by T. M. Clark
She couldn’t breathe. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Enoch attempted to put a kidney dish in front of her, but he wasn’t quick enough; it splashed over the sides and onto the bed. He pressed the button to call the nurse to her room. ‘I have to go now, Chloe, I will be back when there is no nurse here,’ he said, and was about to sneak out when a black nurse arrived in her pristine white uniform.
‘Out, you cannot be here,’ she hissed. ‘What you thinking? A black man being in a white girl’s room? Out before Matron sees you!’ She turned her back on him, expecting that he would leave.
‘Hello, Miss Mitchell,’ she said, looking at the chart. ‘I’m Baleka, your nurse this morning.’ She turned back to Enoch, who was standing just outside the door. ‘Out. I see to her and tell you all what is happening outside the gate. If Matron finds you in here, pas op lots of trouble!’
‘Please let Enoch stay, please,’ Chloe begged.
‘No, Miss Mitchell, he cannot,’ Nurse Baleka said. ‘Come on, we gets you cleaned up before Matron says I’m doing a useless job.’
‘Can Enoch come visit me later?’
‘I don’t know what happens on your farm, Miss Mitchell, but he not come inside here. Black people go to their own section in the hospital and not by the white people’s ward. He knows that.’
‘But Enoch’s family …’
‘Shush, girl. Thula. Never says that to anyone, you hear me? You gets him hurt bad. The police, they make him disappear if you says something like that. Thinks before you speak. Matron can come in and talk to you soon.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘You haves to protect him; there is Afrikaner Partisans people in this hospital. They hear, and they do bad things to him.’
‘Oh, okay, understood,’ Chloe said, and Baleka helped her move to the chair before she remade her bed with fresh sheets.
She hated South Africa and its stupid apartheid laws.
* * *
Chloe sat in her wheelchair, her head still bandaged, while Xo went to fetch the bakkie and bring it closer. Despite her being discharged, the hospital had insisted that she remain in the chair until she got to the car.
The receptionist stopped the porter from taking her further.
‘I made this for you.’ She handed her a melktert in cling wrap. ‘Ons is jammer. You need to know that the vrouens of the town are jammer for what happened to you. Smith had no right trespassing on your plaas like that. You should never have been put in that situasie, and it was a good thing that your kaffir protected you and your pa from him,’ Mevrou Van Vuuren said.
Chloe frowned as she accepted the pie, wondering what else was being said around town about the attack. She knew the townsfolk meant well, but she wished they would just back off and leave them alone. She was so tired of defending her family.
Nurse Baleka had been right to warn her. While she was in hospital, the state mortuary had issued the death notice after the autopsy on Sebastian, which said that he had died of pulmonary contusion caused by a blunt force to the chest; a farming accident. Baleka had warned her that some people didn’t like the outcome.
The Afrikaner Partisans membership was strong in Pietermaritzburg, and in their small community of Howick. Chloe had come to realise that many of the people she was around were supporters of this extreme far-right group. They had an insane idea that a friendship between a white and black person was wrong. They believed that people were not equal and that the government should not be granting any power to any Indian, or coloureds. That they could even think that the world, which had sanctioned South Africa so harshly already, would ever allow an independent Boerestaat for Boer-Afrikaner people only, was ludicrous. There were also rumours that they had begun killing non-whites—yet, nothing was being done to stop them. They could make her life, and her family’s life, difficult if they wanted to because the police turned a blind eye to whatever they were doing.
‘Ek is jammer, about what happened to your pa, must be so hard for you. Please know that you have vriende here. Not everyone is out to find a sondebok.’
Scapegoat? Chloe’s survival instincts bristled. She was being told something here, but her brain wasn’t functioning on all cylinders.
‘If there is anything we can do to help, please let us know,’ Mevrou Van Vuuren said. ‘Your pa, he’s not a very active part of our community, but he’s good with horses; everyone knows that he can settle a green horse down in no time and is no threat to anyone. Which makes what happened so sad. It’s almost like the horse was protecting him from Sebastian.’
Chloe smiled. It hurt. ‘Not quite, but thank you.’
Mevrou Van Vuuren nodded.
Xo was outside, waiting for her. He stood by the bakkie, jungle hat in hand. As the orderly pushed Chloe’s wheelchair to the car, he opened her door as a chauffeur would. He made sure that she was safely buckled into the passenger’s side, before he climbed into the driver’s seat and started the bakkie.
They’d been friends for as long as she could remember. One of her best memories was of when she was about ten and he was eleven, when he’d come to rescue her after she had run away from home. Only this time, he hadn’t taken her right back to her mother. Instead, he’d walked with her further from the house, showing her how beautiful the bush was, and started to teach her what plants to live on if she was out there alone. He had known how to make a bird trap with grass, and he had shown her how to peel the hairy skin from a prickly pear without a knife. She remembered the sweet juices running down their faces when she’d done it right. Chloe had always known that no matter what, she could trust Xo.
He sat back. ‘I’m twenty-two years old, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help him.’ Xo wiped his face with both hands. ‘The police are questioning Dad every day about what happened, and I fear soon he won’t come home, even though he didn’t kill Sebastian.’
Chloe looked at Xo. At six-foot tall, he was built like men were supposed to be, broad shoulders and slim hips, with a face that smiled often and a wicked sense of humour. She’d seen him laugh and cry, but she’d never seen him like this. Not even when they had got into serious trouble for taking their horses into the Communal Land and been late coming home, causing their dads to send out a search party for them. His face always showed hope. Trust. Love. Now it just showed despair. He was hunched over the steering wheel and wore the face of a man admitting defeat.
‘What? Come on, that’s ridiculous! The report said it wasn’t his fault!’
‘He’s black. Sebastian was white. How many times have you witnessed the racism yourself against us?’
‘Too many times. This is madness, dammit!’
‘The apartheid system is going to swallow Dad up as if he was an activist.’
‘But they can’t do that!’ Chloe protested.
‘You and I both know that the police can do anything in this country. There is a state of emergency on; normal rules don’t apply anymore. Dad is going to be made an example of for killing a white man, and they’ll put Marin down too, now that the report is done. They’ll say he’s a menace, a dangerous horse.’
‘We can’t let this happen, Xo,’ Chloe said.
‘There’s no way to stop them,’ Xo admitted. ‘Dad and I have no rights here, and we don’t have money to fight them with a lawyer. I’m out of ideas.’
Chloe watched his face break, and it made her heart ache. But there was something they could do. It would be tricky, and it might have other consequences, but she would do it to save Enoch. She pushed the old vision of the silhouette of Enoch burying someone deep in the ground from her mind. She couldn’t let the uncertainty of that shadow haunt her now.
‘We’ve no place here anymore. We must go home to Delaware,’ Chloe said. ‘I know we came here for the good of my dad, but we need to go back for the good of yours. Before they lock him away forever.’
Xo looked at her. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course I’m serious. I can’t sit here and watch
them take Enoch away. He’s like a father to me.’
‘How do we just leave?’ Xo said.
‘We get in the truck with our horses and we go.’
‘Bringing three horses 1500 kilometres through the bush wasn’t easy, Chloe. Have you forgotten that Dad and I had to get a South African dompas to travel? When we crossed the Limpopo and got to Dad’s friends’ farm in Masisi, he had to sign the papers to say we had his permission to travel, and that we were taking his horses to Howick. Every place we stopped, the farmer had to sign to give us permission to continue travelling. As if we were their possessions. Every policeman or defence force person who stopped us along the way treated us like we were nothing.’
‘But you’re everything to me. You gave up your own freedom to come here and help me look after Dad. Now it’s my turn to help. I’m serious, Xo. We need to leave South Africa and go home.’
‘I would say that only Dad and I go, but your dad and mine—I would never try to part them. That friendship is set in stone. My dad won’t leave yours. You’re right; the only way to save him is for all of us to leave.’
‘The receptionist at the hospital, she was trying to warn me. Something about a scapegoat. Now you tell me about the police, and alarm bells are ringing in my head. We need to leave and leave now. And even if we’re wrong and they don’t come after your dad, they’re going to destroy Marin. I can’t let them do that.’
Xo nodded, then took a deep breath. ‘You think you are up to it? Now? Despite your injuries?’
‘They wouldn’t have let me out of the hospital if they didn’t think I was going to be okay. Besides, this is your dad’s life we’re talking about. I have to be. It’s going to be a long trek. I’m just glad that this time we’ll travel together. It’ll be easier for us to get to Messina in the horse truck, so most of the journey is done, and the only part you and Enoch need to do is cross the Limpopo with the horses again. It’d be so much simpler if the border hadn’t been closed five years ago and the horses had come in with papers.’
‘The horses were never going to get clearance to come through the border into South Africa in 1981, and getting the horses back through the border now is not going to happen. They have to go through the bush.’
‘Have you forgotten there are crocs in the Limpopo?’ Chloe said.
‘And there’re lions, leopards and hyenas in the bush around that area, all along the Limpopo, down to where we cross the river. There’s the South African Defence Force doing their patrols, and terrorists from both sides in Mozambique. There’re going to be more people in the bush than last time—and that’s before we cross back into Zimbabwe with the Red Brigade and the dissident war going on. When we came into South Africa, they weren’t expecting black people to cross the border to get away from Zimbabwe. There was already a stream of white people trying legitimately to cross over to deal with.’
Chloe nodded. ‘I hope that now they’re still going to be too busy with all the people leaving Zim, to realise we’re jumping the border back the other way.’
‘We can only hope.’
She smiled, then winced at the pain. ‘Leaving our horses behind isn’t an option this time either, so we don’t have much choice to get back over the border, except through the bush.’
‘Your ability to just take a situation, make a decision and run with it amazes me. You used to be the wild child, and yet you see straight to the heart of any problem and find solutions so easily.’
‘And it’s got me into trouble many times, too. You know there’s one thing when we get home to Zimbabwe that’ll make life a lot easier for us. My dad’s bank accounts that he couldn’t empty when we left. We can at least go home to decent money again, and we won’t be living this existence that we do now.’
‘I’ve heard living expenses have gone up a bit in Zimbabwe, and you’ll also have to buy your dad’s medication there,’ Xo warned.
‘There’s enough in those accounts, Xo. And there’s Delaware, with Aunty Grace keeping that going. I haven’t done three years of an accounting degree not to know that we should be better off at home in Zimbabwe than we’ve been here,’ Chloe said.
Xo nodded and put the bakkie in gear.
‘I think the quicker we have your dad away from here, the better. Let’s go home. We’ll tell your dad what we decided—when he objects we can tell him it’s two to one, and he’s outvoted if he says no.’
CHAPTER
9
Enoch’s head ached. The police had roughed him up a bit this time, trying to intimidate him. But eventually, they’d let him go. Another day to be grateful for—because their warning on leaving was clear.
He was living on borrowed time.
He looked at the man sitting at the dining-room table, refusing to eat, pushing away Ethel’s arm. In the week that Chloe had been in hospital, Mike had deteriorated before their eyes. His clothes hung from him, and he had become a ghost of the man who used to fill them. Enoch couldn’t quite believe that this was all that was left of his friend.
Forty-nine years had passed too quickly; the end for Mike was coming fast. Who knew if his friend was trapped inside his damaged brain. Enoch knew that despite any change in Mike, the doctors would not operate on him again. Mike was more fragile than ever before.
But it was having Chloe in hospital that had caused Mike to lose heart. Taking him to visit her had been a mistake. It would’ve been better to tell him she was away at university because it was after that visit that he’d stopped eating; he thought she wasn’t coming home. Thankfully she would be here soon, and she’d get Mike to start eating again.
Mike’s expression was just vacant; it was like he’d simply checked out. The last knock on his head had caused swelling again, making him even more mixed up. It was ironic. He’d survived the Rhodesian Bush War relatively unscarred, despite seeing horrendous things that no man ever should. Bodies pulled apart by men like wild dogs, people on poles as if they were pieces of meat, even men hung from trees like cocoons, when Buffel had lost his mind and snapped during one of the Grey’s Scouts’ contact with the guerrillas at Shilo Mission. Before that, none of those men in the unit had any inkling that their fellow scout was so screwed up in the head that he would actually commit such atrocities against another human. Yet Mike had been the one to show compassion, and try to guide Buffel to someone who would help his mixed-up mind. They had faced mortar attacks and been shot at numerous times, they had lost fellow Scouts and heard horses screaming until they’d been silenced by a gunshot, and still Mike had been the strong one.
The Mike he knew had died the night they had taken Andy Pryor’s gold. It had paid for Sarah’s life but cost Mike his.
Enoch needed to honour Mike’s living spirit and take him back to his farm in Zimbabwe, take him home to Sarah. He wasn’t going to live long. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t been near home in all these years. Enoch had always thought that Delaware would be the place where they’d grow old.
‘Sarah, you will not know the man I bring to rest with you,’ he said aloud. ‘But I will keep my promise and bring him home.’ He and Mike were blood brothers, an oath they had sworn long ago as young boys.
He could still remember the slide of the hunting knife against his palm that had cemented their pledge all those decades ago. As the blade had stopped moving, a single drop of red had splashed onto the cow-dung floor of the tack room of Delaware’s stables.
‘Eish, it burns,’ he said.
‘You sure that knife is sharp enough, Enoch?’
‘On my life, I swear it. Look, mine is done.’ He proudly displayed his hand.
‘Okay. Now mine.’ Mike held out his hand.
Enoch shook his head and offered the knife to Mike as blood ran down the handle and dripped onto Enoch’s foot.
‘You do it. If you tell the baas I cut you, he will beat me.’
Mike shrugged. ‘Guess that’s true. Give me the knife; you’re bleeding all over the place.’ He took the handle and gripped
it tightly. He took a deep breath, then he relaxed his hand over the blade, just as Enoch had done, and pulled.
For a moment there was no pain, and then the burning began.
‘Einahhh! Quick, put our hands together,’ Mike said as he held out his hand to Enoch, and as they joined hands, blood dripped again onto the floor.
Mike stared at their hands. One the colour of dark coffee, and the other white, despite his sun tan. ‘Now we are blood brothers forever,’ he said.
‘Always blood brothers, you and I,’ Enoch nodded, ‘no boarding school and no government can ever tear us apart.’
The burning in Enoch’s hand had stopped. Now all he could feel was the pulsing of his blood and Mike’s. He stared at their joint hands as if something might change due to having some of Mike’s white blood run into his body.
‘You think the blood has passed from me into you?’ Mike asked, as if he’d been thinking the same thing.
‘How would I know? You’re the one who knows things like that from your fancy school,’ Enoch said.
The boys pulled their hands apart, and when the air got into the cuts, they both applied pressure to their wounds.
‘Sheeesh, that hurts worse than a Matabele ant bite,’ Mike said, and Enoch looked at his hand. The cut was deep, the white edges had split apart, and swelling had started. Blood still oozed out, but it no longer ran freely.
He passed Mike a piece of a hankie he’d cut in half with the knife. ‘Press this into it and we can tie it off. That way, by suppertime, your mother will not notice the cut. If she does, just tell her you cut yourself by mistake when we were sharpening the hunting knives. Do not tell her what we did; the adults will not understand.’
‘And yours?’ Mike asked.
‘Mine is black; no one is going to notice if I have a cut on it or not,’ Enoch said as he wrapped the other half of the light-blue faded material around his own hand. ‘It will be okay.’