Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms Read Online Free PDF Page B

after it. Ja ?”
    â€œ Ja . Of course.” She looked at her father, and her slow, drunken-love smile, the one she reserved for him, took over her face. “I’d love that, Dad. We could call it Nguruve, hey, to encourage it.”
    â€œ Nguruve ” was Shona for “pig,” and “ Shumba ” was Shona for “lion”; and the captain’s terrier puppy was called Bumhi, which was the fiercest kind of wild dog; and Will was called wildcat. “Everything has parts of other things,” she’d told Simon. She’d been trying to say, nobody is just sweet, or just cruel. Simon had said, “ Ja . You’ve got eyebrows like chongololos.” He had crocodile, she reckoned, and leopard and horse in him.
    As if he’d followed the last part of her thought, her father said, “I found Simon upside down on duty, hand-standing in the veggie patch. I hit him on the head with a cabbage.”
    Will laughed. She could picture it.
    â€œAnd Lucian Mazarotti’s back from Harare.”
    â€œOh! Is he better?” Lucian had had cholera.
    â€œBetter. As healthy and strong as a lion. As strong as you , little Cartwheel. And he brought back six sacks of mealie porridge, and a drum of oil, and a bull calf for his heifertied up in his truck like a chicken. Ja ”—and her father’s smile was slower than his speech, deep and satisfied—“all is well with him. He’s got that gleam back on his skin, like a god.”
    â€œGood! I’m glad. Good ! ” Will felt her stomach blaze with pleasure. Lucian owned the land on the outskirts of Two Tree Hill Farm. He was Will’s hero. There were diviners on the farm who could find boreholes with two sticks and a strange, inborn feeling for water, and Will reckoned Lucian was like that with people. It was as though he dug out goodness from the hard unused centers of souls. He’d taught her to swim, and had held a large finger under her spine for her first backbend, and had picked her up bodily when she’d fallen off her horse, and he was generous with food. It was always Lucian who started off the singing when the men worked in the fields. “That’s good, Dad.” She would have said, “Send love for me,” but Lucian would have been embarrassed.
    â€œAnd . . . Cynthia Vincy drove by West Edge,” said William. “Again.”
    â€œOh.” A syllable can express a great deal. Will’s sounded of resignation but also of swear words, and the smells of rotting vegetation, and wary amusement and bitten fingernails.
    Captain Browne had met Cynthia Vincy on his last tripinto Harare. She was a widow, much younger than the captain and much, much better-looking. She was not the typical farmer’s wife, who were leather-skinned and masculine; Cynthia Vincy was well-dressed, strong-jawed, long-legged, conscious of her power over men: formidable.
    Will had taken just one look and had known that the captain—who was usually stern and a little forbidding—was a goner—scribbled, head over heels, a smitten kitten. And Cynthia Vincy must have known it, because now she often drove along the road that bordered the farm. She never stopped when Will’s father was there, because she’d taken a hissing dislike to his wary eyes and massive, rough frame, but when it was only the captain and the men, she would clamber out to ask his opinion on some problem, wriggling and cooing admiration. And, William said, she was as false as plastic flowers, like air-conditioning against honest wind, margarine against butter, false as “dammit.” “She asks him about tobacco,” William said. “Simple things, storage, harvesting times—with big eyes, nodding with those open lips, ja —but she knows about tobacco. Her husband was a tobacco farmer, for pity’s sake.”
    Will had never seen Cynthia up close, but that didn’t stop her from