Brutal Legacy

by Tracy Going

  I had been trying to do that too.

  My sister had popped around for a visit. One of those impromptu visits I had come to expect. She’d been by my side the last few weeks, watching me, phoning me, protecting me, even sleeping over occasionally, not wanting to leave me on my own for too long, afraid that something else might happen. We had talked about nothing and everything. We had drunk tea.

  It was soon after she left that the ringtone of my phone broke the silence.

  It was him.

  I had watched it ring a few times before swiping at the green button, standing up as though I was shrugging off my fright, tossing aside my fear, like a coat I needed to escape, not yet used to its weight.

  I had listened to him as he explained that he was outside my house, down on the street. The same street that had offered me no refuge a few weeks earlier. The one I had fled down late at night, my jacket hanging torn from my back, as I tried to get away from him. He was out there again.

  “Please, I need to talk to you,” he said, his voice low and desperate.

  It was the third time he had phoned in the past hour.

  “You know we can’t see each other,” I said, as though to remind him.

  It had been three weeks since the family court interdict had been implemented. I had secured a restraining order, a piece of paper that prevented him from being anywhere near me or my property. It stated clearly that he was not allowed to threaten me or harm me in any way, nor was he allowed to make any contact.

  When the sheriff of the court served the papers on him, he’d laughed.

  “Not worth the paper it’s written on,” he’d scoffed.

  But he’d left me alone.

  Then he phoned.

  I ignored it.

  He phoned again.

  And again.

  I broke the restraining order as I answered.

  I listened as he gave me the words I so desperately wanted to hear. Needed to hear.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.

  Then he phoned daily, hourly even. Court records would later show it was fifty-eight times. Always apologising, often coaxing, sometimes shouting and threatening. I had taken his calls then just as I had taken his call the day before.

  The first bruises had long faded and although I was still confused by his anger and unpredictability, I had become increasingly lulled by his endless calls of remorse and regret, the flowers, the air tickets and the offers to repair and pay for damages to my property.

  His words, his kindness, his generosity, were making me feel whole again.

  I didn’t want to believe that I was caught in a vortex of destruction.

  I wanted to believe that I was above that, that I was more.

  And for this I needed him to explain it all away, to minimise it, so that I could rationalise my horrible hurt. I needed his reassurance of a new beginning, and the certainty of a promised shift in his behaviour. I wanted him to look me in my eyes and ask for my forgiveness so that I could validate my worthiness.

  I wanted to understand … and to ask why.

  Why?

  Why had he done this to me? To us?

  Why?

  As I had stood quietly on my veranda, listening to his desperation, his brokenness, I wanted his answers.

  “Please—” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

  As his words tumbled out, I allowed time to stand still. I let it stretch around me as I heard all that I wanted to hear. I was holding my phone tight, as tight as the sun was holding onto the day. I would drop my phone just as the sun would ultimately lose its grip, but for then it hadn’t. It had been so easy to reason my way through it … There was no darkness to shield him … It was light. He was on the other side … in municipal no-man’s land … neutral territory. Surely, I’d be safe. Surely?

  I collapsed into that dark, grey, mouldy expanse of wrongness.

  “I’ll come out to you,” I’d said. “I’ll be there now.”

  Those were my words as I stood tall, back straight, like the aloe in the corner of my garden. I too prided myself on being centred, balanced and strong, rooted in my strength as a young, successful mother and woman.

  It had taken no time at all to find my new, white takkies.

  But as I bent down to slip them on I knew I wasn’t really as strong as I hoped. I knew my boldness was a fragile thing and that it was already beginning to disintegrate as I hurriedly knotted my laces.

  It was then that I executed the very smallest of motions, an almost imperceptible gesture that left no indent in the hardened plastic casing of the remote for the garage door. Just an invisible thumbprint. But nothing is ever truly invisible.

  I opened the garage door … and he slipped in. I rushed forward, my fingers flicking pathetically in the afternoon air, gesturing to him not to enter my property, reminding him that I’d said I was coming out. But he’d already cut the distance between us with no more than a few easy strides.

  I played the conversation over in my head.

  “You’re not allowed here.”

  And I heard his response again and again: “I don’t give a fuck.”

  And with reflection, he was so right.

  He didn’t. He really didn’t.

  The knock on the door brought me back. My mother.

  “Good morning,” she said, peering cautiously around the door, holding a cup of tea. “Can I open the curtains a bit?”

  “No,” I mumbled, trying not to move my face.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Sore,” I said, indicating for her to leave the tea on my bedside table.

  She nodded knowingly.

  It was the only sign she gave – and we would never speak of it again.

  As the tea grew cold, I lay unmoving.

  I tried to block the light from my eyes, but it persisted and filtered through where the curtain fell away from the window. It wasn’t a bright, illuminating splinter of whiteness. More a separation of light from the dark. But still it penetrated. It split my thoughts and suspended me between time and place.

  I knew as I lay in my old bed that if the best of all possible worlds was choice then I would never have come back. I had very little heart for this place. Sometimes it’s best to leave behind that which is over, but as I quietened myself it came to me that there never really are endings. Endings are a deception. Endings are not defined. They are arbitrary and inconclusive.

  It was unnerving to know that, ultimately, I had not left; that instead what had taken me from this house had brought me right back.

  Four

  I was five-and-a-half years old when we moved to the first house my father built. It was the year my family relocated from the Cape to the Transvaal. It was here in Ana Landbouhoewes, thirteen kilometres outside of Brits, that my father found himself a plot of dehydrated land and bought it as his own.

  I have no understanding of what about the place had truly resonated with him. Perhaps he was drawn to the concrete reservoir with its thick sludge that hung heavy over the water like a velvet mirage, offering a false promise of quenching the thirst of its surrounds. That he saw his own dream of settling when he happened upon the stone workers’ hut that offered some respite in the far corner, close to the boundary fence. There was nothing else to redeem those few hectares of land, just the reservoir and the workers’ hut, its walls burnt black from the daily wood fire. So maybe that’s all it was for my father; possibility, the prospect of new beginnings and our very own story that took us all from everything we knew to a place we had to negotiate and a language we had yet to learn.

  Looking back, it was my mother who embraced our new way of life most readily.

  My memory of her is of someone who seemed unfazed by the challenge, who fearlessly took to taming the veld around us. She had been born and raised in the heart of the Karoo, a land of arid air and cloudless skies, it could have been because she simply understood the brutality of the land and unflinchingly submitted herself to its harshness. O
r maybe she believed that, just as the dried tolbos was swept in on the afternoon Highveld dust storms, to be tossed around before being flirtatiously flicked in the air as the wind took its aim, her life too would tumble in another direction. Either way, she knew to persist and had soon cleared the hem of the house, cut back the long, parched grass and provided us with a garden of roughly strewn stones and rocks.

  Over the following two years these stones and rocks would be painstakingly collected and stacked for my father to eventually build us a permanent house a few hundred yards away. But first my father built us a grand shack with shallow foundations and uneven, concrete floors.

  He, along with Charlie – who seemed to be born of the land and was there when my father first arrived – had built our temporary abode, wooden slat for wooden slat. Charlie would set aside his carved walking stick before hitching his oversized trousers into his waist, and together with my father they would sweat, saw and persevere as one to finally produce a structure suitable to be called home. As the night descended and it became too dark to drive another nail, Charlie would slip away and leave my father to breathe deep on his Texan Plains. He would sit content, as the rings of smoke from his cigarette curled through the night air to blend with the malty sweetness of his Lion Lager, satisfied that the profile of the landscape was changing just as he’d envisioned.

  It didn’t take long for our squat, timber square to take shape. We – my mother, the twins and I – arrived to see it standing, splendid with its flat, corrugated-iron roof, its four cut-out steel windows and its hinge-panel front door. As we entered we needed to adjust our eyes to peer into the darkness. The interior had been divided roughly in two by way of untreated wood partitioning.

  My mother placed the Sanderson couch in the front section, clearly dividing the lounge from the allocated dining area; further back was the kitchen and alongside it the bathroom. The bathroom was partially separated, allowing for at least some form of unlit privacy, but was too small to host the metal tub that was our bath. Every evening the tub took centre stage as my mother dragged it to the middle of the kitchen and a quarter filled it with pot-boiled hot water, before the squirming bodies of my brother, my sister and I were squeezed in. This not only saved on time for my mother but also simultaneously raised the level of the water. Our collective howls of objection would fill the kitchen as she grabbed at our feet and, with a hard brush, scrubbed the dirt that had become one with our soles. No child wore shoes on this side of the world.

  To the left of the wooden room divider was where we slept. The front part had been half closed in for my parents, the back area a dark cavernous space with three beds lined up alongside each other like skittles. Given that I was the eldest, I was afforded the privilege of choosing my bed first, so the bed on the left became mine. It was a good spot to have as it was the closest to the light – and the closest to my parents. The twins fought it out between themselves for the next best spot. My brother won.

  My father, being a practical man and one of great ingenuity, saw the pine panelling that separated us from the living area as a perfect storage opportunity. Stacked high up along the top shelf were the Afrovan removal boxes that would be unpacked only when needed. Those boxes on the ground stood much taller than me, and when arranged above me they loomed large like skulking monsters that came to devour children as they slept. During the day I stored away the gnawing fear, but as the night settled in, ominous shapes began to take form between the shadows of those imposing cartons. I would lie there frozen, frightened and breathless, telling myself that the folded blanket was not a python coiled and ready to strike. But I was never able to believe it. My eyes were fixed on the serpent, too scared to blink in case it moved and then disappeared, only to reappear as it slithered over me and covered me in the dust of its scales.

  Snakes became a part of our new lives. My brother, my sister and I would soon learn to identify one serpent from another, but thankfully nobody ever needed to use the antivenom stored in the fridge next to the milk. Puff adders were by far the most prevalent and it took my father, his .22 rifle and many armfuls of cartridges to try to destroy the nest of vipers that were breeding unconstrained under the rocks alongside the reservoir. My mother stood at a distance, shouting words of warning.

  “Bruce! Be careful!”

  “There’s another one behind you.”

  And there was.

  And another.

  One puff adder after the other, writhing and undulating as they intertwined.

  It was Charlie, with his stick, who taught us to listen for their puff, to always look down as we walked and to recognise their cryptic colouration as they lounged lazily, carefully camouflaged in their natural habitat. It was also Charlie who came rushing to the back door one afternoon, ashen in pallor, shouting for my mother.

  “Miessies!”

  My mother opened the door, eyes wide.

  “Daar’s ’n slang! ’n Groot slang!”

  Eyes wider still.

  “Ek kannie die kop of’ie stert sien nie!” he yelled, his stick hanging useless at his side.

  I never did see the snake that stretched from the one side of the road to the other, obscuring both its head and tail at the same time. But I knew it as the python that lived in the hollow beneath the marula tree, the one that guarded the bottom gate, and from then on we were no longer allowed to wait under the tree for my father to come home from work.

  We checked our beds at night to make sure that no cobra had tucked itself in. We kept our eyes open for mambas, by far the most deadly, and lost a bit of ourselves when our dog, Spekkie, died of one’s poison. We watched out for rinkhals that played dead. We observed the boomslangs as they warmed themselves out in the sun or became one with the branch, still and unmoving.

  But the most spectacular was the snake that would one day make its way down our slate passage. It was school holidays and it was just my brother, David, and I at home when it made its magnificent entrance. My brother was in the passage when it sashayed toward him, its head swaying from side to side. I was in the kitchen frying our favourite slap chips when David ran in screaming. I couldn’t make out his words. I thought he’d been stung by a bee. He was very allergic.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “Calm down.”

  “No. It’s a python!” he screamed.

  A python?

  “Johanna!” I shouted. “Daars ’n slang – kom gou!”

  Johanna tossed her iron aside and came running.

  “Dis onner die couch, Johanna!”

  “Nee, nonnie, hy’sie daarie,” she said peering into the under-couch darkness.

  And then, as she dropped the couch back into place, it slithered out from under it, shifty eyes darting, tongue flicking. It was the biggest snake I had ever seen. Easily three metres long and as wide as my hand. So big that we couldn’t kill it. We managed, though, to close it in the TV room.

  Then I leapt up onto the dining table, not wanting my feet touching discarded scales, and called my father.

  The snake park sent one of its handlers. It turned out not to be a python after all. It was a banded Egyptian cobra. And that was how our very own cobra was given its own glass cage next to the prized king cobra at the park. Our snake then became the second biggest snake I’d ever seen and we were given complimentary entrance to the snake park for as long as everyone remembered.

  As scorpions and spiders also blended seamlessly into our environment, my mother decided it was time to introduce animals that we might prefer. So my father and Charlie set to constructing cages and pens and hutches and soon we had chickens, ducks and rabbits. We got stuck in – feeding, collecting eggs and counting bunnies. But the most anticipated event of the year was the spring arrival of three fluffy white lambs, one for each of us to hand rear. We eagerly took ownership of our little lambs and gave them meaningful names like Fluffy, Snow and Diane. We held them tight as they greedily drank the milk that foamed from teats attached to Coke bottles. We wrestled with them, spent
hours training them to follow us and generally loved them until they became big, robust sheep with woolly, matted coats. It was heartrending when they mysteriously disappeared, one by one. My father said it was the jackals.

  Charlie fashioned out a vegetable patch and soon we were growing our own vegetables too, leafy lettuces, spinach, carrots and cabbages. Aside from the bird coop, the vegetable patch and the cleared rock garden, the veld around us was an impenetrable expanse. It was dense with waist-high shrubs, thorn trees, aloes and proteas, a vast wildness that became our playground.

  We had no immediate neighbours – or at least none that we could see from the house – and, having moved from Port Elizabeth, it was a surprise to realise that people could live so far apart. The Bothas owned the smallholding to our right and we only saw them when we passed each other occasionally on the dust road. It was a road that needed to be graded annually after the rains, an initiative spearheaded by Mr Botha himself as he preferred a smoother surface for his Mercedes-Benz. Mr Botha was a distinguished man, active in the local municipality and involved in the church. Mrs Botha was equally refined. To our distant left Johann, the hairdresser, and his boyfriend lived discreetly. Almost two kilometres away, toward the national road, were the Bezuidenhouts, whom we would only befriend once we started catching the school bus. Then on the other side, even further away, were the Van der Merwes and the Du Toits. It would take years for the Goings to integrate.

  But if there was one thing that brought the entire community of Ana Landbouhoewes together quickly, it was a veld fire. And we were particularly vulnerable in our wooden tinderbox. It wasn’t just the time my brother set a match to the grass; the blazing sun had a habit of taking its vengeance out on the parched ground, and its blistering heat was enough for the grass to self-ignite and start a wave of destruction that could quickly escalate out of control. There was one particular night when it seemed that Vulcan himself had released his fury in the form of an almighty blaze that almost took us with him.