Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [32]
So we bury Olivia in a little baby-sized coffin in the cemetery where the old white settlers are lying in their big, proud graves with moss-covered white gravestones and permanent pots of flowering plants and careful, exclusive fences which are there for show and do nothing to stop the monkeys running onto the graves. And after Olivia is buried, we drive to the nearest house; all the families in the Burma Valley in their most careful, sad clothes driving in a long segmented snake of sad-slow cars to an Afrikaner’s house, and we eat the sweet greasy koeksisters and pound cake and scones that the Afrikaner women have been baking all morning and we drink sweet milky tea until someone finds a bottle of brandy and some beers and starts to hand those around. Which gives us the courage to have a small church service in the only way we know how as a community: drunk and maudlin. Alf Sutcliffe pulls out his guitar. He doesn’t know church songs, so we sing “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille” and “Love me tender” until even the grown men, even the tough old Boer farmers, are wiping away tears with the backs of their hands.
A few days after the funeral, we pack ourselves into the green Peugeot station wagon and drive up and out of the valley. But we couldn’t drive away from the memories of the baby who lay under the soft, silent pile of red-fertile soil cut into a barely contained cemetery against the edge of the valley floor where mostly old people lie rotting gently in the rains and drying to dust in the dry season.
No one ever came right out and said in the broad light of day that I was responsible for Olivia’s death and that Olivia’s death made Mum go from being a fun drunk to a crazy, sad drunk and so I am also responsible for Mum’s madness. No one ever came right out and said it in words and with pointing fingers. They didn’t have to.
Mum
AFTERWARD
My life is sliced in half.
The first half is the happy years, before Olivia dies.
Like this: Vanessa and the older neighbor children are sitting with their feet dangling over the windscreen; their legs are speckled with nuggets of red mud. We are sitting behind the big brothers and sisters—we minor offspring—and we are using them as a shield against the slinging flicks of mud and the fat, humid wind, which grows colder as the evening comes.
“Sing,” Dad shouts at us, threatening to catapult us from the roof by steering the car into a sliding halt, “sing!”
We are hilarious with half-fright, half-delight, the way Dad drives. Olivia is on Mum’s lap in the front seat, screaming with excitement. Her sweet, baby happiness comes up to us on the roof in snatches.
“He’s penga!” says one of the big brothers.
And then someone starts, “Because we’ re”—pause—“all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin!” and we all join in.
And Dad shouts, “That’s better!” and presses the car forward, freckling the big brothers and sisters with newfound mud.
We throw back our heads. “We’ll keep this land”—breathe—“a free land, stop the enemy comin’ in.” We’re shout-singing. We’ll be Rhodesian forever and ever on top of the roof driving through mud up the side of the mountain, through thick secret forests which may or may not be seething with terrorists, we’ll keep singing to keep the car going.
“We’ll keep them north of the Zambezi till that river’s runnin’ dry! And this great land will prosper, ‘cos Rhodesians never die!”
The spit flies from our mouths and dries in silver streaks along our cheeks. Our fingers have frozen around the roof rack, white as bones. We are ecstatic with fear-joy.
The second half of my childhood is now. After Olivia dies.
After Olivia dies, Mum and Dad’s joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain. The