Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [54]
THEN MUM HOPED that warmer weather, or rain, would change the atmosphere, settle the dust. And like women everywhere and for all time, she stared at the sky and begged the universe to do something to heal her child. And in due course, the very cold season gave way to a warm, dry September. After that, October came, hot and humid, but still it did not rain and still Adrian did not thrive.
By the third week in October, clouds had been banking against the high veldt violent with thunder for a month, but when the rain fell, it hung like a half curtain in the sky, not touching the earth. And one morning in that third week, not unusually, Adrian woke with a fever and he was crying, a constant, monotonous cry as if he no longer had the energy to express the precise nature of his illness. Mum gave him paracetamol and tried to nurse him, but Adrian wouldn’t eat and his fever stayed high even after a second dose of medicine. Once again, Mum wrapped him in a blanket and ran to the main house to beg a lift from Cherry. On the way to the clinic, Mum put her lips against the soft fluff of hair on Adrian’s hot skull and silently she implored him, “Please don’t give up. Don’t give up. It’ll get better, you’ll see.” And she closed her eyes and did her best to picture Adrian at twelve, at eighteen, at thirty, as if her sheer will could drag him beyond his infancy. And then she bargained with God that if He was going to take a life, let it be hers. “I just couldn’t see how I would ever take another breath if Adrian died,” Mum says.
As Mum is telling me this, I realize that I can’t remember a time when I did not know about Adrian, as if knowledge of him crossed the placenta and went directly into my own cells. But in every important way, I know nothing about what happened to him. When I was young, Mum would sometimes spill his story, but never when she was sober and so the story grew soggy and more confused and refused to hold together. But on this late, hot morning in the Cederberg, I am forty years old and we are not drunk and Mum’s narrative is relentlessly clear. Now, even as I am beginning to know the details of this story, I already know how it ends. My impulse is impossible: I want to reach back through the years and protect my young parents from what happens next.
On that hot afternoon, Dad got a message at the nickel mine from Mum. He hurried back home to find her waiting in the driveway, Vanessa in her arms. My parents drove to Bindura as fast as the Chevy would go, but Adrian was no longer at the little clinic. He had been taken by ambulance to the children’s hospital in Salisbury. So now I picture my parents racing into town, Mum pale and thin at twenty-three with Vanessa on her lap, Dad helpless and unprepared at twenty-seven. They are both frantic.
Adrian was not in any of the cots in the hospital’s general ward and it took some time for my parents to find him, isolated in a white cell at the end of the private wards. “He was strapped to a board, his little arms pinned down as if he were on a crucifix, with intravenous drips coming out of his head.” Mum’s voice is so soft I can hardly hear her. “And he was still crying, that dry, monotonous little cry.” Vanessa, aware of impending tragedy, did the only thing she could think of to make everything normal. She asked for lunch. And the nurse, matter-of-fact in the way of most Africans, told my parents not unkindly that they had a choice: they could either take Vanessa for a meal, or they could stay and watch their son die. “It was meningitis,” Mum says. “And it was too late.”
NOW THERE IS A LONG, long silence. I look out at the Cederberg Mountains, flattened gray in the noon sun. In the intensifying heat, the garden is utterly subdued. The weaver birds in the bougainvillea have given up their usual quarreling. Even the common Cape buntings have melted back into their rocky hideouts. The wind has died completely. The whole country seems crouched and serious in anticipation of the six months of dry heat to come. Somewhere in the servants’ quarters a cockerel crows. Dad has