Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [105]
To be just like the English Friend, I am—to everyone’s collective relief—restored to godlessness.
But still the rains do not come.
We hold a rain dance. We invite all the neighbors. There are Greeks, Yugoslavs, Zambians, Czechs, Coloureds, expats-like-us, Afrikaners, a woman who is said to be part Native American, a Canadian, the English Friend, and one Indian.
We make a fire outside (under the brittle, chattering, weaverbird-full bougainvillea) over which we braai steak and boervors. Adamson, tottering with filched booze, brings out trays of parched gray-boiled greens and boiled potatoes and soggy-hot, peanut-oil-covered salads from the kitchen. The ash from his joint and sweat from his brow drip into the food tray. We drink into the lowering, relentless sun until the groom is called from his Sunday beer-drink to saddle the horses and we go out riding, looking for rain beetles. Mum (who is the best horsewoman among us) slides off her saddle (but does not spill her drink). She is still laughing when she hits the ground, and for quite some time after that. Someone heaves Mum back onto her mount, where she slowly tips forward in a perfect Pony Club exercise: “Now, children, everyone touch your nose to the horse’s mane.”
None of us can catch rain beetles (which are the cicadas whose dry, thirsty rasp has been reminding us of our drought day in and day out). We ride home for more beer.
Dad threatens to find a virgin, to sacrifice to the gods. None among our party are considered worthy. Instead, several of the female guests are thrown into the drought-stagnant pool.
And still the rains do not come.
Since October, Mum has been using a hypodermic needle to inject the Christmas cake (bought months ago in the U.K.) with brandy. Needles and syringes are scarce; we boil and reuse those we have. The cake, however, has designated instruments of its own.
“He, he, he,” says Adamson. “Madam, the cake is sick?”
“That’s right,” says Mum, “I’m helping it get better.”
Adamson chuckles and shakes his massive head. His face seems to be dissolving in sweat. It glows in a shiny film. He shuffles outside, where he sits on his haunches under the great msasa tree and smokes. His head hangs, his arms are stretched over his knees, and, except to adjust the angle of the joint on his lower lip, he is a motionless figure, gently wafting blue marijuana smoke.
The heat in the kitchen is breath-sucking. There are two small windows at either end of the huge tacked-together room, and one stable door, which leads off to the back veranda where the dairyman (surrounded by a halo of flies) labors over the milk churn (milk spits into buckets, cream chugs into a jug; both are in danger of going off before they can reach refrigeration). The fridges, unable to compete with the heat, leak (they bleed, actually: thin watered-down blood from defrosting chunks of cow) and add a fusty-smelling steam to the atmosphere. The aroma here is defrosting flesh, soon-to-be-off milk, sweating butter, and the always present salty-meat-old-vegetable effluvium of the dogs’ stew toiling away on the stove.
The end of the kitchen is dedicated to laundry, where a maid (a baby asleep on her back) with a charcoal iron sweats over piles of clothes. She sprinkles water onto the back of her neck and onto the clothes and slams the charcoal iron down onto the table where her ironing lies. Her sweat sprinkles the cloth along with the specks of water, and singes up with the steam. The crescent-shaped air vents in the iron glow fiercely red with fresh coals. The clothes are ironed to paper in the heat and are crisp, starched with sweat.
Every time any of us walks outside, we glance upward automatically and search the sky for likely clouds.