1972 - A Story Like the Wind (63 page)

‘You must not worry unduly,’ Mopani replied philosophically. ‘He will learn in time all right, I’m sure.’ Mopani paused, for as the word
time
fell from his lips, a strange, far-away look came as always to his eyes as when seeing, as he so often did, a sign in the bush that others could not see; a look that François knew well. Then he went on as if to himself, ‘That is, provided there is still time to learn.’

There was something so ominous in Mopani’s tone that François, dismayed, called out, ‘Oh Uncle, why do you say it like that? It sounds as if you feel that time is just about up for everyone, and everything around us here.’

Mopani was annoyed with himself. It was one of his favourite maxims that it was ignoble of human beings to trouble others with their own private apprehensions before they were verified, and even then, only if necessary for the well-being of all. So he hastened to qualify himself, ‘I don’t mean that at all, Coiske. I was just thinking aloud to the effect that in life it is always somehow later than we think.’

The following day they were early at Hunter’s Drift Siding to welcome Lammie back. François could not be certain but he suspected that the old hunter assumed Lammie would arrive, as the saying went, in deep mourning. In any case it was obvious that Mopani was somewhat taken aback to see her step out of the train dressed in an exceedingly smart travelling suit, as if returning not from a funeral but a holiday; a bright kerchief round her throat and a small, gay, jaunty, almost defiantly young little hat on her head. François knew his mother well enough to realize that this could be entirely a form of bravado, and he found her effort to keep up a bright and gay appearance in dress far more moving than any conventional black would have been. He had only to look at her beautiful face and notice that her large, cool, steady eyes appeared somewhat deeper set, the fine bone in her delicate face showing just slightly more precisely under the smooth skin than before, to have an inkling of what she had been enduring. He was so moved that he had to draw in full on this discipline of calm and ordered emotion which Lammie had imposed upon herself, so that he could greet her with enough composure to calm his feelings.

She herself, much as all this was in keeping with the main trend of her clear spirit, might have found it difficult to maintain such an ordered attitude to the new life which faced her, because one look at François was enough to tell her that he had suffered too and in a way that had complications of which she was totally unaware. He looked older, taller and in an odd way remote, as. if he had in fact become a stranger to what he had been when she had last seen him as well as perhaps to herself. The impression dismayed her but vanished quickly because a new kind of mechanism which had established itself in her from the moment of Ouwa’s death, took over, and it turned her from herself into a continuation of what Ouwa himself would have been had he been there beside her, to such an extent that she saw François not through her own heart but entirely as she imagined Ouwa would have done.

It was as if she could hear his voice in her ear as she said to François in that teasing, ironic way of his, ‘Ah, I see you’ve not wasted any time in my absence to promote what I always suspected was a scheme of yours. I always thought you were bent in your secret self on being taller and better-looking than your father. Obviously you have made full use of the absence of competition to forge ahead and be so disrespectful as to grow taller than your gullible parent. I would not have thought that you would welcome one by heaping coals of such fire on a well-meaning head!’

Somehow this imagined, unspoken voice out of a past more vivid still than the present, helped her to maintain her calm. She greeted Mopani affectionately, yet without a blur of emotion in eye or tone. She talked in a lively and factual way on the journey home of the battles she had fought with lawyers and authorities to get Ouwa’s estate settled and of how well she felt she had succeeded, in the end, so that she would not have to leave Hunter’s Drift again but could get on with the main task of developing it as Ouwa had wished, as well as taking his place as François’s tutor in order to hasten the time when he could go to a university to complete his education.

François did not think it appropriate then to announce that he had turned his back on that world from which Lammie had just come, and that he was determined never to leave Hunter’s Drift or go near anything as pernicious as a university in a system of education which had brutally rejected Ouwa. Like Mopani, he thought it best that Lammie should do the talking and somehow through it expend the turmoil of emotion which her approach to a place which she had created with Ouwa out of nothing must be increasing by the minute. And somehow the unspoken plan worked so well that, although Ousie-Johanna took Lammie in her arms, sobbing bitterly, and !#grave;Bamuthi, his head men and their principal wives all wept openly and bitterly on seeing her, Lammie’s calm never failed her.

She remained strangely royal in circumstances that François was certain any other woman would have found intolerable. In a way it made him proud of Lammie. Yet at the same time, he was sad that her control should cover so large an empire of her life. Whenever he looked at Mopani, he thought something similar was simmering in the old hunter’s heart.

Some of Lammie’s controlled warmth came out in the imagination with which she had planned her return. That very evening everyone who worked at Hunter’s Drift, from the oldest to the youngest child, was summoned an hour before sunset to the great courtyard between kitchen and stables. There Lammie announced that Ouwa in his will had left something to each of them. All the time he had been at Hunter’s Drift he had kept a list of everybody who shared in the enterprise. The moment a new child was born, the name, date of birth and all were carefully entered on the list. From year to year, according to the age and length of employment, the gifts that Ouwa wanted to go on his death to each person were brought up to date.

So, with !#grave;Bamuthi and François at her side, Lammie now called out the names from the list, working up finally to Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi, and told them what each of them had been left. One of their best young bulls was for !#grave;Bamuthi. Ouwa’s legacy to Ousie-Johanna, because she was the only one sophisticated to understand it, was a legacy of £3 a week for life.

All this Lammie followed up with personal presents of her own to all persons on the list; carefully chosen bracelets and necklaces of the finest beads for the young girls, silk shawls and headcloths of the loveliest colours for the young women, rolls of cloth for the old ladies, knives for the young boys, bush suits of cavalry twill for the older ones and so on and on. Ousie-Johanna, however, thanks to hints contained in François’s letters to Lammie, wherein he had described the relationship between Ousie-Johanna and Amelia, was presented with a heavy, shining, black satin dress and white silk apron, as well as a fat album of all the latest recordings of the most famous hymns, including one new to her, ‘John Brown’s Body’, which was soon to threaten to replace ‘Nearer my God to thee’ at the top of her religious pop list.

!#grave;Bamuthi, as head of them all, received a long army greatcoat of majestic proportions, with a double row of gilt buttons bearing the crest of the regiment in which Ouwa had served in the war, a large military bush hat with a lion skin round the crown and an ostrich plume to go with it, so that in the end, far from the first day of her return ending in the sorrowful occasion which everyone had instinctively assumed it would, it became a feast of transfiguration and rejoicing which Lammie somehow thought was exactly what Ouwa would have wished. It was not for nothing, she recollected, that his favourite Shakespearean sonnet, which she herself had played on the piano and sung for him many times began, ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’.

Yet, great as the rejoicing was, and moved as everybody was by their dead employer’s and his widow’s solicitude on their behalf, there was something about it all which troubled the wise and vigilant intuition of so profoundly instinctive and natural a people. There seemed to be a feeling that Lammie was being too good to be true and that she was exceeding their sense of the natural proportions of life. This kind of unease, an unease one hastens to add purely and unselfishly on Lammie’s behalf, showed itself in many different ways, but all amounted in the end to the same conclusion, which is perhaps best exemplified by the reactions of Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi.

Ousie-Johanna, who for days could not begin the day without bursting into tears the moment she saw Lammie and François alone at the great table, would afterwards take François aside and whisper: ‘I can’t understand our Lammie not joining in the weeping too.’ Then, as the days passed, she came to the point of anger, announcing in judgement to François: ‘I don’t know what is blerrie-well the matter with that Lammie of yours. Why has the good God in Heaven given people grief if not to weep over it? Can’t she see that she owes it to our Ouwa to weep for him? If she is not careful she will turn him into a ghost that will haunt all of us.’

!#grave;Bamuthi had the same concern but put it less violently. With the ingrained poetic beauty of his sonorous native language he asked rhetorically, ‘Is it to be then, Little Feather, that the Lammie of our house is never to string the beads? Does she not know that grief grows great and terrible if beads are not strung for it? Since when has grief become a stranger that we should shut our kraals against it and not welcome it to our fires and warm it with our tears? Is it not a sister to our joy that has a right of its own, even in the huts of kings?’

But despite all this concern which François himself secretly shared as far as Lammie was concerned, there was no ‘stringing of beads’ in the presence of others. What may have been done in the dark when she was alone in her bed at night is unknown. The only indication lies in a remark she made once to François. Clutching his arm one evening at sundown she heard herself saying, ‘I’m grateful that Ouwa never knew what it meant to lose a life-long partner.’

There then followed a period of some fourteen months which was the longest, most difficult and the least happy that François had yet experienced. There was not only this weight of Lammie’s undeclared sorrow which seemed daily to grow greater and which he, as the person closest to her, had to carry as well as his own burdens. In addition, there was the constant tension caused between them by the need to parry Lammie’s declared determination to get him ready as soon as possible for completion of his education in the university where both she and Ouwa had graduated.

François was as determined not to go as Lammie was that he should. He was wise enough to protest openly as little as possible but to follow one of Mopani’s maxims: to keep quiet and not attempt to cross that particular bridge until they came to it. But in the depths of himself, he knew Lammie was aware of his resistance and that an all-out battle was being mounted in her spirit to be fought when the moment came. The battle, François knew, would be the more formidable because Lammie would fight it with the strength of two; her own and also that borrowed from her own private image of what she imagined Ouwa would have done in the situation.

What made this prospect worse for François was that, for the first time, he was doubtful of Mopani’s support. Whenever he tried to discuss the matter with Mopani on his now frequent visits to Hunter’s Drift, Mopani, though saying that they had plenty of time for considering the matter, indicated that it might be a good thing if François did consider going to a university. He would add remarks to the effect that they were living in an extremely privileged world there in the bush and that life abhorred nothing more than privilege. He himself knew from his work as a conservationist that their way of life had powerful and well-organized enemies in the world outside—greedy men who were increasingly attracted to so large a tract of virgin Africa with a mounting determination to have it thrown open for economic exploitation. He told François of his own private doubts as to whether he would be able to maintain intact his own great reserve. He thought that if people like himself and François were to fight the battle effectively for preserving the things that they loved in the bush they could do so only if they understood their enemies thoroughly; and knew the sort of weapons and forces that they could bring up against them. For these reasons alone if for no others, he thought it would be as well if François did go out to a university.

François, as far as all this was concerned, was in the grip of emotions too compulsive to make him accessible for the moment to the wisdom in Mopani’s reasoning. He was dominated by a feeling that if Mopani really supported Lammie for such excellent reasons, he might well lose his campaign. Yet there was one battle he was not going to lose on any account, even if he lost the campaign. He was not leaving before he had seen Xhabbo again; or knew him to be dead.

As the long months dragged by, he found himself listening with increasing desperation for Xhabbo’s call sign. There were countless occasions by night and day when the call of the plover or the mournful yanking of a jackal would start up just as if it were the beginning of the call Xhabbo had promised for an- flouncing his return. François’s heart would beat faster. Yet, in the end, the right combination of plover and jackal sounds was never achieved, and he would sink back into a dark mood of disappointment, if not despair.

All this added greatly to the powerful undercurrent of tensions between Lammie and himself. Unfortunately, even these did not make up the full sum of dislocation and discord which seemed to confront him every day. There were outside elements, too, to broaden these areas of discontent.

For instance, for the first time the Matabele at Hunter’s Drift seemed out of tune with themselves and their surroundings. It was no longer just a matter of general alarm, set to music with increasing intensity by the birds at dawn and sunset. There was an increasing anxiety abroad which made itself known to everyone with gathering urgency by the news travelling through the bush from far and wide. It was that the great and Right Honourable Sun-Is-Hot himself was said to be exceedingly troubled by omens. It was widely reported that he no longer allowed people to consult him on private matters; he said that the moment had come when he had to give himself over entirely, for the good of all, to following the voice of the great first spirit of their people, Umkulunkulu. It was declared that Umkulunkulu himself had appeared to uLangalibalela in a dream to tell him that a time of great trouble was upon the land. Could they not all see, the dream asked, how the young men had forgotten the praise names of Umkulunkulu and no longer spoke of him but only of things that were useful to them? Unless they could be brought back to praise him and to fear with awe the first spirit of all things, then disaster would fall upon them. This was bad enough, but worse was to follow.