by Zakes Mda
“But I’ve gotta go to work, Rachel. I can’t leave him here. You never know what a lovesick man can do.”
“I’m not scared of him. What more can he do to me that hasn’t been done by other men?”
This statement makes Nana Moira even more determined to call the law. She dials the sheriff’s office and explains to a deputy about the man camped outside her house.
“We’ll send somebody out.”
An hour later two deputies arrive and talk with the women. Nana Moira tells them she fears for the safety of her granddaughter with the man stalking her out there. They then go to Skye and ask him to leave. He stands his ground; he has the right to be any place he wants to be. Rachel feels bad when she sees through the window the deputies handcuff Skye Riley and load his bike on a pick-up.
The next few days are busy at the Bouchers. The women engage the services of a realtor who will put their double-wide on the market. Unlike a house which has to sit there and wait for the buyer the salesman will tow it to a park where it will be given a coat of paint, revamped inside, and then displayed with the other trailers. The realtor will sell the land separately.
As far as the women of the Quilting Circle and the volunteers at the Centre know, Nana Moira and her daughter are going to the West Virginia State Liars Contest. Nana Moira has indicated to them that chances are that she is not coming back after that. It’s high time she retired and looked after her own.
“What are we gonna do without you, Nana Moira? The Centre’s gonna die,” said the women.
“My granddaughter and my great-grandson need me.”
She would have liked to have a yard sale but there is no time for that. She donates a lot of the household stuff to the Centre for their next Chinese auction. She takes the boxes of memories that were stacked in one bedroom to a storage facility. Rachel takes her car to a park-and-sell lot and asks the lot’s owner to accept whatever amount for it, deduct his commission and send the money to her. She will write to him when she is settled at some motel in the first Louisiana city they will find welcoming enough to set up base.
The night before they leave Rachel goes to the Centre for the first time since the rape. She walks around the building while she gathers courage to enter. Jason’s compost is no longer there. The stack of split wood is long gone as well. She enters the building and walks straight to the quilting room. She averts her eyes so they do not see the spot and goes to the kitchen where she once baked pawpaw bread. She returns, but this time she glares at the spot. She glares at it for a long time, unblinking, as if to outbrave it. Then she steps on it and tramples on it as if killing something that is alive and menacing.
She is a free woman as she walks out of the Centre.
The following morning the Boucher women and Blue get into Nana Moira’s GMC Suburban and begin their journey south. They loaded their suitcases and her guitar the previous night. Nana Moira is at the wheel as they begin the long drive. Robbie Boucher will be with them in his trusty vehicle.
Rachel’s cellphone buzzes. It’s Rain. She is pissed off.
“How can you do this to my brother, dude? I hear he’s in the slammer.”
“He was stalking me and I begged him to leave.”
“I thought you were my friend, Rachel.”
“Nothing will happen to your brother. We aren’t pressing charges.”
Rain is not listening. She says, “After all the things I’ve done for you!”
She hangs up abruptly. But she remembers that she is not done with her; Rachel’s phone buzzes again.
“The State Liars Contest deal is off,” says Rain. “No one wants to see you here after what you’ve done to Skye. You break his fucking heart and then you send him to jail?”
This time it is Rachel who hangs up.
She laughs and says to Nana Moira, “I guess we won’t be seeing the great liars of West Virginia any time soon.”
Rachel’s heart sinks as they leave the Wayne Forest. Yet she is excited to be charting new territory where no Boucher – at least those that are of Robbie’s line – has ever ventured. Robbie Boucher’s are people of the northeast and when they ventured into big cities it was Chicago or Philly or even New York. No one has heard any stories of them travelling as far south as Louisiana.
Rachel is not fazed by the fact that she is going to be a refugee in Louisiana. She is not scared for her future, or that of Blue. No one would dare touch her there. She doesn’t expect the elders in black suits to give up. They will certainly try to get her extradited back to Ohio. But in Louisiana she will have a better chance of fighting them. Her common sense tells her that Louisiana wouldn’t dare extradite her child to a rapist when the state protects its own children by denying rapists any parenting rights.
She gazes at Blue on the back seat. He is fast asleep in his car seat. He’ll be free too. They were both Jason’s hostages. Not any more.
She wonders why this became her story and not Jason’s, why it was the victim’s story and not the perpetrator’s.
About the Book
After a few stalls of beets, kale and zucchinis, and of candles made from beeswax and shaped into angels by a beekeeper who is also selling bottled honey, Jason stops to listen to yet another busker … He concludes that it is not for her voice – rather airy and desperate – that her open guitar case is bristling with greenbacks. It is for her strawberry blonde bangs peeping out from under her hat, and her deep blue eyes, and her willowy stature, and her brown prairie skirt of plaid gingham, and her bare feet with tan lines drawn by sandals, and her black T with “Appalachia Active” in big white letters across her breasts – the entire wholesome package that stands before him. She is trying hard to make her voice sound full-bodied and round, but she was not born for singing. She loses a beat to say “thank you” after Jason deposits a single, and then she tries hard to catch up with the song before it goes out of control.
At that moment Jason recognises her. Rachel. Rachel Boucher from Jensen Township …
Athens County, Ohio, USA. When Rachel Boucher and Jason de Klerk meet again – five years after high school – they immediately renew their friendship. But for Jason their friendship is just a stepping stone to something more – a romantic union that seems to have the blessing of the whole community. That is until Rachel becomes involved with Skye Riley.
As Skye and Rachel grow ever closer, Jason’s anger at the relationship boils over into violence, violence that turns the community on its head, setting old friends and neighbours against one another. But this is just a taste of things to come as, it turns out, Rachel is pregnant …
“Weaving together the personal struggles of its characters with the earth-deep worries of a small town, Rachel’s Blue deftly pulls readers into a close-knit community only to show how suffocating such a community can be. Mda’s insights into the hopes and sufferings of human relationships, into the pains of truth-telling and into American culture are as poignant as ever.” – Dr Melisa Klimaszewski
About the Author
ZAKES MDA (full names: Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda) is a South African writer, painter, composer and film maker. A novelist, poet and playwright of more than twenty works, he has won numerous literary awards in South Africa and the United States. When he isn’t writing, Zakes splits his time between teaching creative writing at Ohio University and beekeeping in the Eastern Cape. He is honorary patron of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg.
Rachel’s Blue was written as a response to the legal situation that persists in many US states today – that the father of a child conceived as the result of a rape can still claim the same paternity rights as any other father.
Kwela Books,
an imprint of NB Publishers,
a division of Media24 Boeke (Pty) Ltd,
40 Heerengracht, Cape Town, South Africa
PO Box 6525, Roggebaai, 8012, South Africa
www.kwela.com
Copyright © Zakes Mda 2014
All rights reserved.
No part of this electronic book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher
Cover design by publicide
E-book design by Trace Digital Services
First published by Kwela Books 2014
Available in print:
First edition, first impression 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0681-3
Epub edition:
First edition 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0682-0 (epub)
Mobi edition:
First edition 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0683-7 (mobi)