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Dad says, “Too late now.”

Mum grits her teeth and talks between them, so that the words are sharp and white-edged. She says, “It’s not theirs yet. It’s still our farm.” She pours brandy straight into a glass and drinks it without pretending to be doing anything else. Straight brandy without water, Coke, lemon. She says, pointing her finger at Dad, “We fought for this land, Tim! We fought for it,” and she makes her hand into a fist and shakes it. “And I’m not letting it go without a fight.”

Dad sighs and looks tired. He stomps out his cigarette and lights another.

“I’ll go and show those buggers,” says Mum.

“Take it easy, Tub.”

“Take it easy? Take it easy? Why should I take it easy?”

There is a baby, our fifth, swelling in her belly.

Mum started to throw up just after Christmas. She puked when she smelled soap, petrol, diesel fumes, perfume, cooking meat. Which is how we knew she was pregnant again.

I had prayed so hard for another baby, this one might have been conceived out of my sheer willpower.

Now Mum says, “These bloody munts make me feel sick.”

Which is not, apparently, anything to do with morning sickness and everything to do with losing the war.

She has closed down the little school which we used to run for the African children. “They can go to any school they like now.” But there is no transport for the children, so they hang around under the big sausage tree near the compound, where their mothers have told them not to play. Mum will no longer run a clinic from the back door for the laborers or anyone else who happens through our farm and is ill or malnutritioned.

Now she says, “Don’t you have your comrades at the hospital? We’re all lovely socialists together now, didn’t you know? If you go to the hospital, your comrades will treat you there.”

“But, madam . . .”

“Don’t ‘But, madam’ me. I’m not ‘madam’ anymore. I’m ‘comrade.’ ”

“You are my mother. . . .”

“I am not your bloody mother.”

“We are seeking health.”

“You should have thought of that in the first place.”

The sick, the swollen-bellied, the bleeding, the malarial all sit at the end of the road, past the Pa Mazonwe store, and wait for a lift into town, where they will wait hours, maybe days, for the suddenly flooded, socialized health care system to take care of them.

Mum’s belly makes it hard for her to get on her horse. She makes Flywell hold Caesar next to a big rock and she hops from the rock into her stirrup and eases herself up. Then she arranges her stomach over the pommel and kicks Caesar on.

“Wait for me!” I yank at Burma Boy’s head. He is ear-deep in some yellow-flowered black-jacks. Mum doesn’t even turn around. She whistles to the dogs, one short, sharp note. She is in a dangerous, quiet rage this morning.

We ride up, past the barns and past the turnoff to the cattle dip and past the compound where our laborers live in low-roofed redbrick houses or elaborately patterned huts. We ride up past the small plots where the laborers are allowed to grow their crops of cabbage, rape, beans, and tomatoes and up the newly blazed trails that lead to the new village erected by the squatters.

There is the acid-sweet smell of burning wood on damp air as we follow the patted-down red earth into the squatter village. We can hear the high, persistent wail of a small child and, as we get closer, the frantic yapping of dogs. The squatters built three mud huts in a circle around a wood fire over which a pot of sadza is bubbling. The curly-tailed African dogs run out at our pack and start to growl, their hackles raised high on bony backs.

“Call your dogs!” Mum shouts into the raw new village (the bush poles that have been cut to make the huts are still bleeding and wet; the thatched roofs smell green—they will not stop water from leaking into the huts when it rains).

The squatters are standing in a row in front of their huts. The baby that has been crying stops now and looks at us in silent astonishment. He is hanging from his mother’s back. The other women have slung their small children onto