The Angels Weep (24 page)

Isazi brought the wagon to a halt below the veranda, and, like
a conjuror, drew back the canvas hood to reveal the contents. The
crowd flocked away to leave Mr Rhodes sitting alone beside his
fancy coach.

Within minutes Jordan sidled up beside his brother.

‘Ralph, Mr Rhodes would like to purchase a few cases of
your best champagne.’

‘I’m not selling in job lots. Tell him it’s
a full wagon or nothing.’ Ralph smiled genially. ‘At
twenty pounds a bottle.’

‘That’s piracy,’ Jordan gasped.

‘It’s also the only available champagne in
Matabeleland.’

‘Mr Rhodes will not be pleased.’

‘I’ll be pleased enough for both of us,’
Ralph assured him. ‘Tell him it’s cash, in
advance.’

While Jordan went with the bad news to his master, Ralph
sauntered across to the bridegroom and put one arm around his
shoulder.

‘Be grateful to me, Harry my boy. Your wedding is going
to be a hundred-year legend, but have you told the lovely
Victoria about her honeymoon yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Harry Mellow admitted.

‘Wise decision, laddie. Wankie’s country does not
have the appeal of the bridal suite at the Mount Nelson Hotel in
Cape Town.’

‘She will understand,’ Harry said with more force
than belief.

‘Of course she will,’ Ralph agreed, and turned to
meet Jordan who returned brandishing the cheque which Mr Rhodes
had scribbled on a tattered champagne label.

‘How charmingly appropriate,’ Ralph murmured, and
tucked it into his top pocket. ‘I’ll send Isazi back
to fetch the next wagon.’

The rumour of wagonloads of free champagne for all at Khami
Mission turned Bulawayo into a ghost town. Unable to compete with
these prices, the barman of the Grand Hotel closed down his
deserted premises and joined the exodus southwards. As soon as
the news reached them, the umpires called ‘stumps’ on
the cricket match being played on the police parade ground, and
the twenty-two players still in their flannels formed a guard of
honour for Isazi’s wagon, while behind them followed what
remained of the town’s population on horse, cycle or
foot.

The little Mission church could hold only a fraction of the
invited and uninvited, the rest of them overflowed into the
grounds, though the heaviest concentrations were always to be
found around the two widely separated champagne wagons. Copious
draughts of warm champagne had made the men sentimentally
boisterous and many of the women loudly weepy, so a thunderous
acclaim greeted the bride when she at last made her appearance on
the Mission veranda.

On her brother-in-law’s arm, and attended by her
sisters, Victoria made her way down the alley that opened for her
across the lawn.

She was pretty enough to begin with, with her green eyes
shining and the vivid coppery mass of her hair upon the white
satin of her dress, but when she returned the same way, this time
on the arm of her new husband, she was truly beautiful.

‘All right,’ Ralph announced. ‘It’s
all legal – now the party can truly begin.’

He signalled to the band, a hastily assembled quartet led by
Matabeleland’s only undertaker on the fiddle, and they
launched into a spirited Gilbert and Sullivan. This was the only
sheet music available north of the Limpopo. Each member of the
quartet provided his own interpretation of
The Mikado
, so
that the dancers could waltz or polka to it as the inclination
and the champagne dictated.

By dawn of the following day, the party had started to warm
up, and the first fist-fight broke out behind the church.
However, Ralph settled it by announcing to the shirtsleeved
contestants, ‘This will never do, gentlemen, it is an
occasion of joy and goodwill towards all mankind.’ And then
before they realized his intention, he dropped them on their
backs in quick succession with a left and right swing that
neither of them saw coming. Then he helped them solicitously back
onto their feet and led them weaving groggily to the nearest
drink wagon.

By dawn on the second day, the party was in full swing. The
bride and bridegroom, reluctant to miss a moment of the fun, had
not yet left on their honeymoon and were leading the dancing
under the spathodea trees. Mr Rhodes, who had rested during the
night in the mule coach, now emerged and ate a hearty breakfast
of bacon and eggs cooked by Jordan over the open fire, washed it
down with a tumbler of champagne, and was moved to oratory. He
stood on the driver’s seat of the coach and spoke with all
his usual eloquence and charisma honed to an edge by a sense of
occasion and his own burning belief in his subject.

‘My Rhodesians,’ he addressed his audience, and
they took it as an endearment rather than a claim to ownership,
and loved him for it. ‘Together you and I have made a great
leap forward towards the day when the map of Africa will be
painted pink from Cape Town to Cairo, when this fair continent
will be set beside India, a great diamond beside a lustrous ruby,
in the crown of our beloved Queen—’

They cheered him, the Americans and Greeks and Italians and
Irish as loudly as the subjects of the ‘beloved
Queen’ herself.

Robyn St John endured half an hour of these sentiments before
she lost control of the frosty dignity that Ralph had counselled,
and from the veranda of the homestead she began a counter reading
of her own, as yet unpublished, poetry:

Her high, clear voice rang over Mr Rhodes’; heads turned
back and forth between the two of them like the spectators at a
tennis match.

‘This is only a beginning,’ Mr Rhodes raised his
volume, ‘a great beginning, yes, but a beginning
nonetheless. There are ignorant and arrogant men, not all of them
black,’ and even the dullest listener recognized that the
allusion was to old Kruger, the Boer president of the South
African Republic in the Transvaal, ‘who must be allowed the
opportunity to come beneath the shield of the
pax
britannica
of their own free will, rather than be driven to
it by force of arms.’

His audience was once again entranced, until Robyn selected
another of her works in matching warlike mood, and let fly
with:

The audience’s critical faculty was dulled by two days
and two nights of revelry and they applauded Robyn’s
impassioned delivery with matching fervour, though the sense of
it was thankfully lost upon them.

‘The Lord save us,’ Ralph groaned, ‘from
emetic jingoism and aperient scansion!’ And he wandered
away down the valley to get out of earshot of the competing
orators, carrying a bottle of Mr Rhodes’ champagne in one
hand, and with his son perched upon his shoulder. Jonathan wore a
sailor suit with Jack Tar collar, and a straw boater on his head;
the ribbon hung down his back, and he clucked and urged his
father on with his heels as though he was astride a pony.

There were fifty head of slaughter-oxen and a thousand gallon
pots of Juba’s beer to account for, and the black wedding
guests were giving the task their dedicated attention. Down here
the dancing was even more energetic than that under the spathodea
trees, the young men were leaping and twisting and stamping until
the dust swirled waist-high about them and the sweat cut runnels
down their naked backs and chests. The girls swayed and shuffled
and sang, and the drummers hammered out their frenetic rhythms
until they dropped exhausted, and others snatched up the wooden
clubs to beat the booming hollowed-out tree-trunks. While
Jonathan, on Ralph’s back, squealed with delight, one of
the slaughter-oxen, a heavy hump-backed red beast, was dragged
out of the kraal. A spearsman ran forward and stabbed it through
the carotid and jugular. With a mournful bellow the animal
collapsed, kicking spasmodically. The butchers swarmed over the
carcass, flaying off the hide in a single sheet, delving for the
titbits, the kidneys and liver and tripes, throwing them wet and
shiny onto the live coals, hacking through the rack of ribs,
slicing off thick steaks and heaping them on the racks over the
cooking-fire.

Half raw, running with fat and juice, the meat was stuffed
into eager mouths and the beerpots tilted to the hot blue summer
sky. One of the cooks tossed Ralph a ribbon of tripe, scorched
from the fierce flames, and with the contents still adhering to
the stomach lining. Without a visible qualm, Ralph stripped away
the lining and bit off a chunk of the sweet white flesh
beneath.

‘
Mushle
!’ he told the cook. ‘Good!
Very good.’ And passed up a sliver to the child on his
back. ‘Eat it, Jon-Jon, what doesn’t kill you, makes
you fat,’ and his son obeyed with noisy relish, and agreed
with his father’s verdict.

‘
Mushle
, it’s really
mush
,
Papa.’

Then the dancers surrounded them, prancing and whirling,
challenging Ralph. Ralph sat Jonathan on the fence of the cattle
kraal, where he had a grandstand view. Then he strode into the
centre and set himself in the heroic posture of the Nguni dancer.
Bazo had taught him well when they were striplings, and now he
raised his right knee as high as his shoulder and brought his
booted foot down on the hard earth with a crash, and the other
dancers hummed in encouragement and approbation.

‘Jee! Jee!’

Ralph leaped and stamped and postured, and the other dancers
were pressed to match him, the women clapped and sang and on the
kraal fence Jonathan howled with excitement and pride.

‘Look at my daddy!’

His shirt soaked with sweat, his chest heaving, chuckling
breathlessly, Ralph dropped out at last and lifted Jonathan back
onto his shoulder. The two of them went on, greeting by name
those they recognized in the throng, accepting a proffered morsel
of beef or a swallow of tart gruel-thick beer, until at last on
the rise beyond the kraal, seated on a log, aloof from the
dancers and revellers, Ralph found the man he was seeking.

‘I see you, Bazo the Axe,’ he said, and sat down
on the log beside him, set the champagne bottle between them and
passed Bazo one of the cheroots for which he had developed a
taste so long ago on the diamond fields. They smoked in silence,
watching the dancers and the feasting until Jonathan grew
restless and edged away to seek more exciting occupation, and
found it immediately.

He was confronted by a child a year or so younger than he was.
Tungata, son of Bazo, son of Gandang, son of great Mzilikazi, was
stark naked except for the string of bright ceramic beads around
his hips. His navel popped out in the centre of his fat little
belly, his limbs were sturdy, dimpled knees and bracelets of
healthy fat at his wrists. His face was round and smooth and
glossy, his eyes huge and solemn as he examined Jonathan with
total fascination.

Jonathan returned his scrutiny with equal candour, and made no
attempt to pull away as Tungata reached and touched the collar of
his sailor suit.

‘What is your son’s name?’ Bazo asked,
watching the children with an inscrutable expression on his dark
features.

‘Jonathan.’

‘What is the meaning of that name?’

‘The gift of God,’ Ralph told him.

Jonathan suddenly took the straw hat from his own head and
placed it upon that of the Matabele princeling. It made such an
incongruous picture, the beribboned boater on the head of the
naked black boy with his pot belly and little uncircumcised penis
sticking out under it at a jaunty angle, that both men smiled
involuntarily. Tungata gurgled with glee, seized Jonathan’s
hand and dragged him away unprotestingly into the throng of
dancers.

The lingering warmth of that magical moment between the
children thawed the stiffness between the two men. Fleetingly,
they recaptured the rapport of their young manhood. They passed
the champagne bottle back and forth, and when it was empty, Bazo
clapped his hands and Tanase came to kneel dutifully before him
and offered a clay pot of bubbling brew. She never looked up at
Ralph’s face, and she withdrew as silently as she had
come.

At noon she returned to where the two men were still deep in
conversation. Tanase led Jonathan by one hand and Tungata, still
with the straw hat on his head, by the other. Ralph, who had
forgotten all about him, started violently when he saw his son.
The child’s beatific grin was almost masked by layers of
grime and beef fat. His sailor suit was the victim of the
marvellous games which he and his newly found companion had
invented. The collar hung by a thread, the knees were worn
through, and Ralph recognized some of the stains as ash and ox
blood and mud and fresh cow dung. He was less certain of the
others.

‘Oh my God,’ Ralph groaned, ‘your mother
will strangle us both.’ He picked up his son gingerly.
‘When will I see you again, old friend?’ he asked
Bazo.

‘Sooner than you think,’ Bazo replied softly.
‘I told you I would work for you again when I was
ready.’

‘Yes,’ Ralph nodded.

‘I am ready now,’ said Bazo simply.

V
ictoria was
amazingly gracious in her acceptance of the change of honeymoon
venue, when Harry Mellow explained shamefacedly, ‘Ralph has
this idea. He wants to follow up one of the African legends, at a
place called Wankie’s country, near the great falls that
Doctor Livingstone discovered on the Zambezi river. Vicky, I know
how you looked forward to Cape Town and to seeing the sea for the
first time, but—’