Alexandra Fuller - Leaving Before the Rains Come

D ad says hes going to die next week, Vanessa said. The phone line from Zambia was good for once. No echoing, no hopping, no static. Still, I felt the distancing power of the whole of the Atlantic Ocean between us.

Say that again, I said.

Dad, repeated Vanessa loudly and slowly, as if she were an Englishwoman-on-vacation in the tropics. He says hes not going to bat some other chaps innings. He says its not cricket. I heard her light a cigarette: the scrape and hiss of a match; the singe of burning tobacco; the capacious inhale. I recognized we were in danger of doing things on Vanessas indolent schedule. She would be there south of the equator cultivating nonchalance. I would be here north of it conscious of time-lapsing deadlines.

Why? I asked. Of what?

The Bible, Vanessa said, calmly exhaling.

Oh, I said. Well, no one in their right mind takes the Bible literally.

I do, Vanessa said.

Exactly, I triumphed.

I pictured Vanessa at the picnic table on her veranda, a generous helping of South African white wine in front of her. Mosquitoes would be whining around her ankles poisonously. Shed be wiping sweat off her nose, pushing panting dogs away from her lap. I could also hear the rainy-season chorus of Southern Hemisphere woodland-living birds in the background. The tyranny of a Heuglins robin, some chattering masked weavers, and a Sombre bulbul shouting over and over, Willie! Come out and fight! Willie! Come out and fight! Scaaared.

Meanwhile the austerity of winter was still hanging on here. Outside my office window, there were tiny beams of frozen mud showing through tall snowbanks. The only birds I could see were an industrious banditry of black-capped chickadees at the suet feeder. They seemed robustly ascetic little creatures, like tiny chattering monks. Id read they are able to lower their body temperature by up to a dozen degrees on cold winter nights to conserve energy. Torpor was the word the bird books used. Hummingbirds supposedly did the same thing, but they also had to eat sixty times their body weight a day just to stay alive, at least according to a fragment of a poem by Charles Wright I kept above my computer. Now thats a life on the edge, the fragment concludes.

I have to go, I said.

But Vanessa had begun to expand on her vision for Dads funeral arrangements and she was in full voice now. Should there be an old Land Rover or a donkey cart for a hearse? And was that Polish priest from Old Mkushi still alive, the one who had been at my wedding? Because he had lived in the bush long enough not to blink if we asked him to have the service under a baobab tree instead of in a church, right? And perhaps we could get people from the villages to make a choir. There are heaps of those Apostles all over the place, Vanessa pointed out. But do they sing, or do they just sit around draped in white bedsheets, moaning?

I said I didnt know, but Id never forget the time Mum got in a dustup with the Apostle who had moved onto the edge of the farm with his several wives and his scores of children and whose vegetable plot had strayed onto her overflowing pet cemetery. Mum had yelled obscenities, planted her walking stick in the soil, and declared turf war. In return, the Apostle had thrown rocks at Mums surviving dogs, brandished his staff, and recited bellicose passages from the Old Testament. An apoplectic apostolic, Mum had reported with relish, although her neck had been out for weeks after the Apostle shook her, just like Jack Russell with a rat.

Vanessa took another considered drag off her cigarette. Oh right, she said. Id forgotten about that. Maybe Catholics might be better after all. Theyll know proper hymns. Plus Catholics have wine at intermission, dont they? And Mum doesnt have a history of battling them, does she?

Not yet, I said.

And what about entertainment for afterwards? Vanessa asked. People will have driven for days. Theyll be expecting a thrash. Itll have to be a huge party from beginning to end, with a calypso band, Harry Belafonte, and buckets of rum punch. Perhaps we could organize boat races on the Zambezi in dugout canoes. That would be groovy. And what about a greasy pole over one of Mums fishponds for the especially inebriated mourners, because you know its going to be Alcoholics Unanimous from beginning to end? And maybe we could have a maze like the one we had at Mum and Dads fortieth anniversary, Vanessa said. Remember?

I would never forget that either. There had been shots of something fairly stiff at the entrance to the maze, and some guests got so drunk right off the bat they were stranded in dead ends until dawn. But I didnt bring this up, nor did I say that I thought Vanessas suggestions were murderously bad. How many funerals did she want in one week? In the interests of time (mine, chiefly) I said I thought they were all ideas worth considering. That is, when Dad is actually dead, I said. And then I added, in a way that I hoped suggested a signing off, Okay, Van. Im quite busy here.

But Vanessa wouldnt be deterred; she poured herself another glass of wine and rattled on. No, no, no, she said. We have to plan now, well be too distraught at the time. She reminded me she wouldnt be able to do any of the readings because she was illiterate, as well we all knew. Mum certainly couldnt do a reading, or much of anything, because she would be an inconsolable wreck. And Richard shouldnt be allowed anywhere near a pulpit. Hell just grunt and growl and terrify the congregation, Vanessa said. No, Al, when Dad dies, youre going to have to do the urology.

A week later, March 8, 2010, Dad turned seventy. The day came and went, and in spite of Psalm 90:10 my father didnt die. To prove the miracle of his continued corporal existence among us, Vanessa e-mailed me a photograph of his funeral party turned birthday bash. There he was on her veranda in the Kafue hills, his arm around Mums shoulders. My parents were wearing matching straw hats and expressions of matching lopsided hilarity. Between them, they were holding a bouquet of beaten-up-looking yellow flowers. Daffodils, I thought, but I wasnt sure. For one thingdue to the camera shaking, or the subjects swayingthe photograph was a little blurry. And for another thing, Vanessa steals most of her flowers from Lusaka hotel gardens, and daffodils seemed unlikely for all sorts of reasons.