Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [103]
At last we tell the story of Jeeves and the now urgent problem of getting the owl to eat. Barry smokes thoughtfully and says, smiling gently, “No, he won’t eat meat like that. It must be covered with hair.” He tells us that the owl needs the hair on its prey to help it digest the meat.
When we get home, Mum (who has wavy, thick, shoulder-length bottle-auburn hair) sits in front of the mirror in her bedroom and crops her hair short, right up to the neck. The staff are scandalized into silence when Mum emerges from her room with hacked-off locks in hand and wraps them around chunks of meat. “Does that look like a mouse to you?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Not really.”
“Do you think Jeeves will know the difference?”
I say, “Probably.”
Mum grits her teeth. “You’re not being very helpful, Bobo.”
“I can’t believe you chopped off your hair.”
“What else could I do?”
“Catch a rat,” I tell her.
“How?”
“Steal them from Percy.”
Mum rolls her eyes.
“There are a couple in my room that shouldn’t be too hard to corner.”
“Why don’t you try catching them?”
“It’s your owl,” I tell her.
We let ourselves into the enclosure. Jeeves puffs himself up, clacks his beak, and hisses. His broken wing hangs like a heavy over-the-shoulder cloak, draping past his feet. Mum had tried to bandage the wing to Jeeves’s body but Jeeves had attacked the bandage until Mum, fearing Jeeves would harm himself, had removed the bandage. Mum impales the auburn-hair-wrapped meat onto her sharpened stick and waves the stick at Jeeves. “Gourmet,” she tells him, “come on, boy.” Jeeves shudders. I laugh. Mum scowls at me.
“He shuddered,” I point out.
“He was only shaking down his feathers.”
“Hair-wrapped meat. Yuck.” I tell Jeeves, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t eat it either.”
Mum sends out a message to the laborers’ children. She will pay five ngwee for mice, ten ngwee for rats. The rodents spill onto the back porch, where they are counted by Adamson, who pays the grinning children. He puts the limp rat bodies (like old small gray socks) one on top of the other into the fridge, where they startle a visitor from town who wanders into the kitchen searching for a cold beer.
Jeeves eats the rodents. He becomes diurnal. He waits for Adamson now, who is the only member of staff who will agree to feed the bird. In the morning and in the evening Adamson comes hunched out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of mice and rats, like a great, gray owl himself, a long, newspaper-wrapped joint hanging from his bottom lip. He squints through the sweet, pungent smoke of his joint and talks softly to the owl, who eats from the tray. Adamson waits for Jeeves to finish and then he shuffles back into the kitchen.
He is a man who has seen too much pain of his own to ignore the pain of a fellow creature. His third-to-youngest daughter was born with severe disabilities, and lives crawling in the dirt, head-jerking and prone to frequent infection; she is a constant source of worry to her father. And now his eldest daughter has been stabbed by the cattle man (whose name is Doesn’t Matter Dagga) and she is dead. She survived two days and two nights with a spear through her middle (we were away in town at a tobacco sale at the time of the stabbing) and she died when someone finally summoned up the courage to pull the spear from her middle. Adamson told Mum that the girl’s intestines came out with the spear and that she died screaming.
There is no more bad luck an owl can bring this man.
I tell Mum she has to do something about her hair.
“What about my hair?”