The Fever Tree

by Jennifer McVeigh

  Piet had grown into a shy, slight, solitary boy with a wad of dark hair, pale skin, and large brown eyes. He was the very opposite of his brothers’ brutality, and he brought home a slew of wounded animals. There was an elephant shrew mauled by an eagle, and a baby bird dropped from its nest, throat transparent and taut, which he carried home cupped between his hands with an expression of profound concern. Inevitably they died, in the night, and he would show himself the next morning, stoic in the face of tragedy. His father was often angry with him. When he caught him playing with his lead soldiers or scratching out letters in the flour dust outside the bread oven, he would cuff him round the head for idleness and say, “There’s a drought on,” as if the boy were somehow culpable. Frances thought he probably blamed himself for the boy losing his fingers. Then there was Jan, the youngest, who spent most of the day sitting in the cool corners of the house with a colored nurse who plaited a kind of willow for the backs of the chairs.

  The drought was one of the worst in living memory. The men, armed with rifles, guarded the dam day and night to stop the game from drinking. Every day the water receded further from its banks, like a puddle drying in the sun. The ground blistered and dried in the heat, its surface cracking, so that it looked like the gnarled, leathered skin of a crocodile. She had always considered the Reitzes to be wealthy—their land stretched as far as the mountains in the distance—but she hadn’t understood that the veldt was so poor that when the drought came and their herds began to die their wealth would fall away from them like coins poured down a drain.

  Mevrouw Reitz kept water turtles in a glass bowl in the kitchen and said that when they rose to the surface it would rain. A dog went missing on the farm, and they found the carcass behind the native huts. The natives had no crops, and Maria said that they were so hungry they were grinding down the bones of dead animals to survive. The water they drank in the house was dank and brackish and always warm. Spring rolled into summer, and everyone waited. The veldt turned from dun to brown, and began to blacken in the sun as if it had been singed by fire. Frances walked down to the river with Piet one afternoon, and they dug their feet into the deep, heavy sand in the riverbed. It was hard to imagine water had ever flowed here. There were no insects or birds. Only the cicadas still grated out their song. Even the mimosa bushes had dried up and lost their green. A few goats were nibbling at their lower branches. She had been told that the leaves would turn their milk sour and the kids would stop suckling, but when she tried to shoo them away they butted at her legs and kept on eating.

  Her great struggle was learning to speak Dutch. Mevrouw Reitz was the only person who spoke English, but she refused to speak it to Frances now that she was a servant. Frustrations were quick to show when she didn’t understand. The difficulty was finding someone to teach her the vocabulary. But here she found a friend in Piet, who loved to explain the meaning of words, never losing patience, perhaps understanding with a child’s intuition that her position in the house rested on her ability to grasp the language.

  There were two other servants who worked in the house. The cook—a small, silent man with two missing front teeth and sad eyes—and Maria, the maid. She was the daughter of Jantjie, the Reitzes’ driver, who had been born on the farm over eighty years before. Maria had high cheekbones and a brush of hair cut close to her scalp like a man. A stream of children would come to see her at the back door of the kitchen, and Frances never worked out how many of them were her own. She was straight-backed and strong, with capable hands, and she took control of Frances as if she were a child, not necessarily because she liked her, but because someone had to assume responsibility. It was Maria who showed her how to polish the brass, how to make coffee—grinding down the beans with dried figs—how to gut a fish without slicing open her palm, and how to mix bleach into the water without burning her hands.

  It was Frances’s duty to darn and mend. The only sewing she had ever done was embroidery, and during her first week in the house she looked with mounting panic at the linen piling up in the workbasket. Maria taught her how to darn socks, fix the seam of a dress, and put a new collar on a shirt. She would place her hands, dry and warm like leather, over Frances’s own, the fabric jammed between her fingers, molding itself into the neat folds which always evaded Frances when she tried by herself. If Frances slipped a stitch or knotted the thread, Maria would admonish her in her own language, a tumbling flow of clicks and vowels.

  Frances ate in the kitchen—mealies, which stuck in her teeth, smeared with gravy from dinner. Occasionally, in the evenings, Jantjie would come and stand just outside the open door of the kitchen, packing his pipe and talking to Maria, and he would nod at her politely.

  For a few hours every afternoon, it was her responsibility to look after Piet. She walked with him to the dam most days. It was a ritual for all members of the household, master and servant, to see how far the water had fallen. Some days the twins would come with them. They wrestled on the muddy banks, bodies jammed against each other, rolling over and over in the earth until one had pinned the other to the ground, knees on elbows, jaw open in triumph. Piet avoided them, content to be on his own, and this reminded her of herself as a child. He would squat down on the mud, watching the natives beating the sheep away from the water’s edge, or stretch out on the burning earth, tempting birds to come closer with specks of bread. His brothers treated him as a curiosity. When bored, they loved to taunt him, and occasionally their bullying turned to violence. He would scramble out from under them with a nose trickling blood or a bruised eye purpling as it swelled shut.

  In the afternoons, wisps of clouds would gather, forming tumbling mountains in the sky with the sugary whiteness of meringues, and the household would look up, daring to hope for rain when they had promised themselves not to. The sun would slip momentarily into shade, and the earth would exhale in gratitude. A moment later the plains would be cast again into a blaze of heat, and they would watch despairingly as the clouds dissolved into a hazy sunset.

  Frances’s fate was inextricably bound up with that of the whole household. If the rains failed, they would all fail, and she would have to go back to England. But she found to her surprise that she wanted the rains to come not just because her survival depended on it but because she was beginning to respect the life at Rietfontein. Mevrouw Reitz was brittle and coarse, but she had purpose. She was never still, with Jan on one arm, pulling weeds out of the garden, or in the kitchen, bottling and preserving and pounding down herbs into medicines for her children. And out of her labor came this extraordinary family, thriving in this hostile place.

  Frances wondered at the single-mindedness, at the passion and the pleasure to be had from such an existence. Life had been so different in England. She and her cousins had prided themselves on being idle, boasting about not having to lift a finger all through the long summer afternoons. But in the Karoo, merit rested on one’s ability to be useful: to cook, to clean, to sew, to mend. Everyone was hard at work, and they seemed happier because of it. They treated Frances for the most part well. She fell into bed every night beyond any exhaustion she had ever known, and found to her surprise that she was, if not content, then satisfied. Her muscles ached in the mornings, and there was pleasure in being busy. More than that, she was learning: about how to create things; how to transform this barren, desolate place, through human endeavor, into a thing of beauty.

  A few trees had been watered through the summer, and they yielded fruit. Frances helped Mevrouw Reitz in the kitchen making jam. She reveled in the process, carving out the peach stones and boiling up the soft chunks of wet yellow flesh in a huge copper with sugar and water until the room throbbed with an aching, bodily sweetness. She loved to watch it thicken, eventually letting a drop fall from the spoon onto the slab of cool marble, where it proved it would set. It was her job to spoon the oozing amber jam into jars, and when it was done she licked the sticky residue from her burnt fingers with satisfaction.

  Her Dutch improved unt
il she was able to understand the Reitzes and hold a conversation with the other servants. She particularly enjoyed talking to Jantjie. His quiet strength and fascination with nature reminded her of Edwin. He would tell her stories about the veldt, bringing it teeming into life. He talked about the droughts which had lasted years and left the land a desert, of the floods which followed when the water ran off the plains and burst the dam, and the swarms of locusts which arrived in the wake of the rains. He told stories of hailstorms which struck in midsummer with stones as large as fists, and the snow which fell one winter three feet deep. Lightning stories weren’t unusual, but Jantjie’s was the best. He had seen a team of oxen all struck dead by one bolt which hit the metal harness.

  Maria called him a slangmeester. He had, so she said, rubbed the venom of snakes into wounds in his skin to give him immunity. There was never any proof of this, though he did once hold up a scorpion in front of the children and let it sting him again and again, and he showed no pain or ill effects. He told snake stories as schoolgirls told ghost stories, and the children sometimes crept to the door to listen to him. There was the time when Maria was still a child. She had pushed open the door from the stoep, and a snake, asleep on top, fell down in a noose about her neck. She froze in fright as the snake uncoiled itself and slithered down her back, leaving her unharmed. Jantjie spoke with such conviction that Frances could never tell when he was blurring the lines of truth. He told her about the snakes that had a thirst for milk—he had seen one with his own eyes drinking from the udders of a cow—and the Xhosa woman who had fallen asleep underneath a tree suckling her child and woken to find a puff adder clamped to her other breast.

  Frances avoided looking in mirrors, but she couldn’t always help catching a glimpse of herself in the reflection of a window or in the glass in the hall. She noticed over time that the scars were losing their redness. They weren’t as deep and pitted as they had been before, but her skin had taken on the indelicate quality of roughly worked clay. Oddly, in her dreams, she was never scarred, and she wondered whether that would change, like those who—living in another country—begin to dream in a different language.

  She longed for news from Kimberley, but few newspapers made their way to the house, and visitors were rare. Occasionally, men stopped in on their way to or from Cape Town, and she would eagerly listen in on their conversations, but she heard nothing of any interest. Only once a trader spent the night, and she overheard him saying business was bad. Smallpox had been declared in Kimberley, and though there was no mention of Edwin, she was pleased that he had succeeded.

  Thirty-Five

  Frances saw that Piet liked her, and was gratified by it. He brought her bugs to examine in matchboxes, chocolates from the dinner table, and one evening, when she was cutting his fingernails, he asked her cautiously whether it was true that her husband had left her.

  “Yes,” she said, thinking he must have heard it from his parents.

  “Why?” he asked, his head tilted up to look at her.

  She held one of his hands in her own, the stumps of his missing fingers round and hard in her palm, and snipped the crown off the tip of his forefinger. “When we married we didn’t know each other well enough.” She held her lower lip between her teeth, and blinked back tears. “By the time we did, it was too late.”

  When the older boys rode out onto the farm with their father in the afternoons, she and Piet would read or walk. One afternoon, she asked him if he could keep a secret. If I take you to a special place, will you not tell a soul? He nodded solemnly, pleased to be included in an adventure.

  They took a parasol to keep off the sun and a flask full of water. Piet thrust his dry hand into hers, and she clasped it. A fierce, hot wind blew up dust devils which flew across the veldt like miniature tornadoes. The land shimmered and danced in the heat. Piet kept his eyes riveted to the ground. He was looking for the blue-headed lizard, which could be seen staring north in the advent of rain.

  When Frances saw the cottage she was torn between joy and sadness. This was the place where she had known Edwin best. Returning here was a way of pretending that nothing had changed. It was an indulgence. As she climbed the stoep, memories flooded back. The door was slightly ajar, and she swung it open, wary of snakes. Piet held on to her hand, fascinated by this old, empty shell of a house weighted down with history. The rooms were shuttered and dark, and the hall smelt dry and faintly aromatic of the camphor Edwin had used in his study. She stood breathless for a moment, Piet dangling from her arm, impatient but fearful. Then she stepped into the bedroom. The brass bed had gone. Fingers of light escaped through chinks in the wood, casting a delicate pattern on the bare floor. The beating of wings startled her. A bird flew in frantic circles around the room, dashing itself against the shutters in a bid to escape. Frances lifted the latch and threw them open, letting in a flood of sunlight, and the bird darted outside.

  She looked at the worn boards and the peeling, plastered walls. These rooms had been a prison to her before, but now the isolation and simplicity seemed full of opportunity. Why had she refused the possibility of happiness here? It had been growing inside her, a sense of contentment, but she hadn’t acknowledged it. Instead she had resented Edwin for bringing her to Rietfontein and thought about nothing but William. She stepped into the sitting room and gave a low cry of surprise. The piano still stood in the corner. It was the only piece of furniture left in the house, and she wondered why it hadn’t been sold. When she pulled off the sheet a plume of dust rose into the air. She sneezed, then lifted the lid and pulled out the stool which was tucked beneath it. The piano smelt of an English drawing room—of wax and the raw underside of furniture. It was just as out of place as her, this piece of England cast up on the veldt.

  It was then that she saw the music book in the stand. She hadn’t noticed it the first time she had sat at the piano. Inside was an inscription: “To my wife. 1880.” Regret welled up inside her. He must have bought it for her, and he would have expected her to see it, but she had been too preoccupied.

  She didn’t recognize the sonatas, hadn’t even heard of the German composer. She began to play the first, feeling her way slowly through the music, faltering at times. It swelled and filled the room, a wonderful, lilting, nostalgic piece, strangely delicate in this tumbledown wreck of a cottage in the middle of the vast plains, miles from the civilization which had produced such refinement, and she thought of all the times she might have played for Edwin but had willfully refused. He had bought her the piano—a gesture of huge generosity—in the hope that it would be something they could share together, but she had assumed, instead, that he had wanted to gloat over the talents of the girl he had secured in marriage. Of course, she had been thinking only of herself. He must have wanted the music too, the release of it. It might have taken them to other places, opened doors between them, but she had shut down the opportunity.

  There were times over the past year when she had been ashamed of the fact that she couldn’t turn herself to any practical purpose. She had felt useless and lacking in some way, but as she played, she remembered something different. The music was exquisitely beautiful, a thing beyond value, and it poured from her fingers. Her pride expanded, stretching inside her, and she remembered that this too was worth something, and he had wanted her because of it.

  When the piece came to an end she put her head down on the lid of the piano. She was aware of Piet standing behind her, watching her, but she couldn’t turn around quite yet. She was tired—tired of polishing, of washing, of serving another family and not having her own. She was tired of blaming herself, and tired of wanting Edwin. For a moment she felt overwhelmed. Her body shuddered, gripped with longing for a past that could not be re-created. Her marriage had played itself out here, and she had made nothing of it.

  A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder. Piet stood holding out a golden feather. She wiped her eyes and smiled, taking the feather from him. In the old, warped cupboard in the kitchen, she fo
und a tin of Swedish anchovies. The two of them sat on the stoep, and she knocked a hole in the lid with a rock and prized open a jagged section of metal. They ate the anchovies with their fingers, delicious and salty rich, and washed them down with gulps of warm water from the flask. A lizard crawled out from behind a rock, the only living creature in a vast empty plain of blackened ant heaps. She had hoped that Nanny might appear, but there was no sign of her.

  They took a different route home, walking up the slight incline of the kopje until they had a good view of the veldt, the cottage behind them and the farmhouse ahead with its kraals and barns. To their right was the dam, shrunken now to a pool that barely reflected the sun on its muddied surface. Vultures wheeled in the air above. Frances had heard they were slaughtering lambs today, to save the ewes.

  When they got home, the twins were waiting for them. The brothers were animated. Hendrik held a box, which he promised to show. It mewled and chattered and threatened to overturn itself until he planted himself firmly on its lid. A baboon, Hermanus said, had been driven down from the mountains by thirst. It had ripped the udders from two ewes, sucking them dry for milk. Mijnheer Reitz had shot it, and when they approached they saw she held a baby to her chest.

  On cue, Hendrik hopped off the box, flipped off its lid, and pulled out a baby baboon. It was a scraggly, ugly thing, no bigger than a rat, which grappled at his arm and screeched in fear. It had pink ears and a pink face, wrinkled and hairless, the very replica of an old man’s, with tufted eyebrows and a dog’s nose. Its head was bald, and the hair was so thin across its body that you could see the fleas crawling over its skin. Piet tried to take hold of it, but his brother laughed and hurled it at the other, who caught it—or, rather, the baboon caught hold of him, sticking like a burr. It tried to cling on but was thrown back again. Piet took great gulps of air, trying to fathom their cruelty, until Frances intervened. “Let him have it,” she said. “You have played with it all day.” And they reluctantly obeyed.