Leaving Before the Rains Come (26 page)

For a long time after that, Dad and I sat in silence. In time a flock of egrets came up the river to roost. I thought about Charlie on this water twenty-two years earlier, how he’d seemed to know its submerged, invisible secrets. We’d camped a mile or two south of here on the second night of our first date, that same canoe trip when we’d been mock-charged by the elephant and I’d thought that this Charlie Ross,
my
Charlie Ross, was invincible. I’d never thought then to be sitting on the banks of this river again, exactly here, now, or that my parents would have left the plateau and made a farm out of a scrub of land in this valley.

“I always thought I’d leave you a bit of land,” Dad said at last.

“It’s okay,” I said, which it mostly was.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Dad said. “I nearly forgot. I got that ring for you.”

“You did?” I was amazed. Around the time I was getting my name back, I had asked my father if I could have a copy of his family’s signet ring.

“It’s only for sons,” Dad said. “Properly speaking.”

“How about improperly speaking?” I asked.

The Fuller crest is a rampant lion holding a ball. Where my father’s ring has rubbed against guns and fences and tools, the lion and the ball have almost worn off, and the gold has become tenuously thin. Still, it seemed something magical to me, a talisman handed down through the generations, like a distant assurance that you were at least somewhat deliberate, potentially worthy, acknowledged as heir.

“Well, I suppose times have changed,” Dad said, but he didn’t sound as if he thought it was a good idea to change with them. So I resigned myself to the reality that I was a daughter, and in my father’s eyes, that excluded Vanessa and me from the automatic stamp of approval that would have been afforded his sons. Then, without my knowing anything about it, over the next couple of years Dad had put signet rings together for Vanessa and me. He found the gold in South Africa, he had the rings made in Zambia, and then he had sent them to England to be engraved. Now he fished around in his pocket. “Here you go, Bobo. Here’s yours.”

I found a finger that fit the ring. “It’s perfect,” I said. “It’ll be good to have when things get tough.”

“Yep.” Dad messed with his pipe some more. Then he lit it and a cloud of smoke wafted over me. “Although it’s worth remembering it isn’t supposed to be easy,” Dad said. “I’m not sure who came up with that load of old bollocks. Easy is just another way of knowing you aren’t doing much in the way of your life.” More smoke came my way. “But you’re doing it, Bobo.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

There was a long silence. Then Dad said, “I should have probably warned you from the start. Living your own life can be bloody frightening, and you will be lost half the time. But if I had told you that, you might not have set out in the first place, and that would have been a terrible waste.”

“I know,” I said.

Then mosquitoes lifted in a thirsty cloud off the ground and misted off the edges of the river, so Dad and I stood up and walked back toward the noise of the camp, where Mum, Vanessa, and Richard were sitting around the coffee table and my nieces were playing cards. A fire in front of the camp chugged woodsmoke and the singe of cooking meat. The dogs were curled up at people’s feet. It was deeply comforting and familiar, and yet I knew I no longer really belonged here. At least, I had lost my unequivocal sense of belonging. I’d fledged too hard, flown too urgently from the nest, been carried off by stronger trade winds than I could fight against. And now I was solo, truly. And it was okay.

A long time ago in Malawi, Dad had bought a Mirror dinghy from a neighboring farmer and rigged it up on the lake. He showed me the basics. “Bottom is wet, top is dry,” he said. “If that changes, you’ve capsized.” Vanessa asked if she could have my cassette player if I drowned. Mum warbled Frank Sinatra’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” at me. Dad gave me a shove, and I was off skimming across the top of the water, the sound of the sails clacking in the wind. Things went well until I accidentally went about and the boom swung around and smacked me in the mouth. But even after that, with my fat lip and gappy smile, the taste of freedom had felt worth it.

I learned this then: sometimes the wind lulled and there was nothing to do but wait it out in the tiny patch of shade afforded by the sail. And sometimes the wind got gusty and unpredictable, and then whatever line I pulled, things didn’t make sense and the boat seemed to get a mind of her own. But there was a feeling of emancipation too, the way I had sometimes felt on a horse, as if nothing malevolent could touch me. As if for once I wasn’t my gender, or my powerlessness. As if for those hours, I was enough.

1
. “Of all the works of mankind, dams are the most murderous.”

2
. From Annie McCaffry,
The Family Behind the Firm: Garrard and Co., 1834–1952
.

3
. Go, and be like them.

4
. Alan Paton,
Cry the Beloved Country
(1948).

5
. Carrie Hagen, “Past Imperfect: The Story Behind the First Ransom Note in American History,”
The Smithsonian,
December 9, 2013.

6
. Thomas Everly, “Searching for Charley Ross,”
Pennsylvania History
67, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 376–96.

7
. Everly, “Searching for Charley Ross.”

8
. Benedicta Ward, trans.,
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection
(Kalamazoo, MI: Liturgical Press, 1984).

9
. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon,
A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together with a Few Observations Thereon
(1854).

10
. Jean-Dominique Bauby,
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death
(New York: Vintage, 1998).

11
. Michel de Montaigne,
The Complete Essays,
translated by M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin Classics, ), 421.

12
.
Jackson Hole News and Guide,
July 20, 2011.

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