Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  “Did he see you?” he asks carefully.

  I shake my head. “The only person who saw me was you.”

  He looks at me for a moment longer, then back down at the radio. “But you did not tell your uncle.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” he asks, not looking up.

  “Because I should not have been there. Because you asked me not to.”

  The words are full and heavy in my mouth. I want him to look at me, but he reinserts the screws, the bolts, the backplate. I watch the inside curve of his arm, the smooth charcoal skin, his hands turning the screwdriver, his fingers black against the gold lettering MADE IN GREAT BRITAIN.

  When the radio sputters into life with a jerk of song we both start, shocked by the strength of it. He loses it and swears, fiddles with the aerial, then it comes in again. The British Overseas Airways Corporation has introduced its first passenger jet service. It is the news. As always with the radio—I feel the magic of it, that it can bring the world into this far-flung place. We lose it again for what seems a long while, then it comes on again. The announcement of emergency legislation to tackle Mau Mau: greater control of the press, powers to seize and destroy unlicensed newspapers, an allowance for confessions made to police officers to be used in evidence, the right for provincial commissioners who believe a person is Mau Mau to order his removal to a restricted area.

  The news report gives way to music. I watch Michael. There is a tension in the way that he holds himself—a concentration—and I do not ask him what he thinks of what we have heard.

  A small airplane drones overhead. Michael raises his head to watch it inch across the sky.

  “Did you ever go in a plane? During the war?” I ask.

  “Only once.”

  “What was it like?”

  “We came into Egypt, over the Red Sea. I felt like an eagle, cut loose from the world below. No family, no duty; just an immense freedom.”

  “And now?” The question slips out before I have considered it. “What freedom is there for you—now that you are home?”

  His eyes settle on mine. “And you, Memsaab—” he says, watching me, a slight smile on his lips. “What freedom is there for you—now that you are home?”

  —

  WHEN MUKAMI has left for the shambas the following afternoon, I turn on the radio, moving the aerial from side to side to find the best reception. Michael steps out of the garage, leaning against the wall. We listen to the voice from England, cracked and fizzing with distance, reading the news; the new Governor’s imminent arrival in Kenya; reports from England of flooding across the south of the country; and—in local news—the murder of two Kikuyu on a farm to the north of Nakuru, less than eighty miles from us. Despite the promises of the government, Mau Mau isn’t disappearing.

  When the broadcast is over, Michael drops a hand to Juno’s head and says, “She’s going to whelp in a couple of months.”

  “Is she?” I call her to me, doubtful, kneeling down beside her, running my hand under her stomach, and see that he is right. Her nipples are large and pink, and there is a firmness in her belly that I had not noticed, the skin stretching to white around her womb. She sniffs wetly at my face. “Do you know if she’s had puppies before?”

  “She had a litter last year.”

  “What happened to them?” I ask, glancing up from where I am kneeling on the earth.

  “She went out into the bush to give birth and came back on her own. There were three or four of them.”

  “How do you know?”

  He looks down at me, crouched at his feet. “I could feel them moving in her belly,” he says, and there is something in the way that his eyes meet mine, an accidental closeness in the widening of his pupils—like grasping something hot—which brings the blood rushing to my face.

  —

  IT TAKES TWO WEEKS to make up enough shirts, shorts and dresses for the children, and when it is done my fingers are rough and blistered from pulling thread. I give the clothes to the children and they take them from me eagerly, examining the buttons, tugging on the shorts and slipping the shirts over their heads, laughing.

  There is another theft at the farm—at the dairy. I box up the radio and ask Kahiki to drive it up to the house. I would like to keep it at the stables—I have enjoyed the closeness it brings to Michael, but I don’t want to risk it being stolen. The men who come thieving in the night are supplying the fighters in the forest with their loot. A radio would give them an advantage. I unpack it in my room, string up the aerial and stow it under my bed, dragging it out in the evenings after supper, the volume turned down low so that my father and Sara do not hear.

  One night there is a knock at my door. I turn off the broadcast and listen in the darkness.

  “Rachel?”

  Harold is standing in the corridor, a lamp in one hand. His gaze shifts past me into the room. I reluctantly draw the door open for him to come inside. When I turn the radio on he stares at me for a moment, then sits on the wooden chair opposite the bed, listening until the broadcast is over and the news gives way to a song.

  “Where did you get it?” he asks.

  “I found it in the barn. It was my mother’s—Michael fixed it for me. You won’t say anything, Harold?” I ask, quickly. “I don’t want my father to know.”

  “Of course not,” he says quietly, and I see in his face that I can trust him; that he is as hungry for this—for the escape the radio can deliver—as I am.

  He comes every night, at ten o’clock, when the house is quiet and my father and Sara have gone to bed. He rarely speaks, and he comes always with a camera in one hand, which he fiddles with as he listens. When I see that he is drawn to the radio—that he does not want anything from me—I begin to relax and be content for him to sit here in my room.

  I smoke one or two cigarettes at the open window, and we listen to an hour of broadcasts from England: politics, conversation and music from America. An interview with Charlie Chaplin, Churchill’s speeches, India’s first elections, Shostakovich’s tenth symphony; the world hundreds of miles away.

  On the local news a Kikuyu loyalist claims to have met Dedan Kimathi, the self-styled Field Marshal of the forest forces. He says in faltering English that Kimathi wears a leopard-skin cloak to disguise himself in the forest, that he spent a year in the British army, that he speaks good English and fights for political freedom. “Surely,” the interviewer says, “we must be wary of crediting lawless terrorists with political motivation . . .”

  Every broadcast brings reports on the increase of Mau Mau activities, the killing and mutilating of Kikuyu who refuse to take the oath, the burning of huts and villages, and I see in the tension that grips Harold that he is imagining the horror of this violence; we are both haunted by the idea that it might come to visit us here at Kisima. But my fears are contained by the darkness; they melt away with the sun.

  —

  I FIND THE SCHOOL BENCHES in the deserted chicken coop and with Mukami’s help drag them out and scrub them clean. I set them up at the shambas. Occasionally I see Harold walking through with his camera, but he keeps his distance. I order more chalks and new slates for the children from Nakuru, and prop up a blackboard on a small table. I start spending a few hours each morning teaching the children. They learn how to write their name on a slate. We make up paper money, then run a shop, and they count out the paper cents to buy and sell beans. They mold clay bricks and write their names on them with their fingers, and we count the goats and chickens that wander through the shambas, making simple calculations.

  I would like to know what Michael thinks of what I have done, but I do not see him at the shambas and I am rarely at the stables.

  After the lesson, I sit with Njeri outside her hut. She weaves rugs and stitches clothes for her baby. The children disperse across the shambas, some to help their mothers, others t
o play—the boys making catapults, the girls collecting seeds and turning them into necklaces. I notice that it is harder for her to sit still and she shifts her weight on the low stool, stretching out her back. Mukami says the baby could come any day.

  XI

  I watch my father from the open door. He gathers up his binoculars, his rifle; slings his cartridge belt around his waist. I shiver in the cool air of early morning. The sun hasn’t yet broken above the tops of the trees, and a web of golden shadows spreads over the lawn in front of the house. Just when I think he has not seen me, he turns and says, “Rachel—do you want to come?”

  “Yes,” I say quickly, happy that he has asked, though I am unsure if this is an obligation or a pleasure. He used to take me on his early-morning rounds of the farm when I was a child. Now I let down the back of the Land Rover and Juno leaps inside.

  We leave behind the clipped green lawns and honeysuckle hedges which surround the house. The Land Rover has a canvas roof—there are no windows, and the air is cool and damp against my skin. I reach into the back, draw out one of the red Maasai blankets and pull it over my shoulders. It is that strange hour after dawn—too early still for conversation—when the land is closed and desaturated, and we drive in silence, watching the earth seep into color under the first rays of the sun.

  The track leads us past the coffee plantation, shining dark and robust behind hedges of pale pink bignonias; past the kitchen garden, overgrown with weeds. I glimpse a flash of golden pawpaws ripening behind lush foliage; peach trees, tangled raspberry nets, mangoes and sugarcane.

  We drive toward the northern boundary. My father has had a report that some Maasai herdsmen have driven their cattle onto our land to graze. Above the house the track drops down along a boulder-strewn gulley into a valley. Sun flickers through the thorny shade. An eagle pushes up from the branches of an acacia, beating its black wings into the white sky above us. We climb slowly out of the valley and emerge onto a ridge. To our left is the beginning of the long, tumbling drop down to the floor of the Rift Valley. The forest here is impenetrable by car. I have walked down into its hot humid depths; a jungle with rocks rising a hundred feet tall like totems from between thick, dark vines, water tumbling into hidden pools where snakes gather to slip their skins and copulate. The secret place of pythons, bird-eating spiders, baboon and leopard. It is no place to go now. My father thinks that there could be Mau Mau hiding there, sweating in its depths.

  As we come over the top of the ridge the land ripples, golden and seemingly endless in front of us. Pockets of mist cling to the forested dells that mark the contours of the ridge. We are out of the bush now onto farmland. There are some three thousand acres of wheat and oats. In a few months they will gather in the maize—the yellow heads stored away to be ground into fodder for the cattle and posho for the Africans. Farther on is field upon field of white flowers—pyrethrum—which will be harvested and turned into valuable insecticide.

  On the boundary we see no signs of cattle, just dust devils that rise like smoke from the track that stretches into the distance. We circle back on ourselves. Away to our left the land drops into a clearing—a quarry carved out of the earth. Men walk up the precarious path from the bottom, carrying stones on their heads, their bodies taut and creaking beneath the weight.

  “The dip cracked last month,” my father says, leaning over his door to see better. “We’re having to build a new one from scratch. There are a hundred and fifty bags of cement that have to come up this road, one thousand five hundred running feet of cut stone and fifty tons of sand, not to mention the water.”

  The site of the new dip is a crater in the earth beside which men stand, breaking up rocks with huge sledgehammers. From below us—through the pounding of the stone—comes the bellowing of cattle, eager to be milked. We drop down to the dairy—not far from the house now—into a cacophony of noise; the clanking of buckets, Africans singing and shouting, the lowing of the heifers. There are eighty cows to be milked before the herd can be driven up to the grazing land, and the cream has to be separated. I watch the milking while my father checks the yields.

  As we walk back to the Land Rover, his gaze lifts to the sky. Three vultures wheel and turn in a vast expanse of blue.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Looks like they’re over the sheep pens,” he says, taking a look through his binoculars. He starts the engine, pulling the Land Rover off the track. We drive, juddering, over the uneven grass of the plain, until I can see the wire of the pens glinting ahead of us. He slows the car. In front of us two vultures dip their long necks to the ground. It takes me a moment to spot the jackals, the same color as the grass, crouched down—eating—their eyes fixed on us.

  “A Tommy?” The kill looks about the size of a gazelle.

  “I’m not sure,” my father says, driving the car closer.

  I squint into the sun. The jackals, uneasy, trot away through the grass, looking back at us every few steps. The vultures are bolder. They shake out their wings, hopping backward. One has hold of a long piece of white wooled skin, as long as its body. It makes a gulping attempt to swallow it—but it can’t get it down its throat and the skin trails out of its open beak.

  My father steps out of the Land Rover and turns the carcass over with his boot. Strips of wool snag on the dry grass. Bones. The white-rimmed dome of a rib cage. A hyena must have got it.

  At the sheep pens, we see that the barbed wire—twelve rows high to keep out leopard and hyena—has been cut, and one side trails uselessly on the ground. A ewe is caught up in it. Her bleats are plaintive and my father crouches down to hold her still with one hand, while I struggle to pull her fleece from the metal barbs.

  Kahiki turns up on foot—he has been looking for us.

  “How many have we lost?” my father asks.

  “We don’t know yet. Perhaps thirty.”

  “Where are Kiongo? Mbira?”

  “They are gone, Bwana,” Kahiki says, shaking his head. Kiongo and Mbira are the shepherds who have slept with the flock for as long as I can remember.

  “Gone where?” I ask.

  “Into the damned forest.” My father waves his hand at the distant slopes of Mount Kenya. “It wouldn’t have happened a year ago, five years ago—” He draws his hands over his face and breathes out heavily. “Bastards,” he says, dragging his boot through the dirt. “They left them to any damned leopard or hyena that cared to pick them off.”

  We spend hours rounding up the sheep. There are more carcasses, littered over the plains, their white fleece like patches of snow on the short grass; black shadows sail over them, vultures wheeling in the sky above us.

  —

  THE ROAD BACK to the farm takes us along the top of the dam. My father pulls the car off the track. The sky reflects white and glassy off the surface of the water.

  “Walk with me,” he says. I feel close to him. It was hot work herding the sheep. My shirt sticks to my back, and the dust has mingled with the sweat on my face. My hands are greasy with sheep’s wool and covered in fine cuts from the barbed wire, but I feel a physical contentment, and a happiness that I have not felt in his company since I came home.

  He opens the boot for Juno and she jumps out. Then he takes a bottle of Canada Dry from the back of the car and shakes a box of Ritz biscuits at me. “Hungry?”

  “Starving,” I say, smiling. I haven’t eaten a thing all morning. I follow him down to the water’s edge. He slips his rifle off his shoulder, lays it on the stones, and we sit on the bank. The water is absolutely still. Juno laps at the surface, causing the smallest of ripples to break its edges.

  He squats at the water’s edge and rinses out the two tin cups. I dip my hand into the box of biscuits. They are dense on my tongue and salty.

  “Men who haven’t lived in Kenya cannot know what it asks of you,” he says, shaking out the water from the cups. “When your mother and
I first arrived here we had three thousand pounds to our name. We worked for a cattle ranch for two years before we had a chance to buy this place. We built the house for a hundred pounds. And borrowed the money for the dip from the Settlement Board. I had to buy stock—it was fifteen pounds for a heifer in calf. I knew we weren’t going to make it unless we had a dam, but we didn’t have the money. We needed water for the cattle, for the dip—every success on the farm relied on it.”

  He takes a bottle opener out of his pocket, flips the lid off the Canada Dry and pours it out into the tin cups.

  “So what did you do?” I ask. He hands me a cup. The soda fizzes cold against my tongue.

  “I rented a bulldozer from a man in Nakuru who charged seventy shillings an hour. He agreed to secure the rent against the three hundred and fifty acres of wheat I had planted. It looked like it would be a good harvest, so I took the risk. I counted every minute—it took 108 hours, 28 minutes and 12 seconds from the moment the bulldozer began to the moment it finished. I didn’t dare do the calculation in my head when I went to bed that night. But the harvest was good. I paid off the man, and the dam was built. It holds eighteen feet of water at the deepest point, and it covers nearly eight acres of ground. After that there were other dams, but this was the first. Your mother stocked it with bass. She loved to fish here.”

  “You brought me down here in the evenings—we used to watch Mama fish.”

  “Did we?” he asks, smiling at me, trying to remember.

  “You taught me how to clean and gut a fish.”

  He shifts his weight—he has spotted something on the far bank. Distracted, he lifts his binoculars.

  I put a hand on his arm. “You did—don’t you remember?” It matters to me that he hasn’t forgotten. “You told me the story of the witch—” I say, pointing to the clump of trees that grows in the middle of the island.