Circling the Sun Read Free Page A

planted maize and wheat, and they flourished. With the money he made, he found and bought two abandoned steam engines. Bolted down, they became the beating heart of our gristmill, and Green Hills the most vital artery in Njoro. Soon, if you stood on our hill and looked out past the terraced fields and head-high maize, you could see a line of flat oxen-drawn wagons bringing grain to our mill. The mill ran without stopping, and the number of our workers doubled and then tripled, Kikuyu, Kavirondo, Nandi, and Kipsigis men, and Dutchmen, too, cracking their whips to drive the oxen. The iron sheds came down, and a stable went up, then several more, the newly built loose boxes filling with cut hay and the finest thoroughbreds in Africa, my father told me, or anywhere in the world.
    I still thought about Mother and Dickie sometimes when I lay in bed before sleep, listening to the night noises push in from every direction, a constant, seething sound. They never sent letters, at least not to me, so trying to picture their life was a trial. Our old house had been sold. Wherever they had finally settled, the stars and trees would be very different from what we had in Njoro. The rain would be, too, and the feel and the colour of the sun in the afternoons. All the afternoons of all the months we were apart.
    Gradually it became harder to remember my mother’s face, things she had said to me, days we had shared. But there were many days ahead of me. They spread out further than I could see or wish for, the way the plain did all the way to the broken bowl of Menengai, or to Kenya’s hard blue peak. It was safer to keep looking forward—to move my mother to the far edge of my mind where she couldn’t hurt me any more, or to imagine, when I did think of her, that her going had been necessary. A kind of forging or honing, my first essential test as Lakwet.
    This was certain: I belonged on the farm and in the bush. I was part of the thorn trees and the high jutting escarpment, the bruised-looking hills thick with vegetation; the deep folds between the hills, and the high cornlike grasses. I had come alive here, as if I’d been given a second birth, and a truer one. This was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I’d been made for.

T he stable bell clanged, breaking open the stillness. The lazy roosters woke and the dusty geese, the houseboys and grooms, gardeners and herdsmen. I had my own mud-and-daub hut, a little apart from my father’s, which I shared with my ugly and loyal mixed-breed dog, Buller. He whined at the sound of the bell, stretching from his nest at the foot of my bed, and then looped his square head under my arm and against my side so that I felt his cool nose and the wrinkled half-moons of scars on the top of his head. There was a thick, lumpy knot where his right ear had been before a leopard had crept into my hut and tried to drag him into the night. Buller had ripped open the leopard’s throat and limped home covered in their mingled blood, looking like a hero but also nearly dead. My father and I nursed him back to health, and though he’d never been particularly handsome before, he was grizzled and half-deaf now. We loved him better for it because the leopard hadn’t begun to break his spirit.
    In the farmyard, in the cool morning air, Kibii was waiting for me. I was eleven and he a little younger, and we had both become part of the oiled machinery of the farm. There were other white children nearby who went to school in Nairobi or sometimes back in England, but my father never mentioned that I might do anything like that. The stable was my classroom. Morning gallops started not long after dawn. I was there without fail, and so was Kibii. As I approached the stable now, he shot up into the air as if his legs were coiled springs. I’d been