A is for Ancestor

R is for Rain. In Fructman’s Illustrated Dictionary for Little People, a duck holds an umbrella against the slashing raindrops.

The rats had come with the rains. Nights, we heard them skitter inside the walls and beneath the floorboards of the bungalow, the scrabble of their tiny claws chasing us into our dreams. Mornings, sawdust fell through cracks in the beadboard ceiling and into our oatmeal as the rats gnawed at the beams, wearing down their long teeth. Afternoons, they slept in the stifle beneath the corrugated metal roof, and the house fell silent.

There was a burr in Mr. Gordon’s Rs, an affectation from his year in Scotland, where he had met Mrs. Gordon. Perhaps he traveled to that country because he’d heard the women are so very fair. “Rrats,” he’d say, looking down on the spoor that peppered his kitchen counters. He dredged it up from the back of his throat. “Bloody rrats.”

In this, my twelfth rain season, the days played out by degrees, like the attic air that chilled with the advance of the mountain shadows. The season brought two types of rainfall: a deluge of heavy drops that beat on our heads until they throbbed, and a soft mizzle that crawled under our cuffs and collars and between the seams, weaving dampness into the fabric of our clothes. At dusk, when the vermin began to stir from their dreamless sleep, Mr. Gordon would rise from his supper of bubble and squeak without excusing himself and climb the ladder to the crawl space with a plate of fried meat to bait the spring traps. He also took a cold beer to drink as he stooped, breathing in the day’s accumulated heat, and one of his enormous ledger books—the coup de grâce, I supposed, for any rat that might survive the snap of his traps. Perhaps he cherished this time away from me and Mrs. Gordon, because he remained there until the air grew cold beneath the shrouded moon, reading aloud by torchlight from the massive ledger. His muffled, disembodied words drifted down on us with the sawdust: a litany of receipts and expenditures, his own Book of Numbers.

On average, Mr. Gordon filled one ledger book every three weeks with his cramped, backward-slanting scrawl. He penciled all the transactions of his life into their ruled margins. Each ice cream he bought for me on haircut day became an account receivable, and each time I completed a household chore he noted a reduction against my debt. Every full tank of gas in our British Ford was an asset to be amortized over the mountain roads he drove each day to and from his furniture store in Umtali. The brightly colored scarves he bought for Mrs. Gordon were entered as goodwill.

Years earlier, Mr. Gordon had ordered his carpenter, Sundayboy Moses, to construct a monolithic file cabinet for the ledgers: a wall of great drawers in the office above the furniture store, floor to ceiling, each as large as a steamer trunk. The joints in the cabinet were beveled to appear nearly seamless, and the drawers glided on runners lined with stainless steel ball bearings taken from the wheels of derelict tractors that littered the Trustland. It was the last piece of furniture Sundayboy produced, his masterpiece, before he limped away northwest, toward the Unspeakable River where God resided.

Sundayboy’s departure left Mr. Gordon’s store with four employees: Mr. Tabori, a sales associate who had fled to Rhodesia after the fall of fascist Italy; two stockboys, Now Now and Pamwe, who worked for daily wages unloading and uncrating furniture in the mornings and running deliveries in the late afternoon; and the cleaning lady, Mrs. Moses, who scrubbed Mr. Gordon’s toilets, emptied his waste bins, boiled and bleached his white shirts and underpants, polished his floors, and rubbed paste wax into the heavy wooden file drawers her husband had made.

At home, Mr. Gordon could not abide Africans, and so I was called upon to act as his servant. I fetched him his beer and jigger of...