Circling the Sun (37 page)

H
ow our lives turn and turn.

Denys was meant to come for me and fly us down the coast to Takaungu. On the way home, we’d test his theory and try to spot a few herds of elephants near Voi and alert some waiting hunting friends with a cable. It was early May. I told Ruta I was going, and then Tom, whom I found at the Wilson Airways hangar, scribbling figures into his flight log.

“But we have a lesson tomorrow.”

“Can’t we postpone?”

He looked at me and then out through the door of the hangar, where scudding clouds tatted the pale blue of the sky. “Don’t go, all right?”

“What is it? Do you have one of your mysterious feelings?”

“Maybe I do. There’s always another day, isn’t there?”

I didn’t want to give up the trip for a vague premonition, but Tom was a wonderful teacher and I trusted him. He also rarely asked anything of me. So I went back to my cottage at the Muthaiga, and Denys left for Voi. I learned later that he’d also asked Karen to go with him, before he’d asked me, but that morning his only passenger was his Kikuyu boy, Kamau. They took off in glorious weather and were out for several days before flying to the foot of Mbolo Hill, where his friend Vernon Cole lived. Vernon was the district commissioner. He had a young son, John, who was transfixed by Denys, and his wife, Hilda, was newly pregnant with a second child. They made Denys a lavish dinner and listened to him talk about the elephants he’d scouted from above, just as he’d suspected.

“There they were, bold as you please, just
browsing
along the river. Weeks of scouting cut out in moments. Only moments.”

The next morning at dawn, Denys and Kamau took off again, this time for home. Hilda gave them a bushel of thick-skinned Kenyan oranges to take along. Kamau held them in his lap as the propeller swung to life, and the Moth’s engine fluttered, coaxed by Denys’s fingertips on the throttle. He took her up quickly, and circled twice before sailing out of sight.

In Denys’s cottage, I was sleeping, dreaming of nothing. Ruta woke me with a knock at my door. “Have you heard from Bedar?”

“No,” I answered sleepily. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know,” he said. But he had guessed at something. Felt it, as Tom had.

Waving once, the Moth’s custard-yellow wings sheared away and dropped out of sight. Denys had named his plane
Nzige,
which meant “locust,” light as the wind, agile and imperturbable. The wonderful machine should have gone on for ever, and Denys, too, but a mile north, for no reason that anyone would ever be able to confirm, his plane spun in at low altitude. He may have broken a crucial cable, or mishandled the wind shear somehow. Perhaps he manoeuvred too sharply at too low a speed, or lost control of her in any number of ways. All anyone would know was that he met the earth almost vertically, hurtling into the rocky soil near Mwakangale Hill and exploding on impact. Bursting into flame. When the Coles traced Denys’s smoke to the site, there was almost nothing left of his body, or the boy’s. The Moth was a ruin. Only a handful of blackened oranges spilled over the charred ground, and a slim volume of poetry that had been thrown from the wreckage, fluttering with bits of ash.

In shock, Hilda Cole dropped to her knees and bent double. Later that afternoon she would miscarry her baby, and that’s how three came to die that day at Voi. Three souls perished, and none of them mine.

K
aren buried Denys on the farm, as she knew he wanted it, at the crest of Lamwia, along the Ngong ridge. The spot lay at the top of a steep incline, and the coffin bearers struggled to get there, stumbling with the heavy box. Karen walked ahead and stood nearest the open hole, red as a wound, when they lowered him in. I was entirely numb from the inside out, unable to speak to her or anyone.

The day was shockingly clear. Below the ridge, the coppery slope rolled onto the plains. A pale stretch of road stood out like rope that had been tossed down from the clouds, or like a snake that went on ceaselessly, all the way to Kilimanjaro. Around the site of Denys’s grave, the grasses were lush and living. Plaited through them were two dark forms, the shadows of a pair of eagles drifting above us in ever-widening circles.

Mourners had come from Nairobi and Gilgil, Eldoret and Naivasha—Somalis and Kikuyus and White Highlanders, hunters and gun bearers, pilgrims and poets. No one there hadn’t seen something to love and admire in Denys. He had always been unflinchingly himself, and honourable for that in the way these eagles were honourable, and the grass, too.

During the brief service, Karen’s head sagged to her chest, and I felt a strong urge to go to her. I was the one person there who knew precisely what she’d lost in Denys; she was the only one who could have understood the weight and colour of my sorrow, too. But a shift had taken place, and it held me back. She was his publicly acknowledged widow now. The gods may have stolen him from her, but with his death she had won him back. No one could challenge their bond, or doubt how she had loved him. Or how truly he’d been hers. One day she was going to write about him—write
him
in such a way that would seal the two of them together for ever. And from those pages, I would be absent.

I didn’t think I could weep any more, that, like Karen, I had spent a lifetime’s worth of tears, but somehow my grief found a way to open wider that day. When the service was over, and the mourners had gone down over the hill to Mbogani, I lingered long enough to reach for a handful of dust from Denys’s gravesite, red as life’s blood and older than time. I closed my fingers around its powdery coolness and then let it go. In a way, it didn’t matter if there was something proprietary in Karen’s sadness, or in how she had loved Denys. I hadn’t loved him any more perfectly—and I understood that, finally. We had both tried for the sun, and had fallen, lurching to earth again, tasting melted wax and sorrow. Denys wasn’t hers, or mine.

He belonged to no one and never had.

After Denys’s funeral I went back to his cottage, where I’d been living, but the sight of his books nearly undid me. It was shocking to think how his mind simply wasn’t in the world any longer. I would never hear his laugh, or touch his fine strong hands or trace the crinkles around his eyes. When he fell out of the sky, everything he was and would yet do had vanished. And he’d taken my heart with him, too. How would I get it back again?

I couldn’t think of what I might do with my days or where I might go, but somehow found myself back in Elburgon, at Melela. My father seemed surprised to see me but didn’t ask any terrible questions. I couldn’t have begun to answer them if he had. I only wanted to be alone, and to be near horses, two things that had always soothed my soul in the past. For weeks I stayed, waking before dawn and striding out into the cold morning to think. The colours of the country were beautifully the same. Mist hung stretched over the towering cedars in the forest, and the ragged curve of the escarpment rose and receded off towards forever. But something was missing. For all its beauty, Melela now seemed to mock me. I’d pinned so many dreams on it, believing that if Mansfield and I could rebuild Green Hills here, rewriting the sad changes of the past, some part of me would feel reclaimed and strong in a way it hadn’t, not really, since I was a young girl—hunting with
arap
Maina, running with Kibii through the tall bleached grasses, slipping out of the window of my hut with Buller at my heels, both of us unafraid of the night.

But all Mansfield and I had truly managed to do was humiliate each other and ourselves, and to carve great big holes in one another. Gervase was a world away. Some days I could barely stand to think of him—and now Denys was gone, too. One crushing loss lay like a black stamp over the other. A shadow smothering a shadow, emptiness and more emptiness, and what could be done?

My father was worried about me, I could see that, but nothing seemed to help until one day, when I heard a familiar sputtering sound echoing through the hills, and there was Tom’s Moth, waggling its way towards the farm through pure and cloudless blue. Using our long paddock as a makeshift runway, he set it down like a feather.

“How have you been?” he asked after he’d cut the engine and clambered out over the wing.

“Oh, you know.” I felt myself give way, and couldn’t manage another word. But I didn’t have to. Tom handed me a flight helmet, and I lowered myself into the rear cockpit, grateful for the sound of the engine rattling to life, the vibration of my small seat, everything shudderingly present as we came to speed. When we roared up over the hills, and the landscape slid sideways and reeled away, my head began to clear for the first time in weeks. Cold air swept against my face and filled my lungs. It was so much easier to breathe up there, and even with the constant noise of the prop and the wind, it was peaceful in a way my wounded spirit had been craving. I remembered how once a native boy had asked me if I could see God from the aeroplane. Tom was there and we had both laughed and shook our heads.

“Perhaps you should go higher then,” he said.

Tom kept us up for a good long time, tracing a wide circle over our valley, towards Njoro to the east and Molo to the north. The tip of the wing was like a bright, silvering wand. Watching it, I felt a whisper of hope and something like redemption. It wasn’t God I saw at this height, but my Rift Valley. It stretched in every direction like a map of my own life. Here were Karen’s hills, the flat shimmer of Nakuru in the distance, the high ragged lip of the escarpment. White-bellied birds and red dust. Everything I’d lived through lay unfurled below me, every secret and scar—where I’d learned to hunt and jump and ride like the wind; where I had been devoured a little by a good lion; where
arap
Maina had stooped to point at a cloverleaf-shaped print in drying mud, saying, “Tell me what you see, Lakwet.”

This valley was more than my home. It beat in me like the drum of my own heart.

Only when we needed fuel did we make our way back to Melela. Tom stayed to dinner and, because he would fly out again at dawn, took himself off to bed early while my father and I stayed up with hot, bitter coffee. There wasn’t any sound in the room—just low light stretching out against the wall and the feeling of something important coming towards me.

“I’m going back to Nairobi,” I told him after we’d been quiet for a long time. “I’ll leave with Tom in the morning. I’m going to take up flying again.”

“I wish I saw the point in it,” my father said.

I’d obviously surprised him—and though I didn’t know if “it” meant aeroplanes or leaving Melela, I said, “Come up in Tom’s plane one day. Maybe then you’ll see.”

He’d been reading the black studbook, his longtime bible. His fingers caressed the spine for a moment, and then he shook his head. “I know where I’m meant to be.”

“I do, too,” I told him, and the minute the words left my mouth I knew they were true.

“What shall we do with the horses?”

“I’m not sure at the moment. They’re Mansfield’s, too, after all. It might be years before our divorce is settled. But however all of that turns out, I want to earn my own living. I
need
to know I can take care of myself.”

“You can do that flying?” He sounded incredulous.

“Maybe. Tom says one day aeroplanes will ferry people far and wide, as ships do now. I could be part of that. Or transport mail and parcels, or I don’t know. Denys had a scheme about scouting for hunters from above.” It was the first time I’d said his name aloud since the day of his funeral. Even though my throat ached, it also felt right to call Denys into this room. He was the reason I’d thought of flying for myself at all.

“It’s awfully dangerous. I know I don’t have to tell you that.” He stared into his coffee, thinking quietly. “But you’ve never been afraid of anything, have you?”

“I
have,
though,” I said, surprised at my own emotion. “I’ve been terrified…I just haven’t let it stop me.”

It was quite late by that point, and we were both too tired to say anything more. I kissed him on the forehead, wishing him good night. But as I settled myself in bed, no matter how drained and exhausted I felt, there was a strange kind of energy pulsing through me, too. Thoughts appearing more plainly than they had in many years. Melela wasn’t safe. It would more than likely dissolve one day as Green Hills had. Pegasus would die as Buller had, both of them my earliest heroes. My father would drift away little by little or all at once. Great rocking changes would come again and again…and I would survive them the way I had long ago, when my mother had boarded a train and become smoke. The tribe had found me then, and given me my true name, but Lakwet was only a name after all. I had forged her myself, out of brokenness, learning to love wildness instead of fearing it. To thrive on the exhilaration of the hunt, charging headlong into the world even—or especially—when it hurt to do it.

Now I stood at the threshold of another great turning, perhaps the most important of my life. The sky had taken Denys, but I knew there was life up there, too—a combination of forces suited to me, to how I was made, in powerful ways. That great soaring freedom and unimaginable grace came fully tethered to risk and to fear. Flying demanded more courage and faith than I actually possessed, and it wanted my best, my whole self. I would have to work very hard to be any good at it at all, and be more than a little mad to be great, to give my life over to it. But that’s just what I meant to do.

The next morning, I was awake even before Tom was. I packed my few things quickly and waited for him in the dark. When he saw me he smiled, understanding immediately the decision I’d come to and what would happen now.

When we returned to Nairobi, I clocked through hours of instruction like a possessed woman, taking every moment Tom could give me. Four weeks after Denys’s accident, nearly to the day, Tom and I finished a short run and seamless landing at the aerodrome in Nairobi. Most of the town was yet asleep, and the Ngong Hills were draped over with mist and stillness, but the morning wasn’t over. Tom had a secret in his pocket. Instead of taking her back to the hangar, where Ruta waited, he had me spin the Moth around for another take-off. This one would be mine, though. My first solo.

“Just once around the paddock.” He smiled. “Nice and steady.” He took off his helmet and scrambled out casually, as if this were something we always did—me alone behind the controls, and him on the ground.

Nice and steady would certainly do it, but adrenaline tumbled through me so crazily, I felt dizzy. Could I remember everything Tom had said over the last months and put it to use? Could I quiet the clamouring in my head, the vision of the ten thousand things that could go wrong? Only one had taken Denys’s life, and that was still an utter mystery.

Willing my hands still, I gave Tom a thumbs-up. Ruta came out of the hangar and stood beside Tom, and I waved to them both, taxiing the Moth to the end of the murram strip, where I pointed her nose at the implacable hills and opened the throttle.

I thought about the tug of altitude and the Moth’s weight. I thought about speed and wind, the hundreds of adjustments Tom made without thinking, but that I was still learning. He had faith in me, though. I felt that solidly, and Ruta’s belief in me, too, as he raised his hand once.
Kwaheri.
Farewell.

Gunning hard, I sped along the hard-packed runway, my heart in my throat, every nerve alive. I waited until the last possible moment to pull back on the stick, and then the Moth inched up, bobbling a little, and gradually steadied, finding the wind and her centre. Behind me I felt Tom and Ruta, and Denys, too. Before me lay everything, an entire world opening moment by moment under my own strong wings.