Leaving Before the Rains Come (17 page)

“There you are,” Charlie said.

“I think so,” I replied.

Charlie made some milky, sweet tea, and I kept it down. Then I took some aspirin and another dose of chloroquine, and Charlie helped me out of the bath and into dry clothes. The next morning after Charlie left for work, I drove myself to a clinic in Zimbabwe. The doctor looked at a slide of my blood under a microscope and said he was surprised I was walking. He wanted to admit me to the hospital and hook me up to an IV, but I thought of how reminiscent of southern African boarding schools that would be—hot, antiseptic-smelling wards overseen by fierce matrons—and I said I felt fine, relatively. So he put me on a course of oral antibiotics and quinine. “It’ll seem as if your head is stuffed with cotton wool,” he warned.

“That’ll be an improvement,” I said.

The doctor didn’t laugh. “There will be a bitter taste in your mouth, you could be nauseous, your hearing might get a bit fuzzy.” He looked at Sarah and then added, “And you’ll have to stop breast-feeding. Quinine can cause hemorrhaging in the baby’s mouth.” He was a kind man, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers at his door, perpetually dealing with near death. He put his hand around Sarah’s thighs and gave them a squeeze. “You’ve done well,” he said. Then he asked the orderly to bring me tea and hurried back into his office.

So I sat outside the clinic under a mango tree for an hour, drinking tea and watching Sarah nurse for the last time. Then I swallowed two quinine tablets and drove to Jay’s Supermarket to buy baby formula and bottles. I figured I had three hours in this heat before Sarah would be thirsty again. So I hurried across the border back into Zambia—baboons seething over the roofs of vehicles in pursuit of Zimbabwean groceries—willing the officials to stamp our passports quickly and let us through customs without a prolonged car search. Then I rushed through Livingstone, turning at the Anglican church onto the road to Quiet Waters, making short shrift of the twenty or so miles to the rocky little farm. For the rest of the day I lay under the mosquito net in the garden, weak and bilious, spilling rivulets of quinine-poisoned breast milk onto facecloths and listening to Sarah’s angry confusion as Josephine—who had taken the baby out of my sight but not out of earshot—tried to persuade her to take the bottle.

At four, Mildred brought a tray of afternoon tea, and Josephine brought Sarah back under the mosquito net. The three of us sat up in the bed and watched the sleeping baby. She was blotchy from crying, her cheeks tearstained, the edges of her mouth pale with dried formula. Seeing her made my breasts ache worse than before. “This hurts,” I complained.

“I know,” Josephine said.

“Oh, Josephine!” I was aghast. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Josephine said. She put a strong, expert hand above my nipple and pushed. Milk gushed between her fingers. “It will get worse and then it will get better,” she assured me.

I got tears then, but Josephine looked away and chewed her lower lip angrily. This country could turn everyone a little extreme—everyday unhappiness greeted with impatience, or sometimes even a kind of terrible laughter, and then years of stoicism giving way to the visceral anguish of the ululating women on their way to the too little graves of the village’s children. My mother had told me over and over, “Save your tears for the big stuff, Bobo.” Sometimes I fancied I could see the strain of all that containment in the sinew-drawn necks of the women, their bunched jaws, the sad spokes of worry at the edges of their eyes.

A month or so later, just as the mornings were finally turning brisk with winter wind, I walked for the last time to the stand of fever trees at the bend in the river and touched four of them, superstitiously and ritually, as if they were the walls of a house to which I wished to return. I said farewell to Jamie and Mildred. Josephine and I embraced, the baby sandwiched between us for a final time. Then the Charlie Ross party of three left Livingstone and flew to the United States.

It had been decided then: our marriage wasn’t going to be about nearly dying, and violent beauty, and unpredictability. Our union was going to be about sticking it out, sensible decisions, college funds, mortgages, and car payments. Maybe it wouldn’t be the seductive edges of terror and madness. But we would have medical insurance and a retirement plan. We would have reliable electricity and running water and refrigeration. Our lives would be good and ordinary and sane.

T
he United States came as a relief and a puzzle both. We built a small house in a new subdivision at the foothills of the Big Hole Mountains in eastern Idaho. We had a view of the Tetons and of a valley of farmland, although almost everywhere we looked, new houses and developments were spreading out where once there had been potato fields, and before that willow bottoms and sage meadows. A crippled-up cowboy whose cousin had sold the land on which we now lived told me that when he was a boy, seventy years earlier, this place was still three-quarters wild: bears and wolves, herds of elk and mule deer, the odd remnant bison. “It’s too bad memory doesn’t reset once a decade so you can’t tell what you’re losing,” he said, and he sounded lonely and regretful in the way of an elderly person whose relatives and friends have died and who is no longer visited by his children.

I thought then of the collective memory of land, of the ways in which people and animals and geological events cannot help but leave scars, sculpt wonders, and weave stories onto its cover. And I thought too of how I had inherited my understanding of land both from southern Africans for whom there was no separation of soil and soul and from European settlers for whom land was a commodity, even if it was a commodity with which they had fallen so violently in love that they had forgotten both the ungodliness of the original acquisition and the godliness of soil. “Stand unshod upon it for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator,” Alan Paton wrote. “Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.”
4

But from a commodity perspective, standing unshod upon the earth is less an act of reverence than a symptom of insanity, wasted time as well as a way to burn or freeze or dirty your feet. So most of us spend our lives creating buffers between us and ever having to feel the ground. We shield ourselves with comfort, dogmas, committees, and half-acre lawns. We put as much space as we can between the scary instructions of the spirit and our transactional selves. It doesn’t matter that Alan Paton and thousands before him had arrived at this truth: the way we treat land, and the ghosts of our land, is the way we will treat everything including ourselves. People who are careless of the land and of the creatures and spirits with which we share it are careless of themselves.

But if I knew any of this back then, I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for that knowledge. And perhaps because of that, without intending to do so, I had continued the pattern of some of the men, and most of the women, in my family, reaching as far back as we had memory. We were careless, and shiftless, and unthinking. We left our ancestral homes, we birthed and sometimes buried our children in far-flung places, and we started afresh over and over. We cared for land, but too often it wasn’t our land to care for.

I suppose in some instinctive way, I believed that Charlie would be the route back to something more solid and enduring. After all, inasmuch as settlers of anywhere could be, he was of this nation; too many generations to count back how long his people had been here. Our children would be able to stand unabashedly unshod upon this soil, they would sense their ancestors, they would feel a belonging. I didn’t want to know or believe that this land had been as violently stolen as our southern African land had been. And it would take years for me to understand spray-painted signs I once saw on a sidewalk in Michigan: “You Are Standing On Native Ground.”

The United States seemed so settled to me, so resolved, so tamed. Even the wild bits seemed wild in an insistently domesticated way. Americans were not expected to encounter unexpected, surprising hazards. “Be Bear Aware,” signs advised in Grand Teton National Park. And in Yellowstone, “Warning: Many Visitors Have Been Gored by Buffalo.” Mile markers along trails reminded us how far we had walked, and how far it was back to our car. There were frequent watering stations and places for people to eat, to stop and apply sunscreen, to rest. It was like being in the constant company of a kindly, sandwich-toting, risk-averse aunt.

Growing up in Africa, we had never carried water, food, and spare socks with us on a walk or on our rides. Moreover, we never knew when we set out if we would be gone an hour, a morning, or the entire day. I can’t now imagine what stubborn idiocy drove us to such unnecessary measures of discomfort. “A bit of thirst never hurt a person,” Dad always said, but being thirsty did hurt in my experience. So did hunger and blisters. “You’re getting soft,” Dad insisted. “You don’t need the bloody kitchen sink every time you step two inches away from the front door.”

But now, from the magnifying distance of the United States, my family was beginning to seem even more careless, unbalanced, and mad than they had when we’d all been in Africa. Meantime, close up, Charlie’s family looked saner than I had believed it possible any family could be. For one thing, his Main Line Philadelphians turned out not to be heroin addicts at all. At least not many of them, and certainly not in the way I imagined. In fact, aside from a cousin’s brother by a failed marriage who shot his inheritance up his veins and died from a flesh-eating bacterial infection, Charlie’s people were heroically reticent and moderate. They buried generations in a single cemetery; they thought about their legacies in concrete and protective ways; they were not squanderers of life and money and health.

And from what I could see, when anyone in Charlie’s family did do anything at all out of the ordinary—running away to Woodstock at the age of fourteen as a brother had done, disappearing to Thailand to become a Buddhist monk as a cousin had done, or taking up extreme river guiding as Charlie had done—it was viewed as a lark, an experiment, a brief expression of the unconventional. No one expected anything like that to last forever, and mostly it didn’t. Sooner or later, his people returned to the mean, reverted more or less conventional. They seemed to follow uninterrupted, undismaying covenants. Their dead seemed to take their earthly desires, passions, secrets, and complications with them; names and dates were carved into stone, their inconvenient or immoderate impulses were immobilized, their legacies were entrusted as if time went only forward.

Until I came to the States, I believed I knew without any doubt that time could be linear only if you counted it not by the moon, or by a sundial, or even by a watch, but by the loneliness of your own relentless trudge toward death, as if yours was the only life to live and time was something to be endured until you had worn it out. “Time is only as heavy as the thoughts you have to push through it,” Dad told me in Malawi when I was fourteen and had been hit by buffalo bean at the lake and had to sit motionless for a couple of hours. “The less you have to think about, the less time matters.” By which I now know he meant that the demons, doubts, and guilt we carry fluster time and make it take on an unnatural, constructed weight.

It’s a wondrous plant, buffalo bean—
Mucuna pruriens,
or as Mozambiquans call it, feijão maluco, the mad bean. It has a cascade of purple blooms in the spring, and in the winter it carries seedpods with long golden beans covered in shimmering tiny hairs. The hairs contain a chemical, serotonin, that causes unbearable itching when they lodge in the skin. Local healers had long understood that the very plant that has the capacity to drive you crazy in one manifestation would almost necessarily have the capacity to heal madness in another. The healers dried the leaves; smoked, it settled the mind. They crushed and prepared the seeds; consumed, it calmed the spirit.

But if the hairs hit you, it was very important to stay willfully calm. Scratching and movement only served to spread the chemical and resulted in worse itching. To get caught in a current of windborne hairs, or to brush up against it, was to be sent into an involuntary crash course in conscious immobility. A person had to empty her mind of the possibility of relief. Suffer calmly. “Sit still, Chookies,” Dad said when I came crying out of the lake where hairs from the plant had landed on the surface, worked their way into my bathing suit, leaving no part of my body untouched. “You’re not alone.”

My suffering did not make me unique, it made me belong. The gust that had brought my maddening misery had not discriminated. When I looked along the lake’s beach that late windy, sunny afternoon, I saw a dozen fishermen and several other women and children sitting as stock-still as I was supposed to, only they were seeming to stare placidly into the wind-whipped water whereas I squirmed and resisted. Also, no one tended to them. Meantime, Mum fed me antihistamines and Dad brought me tea.

“A couple of hours is all,” he said. “And anyway, it’s all relative.”

Dad was a fan of throwing away watches. He always said time was something we invented to make people into money. Clock in, clock out. On the farm, Dad didn’t have punch cards. Work started at dawn and ended when it got too hot for plants, animals, or humans to endure movement. Then everyone slept in the middle of the day, dreaming through the stupefying heat. And in the late afternoon, when the sun loosened its grip, work started again until impending darkness finished the day’s business.

“Do you know how to empty your mind?” Dad asked.

I shook my head.

Dad sat next to me. “Well,” he said. “It helps if you smoke a pipe. There’s no definite end, and there’s no fresh start with a pipe, properly smoked. It’s all the same; the beginning, the end.” Then he lit a cigarette. “Not so much a cigarette,” he said, looking at the tip of his Benson and Hedges. “A cigarette comes to an end. You throw it away. Then you have to light another one. After that, all you have is a habit.”

“Are you drunk?” I asked, not unreasonably I felt.

“A little,” he admitted. So for a while we looked at the lake, the waves coming in and going out, the sun striking everything yellow and pale with its heat. The water appeared infinite here, disappearing into nothing, touching shores in Mozambique eventually, lapping back to us in time. I tried to take my mind off my itching, which had the effect of putting it more terribly onto it. Dad smoked, and other than lifting a cigarette to his lips he sat utterly motionless too, as if he had been covered in searing hairs also. He had been hit by buffalo bean often in the war; the Himalayas behind our house in Rhodesia were smothered in the legume. “But a little itching doesn’t matter so much when you’re worried about getting stonked,” Dad said.

I knew without being told that this wasn’t the worst suffering in the world. Not by a very, very long shot. And it wasn’t even close to the worst suffering I had ever felt. But it was the only suffering I had come across that required you to remain utterly still in its presence and do nothing else except be there, feeling it.

The sun slid down toward the lake. The chemical fire on my skin lifted. Now I could feel where the sun had scorched the back of my neck. Along the beach, the fishermen were beginning to move again. The women picked up their baskets of mangoes and fish and gathered their children around their skirts. Egrets billowed white over the hills behind the lake. Cooking fires shimmered orange from the villages. “Everything ends if you let it,” Dad said. “Good and bad.”

What I didn’t know then, but what I understand now, is that my father was giving me a mini crash course—a crammer—in time, suffering, and relativity. In some ways he had become like the rural southern Africans alongside whom he had worked for so many years; his beliefs had become less solid and certain over time, and therefore more fluid and fearlessly unsupportable. From them he had learned that if you wait long enough, time will circle back to you, and that to attempt to quash or deny trauma was to make a monument of suffering. Dad got to his feet and helped me to mine. “I always think it’s worth remembering,” he said. “Tobacco’s a fourteen-month crop.”

Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States. There seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights. I fumbled with my checkbook, I was unsure how to use credit card readers, I sat a beat too long at the intersection when red changed to green. I found time was jealously guarded too, as if to share any of it, or to take up someone else’s allocation, was the greatest crime. Ironically, it seemed obvious that most Americans had more time than almost any other humans in the history of the earth; they lived longer and more luxurious lives than had ever been lived before. And yet instead of slowing down to fill all the space of their extra years, they sped up and up and up.

In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest. We didn’t bother trying to hoard what could not be safeguarded, restrained, and stored. Sometimes things got all urgent and life tore through us, whether we wanted it to or not. And sometimes the rain wouldn’t come, or the heat would not abate, and there was nothing to do but wait. As a result we were emotional spendthrifts, feeling and living as much as was required from moment to moment, using time carelessly. But from what I could tell, most Americans—at least the people I met—were emotional conservatives, using time and their feelings frugally, selfishly. They believed time belonged to an individual. “Don’t waste
my
time,” they said.