I knew I had come from women who had done much better with a lot less, but there was also the closed-circuit cautionary tale of the women in my history who had done a lot worse with very much more, and who was to say how childbirth and mothering and isolation would catalyze in my mind? “I suppose it was after her mother died that my mother went completely to pieces,” Dad told me. “Before that, it was just practice. Soaked through, but probably not beyond repair.” And I pictured Mugger like the moon to Boofy’s tide, pulling her back into the shallows every time she got too deep.
Exhausted and more than a little scared, I acknowledged I needed help to get me through Sarah’s baby months. So I hired a villager, Jamie Nkomo, to bring buckets of water up from the river and help me with my struggling attempt at a heatstroked vegetable garden. I hired Mildred Tembo—the daughter of one of the supervisors at a nearby safari camp—to help me with the housework. Then one afternoon, as I lay nursing Sarah in the heat of the day, a woman suddenly materialized in the bedroom outside my mosquito net. I sat up, startled, holding the milk-drowsy baby against myself.
“I’m Josephine,” the woman announced, crouching down next to the bed. She smelled of uncured tobacco and carbolic soap, smells so familiar to me I was instantly transported back to my own early childhood and the no-nonsense slightly impatient nannies of my youth who had allowed me onto their laps and in times of pain and distress had lowered their shirts to let me rest against their skin.
I fell back onto the pillows, and Sarah began to nurse again. Josephine slipped her hands under the mosquito net and reached for Sarah’s head. She said she had recently lost her own infant to the yellow fever outbreak in the village. So many children were dying around here, she said, hadn’t I heard? “You are too thin to take care of this baby alone,” she told me. “Babies aren’t safe.”
“I know,” I said.
Grand’Mere had told me about the yellow fever epidemic when Sarah was just eight days old. But at the little clinic in Livingstone, the Indian doctor—whom I visited frequently and with increasing discomfort in the weeks after Sarah’s birth—had equivocated and added to my fear by expanding the list of possible pathogens. “Maybe yellow fever, maybe just malaria. Who knows with these people? They say yellow fever, they mean hepatitis. They say malaria, they mean meningitis. Are they doctors? No. Are you doctor? No. Am I doctor? Yes.”
Then I explained I was still in considerable pain from the delivery, but before I could expound further or attempt to show him my aching rear end, the doctor threw up his hands preemptively. “No titties, no bottoms,” he cried. So I went home to Quiet Waters and treated myself as best I could from my copy of Where There Is No Doctor, misdiagnosing hemorrhoids coupled with mild malaria as an infection from childbirth. The book said nothing about yellow fever, but sometimes if the wind picked up from the river I could hear village women on the way to their little funerals, ululating their limitless grief. So when Josephine emerged that hot afternoon and her capable hands spoke hungry sorrow for her lost child, I hired her on the spot.
I also found a local tailor and had myself measured for a wearable mosquito-net cloud under which I could keep Sarah while I was nursing her anytime between four in the afternoon and sunrise, when the mosquitoes would be out to feed. And all the rest of the time—even in the supposedly mosquito-free middle of the day—I watched her soft skin for the slightest passing shadow of a drifting parasite. Her white terrycloth diapers hung on a washing line above our heads in the sitting room and kitchen, like strings of white flags requesting cease-fire or signaling surrender.
Most days, Josephine and I took turns walking Sarah along the banks of the Zambezi, while inside the cottage Mildred sweated over piles of cloth diapers with a charcoal-heated iron—unironed clothes risked carrying the eggs of putzi flies, which hatched as maggots under the skin and produced squirming boils. I also insisted that drinking water and water for bathing the baby be boiled to avoid bilharzia. From dawn to dusk, the kitchen was thick with vapor and mopane-wood smoke. But now I was not alone. The voices of the two women filled the house. Josephine sang Congolese kwasa kwasa; Mildred competed with mournful religious dirges. Jamie sat on the veranda between chores and chatted to the women with cups of tea and slabs of white-bread sandwiches.
By February the heat had become so unbearable that I moved our bed outside under a Bohemia tree and brought Sarah from her crib to sleep with us: a shared being between Charlie and me, sweetly sweating, her arms flung above her head in capitulation to the temperature. If rain threatened, we would drag the bed back inside, but at least on dry nights the breeze from the river could reach us. And, lying under the mosquito net with my child and my husband next to me, listening to the shouting hippos, the pulsing night insects, the shrieking bush babies, I fell deeply back in love with the land of my childhood. The fight against heat and the worry about my new baby seeped out of me and I felt myself yielding to this place and to my new life.
Then, sometime toward the end of February’s oppressive humidity, the mild buzz of what felt like permanent, low-grade malaria morphed into serious, recurring malaria. Fever abutted fever until at last I had an unending dose of tropical malaise. One night in March, a fortnight or so before my twenty-fifth birthday, riding a collapsing wave of infection, it occurred to me that I was probably dying. I could feel the parasites exploding in my blood, flooding my organs, clouding my brain. I woke Charlie up. “I don’t think I can hold on,” I told him.
Charlie leaned over me. “Bummer,” he said.
I remember the outrageous instinct of laughter. Bummer! Bummer? I’m dying, and that’s it? But I didn’t have the energy to laugh. And anyway, it seemed a perfectly reasonable response. Charlie’s love for me was waning—I’d been a disappointment, it was obvious—but I was still his wife and the mother of his child; there still remained a residue of dutiful love in sickness and in health. After all, isn’t that what we had signed up for? Isn’t that what the Polish priest had warned us we were in for? Charlie was the mate I had chosen, and he had chosen me. Marriage was a contract: you could hope it would be for better, but it might also be for worse. In any case, we had the baby now. There was no going back from how much we both loved her.
I turned my head, and by the light of the silver moon I looked at Sarah, asleep next to me. I ached to put my hands on her face, to trace the milky luminosity of her skin, but I couldn’t make my arms move. Instead I stared at her with all that was left of my focus, imprinting her onto my soul: the silky cloud of blonde hair, the huge, bruised-looking eyelids, the red stain of her birth still evident on her forehead as if the scarification of her delivery from my body into this world would be with her always. I willed her to know that I loved her and that if there was a capacity for love beyond this life, I would go on loving her always. Then I closed my eyes and felt something darker and deeper than sleep pull me away.
Afterward, Charlie would sometimes say that we left Zambia to save me from the seemingly permanent malaria I had contracted, to save my life. But that was only half true; we had already decided to leave the country. Months after arriving in Livingstone, we had begun to send boxes with my books and our clothes and Charlie’s African curios to Wyoming. We found prospective homes for our animals. We started to look at flights. By March, by the time of my full-blown almost constant malaria, we were already half gone.
The whole truth is that we left Zambia not only because I had almost died of malaria but also because the reality of the country had not matched Charlie’s vision of how it should have been and he wasn’t prepared to beach up against the reality of the place in the manner of Grand’Mere and my parents and any number of other hanging-in-there settlers and their descendants. Romance isn’t everything. In fact, romance is what gets you killed if you get too enveloped by it. Charlie had choices, and he was going to make the right one.
Westerners came to Zambia and felt an inexplicable sense of connection in part be
cause back then in the early 1990s, the country still had much of what the developed world had destroyed: vast pockets of roadless land; wild rivers; sizable herds of charismatic and sometimes dangerous animals. But our south-central African beauty wasn’t as unspoiled as it looked, and we Zambians weren’t as innocent and uncomplicated as we first appeared. Most Zambians I knew would pick air-conditioning over virgin forests; a car over a bicycle; antidepressants over despair. The purity that foreign visitors elected to see in many of us—so friendly, so earthy, so naïve—was partly a glitch in translation and partly a willing suspension of disbelief.
Charlie shook me and said my name, and when I did not respond he pulled me from under the mosquito net, draped my weight over his arms, hurried across the garden and into the cottage. He made his way through the dark, stifling sitting room and through our tiny bedroom into the bathroom. He hoisted me against his chest and switched on the light—a single electric bulb sizzling from beneath its banana-leaf-woven lampshade. Then he lowered me into the bathtub, still full of cool boiled river water from Sarah’s bath earlier that evening. I woke up startled to find myself wet. Charlie held my head and my back. My cotton nightie stuck to my belly and hips.
“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.
MAD BEANS, TIME, AND GHOSTS
The 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 perha
ps 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.”