One Hundred and Four Horses. Mandy Retzlaff

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       Chapter 2

      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; СКАЧАТЬ