as if a pack of Staffordshire terriers have been released. The rats have developed a taste for Mom’s favorite sandalwood soap, which she’s placed in every bathroom, so they periodically eat holes in the doors to get to it. The rats attract the snakes. My father would happily bathe with gnawed pieces of sandalwood soap and turn a blind eye to the snakes, but Mom will set so many traps that walking through the house is like strolling in a minefield.

  At one stage our roof was leaking so badly that when it rained, we’d dash outside to sit under the knobthorn tree for shelter. Mom told Dad to fix the problem, but, as always, he was satisfied with the status quo. Mom was soon sighted dangling precariously from the roof, trying to drape a tarp. She finally delivered a loving ultimatum: Fix it or die. Dad fixed the roof.

  Recently my mother had one of those weeks when it seemed as if the whole world was conspiring against her. She’d spent hours driving and walking around Londolozi, seeking out leopard orchids, each one secretly hidden in a separate grove. She’d roped herself up into each tree to extract them—a bit of a job in itself—and then painstakingly transplanted them into the crooks of trees around our house so that at certain times of year they would explode in fountains of yellow. She’d treated those orchids like family, making sure to speak to them each morning. “Grow! Grow! Grow!” she’d shout out the window. (This is standard operating procedure for Mom. There’s a sausage tree in the courtyard near the safari lodge that got chewed down by an elephant. Every day as Mom passes it, she grasps the stump and utters a fervent “Love! Love! Love!” And damn if that tree isn’t making a comeback!) There are half bottles of Super Bloom plant food all over the house, a testament to her nurturing nature. And then an elephant knocked down the fence and got into her garden and ate all her leopard orchids. God, those orchids had been her pets, and now they were all on a safari through the large intestine of an elephant.

  This is typical of the onslaught Mom has had to deal with: carving out some time and fossicking all over the vast terrain to find the ultimate natural ornament for our home, only to have her curatorship undone by a plundering pachyderm. Everywhere I look in our home, in every public area, in every guest suite, Mom has placed the perfect painting, the most beautifully detailed fabrics, sculptures, flowers. Her inner beauty comes out in the spaces around her.

  While they may have stumbled into their adventure together so very early in life, Mom and Dad have remained utterly, passionately committed to it for forty years. Mom has always been devoted to Dad, even though he irritates the bejesus out of her. And Dad has never, ever overlooked an opportunity to credit her. At every public event I’ve ever attended, Dad has praised Mom’s efforts first and foremost.

  “When you first meet someone,” he told me, “you’re jolted by those great electric sparks, but what you hope for is someone who will always give you that warm glow.” This is what my parents have. They can’t bear to be apart. Dad often tells Mom how much he loves her. When Mom comes back from town after a supply run, he kisses her as tenderly as if she’d shipped off for a year. The only time Dad ever sulks is when Mom flies off without him to some resort convention. My parents’ marriage gave me an incredible model of love and stability—but more important, an idea of how important it was to be on a team together. Bron and I never thought of partnerships as separate from one’s mission in life, because Mom and Dad shared theirs.

  It hasn’t been easy for Mom, living with two guys who refuse to plan or save. Any bit of money my father or uncle has ever made has been thrown right back at some grand project designed to save wild areas. Strong families aren’t built around rock stars; they’re built around rocks like my mother.

  FOUR

  FRIENDI IN THE STORM

  “FRIENDI, COME HERE!” Bron cried out.

  “I’m scared,” I called back, crouching in terror behind my bed. “Yes, I’m also scared. Come here!”

  Perhaps you have never experienced an African thunderstorm. These nights of wind and drenching whiteness stand out in my memories of childhood like exclamation marks. The crashing thunder booms like ten thousand gongs and shakes your insides at a solid 9 on the Richter scale. The lightning comes down in sheets, not bolts, bleaching your retinas. You feel as if you’re under attack by squadron after squadron of Stuka dive-bombers.

  That night, the wind shot into all the tiny openings of the house so what was concrete and safe started to scream like a banshee.

  The electricity had gone o
ut. Bron, always my protector, braved the blasting darkness to save me. I heard her small voice above the thunder: “Friendi, I’m here.” She led me, our sweaty palms pressed together, past curtains that flailed as if animated by ghosts, to my parents’ room. The thunder rattled the doors and the lightning cracked a cowboy whip above my parents’ bed, where Bron and I fled to the shelter of Mom’s arms. Dad was away. The sideways rain lashed the house as demons moaned from the blackness outside. This was a real beast of a bushveld storm, the lightning striking all around, the smell of burned earth rising as granite rocks were cracked open by the energy in each bolt of pure channeled white-hot rage.

  We searched for one another’s faces in the brief moments of illumination when lightning flashes filled the room. “There, there.” Mom tried in vain to convince us that the storm was merely “God moving his furniture.” She stroked my hair, waiting for the storm to calm, my heart to slow. But I could feel her shaking next to me. She must have felt so alone.

  Suddenly we heard the front door burst open, rattling like death on its hinge as the house inhaled a blast of wind. Mom went rigid next to me as we listened to footsteps approaching along the passage outside the bedroom.

  “Shanny! Shan! Where are you?”

  At two in the morning, in the vortex of a storm, Uncle John, knowing that Dad had gone to town, had walked from his house next door through the dark to check on us. I could smell the cotton of his soaked jersey, the crisp scent of the storm, the wildness of the wind sticking to him as he slumped into the chair at the end of the bed.

  “We’re okay, John,” Mom said. “Hell of a storm, hey?” I could feel her body relax ever so slightly.

  With Uncle John keeping vigil in the chair, visible in the strobing lightning, water dripping off the tip of his cap, I fell asleep, Bron’s arm resting on mine.

  Bronwyn had my mother’s glossy dark brown hair and determined mouth. Mom’s eyes are dark hazel, while Bron’s are chocolate brown. Bron was the ultimate girly girl, insisting on keeping her hair long, always done up in fancy ponytails or plaits. While I wore the same dirt-colored camouflage as Dad and my uncle, Bron glowed in bright pinks, lime green, and spotted leopard tights against the dun colors around us. She often tied her doll to her back with a towel, like a Shangaan woman caring for her baby. She occasionally exchanged her favorite ballerina outfit—pink leotard, tutu, tights, and slippers—for a raid on the corner of Mom’s closet that held a few glamorous party dresses for fancy dinners. Bron would safety-pin the gowns up the back, twirling the voluminous skirts as she choreographed dance routines to Whitney Houston, a glamour-puss among the rest of us with our frayed, tattered khaki.

  Left to my own devices, I would never have abandoned my post in the yard, watching the ants or wasps. Bron pulled me out of myself with endless ideas for fun. I couldn’t have asked for a more amazing playmate and companion than my sister. Our main preserve was the front garden, which in those days was fenced in by reeds. “Come on, friendi, let’s play Cowboys and Indians!” Bron would call. We’d be at it for hours, making elaborate tents out of seven or eight chairs pushed together and covered with blankets, our cozy world inside. From there we rode out to capture the bad guys on our broomstick horses, their heads made from socks stuffed with cotton wool and button eyes, strings standing in for reins. Bron led the expeditions to eat the small, tart berries of the buffalo thorn trees that grew all over the village. She would spend hours standing at the base of a tree, carefully plucking the red treats from between the dense mat of thorns, her bright clothes glowing against the brown tree limbs.

  When a plane crashed at Londoz and the wreck languished on the runway, awaiting repairs, it was Bron who announced, “Boyd, you gonna be the pilot; I’ll be the air hostess.” It was she who dubbed us Squeaky and Squawky and organized spying expeditions on the adults, hiding us under the dining room table to eavesdrop and report.

  After every storm the fireflies burst out, magical orbs moving as randomly as electrons. “Friendi, let’s see how many we can fit in a jar!” she’d call out. Bron appointed me her assistant fairy catcher, and we dashed around the front lawn grasping passionately at the mystical baubles of light. That image is framed in my mind’s eye: nature teaching us to pluck flecks of light out of the darkness.

  The next morning Bron would grab my hand and we would run naked to our bikes, a pair of secondhand BMX cycles that were usually hobbled by acacia thorns speared through the tires but were perfect for destroying puddles.

  “Friendi, into the puddles!” Bron would scream. “Fast as you can go!”

  There are few joys greater than being a naked child riding a bike into a puddle. That glorious mud seeped into our pores and baked hard onto our skin. I am that land. It is in my body.

  Our photo albums make it clear who ruled whom in early childhood. As creative and fun-loving as she was, Bron had an inborn seriousness. Uncle John even called her “Mom” because she was forever telling him where to sit, what to eat, how to behave. My sister’s benevolent-commander face was generally set in a concerned scowl as she led me somewhere, one protective five-year-old hand on my bald little Kojak head. Bronwyn absorbed endless worry so I could be the “free one,” and I flourished in her shadow.

  My sister carried the responsibility, made the plans, and did the grunt work, too. Each year she would meticulously organize a little Nativity play, to which we would subject all of our family and friends. Throughout her planning and rehearsals, I would clown around, strapping a tinsel-covered halo to my ear and pretending I was picking up radio signals from God.

  “Boyd, stop messing around—you’re ruining everything!” Bron implored. Later, when the show was in action, I would stroll onstage like a show pony, my carpenter Joseph upstaging even the baby Jesus. I was extremely shy in any new situation, but once I felt comfortable, I quite happily played the buffoon. Bron made it easier for me to come out of my shell by taking charge and ordering me about.

  With her overdeveloped sense of responsibility, Bron seemed intent on becoming an adult as quickly as possible. At the time, I thought we were spying for the fun of it, but now it occurs to me that Bron was trying to glean instructions so she could grow up faster.

  At the age of eight, Bron decided that she was going to be a hotelier. She forsook her pink leotard, fashioning her own uniform out of khakis and a white shirt, and declared herself a kind of assistant camp manager. “Hello, welcome to Londolozi,” she would tell guests. “Please let us know if we can do anything for you. I’m going to the kitchen now.” She hustled herself two rand a day—about twenty-five cents—and reported for duty to the general manager every morning. While I was poking sticks into termite mounds, she was working side by side with grown-ups on the kitchen shift, rolling balls of dough, baking bread, making chocolate truffles, chopping and prepping for all the meals. She helped set up drink stops so that guests driving through the bush would happen upon these magical oases. For daytime picnics she helped spread blankets, arrange beanbag chairs, and display snacks and games. For the evenings, she accompanied the camp manager to lay out starched white tablecloths and silver and hang lanterns from the leadwood trees, then set out giant cheese boards, fixings for gin and tonics, buckets of Champagne.

  Our paths were clear. I was going to be a conservationist, like Dad and Uncle John. Bron, with Mom’s natural gift for organizing to the finest detail and thinking up ways to delight guests, was going to rule the business world.

  To me, Bron was always supremely competent and creative. It’s always surprised me that she didn’t see herself that way. She seemed polarized between extreme uncertainty and absolute clarity. This was especially true in the bush, since she didn’t spend as much time there as I did, with Dad and Uncle John, and didn’t have my physical confidence. She saw that things came easily to me, that I was more able to clown around and shrug things off, while she had to work harder to make her mark. But what I admire most about her is that she’ll never, ever back off from a challenge.r />
  Bron has always had a particular dislike of elephants. Perhaps it’s because the occasional elephant would crash through the reed fence in our front yard—never while we were playing there—and then trample through the other side. People ask her if she ever had a bad experience. “A few,” she’ll say. “The first one was in a previous life when I was an Indian princess and an elephant sat on me.” She dispenses this casually over dinner with such charm and grace that people seem to simply accept it.

  One morning Bron and I were out driving in the bushveld with Uncle John, who’d brought us along on his daily morning ramble in search of something interesting to film. Days like this one could be dodgy. Uncle John would wake us at four in the morning, then have us sit for six or seven hours watching a leopard, waiting for it to hunt. We’d get tired and thirsty, but Uncle John would wave off any complaint. Hours of excruciating boredom might be rewarded with a few minutes of action if the leopard went for a kill.

  On this day, Uncle John had deposited Bron behind the wheel of the open-topped Land Rover so he could focus on the job of filming, but he forgot she was ten and not a thirty-year-old rally driver. Bron was piloting us home when the tarpaulin-like ear of an elephant flapped in the bush ahead of us. Bron froze. She wasn’t blindingly afraid, but she knew that elephants had been culled and shot at in nearby Kruger National Park not so long ago and it wasn’t uncommon to run into one that was still a little pissed off with people. While hundreds of stories told of elephants walking peacefully by, she was well aware of the more headline-grabbing accounts of elephants maiming and killing. No doubt being in the open Land Rover added to her concern. Even if a roof offered little protection against an angry elephant, a false sense of security was better than nothing.

  “Jonno, you come drive,” she pleaded. She looked like a tiny doll behind the massive steering column.