One Hundred and Four Horses

by Mandy Retzlaff

  “When will they be back?” Kate asked.

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” I said. “Look over there . . .”

  In the paddock, Pat was besieged by a dozen foals.

  “We’d better go and help,” said Kate.

  I put out a hand and stopped her. “This is your father’s madness.” I grinned, watching Lady butting him in the behind. “He brought this on his own head. Let’s just watch for a while first . . .”

  Chapter 10

  GRANNY BERYL AND I had made it to the top of the training trail, following in the prints Pat and Imprevu had left behind. We looked down on the dam for a long time before turning to make the trek back, weaving our way downhill. We were halfway there, overlooking the farmhouse and the horses in their paddock, when I saw the plumes of dust. In the distance, a Land Rover cut along the farm road.

  “Where’s Pat?” Granny Beryl asked.

  “Out riding,” I said. “It isn’t him.”

  “Then who?”

  The Land Rover quickly grew nearer. At last, I could pick out the outlines of figures behind the windshield. The vehicle was laden down with passengers.

  “Come on, Mum,” I said. “Before they reach the house . . .”

  We made haste along the trail, picking our way as quickly as we could around all the obstacles Pat and our workers had built in to desensitize the horses and prepare them to be ridden. Along the way, I scrambled for the phone in my handbag. The signal was weak, but I lifted it high and tried to raise Pat. The phone just rang and rang.

  Hoping he was in the farmhouse, we tumbled down the end of the bank and rushed along the paddock’s edge. In front of Biri farmhouse, everything was still. We paused. There was no sign of the Land Rover.

  “Get inside, Mum,” I said. “Come on!”

  We crashed from room to room, but Pat was nowhere to be found. Again, I tried him on the phone. Again, it rang and rang.

  “Mum, maybe you should go and . . .”

  I was about to tell her to go and make some tea, take a rest, anything so that she didn’t have to see me panic, when one of our drivers, Albert, appeared in the doorway. For a second he stood, framed there, before I beckoned him in. He was holding his hands in front of him, and in them was a crumpled piece of paper.

  “What is it, Albert?”

  His eyes were downcast, as if he did not want to say.

  “There was a Land Rover.”

  I threw a look at my mother. Thankfully, she was retreating farther into the house.

  “We saw it, Albert. Where is it?”

  “It came to the workshop. There was a . . . police officer.” He stressed the last two words, as if to imply that the man had only dressed up in a policeman’s clothes. It did not matter. There were no true police officers in Zimbabwe any longer; it was just another way of saying Mugabe’s thugs. “Please,” Albert went on, “you must read.”

  His fingers were trembling as I took the note. My eyes scanned the words. Then, they shot back up to meet Albert’s own.

  “You know what this says?”

  Albert nodded.

  “Chanetsa,” I breathed.

  Again, Albert could only nod. Peter Chanetsa was the governor of Mashonaland West. He was also a member of Mugabe’s inner circle. I vividly remembered him as one of the men who had gone out to Two Tree on the day of Charl and Tertia’s eviction to oversee the kangaroo court outside the farmhouse.

  The letter in my hand declared that Biri Farm was now the property of Peter Chanetsa. We had only four hours to vacate the property.

  I could hear my mother shifting upstairs. I left Albert in the doorway and, the note screwed up in my hand, tried again to call Pat. When there was no answer, I dialed for Janey at the neighboring farm store instead. The phone just rang on.

  Hanging up, I bustled past Albert.

  He coughed politely, as if to get my attention. “This is serious,” he said, pleading in his tone. “You must start packing.”

  “We will, Albert. I have to tell Janey . . .”

  I hurried past the paddock, ignoring Lady’s demands for attention, and up the steps to Janey’s house. I found her in the farm store, sorting out boxes.

  “Janey . . .” I realized I was brandishing the piece of paper as if it was some sort of weapon. “Janey, listen!”

  Janey stopped. “What is it?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to read the note, so I passed it to her instead. Her eyes glazed over. Then they drifted up, as if to look into the house.

  “Mandy,” she breathed, “my parents are staying. And Fred—Fred isn’t here . . .”

  Like me, Fred had decamped to England in an attempt to make some money. The last I had heard, he was slaving in a supermarket warehouse while Janey remained here, struggling to make the farm shop work.

  “The police drove into the workshop. They cornered Albert, made him deliver the note . . .”

  “The police are issuing evictions now?”

  “What does it matter? We’ve only got a few hours . . . Janey, we have to pack.”

  She took a step backward, slumping into a chair, her dark eyes enormous. “Why now? With Fred away and . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter why. This is real, Janey.”

  There was a moment of pure silence, and then Janey nodded. “Thank you, Mandy,” she said and, mysteriously, turned back to her boxes.

  As I hurried back to our farmhouse, a thousand thoughts turned in my head: What should we pack first? How would Granny Beryl cope? Where could we possibly go in such a short space of time? It was Thursday, and I thought suddenly of Kate, coming back tomorrow from her week at school. I looked up. The sun was almost directly above. The clock was ticking.

  Rushing past the paddock, I saw that Imprevu was back from her ride, standing alongside her daughter, Deja Vu. Pat must have been somewhere near. I reached for my phone and was about to dial him again when I saw movement down by Princess’s stable. I cut through the paddock, ignoring Lady’s pleas, and crashed in.

  Pat was standing with Caetano, one of our drivers, re-dressing Princess’s wound. He looked at me. We said no words. I simply handed him the note.

  Pat studied it for a long minute, seemingly reading and rereading every word. Then, he crushed it in his fist and cast it down where it belonged, mired in Princess’s muck.

  “Start packing now,” he said and, bustling past me, hurried to the paddock.

  I came into the farmhouse and felt as if I was about to start scaling an unconquerable mountain. The sides were too steep, the cliffs too sheer to climb. We had lost everything at Crofton, but, somehow, we had accumulated so much at Biri. Furniture donated from friends who had fled, horse gear we had inherited from abandoned farms and rescue centers, pots and pans, household utensils, all the clothes we had been able to spirit off Palmerston Estates. Caetano appeared behind me, and I soon realized that our other workers were assembling. Chanetsa was robbing them of a home as well. Jonathan and Albert and Denzia and all the rest. Perhaps, if we all worked together, we might yet get off Biri Farm.

  Then I looked around. Pat stood in the paddock, surrounded by our seventy-one mares, geldings, and foals. He threw his head back, ran his hands through his hair.

  Four hours might have been enough to get ourselves off Biri Farm, but there was no hope of leading the horses off in time.

  My heart sank.

  Three hours to go.

  At Biri farmhouse, the packing had begun in earnest when another vehicle appeared on the horizon. This time, my heart did not sink. It soared. The car pulled into the yard outside the farmhouse and Carol Johnson stepped out.

  “Carol,” I said, rushing to her. “Thanks so much for coming . . .”

  “When could I ever resist the urge to be your knight in shining armor?”

  We walked up the steps into the farmhouse. Boxes were scattered around, as Jonathan, Albert, Caetano, and the other workers helped to pile our belongings inside.

  Ruefully, Carol looked me
in the eye. “We’re getting rather good at this, aren’t we?”

  Caetano looked up from his box. “Not good enough! Madams, we are not going fast enough! This Chanetsa, he is a dangerous man . . .”

  Carol launched into the kitchen, where Denzia was packing up the kitchenware, while I ventured upstairs in search of my mother. Granny Beryl had been dispatched to pack up her own belongings, and, as I climbed the stair, I was struck with that same terrible sense of failure I had had on returning to Zimbabwe: I could not provide a home for my children, nor for my mother in her old age.

  I pushed open the bedroom door. In front of her wardrobe mirror, my mother was looking at her reflection longingly. I froze—this was absurd. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them again, the vision was just the same.

  Granny Beryl was wearing a blue nurse’s uniform, one she had not worn in more years than I could remember. She considered herself carefully and then moved, struggling to fasten her epaulets.

  “Mum!” I cried. “What are you doing!?”

  It took a second for Granny Beryl to snap out of her reverie. When she turned around, she seemed to be looking at me, not only from the other side of the room, but from some distant past: a normal Zimbabwe, when we had all led normal, everyday lives.

  “Amanda,” she began, “can you believe it? I found this old thing in a suitcase, and it still fits!”

  I could scarcely believe my ears. I stepped farther into the room, closing the door behind me.

  “Mum, we barely have three hours . . .”

  “Three hours?”

  “If we’re still on the farm when Chanetsa comes . . .”

  Granny Beryl waved her hand, as if to dismiss the commotion. “You don’t need to bother yourself with that, Amanda.”

  I rushed over to her, picked up a suitcase from where it lay on the floor, and heaved it onto the bed.

  “Please,” I said. “Just get everything together . . .”

  I could hear another commotion downstairs, Carol calling my name. I turned, opened the door, took a step out.

  “Mum, promise me . . .”

  Granny Beryl looked at me with that same perplexed look.

  “Mum, be ready in an hour. I need to get you off the farm . . .”

  Leaving Granny Beryl dressed up like the nurse she used to be, I rushed down the stairs, half expecting to see Chanetsa already here. In the front room, surrounded by piles of boxes still unfilled, stood Pat.

  “We’re going to Avalon,” he began. “Nick Swanepoel’s going to put us up for the night.”

  Avalon was the farm to the east of Biri, ten kilometers away, beyond the defiant dam wall. Nick Swanepoel had been a good friend, but the thought that he would help us now was overwhelming; it lifted whatever stone had been sitting on my chest. Gaydia, who still worked with Pat on what was left of our agronomy business, had herself been living in a cottage on Avalon’s grounds, along with her two children. The thought of her cheery face welcoming us as refugees was enough to temper my anxiety, if only for a second. Gaydia was an expert horsewoman too, and instinctively my thoughts turned to the herd sitting out in the paddocks, Shere Khan looking loftily over them.

  “All of us?”

  “All of us,” Pat said, turning over his shoulder, “and all seventy-one of them. We just have to figure a way of getting them off . . .” He stopped, scanned the room. “Why isn’t everything packed?”

  I thought I might explode. “Packed!?” I thundered. “What do you think we’re doing!?”

  Pat considered the room methodically. “Put white sticky labels on everything you need to take. Only the important things. The rest we’ll leave.” He paused. “Mandy, do it now.”

  Two hours to go.

  I hurried to the office and rifled through drawers of stationery until I produced a box of the white sticky labels Pat used for marking agronomy files. Back in the house, Carol and Granny Beryl, still dolled up in her old nurse’s uniform, were kneeling together, packing box after box. The room buzzed around them, and, for the first time, I could see the fear etched into my mother’s face. Perhaps at last she understood.

  I passed the box of labels to Albert, and together we rushed around the house, planting labels on everything we had to take: boxes of books and the agronomy files first; everything Kate had accumulated in her new bedroom; the countless saddles and bridles and girths we had collected along with the horses.

  I was in the kitchen, pasting white labels left and right, when I heard the rumbling. Instinct drove me to the window, but my fears were unwarranted; it was not Chanetsa arriving early, but only the first of the tractors coming to haul our goods the ten kilometers to Avalon farm. Sitting in the driver’s seat, Jonathan leaped off and joined the stream of workers ferrying boxes aboard.

  When I looked back, I saw that the kitchen was full of boxes with white labels. Albert stood in the doorway. With a flourish, he peeled off one of the remaining labels and planted it firmly on the breast pocket of his overall.

  “Don’t leave me behind,” he said. “I’m important, too!”

  I opened my mouth to laugh, but a strange feeling was welling up inside of me, and I had to turn my head so that he could not see the tears that now flowed, unchecked, down my cheeks.

  One hour to go.

  The tractors were making their way in convoy off Biri Farm, following the red dirt roads to Avalon in the east. Down at the paddocks, Pat, Jonathan, and Albert were readying the horses with halters. I looked, again, at the sun in the sky. I imagined Chanetsa on his drive out to Biri Farm, even now.

  A plume of dust worked its way along the farm roads. At the paddock, we all froze, watching as the vehicle arrived. When it pulled into the yard, the relief in the air was palpable. Paul stepped out. I rushed to him. He had been visiting friends in Harare before flying back to England, and half of me wished he was already gone.

  “I’m sorry, Paul,” I said, remembering Palmerston. “I didn’t want you to be here when . . .”

  He silenced me with a hug.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked, striding toward the paddock.

  “We’re coming back for them as soon as it’s dark,” Pat replied from the other side of the fence. Paul reached over and let Imprevu nibble at his hand. “Nick Swanepoel promised us paddocks at Avalon.”

  “And then?”

  Pat smiled, wryly. “We’ll have to make a plan.”

  As he began to explain the route he and the grooms had charted off Biri, I hurried to find Janey. Although packed boxes were spread around her house, she still lingered in the farm store. She seemed to be tallying up prices, taking inventory.

  “Janey,” I ventured, coming tentatively through the door, “it’s time to go . . .”

  Janey looked up. “Not now, Mandy. I just need a little more—”

  In that instant, I heard the gunning of engines. Rushing back to the veranda, I looked down the farm road. Trucks had appeared from the fields and I could see people pouring out. As I looked at them in their shabby clothes, with their axes and pangas hanging at their sides, the old fear ran through me.

  “Janey, please, it’s starting. The war vets are here . . .”

  “Not yet, Mandy. We’re not ready yet . . .”

  I turned, rushed back to the paddocks. There was nothing to be done—we had to leave. Already, I could hear the settlers shouting as the trucks unloaded around the farmhouses. Somewhere, a chant was going up. I saw a group of men tumble from a truck and begin to yell at Albert and Caetano. Damn them, but they were beaming, taking glee in the chaos they were about to create. In the corner of my eye, I saw three men take to one of the giant fig trees with their axes. They were getting ready to block the roads.

  “Pat,” I called. “We have to go . . .”

  In the middle of the herd, he looked up. One of his hands lay on Shere Khan’s flank, as if both Pat and the queen of the herd were preparing to repel these invaders together. He was wearing the same face I had seen that day on Palmerston. I w
illed him to stay calm with my eyes.

  “Get in the car, Mandy,” he said, taking his hand softly from Shere Khan’s side. “We’re right behind you . . .”

  Darkness fell suddenly across Avalon Farm.

  Avalon was one of the prettiest farms I had known. In addition to its main farmhouse, there were other cottages and buildings stretched around. Workshops and barns sat in a great semicircle, and in their cradle land had been roped off for a makeshift paddock. The lights were on in the main farmhouse, where Nick Swanepoel and his family lived, and beyond its wide verandas lay the grasslands where Nick had promised our horses pasture. Beyond that were the fields where he grew soybeans, wheat, tobacco, and maize. That night, Avalon seemed to me to be some kind of oasis, a farm somehow managing to march on while all around it others tumbled.

  Nick was a big man, a few years older than Pat, and Avalon was his pride and joy. Across the empty paddock, I could see his silhouette in his farmhouse window. Pat and I made preparations to move in with Gaydia, whose cottage was next door to the main homestead. On the other side of the Avalon farmhouses sat Nick’s private game park. Here he kept all kinds of African antelope, giraffes, and zebra. I could sense their presence, and for a moment it was like stepping out of Crofton in the dead of night to breathe in the bush.

  We had been here scant hours. In the little cottage behind me, mattresses had been spread out, and the kettle was constantly on the boil. If I was grateful for anything, it was only that Kate was still at school and did not have to live through this again.

  Some of the trucks were being unloaded, but our car still sat, heaped high with boxes, outside the cottage. In front, Pat gathered with Albert, Caetano, and Jonathan. They had collected clusters of lead ropes and halters, and as the stars revealed themselves, plastered across our African sky, they knew that the time was nigh.