Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [64]
Vanessa and I hunch beside the men, arms outstretched to the warmth of the fire. The men shuffle aside to make room for us, offer us a pull off their carefully smoked cigarettes, and laugh when we shake our heads.
We wait for Dad.
When the men get hungry they boil water and add a fistful of cornmeal into a pot for sadza. Into another pot they throw beans, oil, salt, and sliced dry meat for the relish. One man gets up and fills a small bowl with water from the drums in the back of the Land Rover. The water bowl is passed around and we all wash our hands. Now we eat, squashing balls of hot sadza with the fingers of our right hands and scooping up a little of the gravy onto the ball of meal. The men eat communally from dishes that sit in the middle of us, everyone eating slowly, eyeing their neighbors, careful not to take too much. Each man finishes when he is full, washes his hands from the small bowl. The men relight their cigarettes.
By the time Dad and Cephas return, the moon has risen in the east and is hanging low over the trees, sending a silver light over the faces around the fire. Cephas comes first. He is walking effortlessly with an eighty-pound impala ram slung over his shoulders, the little black-socked feet caught in his fists. Dad follows with the gun. The impala has been field-dressed; the stomach and guts have been left in the bush for hyenas, jackals, and the morning-circling vultures.
Dad has killed the impala with one shot to the heart. I insert my forefinger into the passage where the bullet has gone. It is still warm and wet with quickly robbed life. There is a tinny smell of blood and there are animal smells that waft up from the carcass—the smells this ram carried with it in life: dust, rutting, shit, sun, rain. Live ticks still suck from the dead animal, clustered where the skin is most soft, near the animal’s ears and genitals and on its stomach. Its eyes bulge hugely under eyelashes as long as my finger.
Cephas hangs the impala from a tree and slits its throat, and blood gushes out onto the ground where the dogs are waiting, tongues hanging.
We pull out sleeping bags and set up to sleep around the fire. Dad heats up some baked beans for supper, which he washes down with brandy and warm, silty-tasting water. We can hear the hyenas starting their evening scour: “Waaaa-oooop!” “Waaaa-oooop!” The dogs, blood-spattered and bellies distended, growl and press themselves against our sleeping bags.
“Waaaa-ooooop!”
The next morning we are up before dawn. It is too cold to sleep. The men stoke the fire and boil water for tea. Dad smokes. We curl stiff-cold hands around our tin cups and suck on the milky sweet tea until the sun startles up over the horizon, flooding pink light through the trees to our camp. It is almost immediately warm. In an hour it will be so hot that sweat will run in stinging rivulets into our eyes and dust will stick onto fresh sweat. For now, it is cool enough. Food and tea, wood-smoke flavored, are sweet comfort. The mourning doves begin their sad call, “Wuwu-woo. Wuwu-woo.” The Cape turtledove is crying, “Kuk-KOORR-ru! Work hard-er. Work hard-er.”
The men wash up from breakfast and Vanessa packs the breakfast food and tea back into Dad’s old ammunition box. We scramble up into the back of the Land Rover and sit in a circle, perched around the impala. The men begin to sing, picking up songs and tunes from one another. They are songs of work and love and war. They are the songs of men who live