by Trilby Kent
I lowered my gaze and slowly knelt near the base of the tree. I tried to steady my breathing, thinking that by somehow sinking into the background I might avoid scaring the animal away.
We sat like that for several minutes, until I finally dared to steal a look up at the low branch. The monkey had disappeared, and for an instant my heart sank. Then I heard a scrabbling sound immediately behind me, and I swung around, terrified that perhaps the hyenas had returned. Only it wasn’t a hyena behind me: it was the little vervet.
Crouched and suspicious, it seemed to waver between curiosity and caution. Slowly, very slowly, I stretched out one hand and rested it, palm up, on the ground between us, clicking my tongue softly in encouragement.
The vervet considered its position, looking from my outstretched hand to my face and back to my hand again, before scuttling toward me. It paused, swaying on bowlegged haunches, eyes wide and alert, bobbing its diminutive head, before craning forward to sniff at my fingers. Its delicate whiskers tickled my palm, and I tried not to flinch. After a while, the monkey stopped, considered me again, and finally drew closer. I froze, pretending that I was a statue, as the vervet proceeded to inspect the contents of my father’s coat pockets. First, the left: here a piece from a dry mealie rusk, which it nibbled at apprehensively before greedily licking the whole thing over. When it began to tear into the wet crust, I realized just how ravenous it must have been. Its hunger was even greater than its fear.
The other pocket was empty, but it was so deep that the vervet tumbled headfirst into it before scrambling to right itself. Emboldened, it returned to investigate further — no doubt smelling the traces of the buck meat I had carried home the previous night. When at last the search proved fruitless, the vervet poked its head out of the pocket with a perturbed expression. It was all I could manage not to burst out laughing at its affronted scowl.
“I don’t have any food with me,” I said, keeping my voice low. “But I could get you something to eat from the laager. Would you like that?”
The little vervet only gazed up at me in silent contemplation, gripping the hem of my father’s coat with claws so tightly clenched that I couldn’t imagine it would ever let go.
THE OX WHIP
“Vermin!”
I cradled the monkey in the pocket of my father’s coat while trying not to drop any of the mealie corn that I clutched in one fist. My mother’s shrieks pursued us from the wagon into the center of the laager.
“Dogs are one thing, my girl, but monkeys are wild animals that grow teeth and have tempers that could kill a boy Hansie’s size. I won’t have it in the wagon.”
“But his mother —”
“His mother left him to the hyenas. If you had an ounce of sense in your head, you’d take him back to where you found him and let the Good Lord’s will be done.” Ma steeled her jaw, peering down at me like an Old Testament prophet. “There’s no use interfering with nature, Corlie Roux.”
“I can feed him and keep him warm. He’s not dangerous. Look how tiny he is —”
“You can take him back to the forest, or you can give it to Lindiwe to kill for the medicine man.”
The nganga: he would use my little monkey to bring the rains, or to feed his villagers’ poor empty stomachs. As if he, too, knew what my mother was suggesting, the vervet froze in my pocket. I was sure that I could feel his miniature heart drumming through the coat.
“I won’t let her give it to the nganga!”
“Please yourself — but get rid of it. I don’t care how.”
Gert followed me to the thornbushes, where I gently tipped the mealie corn into the pocket where my monkey had curled himself into a tiny ball.
“Ma will kill you when she finds out you stole from the mealie sack,” said Gert.
“I don’t care.”
“Can I see it?”
I held the pocket open for my brother to peer inside. The vervet had already devoured most of the corn, greedily cracking each kernel between its teeth. My brother grinned.
“You know, Corlie,” he started. “Ma only said you couldn’t keep it in the wagon.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“The jockey box is empty. I looked.”
The jockey box was a small wooden crate that hung off the back of the wagon. Usually it was used to carry extra supplies, but Tant Minna considered that an invitation to thieves and curious children.
“We could pad it out with straw and take turns feeding it. Ma won’t suspect a thing.” He had a point: as far as Ma was concerned, neither Gert nor Hansie could do wrong. I was the one who had to be watched. Since Pa’s death, it seemed the boys had become that much more precious to her. Because they were precious to me, too, I suppose I forgave her.
“What if he makes a noise?” I asked.
“We’ll take him out during the day — you can say that you’re going back to the forest to look for him. We’ll leave him with lots of food at night.”
We both considered the monkey, which was backing out of the pocket so that his spindly tail shot up straight in the air. He began to chatter busily, tugging at the buttons on my father’s coat as if they were playthings.
“What will you call him?” asked my brother.
“Monkeys don’t have names. He’s just that, an apie.”
“Hello, apie. Hoe gaan dit?” Gert gently stroked the back of its head, provoking the vervet to twist around and grasp my brother’s finger with tiny paws. “Ag, you’re strong!”
“We mustn’t tell Danie or Andries; they’ll only tattle to Tant Minna.” The creature had begun to coo with pleasure as Gert scratched it gently up and down its back. “The little one isn’t out of danger yet.”
In the laager, each morning began with an impromptu prayer service: one of the women read from the book of Psalms and one of the men led a hymn on a battered banjo. As far as the Boere were concerned, worship was never to be neglected, no matter the circumstances. My father had once told me about the Voortrekkers who had been so devoted to their church that they’d taken it along with them into exile. Dutch faithful had dug it up by the foundation, lifted the clapboard frame onto sturdy runners, and hauled the whole thing twelve miles north to build a new Jerusalem farther inland.
After the service that first morning, I took Hansie to join the other kids, who were told to gather firewood and stuff thornbush branches between the spokes of the wagon wheels. The wagons had been chained together to form a ring, and any gaps between the wheels had to be filled to stall potential raiders. I wasn’t sure that thornbushes would do much to deter khaki soldiers, but I kept this opinion to myself. Lindiwe and her girls were put in charge of tending the goat that the Van Zyls had brought along: feeding and milking in the mornings, picking its hooves in the evenings, and packing the dung into bricks for fuel. Gert and Sipho were bade to perch on the wagon steps to clean the saddles and harnesses with polish from Oom Cronje’s work chest, and I was to sweep the campsite or help Ma with the washing.
These tasks kept us busy until lunchtime, when everyone would gather around for ash-bread or sweet potatoes roasted in the fire. According to Danie and Andries, there had been horse meat for a week after one of the Cronje’s mares was found shot in a field not far from their abandoned farm. While we ate, Smous Petrus would read aloud from his family Bible, an enormous book bound in black leather with metal studs down the spine. After the meal, the men would spend the heat of the day polishing their rifles and taking stock of ammunition, while the women shook out blankets and mended clothing, darning socks and stitching rag quilts and stopping only to bicker over whose turn it was to borrow Suzette van der Westhuizen’s crochet needles. The older boys were in charge of greasing the wagon wheels and grooming the horses, important tasks that I knew Gert wished he had been invited to do. At dusk, those boys would accompany a party of older men down to the river in search of game; sometimes they would come back with a wood pigeon or two, but most nights we had to satisfy ourselves with
porridge and biltong, and perhaps a few sour figs.
More and more, as the days passed, I found myself counting the hours until the sun would sink below the fringe of treetops on the distant horizon. I could usually check on my little monkey after supper, while the rest of the laager remained huddled around the fire, singing songs and listening to Oom Sarel’s tall tales. In just two weeks, the vervet had grown considerably — its head was now virtually in proportion to its large ears and wide, expressive eyes — and I could tell that the time would soon come when it would need to learn to forage for itself. Not just yet, though: the cracking of a tree branch or the whinnying of a horse was still enough to send it scrambling into the folds of my coat, and it continued to suck drops of goats’ milk from my fingers with the contentment of a newborn.
One evening, Gert sidled in next to me on the campfire bench, his wide eyes telling me of some dreadful change. It had been his turn to feed the vervet, and immediately I sensed that something was wrong.
“He’s caught a gecko,” whispered my brother, not looking at me but staring straight into the flames as he fiddled with a bit of kindling.
“Where?”
“How do I know? He’s taken it into the jockey box. I think he’s going to eat it.” Gert tossed the stick into the fire, then picked up another. I watched him peel the bark off, strip by strip.
“It’s what he’s supposed to do,” I said at last. “He’s becoming wild, that’s all. Maybe we should let him go.”
“But he’s still tiny, Corlie.” Gert slid me a nervous look. “Won’t you go and see, at least?”
When I opened the lid of the jockey box, I prepared myself for the worst. And yet what I discovered inside took me entirely by surprise.
My little monkey was cradling the flickering green lizard to his chest, cooing softly as the gecko wriggled against the blanket of fur.
When I returned to the campfire and told Gert, he dropped the stick in his hand and faced me squarely. “You’re making it up, Corlie.”
“No, I’m not — you can go back and see for yourself. He’s adopted the lizard — just like we adopted him. Perhaps he’s lonely.”
“So he’s not going to eat it?”
“It didn’t look that way to me. We feed him enough as it is.”
And so it was that my brother and I found ourselves tending to two small creatures: the orphaned vervet and the gecko it had taken on as its own. Strange as it may sound, we never once saw the lizard try to escape from my apie. Instead, it stoically endured the vervet’s long bouts of affection — stroking, cradling, and picking off bits of dirt or imaginary fleas — before curling itself up under a clump of grass that we had put in the corner of the jockey box. This lasted for almost a week — and then one morning, Gert discovered that the little gecko had fled.
“A bird might have got it,” he whimpered, trailing behind me as I swept the periphery of the laager. “It must have left the box when I took apie out before breakfast.”
As soon as it became clear that the gecko was not going to return, the vervet seemed to sink into a deep gloom. We tried to distract him with trips into the forest and ingenious new toys to keep him entertained: a spinning top, a jar full of buttons, a ball woven out of fabric scraps attached to a leather cord. But nothing seemed to restore its spirits for long. No amount of fussing or food made an ounce of difference — and within just a few days, I could tell that the tiny forlorn creature was beginning to withdraw into itself once again. For the second time in its short life, my monkey grieved.
It was around this time that I caught Smous Petrus hitting Sipho with the ox whip.
I hadn’t spoken often to my friend since we’d arrived at the laager. The conversations we had shared were limited to practical exchanges — feathering grouse or carrying dried dung bricks from wagon to wagon. I hadn’t even had a chance to tell him about Corporal Byrne — and I was ashamed to realize that the soldier was not something I wanted to share with Sipho. The laager didn’t look kindly on fraternizing with kaffirs. Rumors of African attacks were rife, although how anyone could have picked up such information, I don’t know. It was Yvette van der Westhuizen who first whispered to my mother that she’d heard a local commando had been wiped out by an African raid, with only one man managing to escape into the bush where he survived for three days before reaching Standerton.
“The kaffirs were after food, that was all,” she told Ma as they squatted by the fire, cutting bars of soap. “It was nothing to do with the khakis.”
Betsie Gouws had told us that two natives had escorted the Tommies when they came to destroy her neighbor’s farm. Once the British soldiers had taken stock of the contents, they allowed the Africans to loot the house for whatever food or clothing they wanted. It was a tactic intended to humiliate the farm owners and to reward those natives who worked for the British.
“Because there’s a war on, they think they can take what they like from us,” said Ma.
It had been her idea to use goats’ milk to make the soap. She and Yvette had acquired oil from Sanna Wessels and made lye from wood ash; now, at last, the time had come to break the milky white slab into chunks to share among the wagons. I watched them, rolling a bit of soft soap between my palms and wishing that it smelled less of castor oil.
“If you ask me, we should let the khakis take the kaffirs back to England with them!” Betsie Gouws lowered her voice and pointed one finger conspiratorially at my mother. “The English will mix with all sorts, if it suits them. My Anton says they’ve even got Indians fighting for them — what do you think of that? Dressing up their coolies in a white man’s uniform, and calling themselves a God-fearing people …”
“The English are hypocrites,” replied my mother. “They pretend to treat the blacks and coolies as their equals, but they don’t trust them any more than we do. You won’t find a Boer embracing an African with his left hand and stabbing him in the back with his right, will you?”
It was all they could do, those older women: bicker and curse. What did Betsie Gouws know about Indians, anyway? As far as she was concerned, it had been coolie spells that caused some of our cattle to die the year before last. I had half a mind to tell Ma that if she thought my fairy tales were silly, she should consider all the stupid things Betsie Gouws believed in — but of course I wouldn’t dare. I knew that the women moaned like this because they were afraid, frustrated, and exhausted, and all too aware that their hands were tied. If that was what it meant to be a Boer woman, I wanted none of it. I’d stay a girl forever … or else I’d disguise myself as a boy and run away to join the men on commando as a girl guerrilla: I’d wear my hair in plaits and make every shot count, and around the campfire each night I’d learn to drink and swear like a man. What honor was there to be found here, squatting over blocks of soap and cursing other people for our problems?
At last I got up and wandered across the campsite to where Lizzie Van Schaeve and Irene Wessels sat making husk dolls. Both were younger than I, all little-girl elbows and knees, and they regarded me with suspicion.
“You can use the silk for hair,” I suggested gently. “Comb it together into a plait, and tie it like this — let me show you —”
That was when I heard the screams.
By the time I’d clambered beneath the nearest wagon and wriggled my way toward the other side, Smous Petrus already had Sipho on the ground. Clutching my friend’s wrists together in one hand, Smous Petrus was hurling the whip at the backs of Sipho’s legs. I felt repulsed and enraged, but also frozen with sickened disbelief — much as I had when Andries once made a show of tearing the legs off a dung beetle. This was worse, however, as I felt Sipho’s humiliation with every blow. Each stroke was accompanied by a grunt, an ugly expulsion of air and breath that stank of dop. Sipho was struggling to get up, tucking his knees in and pushing his shoulders to the ground — but every time he came close to righting himself, Smous Petrus booted him roughly from behind, sending the boy skidding face-first through the
dirt.
“Sneaking off into the bush to meet up with your Zulu friends, eh, kaffir?” Smous Petrus’s face shone scarlet, and flecks of saliva coated the corners of his mouth. “Getting out of your heads smoking dagga, no doubt!”
Sipho said nothing. The pause in the beating was an opportunity for him to catch his breath, and I watched the curve of his spine as it heaved up and down. Sipho would not give Smous Petrus the satisfaction of hearing him weep, and yet from where I crouched I could see that his long, black eyelashes glistened with tears.
I wish that I had done something to help my friend then, but I didn’t have time to: all of a sudden Lindiwe appeared out of nowhere, trailing her twin girls in the swirling dust. Both children wailed loudly, their faces streaked with sticky tears, and I realized that they must have been the ones who had alerted her. In an instant, Lindiwe let go of the girls and lunged at Smous Petrus with fingers spread like claws.
“Let go of my son!” she yelled. Her throat muscles constricted as she hurled herself at him, outlining the taut tendon and sinews of her neck like the roots of a tree. “Let go of him! He has done nothing wrong!”
But Smous Petrus only had to drop the whip and extend one hand to knock her to the ground, and Lindiwe landed with a thud, like a sack of flour. Immediately, Nosipho and Nelisiwe began to scream, tearing at their mother’s skirts. This was when I scrambled out from beneath the wagon and found myself confronting the red-faced man.
“Stop!” I shouted. “She’s one of ours. The boy, too. They’re not yours to beat.”
For a fleeting moment Smous Petrus looked as if he might strike out, and I braced myself.
“I’d mind my lip if I were you, meisie,” he growled, glowering at me with poached eyes. Then, as if he knew what would hurt me more than any physical blow, he added, “If your Pa were here, perhaps I wouldn’t have to do his dirty work for him.”
He turned on his heel before I could muster a reply, hitching his breeches up around his belly as he strode off into the tea tree bushes.