Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  I was impatient to finish quickly so I could do my pre-school stationery shopping. I was also stressed by the responsibility of the task before me. I’d done sleeping problems, eating problems, excessive worrying. But I’d never yet, in my occasional role as self-taught semi-professional hypnotist, ventured this far.

  Mum whispered, “It’s probably a good thing you’re not actually going to be there. It’ll be bad enough with me. I don’t really think poor Bernard would cope with a fifteen-year-old gatecrashing his op.”

  Bernard Sobotta was our dentist, and he and his wife, Mali, had become good friends. Before moving to Botswana, Bernard had worked as a dentist in the German navy. He was gentle, and thorough. But largely due to Mum, who grew apoplectic at the suggestion of mercury fillings and dismissed all arguments in their favour, a tense undercurrent had persisted in the Scott family teeth’s relationship with Bernard.

  Jean Keikopf, who had a general phobia of dental work, was less worried about mercury than she was about the long, gory process of having to have an impacted wisdom tooth cut out of her jaw. “I just cannot bear,” she’d said, “the thought of this op…he’s going to cut my gum open and saw it out of my jaw, for God’s sake.”

  Bernard had told Jean she could have the operation done under a general anaesthetic, but only in Gaborone. “And I hate generals anyway,” she’d said. “But now I don’t know how I’m going to get through it all.” She’d shuddered, paling at the thought. “Even with a local anaesthetic.”

  It was Mum who had the hypnosis idea.

  That I wasn’t going to be around for the operation didn’t deter Mum for a moment. “Robbie, you can put Jean under before you go back to school. Prep her. Build in some strong triggers to help me get her back under. Then I can go in with her for the op…and reinitiate the state once she’s in the chair…”

  I’d hypnotised Jean a number of times before, and she agreed at once.

  Feeling flattered, and curious to experiment, I agreed too.

  “But you’ve got to follow instructions, Mum,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of work on Jean. I don’t want you messing it up.”

  Mum’s eyes twinkled. “Of course, Robbie,” she said, “absolutely. You’re the expert. Will follow your instructions to the letter.”

  “You must watch her breathing,” I now instructed. “Listen carefully.”

  We bent over Jean, listening to several deep, very slightly rasping breaths.

  “See. Should be like this. If it changes, something’s going wrong.”

  Mum nodded.

  “That’s one of the best indicators…Rapid eyeball movement under closed eyes can also be a sign of discomfort. Also remember – always keep talking…I’ll tell her that your voice will be extremely soothing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say something now, then.”

  Mum said, “Jean, you’re feeling very relaxed.”

  I said, “Jean, when you have your operation, Linda’s lovely soothing voice will make you extremely relaxed. Just like now.”

  Mum said, again, “Jean, you’re feeling very, very relaxed.”

  Jean grinned and shivered with pleasure.

  I smiled approvingly at Mum and continued. “Always keep your voice very level and rhyth-mi-cal,” I said, doing the same. “Before the work starts, give her a strong image to focus on…bring her back to this every time there’s any discomfort…”

  I finished with a few minutes of deep, happy relaxation and then told Jean I was going to wake her up, but that as soon as Linda told her to go into a deep relaxing sleep again, she would. I also added, for good measure, that Bernard’s dentist chair was a very safe and comfortable place to be, and she was going to be very pleased to sit in it. Then I ‘woke Jean up.

  She grinned dreamily at me. “Wow, Robbie,” she sighed. “Thank you so much. That was lovely. You could be a professional, you know.”

  “It was a pleasure,” I said importantly, “and I have considered doing it as a business. But it’d really be too draining. And probably difficult to find enough clients in Bulawayo.”

  I also suspected that advertising myself as a part-time hypnotist would destroy my tenuous favour with Sister Brun-hilda. Managing not being baptised was difficult enough. And hypnosis would be harder to blame on my family than baptism – the strategy I’d most recently employed when Sister Brunhilda had raised the matter.

  “Ja, Hobbin.” She grinned meaningfully. “You have been thinking, no? Any decisions yet?”

  “The problem, Sister,” I explained, “is that I’m still quite confused. My family makes it so hard to decide.”

  Sister Brunhilda narrowed her eyes. “Oh, no, really!”

  “Well, my mum’s parents are Catholics. But they don’t go to church any more, and my Grandpa Terry says they’re ‘RCs’. Retired Catholics. And my dad’s dad, my grandpa Ivor, is from a Christian family, but he never really took it seriously…And then he married a Jew, my granny Mavis, who didn’t practise as a Jew. Then they got divorced and she went to India and found an Indian swami guru. And now, recently, my grandpa Ivor has also been getting into Eastern religions. And then there’s my dad, who’s technically Jewish through his mum, but doesn’t really believe in anything. And my mum is just generally spiritual and believes in bits of everything. So it’s very hard for me.”

  Sister Brunhilda shook her head silently and, acknowledging temporary defeat, left it there. But she rallied quickly. At the next opportunity, she selected me to do the reading in mass, in front of the whole school. “Ja, this is an honour,” she reminded me pointedly. “Such a lovely thing to do. Such a good speaker. You liked it, Hobbin. No?”

  I said I did, and then I explained respectfully that I was still thinking.

  Meanwhile, I tried to keep a low profile, which was getting increasingly difficult thanks to my burgeoning stationery business.

  The local Zimbabwean stationery was horrible: the paper was a coarse, ugly brown. The pens and highlighters were badly made, with poor colours that faded and ran across the rough paper. The erasers, sticky tape, and correction fluid were ineffective. The opportunity was obvious: even during my first overwhelming days of school, I’d noticed my classmates enviously eyeing my box of stationery.

  My announcement that I was going to start importing stationery produced a flood of orders, which quickly expanded beyond my own class. Before long, as I sat on benches outside with my friends at break times, armed with my accounts book and bag of goods, I was catering to a stream of girls of all ages.

  I did a particularly good trade in fluorescent pens and Tipp-Ex, and after a few months the bright colours and shiny white streaks were appearing in exercise books and notice boards across the school. Then teachers started ordering, and I began break-time deliveries to the staff room door.

  Conducted as furtively as I could manage, these transactions with the non-nun teachers were deeply tense. A nun could walk round the corner at any time, and, caught with a wad of Zimbabwean dollars, I always felt guilty – like some terrible corrupting intruder. Before I’d arrived, the most commercial student activities at the Convent had been charity cake sales.

  Leaving Jean in a peaceful post-hypnotic high, Mum and I drove across town to the Phikwe mall. “The teachers are some of my best customers’,” I explained as I headed to the pen aisle. “Red and pink are best sellers. They use them for marking.”

  I rummaged through the boxes, handing Mum colourful bunches of pens.

  “That’s nice,” she mused. “So even if you get a disappointing mark, 3’ou have the satisfaction of it being written in your own wares…Now, come on, Robbie, please hurry up…”

  Mum was insisting on ‘just a quick visit to Selebi’ before I returned to school. We were already running late, after she had decided to bake her need-a-chainsaw-to-cut-it bread just as we prepared to leave the farm. The car smelled of yeast from a loaf that Mum had brought along with us, cooling in its tin, covered by a dish towel.

  “It�
��s important you see Ivor and Betty,” she said again as we sped along the familiar road beside the railway line. “They’re getting old. And you know how much they love it. Hey, look, there’s the good old train…”

  We waved to the driver, and Mum hooted energetically as the black monster whooshed past us in the opposite direction.

  “So funny to see it again,” she continued, “it was so much a part of our lives. Gosh we did have good times here.”

  “I should have got more pens,” I said. “I hate running out of stock.”

  Mum said, “I’ll make sure you get some. I promise. Have I ever let you down?”

  “Suppose not.”

  “Well, then, stop worrying. Look, there’s the great old baobab.”

  Mum had, from the start, been a crucial part of my stationery business: giving me the first stock as a present, bringing supplies on her visits to Bulawayo, and arranging to send emergency orders up with other Phikwe families visiting Bulawayo. All this was typical of Mum. But, sometimes, in an uncharitable mood, I suspected she also still felt guilty about business venture number one.

  For more than a year, the twenty rehabilitated hens had thrived. Then they started to stop laying. Every comfort and supplement I could think of was to no avail, and eventually the weary hens dwindled to a couple of eggs each a week.

  “You can’t run a business like this, Robbie,” said Dad. Mum agreed. The chickens, they suggested, could be sold off to people at the local cattle posts, and I could rescue a brand-new batch of twenty battered battery hens.

  Thrilled by a repeat of the noble mission, it didn’t occur to me to dwell on whether a one-egg-a-week-chicken would be of any use to anyone else. Mum and Dad, who were unusually vague, did the selling, and I was soon absorbed tending to my new bedraggled brood.

  I missed the other chickens, but contented myself that one of my favourite hens had gone to Ruth. For a few weeks, whenever we passed Ruth’s ramshackle little house on our driveway, I peered fondly at my old hen scratching in the dust. I wondered where she was laying her eggs; if she ever laid them in the house, into which she sometimes wandered.

  Then one day, I screamed.

  Mum braked violently, and we skidded to a halt – just a few scraggly thornbushes between us and the dirt clearing in front of Ruth’s house.

  “What on earth, Robbie?…oh, no…oh, dear…oh, Lordy…don’t look, Lulu.”

  Outside the hut, beside the fire, Ruth bent over a tree stump that she used as a stool. In one hand she held a raised axe; in the other she held my chicken, head on the block. The axe fell as I jumped out of the car.

  I yelled.

  Ruth dropped the axe. She stood up in surprise, still holding the head in the other hand. She waved cheerfully. “Dumela, Robbie!”

  I was speechless, though, and frozen where I stood, transfixed by the chicken’s body, which had clambered to its feet.

  Pausing for a second, she ran towards the bush, as fast as any normal frightened chicken. Then she veered back into the swept clearing. Then she headed to the bush again. Like a macabre cartoon, I almost expected the head to at any moment reappear and settle back on the body.

  Then there was a squeal.

  Emmanuel, Ruth’s six-year-old son, leapt up from the dust where he’d been playing. He hurtled after the chicken but missed as she swerved with uncanny eyeless, brainless sight. Laughing and pulling himself up off the dirt, he charged again and launched himself, rugby style, at the dust. This time, he hit the headless hen. Standing up, he held the struggling body proudly in front of him. Ruth said something to him in Setswana.

  “Dumela, Robbie,” Emmanuel called shyly.

  Dealing with the aftermath took all Mum’s powers of philosophical spin.

  Dad just said, “What did you think happened? It’s the most humane way to go.”

  I reluctantly acknowledged the grim reality. But thereafter, whenever I cuddled one of my hens, the ghastly image loomed in the back of my mind. And when the second twenty chickens stopped laying, I sold them off sadly and closed my business.

  “Don’t worry,” Mum had said, “something else is bound to come along soon. And you’ve got your saddle. You’ve done what you set out to do. And you’ve educated Phikwe about free-range eggs. And you’ve given forty chickens a very good life. All in all, it couldn’t have gone better.”

  ♦

  Now, as we bumped past Ruth’s old house, I stared at the fateful stool and the little building, which seemed especially forlorn. Nowadays, only Ruth’s ancient mother Georgina still lived in the old house. Further on, outside the cowshed, were the unfamiliar cars belonging to the new family staying there.

  In front of Grandpa Ivor’s house, a new Toyota Camry stood beside the ancient white bakkie that so long ago had carried the five of us and the frozen turkeys home.

  “Business is fantastic,” said Grandpa. “Of course, I still have to keep an eye on that Seloma, though. Baby in the world of business…I tell him, “Slo, I’ve been bloody running businesses for years! I know what I’m doing!” And still he doesn’t bloody listen…”

  Granny Betty offered us tea, which even Mum was pragmatic enough to decline. After her hip replacement, Granny moved at an almost glacial pace. Tea could take hours, and she insisted on doing it herself, as well as preparing a snack for the animals so they didn’t feel left out.

  The two dogs and the cat were now obese. It was as if Granny was feeding them instead of herself. She had grown very thin and frailer than ever. She subsisted, Grandpa complained, on a few biscuits, sweets, and scraps of food at dinner.

  Granny’s eyes sparkled defiantly as Grandpa said, “Betty and her bloody junk food. No wonder she’s not well.”

  Grandpa was thin too. “More grape fasts,” he explained. “No booze. No meat. Never felt better.”

  Mum and Grandpa discussed nutrition, which reminded Mum about the bread. “I knew there was a reason I should bake,” she said, rushing out to the car.

  When she unveiled the enormous loaf, Granny looked almost ill. But Grandpa clutched the whole-wheat brick with delight. “Wonderful, Linda. So kind of you.” He turned to me. “Your mother’s a wonderful woman, Robbie.”

  I nodded. “But you’ve got to eat it quickly. Or you can’t cut it at all.”

  Mum said, “That’s not strictly true.”

  “Not a problem,” bellowed Grandpa, “I’m a health freak now! Got to pass my medical.” Grandpa was seventy-five. His medical was for his flying licence, which he was determined to retake. “Brain’s still sharp as anything,” he said, tapping his now totally bald head.

  I told Grandpa about my stationery business.

  “Bloody marvellous,” said Grandpa.

  Then I explained I was thinking of importing curios from Zimbabwe and selling them in Botswana, where the crafts were less diverse and more expensive.

  “Bloody marvellous idea,” said Grandpa again. “I’ll sell them up at Nata for you too. Petrol, food, crafts. We can offer it all. No limits in this place.”

  “My concern,” I interrupted, “is the customs people. The Zimbabweans don’t look at the stationery cause I’m a student. But the Bots side might get suspicious.”

  Grandpa snorted. “Not a problem. I’ll tell you what to do. I used to fly in imports from Bulawayo. Did I ever tell you about that? Beer. For our parties…We had great parties here with all the pilots. Ask your father. I don’t drink the wretched stuff now, of course. But we used to get through a lot. Anyway, never had a problem…You know what I mean.” He winked. “Just kept the airport guys well stocked. Little generosity never goes amiss.”

  “I would never,” I said indignantly.

  “Bloody right,” said Grandpa. “Bad stuff. You’re absolutely right. Bloody marvellous.” He grinned, wildly and infectiously. I grinned back.

  “Thanks for your advice,” I said, as I kissed him good-bye.

  “Not a problem,” said Grandpa. “Anytime.”

  Hurtling back to Phikwe, l
ater than ever, I felt the old conquer-the-world buzz. “I enjoyed it,” I said grudgingly. “Thanks for taking me.”

  Mum said, “I just ‘wish your father would see more of Ivor.”

  Dad did visit the old houses. But he visited mainly to see Granny Betty. Dad said he couldn’t stand listening to Grandpa complaining about the long-suffering Seloma, to whom he now owed most of his income.

  Mum said, “But he’s your father, Keith. And in many-ways an amazing man. Even if he is absolutely impossible.”

  Dad just shrugged.

  Mum was the family keeper, the one who could forgive faults in just about anyone for the sake of harmony. As we spread out across southern Africa, she was the one who straddled all the distances and fought determinedly to keep us connected.

  “Write lots,” I said, as we hugged good-bye in Bulawayo. “Tell me everything. Especially how Jean’s op goes.”

  “Will do,” said Mum. “Always do. Will write as soon as I get home.”

  “Before you get lost in your book.”

  “Promise.”

  Dearest Robbie,

  It’s 9 p.m. and I have just got back. I am exhausted after the drive home (caught behind three buses on the Zim side of the border), but am keeping to my word and scribbling a quick note before bed. Dad will post tomorrow on the way home from his clinics.

  Not much to report here, except that Dad was fdling up with petrol at Sherwood and bumped into old Piet Louw, who said he’d heard a ‘very reliable rumour’ that there’d been heavy rains in the Lotsane’s catchment area and the river was definitely on its way down. Can’t help getting excited, even alter all the disappointments – and even coming rrom PL, who should be disbelieved immediately on the grounds of what he said afterwards. He and Dad got chatting about fishing, and Dad remarked that there didn’t seem to be as many bream in the river as last year. Piet said, “Ag, no, Keith. You mustn’t worry. You won’t catch any fish this month. Everyone here knows that you only catch fish in months with an ‘R’ in them.”

  On that sage note, that’s all from me for the moment. Hope your stationery stock has held out for the first few days.