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OPENING UP THE bush to set up a farm is like riding a horse; you cannot command the land to do your bidding—you can only ask it. Like a horse, the land has its own character. It can be willful. It can be defiant. But it can give great joy as well, unveiling its secrets for you as you come closer and learn to work together for a greater good.
As we gazed out over virgin bush, Pat and I shared a daunted look. The land was rugged, scrubby lowlands out of which grew the wild, rocky hills we called koppies. Though the farm was bordered by two rivers, one a perennial stream and the other flowing north into the great Zambezi, the soil on which we meant to farm was fertile yet difficult to handle, being very hard and compacted, the kind of land that was impossible to cultivate without heavy machinery and careful management. The thought of driving back the bush and seeing fields of green tobacco, acres of tomatoes, and the rich glow of Mexican marigolds was enough to buoy us for the moment, but there was no use denying it: this was land into which only somebody as determined as Pat would dare to pour his life. There is no doubt that my husband is the most determined and optimistic man I have ever met. Were he not that way, our lives today would be very different.
The land we had bought had been a farm once before, during the Rhodesian tobacco boom of the early 1960s. For decades, though, no crops had been cultivated here; only cattle had roamed from river to river. In their fields, the mfuti trees with their long feathered leaves grew tall again, and the bush had crept down from the hillsides. For all its wildness, the farm was exactly what Pat had been dreaming of: a place where we might test ourselves like the first African pioneers, somewhere he could use all his years of study, a place we could shape and leave for our children.
All the history books had the same wisdom to share. It was not the pioneers who benefited from the years they did battle with the land; it was those who came after: their children.
“Where to begin?” I asked. Paul, Jay, and Kate gathered behind us.
“It begins,” said Pat, “with tomatoes.”
This land could not be tamed by Retzlaffs alone. In the days that followed, we hired more than 250 workers, who began to build their homes here, too. Never and his wife, Mai Never; our driver, Charles; our gardener, Oliver; and Kate’s nanny, Celia—only once we were all together could we begin. Farms in Zimbabwe often had whole villages of workers living on the land, with their own farm schools and medical clinics, and our farm was to be no different. We would have a core of workers who lived here, and, with the harvests, more would join us as seasonal contractors.
All over Crofton the rooms were dominated by big contour maps and plans Pat had drawn up: where best to build the grading sheds for some future crop of tobacco; how best the roads might run so that they were protected from natural erosion; how much of the land could be irrigated without resorting to building a dam. It was a broad, holistic approach to farming, a scheme Pat had been dreaming of since the first years of our marriage. To see it come to fruition was the culmination not only of a dream, but of decades of hard work.
Those first months were spent driving back the bush. It would take a man four days to carve a crater and fell one of the giant mfuti trees that flourished here, and four more to chop that tree into cords for shipping away. Even then the work was not done, for half the tree remained underground and would not truly leave the land until five or six seasons had passed.
Some days it was imperceptible, the farm changing only as slowly as a glacier melts. Other days, the bush had visibly receded between dawn and dusk, and we would go to bed on a farm different from the one on which we had awakened. The children would go off to boarding school during the weeks and return for weekends to a farm that was never the same: only the same sheltering sky, the same herds of tsessebe, the same mother and father warning them about the dangers of the bush.
As the first yields of tomatoes were being harvested and packed into crates, Pat and I rode on horseback between the fields, with Frisky and a chestnut mare named Sunny. Tomatoes flourished on virgin land, and we knew how much they enriched the soil for different crops to come: tobacco, cotton, maize, and export vegetables and flowers.
Frisky whinnied softly underneath Pat.
“What next?” I began, watching the shadowed outlines of our workers move between the rows.
“I was thinking,” Pat joked, “that I might get some turkeys …”
It is a curious feeling when your heart swells and sinks all at once.
Years ago, when we had barely been married a year, I had come to understand the particular nature of Pat’s insanity, his desire to collect and hoard animals of just about every description. As Zimbabwe was being born out of the ruins of Rhodesia, Pat had worked at an agricultural research station called Grasslands, where company policy had been to slaughter the smallest lamb every time a sheep gave birth to triplets. Unwilling to accept this, Pat had taken to bringing them home, until our garden was heaving with his own private flock. While baby Paul crawled around the living room, he was surrounded by dozens of baby sheep, bleating out for their bottles. I became particularly skilled as a surrogate ewe, able to hold six bottles between my legs for the lambs to suckle while I fed another four out of my hands.
If this had been the limit of Pat’s madness, perhaps I could have written it off as a strange idiosyncrasy. Soon, however, Pat found himself the proud recipient of a gaggle of turkeys as well—and, as turkeys are usually very bad mothers, he insisted that each turkey have its own cage in which to lay her eggs.
Pat, of course, had to go to work during the day, so the management of the Retzlaff menagerie invariably fell to me. One of the most important of my duties was to move the turkey cages each day, so that they were on fresh ground and could be exposed to the very best sun and shade, dependent on which each needed. Often, I felt as if I was being watched over by Frisky, who would immediately report on my work to her beloved Pat when he came home from work. Those two, I had begun to understand, were as thick as thieves.
After grueling days of feeding lambs and horses—not to mention our very young son—perhaps I could be forgiven for forgetting to move the turkey cages in accordance with Pat’s regimen. One day, exhausted by the morning’s efforts, I decided that the turkey cages would have to wait. That evening, while I was cooking supper, Pat came home and conducted his evening inspection of all his beloved animals, the toddler Paul perched happily on his shoulders. I was stooped over the pot, breathing in the beautiful aromas of lamb—not our own, I hasten to add—when I heard Pat’s roar. In seconds, he appeared in the kitchen doorway, his face purpling in fury.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my thoughts turning to baby Paul.
Pat simply lifted an accusing finger.
“You,” he said, “haven’t moved a single turkey cage.”
At Crofton, as he brought up the subject of turkeys again, I looked away, trying not to acknowledge Pat’s wicked grin. I reined Sunny around, as if to make for home.
“This time,” I said, “Jay and Kate can look after them.”
In August the whole country would change color. These were the first stirrings of Zimbabwean spring. Across the farm, the msasa trees came into new leaf. Light pinks deepened into pinks and reds; reds softened into vivid mauves; mauves ebbed away, leaving a rich dark green in their wake. In the evenings we would ride from Crofton farmhouse and watch as the bush came alive in this new array of color.
On one particular morning, driving to pick up Paul at school, I was late. Even the traffic in the city of Harare seemed to know it, slowing down and jamming at every intersection I tried to drive through, as if deliberately trying to vex me. As I checked and rechecked the time, my only consolation was that Paul knew the kind of life we led too well; he wouldn’t be expecting me to be right on schedule.
He was waiting at the bus stop in a scuffed-up school uniform when I arrived, at five feet tall an image of his father in miniature. Like his father, he scowled at me, but, like his father, he didn’t mean it.
Also like his father, Paul loved all animals. My eye caught something squirming under the folds of his school blazer.
“His name’s Fuzzy,” Paul said, sliding into the front seat. The tiny head of a puppy, a Jack Russell crossed with a Maltese poodle, poked its head out of the top of his collar, inspected me with mischievous eyes, and then ducked back to wriggle against Paul’s chest. “He’s saying hello.”
“Darling, where …”
I had taken off into traffic, my eyes flitting between the road and this ball of fur that Paul was now feeding the end of an ice cream cone from his pocket. From somewhere, horns blared. I looked up, managing to correct my course just in time.
“Remember when school gave me Imprevu?”
Actually, we had paid a fortune for Imprevu. She was a beautiful bay mare, extremely eager, responsive, and exciting to ride, and she would be ridden by Paul and Pat regularly after Frisky died. She had belonged to the riding school, but they were only too pleased to send her to Crofton and receive a princely payment in return.
“Well, it was the same thing. My teacher gave him to me.”
“Just gave him to you?”
“He knows how much we like animals.”
I had to smile.
“Look over your shoulder, Paul.”
Paul looked over his shoulder, Fuzzy craning his neck the same way. On the backseat sat a crate with two little Scotties peeking out. Each of them wore a perfect little tartan bow, and their tiny black eyes considered Fuzzy carefully.
“I’ve just picked them up,” I said. “Aren’t they adorable?”
“Mum!” Paul exclaimed. “You’re just like Dad!”
“Don’t start on that. Your father’s much worse than me …”
Paul was fixated on the box of scrabbling pups. I had long been fascinated by Scotties. They looked perfectly adorable, with black eyes like the ones in the face of a teddy bear. Well, if Pat could go around collecting turkeys and horses and sheep, I had to be allowed a little indulgence of my own. Perhaps it was my husband’s madness rubbing off on me.
Fuzzy made a spirited squirm out of Paul’s arms and dropped into the backseat with the other pups.
“Have you told Dad?” asked Paul.
“Let’s keep it quiet for a while.” I grinned. “I’ve been promising him another Great Dane …”
Of all our children, Paul was the most eager to live a life in the saddle. Imprevu, the mare he had brought home from school, was similar to Frisky in many ways. She required an experienced hand and was ridden only by Paul and Pat. Paul experienced the same joy in saddling her up and exploring our farm as Pat had as a boy with Frisky.
Jay did not have the same passion for horses but loved the bush and spent his time roaming the farm with his best friend, Henry, hunting and birding—but I would often see Kate marveling at her father in Frisky’s saddle, or Paul as he took off on Imprevu, kicking up dust as they cantered along the winding farm tracks. Soon, it would come time for her to learn to ride, and she would do it with the very same partner with whom Pat had spent those idyllic years of his own childhood.
When Kate was on Frisky’s back, everything seemed to come together at Crofton. I would see her sitting in the saddle, her father just behind her, Kate’s hands nestled inside his, with the reins folded up in between. She would tug and tease at the reins and, in return, Frisky would obey the simplest commands. Somehow, she seemed to know that this was Pat’s daughter on her back, and she treated her with such kindness, such simple charity, that it pulled at my heartstrings to see it. In her old age, Frisky had lost the mischievous, flighty temperament of her earlier days—but there wasn’t a thing she wouldn’t do for Pat, or in turn for little Kate.
Kate took to riding like her father and eldest brother before her. She was a natural, and soon she would join Paul and Pat at the local equestrian events and paper chases. Seeing her in Frisky’s saddle, I often thought back to that cheeky little pony Ticky and how he had put me off horses when I was a girl. I wondered what I might have been like if I had had the same childhood as Pat, running wild on a Rhodesian farm with a beloved horse underneath me.
One morning, Pat and I saddled up Frisky and three other horses and set out with Jay and Kate to check the fences around the farm. The ride was long, and the sun was blistering overhead. As we approached the Munwa River, Jay reined in and gestured for Kate to do the same. They were looking, almost longingly, at the crystal waters. Jay gave me the same pleading look I’d seen before.
“Can we go for a swim?”
The horses, too, looked as if they needed a rest, so we dismounted and Pat held the reins of all the horses while I helped Jay and Kate undress.
As the children were preparing to run into the waters, Pat loosened his hold on the reins—but Frisky, covered in a sheen of glistening sweat, only looked nervously at the riverbank, refusing to go near. Pat and I exchanged a curious look and no sooner had we done so than Frisky released a desperate whinny and began to stamp her feet.
Pat, as he had done ever since he was a young boy, put his arms around Frisky, patting her neck and rubbing her flank, whispering to her so that she might calm down. Yet, no matter how much he consoled her, Frisky could not be calmed. As Jay and Kate scrambled out of their socks and headed for the water, she picked up her front hooves and smashed them back down. There was something desperate, almost pleading, rolling in the back of her throat.
I turned to Jay and Kate. They were almost at the water’s edge. Only then did I see what Frisky had seen. The dark eyes of a crocodile glimmered menacingly, just above the surface of the water.
Yelling for Pat, I hurtled down to the riverbank and grabbed Jay and Kate to drag them back. From the water, the croc looked at us, shifting its malevolent eyes.
Back at Frisky’s side, listening to her gather her composure, I shuddered.
“No swimming today,” I said.
Terrified at what might have happened, we hastily turned the horses from the Munwa River to make the ride back home, but for days afterward I could not stop imagining the look of terror in Frisky’s eyes: not that anything might happen to her, but that something terrible might befall one of our children. It is not for nothing that people say they can see keen intelligence shimmering in a horse’s eyes. If I had never seen it before, Frisky was the one to teach me that lesson: the horse sees, the horse knows, the horse cares and remembers. We think we are their guardians, but sometimes—just sometimes—they turn out to be our guardians as well.
It was a lesson we would keep coming back to throughout our lives, for reasons none of us could begin to imagine.
The lands were cleared, plowed, and treated. The irrigation pipes stretched for long kilometers from the rivers that encircled us. The grading sheds were ready, the curing barns waiting eagerly for their first crop; the tobacco seeds were germinating in the seed beds, waiting to be transplanted to the land.
All we needed was the rain, but the rain wouldn’t come.
Between 1993 and 1995 only fourteen inches of rain fell. The rivers disappeared, the game looked emaciated, and the waters in our neighboring Two Tree Hill Dam fell imperceptibly each day, until they were only a brown shimmer in the bottom of the basin, the dam wall standing high and exposed.
In those droughts, tomatoes were all that we had. The farm was telling us that she could do no more. They grew in the fields all year round, so all that year I was setting out after dark to sell them, running long circuits around Harare and, now, into the villages and townships, too. Along the way I could see other Zimbabweans selling tomatoes, maize, and bush fruits on the sides of the road. It did not come to this for us, but as I looked into the grading sheds and saw the poor, wilted leaves of tobacco we had managed to harvest, I wondered what we had done. Had we sacrificed our children’s future by gambling on clouds in the sky?
Those skies were endless expanses of blue, cruel in their blank simplicity. Beneath them, Crofton baked. I walked along the narrow channels between the tomato vines, lifting leaves and cupping each green fruit in my hand, turning them gently to look for signs of infestation or disease. Along the edge of the field, Pat and Frisky followed one of the trails, calling out to workers in the opposite fields. Every time I saw a mottled leaf or serrated edge showing the telltale signs of some hungry insect, I called out. Pat turned to acknowledge me. When he did not hear, I shouted louder. Here, I said. Here, and here. In silent fury, he swung from the saddle. He wanted nothing more than to ignore me, to go back to wrestling with blighted tobacco in the fields or opening another stretch of bush in the deranged belief that the rains would shortly come. Instead, he strode over to lift the same leaves I had lifted, to see the early signs of disease. He exhaled, his face breaking into a muted grin as he realized how full of fire he had been, and called over one of our workers. In minutes they were there to spray the vines.
Opening up a farm, I constantly reminded him, was not only about driving back the bush. There were smaller, more insidious enemies to beat back as well.
“I’m sorry, Pat. There’s nothing else for it. It really would be the kindest thing.”
We stood in the garden of Crofton farmhouse. Dave, one of our local vets, crouched beside me. In front of us, the little foal Deja-vous, only recently born to Paul’s mare Imprevu, lay with her head in ten-year-old Kate’s lap.
“It’s deep, Dave,” I said, “but isn’t there anything you could do?”
“With an injury like this, it’s often better to put them to sleep,” Dave said.
Pat bristled. “No, David. Let’s give her a chance and see.”
As the vet said his good-byes, promising to come back if we needed him, Kate nuzzled Deja-vous. The little foal’s eyes revolved in their orbits and fixed on her. For a moment, the foal seemed to want to stand. Then, realizing the pain in her leg was too great, she simply laid her head back down.
She had been in the paddock with her mother when she had become entangled in a length of wire fence. By the time her panic had roused the attention of a passing worker, she had struggled against the wire so much that it had tightened around her front leg, cutting her so that the bone was exposed. When Pat arrived, Deja-vous was in a weak, depleted state. Her mother stood guard over the trapped foal, and when Pat got near, it was to find the foal spent from her exertions, torn muscle glistening where the wire constricted her leg.
After cutting her free, Pat had carried the tiny foal into the garden at Crofton, where Kate attentively lay down with her. When I called for the vet, I knew already what he would say. Deja-vous, I thought as I put down the phone, didn’t stand a chance.
Back in the garden, I saw Pat crouching over the ailing foal, dressing the wound.
“You wouldn’t let him, would you, Dad?”
“Sometimes it is the kindest thing.” Pat stroked the little foal’s head. “But not this time, Kate. Not for this little thing …”
“What do we do for her?”
Pat was silent for only a second. “We don’t give up on her,” he said. “You don’t give up on her, Kate. The bone isn’t broken. She’ll walk again. But the cut’s deep. Her leg’s torn up. She’ll get infected. She’ll get a fever. She’ll need us. Need you.”
Kate’s eyes were open wide, but her arm lay along the length of Deja-vous’s back. They both seemed so tiny together, shadowed by the mango tree.
“Dad,” she whispered with a defiance I had never heard in her voice, “where do we start?”
I opened the cupboard at the top of the stairs. Two eyes glimmered out, a round, feathered face looming in the darkness.
I simply placed the folded sheets inside and closed the cupboard. This wasn’t the first time that one of Jay’s birds had found its way into one of the cupboards and decided to take up residence there. In fact, I was so used to seeing one of his hawks or owls lurking in some crevice at Crofton that I barely registered any surprise. Ours, you see, was not just a family home; it was positively a zoo as well, and Jay was in love with birds.
“It’s your turn to take Jay out tonight,” said Pat, tramping up the stairs behind me.
As I followed Pat into our bedroom, I caught sight of another pair of eyes, these hidden behind Jay’s long blond mop, shining at me from the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t yet dark, and our thirteen-year-old son was already waiting. He had become a keen falconer since starting high school, and he plagued us incessantly to take him and his falcon Buffy out on night drives so that he could practice hunting with her. Buffy only hunted at night, and without this practice Jay was apt to become disgruntled, mischievous, and more taciturn than ever. And Pat or I had to go with them. But I really didn’t want to go out tonight.
I snatched up a deck of cards.
“I’ll play you for it.”
When we were at loggerheads like this, sometimes there was nothing for it but to play a hand of cards. The one who pitched the high card would get to sleep in the warm comfort of our bed, while the loser would have to drive Jay and Buffy out into the bush to go hunting. Sensing no other way out, Pat nodded.
I cut the deck and cut it again. I passed it to Pat, who shuffled it in his big hands. He cut it, I recut it, he cut it again, then he fanned it out and offered it up.
“Just deal it,” I said. The tension was unbearable.
Pat picked a card from the top of the deck: the seven of hearts. My hand hovered over the deck. I cut it again and lifted the top card.
The three of spades.
“Sorry, darling,” Pat said.
Two hours later, I set out behind the wheel of our truck, swinging out of Crofton and up into the bush. The night was close around us, the stars hanging high above the mfuti and msasa. In the back of the truck, Jay stood upright, his falcon Buffy blinkered and leashed to his wrist. Eagerly, he urged me on.
I could never resent these midnight trips—Jay had never been a boy suited to school like his brother, and it was only out here in the bush that he had found real confidence—but I had been awake for eighteen hours already. At a high ridge Jay unleashed Buffy; she turned and dived in the headlights of the truck, her talons sinking into one of the tiny nightjars that made their home here.
Jay looked at me. “Let’s go higher.”
“Darling, aren’t we finished yet?”
Jay frowned. “I think we should go higher.”
This, I thought, must have been how Patrick’s father used to feel.
