A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,128
came forward then, these aunts and sisters of Gideon, and they enfolded me, smearing my clothes with the red ochre and the grease that they used to make themselves beautiful. They touched my face and hands and embraced me and called me sister. The men stood back, chanting a song of one who would not be forgotten, of loved ones lost and returned to the earth, and of the land itself which does not die but is always born anew with each fall of the long rains. They chanted of life, which is short as a spear of summer grass or long as the heart of the Rift itself, and of the silent land that waits beyond. They chanted of Africa.
They were still chanting when I began to crumple, long after night had fallen and long after the fires had been lit, and when they carried me to my bed and tucked me in as tenderly as a child and left me, it was this song of Africa that was my lullaby.
* * *
When I went to the window the next morning I saw that there was no sign of them save the bright green grass that had been trodden under their feet. After I had eaten a simple breakfast, the Africans came again, but this time it was the farmworkers, neglected after my stay in Nairobi. They came as if I had never left, bringing their wounds and ailments, offering up their pain. I applied ointments and powders, bandaged and gossiped, taking from them their suffering and their stories and giving them relief in return. They told me of two babies born while I was gone and an old man who had died and been given to the hyenas, his bones crunched to nothing in those powerful jaws. Africa had borne him and in the end, Africa had taken him back. There was nothing left to show he had been except the memories of those who knew him, and these they shared with me.
I traded them—salves for salvation because, as I worked, I felt peaceful for the first time in a long while. I gave them food and milk and when they left, I sat on the veranda for a long time, thinking of them and how little of the promise of Fairlight was actually fulfilled.
In the afternoon Ryder came, walking his slow-hipped walk, and I stood in stillness, watching him come near. He stopped a foot away from me.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
I followed him without a word, and he led the way out of Fairlight and onto the savannah. He took a different track, a path beaten hard into the earth and leading to a high rock outcropping. We climbed it together and he gave me his hand to bring me up the last few feet to where he stood. We settled down on the rock and he pointed across the savannah. There, on a termite mound, sat a cheetah, slender and watchful.
“He’s beautiful,” I murmured.
“She,” he corrected quietly. “She just left her cubs two days ago and she’s hunting for herself now.”
“How do you know so much about her?”
She didn’t move as she surveyed the savannah. Only the lightest of breezes ruffled her fur as it did the long grasses. A small herd of Thomson’s gazelles grazed nearby, unaware of her presence.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on her for months.”
“Why? You don’t hunt cheetah.”
“Because something that beautiful and dangerous is worth watching,” he replied.
Just then she darted out, launching herself straight at a small patch of quivering grass. A young tommie huddled under the grass, waiting until the last possible moment to run. Too late, its mother saw the danger and circled back, bleating her distress and throwing herself between the cheetah and her young.
But the cheetah would not be diverted. She circled back, cutting sharply and seized the tommie, carrying it off in triumph. The mother sniffed the air and let out another soft cry before returning to her herd. The cheetah took her trophy back to her mound, suffocating it quickly and beginning to eat.
“She doesn’t waste time,” I observed.
“She can’t afford to. She seems fierce but there are lots of things out here bigger and meaner than she is. Any one of them would take that tommie from her and go after her, too. She’s a lot more vulnerable than she looks.”
I sighed. “Did you bring me out here just to show me metaphors for my own life?”