That visit home was pivotal, though I didn’t know it at the time—you seldom do. I was fussed, yet being fussed is not memorable. The great changes in our lives are rarely well-planned capers or dramatic decisions, knee-deep in the Rubicon, plunging forward. They’re usually bumbling deviations, barely perceptible at the outset. It’s not an apparent choice. You find yourself on a path, you wander aimlessly, and after a while you’re awakened to its widening, and its differences. Then it’s too late to turn back, or too much trouble, because you’d have to explain too much. It’s more comfortable to drift, and you console yourself by claiming this was a good move. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was a mistake. But it all happened simply: way back, you took a turn, possibly a wrong one, and didn’t stumble, and kept going, growing, or diminishing, but certainly becoming someone different. That’s how it was with me.
My first steps began with silences. It is so much easier and more peaceful to say nothing. I didn’t confront Frank in his lie about the compass. I didn’t dispute Mother’s version. Over family dinner with Vita and Gabe I mentioned I’d seen Frank. Vita volunteered that Frank was helping Rescue/Relief with another lawsuit.
“Pro bono—he’s an angel. I have a huge caseload at the moment,” she said.
She was helping people, Frank was helping people; I wasn’t helping anyone, so I had to change the subject.
Gabe said, “Uncle Frank talked to our civics class about a law career.”
“Maybe I should talk to them about rocks.”
“The class really liked him,” Gabe said, talking over me, in the way Frank often did. “He had some cool stories.”
“What about?”
“Like, character. Like winning.”
“I sometimes wonder about Frank’s character.”
Still talking, Gabe said, “Character is the determination to get your own way. That’s his definition.”
“I’d say character is more like the determination to find your own way. Not conquering, but a kind of quest.” While Gabe pondered this, I said, “Vita?”
She was serving a meal she knew I loved. I hadn’t prompted her, she was trying to please me: fish baked with black beans and rice, topped with salsa and cilantro.
“Frank’s an asset,” she said, filling my plate.
“A little complicated maybe? Character issues?”
She sat and began eating, her chewing like a process of reflection, and after she swallowed, she said, “I’ve moved on.”
That was her shorthand in our marriage. It meant Enough. Change the subject. I’m not listening.
I couldn’t blame her for relying on Frank for legal advice. In his Soul of Kindness role he had a way of making himself saintly and indispensable—the altruist, eager to help, and always getting results. As an altruist herself—Rescue/Relief advocated children’s rights, saving lives, keeping families together—Vita felt that she and Frank were engaged in a common pursuit in what I thought of as the Big Charity virtue business. I knew that Vita was sincere—her early campaign, publicizing the exploitation of child labor in the Colombian emerald mines, showed she had compassion and unselfishness. With Gabe in school she was unable to travel as she’d once done but she still exposed abuses and she developed contacts in many countries where children were exploited.
Frank was another story. I knew him to be self-serving, but he was a plausible ally, and as he’d been helpful to Vita and the agency in advising on legal issues I couldn’t disparage him without seeming to undermine Vita’s efforts. And as she said, she’d moved on.
“I visited my mother the other day,” I said, to move on myself. I didn’t mention the compass, or Mother suggesting that Frank was weak and rather vain.
Vita said, “I try to see her as much as I can. She never needs anything. She never complains. I see a lot of her in Frank.”
I didn’t say, Not the Frank I know, but instead, “She’s a really generous person—she was loved. So she knows how to love. And my father loved her. There aren’t many marriages like that. She supported my father in everything he did. He didn’t want much, only to be a trusted insurance guy. And he was so proud of us, and her. No matter what my mother cooked—and it might have been baked beans—he always said, ‘You serve a wonderful table, Mother.’”
“I’m glad you see that in her,” Vita said. “I think it helps that she lived all her married life in the same house. She had stability. My parents were subjected to so much disruption, having to move because of my father’s job. Also being Hispanic.”
“But your folks were born in Florida and your mother’s Italian.”
“If you have a Spanish name you’re Hispanic, no matter where you’re born. Lots of the kids I try to place for adoption are rejected for being Hispanic—and they were born in the States, usually to single mothers.”
It was another insight into Vita’s world of rejection, vulnerability, exploitation, abuse—her efforts on behalf of the poor and dispossessed. Frank’s efforts, too, as she would be quick to point out.
And the next night at dinner, still on this theme, and aware that I was returning to Zambia, she said, “We’re getting reports of children being forced to work in mines in the Congo. Place called Katanga.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “I make sure that no children are working in our mines. Like I told you, we’re keeping our location secret, because of the ore we’re hauling out. Where do you get your information?”
“Missionaries, medical people in the area.”
“The Congo border is pretty near where we are in Zambia. Katanga’s on the other side.”
“Maybe you can look into it, Cal.”
I said I would, I listened, I sympathized. The situation that Vita described was indisputably wicked. I wanted to care and to help eliminate injustices, but I’d seen too much to be indignant. The places where I’d lived and worked were full of barefoot children doing menial jobs—India, South America, and now Zambia, where children working was nothing out of the ordinary. To liberate children and send them to school meant depriving a family of an essential worker. When Vita talked about the children, I saw much more—the family, the village, the clan, a whole culture struggling to survive. Tamper with it, remove one or two crucial elements, and it starves, or fails badly.
I didn’t have Vita’s assured belief in the charities that were involved in trying to save poor countries. My only solution was: pay people more, treat them better, let them share in your successes, and keep the government out of it all. That was our strategy in Zambia, and the reason our miners were loyal and our emerald mine was productive and still secret.
Yet I admired Vita in her passion to rescue children and her belief that she could change the world. Because all I ever did was creep into the uterine passages of the earth and dig among the rocks, to deliver dusty crystals, and bathe them, and cut them, to let light pierce them, and make them live.
I went away again soon after, drifting into my other unexplained life, my real life of prospecting. I was aware that in leaving home I was separating myself from Vita and her passion and commitment. But I needed to concentrate. Wherever I traveled as a geologist I encountered in those remote places the inclusions and imperfections of rocks, as well as the contradictions and injustices of humans. I beheld the world’s nakedness—raw rock, poor people.
Belowground I was at home. The pressures and enjambments that created the faults in rock formations squeezed into being small marvels, in the form of crystals and minerals and metals, fused to the ragged matter of junk rock. I dug and delved in the imperfections of the subterranean world, liberating chunks of loveliness, the sparkle of gems, the glittery crust of minerals, the glow of gold.
Aboveground, I was helpless, unable to resolve the injustices, nor could I—like Frank—pretend convincingly to believe they could be fixed. Vita’s idealism and Frank’s opportunism evoked in me a wearying sadness and ultimately the tedium of futility. In leaving Littleford I was not rejecting my wife or brother, or treating my travel as evasion. At least that’s what I told myself. I was simply going to work.
But the heaviness of home disturbed me, the clutter in Mother’s house—a house I owned. And the clutter in the house where Vita and I lived—the melancholy I felt among so many possessions, the acute culture shock whenever I returned home, the disgust I felt among the things I owned, more and more of them as the years passed, the accumulation of these useless possessions, their dead weight oppressing me.
I returned to Africa, and the small village in Kafubu, deep in the Zambian bush, the dusty portal to our magnificent mine, and my simple tin-roofed hut, with a bed and two chairs and a table, the cooking fire outside, blackened pots hung on the bare branches of a dead thorn tree. And each morning, Johnson Moyo would meet me and we would enter the black tunnel of our mine, its passages growing muddier as we descended. Each evening we emerged with our workers, their wheelbarrows piled with chunks of jagged ore, the pick marks chopped into their planes giving them the look of violent stabbings, disinterred body parts from clumsy disembowelings, obscured with the detritus of their burial place. But if you looked closer at the smoother face of the rock, you saw encased in it the greeny-blue gleam of a lozenge of emerald.
Without my being aware of it, this pattern of work became a turning point in my life. I’d drifted down another path, and though I kept returning to Littleford, supporting Vita, helping to raise Gabe, and still seeing Frank for lunch, I’d begun to live an alternative existence that had its analogy in my underground and overground lives, each of them a world apart.
“It’s work,” I said. The word work is indisputable. It was my living, it made my life in Littleford possible, it allowed Vita to succeed in Rescue/Relief, a nonprofit NGO, it paid the bills, it made me look earnest and resourceful in my grubbing among rocks for usable ore.
Going to Zambia in those years I was going off to work, and calling it work meant I didn’t have to reflect on whether what I was doing was selfish or else a form of self-preservation. I was diligent in my self-justification, I was supporting my family, in spending those long periods—three months at a time usually—and then a month or more of home leave. It was like being a soldier, as I told Vita.
There was much more to my life, though I didn’t disclose it: this life in Africa was possible and sustaining because it was complete. It was more than the extraction of emerald-bearing ore; it was life in the bush—routines, pleasures, friendships, and one of those friendships was with a woman.
In that small Kafubu village, it began in the simplest way. Moyo and I were sitting under a peeling gum tree in the late afternoon after a long day in the mine. We’d pulled our boots off and were drinking beer and listening to birds chirping in the branches above, while the cool air tickled our bare toes.
A woman passed us, keeping her distance. She was slender, clothed in a green wraparound, and barefoot, but walking in an especially stately way because she was balancing a basket on her head, one hand holding it still, her posture perfectly upright on the dusty path, in the gold gleam of sunset.
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
“What are you saying?”
“That woman.”
Moyo swigged his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he smiled. “She is a servant.”
“So what?”
“She has laundry in that umuseke. She has just come from the river.”
“But she’s lovely.”
“You are so funny, Cal.”
“Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“She bends her back in the garden,” he said. “She washes clothes in the river.”
“Maybe she can work in my garden. Maybe wash my clothes.”
That made sense to him, much more than my remarking that she was pretty. He said, “I can inquire.”
Her name was Norah, but they called her Katutwa, or Tutwa, because in Bemba, the local language, that was the word for a particular bird called a laughing dove, a brownish bird with a pale head, that roosted in the village trees and sang in a melodious way that seemed like giggling laughter.
Tutwa was a widow, but a young one, her husband having died of malaria a few years after their marriage. The Bemba custom, Moyo said, was the widow would become the second wife of her late husband’s brother. But when she was confronted with this, the brother-in-law visiting her soon after the burial, Tutwa refused and laughed so loudly the villagers heard her, and she got the name of the laughing dove.
“Why did she refuse?”
Moyo said, “Because she has been to secondary school. The teachers discourage these people from their traditions.”
“Maybe she wants to find her own husband.”
“There is no possibility, my friend. She is a widow without children. A woman without children is not fully a woman.”
“She looks like a woman to me.”
“Because you are a mzungu! You don’t differentiate.” He drank his beer and added, “As we civilized people do.”
“All I need is for her to work in my garden and wash my clothes.”
“That can be arranged.”
Tutwa visited later that week, bowing as she approached us, then kneeling. Moyo offered to translate. But after the initial greetings, I said, “Do you speak English?”
In a soft voice, she said, “Yes. I did my schooling in Ndola District. But after gaining my certificate I was going for nursing. But I married instead.”
“What happened to the nursing career?”
“Money was the problem, sah. And when my husband died I had no chance. I refused his brother. So I languish in the village.”
Moyo said, “A common story.”
“I think I can handle this, Johnson. I won’t need you as translator.”
“So I will take my leave,” he said and saluted me with a tipsy smile and left us.
Tutwa was still kneeling in that submissive pose and seemed more anxious with me alone. In her uneasy posture, crouching, her anxiety, the tension obvious in her dark, widened eyes, lit her face and gave her the watchful beauty of a rabbit on a lawn, alert, tremulous, almost electric, her features shining with fear. I supposed it was her rapidly beating heart that made her more beautiful, her heart pumping madly in apprehension.
“Please don’t worry,” I said, hoping to calm her.
“When people say don’t worry, I worry.”
I liked that for its wit. I said, “I live in that hut over there.”
“I am knowing that,” she said softly.
“I have a garden that needs to be tended. The previous owner planted beans and cassava but it’s been neglected. I also need someone to clean the house and do laundry.” Then I remembered what Moyo had said. “What’s your name?”
“They call me Tutwa.”
She inclined her head as though in prayer, and because she was still kneeling, and I was sitting before her, I stood up and walked a few feet away and said, “Please take a seat.” I gestured to the chair Moyo had been sitting in.
With obvious reluctance she stood and lowered herself into the camp chair, yet seemed more awkward sitting than she had kneeling before me. Her head was still bowed, and she was whispering what sounded like “Thank you.”
“Do you think you can do it—the garden, the laundry, the house cleaning?”
With her head lowered I could see her long lashes. Her hands were clasped, her forearms resting on her knees. Her reply was another whisper. “I can try, sah.”
I named a sum of money, turning the dollar amount in my head into Zambian kwachas. She covered her face, and I thought from the movement of her shoulders that she had started to cry. But when she looked up at me, she was smiling, she’d been laughing. She was gleeful.
I was two months into my tour, and so for the next month Tutwa arrived every morning and built a fire and made tea, bringing the cup on a tray to my bedside, then backing out of the room and sweeping the house, before heading to the garden. I waved to her as I set off on foot to the mine, usually meeting Moyo on the way. And when I returned in the evening, Tutwa had made the bed and left a plate of food for me, a grilled fish, or a bowl of stew, and sometimes a sinewy piece of meat I didn’t recognize—ostrich, or croc steak.
Except for the hello at those morning cups of tea, we rarely spoke, though I often heard her singing as she swept the parlor, or humming as she hoed the garden. I did not risk more than a friendly hello, or at the end of each week, when I paid her, I’d ask, “Are you happy?” Then she would cover her face shyly and speak through her fingers, “Very happy, sah.”
It was June in the village, one of the cooler months, chilly in the Tropic of Capricorn, a season of harvesting, usually overcast, gray and raw, not the stereotype of sunny, lush Africa. I was preparing to head to Ndola, for the plane to Lusaka, to fly to Boston and Littleford, to spend the summer with Vita and Gabe.
Moyo showed up the night before my departure. He was carrying a bottle of clear liquid that I guessed was local gin, an illegally distilled liquor, made from fermented maize—potent, viscous, and sharp, burning its way into your head.
“Kachasu, bwana.” Moyo uncorked the bottle and poured shots, and we drank and complimented each other on our friendship, and our secret emerald mine and our wealth, until I was near to passing out.
In the morning I was still half drunk—woozy, anyway—in that incoherent and reckless state of semisaturation, a hangover hum in my head that was like the onset of stupidity. I was cold—my uncovered face in the early chill, the mist outside they called chiperoni clouding the windows.
The shadow over me was Tutwa. She whispered, “Chai,” and set the tray down, the cup tinkling in its saucer. I reached and took her by her wrist and drew her toward me. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking away.
“It’s warmer in here,” I said.
I couldn’t see her face. I let go of her wrist. I thought, I will say nothing else. I won’t coerce her, I’ll let her choose, I’ll accept whatever she decides, and I’ll never ask again. I turned away, burying my sore head in my pillow.
With a bump of the bed frame she was beside me, pressed against me, her cold feet chafing against mine, as though to warm them. She draped her arm over me, a slight soapiness clinging to her skin, her breath heating my neck. I took her hand and was surprised by the hard pads on her fingers—a farm girl’s fingers. But when she slid them lower and held me in them, their hardness was welcome. I was enclosed, unambiguously gripped.
But what overwhelmed me, her body on mine, was an enveloping odor, a rich humid tang, a muddy aroma of the earth from the creases of her flesh. It was sharp, almost sweet, the smell I realized of the mine, at the deepest level of the shaft, where among the broken rocks, emeralds mingled with mud.
We parted shyly, hardly speaking, before Moyo showed up to drive me to the airport.
Back in Littleford, I resumed my other life. I became the person who belonged there, throughout the steamy summer, a ritual meal with Frank at the diner, and a month on Cape Cod at a rental in Barnstable. Vita was content; Gabe—who was now as tall as me—had taken up windsurfing. We spent mornings at the beach, and read on the porch in the afternoons, and lay at night in the heat of the upstairs bedroom.
Vita was often on the phone with Frank, about details in Rescue/Relief contracts or strategies for saving children. She’d usually hang up saying, “I’m so lucky to have him on my side.”
Just after Labor Day, I flew back to Zambia. Alighting from the bush taxi at my house, I saw a wraith seated at the door in the failing light, head down, in a posture of lamentation, someone obviously grieving. It was Tutwa, but so thin I scarcely recognized her. She burst into tears when she saw me, but remained seated, lifting her wrap to cover her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought you were not returning,” she said in a tearful voice through the cloth.
I led her into the house and switched on the lamp and was shocked to see how skinny she’d become. She seemed to know what I was thinking. She said, “I couldn’t eat. But I can eat now.”
I was briefly flattered, but quickly saw that I’d subverted her—no different from the colonizer who promotes dependency. And yet—I supposed like some colonizers—I was smitten.
Long before, wandering along another path, I’d been heading to Zambia and in her direction without knowing it—the turning point that hadn’t been clear at the time, not a decision, but a way of drifting, that had started with silences, my dislike of Frank, my overlooking his deceptions and his lies, Vita saying, He’s an angel and I’ve moved on, no one wishing to listen to me—to hear my side of the story. I had turned away, and though I was hurt by Frank and disappointed by Vita’s indifference, I’d found a refuge. And I discovered something new and heartening now—I’d been missed. I was needed, I was cherished, it was like being loved. Lame excuses, of course, but I was happy.