Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [107]
We drink hot, mulled wine with Swedish aid workers.
It is dawn and we still have to sing for the Indians and the Yugoslavs.
Dad says, “Look at that bloody sunset, would you? Never seen a sunset like it.”
“Sunrise, Dad. Sunrise.”
And it is truly a stunning, low-hanging, deep-bellied sunrise. A vividly pink sky under thick gray clouds. Thick, gray, massing, rolling, swollen-bellied clouds. We blink into their pile upon pile of gray and we are briefly, startlingly sober.
“That looks like something.”
Vanessa sniffs the air.
The guitar player says, “Man. I think this is it.”
Dad has fallen into a quick coma-drunk sleep on the English Friend’s shoulder. We wake him up. “Looks like rain.”
“Great sunset,” mumbles Dad. “No one shut any doors or windows.”
Finally, rain.
The English Friend drives toward the gathering clouds and they come tumbling out of the west to meet us, gathering and rolling until suddenly the sky sags open and the road is instantly as thick and sticky as porridge.
We lie in the back of the pickup with our mouths open. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring!” The pickup churns and slides through thick heavy mud. The English Friend is driving like an East Africa Rally driver.
Dad, awakened by the storm, is still chief navigator, although as far as we can tell he no longer knows which way is up, nor is he consistently conscious. “Pamberi!” he shouts above the whine of the laboring engine. It is the slogan of the ruling party in Zimbabwe: “Pamberi to final victory!”
Mum and Dad with tobacco
In the back we are clinging to one another, wet to the skin, skin-against-skin, drunk, screaming into the great gray sky. Hair slicks over our foreheads.
By the time we get home, just before lunch, Dad is in drag. We take off the black Afro wig and put him to bed.
Mum has told the farm laborers she will pay a ten-kwacha bonus to anyone who comes out to plant tobacco. She takes a hip flask of brandy and rides out in the rain (horse steaming saltily under her) to the fields. The laborers are already drunk. They crawl, stagger, supporting each other, singing and damply cheerful out to the field. The crop is planted, but the tobacco is not in straight lines that year.
We are supposed to be holding a proper English Christmas lunch at noon for our houseguests and various neighbors. The electricity is out. Adamson has been passing out beers to anyone who comes up to the back door. He is crouched over a fire he has made on the back veranda and is roasting the Christmas goose, though he is almost too drunk to crouch without toppling headlong into the flames. The only thing that seems to keep him a reasonable distance from the fire is his anxiety not to catch the end of his enormous, newspaper-rolled joint on fire. He rocks and swings and sings. Everyone within a thirty-mile radius of our farm is drunk.
Except our freshly arrived guests, hair uncomfortably pressed into place, polite in new Christmas dresses and ties, throat-clearing at the sitting room door.
Mum, mud-splattered and cheerfully sloshed, is determined to inject the Christmas cake with more brandy before its appearance after the goose.
Dad is in a worryingly deep alcoholic coma. His lipstick is smudged. His snores are throaty and deep and roll into the sitting room from the bedroom section.
It is long after noon when the goose is cooked, by which time our Christmas guests are drunk, too. One has fallen asleep on the pile of old flea-ridden carpets and sacks that make up the dogs’ bed.
We wear paper hats and share gin from another watermelon porcupine. We eat goose and lamb, potatoes, beans, and squash all rich with the taste of wood smoke. Adamson is asleep against a pillar on the back veranda; the rain blows in occasionally and licks him mildly wet. His soft, enormous lips are curled into a happy smile.
When the Christmas cake appears on the table, there is a moment of quiet expectation. It is the ultimate gesture of a proper English Christmas. Mum has made brandy butter