Free Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller

boma carrying bribes, but nevertheless expected gifts from his visitors commensurate with their means. The difference between a bribe and a gift seemed to depend on the chief’s assessment of the gift-giver.) Anyone requesting land from the chief—my parents included—could expect both arbitrary and thorough inspections, as well as a rigorous trial period during which the chief ensured the land was being developed as promised and that jobs were going to his people, and not to workers from other provinces.
    K said, “Half his relatives work here now, so I’m long Chinas with the chief.”
    The sun caught the tip of the escarpment and flooded the lower western sky with a golden thread. A young man clad in a camouflage-patterned tank top and green trousers came to the gate and beat the gong.
    K put his hand out to stay the dogs. “Come!” he told the man.
    The young man came down to the veranda. “I am Innocent,” he announced.
    “Bo,” I said, shaking his hand.
    Innocent took the tea tray to the kitchen and began to retrieve clothes from the washing line. I glanced at my watch and said that I thought it was time I started to head home.
    K stood up. “But there’s something I want to show you first.”
    “Perhaps another time,” I suggested. “I have a long walk back to the road.”
    “No, no. You don’t need to leave right now. You’re in no hurry. I’ll drive you home. I’ll drive quickly,” said K. “Did you have enough tea? Enough to eat?”
    “Plenty, thank you.”
    “Come now,” ordered K. He led me away from the veranda and garden, through the farmyard, and cut sharply toward the bend in the river, on a path cleared through the bush. Vervet monkeys clattered overhead and openbill storks stood sentry in the top reaches of a winter thorn tree. Suddenly, the bush opened up into an expanse of rain-misted lawn. A half-built redbrick house in the middle of a freshly planted lawn stood watch over the river, facing the square head of a mountain on the far bank.
    “That,” said K, pointing across the river, “is Peace Mountain.”
    I had seen the mountain before from the tarmac road. It is a distinctive wedge-shaped rise of land with a wide band of cliffs at its neck. “I didn’t know it had a name,” I said.
    “It didn’t,” said K. “I named it.” His voice thickened. “I climbed it last year. I got caught on a cliff. I just had to hang there and wait for the Almighty to tell me what to do. If it hadn’t been for Him . . . It took me until well after dark to get down, just praying to Him to guide me as I went.” K demonstrated a massive bowl of a hand. “You have to remember that He holds each and every one of us right there, right in the palm of His hand.”
    “Luckily,” I said.
    K frowned. “Come,” he said, leading me up to the house. It stood stubbornly in the middle of the lawn, the reverse of a ruin (something being built up against the press of the Sole Valley sun, instead of the more usual experience of something crumbling and melting back into the ground).
    “And this,” said K as he stepped into the roofless house, “is where we’ll live one day. I’ll finish building it soon. I have to get the farm going a bit more first, though. But what do you think?”
    I wondered who “we” was, but I didn’t ask. Instead I said, “It’s lovely.”
    “Look,” said K, “it’s all set up for books. Shelves here, and here. Maybe you could put ornaments on this shelf. This is the kitchen. See? A view of the mountain out the window.” He turned to me and I can describe the look on his face only as transported. “I don’t think,” he said, “that God is going to have me make this journey alone. He will send me a woman when the time is right.”
    A blue-headed lizard scampered up the wall where the larder shelves would be one day and one of the dogs darted after it, barely catching the end of its tail, which sloughed off and wiggled hysterically on the cement-dusted