Auntie v The Soil

 Auntie grew up in a far-off communal land, the youngest in her family. Her parents were past their fifties when she was born. Old and past the age of chasing after a newborn and changing napkins. The moment she arrived, her mother passed her on to her older sister, Chido, who was twenty at the time and ready to start her own family. 

Save for the occasional drop-ins to breastfeed her child, her mother remained a distant stranger whose sustenance flowed full and rich into Auntie’s eagerly suckling mouth. Auntie was a pitiful looking child always hungry. Hungry for her mother’s milk, for her visits were few and far in between, hungry for a mother she never truly knew. A mother who until the day she died remained a stranger a mother she never knew. At the time of her death, she had been dead to Auntie for a while. She had been dead for twenty-two years exactly.

 

To Mai Chido, the day Auntie was born was as far as she was concerned, an unburdening. It was not that she did not care for her baby, but as far as she was concerned, she had done her bit and now the next woman would do her bit. Chido would need to learn to care for a baby, for one day she would give birth to her own baby. That day was fast approaching. Godfrey had begun calling in earnest. They thought Mai Chido did not know, did not see the hidden meaning behind his words when he called on Baba Chido for one innocuous reason after another. Somehow Chido managed to be there during these. Chido who kept to herself whenever anyone came to the compound.

“Hesi Chido, ende wakura.” You have grown. She had grown.

“ Zvino zvawapedza fomu four wanga wafunga kudi?” 

Mai Chido doubted that Chido had had any thoughts about anything. Judging also by her form four results, not much thought crossed Chido’s mind. Her mother knew it and had known it from when Chido was a baby. Maybe she knew it on the day Chido was born. When Mai Chigamba had given her baby over to her. Heart soaring with love she had gazed with wonder at her baby counting her toes, her fingers, her hairs. Inspecting her perfect little nose, little mouth, and little ears. Finally, her eyes had alighted on Chido’s big black eyes. Chido had stared back. Mai Chido had found herself willing her baby to see her, to feel this love that flowed from her mother's heart and flowed in her tiny baby veins. For Mai Chido no moment was more perfect than the moment she looked into her baby’s eyes.

Instead, her dark gaze fell on her mother, dull and vacant. Mai Chido did not know it then but she felt she might have. Looking back, it seemed that that vacant gaze was a window into Chido’s brain. Vacant, blank. It took some time though for her to realise this, and when she did she realised in her oh so practical way, that the best thing for her Chido would be for her mother to teach her to be a wife. So, when she turned Auntie over to her she knew she was imparting to her the gift of Motherhood.

 

What Auntie lacked from her mother Chido made up for over and over. Filling her vacant little soul as best she could. She rocked her to sleep when she let out sad mewling cries, part hunger part yearning. She fed her sadza rakakanywa nemukaka when her mother forgot her nightly feed. She bathed the dirt from her feet every night before bed and later she held her hand on her first day to see the cows.

Those same cows that would keep Auntie company throughout the years. Herding cattle was an escape for her. It meant not getting up before the sun was up to get the land ready for the meager crop of maize that her family relied on for sadza throughout the year. Sometimes when she looked across to them toiling in the soil, bleached white by the sun. Their backs bent in agony, for how could it not be painful, as they hit the soil repeatedly with mapadza welded together with thick rubber bands and other pieces of metal, she wondered why they bothered. The land seemed to take more than it gave. Years of toiling had left her mother with a bent back and feet that were constantly swollen. And every evening, her father would return, his face cracked by the sun and hands hardened by long healed blisters. She shuddered, her cows were slow and deliberate they did not demand much from her. But they too were going, for when the crop failed her Father would head on over to Baba Godfrey’s compound. Trading a cow for upfu. Auntie would think about this, curled into a tight ball on the kitchen floor. The rupasa was hard beneath her. She would drift off to sleep wondering why she bothered, for pretty soon there would be nothing left for them, for this land bleached white by the sun would take everything.