A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,90

the tree and used his stick to break off a piece of honeycomb. He lifted it, dripping with golden honey and placed it carefully onto his saved piece of toast. When he was finished, he scraped a hole in the ground to bury his burned grass. He hummed another few bars of his song for the bees and turned to me, smiling his sweet smile.

We walked a little distance away so as not to disturb the bees, and he broke off pieces of the honeycomb to share with me. I sucked the honey from the beeswax. It was warm and thick on my tongue and I tasted the sharp edge of something green and herbal before it was submerged into the sweetness. Moses finished his honey and chewed the beeswax and I gave him mine to save for later. He laughed at the honey on my chin, and I thought about the mother that had given up on him and the father who had disowned him and I hated them both.

It was a slower walk back to the pasture. Moses was limping now, resting heavily on his stick, but determined to return to his herd. He took his cows very seriously, and when we reached the pasture, he was very proud to show me that one of the cows I had bought was carrying.

“Make sure she gets extra care,” I told him. “She’ll be the foundation of our herd.”

He smiled again and headed into the pasture to hum a special song to her, a song that would make her calf grow strong and her milk come sweet.

It was only after I walked away that I remembered I wouldn’t be staying long enough to see it born.

* * *

There were other walks with Moses after that, and long mornings spent listening to him sing his wordless songs to the cattle and telling stories to each other with our gestures and words scratched into the dirt with his cowherder’s stick. Sometimes Gideon joined us, and sometimes the three of us walked into the bush to see a baby giraffe or to gather honey for the table. Besides my outings with Gideon and Moses, Tusker called twice a week for lunch, Mr. Patel came to bring mail and packages, and I spent long hours on the veranda, nursing a drink and catching up on my reading.

I was falling into the African rhythm of life, a slow and steady pace that meant one day was sometimes very like the next until the seasons changed and brought an entirely new world. Tusker talked of the short rains that would come in November and the wild Christmas extravagances at the club in Nairobi. She talked of the growing tension between the settlers and the government, and she taught me much about the natives. She had a soft spot for the native girls, lamenting loudly the fact that so many of them were circumcised.

“Goodness knows I never had much going on in that way, what with marrying a poof, but a woman ought to at least have the option of getting her cork properly popped,” she said roundly.

“Of course they all justify it by claiming it stops the women from wandering off.”

“That’s absurd. It certainly didn’t stop adultery in Moses’ mother’s case.”

She shrugged. “Bush logic. You’ll get nowhere arguing the point. Jude has tried.”

“Jude disapproves as well?” I was intrigued. Tusker mentioned her niece occasionally, as if prodding a scar to test the tender flesh beneath.

“I should say so. She got into a flaming row one day with one of the tribal elders about it. They’ll come around in time, I’ve no doubt. That’s how it always happens. We civilize and educate them and teach them how to read and write and tie their shoes, and in the process we rob them of everything that makes them who they are. And we call ourselves saints for it.”

I said nothing. Tusker could warm to a theme, and one of her favourites was the role of whites in the colony. But she was contrary. I had seen her argue both sides of the coin just to spite her opponent. The truth was she cared, passionately, about the native tribes. She respected their wisdom and their ways. But she was still Englishwoman enough to rebel against the most savage of their customs. I pitied her a little. She wanted her illusions, but they had been stripped away long ago, and she saw the natives the same as she did everyone