Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

For the next three years Cyprian worked as Baba Cripps’ messenger and helper, accompanying the priest on his treks across the Charter country. At the end of the third year Cyprian said he wanted to train to be a priest like Baba Cripps and Cripps, satisfied that the boy was serious, arranged for him to go and study under his friend John White at Waddilove. Before he went he asked Cyprian to carry one last message for him, and it was then, one week ago, that Cyprian met Jack Beardsley, who had been waiting for him behind the trunk of an acacia tree long enough to scatter the ground at his feet with a confetti throw of cigarette butts and ash.

♦

Jack was waiting behind the acacia tree because however much he fenced this patch of land the piccaninnies and women from the missionary’s farms persisted in using a foot track that ran across it. Signs and wire were no use, so he had taken to waiting and catching the perpetrators in person. At first he merely gave the native a beating or chased them back down the track past the fence, but recently he had become more inventive with his punishments. Last month he made a boy climb the trunk of the acacia tree while he stood beneath prodding him on with the barrel of his shotgun, and the week before he’d made a girl knock down a hornets’ nest that hung in the same tree with her bare hands. He just wanted to make it clear this land was no longer theirs, that the path could no longer be used, and if it was, they would be punished for their trespassing.

With Cyprian Jack was in playful mood, the morning’s whisky having not yet sunk so far as to drag him down with its cooling plumb-line weight, and so he made the boy dance. Leaning against the tree with a handful of pebbles and his stick under his arm, he threw the stones at the boy’s feet, and shouted at him: ‘Dance, kaffir! Maybe we’ll have a little rain if you do, hey? Dance for more rain!’ He even clapped out a rhythm, clapping faster and faster and never stopping until Cyprian’s eyes began to roll from exhaustion and his whole body was shining with sweat.

♦

Cyprian told Baba Cripps what had happened, and the next day Cripps walked out on the track himself. He told Cyprian not to follow him, but he did, keeping at a distance and crouching behind a bush when Baba Cripps confronted the farm manager. He could not hear what they said to each other but he could tell the two men were arguing. The manager was waving his arms around and at one point he picked up his gun, and Cyprian wondered whether he should run out and knock the man down. When Baba Cripps finally walked back down the track Cyprian saw the priest’s face was flushed and that one vein was standing proud, running across his forehead and scalp into the greying hair above his ear, like the snakes Cyprian had seen, disappearing into the grass when disturbed.

Cyprian told his friends about Baba Cripps and the farm manager and when Jack went into Enkeldoorn that night he complained loudly in the bar of Vic’s Tavern about ‘that bloody priest sticking his nose in’. The other drinkers who had lived in Enkeldoorn for longer than Jack were familiar with Cripps’ behaviour and though they nodded sagely in agreement, they couldn’t help smiling to each other at his outbursts. Still, they told him, slapping his shoulder, it was nothing to worry about, leave the mad old priest to his ways. They bought him drinks to ease his temper and before too long both Jack and the others had forgotten about the troublesome Baba Cripps.

But when Jack is found this morning lying dead in the middle of the Enkeldoorn to Umvuma road, it will not take long for those same men to remember his confrontation with Cripps, and as his body is lifted into the back of William Tully’s new Ford truck they will already be whispering about the priest’s involvement in the accident:

‘Bucks don’t just jump out like that, they just don’t, not when there’s a bike on the road.’

‘I’m telling you, that priest, man, he’s dealing with more than just our God now. He’s been learning that black magic shit from the kaf-firs, I tell you.’ And in Maronda Mashanu too, people will speak in hushed tones about the miracle of the gazelle buck and the farm manager. Old men sitting at the dare of their homesteads will nod their heads slowly when they are told, as if the story of the gazelle buck merely confirmed what they could have told the teller many months before. Small boys will begin trying to command the birds that hop between their parents’ huts and as they fry a pan of peanuts over the fire, mothers will tell stories to their children about Baba Cripps and his power over the animal spirits of the veld.

♦

The rear wheel of the bike stops spinning. The oil has stopped flowing and the gazelle’s breathing has slowed to nothing, like water settling to stillness after a pebble has broken its calm. A couple of the vultures flap down to the road from the umbrella tree. They are joined by a stork and a pair of crows, strutting in the dust. The crows are the first to the body of the gazelle. Hopping onto its muzzle with quizzical heads, they begin pecki ng at the dark reflection of the broken bike, the flat canopy of the umbrella tree and the road, disappearing into the centre of the animal’s eye.

When the Society of the Divine Compassion withdrew from Wren-ingham at the beginning of 1933 the newly appointed Bishop Paget was forced to find a suitable substitute to run both the church and the mission school. Although Wreningham was close to Maronda Mashanu and Cripps had started his career in Southern Rhodesia at the mission, approaching Father Cripps was out of the question. Paget didn’t doubt that even at the age of sixty-three the old priest had the energy for such a task, but over the years he had applied that energy in such a way as to rule himself out of any candidature. A refusal to accept government subsidies for his schools had led to a split between Cripps and the Anglican Church and it was a fissure that Bishop Paget feared too deep to breach. Cripps had even gone so far as to leave Southern Rhodesia, although in the end he came back, four years later, as the Bishop had suspected he would. The old man was more African than European now and Paget couldn’t imagine him settling into an English country parish with anything other than difficulty.

Although Cripps returned to the country, he did not return to the Church. Refusing a licence from the Bishop he gave himself the title ‘Independent Missionary to Mashonaland’ and when necessary followed his name simply with ‘Clerk of Holy Orders’. Again Paget could not pretend to be surprised. At the last Synod before he left for England Cripps had sat, eaten and slept with the African clergy rather than the European. Even his presence was dependent on there being some pressing case in defence of the native and he would rarely attend for any other matter. His world had become black and white and his vision, just black. A black Christ in a black country, in which they, the white settlers, were merely tenants, obstacles to harmony and a presence to be endured.

Many in Salisbury were surprised the Bishop let Cripps carry on his work in his diocese — a rogue missionary operating without official licence.

‘Isn’t he more trouble than he’s worth?’ the Company’s Administrator had asked him at the Governor’s lawn party, hoping, Paget suspected, that he might rid himself of Cripps’ endless petitions via the authority of the Church. The Bishop pointed out, as he did to all such enquires, that Cripps’ land was his own and that he still accepted Cripps’ candidates for ordination, and yes, he would continue to do so until given good reason not to. ‘And besides,’ he had added, wanting to leave no doubt in the Administrator’s mind of where he stood on the matter, ‘I think I know a saint when I see one. I just let him well alone.’