The Silt Path
Togara Muzanenhamo
When the old man woke into the darkness of that winter morning, it was with a heaviness and fatigue that tested his strength. All night he had dreamt of the calf and slept uneasily. In the windowless room he had lived in for most of his adult life, he did not strike a match but simply rolled the blankets up off the floor, packed sweet potatoes he had boiled two days ago, then slipped his feet into broken boots that he secured around his ankles with baling twine. He licked his fingers and removed dry parcels of caked sleep from the corners of his eyes. Stepping out of the hut, he was met with the smell of wood smoke and the ringing of cooking pots. Darkness had just begun peeling back off the horizon, stars to the west still nailed bright to the black canvas above.
There was little morning talk in the compound, men woke and dressed silently, ate silently – walked out in gangs to the work yards, sheds and silos. They walked with only a few words between them until they were stationed at their posts, breath cupped warm in their hands. But his silence was different. It was an enduring bitterness held back in his throat by this life that had shown him nothing but labour, this land that had given him nothing to own, where death had taken those he loved, discarding them over the ridge to the great beyond, their graves unmarked.
Adjusting the thick coat he slept in, he walked along with the others – labourers, drivers, graders, mechanics – raising a shallow cloud of grey dust off the powdered clinker path that leads to a broad thoroughfare lined with giant gum trees. The men’s silhouettes grew starker as the stars faded, deep stains of diesel and engine oils mapped across their overalls.
In his mind he had planned his route to seek out the calf, walked the land in his dreams, the images of his journey set in a simple sequence: the blue triangular dam that hugged the border of the estate, the wide open jaws of the stone quarry, the solitary windmill in the west.
By the time the sun rose, he was completely alone, walking away from the distant roar of engine and machine, away from fields still bright with maize stover – he was far into the lower arm of the estate, his boots wet with dew thawed from frost. The air cleared as he emerged from untamed bush to a wide pleated strip of harrowed earth. Along the fireguard a row of wood poles shrunk into the distance with staves of barbed wire glistening with the music of the sun. As he approached the most easterly border of the estate, the smell of water thickened the air with the weight of growth and vegetation. He scaled the muscled bank of the dam and saw the sky off the water’s surface, a sky cradled by bulrushes bowing into carpets of soft silver moss. He took off his coat and trailed through the grass, his bamboo cane slipping through the dry undergrowth that fell away from the dam’s soggy banks.
He would find nothing, no newborn or carcass.
*
Sitting on an anthill, he rests and eats. The noon sun overhead, his buttocks flat on his shadow. As he sits there, he thinks of the calf’s mother
