It began, as these things often do, with paprika. We had been consulting with Zimbabwean paprika growers with our agronomy business since before we were forced out of River Ranch and Palmerston Estates. We had worked closely with a large company known as Highveld Paprika.
Highveld Paprika had financed the growing of paprika across Zimbabwe, but, like us, the company’s leaders had been drawn to the east, to the fresh world of Mozambique, ten years out of its civil war and desperate for development. There was so much virgin bush here, and so little organized agriculture, that to the exiled farmers of Zimbabwe it must have seemed a promised land. It certainly seemed that way to the directors of Highveld Paprika. Their plan was to open up countless hectares of bush, investing in both local farmers and people like us who were streaming over the border, and watch the bush roll back, bountiful fields of paprika crops growing in its wake.
Overnight, Chimoio had become a boomtown, and we were at its epicenter. Investment in the land encouraged investment on a much wider scale. Across town, new houses were being built, and new traders were opening their stores. Engineers were setting up bases to help in building works and irrigation schemes, while money was being poured into the town’s utilities, a new medical practice had sprung up, and foreign NGOs cascaded in.
Pat and I had been tasked by the two directors of the company with being their intermediaries on the ground. Though we would not farm ourselves, we were to oversee the farmers in whom Highveld Paprika was investing. The plan involved Highveld Paprika lending a vast amount of money that we would manage and dispense among the Chimoio farmers involved in the program, by way of buying them tractors, harvesters, and irrigation equipment—and, of course, advising them on how best to treat and manage the crop. We did not plan on doing it forever, but the opportunity, we knew, was far too good to miss. For the first time since being driven from our home, we had the tools to claw our way back to the top, earn enough money to found a new home and build a permanent life for ourselves and our horses. It would never be Crofton, but deep inside I still dreamed of a place our children could come back to, a house to which they might bring our future grandchildren.
Pat strode along the trail, tracked by Tequila and Marquess in the paddock beyond, and walked between two banks of paprika plants. I followed. The paprika plants were shin high, wearing rich green leaves and budding fruits. I trailed my hand across their feathery tops, feeling the cold rustle of leaves across my fingertips.
For a second, we were fifteen years in the past, back at River Ranch in our earliest days. I was standing in the middle of one of our tomato fields, inspecting the leaves for signs of infestation or disease and calling out to Pat whenever I found something suspicious. Opening up the land, I constantly reminded him, is not only about driving back the bush. There are smaller, more insidious enemies to beat back as well.
“It’s really going to work here, isn’t it, Pat?” I called out.
Too lost in his dreams of the land, Pat did not turn back.
“Isn’t it, Pat?”
He looked back and nodded. “This is good land, Mandy,” he said, grinning.
“Better than home?”
He crouched, fingering one of the unripe fruits.
“It’ll do.”
I supposed that it would.
At first, I thought the voice was a dream. Half-awake and eager for the comfort of sleep, I rolled over, wrapping myself around Pat. He had kicked the sheets off in the night—the air beneath our mosquito net was so hot and clammy as to be almost unbearable—but a deep sigh told me he was still asleep. I was glad that one of us, at least, could get some rest.
“Wake up!”
This time, the voice jolted me from my tormented slumber. I sat bolt upright, happening to elbow Pat in the face as I did so. With a single giant snort, not unlike the disparaging sound Black Magic might have made, Pat awoke.
“What is it?”
“There’s somebody at the door . . .”
I moved to push out of the mosquito net, but, muttering some incomprehensible complaint, Pat pushed me back to the mattress and climbed out himself. Too nervous now, I followed him to the bedroom door and listened down the hall.
“There has been a terrible accident.”
It was the voice of our night guard, a local man we had employed to keep the horses in their paddock safe at night.
“What kind of accident?”
“The fencing wire has been stolen . . .”
Pat growled in discontent. “That doesn’t sound like much of an accident to me . . .”
It was only when the night guard next spoke that the true purpose of his moonlit visit became clear. “There are horses on the road. You must come quick.”
Pat pulled on a shirt, I quickly heaved boots on over my nightclothes, and we set out into the hot Chimoio night.
Our first stop, the night guard in tow, was down at the riding school. As we climbed out of the Land Rover, Jonathan and Albert were down at the end of the paddock, shoring up a hole where the fencing wire had been stolen. Among the horses gathered at the other side of the paddock, I could see Lady, Black Magic, and Deja Vu eyeing us curiously. As Pat and I came to the fence, Lady began to amble over, but she quickly realized something was wrong and came no farther. Above us, the sky was streaked with thousands of stars.
“How many got out?”
“We counted three missing.”
“Who?” I asked, gazing into the dark silhouettes of the herd.
“Grey is gone,” Jonathan began. “Treacle, Romans . . .”
Pat stepped through the hole in the wire. “Which way?”
Jonathan pointed into the darkness. Grey and the other two runaways seemed to have turned their backs on the town and headed into the wild, open scrub. Yet out there lay as many dangers as there were here in Chimoio.
“The main road, Pat. What if they were . . .”
Pat cut me off. “Get back in the car, Mandy.”
We left Jonathan and Albert looking over the herd and screeched the car around to follow. Our headlights arced across the road, illuminating the potholes, and then we took off, out of Chimoio. The night rushed past around us. Streams of burning sand kicked up by the wheels twisted across the windshield, finding their way through the open windows to whip and sting us.
We hit the main road and turned west. My eyes roamed the verges, but in the darkness I could see no sign of where the horses might have gone. If there was grazing nearby, perhaps they had remembered it from their rides and were bound that way—yet all around, there was only the dry, thorny scrub.
A full moon was on the rise. Fleetingly, in its ethereal light, I saw a spattering of horse dung in the middle of the road. I breathed out a sigh of relief—we were headed in the right direction. Then something twisted in my chest.
“Pat,” I said, “they’re walking on the main road.” I paused. “In the dead of night . . .”
He looked at me, expressionless. The thought had occurred to him, too.
It felt cooler outside of town. The shadowy silhouettes of a stand of msasa trees, with their familiar fingerlike leaves, blocked out the silver of the moon and stars for a second—and, when we emerged on the other side, we saw a vast shape looming ahead.
Uncertain at first, Pat pressed his foot on the brake, and the Land Rover ground to a halt.
Our headlights picked out the shape of a truck at the side of the road, its back wheels up on the bank.
I moved to get out of the car.
“Stay there,” said Pat.
But something compelled me to stand, and I joined him on the side of the road.
We walked in the path of our own headlights, up toward the truck. The driver was already climbing back into the cab, gunning the engine back to life. With a crunch of gears, he hauled the truck around, crashed down from the bank, and took off up the road. Exhaust choked out of the back of the truck, enveloping us in an acrid cloud.
As the cloud parted and we emerged on the other
side, I stopped dead. The shapes lying in the middle of the road were not great boulders of earth, nor cargo dropped from the truck. In pieces before us lay the bodies of the three horses.
I rushed forward, stalled, rushed forward again. I froze. By the time I came to my senses, Pat was on his knees at the side of the first horse. He gestured wildly for me to go back to the car, but I was drawn on, like a moth to a naked flame. I guessed that this had been the first of the horses into which the truck had plowed, for his haunch was torn half away from his body, and a mess of meat was open to the stars and insects of night.
My eyes panned up the ruined carcass, and I saw Grey’s head, stiff and lifeless. His tongue lolled out, caked already in hot dry dust.
In a daze, I stepped past. Farther on, up the road, hanging half in the ditch between the stone and a scrubby field in which subsistence maize was being grown, lay Treacle. At first, my heart soared, for her body was not pulverized like Grey’s. I dropped down to touch her flank, and my hand sank into her hide. Underneath, her ribs were shattered. Her body was a mere mask, for inside she was shredded. I ran my hand up her spine, into her mane. She had died with her eyes open and they stared at me now, pleading.
Between Grey and Treacle, Romans lay. Pat sank to her side, pressed his head to her chest as if to listen for her death rattle. There was only silence.
The truck was long gone, its exhaust trails clearing. We sat in the middle of the road, surrounded by the devastation.
I was too numb to cry, but images rained down on me: Grey, a lovable foal on Two Tree; then, older now, taking me high up into the forests in Penhalonga as we searched for a way to drive the horses over the border.
“What do we do?” I breathed, still stunned.
Pat was beyond speech. He wheeled around, as if to climb back into the Land Rover, but then stopped dead.
“We need a truck,” he uttered. “You’ll have to go . . .”
“Pat . . .”
“Well, I’m not leaving you here, am I?” he roared. Then, suddenly, he calmed. “Tell Jonathan to get a truck out here quickly.”
I could still see Grey’s tongue lolling in the corner of my eye. I tried to shake the image away and found that, for the first time, my vision was blurred by tears. Perhaps it was a good thing; at least now I did not have to see their faces staring up at me. Grey had survived war vets, come back from being stranded out on Two Tree, been rustled off farms, and somehow made it through the rush of disease and parasites that had feasted on the herd when we first came to Chimoio. The thought that he was dead on account of us was awful.
I climbed back into the car. There I saw the cadavers, trapped in the headlights as if I were the one about to run them down. I tried not to look as I swung the car around and drove the long road back into Chimoio.
Half an hour later, I made it back into the riding school. Jonathan and Albert were just cutting off the last strands of wire in the new stretch of fence. I asked Jonathan to bring a truck round.
“Will you drive, madam?”
I looked down. I had not realized it, but my hands were shaking. “No,” I said. “You . . .”
It took an interminable time to get back. In the passenger seat I could not sit still. I wound down the window, wound it up again, played with the phone in my hands and toyed with calling Pat, each time fighting down the urge. In the back of the truck, Albert and another one of our grooms bounced around, waiting to help with the grisly task.
“I remember a time on Crofton,” I began. The memory had not occurred to me in such a long time, but for some reason it had resurfaced now, as vivid as if it were yesterday. “I was riding with Charl, who was on Grey, with Kate and Jay riding up behind us. Suddenly, Grey was so agitated. He stopped dead, refused to go on. It took me a while to see what he had seen.” I looked at Jonathan, my eyes glassy. “In the bush, there was a python, just gorged itself on a sable calf. Her mother must have been off grazing and came back to see her calf in the belly of this snake, straining at its skin from inside. She was hammering her hooves up and down, pulverizing that snake . . . but she could never set the calf free. It was already gone.” I paused, kneading my hands. “How did Grey know? Why did he care?” My voice broke. “I loved that horse.”
By the time we came back to the spot in the road, I realized we were not the only ones. The truck headlights picked out Pat, standing between Grey and Romans, with Treacle on his other side, but around him I saw groups of local villagers. Three figures, two women and a man, stood in the maize, while another crouched at Grey’s ruptured back. As I stepped out of the cab to hurry over, Jonathan maneuvering the truck so that we might heave the carcasses inside, I noticed others as well. One of them cried out in his local language. Though I knew he could not understand, Pat shot him a look like daggers. Turning, he saw the man bent low at Grey’s side and, with a great stride, drove him back to the edge of the road.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They want the meat,” Pat said.
I stared, as if asking him to say it again.
“We need to get them out of here, before more come . . . Jonathan!” Pat barked. “Help me here!”
There were more faces on the banks of the road now. I felt a hand tugging on my elbow and turned to see the questioning faces of two local women, shrouded in the blackness. Whether they were speaking Portuguese or their local language, I could not tell; the words were blurred, indistinct, as I watched Grey being loaded onto the truck.
When, at last, all three horses were aboard, Jonathan edged the truck around so that Pat and I could squeeze up front. When the headlights swept round, they illuminated not only the mass of local men and women, whose confusion quickly turned to anger at the thought of us hauling their meat away, but also the stains of gore where Grey, Treacle, and Romans had fallen.
I shut my eyes to it, but I could not block out the baying of the horde.
As the pink lights of dawn rose that morning, illuminating the snaking dust along Chimoio’s back streets and the blinking horses in the riding school yards, Pat and I stood with Jonathan, Albert, and some other workers in a small stand of gum trees on the very outskirts of town. There, in the holes we had excavated, lay the cold remains of Grey, Treacle, and Romans.
I could not bring myself to shovel the dirt in on top of them. I simply stood and watched, and knew, with a terrifying finality, that one of the last connections we had to the old world of Two Tree and Crofton was gone.
In the morning, I stirred late, my eyes heavy with sleep. Pat was already awake, hauling on his jeans on the other side of the mosquito net. When he saw that I had woken, he looked down.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going?”
He stopped in the doorway. “There’s something I’ve got to . . . Mandy,” he said, “you need to rest.”
Sensing that something else was wrong, I scrambled out of the mosquito net and followed him into the hall. By the time I reached him he was already out the door and climbing into the Land Rover.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll deal with it, Mandy.”
Still barefoot and in my nightgown, I flung myself into the passenger seat. “Tell me,” I insisted.
At last, Pat relented. “Better put some clothes on, Mandy. We need to take a drive.”
Half an hour later, my eyes still heavy with sleep, Pat and I stood in the same stand of gum trees in which we had lain Grey, Treacle, and Romans. The ground in front of us was open, the graves empty, the only sign that our horses had ever lain here the dark earth where Grey’s blood had pooled in the ground.
“They took the meat,” I breathed.
“Followed us here and dug them up,” Pat said, too stone-faced to betray any emotion.
“We have to get them back . . .”
Even as I said it, I knew it was too late. That meat was already gone, out into the villages or off to market.
“What good would it do Grey, anyway?” Pat said as
he led me back to the car. “We failed him.”
Morning’s light was spilling over the riding school when we arrived. In the office, staring through the dusty window at the horses in their paddock, it struck me that I would never see Grey among them again. It seemed such a foolish thing; I had seen him sprawled on the road, I had watched them lower him into the earth, I had seen his grave spoiled and his body carried away—but it was only when looking at Lady, Deja Vu, Shere Khan, Black Magic, and the rest that his absence really sank in. I buried my head in my hands and wept, long and hard.
At that moment, one of the grooms appeared in the office doorway to beckon Pat. He was holding out a mobile phone.
“It is ringing,” he said.
Silently, Pat went to take the phone.
“Is the madam all right?”
“It was the horses last night,” Pat said, the phone still chiming in his hand.
“And you are upset?”
I looked up. I couldn’t reply. The grooms we had hired locally could never understand what these horses meant to me. They had not seen Grey limping off Two Tree, his hoof almost hanging off; they had not been there to see the gunshot wound through Princess’s withers, nor had they watched foals like Brutus escape the jambanjaed farms.
“I better answer this,” said Pat. “It’s Highveld Paprika.”
He walked away, bustling the groom before him. In the office, I was left alone. Then, after drawing in my tears, I decided there was only one way to face this new day.
I went out to find Lady and lose myself in the herd.
“It’s happening with tobacco,” Pat said over dinner that night. “It could happen with us, too.”
Nervously I poked the food around my plate. Then, deciding to get a grip on myself, I began to eat properly. I might as well eat while I had the chance.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 20