Food from the moon

...one giant leap...or was it ??

So the Americans landed on the moon back then when all we knew was that it glowed at night and when at   its fullest, it would drive the oceans crazy. And some of us would toss and turn because of its brilliance...but did landing on the moon mean much to the man in the field with a family to feed?

Here's a memory -- AND, AS ALWAYS, COMMENT...PLEASE. 

FOOD FROM THE MOON

 Mabuza never wore shoes and I doubt he ever had. The soles of his feet were broad and flat. The heels of his feet were criss-crossed with minuscule, dust-congealed ravines that were a memento to the roads and paths he had journeyed.

Mabuza wore a pair of grey, white man’s shorts that hung below his knees and an old man’s short-sleeved vest. Around his waist, he’d tied a braided, leather rimpie (thong) and attached to this belt was a small, cheap clasp knife and a handmade leather tobacco pouch in which he kept his little tin of snuff tobacco.

Mabuza’s teeth were as yellow as a newborn chick, but the whites of his eyes were as clear as recently ground maize.

Mabuza was a tall, stringy man, whose peppercorn hair was beginning to show speckles of grey, and his nostrils were flared, and his belly was showing signs of too much maize beer.

Mabuza would always squat over the ground for fear of the wiggly-bastard worm, and he could do this for a very long time without shifting a muscle, even when he inhaled the snuff tobacco off his extended finger, or ate from his plate of maize porridge with bent fingers.

When we went hunting for buck, Mabuza would tie a battered, convict issue tin mug to his belt. My eldest brother would carry the rifle. The gun now had a bent barrel after he’d fallen with it chasing the wounded Duiker in the pineapple field. To shoot a buck in the head, he would now have to aim for its shoulder blade, and to shoot it through the lungs he would now have to aim for its backside.

Mabuza would lead us toward the kopje (hill) we called Executioner’s rock. Here, the elephant grass was less high so that the foraging buck was easier to track and see. The granite cliff was about seventy foot high, and at its base Rock fig and some Knob thorn trees had grown in a thick clump. Mabuza would always take the lead, and his feet left faint spoor in the dust of the animal path we followed. Reaching the top of the kopje, Mabuza would venture off on his own, looking for the fresh footprints left by the King’s buck that we were illegally hunting, and my brother and I would stand on top of the cliff and look down the face of granite and try to spot the glimmer of human bones that lay down there in the undergrowth.

I once asked Mabuza who it was, that was thrown off the rock?

“Mabuza,” I asked one day as I lay on my stomach looking down at the base of the cliff. “Who lies down there?”

Mabuza squatted alongside me. “This was the place, first, of the Sangoma. From here the Sangoma, many, would put the people with bad medicine,” he explained, looking out into the valley and not at the base of the cliff, as the bones of dead people were of little interest to him.

“The Sangoma pushed people from here?”

“Yes. But then one time the King had all the Sangoma pushed from here so now the Sangoma does not come here anymore.”

When Mabuza found a fresh spoor, we would follow along the ridge where the elephant grass was only knee high, and where the stout Rock fig tree grew and that had roots as thick as my thigh. There was always a breeze up here, and the yellow stems of the grass would sway in gentle waves with the yellow and green striped locusts clinging on for the ride.

Should Mabuza spot the buck, we all crouched and then he would gesture for my brother with the rifle to join him. Slowly they would inch away for a better view, and I would study the ground or the grass in front of me daring not to move. This could be for a long time, which made me wonder why I was there in the first place. If I stood up, I would scare the buck, so I remained squatting on my heels on the path and learnt how to be patient; learnt that if you look at a rock long enough, mica can become silver, and working, red ants become the labourers in an imaginary silver mine of great richness.

If a shot rang out, I stood up quickly.

If the first person I saw was Mabuza running toward where the buck had been, I’d know the animal was down. I would run toward Mabuza. My brother was running, too. My feet were bouncing off the small, swollen rocks and avoiding the patches of devil thorns that lay disguised like rabbit shit in grassless patches, their prickly hides a certain pain to a naked foot.

I’d get there in time to see Mabuza slit the buck’s throat with his clasp knife, the convict issued tin mug already placed beneath the animal’s jugular. A thick stream of blood would squirt around the knife’s blade, and Mabuza would aim the stream into his mug.

Mabuza would drink the blood whilst my brother told me about how he had to aim, this time, for the buck’s ribs in order to shoot it in the head, and Mabuza would nod in agreement to this and smile through blood stained lips.

When we found no buck, we would trek over the hill and down the southern side back to the house. Often I would see Mabuza lean down and pick up a pebble or stone and slip it into his tobacco pouch, so one day I asked him why he did this.

“Mabuza,” I asked him one day. “Why do you pick up a stone here and there and put it in with your snuff?”

“To remind me, little master, of the places I have visited,” he explained.

When man first landed on the moon, we did not have television, but as I was at boarding school then, we were allowed to stay up later than usual to listen to the landing on the radio.

From the dormitory window, we all had a good view of the moon that night. I am certain many young imaginations were stretched to their limits as we viewed the distant lunar orb and listened to the radio. We were able we imagined, to hear the squeak of the door of the Eagle ship as it was opened and hear Mister Armstrong’s breath behind his mask. Every pore of the crater, called Maskelyne, we could see in our minds, and as Mister Armstrong’s massive shoe hit the moon dust for the first time we imagined its weight and saw the dust rise like the seeds of a dandelion in a breeze.

Yes, I think we had a better picture than what was being broadcast on television whilst listening to the radio.

Some weeks later, back at home on a school holiday, a national magazine printed photographs of the first man on the moon, so I took the magazine to Max, the horse boy, to have a look at as Max always showed a keenness on the mechanics of the farm tractor and the diesel generator and the workings of the transistor radio that was now replacing the valve radio.

Max was applying dubbin to some bridles, so I squatted alongside him outside the tack room and showed him the photographs page by page.

The smell from the stables was ripe, and the blue bottle flies were in competition with each other as they darted over horse dung like Spitfire aeroplanes.

I told Max about the booster rocket and the loss of gravity and that Mister Armstrong’s footprints would never, ever disappear from the moon, and neither would the American flag.

Max whistled a few times through his teeth to emphasise his interest, and I caught him, twice, looking up at the day’s sky so all in all I felt that Max had been impressed, so I left him there outside the tack room with the blue bottle flies that were heading out on another sortie.

Two days later, Max came to me whilst I was walking down the road to the potato packing shed. He asked me what food had the men coming back from the moon brought back with them.

“To put in the stomachs of their children,” he concluded.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“No skoff, little master?”

“No skoff.”

Max told me that he thought this was a very long, long distance to travel and to come back without anything. Even the man who travels to the sea comes back with a bottle of salt water to rectify intestinal ailments, Max offered. And that, sometimes, was many day’s journey by bus but quicker by train if you had the money, he added. This I had to agree with, but I did retaliate by saying that we will all learn about our own earth now that it had been seen from the moon.

Max shrugged, unimpressed by what seeing what or whoever being able to see whoever.

“Nothing? No food? Nothing? ”

Then I remembered. “They did bring back something, Max! I’d forgotten!”

“This is good, little master! What?”

“A rock,” I answered thinking of Mabuza and his pebbles, as the words left my young mouth.