Free The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith

unkind, he had simply wanted to explain the finite life of machinery. Women knew many things, he felt, and there was little, if anything, that he could tell Mma Ramotswe about the world; except when it came to machines. Then, in his view, women seemed less interested; they wanted machines to work, but they did not necessarily want to understand
why
they worked or, more important, why they went wrong. Love was usually quite enough to stop people going wrong, but would not always work with machinery. One of his clients had just demonstrated that. She had brought in her car, which was behaving erratically. “I love it,” she said. “I am kind to it. And now it has decided to turn against me. What have I done, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to deserve this?”
    “It is not love,” he had said. “It is oil.”
    That is what Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought about how women treated cars; but the world was changing, and even as he entertained these thoughts, he began to feel slightly guilty. He was a fair man, who disliked prejudice, but he had yet to be persuaded that women were good with cars. Not that he would ever have dared express such views to Mma Potokwane, for instance, or even Mma Makutsi. These ladies were feminists, he had been told, as he had once informed the apprentices when admonishing them about the things they talked about in the garage, often at the tops of their voices.
    “You should watch what you say,” he had warned. “What if Mma Potokwane is sitting in the office there and hears these things you say? Or even Mma Makutsi, who has very good hearing? These ladies are feminists, you know.”
    “What is that?” asked Fanwell. “Do they not like to eat meat?”
    “That is vegetarian,” said Charlie, scornfully. “Feminists are big, strong ladies. Ow!”
    “They are ladies who do not like to hear young men say foolish things about women,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “They will punish you if you do not watch out.”
    Charlie had grinned. “If the feminists take over, Fanwell, they will make men sit by the roadside and sell tomatoes. That is their main plan. For you too. That is what is going to happen, big time. Ow!”
    Mma Ramotswe steered the blue van off the road. The track—for it was not much more than that—led very quickly to a gate fastened to its post with a twist of wire. She opened this, making sure to close it behind her to keep cattle from straying on to the Lobatse road. That was a major cause of accidents, cattle at night, invisible in the darkness until the last moment when they turned their heads and the driver saw their eyes caught in the headlights, looming large. Everybody knew somebody who had hit a cow, who had lost their vehicle as a result, sometimes their life too.
    The track was in good enough condition; a grader, it seemed, had passed along it not all that long ago and had evened out the worst of the ridges and filled the deepest of the holes. This makeshift pact with nature would last until the next rains came, when the dry season’s work would be undone with all the quick impatience that nature has for the puny works of man. The first floods of the rainy season were the worst, as the land, parched bone-dry from the winter, would shrug off the sudden deluge, sending it off in red-brown torrents through networks of eroded dongas. Only later would the land drink in the rain and spring to life once more.
    On either side of the track, the grey-green bush stretched out, a landscape of struggling shrubs, leaves shrivelled and dusty, filling in the space between the endless forests of thorn trees. The more established acacia provided some cover from the sun, casting poolsof shade under which, here and there, cattle clustered, their tails twitching listlessly against the flies. The prevailing note was one of somnolence and stasis, a note taken up and orchestrated by hidden choirs of screeching cicadas: this was a Botswana that had existed since the days when cattle-herding peoples first came