Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  “Nothing, Papa. I am just the same.” I want him to come to me, but he doesn’t rise from his chair.

  “I remember you when you were just born. You clenched your fists and cried, and I held you and I thought that I had known pain before but there was no pain like hearing you cry. It took my breath away.” I am empty inside, but my face is wet, the tears spilling out of me so easily that I do not feel as though I am crying—like a bandage ripped from a wound, the emotion flows like blood, unfettered now. There is no stopping it.

  “But you have forgotten me.”

  “I have not forgotten you.” He leans his shotgun against the fireplace. He stands up and walks a few paces toward me; puts a hand to my cheek. His face is tight with emotion. “I tried to warn you in my letter. That you would not be happy here. That you should not come back. I knew that you would try and resurrect what cannot be resurrected.”

  “If you had brought me back with you from England. If you had not left me—”

  “What kind of life could I have given you—out here, so far from other people?”

  “It would have been enough to be here with you. It is enough now—” My voice rises. I do not want him to say what he is saying.

  He takes my head in his hands and kisses my forehead, and the tears run down my face. He cannot put his arms around me. He will not draw me to him. “It is not your fault, Rachel,” he says in a whisper. “It is my fault.” It is not an apology; it is an admission of guilt, a plea for understanding; for what he cannot do; for what he cannot be. And I am sobbing now, for all the things that cannot be unwritten.

  “Robert—”

  We turn, and I see Sara in the open door. I feel my body freezing up under his hands, braced for what she will say. My father doesn’t let go of me right away.

  “Not now, Sara,” he says softly.

  She walks into the room. I am going to lose him.

  “Surely you see that she isn’t well?” she says.

  “This isn’t the time,” he says. His voice is both a plea and a warning.

  “But when is the time? After she has slept her way through the ranks of Mau Mau? After we have been murdered in our beds? After she has sold every shred of dignity associated with this family? She needs your help, Robert.”

  I see my father’s face, frozen with anger, crippled with doubt. He wants to stop her but he cannot. He does not have the strength to extricate himself. We are ripping him to shreds, and despite all his weakness, I feel guilt. That I am causing this pain. I think of Solomon deciding which of the two women should keep the baby that they both claimed was theirs. The mother—the one who loved the child—would not see the baby cut in two. She would rather lose the child than cause him pain. I feel this way about my father.

  Sara walks over to where we are standing. The back of her hand settles against my cheek. “This is all too much for you,” she says, her voice full of a subtle manipulation. “You need to get some sleep.”

  “Steven—he put his hands on me,” I say, looking at my father, trying to start on the truth of what happened. The violation. Before it is too late.

  “He was trying to protect you from yourself,” Sara says. “You are not yourself, Rachel. Don’t you see?”

  “Before. He put his hands on me before. Michael was protecting me from Steven.” I need him to listen to me. I think I have caught his attention. When something happens that explodes the small room in which we are standing. A short, hard hammering on the door. And a shout. “Bwana!”

  My father turns so sharply it is as though he has been struck with a whip. He lets go of me and is across the room in a moment, picking up his shotgun. I feel my heart expand with a thump in my chest. My hands are empty. I have nothing with which to defend myself.

  We follow him into the hall. I listen, but all I can hear is the silence roaring in my ears.

  Then—“Bwana, come quick.” It is Kahiki’s voice.

  “What is it?” my father asks, taking the safety off his gun.

  “There are strangers in the shamba. They are oathing the men.”

  My father crosses the hall into his room. Sara’s voice: “Don’t do it, Robert. It will be a trick.”

  “And if it’s not? What should we do when the watu have turned? What about tomorrow night? And the night after? How will we sleep if we know the farm is overrun with Mau Mau?”

  My father appears in the doorway with a second shotgun which he slips over his shoulder. His revolver is in his belt. He has a torch. He holds it in his teeth as he squats down to lace his boots.

  There is a shout outside. We all start. Kahiki again. “Come quick, Bwana.” And I strain my ears for some other sound. Another man breathing behind him. Setting this trap so they can burst through the door and cut at us with their pangas.

  I am acutely aware of the door as our only protection. The soft parts of my body—my belly, my neck. The sharpness of their knives. Sara is standing in the doorway behind him, in her dressing gown, a revolver in her hand. My father stands up. “Don’t, Robert,” she says, gripping his arm, as though she can squeeze a sense of reality into him. “For Christ’s sake. It will be a trick. It always is.”

  “Not Kahiki. I know him. He would give me a warning.”

  I gulp down air. All the waiting has resolved into this—this moment.

  My father gives her the other shotgun, and says, “Don’t let anyone in. You hear me? Anyone.”

  “Robert—don’t be an idiot. You don’t know if he’s telling the truth. You can’t leave me here on my own.”

  “You’re not on your own. Rachel is here.”

  “She can’t help me.”

  “She won’t have to. I will be back as soon as I can.” He turns to me and kisses me quickly, on my forehead, then he slides back the steel bolt on the door, his revolver in his hand. I walk backward out of the hall. Ready to run—but where? Sara has her revolver raised, pointing past my father. I expect the door to fly open, brace myself for violence, but all I see is Kahiki’s face, briefly illuminated by the wash of the torch; my father’s back and the near darkness outside—visible for just a moment, before the door swings shut. Sara slides the bolt back across the door and we are thrown into a pool of silence.

  She does not tell me where she is going. I watch her walk along the corridor to her room and hear her door click shut. She will drink in bed; I have smelled it on her breath in the mornings.

  I go into the sitting room and put out the lamp. I do not want to draw attention. There is the light from the fire, but otherwise the room is in darkness. I have no gun to protect me. I sit down on the sofa, tucking my legs underneath me. The silence outside is overwhelming. Kahiki had said men. How many men? Had they come armed? With knives or guns? How would my father arrest them if the labor in the shamba had already been oathed? If they had already turned their loyalties against him?

  I imagine them swarming up the hillside to the house. My heart is racing now, in my chest. What about Michael? Where is he now? Does he know about this?

  I sit with my eyes fixed on the fire. Sleep drifts over me. When I wake the fire has dulled to a smoldering red and the room is in darkness. Did something wake me? A flash of light flickers across the window. I rise, startled. And another from the window behind me. Voices now, raised, talking quickly. Not English. Kikuyu. I swallow, standing fixed, strangely immovable. Anxiety scurries like insects, quickly, through my veins. I feel the urgency, the quickening, and it increases my sense of horror. My fingernails are digging into my palms, wet from fear. Time slows; my heart thuds out the seconds. There are voices now coming from behind the front door. They are all around the house.

  “Sara,” I call, knowing that it won’t help. She is already standing in the doorway. Her revolver is in her hand. We both stare at the walls of the house. I see my own horror reflected in her face. Something is happening. We hear it before we see
it. A crackling. Then the lick of a flame. Light at the windows. The truth of it terrifies me. They are setting fire to the thatch. I hear a crackling, a snapping, as the flames lick up the roof of the house.

  Sara screams. I hear her panic and feel my own settle deep in my stomach. There are flames at both the windows in the sitting room, licking round the edges. And the sound of the thatch burning—like a wind blowing through the house. She runs to her bedroom and I follow her. There are no flames here, at this window. Not yet. She flings open the curtains. Her hands are on the wire. She is pulling at it, but it resists.

  “Can we cut it?”

  She is holding her weight on it. “A knife wouldn’t be strong enough.”

  I put my hands on the wire, but I know before I feel the resistance that it won’t come undone. We both pull with all our strength, but the wire doesn’t move under our weight. I go into the sitting room. The thatch overhead is showing flames on its underside. Soon it will catch completely, and then it will burn in minutes, falling in on us. Roasting us alive.

  I run down the length of the house, to my bedroom. It is cooler in here. The fire hasn’t caught hold. I have no light. I do not want them to know I am here. The room feels cavernous in the dark. The crackling, the heat, is at my back. I stand close to the window. My head against the wall, trying to think. A thin breeze stirs the curtains. We had rats under the henhouse. Hundreds of them, black with thick hairless tails, hiding in holes, killing the chickens, eating their eggs. My father lit a fire. Smoked them out. I remember the shrieking of the rats, as they emerged from the earth like lava. My father and Kahiki picking them off with their rifles.

  The air is getting thick. Smoke is pouring in under the door, and I am coughing.

  “Rachel,” a voice on the other side of the wall. A low shout. “Rachel.”

  “Michael?” The relief sends a new wave of terror through me—he is just on the other side, but I cannot get to him.

  “Listen to me.”

  “Michael—it’s hot in here,” I cry. “The fire is getting stronger.”

  “Can you pull up the floorboards? Is there a way to do it?”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Open the curtains.”

  I don’t move. My limbs have become thick and slow with fear.

  “Rachel!” he calls. I don’t reply. I am stunned by terror.

  “Listen to me. I have only a moment. You can get yourself out of there. Your father has a hammer. You can use it to lever up the boards. Think where he keeps it.”

  I force myself to move. Draw the curtains open. Moonlight filters into the room. This end of the house is built on stilts. There is open space under the boards. I kneel down. Run my hands over them. He is right. If I can get them up I might be able to get out.

  I open the door and step into a dense, thick cloud of smoke, billowing up from the floor. I run to the sitting room and pull open the door. Smoke envelops me. A wall of heat. I cover my mouth with my forearm and move into it, through it. A tangle of scarlet flames, more heard than seen, illuminates the smoke. I push myself through into the hall where the smoke is not so thick. There is a cupboard here. I am moving too slowly. There isn’t enough time. I turn the small key. There is no window; no light by which I can see. My hands feel their way over the shelves. Trays of nails fall clattering to the ground under my fingers. The fire above me begins to take hold, crackling as though a living thing is scrambling over the roof, breathing hot flames down on me, sending fragments onto the floor. A clutter of metal. There is no hope of me finding it in the dark. Of getting up the floorboards. Of escaping. It is too late. Then my hands settle on something smooth and wooden. I feel a ridge of sharp metal. The hammer. I stagger back through the cavernous smoke, back to my room and shut the door behind me. Go over to the far corner where the floor is highest off the ground.

  “Michael?” I shout, sobbing as I kneel on the floor. “Michael.”

  He does not reply. Has he gone? I let out another cry. Then try to lever the hammer under the boards, feeling for cracks with my fingers, where I might be able to wedge in the metal claw. Some of the rats died at the mouth of the hole. Asphyxiated. Not prepared to face the guns that were waiting for them, and my father dug them out later, hair scorched and skin blackened.

  I want to live. I cannot get the hammer into the gap between the boards to lever them up. There is not enough room and the metal keeps slipping. I swear. It has to work. I need only to get a corner of the metal claw in and I’ll have some leverage but it is too wide. Then I find a gap between two boards—broader under my fingers. I push in the claw and it holds. I lean my weight against it. The board moves. I lean again. It makes a cracking sound, and I throw down the hammer and pull on the board. It comes away, nails ripping from their sockets. I lean down and suck at the clean, cold air below.

  The others come quicker. Four boards, and there is a hole large enough for me to squeeze my way through. I am sitting on the edge of the hole, about to lever myself down, when I remember Sara.

  I run into the bathroom and turn the tap. I push water over my face, over my dress so that it runs down me, ice cold against my hot skin, breathe for a moment with my head below the floorboards, then plunge back into the house. The smoke is denser now, blacker, more hostile. It is like moving through something solid, and it holds the heat as though the air itself is burning. The sitting room is no longer smoke but fire. Great chunks of thatch are falling from the roof. The heat is scalding.

  “Sara!” I shout to her at the door of her room. I can just make her out. She still has her hands wrapped in the wire. When I go closer I see that her hands are black and wet to touch. They are running with blood, but she keeps on pulling.

  “I have made a hole in the floorboards. There is a way out.”

  She stares at me.

  “Michael is there. He will help us escape.”

  “It’s a trap,” Sara says.

  “It’s that or burn alive in here.” I pull at her arm, but she snatches it away. “Come. Quickly.”

  She does not move.

  I stare at her for a moment, then run back across the sitting room. I can no longer see and I am not sure if my eyes have burned up or the smoke is too thick—it feels one and the same thing. They are no longer any use. My skin is on fire. I wonder if I will get through. I feel my breath failing. The heat. The sucking of the flames. My lungs are hotter than my body, or hot in a different way, layers of burning, as though I am breathing in fire. Then I am through to the corridor, shutting the door behind me. The smoke is thick in here but the heat is less. I am pushing at the door of my bedroom, struggling to get it open, thinking in the blackness that it might be beyond me, when it opens under me, and Michael is there pulling me through, kicking the door shut, pushing me toward the hole.

  I fall toward the gap in the boards. For a moment I think there might not be enough room. I push my hips through and my feet touch the cool earth below. My dress snags on the boards. I yank at it until it rips, then lever the rest of my body through, pressing my face to the earth, taking great gulps of clean air. Michael drops down beside me. We are pressed low to the surface of the ground. There is about a foot of space above us, but more room at the corner of the house. The light outside is murky. Smoke clouding the glow from the fire. There are voices, but a long way off on the other side of the house—Africans shouting. They are waiting for us to burst out of the front door. The house is burning above us, there is smoke here too—we cannot stay here for long, but I do not think I will have the courage to leave.

  “Go on now. Quickly. I’ll be right behind you.”

  I rub my eyes. They feel hard as though the surface has been burned. I force them open again and realize I can see after all; the land beyond our hiding place is discernible.

  “Rachel—you have to move. We cannot stay here.” I do not want to listen. I cannot leave the safety
of this place.

  “Now. Rachel.”

  “They will kill me.”

  “They won’t see you. Quickly.”

  He presses past me. His fingers close warm around my hand. He pulls me forward, and I scramble after him. And then I am out, in the open. He runs ahead and I follow. I don’t look backward. I can feel the heat of the fire at my back. The flames licking into the sky. The sky glowing red like hell above us. The shouts of men. I am running, as fast as I have ever run in my life, across the lawn, my back arched, waiting for a gunshot. Or the pounding of feet and the stroke of a knife. I can see the cover of the bush ahead, looming dark against the sky. Then we are there, pushing through branches. My feet are scraped raw. They have been burned in the fire. I cannot keep up. I lose Michael ahead. Then he is back again, taking my hand.

  “Quickly.”

  I stop, breathing hard. “What about my father?”

  I can see his face in the moonlight. “Rachel—there is no time.”

  “I won’t. Not until you tell me what happened.”

  “He broke up a meeting in the shamba. Men down from the forest, oathing the workers. Your father is trying to track them.”

  “You were one of them?”

  “I got away. I knew they were planning on coming to the farm. It was a diversion. They wanted to get him out. Away from the house.”

  “So they can kill him.”

  He does not answer. “They will raid the barns. Take what they can from the house.”

  “How could you let it happen?”

  “There was nothing I could do to stop it.”

  “But you are one of them.” I slam my fists against him, into his chest. Using all my force against him. “You would have had me burned alive.” I am nothing. I am all used up. Only this. He grasps my wrists and holds them, absorbing all my anger. I struggle against him, but he holds me still, and then he is pulling me into him. I strike my head against him but he has me held deep into him, so that there is no space for me to strike him, no room for conflict, and my anger flows into great racking sobs.