Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

“I was eleven.”

  “It seems very young, to be left alone with one of them,” Sara says. Then—to my father—“What on earth drove you to that decision?”

  “Rachel’s mother insisted,” my father says.

  “And you agreed,” she says, as though it is proof of his weakness.

  “I rather respected her decision at the time. She didn’t want Rachel sent off to school so young. He was a good, hardworking Kikuyu boy.”

  “The only good Kikuyu . . .” Steven says, picking his teeth with his fingernail. Is a dead Kikuyu.

  “But schooling is so incredibly important. Particularly in Africa,” Sara says to my father. “You can’t have a child growing up like a native.”

  “Did he ever talk about politics with you?” Steven asks me.

  I hesitate for just a second. “No,” I say, thinking that it is—after all—not quite a lie.

  He looks at me for a moment, a slight question on his face, as though I might reveal myself to him. As if he has caught my hesitation, and he can take it in his mind and mold it into something.

  “Did you ever feel threatened by him?”

  “In what way?”

  “Physically?” He pauses. “Sexually?”

  I shake my head, cheeks coloring.

  “Steven—honestly. Everyone has a brother or a cousin who is Mau Mau.” My father draws a hand over his face. “He’s been through the war, for God’s sake. He was an engineer in Burma. He has a better grasp of English history than half the Europeans living out here. I can’t see he’s going to embrace a return to some kind of tribal idyll.”

  “Still—” Steven says, running a hand over the top of his revolver, “you must be careful thinking that because he’s civilized he’s on our side. Those are the ones you have to watch out for. They’ve fought in the war, shared a mess tent with a bunch of English boys, pulled the trigger on Europeans who look like you or me. They’ve probably slept with a few white whores, and it makes them feel all of a sudden like they could have our job.”

  “I trust Michael implicitly. We’ve got to draw the line of suspicion somewhere,” my father says, putting an end to the conversation, but it sounds weak, the plea of a man who is asserting himself in the face of defeat.

  XIV

  I am kneeling down in the large barn behind the two tractors with their jutting metal arms. The yard outside is empty. Michael has been working up at the dairy for a week, helping my father install new equipment. It is cool and dark in here at the back, under the tall, pitched roof. A few shards of light, escaping through seams in the corrugation, illuminate the spiraling dust. Everything is quiet except for the scratching of crows’ feet on the metal roof above me.

  The two locked trunks are at my feet. I have a penknife and I am trying to flick open the lock on the one nearest me. My father has mislaid the keys. I swear again as my knife pops uselessly out.

  A scraping noise behind me. I turn around. One of the wide doors pushes open and a shaft of light slides across the floor. Michael walks a few paces into the barn, blinking in the darkness. For a moment I can see him before he can see me. He runs a hand over his cropped hair and breathes out. His overalls are peeled down to his waist, and his vest is illuminated white in the dark.

  Then his eyes pick me out, crouched on the floor.

  “Michael—” I swallow, standing up, feeling caught out. I see him watching me, waiting. “I can’t get the locks open—” To my surprise tears prick at the back of my eyes and I bite them back.

  For a moment I think he might walk away, then he steps forward and pulls a bit of wire from his pocket. He crouches down in front of the trunk. I look down at his brown, curled hair, the dust-soaked white vest, the bunched muscles of his shoulders. A rivulet of sweat runs down the dark indentation of his neck.

  It only takes him a moment—a few seconds with the piece of wire, and he has sprung open the lock. He does the same for the second.

  “Thank you,” I say, unnerved by how quickly he has achieved what I have spent the last hour trying to do. He stands up, moving away from me toward the doors.

  “Michael—”

  He stops, but does not turn around.

  “I heard about your brother—they were talking about it at the house.”

  He says nothing.

  “You should know—my father trusts you.”

  Still he is silent. All I can see is the curve of his vest in the shadows. I feel I have nothing to lose. Somehow it is easier to speak the truth, here where there is scarcely any light. “Why don’t you say anything? Why do you ignore me?”

  “I am not ignoring you, Memsaab.”

  “You don’t trust me,” I say, standing up. “You think that I will say something about the strike to my father.”

  There is a long silence. Then he shifts his weight in the liquid dark of the barn. I hear him breathe out heavily. His voice is different when he speaks. It is softer, more natural. “It would be difficult for you not to, Rachel.” He has called me by my name, and the sound of his voice articulating it, the sense of closeness it brings, sends a current right through me and I realize with a shock that this is what I have wanted. “If things get difficult on the farm. If there is an attack, why should you not tell your father?”

  “Because I trust you. I don’t believe you would do anything to put us in danger.”

  “That is easy for you to say now.”

  “How can I convince you?”

  He walks a little way toward me, close enough that I can feel the heat rising from his body. “Why are you so determined to convince me? It would be much easier for you if I left.”

  The question throws me. I am not sure myself. Why do I care so much? Am I still trying to patch together the broken bits of my childhood? Is it because my mother had faith in him? But there is more to it than that, more than I can articulate, so instead I say, “I want you to stay. We’re virtually under siege here. Who else am I going to talk to?”

  I say the last bit with desperation, and he laughs, softly, in the dark, looking down at me, and I notice his height, the closeness of his body, the slow softness with which he moves. He has shed his other self and has become, all of sudden, real. It is what I wanted from him, what I have wanted since I first came back to the farm and saw him in the yard, but it is more frightening than I imagined. I have opened up something that he wanted to keep hidden. Now that it is open there will be no closing it again. The light catches the side of his face, shining in the dark.

  “You know that I would be arrested if you said anything?” His voice drops to a hoarse whisper. “Even an allusion to what happened at Uplands would be enough to have me transported to a camp. They are lawless places. Men are tortured and executed.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t say this for my own sake—though I won’t pretend it doesn’t scare me—but because all of this becomes your responsibility if you find you cannot stay silent.”

  “I understand.”

  We both start at a noise in the yard. Footsteps and my father’s voice calling Michael’s name.

  He wipes his hands on his overalls and walks out, leaving me sitting in the near dark. I don’t follow him. I don’t want to see my father just at the moment.

  I listen to their voices talking about the replacement parts they need to pick up for one of our Land Rovers in Nakuru, a new digger that should be arriving next week to dig up the forest that stands in front of the old shambas so they can cultivate it for coffee.

  As my father says good-bye, he asks in a quieter voice, “Is Rachel there?” And I think for a moment he might come in and see me, to apologize perhaps for the way things have been and help me sort through the trunks. But I hear his footsteps walk out of the yard and I wonder if it even crossed his mind to come inside, and whether I am glad after all that he didn’t.

  I hover over the t
runks full of my mother’s things. Now that they have been unlocked, I cannot bring myself to lift the lids and see what is inside. I am not ready. I want to keep them as they are—full of possibility. I cannot have this moment twice. Instead I pick up my mother’s old, split-cane fishing rod, lying on the floor against the back wall, and sift through the cardboard boxes until I find some rusted lures which I can polish.

  When I emerge from the barn, Michael is squatting with his back against the wall, stroking Juno. I jump—not seeing him at first—and then stand a little awkward now in the bright sunlight, after the things I said in the barn.

  “What news is there of the Emergency?” he asks, softly, and I glance down at him. He meets my look, unflinching, and I realize that he can ask something of me that he wouldn’t have asked before, and it scares me a little.

  “You haven’t read the papers?”

  “The Kikuyu papers have been banned. Your father used to pass on his copy of the Standard, but he stopped a few weeks ago.” I remember Michael listening to the radio in the yard, the concentration on his face, and realize that this is what drew him to me—he was thirsty for the news. I had not seen that it was so important to him, and how cut off he must feel without it.

  “There have been more sweeps in Nairobi. Arrests.”

  “Kenyatta?” His eyes sharpen on mine.

  “Yes,” I say, quietly. It was on the radio last night. Jomo Kenyatta—the political leader who had so far managed to keep himself free of association with the violence of Mau Mau. Nate had said he was the great hope for uhuru—independence—in Kenya.

  His jaw clenches, the muscle ripples in his cheek. If I was closer I think I might hear his teeth grind. “On what charges?”

  “Leading the extremist wing of the Mau Mau. Inciting hatred and violence against Europeans. The creation of the Mau Mau oaths.”

  He looks away, down the track. I can feel the anger in his silence, in his absolute stillness. I asked Nate about Kenyatta, the morning after the State of Emergency was declared. Well-educated, articulate and seemingly moderate in his politics, Kenyatta had spent sixteen years in England, had written for the Times, even published books. He represented hope—if the British were going to consider independence, they would start by talking to Kenyatta. By arresting him they had made their position absolutely clear.

  Michael doesn’t look up at me again, and I leave him sitting in the yard. As I walk back to the house I feel uneasy. Have I done the right thing, promising that I will not tell my father? If Michael’s loyalties are pushed, which side will he choose? But there is something in him that I trust, and it feels stronger and more truthful than the politics put forward by Steven Lockhart.

  —

  MY FATHER MAY HAVE warned me away from the new shamba, but I cannot spend all day indoors. I take my mother’s spinning rod, with its cork handle, and walk down to the dam. The reel glides easily under my hand. She stocked the long dam with black bass. My father used to bring me down at the end of the day, when the sun was losing its intensity, and we would find her on the bank, wading knee-deep in the water, reeling in her catch. He never fished himself—said he didn’t have the patience—but he would show me how to gut the fish that she had caught, sliding a knife into the smooth belly, scooping out the guts, then rinsing the blood-flecked body in the water. We would walk back together in the cool evening air, me trailing behind them, running a stick through the dust, their voices lifting softly into the fading light.

  The dam is vast. It stretches as far as I can see, and the forest borders the far eastern bank in the distance. I push through the scrub and long grass along the bank to get to the casting platform. It has rotted a little and isn’t as steady as it used to be, but it will hold my weight. I pull my gun from my belt and lay it on the platform behind me, then take the lure from my pocket, spit on it and polish it against my shirt. I throw out my line. The spinner makes a small splash, sinking deep into the water. I reel it in slowly.

  The bank of trees is dark and heavy, and I feel isolated here, but I am not unhappy because of it. A herd of buffalo come down to the shore on the far side to drink. In the distance I can hear the dull ringing of cattle bells. The birds calling across the water are soothing, and I soon grow to believe that this is my territory and that beyond in the trees belongs to elephant, buffalo, leopard and lion; and to the men who share the forest with them. That I am safe in this small clearing on the bank, at the edge of the platform.

  I catch three bass, gut and clean them, and carry them back to the house. I will offer them to Jim. I have not talked to him about his family leaving; about the shambas being dismantled. I do not know what to say, and my shame keeps me silent.

  —

  “RACHEL—” Sara says at dinner one evening, “I gather your dog is going to have puppies soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting her to have them in the house.”

  I look at her in surprise. “Where else would she have them?” She doesn’t reply. “What if something goes wrong? I want to be with her when she gives birth.”

  “She’s not a pedigree. I’m sure she’ll manage just like all the shenzi manage. God knows they don’t seem to have any trouble breeding.”

  “Can I not keep her in my bedroom, when she whelps?”

  “I really don’t think so. There’ll be such a mess.”

  “Rachel—” my father says, looking at me across the table, “Sara was very accommodating when you asked her if Juno could sleep in the house, but I think you can understand how she feels about this.” I do not see in him the same man who sat on the veranda with Nate two weeks ago, and said—smiling—that we could go to the Markhams. I wonder if this careful support of Sara’s wishes is the price he has had to pay for letting Harold go.

  “From tomorrow,” Sara says, slipping her fingers over my father’s hand, “she can sleep at the stables.”

  “Of course,” I say, remembering my father’s words at the dam: I would like you to make a particular effort with her. If you are going to stay.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, I open up one of the stable doors and sweep out the dust. The yard is empty. Juno watches me from the open door—she is walking more slowly now, moving between patches of shade to keep out of the sun.

  This is the stable I brought her to, when I found her on the rubbish heap at the dairy and I thought she might die. I shake down straw to cover the concrete floor and—as if showing her satisfaction—she sniffs it appreciatively, turns a circle and lies down heavily. She will be comfortable here, but if the puppies come at night I won’t be able to help her.

  I lay my hand on her belly; the smooth, hairless skin, split now by a dark line down the center, and her nipples, swollen and pink, the milk already gathering. As my hand rests there I feel a movement underneath it. A turning like the rotation of a ball beneath her skin. I remember Michael saying, I could feel them moving. My pulse quickens. She will have her puppies soon.

  —

  I AM WOKEN in the night by the grating call of a leopard, guttural and low, like a saw being drawn roughly through wood. I shiver, turning over in bed, listening. It is some way off—the stables, perhaps, attracted by the smell of Juno. Of all the predators, I fear leopard the most. They are silent and full of cunning, hunting under the cover of darkness, stalking their prey until they can pounce, deathly and quick.

  It calls again, a rough coughing, splintering the quiet. It is unusual to hear one so close to the house. A leopard took one of my parents’ lion dogs. I was six years old. We could see its paw prints deep in the dust the following morning, just a few meters from the front door. For a week afterward it circled the house, grunting, until one evening my father hobbled the legs of a goat and tethered it to one of the trees on the lawn. He sat at the sitting room window with his shotgun. All night I could hear the goat’s desperate bleating. My father
waited for hours. When he put down his gun to relieve himself in the bucket at his feet, the leopard struck—almost, he said, as though it had been watching him. By the time he had his gun in his hand a few seconds later, the leopard was nothing more than a shadow slipping through the long grass. The goat had been ripped from the tree. The leopard did not come back, though my father waited for it night after night, and for months afterward the goat’s terrified bleating haunted my sleep.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, before I let Juno out, I look for the leopard’s tracks in the yard, but I can’t see anything. I sink my head into Juno’s soft coat, wondering if it has been here, and whether it will come back.

  XV

  Sara suggests a trip to Nakuru. “It’s time you saw a little civilization,” she says. “We don’t want you turning native.”

  I am happy to go with her—it has been a month since I was last in town.

  I leave Juno locked in the stable—she is large now and moves more slowly, and I do not want her running away to have her puppies. When I step down from the veranda, Sara is slipping on her sandals and sliding into the Land Rover. She is wearing a yellow dress, which rides up above her knees when she sits, and she has a white canvas holster around her waist to hold her revolver.

  “Do you like it?” she asks, laughing, running a hand over the canvas. “I ordered it from Nairobi.”

  The short rains haven’t come and the land is dry as tinder—I can hear it in the grass snapping under my feet and the trees rasping their thorns along the side of the car.

  As we drive down onto the road to Nakuru we pass a large white sign, newly painted in capitals. WARNING: IT IS MOST DANGEROUS TO PICNIC IN THIS AREA BECAUSE OF TERRORIST GANGS.

  A convoy of army jeeps crawls along the road ahead of us, loaded with troops wearing red berets and khaki shirts—British troops erupting from hiding, like termites from a ransacked mound.

  “Lancashire Fusiliers—shipped in straight from England,” Sara says, as she maneuvers past them. Two of the soldiers tip their berets and whistle at us as we drive past, and Sara smiles knowingly at me, as though we have colluded.