The Return

Thinking about his son eventually made Tru retrieve his drawing materials, which he carried out to the back deck. Next door, he noticed that Hope had gone inside, although the towel she’d used on Scottie was still draped over the railing. Settling himself in the chair, he debated what he should sketch. Andrew had never seen the ocean, not in person, so Tru decided to try to capture the enormity of the sight before him, assuming that was even possible.

As always, he started with a general and faint outline of the scene—a diagonal point of view that included the shoreline, breaking waves, the pier, and a sea that stretched to the horizon. Drawing had always been a way to relax his mind, and as he sketched, he allowed it to wander. He thought about Hope and wondered what it was about her that had captured his interest. It was unusual for him to be so instantly taken with someone, but he told himself it didn’t really matter. He’d come to North Carolina for other reasons, and he found his thoughts drifting to his family.

He hadn’t seen or spoken to his stepfather, Rodney, or his half brothers, Allen and Alex, in almost two years. The reasons were rooted in history, and wealth had further compounded the estrangement. In addition to the Walls family name, Tru had inherited partial ownership of the farm and business empire. The profits were substantial, but in his daily life, he had little need for money. Whatever he earned from the farm was sent to an investment account in Switzerland that the Colonel had set up when Tru was still a toddler. The funds had been piling up for years, but Tru seldom checked the balance. From that account, he arranged for money to be sent regularly to Kim and he paid for Andrew’s schooling, but aside from the outright purchase of the house in Bulawayo, that was it. He had already arranged to sign over a chunk of the money to Andrew when his son reached the age of thirty-five. He assumed that Andrew would find more use for it than he would.

Recently, his half brothers had started to become resentful about that, but theirs had always been a distant relationship, so it wasn’t altogether unexpected. Tru was nine years older than the twins, and by the time they would have been old enough to remember Tru, he was already spending most of his time in the bush, as far away from the farm as possible. He moved away for good when he was eighteen. In essence, they were, and always had been, strangers to each other.

Things with Rodney, on the other hand, were more complicated. Tru’s equity in the business had been causing problems with Rodney ever since the Colonel had died, thirteen years ago, but in truth, the relationship had been broken far longer than that. To Tru’s mind, it dated back to the fire, when Tru was eleven years old. Much of the compound had gone up in flames in 1959. Tru had barely escaped by jumping from a second-floor window. Rodney had carried Allen and Alex to safety, but Tru’s mother, Evelyn, had never made it out.

Even before the fire, Rodney had never been supportive or affectionate with his stepson; he mostly tolerated Tru. In the aftermath, Rodney’s attention became almost nonexistent. Between dealing with his grief, raising toddlers, and managing the farm, he was overwhelmed. In retrospect, Tru understood that. At the time, it hadn’t been so easy, and the Colonel hadn’t offered much in the way of support, either. After the death of his only child, he sank into a profound depression that seemed to lock him away in a vault of silence. He would sit near the blackened ruins of the compound, staring at the wreckage; when the debris was hauled off and construction began on the new houses, he stared without speaking at the ongoing work. Occasionally Tru went to sit with him, but the Colonel would mumble only a few words in acknowledgment. There were rumors, after all; rumors about his grandfather, the business, and the real reason for the fire. At the time, Tru knew nothing about them; he knew only that no one in his family seemed willing to speak to him or even offer so much as a hug. If it hadn’t been for Tengwe and Anoona, Tru wasn’t sure he would have survived the loss of his mother. The only thing he could really remember from that period was regularly crying himself to sleep and spending long hours wandering the property alone after school and his chores. He understood now that those had been his first steps on the journey that led him from the farm to living in the bush. Had his mother survived, he had no idea who he would have become.

But that wasn’t the only change in the aftermath of his mother’s death. After she passed, Tru had asked Tengwe to purchase some drawing paper and pencils. Because he recalled seeing his mother sketch, he began to do so as well. He had no training and little natural skill; it was months before he could re-create on paper something as simple as a tree with any semblance of realism. It was, however, a way to escape his own feelings and the quiet desperation always present at the farm.

He longed to draw his mother, but her features seemed to vanish more quickly than his skill developed. Everything he attempted struck him as wrong somehow, not the mother he remembered, even when Tengwe and Anoona protested otherwise. Some attempts were closer than others, but never once did he complete a drawing of his mother that he felt fully captured her. In the end, he threw the stack of sketches away, resigning himself to that additional loss, like the other losses in his life.

Like his father.

Growing up, it had sometimes felt to Tru as though the man had never existed. His mother had said little about him, even when Tru pressed; the Colonel refused to speak of him at all. Over time, Tru’s curiosity waned to almost nothing. He could go years without thinking or wondering about the man. Then, out of the blue, a letter had arrived a few months ago at the camp in Hwange. It had originally been sent to the farm; Tengwe had forwarded it, but Tru hadn’t bothered opening it right away. When he finally did, his initial instinct was to regard it as some sort of practical joke, despite the plane tickets. It was only when he scrutinized the faded photograph that he realized that the letter might be genuine.

The photo showed a young, handsome man with his arm around a much younger version of a woman who could only be Tru’s mother. Evelyn was a teenager in the photograph—she had been nineteen when Tru was born—and it struck Tru as surreal that he was more than twice the age she’d been back then. Assuming, of course, that it actually was her.

But it was. In his heart, he knew it.

He didn’t know how long he stared at it on that first evening, but over the next few days, he found himself continually reaching for it. It was the only photograph he had of his mother. All the others had been lost in the same fire that had killed her, and seeing her image after so many years triggered a flood of additional memories: the sight of her sketching on the back veranda; her face hovering above him as she tucked him into bed; the sight of her wearing a green dress as she stood in the kitchen; the feel of her hand in his as they walked toward a pond. He still wasn’t sure whether any of those events were real or simply figments of his imagination.

Then, of course, there was the man in the photograph…

In the letter, he’d identified himself as Harry Beckham, an American. He claimed to have been born in 1914, and to have met Tru’s mother in late 1946. He’d served in World War II as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and after the war, he’d moved to Rhodesia, where he worked at the Bushtick Mine in Matabeleland. He’d met Tru’s mother in Harare, and said that the two of them had fallen in love. He further claimed not to have known that she’d been pregnant when he moved back to America, but Tru wasn’t sure he believed that. After all, if he hadn’t even suspected that Tru’s mum had been pregnant, why would he have searched for a long-lost child in the first place?