How 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.
Karen 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.