Free The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

to this land; this was a Botswana that was a hundred years from the world of Gaborone, from the world of cars, of white buildings, of commerce and diamonds. But it was the real heart of her country, the heart that she hoped, when her time came to leave this earth, she would see, in her mind’s eye at least, before the final darkness set in. And for all that she belonged to Gaborone, and to that other world, Mma Ramotswe belonged here too, and felt beside her quite strongly the presence of her father, the late Obed Ramotswe. As she gazed out through the tangle of acacia, she felt he was there, seated beside her in the van, his familiar old hat resting on his lap, looking out at the cattle and rehearsing in his mind the possible bloodlines of these beasts he knew so well.
    Her reverie ended as the van encountered a particularly deep pothole, teetering for a moment before toppling over the rim of the miniature void. Forward momentum prevailed, and the van was soon back on the level, but the creaking and protest from somewhere under the engine made Mma Ramotswe wonder how her white van would have coped with the challenge—not as well, she suspected.
    The track changed direction; now came the first signs of human activity: a dip tank, rust-red, with an empty drum lying by its side. The sight brought back a memory—the stench of the dip, that harsh chemical smell, not unlike a mixture of tar and vinegar, which she remembered from her father’s cattle post all those years ago. It was an unpleasant smell in itself, but tolerated, perhaps even hankered after, for its association with cattle, and with the life that was led about cattle. Beyond the dip tank there was a rickety enclosuremade of stakes of rough-hewn wood—the trunks of small trees—driven into the ground and tied together with wire and strips of bark. Again, this prompted recollections of those long weeks spent out on the lands and at the distant cattle posts, and of the sound of the cattle lowing in the night when disturbed by some movement in the bush: some pair of eyes betraying the presence of a hyena or jackal.
    Then she saw the house, standing beside a large thorn tree that had thickened considerably, its upper branches making a dense crown, like a head of unruly hair among the ranks of the well-barbered. It was not an imposing house, but it was more than the single-room structures that served many who lived out in the bush. The roof, like the roofs of almost all farmhouses, was made of corrugated iron, bolted on and painted red. This covered not only the main part of the house, but the shady verandah that ran the length of the front, the space between the whitewashed pillars gauzed in against flies. Behind the house, in a cluster several hundred yards away, was a small group of buildings that made up the servants’ quarters. There were always such dwellings—the abode of the cook, or the man who tended the yard, or the woman who did the washing and ironing; so normal and unexceptionable as to attract no attention, the places where lives were led in the shadow of the employer in the larger house. And the cause, Mma Ramotswe knew from long experience, of deep resentments and, on occasion, murderous hatreds. Those flowed from exploitation and bad treatment—the things that people would do to one another with utter predictability and inevitability unless those in authority made it impossible and laid down conditions of employment. She had seen shocking things in the course of her work, even here in Botswana, a good country where things were well run and people had rights; human nature, of course, would find its way round the best of rules and regulations.
    As she nosed the van into a patch of shade under the largethorn tree beside the house, the thought came to her that the solution to Mr. Moeti’s problem might be simpler than he imagined. It always surprised her that people could be so blind to the obvious; that a person could mistreat a servant and then