Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

He stops, feeling the sun-heated dust burning the soles of his feet, and bends over, supporting his hands on his knees, a wave of sweat washing over his skin. The other men congratulate and commiserate around him. Over by the tents the trader’s companion is whooping and waving his hat, shouting to his friend ‘ Ganhaste! Primerio Lugar! ’ A couple of hands rest on his heaving back for a second, accompanied by voices. ‘Well run, Father’, ‘Good race, Padre.’ No one calls him by his name.

♦

Cullen had been waiting all morning for the right time to approach Father Cripps, trying to keep an eye on him between the tide of conversations and duties that events like these always brought his way. So far, however, he’d been unsuccessful and now he had been waylaid again, this time by Mrs Chesterton and her niece, Miss Haverly. Miss Haverly was fresh from England, come to Rhodesia to ‘keep house’ for her aunt, a common euphemism for looking for a husband. It was well known that in Africa the men outnumbered the women ten to one. Cullen knew he was one of a handful of eligible bachelors that Mrs Chesterton had in her sights, but although Miss Haverly was perfectly agreeable he didn’t intend on getting within striking distance. As an aversion tactic he did his best to exaggerate the misfortunes of his way of life, giving the ladies a particularly grim sketch of Colonial Office living. He finished with a tale about another DC who had tried to end the despairing loneliness of his isolated position by cutting his own throat with his razor. He’d survived, but only because his African boy had found him and coaxed his master back to health. He’d returned to England now, Cullen told them, taking a whisper of a voice and a neat choker of scar tissue as mementos of his stint in the bush. He left the two women wide-eyed under their parasols, Mrs Chesterton giving the worried-looking Miss Haverly a squeeze of the arm with her white-gloved hand.

In an attempt to avoid any more run-ins with the overly sociable Enkeldoorn crowd, Cullen made his way around the back of the drinks tent to its far end, where, resting his shoulder against the tent’s corner pole, he could get a clear view of the sports field. From this position he watched the riders preparing for the puissance while also hoping to catch a glimpse of Cripps, with whom he still wanted to talk.

A small group of men sat talking behind the food tent next door, and as he watched the games Cullen also listened in on their conversations and stories. They were sitting in a semi-circle, perched on upturned crates, stools and old kegs. At the moment only one of them was talking, an older man with a clear bald head beaded with droplets of sweat. Although the others listened intently Cullen had no idea what the man was saying. His voice was no more than grunts and moans, but this was of little surprise, given the state of his face.

The speaker’s name was Bill Usher, an Enkeldoorn old-timer who’d been prospecting in the area when the 1896 uprising blew out of the bush like a sudden summer storm. In those days Bill was known for two things and neither of them was his skill as a miner. The first was his storytelling, which was the most engaging anyone knew in Southern Rhodesia, and the second was his wig, a thick head of real hair he’d had made for himself in Dar es Salaam. No one had ever seen him without the hairpiece and as far as they knew it was a permanent feature.

On a hot afternoon back in 1894 Bill was setting charges at the bottom of a thirty-foot shaft when he broke with the habit of a lifetime and removed his wig. The heat had made his head sweat, sending rivulets of perspiration down his forehead into his eyes, blurring his vision. He placed it in his shirt pocket, then got back to lighting the fuses before shouting to the native boys at the top of the shaft to wind him up on the windlass. Like everyone else, the boys had never seen Bill without his wig, and didn’t even know what a wig was. No Mashona had ever felt the need to cover their baldness with another man’s hair. The boys were winding furiously, kicking up clouds of dust with their feet as they gripped for purchase in the soil when they saw Bill’s bald head emerging from the mine. All Bill heard was a cry of’Umtagati! ’ (The Devil!) before the tension of the rope went slack, then gave altogether with a wild lurch that sent him rushing to the bottom of the shaft. The boys had fled, letting the windlass go, its twin handles flaying like a maniac’s arms as they spun backwards, sending Bill down the shaft with a rush of air punctuated by a deadening thud as the basket hit the mine’s floor.

When Bill came to the first thing he saw was the charges, sparking and spitting like wet candle-wicks in front of his face. Realising he only had seconds before they exploded, he frantically began pulling them from their plugs and biting at the fuses. He had the last charge almost to his teeth when it went off, blasting away the fingers of his right hand and part of his lower jaw, leaving a mess of flesh, tongue and shattered mandible hanging from his face.

Ten years later Cullen watched Bill sitting on the crate, talking with the other men. His right hand was hidden inside his jacket and a decade of healing had moulded the disaster area of his chin and mouth into a marble cast of scar tissue and bone. Most of the front of his chin had gone and skin had grown into the gap left by the explosion like ivy occupying the derelict remains of a house. His tongue had not survived, but his upper lip and jaw had, giving him a bizarre overbite above the diminished lower part of his face. He was lucky to be alive, though, and had the charges he’d bought off a scamming trader in Enkeldoorn been authentic and not mostly packed with sand he would almost certainly have been killed and wouldn’t be sitting here now, telling tales and mopping his bald head with his handkerchief.

Bill never wore his wig again, but the accident didn’t stop him telling stories. And people still sat and listened to them. Only his oldest friends had any idea of what he might have been saying, but that didn’t seem to matter. The words went on in his head and his listeners heard the shape of them: the pace, the hand movements, the rise and fall in pitch, the tone of his eyes, the frowns, the nuances and the grim, deformed smile. It was a strange predicament, Cullen thought, watching Bill talk: a storyteller with no speech to tell his stories. If he was literate he would write, he supposed. But he couldn’t, so he was left with this language of sound and movement instead. This resonance of Ianguage. But watching him now he understood why you might want to sit and listen to Bill for a while. Maybe the old man had struck something after all: if not gold, then at least the idea that maybe this is enough, this storytelling without words. As if the words had just been obstacles after all.

While Cullen watched the group watching Bill he also kept an eye on events on the games field, still hoping to catch a chance to talk to Father Cripps. Scanning the crowds he finally saw him, on the slope over on the far side. He was sitting with the Africans there and Cullen could see even from this distance how his body language changed when he spoke with them in Shona. His movements were more fluid and he tilted his head to one side when he listened, just as Cullen had seen the headmen do when they came and crouched outside his office. Some of the Africans wore scraps of material tied about their arms, blood red against the brown and greys of their torn and dirty shirts. These armbands were Cripps’ doing, a mark of temperance he encouraged the men to wear as a sign of their sobriety. It was, Cullen thought, a gesture typical of Cripps: forthright, simple, direct and just a little ridiculous in its naivety.