“What happens now, Pat?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Pat stood, strode toward the Land Rover. I hurried after.
“Pat, I want to . . .”
“They die, Mandy,” Pat said, slamming his fists against the car door. “It stays in their system. There’s no expunging it. There’s no cure. It’s already in them. It’s already killing them, bit by bit. It bides its time and it festers and, when it’s ready, it shuts them down.” Pat’s face was strained, even though he had checked his tears. “Every last one of those horses we took to graze in that field is going to die.”
At least, now that we knew it was not a contagious disease, the horses could live as one herd again. Princess and Evita, Rebel and Philippe, Black Magic and Jade, even Lady and Duke, who had come all the way from Two Tree—we were now certain that they would survive, for they had never been near the poisoned land.
In the afternoon, we went riding with a British family based in South Africa. As I tacked up Echo and Evita, I stroked their ears and told them how lucky they were. If Echo had not abetted Jazzman in his great escape by nimbly untying the knots in the rope, and Evita not followed them, we would have left them in the fields, and they too might have feasted on the sun hemp. Were it not for their mischievous ways, they might be dead already, under the sand with Vaquero, Fleur, and the rest.
I looked across the stable and saw Pat tacking up the regal Shere Khan. She looked down her long nose at him, as lofty and statuesque as ever. Yet I could see the look in Pat’s eyes. Shere Khan had cantered in those fields. She had turned the grass in her teeth; she had kept her lofty eyes on the rest of her herd. She had been there throughout, and there seemed little hope that she had not eaten the poisonous vegetation like all of her friends.
We had taken more than thirty horses out to graze on the poisoned land. Almost all of them were already gone. When the twenty-ninth passed away, the new year was here and three months had already passed—but, Allan had told us, the Crotalaria poison could linger in a horse’s system for six months or more, waiting for the cruelest moment to spring its deadly trap.
Shere Khan, the queen of the herd, was living on borrowed time.
I was standing on the beach, Brutus’s lead rope in one hand and Lady’s in the other, when I saw Pat urge Shere Khan into a gallop. Beyond him lay the sweeping azure sea; beneath him, the undulating golden sand. I thought I had never seen such a majestic sight, but, when he turned her toward me and reined her down, I saw that he was trembling.
“What is it, Pat?”
It took a moment for him to find the words. “I can feel it in her chest, Mandy. It’s coming. It’s already here.”
Daylight lasted for long hours this deep into summer, and as the sun set in the west, somewhere over our old home in Zimbabwe, Pat and I walked Shere Khan gently out of the stables. Behind us, Lady, Black Magic, Brutus, and the other survivors watched. I have always thought that they understood exactly what was happening that night; that this was the very last time they would see their queen in the living world.
We led Shere Khan slowly along the beach, listening to the gentle lap of waves at the water’s edge. The light was soft, the palms swayed, a single sailing dhow bobbed out on the bay. Along the beach, we met Jay and, together—Pat holding Shere Khan’s lead rope, knowing he would never ride her again—we came to our little rondavel.
Shere Khan’s breathing was labored, but it was not until the morning came that we could fully hear the death rattle in her breast. Her tongue began to loll; a sheen of sweat shimmered across her beautiful hide, as if she had spent the day galloping through the fierce Mozambican heat; and by the middle of the next afternoon something had dimmed in her eyes. It was terrifying to see that knowing intelligence flicker and fade. Not once had we seen Shere Khan look so diminished. She was arrogant, confident, an imperious mare who knew she was more beautiful than anyone else—but now the knowing was gone from her eyes. She looked at us, but it was as if she were on the other side of a veil. Death was claiming her from the inside out.
We stayed with her through the long night.
“I’ll never forget coming back to Biri after I’d been in England,” I began, “and there she was. All those new horses you’d found . . . but she stood out, Pat. The most beautiful horse I’d seen.”
But Pat just sat in silence, one hand on Shere Khan’s trembling flank, her head propped in my lap.
In the morning, she was still with us. She took no water. She did not stand. We had clients to ride with this morning, but neither Pat nor I set out to meet them. In the rondavel, the phone rang and rang again. We let it go. There would be time enough for apologies later. This was our time now. This was Shere Khan’s.
In the middle of the morning, Shere Khan’s eyes rolled toward Pat. In that second, all of the old fire was there. Suddenly, she knew who she was. Suddenly, she understood that she was the queen, bigger, bolder, more intelligent, more beautiful than all the rest. She seemed to know where she should be—riding at the head of the herd, leading them on a thunderous gallop across these African sands.
But the moment was fleeting, and then the moment was gone. Shere Khan’s chest rose, and then she exhaled. Then, eyes still open and gazing at the blue African skies, she was still.
I looked up. It had been a long time since I last saw my husband cry, but his hands were tangled in Shere Khan’s ebony mane, and his tears flowed unchecked.
As soon as she was in the water, Black Magic performed an absurd belly flop and began to roll. A little farther along the beach, Brutus, seeing the preposterous fun Black Magic seemed to be having, attempted to do the same. Tentative at first—and still wearing his permanently worried expression—he only paddled. Then he too dropped down and rolled. I heaved on his lead rope, trying to encourage him to stand and come deeper into the water, but he steadfastly refused.
Along the shore, our other horses were coming in procession, their grooms on either side. At the head I saw Lady and Jade, Tequila and Echo tucked just behind, Philippe and Rebel on the edges, straining at their ropes to get to the water. At the end, Princess came with her daughter, Evita.
I saw the ghosts around them, too. There was Grey, cantering like a silvery streak; there was Deja Vu, whole again, her only scars the ones around her leg. There were Fleur and Marquess, who had come all the way from Two Tree together. I saw Arizona and California, plucked from a den of lions only to be led into the jaws of a crueler death. I saw Kahlua, trotting alongside her still-living brother, Tequila, as if they still belonged to the same herd. And, above them all, I saw Shere Khan, still a hand higher than the horses around her, still looking regally down her nose, still queen of her herd, even in that ethereal world.
One after another, we led the survivors into the water. Deep out, I sat on Brutus’s back, while Pat clung to Black Magic’s mane. The grooms led the herd around us, but Pat and I were suspended there, in the middle of the swirling azure waters.
We swam in circles, and when we turned, I saw a single horse’s head bobbing toward us, with Jonathan trailing behind as if it were he who was wearing the halter and lead rope. Pat and I slowed down. Princess was coming to see us.
We waited for her to reach us. I put my hand on her muzzle and Pat put his arms around her, careful not to touch the sensitive flesh of her withers.
“Do you remember,” Pat said, “the day you threw Resje and I chased you up through the Two Tree bush?”
If she remembered at all, it was part of a different world, like a false, distorted memory of childhood. I slipped from Brutus, kicked through the warm blue water, and rolled gently onto Princess’s back. Sitting high, I gazed around at what was left of our herd, playing as the Mozambican sun beat down.
I looked up. On the beach, I fancied I could see Shere Khan and the ghostly herd watching. I turned to call Pat, but when I looked again, they were gone. Now, only memories cantered along that beach.
“What do you think, Princess? Are
we home?”
She took off, as if making for shore.
Once, I had thought home was forever. Once, I had thought Crofton was where I would grow old and die, a place to which my children and, one day, my grandchildren could always come back. Now, home was different. Princess and I rose out of the ocean and stood sunning ourselves where, moments ago, the ghostly herd had stood. I thought I could hear the thunder of hoofbeats as Shere Khan led them on one final canter.
Home, I knew now, was wherever our herd still survived.
I turned and watched Pat and Black Magic, gleaming like ebony, rise out of azure sea.
Home was Pat, and here he was.
Epilogue
ZIMBABWE: YOU HAVE a lot to answer for.
February 2012 is the heart of a fierce Mozambican summer, but Jay and I are traveling west, through Chimoio and back over the Bvumba. I have been dreaming about writing a book about the story of our horses—but first, I know, I must see what has become of the country we used to love.
It is the first time I have crossed the border into Zimbabwe since we were forced to leave. It is after dark by the time we are through the checkpoint and traveling down the other side of the mountains. Mutare’s streets are heavy with the scent of flowering trees along its roads, and a rush of nostalgia hits me. It is like an epiphany: for a while, we were happy here.
We spend the night with old friends, but in the morning we are gone west along the Harare road. Even the main highways are pitted with potholes now, and Jay must constantly slow and swerve to avoid smashing the car’s chassis. Along the banks of the road, the telegraph poles are down, lying in tangled heaps, and the fields we pass, once rich, verdant farms, are either gone back to bush or planted with thin, straggly crops. Every ten kilometers we come to a checkpoint where police pull drivers over, ostensibly to fine them for dirty windshields or fractured mirrors, but really to ask for bribes; not even the police are paid in Zimbabwe now, and they must make their living on the country’s roads like bandits of old.
Before we venture back “home,” Jay and I head for Grasslands Agricultural Research Station at Marondera, one of the very first places Pat and I lived as a couple. The research station is wild and overgrown now, but on the outskirts of the local town lies a little graveyard. This, too, is overgrown, unkempt and untended, but we fight back the thistles and long grass and find a grave I have not seen in many years: the resting place of Nicholas, the baby we had to leave behind. We spend some time cleaning his grave and leave flowers to wilt in the harsh African sun. I do not know how long it will be before I will see him next, and as we head off, I am left with a feeling all too familiar: Zimbabwe has made me abandon him all over again.
In the afternoon, we reach Harare and spend the night at the home of my old friend Carol Johnson. Carol is widowed now and lives alone, with a dog named Scruffy, a Maltese poodle who walked in through her gate one day and never left. There is no electricity in her part of Harare—it seems that the only way to have a constant supply is to live near a minister—and she must buy her water privately. Jay, Carol, and I spend the day fortifying ourselves before setting out. We drive north from Banket on the Chinhoyi road. In the fields there is maize, tall and strong, and for a moment my heart soars: something, I think, has survived. Then Carol shakes her head. These are not Zimbabwean farmers, she tells me. These, Carol explains, are the Chinese. Since 2008, when the U.S. dollar was legalized, effectively ending the old Zimbabwean currency, Mugabe has been selling his country wholesale to investors from overseas, India and the Far East. Seeing the farms from which we were evicted going to waste, Mugabe sensed an opportunity to revitalize the ailing economy. Now, these lands are contracted out to mechanized Chinese farmers, the grain and other produce shipped thousands of miles to feed the starving mass of inland China.
After all of Mugabe’s rhetoric about taking the farms from the hated white colonists, he has opened his arms and invited in a colonist of a different sort. Zimbabwe is being colonized economically. He has found yet another way to rape the land.
When we get there, Two Tree Hill farm is still and silent, its fields unfarmed, bush creeping down from the hills. Down at the dam, three black men wearing only rags see our car approaching and, fishing spears in hand, approach us and block the road. In the backseat, Carol and I listen as Jay engages them in Shona. For a moment, it is unbearably tense; I do not know what he is saying. Then, at last, the men begin to laugh. Jay draws the car around and we climb toward Crofton. I ask him how he explained who we were, that this is our land, that they are fishing the waters of our dam. He looks at me, perplexed. Of course, he said no such thing. He told them we were lost, looking for somewhere to fish. The dam, they said, is empty now. It was once so full of bream, but they have taken it all.
We reach Crofton, and Crofton isn’t there.
The only part of the house left standing is a tiny corner of brick wall where Jay’s bedroom used to be. We climb out of the car. Except for that small pile of bricks, you would not know that a house had ever stood here. You would not know that there was a garden where my children played, a paddock where our horses grazed, a corner where Kate used to hide with a Scottie pup whenever we had to sell one. I cannot even pick out the place where I lay down with Frisky as she died.
“There’s still the mango tree,” says Jay.
The fruit is unripe, but he reaches up and plucks one.
The road from Crofton to the farm has disappeared. There is a deep gulley and we are unable to drive the car down to River Ranch to see what remains of the farm we started from virgin bush. Would the tobacco barns and sheds still be intact, or would they have been dismantled like the homestead on Crofton? Just as well, I think. It would bring back too many painful memories.
We head back toward Chinhoyi, but we cannot get near Palmerston Estates. A village has grown up around the old farmstead and we are not welcome here. Instead, we drive on, taking the worn, uneven road up to Carol’s old home at Anchorage Farm.
Carol, it turns out, was approached a season before by a young white man, the son of a farmer who was evicted ten years before. He had a proposition: Anchorage Farm was going to waste, unused by the war vets who occupied her; what if he were to lease the land from them, develop it for commercial agriculture again, and share a fraction of the profits with Carol? Seeing it as a way of getting something out of the farm she had loved throughout her life, Carol accepted the proposition.
Now Anchorage Farm is slowly returning to full use. There are potatoes high in the barns and workers in the fields. The Anchorage farmhouse still stands, though its grounds are overgrown and nobody has tried to beat back the bush that has taken over. Inside, the house is just a shell, only one room inhabited by a settler and his wife, the others filled with goats whose mess covers the bare ground. At first, the war vet’s wife is happy to show us inside. Even so, I feel a hundred eyes on me, the men at work in the barns and yards turning to stare at us, wondering who we are.
We wander from room to room, seeing the places where Carol used to host dinners, the room where my son Paul and her son Andy would play. None of it is familiar, and as we go from room to room, Carol begins to grow more jittery.
“Keep calm, Carol.”
“I am calm,” she insists—but she is not.
At last, as we step back out of the farmhouse, goats flocking out of our path, Carol turns to the woman.
“You know, this is my farm. You’re living on my farm.”
I am frozen, but the war vet’s wife says nothing. It is only now that I realize: I am not the only one afraid. The war vet’s wife looks suddenly bereft, unable to find the words. We are, both of us, trapped by this situation, standing on opposite sides of a chasm Mugabe himself has opened up.
“Yes, madam.”
She has adopted the old words of servitude, even though it is she who now lives on this farm.
Jay and I steer Carol toward the car, eager to be off Anchorage before it is too late.
Car
ol, I understand now, is not the only one entering into pacts with the war vets. Across Zimbabwe, the younger white generation—those with the skills to use the land like their fathers—are leasing land from those who took it from us. To lease land back to farmers like Pat and me would be frowned upon, but to lease to the younger generation is somehow more palatable. They call these people the Born Frees, white Zimbabweans not tarnished with the same stink of the colonial, the stigma of having fought for Rhodesia in the bush war. That they enter into these pacts is perhaps understandable; but so too is the hate the farmers of old feel at seeing their farms taken by new hands. Farmer is being set against farmer while, just outside their lines of sight, the country is being sold to the Chinese. Mugabe has achieved his objective of remaining in power, but the cost has been so great. In the morning, we drive back toward Mutare to cross back into Mozambique, and neither Jay nor I can comprehend how quickly Africa’s jewel has become a symbol of her ruin.
In Vilanculos, Pat is waiting. I will have to tell him the epiphany I have reached: Zimbabwe, like Rhodesia, is already gone. That little fire in my heart that I have always nursed, the hope that one day we might return, has finally been extinguished. You can never really go back home.
At our little rondavel by the sea, gazing out over azure waters with the archipelago hanging on the horizon, Pat is looking at photographs. Of the one hundred and four horses we brought over the mountains, we have only twenty-six left—but the herd must live on. Across the world, horses need rescuing. For us, the land invasions threw this into stark relief, but in every corner of the world the story is the same.
In the photographs, eight horses—bays and grays, geldings and mares, a small skewbald foal with inquisitive eyes and a startled expression—stand in a South African field. The farm on which they live is being sold for redevelopment, and they must find new homes. Our hope is that they can stay together, come north over another border, and join us here. One day, Africa willing, our herd will be strong again—and, in that way, we will all live, the horses repaying our faith in them, Pat and I repaying their faith in us.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 27