Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [49]
Now Mum, Vanessa, and I watch Dad’s hands as he walks the line. If he agrees with the price we have been offered for each bale, he hesitates, fingers hovering briefly above the ticket, and then walks on, leaving the ticket intact. That tobacco will be taken away to cigarette factories: famous, well-traveled Rhodesian burley all the way from our lucky farm.
If Dad disagrees with the price the buyer has offered, he tears the ticket. Those bales will be rewrapped, loaded onto lorries, and brought back to unlucky Robandi. Dad will wait to sell them later in the season, when perhaps the buyers will be more hungry for tobacco. Those bales will sit in the grading shed, open to the air, where blasts of steam will keep the leaves in a fine balance between soft and moldy. They will anger Dad whenever he sees them. Mum will spend hours, until her fingers burn with the sticky yellowing residue of the leaves, re-sorting and re-baling the leaves in the superstitious belief that a new presentation might bring a healthier price.
If Dad starts tearing tickets and his face becomes folded and deep, we feel ourselves become quiet and wishing-we-weren’t-here. But if he is walking quickly over the line of tobacco, leaving the tickets pristine, beautiful whole rectangles of yellow, we are giddy. Vanessa and I start to run between the bales, exuberant, silly, loud, and Mum doesn’t say, “Shhh girls! Behave yourselves!” And then Dad has walked the line and, without looking at the other farmers, he takes Mum by the hand and he says, “Come on, Tub.” Vanessa and I fall into line behind Mum and Dad. His fingers are wrapped around hers. By the end of today Dad will have gone to see the fat man with the wet lips from Tabex and Mum will have her rings back, and when we get home to Robandi she will polish them in Silvo to remove the tarnish of shame and disuse.
Dad doesn’t smile, or concede any kind of victory in front of the buyers. He waits until we are in the car and then he says to Mum, “Fair price.”
Which means that, in addition to our yearly and unavoidable checkup at the dentist, there will be a new set of clothes, a new pair of shoes, a visit to the used-book store, tea and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream at the tearoom in Meikles Department Store. We will spend the night in the delicious luxury of a friend’s town house with its irrigated garden, clipped lawn, tiled white shiny kitchen, properly flushing loos, and (most wondrous of all) television. When our tobacco sells well, we are rich for a day.
But whether the tobacco sells well or badly, when we arrive at Robandi it will be back to rations and rat packs.
Off to school
SCHOOL
Vanessa goes away to school when I am four. Packets come for me from the Correspondence School in Salisbury. Cloud makes me a small chair and table at the woodwork shop and paints them blue and the table sits next to Dad’s desk on the veranda. In the morning, after breakfast, I sit down with Mum and the wad of papers from Salisbury and I write my “Story of the Day” and I learn to color, count, paint. Once a week after lunch, Mum turns on the radio and we listen to School on the Air and I throw beanbags around the sitting room and pronounce (“Say after me”) the colors of the rainbow and the names of the shapes, and I walk like a giant and (“Now, then, very softly”) like a fairy and Mum lies on the sofa and reads her book.
But the afternoons are long and hot and buzzing with fat flies and lizards lying still on the windowsills, and Mum is resting, and my nanny—my nanny of the moment; they seem to change like the seasons—has gone off for lunch. So I recruit children (picanins, I call them) from the compound and force them to play “boss and boys” with me. Of course, I am always the boss and they are always the boys.
“Fetch mahutchi!”
“Yes, boss.”
“Quicker than that! Run. Boss up! Boss up! Come on, faga moto!”
The children run off and fetch an imaginary