Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [45]
The medics stare. “Shit, I dunno, hey. She looks pretty bad,” says one.
Another says softly, “Jesus Christ!”
The medics roll Violet onto a stretcher. She is soft and heavy. The stretcher sags under her weight. They put her into the back of their Land Rover.
Mum says, “Will you have a drink?” It’s almost light. “Or a cup of tea?”
They accept tea out of tin cups and drink it quickly as the eastern sky softens with dawn. And then they drive away and we never see Violet again. We hear later that she got out of hospital and went back to her village. Afterward the Umtali Post writes a story, “Farmer Saves Maid’s Life.”
Mum says, “The farmer had nothing to do with it. It was the farmer’s wife.”
The sky is starting to streak vigorously now, pink-gray. Dad and his gang head off for the hills.
Mum says, “Why don’t you take the dogs, at least?”
Dad shakes his head. “Too much noise.”
Mum goes into her bedroom but she does not sleep. Vanessa and I don’t sleep. We stay on our beds, with the dogs, and our eyes sting and our mouths are dry. It is breakfast time but there is no one to feed us. Violet is sliced and bleeding in the back of the medics’ Land Rover, heading for hospital; July is running for Mozambique with all our clothes and money and Mum’s rings. Mum is not talking. Dad has gone to kill July.
“Let’s play cards,” says Vanessa.
“I can’t. I’m too hungry.”
“I’ll make you some Pronutro,” says Vanessa. “Then will you play cards with me?”
“Okay.”
Vanessa mixes the powdered soybean meal into a paste with some milk and sprinkles sugar on the top for me. She puts the kettle onto the woodstove for tea. The fire has gone out and we try to make another one but the fire from the newspapers we shove into the stove’s mouth generates only a thick, oily, black smoke.
Vanessa says, “We’ll have to wait for tea.” She finds some bottles of Coke, which we are ordinarily allowed only on Sunday, and opens one.
“We’ll get into trouble, hey.”
“We’d better share,” she says, pouring the contents of the bottle into two plastic cups. Warm Coke and Pronutro for breakfast. It feels like camping.
We sit opposite each other at the dining room table. Vanessa patiently builds a barrier around me because she can’t watch me eat. She puts the milk jug in front of my face and sits back down and says, “Not enough.” She fetches a coffee can and some boxes and bottles from the pantry. From behind the barrier she says, “I can still hear you. You should try and eat more slowly.” But I’m too hungry to slow down, I hurry food into my drum-tight empty stomach, which swells with the pasty, cold porridge and the warm Coke.
Then Vanessa brings the cards and dismantles the barrier, and we play war.
Dad’s story comes out in bits and pieces, and I catch it from the stories told around the bar at the Club. And sometimes, when I’m older, around campfires in Malawi and Zambia, there will be quiet after supper when we are full and heavy and drinking and staring into the fire. And Dad will be smoking a cigarette and suddenly he will clear his throat and say, as if it were still relevant, “Best damned tracker I ever saw was that Cephas.” And he tells me the story of that night.
Dad and his boys—the men—park near Ross Hilderbrand’s old farm. Before the war, there were white farmers all over these hills. They were high enough above the hot, steamy valley to grow coffee in thick red soil. But the farmers here were intimidated by their proximity to the border and they were attacked by terrorists and their labor were abducted and taken to Mozambique. All those farmers have left the area. Now, quick-growing bougainvillea and Mauritius thorn have started to hang thickly from the verandas of those old farmhouses. In the gardens, cannas have spread over the edge of their beds and the grass has grown like long untidy hair and the windows have had rocks thrown through them. Bats shit on the floors and hang upside down from the ceilings, where yellow-brown stains from rat pee spread like tea spills above them. The whitewashed sitting rooms where dinner parties (with proper