Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [102]
I finish my tea and contemplate a trip down to the yard, where Dad is in his office and where I can usually find work to justify my luxurious life and my daily ration of cigarettes and beer. As I get up, I see Mum in the pickup, barreling back up the driveway from the workshop. There is a thin, sandy, two-mile-long road between the house and the workshop, and the funnel of dust has kicked up as far as I can see. Even from here, shading my eyes against the sun, I can see the pickup juddering over the ribby wash of the road. The horses startle and bolt at her approach. The dogs leap off the veranda and run tail-high to meet her.
Mum skids to a halt in front of the garage. I run out to see what has happened. She emerges awkwardly, kicking at the dogs, who are leaping up to investigate her lively parcel. She is holding, at a cautious distance, something wrapped in a sack. “Quick, Bobo, get me a box,” she says.
We call him Jeeves. He’s a spotted eagle owl. The Zambians here are deeply superstitious about owls. They believe that if an owl lands on a roof and hoots, an inhabitant of the house on which the owl lands will die. Mum found Jeeves at the workshop, legs bound together with coarse rope; he was being spun, helicopterlike, over the head of a young man while a circle of the man’s friends stood and cheered each time the owl crashed to the ground, his wings spread out and limp.
By the time Mum ran, screaming with rage and horror, into the cluster of jeering spectators, the owl was dust-covered, bleeding, with one leg and one wing broken.
The gardener is ordered to build an enormous cage in the garden, under the shade of the tree. Jeeves is installed in his new home; it boasts the thick branches of dead trees for a perch, a soft green carpet of lawn, and a small brick kennel with a roof for rainy days.
Jeeves is furious. He glares at us from his perch, his massive yellow eyes sliding over us eerily. When anyone approaches his enclosure he hisses and clacks his beak at us. Once in a while he calls, “Voo-wu-hoo,” and the Zambians shudder and hunch their shoulders, as if against a stinging dust storm.
Mum tries to feed Jeeves chunks of meat. “Come on,” she tells him, “it’s my best bloody steak.” But Jeeves hisses and glowers and the meat sits untouched on his perch, turning from red to brown to gray until it is removed. The staff observe Mum, slant-eyed and peripheral, and sulk at the waste of food. Some children who have come with their mothers for the daily clinic at the back door cover their mouths with their shirts and jerk quick, furtive looks at the bad-luck bird. Their mothers pull them closer and smack them.
It has been three days, and still the owl won’t eat. Mum rakes through her books and sees that, in the wild, an owl of Jeeves’s order would eat insects, reptiles, mammals, and other birds. She shapes the steaks into small-mammal and lizard sizes and tries to make them act alive, piercing the meat on the end of a stick and having the morsel jerk and scamper around the enclosure before coming to a shaky rest near Jeeves’s feet. He blinks and turns his head completely away from Mum and her offering.
So we drive off the farm, across the railway line and out toward the main road, to Barry Shenton, who was one of the earliest game wardens in the country: a legendary guide and tracker turned soy and maize farmer. We wait while Marianne, his Swedish wife, pours tea (she offers lemon or milk and for a moment we are stunned, overwhelmed by the idea that anyone would drink anything but strong black tea topped with strong thick milk). Marianne has a walled garden, like something I imagine out of England. She is slender and vegetarian and drinks hot water and lemon instead of tea. She has traveled to India recently. We listen politely, riveted, as she tells us of her adventures there.
This is the African manner. We must follow the ritual. There is no direct way to come to a point of business. Whether we have come for a spare tractor tire or some advice on feeding an injured owl, we