The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (16 page)

“Yes, Mma?”

A woman had emerged from the smaller of the two buildings and was staring at Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Ramotswe began the traditional greeting. Was this woman well? Had she slept well? And the woman asked the same questions of her, and then again said, “Yes, Mma?”

“I have come to speak to the teacher,” said Mma Ramotswe. “My husband knows the teacher at the other school—the one over on that side. He is his cousin, and he said—”

The woman raised a hand to stop her. “Yes, you are that lady, Mma. We have heard that you would be coming. There was a message. You are welcome.”

“Thank you. I will not take much of the teacher’s time.”

The woman indicated that this did not matter. “I am the school secretary. There is just me and the teacher. We are the staff, and we get very few visitors, Mma. We are very happy that you’ve come to see us.”

Mma Ramotswe followed the woman into what she saw was a small office. The walls were plastered, but unpainted. There were no ceiling boards, just a criss-cross of wooden beams and the underside of a corrugated-iron roof above. In the centre of the room there stood a rectangular, three-drawered desk of the sort found in a thousand government offices up and down the country. Behind it there was a revolving chair covered in threadbare, greasy brown fabric. At the side of the room, pushed up against the wall, was another, smaller desk on which an unstable tower of box files had been built.

“This is the teacher’s desk,” said the secretary, pointing to the desk in the middle of the room. “And that one over there is mine. This is also the staff room.” She smiled at her own joke. “When teachers come from bigger schools, they say, ‘Where is your staff room?’ And I say, ‘You are in it right now!’ ”

She gestured to a spare chair that had been placed in front of the teacher’s desk and invited Mma Ramotswe to sit down. “You sit there and I shall fetch the teacher.”

While the secretary was out of the room, Mma Ramotswe looked about her. The walls were almost bare, apart from a small cluster of notices pinned to a square of discoloured soft board. There was a timetable of the hours from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon, with a subject noted after each: eight—roll-call and arithmetic; nine—Setswana and geography of Botswana; and so on through the day. Reading it brought a smile to Mma Ramotswe’s face, as did a small notice addressed to “All Staff,” setting out the dates of the school terms. It would be like putting up notices to herself and Mma Makutsi, she thought, although she could include notices about tea and the washing of teacups addressed to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and the apprentices.

A voice came from behind her: “Mma?”

She spun round. The teacher was standing in the doorway, the secretary behind him. She drew in her breath sharply; she had not expected this. The teacher was very short—a dwarf, in fact—and the secretary, who was a woman of barely average height, towered over him.

She recovered her poise quickly. “
Dumela,
Rra. I was just looking at the timetable. You must be very busy.”

The teacher inclined his head. “There is just me,” he said. “Me and this lady here, who you have already met.”

He crossed the floor and extended a hand in greeting. Mma Ramotswe reached down; it seemed so strange to be bending to shake hands with a man. His handshake felt firm, almost too firm, as he gripped her.

“Please sit in that chair, Mma,” he said. “I will go to my desk.”

He walked round the desk, his head barely showing above its surface. “My name is Oreeditse Modise. And you, Mma, are …?”

She gave her name, and he wrote it down solemnly on a pad of paper on his desk. That done, he looked up at her and smiled. There was something about the smile that touched her; it was as if he were reaching out to her.

“I am married to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni,” she said. “He is the cousin of your colleague at the other school.”

Mr. Modise made a further note. “Cousin,” he said. “That is very good.”

“I am a detective,” said Mma Ramotswe.

She expected him to note this down too, but he did not. This information had clearly surprised him, and he threw a glance in the direction of his secretary, who opened her mouth slightly in a silent
oh.

“Not a police detective,” said Mma Ramotswe quickly. “I am a person who works for people who have private problems. That sort of detective.”

She saw him relax.

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

“There has been a very unpleasant incident at a farm near here,” she said. “There was—”

“I know all about that, Mma.” Mr. Modise put down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. “There was a dastardly attack on some innocent cows over at Mr. Moeti’s place. Very bad.”

The secretary let out a wail. “Very bad! Cows! Cows!”

“So you’re working on that, are you, Mma? Then I am very happy to assist in any way. We cannot have people attacking cattle in this country. We cannot.”

“No, no!” shrieked the secretary.

Mma Ramotswe felt that the temperature in the room was rising rather higher than perhaps it should. “We must remain calm,” she said quietly. “It is the sort of thing that makes anybody angry. But we must remain calm if we are to deal with this.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Modise, glancing at the secretary. “I am calm now. You need not worry, Mma. We are all calm.”

Mma Ramotswe realised that her fears as to their cooperation were misplaced: these two, at least, were allies—the entire staff. She told them why she had come to see them. There was a boy called Mpho, whose mother worked in the Moeti house …

“Mpho?” said the teacher. “That boy is one of ours. He is in the classroom. He is there right now.” He picked up his pencil and wrote the name on his pad of paper: MPHO, in capital letters.

Mma Ramotswe clasped her hands together involuntarily. It had worked.

“Does that boy know something?” asked Mr. Modise.

She explained about her meeting with the child on the Moeti farm. “I am sure that he knows what happened,” she said. “But I am equally sure that he was frightened. So I need to speak to him.”

“Yes, yes,” said the teacher, making a signal to his secretary. “Fetch him straightaway. Then we can ask him about this thing. We shall get the truth out of him and he will tell us, or we shall give him a beating.”

Mma Ramotswe gasped. “Please! Let’s not beat anybody. And …” She paused. It would be impossible to speak to the boy in the teacher’s presence, and yet she would need to be tactful. “If you wouldn’t mind too much, I think it might be better for me to speak to him privately, Rra.”

“Why? I am his teacher.”

“Yes, and I’m sure that he respects you very much. But in my experience, Rra—and I have been a detective for a few years now—I find that some witnesses, and particularly children, do not speak freely if there is somebody they like and respect in the room. They say what they think that person will want them to say, Rra. It is very curious, but human nature is strange, and that is what I think.”

He looked at her doubtfully for a moment, and then nodded his agreement. “You’re the expert, Mma.”

She thanked him for his understanding, and noticed how he beamed at the compliment. What compliments were paid to a teacher out in the bush, she wondered; and to a teacher like this, a small man who must be accustomed to the stares of others?

“It is nothing, Mma,” he said. “Nothing at all. Would you like to speak to him in here, or outside?”

“Outside,” she said quickly.

THE BOY MPHO,
part-time herd boy, son of a domestic servant, a rather puny little boy who probably did not know who his father was—a boy with a running nose discharging mucus onto his upper lip—stood before her, shaking with fear.

They were under a tree a short distance from the schoolroom itself. It was hot, and the shade was welcome. From inside, through the open windows of the schoolroom, came the sound of the children reciting their tables.
Two fours make eight; three fours make twelve; four fours …

“You remember me, Mpho?”

He looked up at her briefly, and then down at his feet. He was barefoot, and his feet were dusty. Such little toes, thought Mma Ramotswe.

“Yes, Mma. Yes.”

She smiled at him. “You mustn’t be afraid of me, Mpho. Look … look here.” She reached into her pocket and took out the fragment of eggshell.

He glanced at the shell and said, “It’s broken.”

Mma Ramotswe handed it to him. “You can have it, if you like. There. Some people think that this brings good luck. Have you heard that before?”

He shook his head as he reached out to take the shell from her. She saw that he used both hands to receive the gift, as was proper. Somebody was still teaching children the right thing to do, even a poor little boy like this who could not have had much in his short life. She wondered whether he had ever been taken to Gaborone—probably not; or given a treat—almost certainly not. She remembered her first ice cream and the pleasure she had derived from that; how lucky she felt to have had a childhood in which she had been able to lay down good memories.

“When I saw you last time, Mpho,” she said gently, “I thought you were a little bit frightened of something. I don’t want you to be frightened now.”

He continued to stare down at the ground. He was still shaking, she noticed.

“Sometimes, you know,” she continued, “it’s better to talk about something rather than to keep it inside you. Nobody is going to punish you for speaking to me, you see. And I won’t tell anybody that you have spoken to me. I promise you that.”

He remained silent. A shadow crossed the ground beside them, the shadow of a large bird, a buzzard perhaps, that was soaring between them and the sun.

“Rra Moeti won’t know,” she said quietly.

The effect of this was immediate. He looked up sharply, into her eyes; and she saw his fear.

“He cannot harm you,” she said. “He is not allowed to harm you. There is …” What, she wondered, was there to stop Mr. Moeti harming this child? The law? As embodied by whom? A policeman in a police post fifteen miles away? An official in an office in Gaborone even further removed from the world inhabited by this boy? “It is not allowed,” she said.

He stared at her. His lip was quivering, and then the tears came. She stepped forward and put her arms around the boy as he
sobbed. She felt him shaking in her embrace, the shoulders so narrow, so vulnerable.

She did not say anything until his sobs had subsided and she was applying her handkerchief to his nose. “There, Mpho. That’s better now.”

“I’m sorry,” he stuttered. “I’m sorry I did it, Mma. I’m very bad and they can send me to prison now.”

Mma Ramotswe had not expected this. “You … you did it, Mpho? Those cattle? The cattle you looked after?”

He nodded silently.

“But why? Why would you harm the cattle?”

“Because Rra Moeti is a bad man, Mma. He has done bad things to my mother.”

Mma Ramotswe drew in her breath. The inexplicable becomes explicable, she thought. Yes, it was more or less as she had imagined. The poor servant woman and the powerful farmer. It was nothing new; it would be happening up and down the country—up and down every country, no matter where it was. People with money and land treated those without either of those things as they wished. Poor people were at their mercy; it had always been like this, and, sadly, it would probably not ever change very much. Oh, there would be changes on the surface, with laws and regulations making it harder for people to take advantage of others, but there would always be places, places off the beaten track, that laws and regulations never reached. And there would always be men of the view that laws that protected women had nothing to do with them, or were not meant to be taken seriously.

She took stock of the situation. The boy must have seen his mother abused—beaten, perhaps, or made to cower—and decided to take matters into his own hands. He must have felt completely powerless in the face of his mother’s tormentor, and then realised that there was a way in which he could strike back at Moeti. Every
Motswana loved his cattle, and Mr. Moeti was no exception. If one really wanted to hurt him, then what would be easier than to take a knife to the very cattle who knew and trusted one?

She was not sure what to say. Mpho had caused major loss and she could hardly ignore that, especially as it was her responsibility to find out what had happened. But how could she throw him on the mercy of Mr. Moeti—the very man who had been cruel to his mother? She remembered, too, that she had promised him that Mr. Moeti would never know that he had spoken to her.

She looked down at the boy. “Listen to me, Mpho. What you did was terrible—one of the worst things anybody can do. You must never do anything like that again, Mpho. Never. Do you understand?”

“You are going to beat me, Mma?”

She tried not to smile. “Of course not. What I’m saying is this: I can see how you felt very angry when you saw your mother being harmed. But you can’t go and do something like that, even if you think that man deserved it. It is not the way we do things here in Botswana. Do you understand?”

He had stopped shaking, she noticed, and she thought that his voice sounded stronger.

“I understand, Mma.”

She looked at him. She suspected that this boy knew all about punishment, and children who knew about punishment often did not need to learn any more.

“All right,” she said. “You remember what I said. You remember it. Now, let’s go back to the classroom.”

She walked him back to the schoolroom, her hand in his. As they crossed the short expanse of hot red earth she asked him whether he enjoyed being at the school. “And Mr. Modise?” she said. “Do you like your teacher?”

Mpho nodded. “I like him, Mma, even if he is too small, Mma.”

“Yes, he is small,” she said. “But you must always remember: small people are often big inside—and that is what matters.”

“Maybe,” muttered Mpho.

SHE DROVE BACK
to Gaborone deep in thought. There were some enquiries that fizzled out remarkably quickly, when a well-placed question led to the rapid unravelling of what had seemed to be a tangled and opaque skein of confusing facts and half-truths. She had not expected the solution in this case to come quite so quickly, and so simply; but that, she reminded herself, was how many problems in this life sorted themselves out—quickly and simply.