The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [60]
They walked along a steep terrace through a mango orchard and bushes laden with red coffee beans. Mary Ndegwa held the skirts of her caftan, planting her red platform shoes firmly along the murram path. He noticed that they had been freshly polished. She stopped on a knoll.
—Mr. Thomas, you have heard of the Mau Mau rebellion?
—Yes, of course.
—This is the place where Ndegwa’s father was executed, she said. He was shot in the back of the head by British soldiers.
Thomas studied the ground, and reflected that once it had been soaked with blood.
—He was made to dig his own grave before he was shot. His wife and children were brought out and forced to watch. Ndegwa was ten years old when he saw this.
Thomas looked at the cross and its inscription: Njuguna Ndegwa. Freedom Fighter. Husband. Father. Go with God.
Ndegwa, his friend, had watched a soldier shoot his father when he was only ten years old. Age mates. What, in his own childhood, Thomas wondered, had been remotely comparable?
Mary Ndegwa put a hand on Thomas’s arm. He knew her words before she spoke. Yes, he wanted to say, he was a poet, standing in a doorway.
* * *
A dozen children, in shorts made gray with use and age, swarmed over the Escort — peering inside, turning the steering wheel, touching the radio. He patted the pockets of his sports coat and was relieved to discover that he hadn’t left the keys in the car. He’d have liked to give the children a ride but knew himself too drunk or dazed to do so.
He pulled away from the shamba slowly, terrified he would hit a child, and drove along the steep terraces, distracted by too many thoughts, not sequential, that were crowding his mind for attention — so that he had only bits of sentences, half-told stories, pictures skittering behind themselves. Regina with her arms crossed; Mary Ndegwa with her fly whisk; Linda bent to pineapples.
He arrived at the crossroads at Ruiru, not entirely sure how he had gotten there. A wrong turn? A left fork taken when he ought to have taken a right? He hadn’t been paying attention. The sign said Njia to the north, Nairobi to the south. It would not be truthful, he knew, to say that the wrong turns had been accidental. Njia: 80 kilometers. With any luck, it would take him an hour. He pulled to the side of the road and sat with the motor running, watching a matatu, loaded past possibility with people and luggage and chickens and goats, lurch recklessly past him. They were death traps, they told you in the training sessions. If you had to use one, sit in the back and wear sunglasses to protect you from shattering glass when the vehicle tipped over.
Sunday afternoon, and Linda might be with the man she called Peter. They could be sitting on a verandah, or (he hoped not) lying in bed. He preferred to imagine her sitting alone in the doorway of a mud-and-wattle hut, reading. He didn’t try to tell himself that he was in the general neighborhood, or that it was perfectly acceptable to go an hour out of his way to see an old friend from home. He understood, even as he put the Escort in gear and turned north, exactly what he was doing.
He traveled through dark forests of eucalyptus, between thickets of bamboo, and along moors trailing mists like veils, emerging to a landscape of soft green hills and broad valleys, watched over by snow-capped Mount Kenya in the distance. A buffalo stood in the middle of the road, and Thomas stopped the car just feet before he would have hit the massive beast. He rolled the windows up and sat unmoving. Of all the animals in Africa, they told you in the training sessions, the buffalo was the most deadly. It could kill a man in seconds, goring him with deadly accuracy, stomping him to death if the goring only wounded. You were supposed to lob stones