Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [83]
Then all of a sudden, just as he was about to give up hope, all the pieces of ritual and custom and law shook loose and resolved themselves on a land officer’s desk into an acceptable application. And one morning in February 1999, a few weeks before my father’s fifty-ninth birthday, the Land Office of Zambia issued him title deed, a ninety-nine-year lease, for a small farm in the middle Zambezi Valley. Dad raced home and burst into the bedroom. “Tub!” he shouted. “A farm! We’ve got ourselves a farm!” Mum turned toward the door, lowered the blankets and sat up. “What?” she asked.
“A farm,” Dad said again, “on the banks of the Zambezi River.” Dad waggled his hips. “How about some plonk in the garden?” He held up a box of South African wine. “Come on, Tub!” And he put an arm under Mum’s shoulder and got her out of bed. Flustered and a bit shaky, Mum put her hands to her hair and tried to flatten it. “It’s okay,” Dad said, calming down a little. “Take your time. I’ll wait for you outside.”
Dad went into the garden, the dogs spilling after him, and he poured a little wine into two glasses. Several minutes passed, and then he heard the bedroom door open. The dogs sprang to their feet, their tails beating a fervent greeting. Even in the steamy February heat, Mum was dressed as if she were preparing for a long, difficult journey to a lonely, cold place—pajamas, a shawl around her neck, thick socks—but she had brushed her hair as best she could (it still skewed sideways) and there was a line of bright lipstick on her lips.
“There you are, Tub,” Dad said.
Mum sat down next to Dad and looked out at the msasa forest. “Hm,” she said.
“Here,” Dad said, handing her a glass.
Mum raised her glass. “Here’s to us,” she said. She smiled. “There’s none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”
Dad took a sip of his wine. “You can say that again,” he said.
MY FATHER BOUGHT two working donkeys from the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture. His old cattle manager from Mkushi who had gone on to be Mum’s groom insisted on coming down to the farm to work with the donkeys. “If you have some donkeys,” Dama Zulu told my father, “then I must come and help you.” Mr. Zulu appraised the donkeys with his expert eye, “We can call them Flash and Lightning,” he concluded with what turned out to be prescient optimism. And so my father and Mr. Zulu, the donkeys and a span of men from the surrounding villages worked together for months. They cleared the farm’s boundary, pulled stumps, created firebreaks, opened up thick scrub. It was terrifically hot—far too hot to sleep in a tent (“You’d roast to death,” Dad says)—so Dad and Mr. Zulu slept under a tarpaulin strung across some mopane branches. And as people do who are so closely thrown together, they began to acquire one another’s habits: Mr. Zulu, for example, taking on something of my father’s bandy-legged walk and his manner of not speaking except in short barks; and my father settling into Mr. Zulu’s habit of walking everywhere with a long stick, a defense against snakes and ropey vines of buffalo bean. “And at night they both got bitten to death by mosquitoes,” Mum adds. “Mosquitoes like jackals, siphoning out gallons of blood until there was nothing left of Dad or Mr. Zulu except little bits of skin.”
“Oh, you do exaggerate, Tub,” Dad says.
“Well, she can put that in one of her Awful Books then,” Mum replies.
By April, Mr. Zulu, whose two obsessions were land and wives, had damaged two young women from the village (and had married one of them, much to the consternation of his first three wives) and Dad had malaria, but a road had been cleared to the river and it was possible now to see the layout of the farm; the top mud flats where the fish ponds would go; the more loamy soil below where the bananas would fit; a stretch by the river reserved for a future fishing lodge and bar. “Today,” Dad told Mr. Zulu, “I am going