—
Over the months that followed, though I wasn’t involved any more, I watched my father win the Naval and Military Cup, the War Memorial Cup, the Myberg-Hiddell, and the prestigious East African Standard Gold—and yet very few good buyers came sniffing around. News had already begun to leak out that Green Hills had gone belly-up. It didn’t seem to matter that my father had been a pioneer in the colony, with a gold-flocked reputation; the same newspapers that had once touted his victories were full of gossip about the bankruptcy. Several editors speculated about the causes, and the Nairobi Leader even published a jeering little poem:
They speak of a trainer named Clutterbuck
Who enjoyed the most absolute an’ utter luck,
Now he’s turning his tables,
And selling his stables,
In fact he is putting his shutter up.
My father seemed to take it on the chin or pretended to, but I was mortified to see our failings at Green Hills so publicly exposed. I wanted everyone to remember what was marvellous about our farm, how it had been built up from nothing at all, how happy we’d been there. But after sixteen years of impossibly hard work and high standards, now all anyone wanted to talk about was its failure. Green Hills had become a dark joke, and my father a cautionary tale, someone to pity.
The auction process dragged on for several gruelling months. Buyers came, haggling over the price of wheelbarrows and pitchforks and riding tack. Like a puzzle box emptied out on the floor and picked over by strangers, the outbuildings were dismantled piece by piece and stick by stick—the groom’s cottage, the stables, and the house. The horses were sold off at alarming bargain prices that made my stomach twist—all but sixteen that Jock and I were to hold on to until the right price could be fetched, and Pegasus, of course.
“You can’t let Cam go for less than five hundred pounds,” my father reminded me the day he left. I had travelled as far as Nairobi to see him off. At the railway station, livestock was being loaded and unloaded with commotion and clouds of red dust. Totos dragged or carried trunks and boxes twice their size. One wrestled with a swooping yellowed ivory tusk as if he were dancing with it, while Emma fussed with her hat.
After years of pelting me with advice and restrictions, Emma had nothing left to say now. Nor did I. I could barely remember why I had fought her so much. She seemed just as lost as I was. Squeezing my hand once, she hurried up the three sooty steps to the carriage, and that was that.
“Let us know if you need anything,” my father said. His hands worked over the brim of his hat, turning and turning it.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure that was true.
“One day you might want to train for other owners, maybe even for Delamere. You’ve got the right base and you’ve the instincts.”
“Get my trainer’s licence, you mean? Has a woman done that?”
“Maybe not. But there aren’t any rules against it.”
“I could try…. ” I let the words trail away.
“Take care of yourself and work hard.”
“I will, Daddy.”
Neither one of us had ever been good at voicing our feelings. I told him I would miss him, and then watched him board his train, the back of his shoulders defiantly straight under his jacket. His departure had been months and months in coming, and still I wasn’t nearly ready. Did he know how much I loved him? How sick and raw I felt to have lost all we’d shared?
A red-jacketed porter hurried by me with a heavy steamer trunk, and I felt a rushing up of memory. At four, I had stared at the shrinking train that carried my mother away, black smoke rising, distance between us stretching by the moment. Lakwet had learned how to bear her loss—how to live in the world her leaving had changed, and find good things, and run hard, and grow stronger. Where was that fierce girl now? I didn’t feel any whisper of her stirring in me. I also had no way of knowing how much I was yet supposed to weather—when my father might return, or even if he would.
The soot-black engine groaned in readiness. A sharp whistle pealed, and my heart turned over sickeningly. Finally, I had no choice but to walk away.
—
Almost as soon as I arrived back at Njoro, it began to rain for the first time in over a year. The sky went black, splitting open with a deluge that didn’t want to stop. Five inches fell in two days, and when the storm had finally cleared, and our long drought had ended, the land went green again. Flowers sprang across the plains in every colour you could think of. The air was thick with jasmine and coffee blossoms, juniper berries, and eucalyptus. Kenya had only been sleeping, the rain said now. All that had died could live again—except Green Hills.