Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Read Online Free PDF Page A

which is the first time I had done that to a
white man.
    “You go back home to your wife,” he said.
“If a man leaves his wife too long, she starts to make trouble for him.
Believe me. Go back and give her more children.”
    So I left the
mines, secretly, like a thief, and came back to Botswana in 1960. I cannot tell
you how full my heart was when I crossed the border back into Botswana and left
South Africa behind me forever. In that place I had felt every day that I might
die. Danger and sorrow hung over Johannesburg like a cloud, and I could never
be happy there. In Botswana it was different. There were no policemen with
dogs; there were no
totsis
with knives, waiting to rob you; you did
not wake up every morning to a wailing siren calling you down into the hot
earth. There were not the same great crowds of men, all from some distant
place, all sickening for home, all wanting to be somewhere else. I had left a
prison—a great, groaning prison, under the sunlight.
    When I came
home that time, and got off the bus at Mochudi, and saw the
kopje
and
the chief’s place and the goats, I just stood and cried. A man came up to
me—a man I did not know—and he put his hand on my shoulder and
asked me whether I was just back from the mines. I told him that I was, and he
just nodded and left his hand there until I had stopped weeping. Then he smiled
and walked away. He had seen my wife coming for me, and he did not want to
interfere with the homecoming of a husband.
    I had taken this wife three
years earlier, although we had seen very little of one another since the
marriage. I came back from Johannesburg once a year, for one month, and this
was all the life we had had together. After my last trip she had become
pregnant, and my little girl had been born while I was still away. Now I was to
see her, and my wife had brought her to meet me off the bus. She stood there,
with the child in her arms, the child who was more valuable to me than all the
gold taken out of those mines in Johannesburg. This was my first-born, and my
only child, my girl, my Precious Ramotswe.
    Precious was like her
mother, who was a good fat woman. She played in the yard outside the house and
laughed when I picked her up. I had a cow that gave good milk, and I kept this
nearby for Precious. We gave her plenty of syrup too, and eggs every day. My
wife put Vaseline on her skin, and polished it, so that she shone. They said
she was the most beautiful child in Bechuanaland and women would come from
miles away to look at her and hold her.
    Then my wife, the mother of
Precious, died. We were living just outside Mochudi then, and she used to go
from our place to visit an aunt of hers who lived over the railway line near
the Francistown Road. She carried food there, as that aunt was too old to look
after herself and she only had one son there, who was sick with sufuba and
could not walk very far.
    I don’t know how it happened. Some
people said that it was because there was a storm brewing up and there was
lightning that she may have run without looking where she was going. But she
was on the railway line when the train from Bulawayo came down and hit her. The
engine driver was very sorry, but he had not seen her at all, which was
probably true.
    My cousin came to look after Precious. She made her
clothes, took her to school and cooked our meals. I was a sad man, and I
thought: Now there is nothing left for you in this life but Precious and your
cattle. In my sorrow, I went out to the cattle post to see how my cattle were,
and to pay the herd boys. I had more cattle now, and I had even thought of
buying a store. But I decided to wait, and to let Precious buy a store once I
was dead. Besides, the dust from the mines had ruined my chest, and I could not
walk fast or lift things.
    One day I was on my way back from the cattle
post and I had reached the main road that led from Francistown to Gaborone. It
was a hot day, and I was sitting under a tree by the roadside,