by Isla Morley
Someone is calling my name. Just for a moment I wish it were the gardener. “Abbe! Come along! We don’t have all day,” Rhiaan hollers, and I hurry up to the front door, which he holds open. A tall Ndebele woman walks from the parlor into the hallway to greet us, a petticoat of students encircling her to have a look at who has come to visit. She introduces herself as Teacher Mavis, and Rhiaan apologizes for disrupting her lesson.
“It is an honor to meet you both,” she says, although her tender eyes seem to be saying something else. “We have been waiting for you, and the children have prepared a gift to say thank you for the years you have let us stay here.” She invites us into the classroom while the children scramble back to their desks. She addresses them in Xhosa, and in reply several children come to the front of the room. Dressed in clothes that are either too small or too big, they huddle against one another in front of the blackboard and giggle shyly until the tallest girl at the back taps her shoe against the polished wood floor and starts the song. The others answer antiphonally, clapping hands their only accompaniment. It is a traditional Zulu song about the children of the village running to meet their mothers, who are returning from the town with treats they have traded for their crops.
When the children have finished their song, Rhiaan and I applaud. While they return to their seats, one boy remains. “This is Bumlani Mabele,” Teacher Mavis tells us. “He has been with us for three years.” The boy, who looks no older than eight, stares at his leather sandals, scuffed and worn. His trousers, while clean, end two inches above his ankles. His knitted sweater, with sleeves rolled up several times to his wrists, is tucked in neatly at the top of his pants. “The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat,” he recites, staring beyond us as if to some boat that has left without him. “They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five-pound note.” Teacher Mavis smiles fondly at him and I cannot help but think these orphans, mismatched and without flocks of their own, are owls and pussycats and piggy-wigs sent packing out from under their pea-green roof.
As Teacher Mavis takes us through the other rooms—three with bunk beds packed tightly together, the fourth a makeshift clinic—there is very little to remind me of the months I spent in this house. But reminded I am, not by furniture and the faces of people long gone, but by the views—those outside every window and those that dance across my mind.
“The places the children are moving to—are they good schools?” asks Rhiaan. Teacher Mavis nods, again with her sunset eyes. “Yes, they are very good. It is only sad the children will be split up. Some of them have been together many years; they are like sisters and brothers to one another.” Rhiaan’s face is suddenly blotted with guilt—we are breaking up a family.
In the kitchen at the stove is a second staff member who attends a large stainless steel pot already bubbling with stew for the children’s midday meal. One of her feet is pumping an invisible organ pedal so that her entire body rocks to and from her pot. “This is Nomsa.” Teacher Mavis introduces us, and Nomsa wipes her hand on her apron before giving us each a clammy handshake, still rocking. “Stay for lunch, stay for lunch,” she says, eyes fixed over our shoulders, grin off-kilter, before returning to her organ pedal and pot.
“Nomsa used to be one of our special students; she has been here from the very beginning,” explains Teacher Mavis.
Rhiaan tells Teacher Mavis that we will probably wander around the property for a little while longer before we leave for a noon appointment in town. Piet is expecting us to arrive at his office to sign the final contract before the buyer’s representatives show up with any last-minute requests.
Just before heading out the back door, I turn to her and say, “By the way, who is the person who has been taking care of the apricot trees?”
She shakes her head. “Nobody, nkosikazi.”
But from her pot, Nomsa disagrees, “Qamatha, Qamatha.”
“What is she saying?” Rhiaan asks.
Before the teacher can interpret, I answer, “God. She is saying God has.”
Nomsa smiles and nods.
The back veranda has two large trestle tables pushed end to end, and functions as the outdoor dining room. It has a commanding view of the overgrown clump of wattle trees and the kopje, which serves more as a milieu than a backdrop.
“I don’t think there was ever a time when I came to the farm that I didn’t hike up there,” Rhiaan says wistfully. “It always made me feel like I had climbed to the top of the world.”
“You want to go up there now?”
“Are you up to it?”
“Sure,” I reply. “If I get tired you can give me a piggyback.”
He shakes his head. “Unless you weigh what you did when you were eleven, I think that option is out of the question.”
“If you know what’s good for you, brother dear, you will steer clear on matters of a woman’s weight.”
We head out on one of the well-trodden trails, and it winds its way through the knee-high fynbos to such a degree that sometimes we are headed in the direction of the hill and sometimes we appear to be switching back to town. After twenty minutes of walking from one grasshopper conversation to another, we begin a gradual ascent that becomes suddenly steep. Rhiaan hands me the bottle of water as we pause to catch our breaths. Even from halfway up the view is commanding.
“You can’t say you’ve ever seen Paarl if you have never seen it from the top of Grandma’s kopje,” Rhiaan announces.
I want to correct him; it is Beauty’s hill, not Grandma’s, if it is a hill at all. More like a dispensary is this place, rationing out, as it did, muti and magic, cures and curses.
After ten minutes we arrive at the summit, which is strewn with boulders the size of shopping carts. Rhiaan scrambles to the top of one and belts out a throaty yell. “My God, it feels good to be up here.”
I find a boulder for a bench that overlooks the valley. The farmhouse with its green roof looks like a model. To the south, the town of Paarl sprawls out like a picnic on one of Cicely’s quilts. Beyond are the mountains of Du Toitskloof. Rhiaan sits down next to me and hands me a fistful of Cape daisies. “One forgets how beautiful it is here.”
I nod. “I wish Cleo could have seen this.”
“She would have loved the farm; can’t you just picture her playing hide-’n’-seek in the orchard?”
“Bossing all the schoolkids around, more like it!”
“That too.” He chuckles.
“You never brought Frannie and Claude here, did you?” I ask him.
“No.”
“Why is that?”
He shrugs. “I can’t say for sure. Partly because it is always a bit painful coming back, to the empty nest, so to speak.” After a pause, he continues, “But I suspect part of it is that this place represents a time in my life of which I am not entirely proud.”
“I think you can be proud of what you did, Rhiaan. You took a stand; most people weren’t that brave. I wasn’t that brave.”
“I ran away, sis; one can hardly construe that as bravery. Everyone thinks of it as political exile; I wanted to believe it myself. But I always wonder if things might have been different had I stood up to Dad, had I stuck up for Mom.”
It occurs to me that this brother who I thought saw my mother more clearly than any of us also sees her in part. I consider adding the piece that might bring her closer to being whole for him. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Mom had to learn to stick up for herself.”
“You may be right,” he says, sounding as though he means the contrary.
“I am, and she did.”
“She did what?”
“Stick up for herself.”
Whenever we disagree, Rhiaan pulls rank, and he does so now simply by shaking his head. My two-mindedness tapers into a pencil-sharp point.
“Remember Beauty, Grandma’s maid?”
Rhiaan shrugs. “The one who used to pilfer Grandpa’s scotch.”
“No she didn’t!”
He laughs. “Come on, Abbe—don’t tell me you still believe all that nonsense about her being a sangoma and brewing up magic potions in Grandma’s kitchen. She was an alcoholic who qualified for Grandma’s charity.”
His condescension is irksome. “She was a sangoma, Rhiaan, not a drunk. In fact, I found out she is still alive, and I went to see her the day before the robbery.” My brother’s response is to retrieve from his pocket his pipe and tobacco pouch. “She knew things about our family I didn’t know, stuff I bet even you don’t know.”
Holding the lighter to the nest of tobacco, Rhiaan tokes on his pipe till a spindly coil of smoke dribbles from his mouth and disappears. There seems to be a danger of Beauty’s story going the same way, so I say, “It’s something I think you should know.”
Rhiaan’s response is to raise one eyebrow lazily, as though this statement doesn’t warrant the energy of raising both.
“She told me she helped Mom poison Dad.” There.
Shock, I expect; at the very least, speechlessness. Maybe a denial, a call for evidence. But not laughter, which is how Rhiaan now responds.
“It’s true!” I protest.
He gears down to a smile and tries to rub my head before I pull away. “Come on, Ab.”
“It is true! I saw it, back then. Beauty had a vial of poison stuffed in a loaf of bread in her kaia. Mom was using it to kill Dad. Beauty says that Mom got sick from handling the stuff, that she ended up dying from it herself.”
I recount the story, a single cord braided with strands from both my own memory and Beauty’s recent account, and conclude with the vision I had of our mother as a warrior. I see immediately it is a mistake to include this part. Although Rhiaan has been quiet throughout the telling, he gazes over the farm. If he is convinced of anything, it is my slant toward melodramatics. “You don’t believe it, do you?” I ask.
“It’s not what I believe that matters.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Rhiaan takes another puff of his pipe, exhaling patience. “I don’t know that it matters how Dad died or how Mom died or who was to blame for what. They died. End of story. What seems to me to be the issue is how the rest of us are going to live our lives.”
“Of course it matters! It matters what Mom did because it changes who she was. And who she was influences who we are, how we act. Or at least how I act. Realizing that she finally took charge of her own destiny, instead of being pulled along by one current or another, is what made me do what I did the night of the burglary. It’s as though Mom was telling me: You have two choices—you can die, or you can die trying. It’s in the trying that she lived, and it’s in the trying that I feel I started living again.”
“What you did, Abbe, is not because of who Mom was, but because of who you are. I don’t think you can give credit to other people for things going right in your life, any more than you can blame them for when they go wrong.”
It seems futile to continue arguing, particularly when we notice two pickup trucks pull into the farm’s driveway, spewing up dust in their rush. Along the roadside, across the street from the farm’s entrance, stops a dirty-yellow bulldozer, its mandibles coming to rest in front of it.
“Who are they?” I ask.
Shielding his eyes from the sun, Rhiaan stands up and squints into the distance. “It looks to me like the developers.”
“But our meeting is at Piet’s office, isn’t it?”
He nods.
“Then what the heck are they doing here?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”
Slimy from perspiration and bothered by the lazy flies looking for a free ride down the hill, I arrive at the farmhouse substantially more agitated than when I left it. It has nothing to do with my aching collarbone or my fatigued muscles, and everything to do with the particular way the man with the red cap is gesturing with one hand, swinging it from the plans rolled out on the hood of his car to the fields. Rhiaan, on the other hand, is composed concern.
“May I help you?” he asks several feet before we are face-to-face. The pickups are company trucks, BOLAND CONSTRUCTION, INC., according to a sticker on the car door.
“Sorry, who are you?” The man with the cap is peeved at the interruption.
“Rhiaan Spenser, and this is my sister, Elizabeth. We are the owners of this farm.”
“That’s not what I have been told,” he says. “Hammerson and Sons—that’s who owns the place now. Bit of a kakhuis, if you ask me, but I—”
“I’m sorry, but what did you just say?” Rhiaan is clearly vexed.
“I think he just called our farm a ‘shithouse,’ ” I tell him.
“Look here, sir, I’m going to ask you kindly to leave. As of this minute, the property on which you stand is ours and you don’t want to be in the unfortunate position of trespassing,” orders Rhiaan.
The man with his cap turns to the other two men and snorts. When he faces Rhiaan again, his contempt is a hazard sign. “Listen, mister, when you start paying my salary, then you can tell me what to do. Until then, you can kindly piss off and let me do my job.” This brings titters from his two cohorts.
By now a brood of children have assembled on the stoep, Teacher Mavis pecking at them to stay together while Nomsa grins madly and waves at our shadows.
Whatever ground Rhiaan imagines he did not stand in the past is now bearing the full weight of his umbrage. “I’d say you are dangerously close to not having a job.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let’s not do this, Rhiaan,” I interrupt. Rhiaan glances at me while the man with the red cap mutters an instruction to his associate, who flips out his cell phone and punches numbers. My brother knows, as he so often does, what I am thinking—this time that I do not want to sell the farm, that I cannot sanction the eviction of orphans any more than I can allow a concrete parking lot to replace the orchard, especially with its bushy boughs. To my questioning eyes, Rhiaan nods his consent: Go for it!
When I look at the man with the cap, he snatches the phone from his colleague. I take a step closer to him. “What my brother is saying is, you don’t have a job, at least not this job.”
In response, he raises an index finger requesting a minute, but it is not the voice on the other end to which he must now pay attention.
“No,” I tell him, “you can’t have a minute. What you can have is two minutes; two minutes to get into your trucks and get the hell off this property before I call the police. And you can take that monstrous contraption parked on the road with you. There won’t be any digging over here. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
ASCENSION
DAY
TWENTY-THREE
Cleo’s first word contained two distinctly different syllables: tuhr-til. We were at the pet store buying dog food when I took her over to the little glass tank on the floor with teeny baby turtles barely distinguishable from the rocks on which they were sitting. “Turtle, Cleo.” I pointed and she repeated the word back to me as clearly as the Queen of England might have done. I yelled across the store, past the ferret-looking cashier to Greg. “Honey! She said ‘turtle’!” He came rushing while Cleo stood with her index finger pushed against the glass, saying “turtle” over and over. She was only ten months old and we looked at each other for the thousandth time, with raised eyebrows and fly-catching mouths as if to say “Star.”
First words. They are recorded in baby books, are bragged about to parents who for the life of them cannot recall what your first word was, and are the subject of press releases sent to everyone no matter how remotely related. Those with pulpits may very well do what Greg did: announce it in church. Just after the congregation had hollered its lethargic “aloooo-ha” to the first-time visitors who had been bold enough to introduce themselves, Greg boomed, “This week, there is only one announcement not printed in your bulletin worth high-lighting.”
People looked up.
“Cleo said her first word yesterday.” Whi
le the little old ladies cheered, he came down the center aisle to the pew where I was holding Cleo, picked her up, and carried her back to the chancel steps. He held out the jade turtle pendant Jenny always wore around her neck and asked, “Cleo, what’s this?” She peered at it, then at the congregation waiting for a pin to drop, then grabbed the microphone and took a big, slippery bite out of it, making the speakers crackle and everyone laugh. “Today,” he continued, “is Turtle Sunday. It is not on the liturgical calendar, but it’s a day of great import nonetheless. This day we thank God for all shelled creators, from the ones snapping in mud ditches beside the roadside in Ohio, to the great green sea beasts that inhabit our Hawaiian waters, to those that inspire babes to utter their first words.” On cue, the organ bashed out the opening bars of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and we all stood and sang as though all things were.
But what of last words? Not the ones we the surviving kin inscribe on gravestones or send off to the obit editor, but theirs. The ones who speak no more. Nobody came to ask me about Boss’s last words, which I like to think were more benedictory than blasphemous, that in his terminal wail (“Jesus!”) the summoned Lord had indeed rushed to meet him—gun unfired, sins forgiven, no harm done. Surely someone wanted to know—a mother, a brother, a girl waiting at home with his baby at her breast. And yet they never came to ask.
The subject of Cleo’s last words has been the same way—like a bone, at first buried for lean times, now possibly irrecoverable. If I concentrate hard enough I can still conjure Cleo’s voice, and slowly then will the edges of her chubby face emerge, and I am as sure as ever I could pick her out of a crowd. But just as she opens her mouth to speak, the edges blur and she fades away as swiftly as a shadow on an inclement day. I once thought we had never inquired about her last words because it was easier living with what each of our sainted memories conjured for us—parting words bestowing favor, as Isaac did on the wrong son. But now I know it is because last words require an act of community. Retrieving the buried treasure cannot be done alone. Someone has to help, someone who may be responsible for there being a dry bone in the first place.