Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [57]
Mum circles around the huts; Caesar spins up the newly stripped earth as he paces. I pull Burma Boy up under one of the huts and sit, crouched into my saddle, watching.
“This is our land!”
The squatters stare back, their expressions not changing.
Mum spurs Caesar on, charging into the impassive group of men, women, and children. The African dogs yelp and flee, cowering, into the dark mouths of the huts. One of the young children, too big to be on a hip but too small to be far from his mother, screams and follows the dogs. The mother with the baby on her back is holding a gourd, used for carrying water or beer. She suddenly, in a rage of bravado, runs at Mum, shouting in a high, tremulous, singing voice, and strikes Caesar on the nose with the container. Caesar backs up, but Mum spins him around again, digs down into her saddle, legs tight. “Come on,” she growls, and then as Caesar surges forward, his nostrils wide and red-rimmed with surprise, Mum screams at the woman, “Don’t you hit my horse! You hear me? Don’t you hit my bloody horse. . . .”
Mum charges at the squatters repeatedly, kicking Caesar fiercely and running indiscriminately at the women, the children, the men. And then she turns her horse onto the freshly planted maize field and begins tearing through it, between the still-bleeding stumps of the newly cut msasa trees. “You fucking kaffirs!” she screams. “Fucking, fucking kaffirs.”
Some of the men break from the huddle around the huts and start to run after Caesar, shouting and waving their badzas and machetes. The children are all crying now. The women wrap the children in their arms and skirts and shield their faces.
“You bastards!” screams Mum. “You bloody, bloody bastards. This is our farm!”
One of the men starts to hurl clumps of earth at Mum. They fall damply against Caesar’s flank. He shies away, but Mum hunches down and clamps her legs onto him so that his breath comes out—umph—and she charges again and again at the squatters. The women scream and run into the huts with the children, shutting the flimsy bush-pole doors behind them. The men stand their ground, heaving whatever comes to hand at Mum and her horse. They are shouting at us in Shona.
I shout, “Come on, Mum!” Scared. “Mu-uuum.”
Still she wheels Caesar around again and again; the white froths of sweat gathering in balls on his neck and flecking out from between his hind legs.
I stand up in my stirrups and scream as loudly as I can, “Mum! Let’s go.”
I start to cry, pleading, “Mum-umm, please.”
Finally the fight seems to bleed out of her. She turns to the men one last time and shakes her riding crop at them. “You get off my farm,” she says in a beaten, broken voice, “you hear? You get the hell off my farm.”
Mum has come back from the ride pale and with a light film of sweat on her top lip. She doesn’t talk. When we get back to the yard, she slips off the horse, sliding down the saddle on her back, and then grimaces, holding her belly. She lets Caesar wander off, still saddled, reins looped and dragging on the ground, to graze in the garden. I shout for Flywell, frightened by the look of Mum.
Mum pours herself a glass of water and goes into her room. When I go in there, the curtains are drawn and it sounds as if Mum is breathing through her voice.
“Are you all right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I get you some tea?”
“That would be nice.”
So I order the cook to make tea and I bring Mum a cup but she does not drink it.
When Dad comes in from the fields, he goes into the bedroom and stays there. I hear them talking softly to each other. It sounds as if Mum is crying.
Vanessa says, “Why don’t we make a cake for Mum?”
I shake my head. “I don’t feel like it.” I go to my room and lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. It is a hot,