Prayer Of The Crow

By Christopher Holt

Isaac looked up and pointed to some vultures gliding towards us. I quoted an old Shona saying.
"The lion is king but it is always the vulture who is the last to die." "No, Inkosi," said Isaac.
"It is not the vulture who is the last to die. It is the crow." "The crow?"

 

"Yes, Inkosi. And before it dies, it will say a prayer."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookopedia
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393789680

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Christopher Holt

Published by Bookopedia 2020

Copyright © Christopher Holt

The right of Christopher Holt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.

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ISBN-13:  978-1502576552

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To the Memory of Isaac Kanyemma

From the Rhodesia Herald,  April 28th 1974

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MEN STILL MISSING

We have no further news of Vumba Farmer Lucas Harrogate and his employee, Isaac Nkomo, who were reported missing twelve days ago.

According to a statement by BSA Police the two men may have strayed across the border into Mozambique.

FORTY YEARS LATER

The Royal Over-Seas League,

St James’s Street,

London

SW1A 1LR

United Kingdom

Sir Aidan Broadbent, C.B.E.

Tay Burn

Argyll

Scotland

PA35 7HQ

4th January 2014

Dear Sir Aidan,

Re: Enclosed Documents from Kwazulu – Natal, South Africa

Today we received this journal and its accompanying letter which I have resealed in fresh packaging before forwarding on to you.

The parcel was delayed by H.M. Customs because the sender had written on the original wrapping (now destroyed) the words: ‘After handling this, please wash your hands’.

I hasten to add that no contagion of any kind was found but the pages are weather damaged and seem to  

be quite old.

Yours sincerely,

Melissa Gatewood.

Members’ Secretary.

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

Lucas Harrogate

The Hospital de Nossa Senhora dos Espinhos

Mozambique.

For the Sole Attention of

Aidan Broadbent

Former District Administrator

Manicaland Province and Eastern Mashonaland

Rhodesia

The date? It’s odd but there are no calendars here. It feels like early November, just before the rains.

Aidan,

Are you still alive? Yes, of course you are. You are a giant tortoise and you will outlive us all. I assume that you’re retired now and are back somewhere in the UK so I’ll try to have this posted to that club in London you once told me about. I hope you kept up your membership.

So why am I writing now? This must be a shock to you, like seeing someone rising from the grave. Some might say I should leave you alone and continue what’s left of my life in anonymity. No, I cannot do that.

There is only one reason to explain my long silence and only one word is required.

Amnesia. Years and years of it. Forgetfulness so turbid I didn’t even know my own name. I suppose I could still retain most of what I’d learnt from school and I never lost my practical skills. I could quote from Milton and speak bad Shona and better Ndebele. I hadn’t forgotten how to shave without a mirror and I’m sure I could have reconditioned a tractor engine.

No, Aidan, what I lost was the narrative of my life.

But three weeks’ ago, as I sweated on this same bed with the mosquitoes droning around my net and the other patients wailing in their sleep, the amnesia was stripped away like a bandage from my eyes, the old memories raged in and as the night lifted, I broke down and wept like one of the damned.

You will understand why I am now compelled to explain to you what happened. As you know, I had no relatives and you are the only person from those days I believe I can still trust as a friend.

By the way it wasn’t the amnesia that brought me to hospital. I’m here because I have the same grey sickness which killed off nearly a whole village and will probably kill me.

Keep an open mind about my hauntings - call them what you will. Most Westerners deride our ghosts by calling them hallucinations - as if all we have to do is to give them a name and that explains everything. How craven. Let me tell you something, Aidan. Hauntings are born of desecration. The more we desecrate the more ghosts we beget. Carthage, Lidice, Dresden, Nagasaki - all have their hauntings, as does Africa, especially Africa.

Isaac Nkomo doesn’t haunt me but he would have a

right to. I cannot bear to think of Isaac. The poor man hadn’t wanted to come with me in the first place. Did someone take care of his family, Aidan? He had two wives and three children. In my will I left the Nkomos two hundred acres of good land. They would’ve needed every square yard just to feed themselves.

Memory brings back the faces. Shy faces. Loving faces. Faces I have loved. Children’s faces. Faces of solicitude. Silent mouths that say everything. Yapping tongues that say nothing. Flared nostrils, wanton lips. Faces I close my eyes to and gnash my teeth, Ageless faces. Faces of propinquity. Faces of cruelty. A face for every abstract noun.

I was stunned when I remembered that I once had a wife whose eyes could haze over like two pale suns in a blue mist. I think they beguiled every man she ever met.

Trilby! - as frivolous as an English butterfly. Do you remember how she’d drag me off to those parties in Umtali where there was always some lothario out to seduce her? At the buffet I would see their fingers touch. She would serve him salad on his plate and lean all over him. They’d eat their lunch out on the veranda, just the two of them and afterwards disappear for the whole afternoon.

Why did I let it happen, Aidan? Why didn’t I have the guts to put a stop to it? You must have wondered this yourself at the time. I suppose you put it down to David’s death. Absolutely right, of course, but you weren’t to know that only days after his funeral Trilby

made her wild confession and that was the end for both of us.

I’m all sweat. The heat’s got to me and I have to take a shower. Wash your hands, Aidan. Every time you touch these pages, wash your hands. Wash them as diligently as Pontius Pilate.

I’m back. Taking a shower here is never a good experience. Just now as I climbed out I heard something stridulating like a cricket, and nearly stepped on a baboon spider, larger than my hand, drinking under the leaking pipe. It reared up waving its hairy front legs and gave me a rasping hiss before it crawled away to hide behind the lavatory bowl. I’d only just recovered my composure when another one scudded down the drain. The washroom is crawling with them.

My apologies for writing in a cash journal. It’s all I had. Beatriz purloined it for me from the hospital stores. As you can see it’s got a good stiff cover so I didn’t need to rest it on a desk to write.

I’m afraid my narrative meanders. After all, I’ve been digging in a cemetery of dead images. Dates and years elude me and I realised from the start that my realities are not the same as yours.

For this reason I’ve included my hospital interludes and some events of the past that you will know about. It’s not enough for me just to write them down. I need to present them to a contemporary who can vouch for them.

My other observations, the ones about the hospital itself, and my conversations with Beatriz, were

supposed to help me to retain what was left of my

human ordinariness. I’m not sure they succeeded.

At one point, somewhere in the middle of the report, the ball point ran dry but, thank heavens, Beatriz went off to raid the stores again and came back with an indelible pencil. The writing is faint but if you wet the paper, it will go purple and won’t smudge.

You will still find this hard to read. I’m sorry. Being propped up in an iron bed is not conducive to calligraphy. I also felt I should scribble away in haste, like a man awaiting execution.

I’ve set everything out in chapters and numbered the pages just in case the binding falls apart in the heat. It must be a blessing to live under your cool British skies.

Fambai zvakanakam, Aidan,

Go well, my old friend,

Lucas Harrogate.

Chapter 1

We sat at breakfast knowing we had nothing more to say to each other for the rest of our lives. Her two suitcases were already on the veranda for Isaac to load in the car.

For the last time I saw my wife unroll her napkin from its silver ring and lay it over her lap. Betty brought in the orange juice first and afterwards returned with the serving tray of bacon and eggs.

Tinotende, Betty, I said. My throat was dry and I swallowed some orange juice. Betty tried to serve Trilby who shook her head. I wasn’t the slightest bit hungry but Betty had gone to some trouble cooking our breakfast and so not to disappoint her, I had an egg. Trilby just nibbled at her toast and washed it down with coffee which she’d over-milked. It was a relief when Betty began to clear away the plates.

Be quick, Betty, said Trilby. Get the rest of your things and meet me on the veranda.

Betty looked at the dirty plates. But medem ...

Isaac can wash those afterwards. Now do as I say. Get your things.

Up until that moment I hadn’t realised that Trilby was taking Betty with her but I was in no mood to argue.

I got up from the table and went outside.

Throughout the night a heavy guti had been rolling

in from the east. The farm was sodden. Its hilly landscape was like a water colourist’s wet- on- wet. I imagined the perennial springs would be running torrents and the vlei would be a swamp.

I watched Isaac packing the cases into the boot of Trilby’s little Ford Anglia. Betty came out with a carrier bag. She was wearing a head scarf. "Sari zvakanaka, Inkosi, she said to me. She was crying.

Zvakanaka, Go well, Betty, I said as Isaac opened the car door for her and she climbed in the back.

Trilby trooped down the veranda steps wearing a red mac. She tipped her umbrella to the side to give me a light kiss as I opened the driver’s door. As soon as she was inside and without waiting for me to close it, she pulled the door shut and started the engine.

The car spun its wheels on the wet grass as it moved off. The guti was heavier now and it worried me that Trilby hadn’t turned on the windscreen wipers as she accelerated down the farm track. Rustum barked and chased after Isaac who was sprinting to open the lower gates. I remained gripping the fence post while the guti soaked my hair and ran down my cheeks. I gave a stupid wave as Trilby slowed at the cattle grid and then I went inside. Trilby had left me for Clive Lawson.

By midday the guti had cleared though the mealies were still beaded with water and the trees were dripping. I was desperate to get away from the house so

I whistled for Rustum and tramped the six miles to the edge of the farm, a sheer cliff which marked the

frontier with Mozambique.

My grandfather had named this place World’s End. When Trilby and I were first married, we’d often stood hand in hand gazing down at the cloud mass, pierced by mountain summits, each one like an isle of Avalon in a white sea. The vista was infinite, as though one could never reach the end of endlessness. It was a time when the air was honey. At least that’s how it was to me.

No giant waterfalls leapt off World’s End, not like the Pungwe Gorge which the tourists make such a fuss about. Our streams disappeared underground except for one small river which spread itself meanly on the cliff edge before dropping like a curtain of gossamer.

Rising high from the depths was Mitre Buttress. We called it the Spectral Mountain but as you know, Aidan, there are spectral mountains all the way from Inyanga to the Chimanimanis but they’re only appendages to the range. Mitre Buttress stood alone.

The winds howled through the clefts like feral dogs. I looked for a sheltering overhang but the path was strung along an exposed ridge. It was like looking for a gap between the vertebrae of a colossal dinosaur.

Finally I settled myself in the lee of a crag hanging over the chasm. Rustum stretched his long body out on the rock face, his front legs folded like the Sphinx, his short hair quivering and his eyes fixed on a skink with an iridescent tail.

I perched myself on the cliff edge, my legs dangling. As I gazed down at the milky fog hundreds of feet below,

I tortured myself with thoughts of Trilby and Lawson

and what they would be doing together.

Deep in maudlin speculation I was startled by the

close shadow of a hovering bateleur eagle struggling to overfly our ridge. I say a bateleur but it might have been one of the other big raptors, possibly a harpy. This was because all my attention was focused on its prey, a lion cub snatched up from the Mozambique plain. It was an extraordinary sight. The cub had twisted its body to tear at the eagle’s under-breast and thighs. Tufts of bloody feathers were being swept away by the wind until finally the great bird opened its talons and sent the cub spinning into the void. I watched the eagle fold back its legs and ride the updraft into the open sky.

Rustum and I remained on the ridge until the winds eased and the night descended. The moon faded in vapours of fresh guti. A bat shimmied over my head. Something growled among the rocks. Rustum barked and I snapped at him.

"Just shut up, Rustum! Shut up!"

We got back to the house around midnight. Isaac had set out the mail on a tray in the hall. Among the letters, I found a gilt edged card inviting me to the Easter Ball in Umtali. It took a while for me to realise that without Trilby I didn’t have to go. As you know, Aidan, I always hated those occasions when you had to hob nob with the hoi polloi, the so called successful people. I had no wish to meet successful people. Failures never do.

After that hike to World’s End Isaac kept a close watch on me. To the gregarious Isaac my solitude was an aberration which could only end badly. He hid my army FN automatic and its spare magazines, and took

away the little .22/.410 combination rifle and shotgun.

He must have thought I might go and shoot myself or my rival He was wrong. I was too much of a coward and  Lawson wasn’t worth hanging for.

I tried to convince myself that Trilby didn’t want Lawson at all; it was his horse stud she was after with all those pure bred Arabian stallions. Horses are an addiction to some women. Have you a wife now, Aidan? Daughters? Granddaughters? Keep them away from horses.

Trilby’s desertion had made my position stark and frightening. It was like turning on a light in the barn and seeing cobras gliding over the dust. But more terrifying to me than cobras were other people. I began to fear meeting them. Most of all I feared what they might be saying.

Why did she leave him? Couldn’t have been much of a life for her. She was a Londoner you know. I’m sure it wasn’t all her fault. He must have done something! Why would a wife leave a man like Lucas Harrogate? Yes, but you can’t judge a marriage unless you’re in it ... and I know it’s only a rumour but according to...

The fact that none of this had any basis in reality didn’t make the slightest difference. I didn’t want to show my face around Umtali. I also felt a new ineptitude: I had been married to Trilby for so long that I had no idea how to be a single man again in a society of couples.

Fortunately I had taught Isaac how to drive the bakkie. I got him to collect the produce from town, do

the grocery shopping and post my mail. With this

strategy in place, it wasn’t hard to cut myself off from

other people. I resigned from the Farmers’ Federation and the Manicaland Conservation Society. I stopped playing cricket for Leopard Rock. I gave up going to church. Even with the few contacts I had left, I changed personas like an actor until the time came when the genuine Lucas Harrogate evaded me altogether.

I assumed a cruel stoicism. I told myself that life was a lonely business anyway, that despite my marriage I had always really been alone and that coping with isolation was the natural condition of a farmer – just working the land with a God he half believed in.

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Chapter 2

Amnesia is a black wave. It rises over you, drawing you into its blackness, but it’s in the ebbing that the torture begins. Here on this hospital bed I have too much time on my hands and all I can do is to ponder. ‘Ponder’ – an outdated word, yet it serves me well. I ponder how the farm had been my inheritance – and David’s too, if he had lived. So much of the farm is coming back to me. I hear the wind moaning through the kopjes and our little samango monkeys calling ‘Jack! Jack!’ from the tree tops.

One day Trilby demanded that I change the name of the property from Harrogate to Tempest.

It makes good sense, she said.

My chest tightened. Why? Because of the high winds?

"Oh, that! No, of course I don’t mean the winds. I mean exactly what the word says – Tempest!"

I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Oh the play – Shakespeare!

"No, Lucas, I wasn’t thinking of bloody Shakespeare, just the word ‘Tempest’. Tempest! Think of ‘tempestuous’."

Oh, I see.

"No you don’t, Lucas - and that’s the point. I’m talking about a venue for real people." She’d got up and

looked out of the window where the turkeys were scratching in the watermelon patch. After a while she turned to me and sighed. "Real people are tempestuous, she said. They hold wild parties at the drop of a hat. I want to meet people who are alive, who turn up out of the blue without phoning first and never care about overstaying their welcome. People who don’t fret about their Ps and Qs and are not afraid to use four letter words."

I didn’t know what to say to her. "Trilby, I have a farm to run, I raised my voice. I can’t just down tools at the drop of a hat and waste a whole afternoon pouring drinks." My face felt hot.

Waste? I don’t believe it, Lucas Harrogate. You’re actually angry. God be praised! A miraculous departure from the prosaic Lucas. For once, just once, you’ve