Fly Away Home (2 page)

F
rancina stopped hemming for a moment to study the bowed head of her adopted daughter, who was sewing beads onto a wedding dress for a lady from a town north of Lady Helen. The poor bride was going to stagger under the weight of a thousand imitation pearls, but Francina always said that she would gladly shave her head if she came across a bride who was not prepared to suffer for beauty on her big day. A groom wouldn't wear shoes that pinched his toes, or a hairstyle that pulled so tight the corners of his eyes lifted, or a shirt so snug across his stomach he couldn't eat a morsel from the menu that had been so painstakingly chosen.

Unlike some of the other fourteen-year-old girls at Green Block School, Zukisa wore her hair in the natural style of proud African women. Sometimes Francina would braid it, but the girl complained that it pulled too tightly on her scalp. Perhaps Zukisa would one day be the first bride Francina had ever met who was not willing to suffer for beauty.

“Am I going too slowly?” asked Zukisa.

“No, not at all. I was just admiring the neatness of your rows.”

Although Zukisa and Francina were not related by blood, they both had high cheekbones, aquiline noses and, up until Zukisa became a teenager, the same flawless complexion. But their eyes were different. Francina knew that people were unnerved by the way her left eye stared without blinking. Her first husband, Winston, the son of the chief of the village where she'd grown up, had once beaten her so badly that doctors had had to replace her left eye with a glass replica. Children, more openly curious than adults, frequently requested that she take it out so they could study it, and she often obliged them.

Francina's mother-in-law, Mrs. Shabalala, would normally be in the shop in the afternoon, while Francina and Zukisa supervised the boys at Monica's house, but today Monica had taken Mandla with her to an appointment in Cape Town, and Sipho, at fifteen, was perfectly safe on his own. After some initial fine-tuning, Francina found that this shift arrangement worked well for Jabulani Dressmakers. In the mornings, Francina measured clients for new orders and did most of the sewing. In the afternoons, Mrs. Shabalala balanced the accounting books, ordered fabric, thread and other supplies, wrote invoices, met clients to hand over their completed orders, and cleaned the shop. Though Francina had given her mother-in-law many lessons in sewing, Mrs. Shabalala's most valuable contribution would always be her cheerful manner, which could soothe even the most agitated client if an order was not ready on time. Jabulani, the name of Francina's village in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, meant happiness in the Zulu language, and with the division of labor as it was, the atmosphere of the shop always lived up to its name.

Since coming to live with Francina after the death of her mother, when she was ten, Zukisa had shown an eye for design. The meticulous stitching had come later, after patient tutoring from Francina, but from the start Zukisa had known which colors complemented each other, whether a fabric would look better cut on the bias or not, whether a client would look elegant or ridiculous with ruffles. A year later, she was sketching her own designs and cutting out pattern pieces from newspaper. Some of her early efforts had made the mannequin look dressed for a pantomime, but now clients came in just to see the latest design it displayed. At times, Zukisa needed encouragement to keep working on her creation until it was completely hemmed and pressed, but that was understandable for a teenager. Francina was pleased at her daughter's dedication to the tedious job of sewing beads onto this wedding gown, when other girls would be wandering idly up and down Main Street with their friends.

“My aunt couldn't come to the phone this afternoon,” said Zukisa.

Francina did not allow herself to ask about Zukisa's weekly phone calls to her aunt, and instead waited patiently until the girl offered her tidbits of information.

“Was she working an extra shift?”

Zukisa's aunt cleaned a restaurant frequented by men of the nearby dockyard. After the death of her mother from AIDS, Zukisa had gone to live with her aunt, where she helped out taking care of her aunt's grandchildren while the woman was at work. Zukisa's aunt said that her daughter—the mother of the children—had fallen through the cracks of life and could not take care of them.

“She didn't just fall,” Francina was fond of telling her husband, Hercules, “she lost her balance because she raised a bottle to her mouth.” Francina could not understand how a woman with three beautiful children could abandon them for a life of sin, when she, Francina Shabalala, a woman who had passed her prime early and could not have children of her own, managed to live a decent life and put the violence she'd suffered at the hands of her first husband behind her.

“Not everybody is as strong as you, my dear,” Hercules would say. “Addiction is a medical problem.” The worst of it was that the wayward mother had joined the oldest profession in the world so she could afford her liquor.

Zukisa had stopped going to school in order to take care of her sick mother, and didn't go back when she moved in with her aunt. Zukisa had been another mouth to feed, another child who needed school fees paid and school uniforms. The aunt's meager state pension was just not enough.

Now, four years after Zukisa had come to her, Francina still thanked God daily for His gift of the child.

Zukisa stopped sewing and looked at Francina. “My aunt is sick.”

From the anxiety in her eyes, Francina could tell that Zukisa believed the same disease that had taken both her parents would now take her aunt.

“No, it can't be what you're thinking,” she replied in a gentle voice.

Zukisa's expression relaxed a bit. Her adopted mother had never lied to her.

“Are the boys looking after their baby sister?” Francina asked.

Zukisa shook her head. “Those two wouldn't know how to look after a dog, never mind a five-year-old girl.”

Francina saw the question on her daughter's face. She took a deep breath. “We can drive down on Saturday if you want.”

Zukisa smiled. “Thanks, Mom.”

Francina did not know why, but she still lost sleep over her daughter's monthly visits to her blood relatives. Zukisa had come into Francina's life so unexpectedly and with such ease that it seemed likely the girl could leave it in the same way. But God wouldn't grant Francina happiness only to take it away one day, would He?

Footsteps sounded on the stairs leading down to the shop from the family's two-bedroom flat. It was Francina's husband, Hercules. His mother, bless her heart, made her impending presence known with greater volume. Ever since Francina had met her, Mrs. Shabalala had been trying to lose weight. Some months she'd be successful, but her close friendship with Mama Dlamini of Mama Dlamini's Eating Establishment was her downfall. Mama Dlamini's cakes and pies could melt the resolve of even the most motivated dieter.

“When are my girls going to call it a day and come up and see my new painting?” Hercules said, entering the shop.

Francina had met her future husband at a choir competition in Ermelo, a small town east of Johannesburg. Her fellow choir members had mistakenly left her behind at the hostel when they'd hurried off to the church hall. With only thirty minutes before the performance started, and nobody else around, Francina had accepted Hercules's offer of a ride. He'd gone back to the hostel because he'd forgotten his retractable baton and never conducted his choir without it.

When he'd come over to her in the dining hall after the competition, she'd been impressed that he didn't talk about sports as most men did, but about his mother, who was going to be disappointed, he said, that his choir had not won the competition that year. Francina had permitted him to join her at the table, partly because she was in the company of three of her choir sisters and felt that it was proper, and partly because a man who talked of his mother deserved to be treated kindly. She'd agreed to go for a walk with him that afternoon, and not once had she caught him staring at her glass eye the way most people did when getting to know her.

Back in Johannesburg, she'd looked up the name Hercules in Sipho's encyclopedia and had been amused to discover that a tall, pointy man with no meat on his bones could be named after a Greek who looked like a white version of a Zulu warrior. With a name like Hercules, what else could he have become in life but a history teacher?

When Francina and Zukisa were working in the shop, Hercules spent his free time painting. Lady Helen had become a respected center for the arts after a famous artist, S. W. Greeff, had rediscovered the crumbling and deserted town on a walk up the West Coast. Hercules, the dear man, had thought that he could add to the town's reputation, but his first efforts had caused Francina a crisis of conscience; she didn't want to hurt him but she never lied. In the end she had reluctantly—and gently—told him the truth. Now, after four years of art lessons, Hercules had disproved the theory that talent could not be taught, and every space on the walls in their flat was taken up by his paintings. Francina could not think of a scenic spot anywhere in the surrounding countryside, including on any of the koppies, that he had not captured in watercolors. He had recently hung a large painting of dairy cows in their bathroom, and Francina found, to her annoyance, that she could no longer relax as she soaked in her tub, not with six pairs of large brown bovine eyes staring at her.

“Why don't you have a show and sell them?” Francina had asked Hercules time and again, but he did not believe that his work was good enough to be seen by the public.

Hercules's mother would never utter a word of criticism of her son, though Francina had seen the look of irritation on her face when she knocked into one of the many works hanging in the narrow hall to the bedrooms. The small flat felt even more confining with walls of vivid color.

This tall, skinny history teacher, who Francina's choir mates had once likened to a giraffe, was a man of surprises. Those silly girls had quickly lost their smiles, though, on the weekend when she and Hercules had their first official date, in Pongola, a small sugarcane farming town near the Swaziland border, and his choir had taken first place in the competition and won the trophy. Her choir hadn't placed, but she had snagged the greatest prize of all—the man who would become her husband.

“While I was painting I was thinking back to the choir competitions,” said Hercules.

Francina knew her husband was leading up to something. Unlike her, Hercules never made idle conversation.

“I think our choir could do well.”

Francina couldn't have been more shocked.

“Our choir? Traveling in a minibus taxi to sing in a scout hall and stay in a school dormitory? Hercules, have you gone mad? It took those white ladies five months to get used to wearing their African-style tunics. And now you want them to go and sing Zulu praise hymns. I think that the fumes from your paint have gone to your head.”

Zukisa giggled.

“We don't have to go in a taxi. The ladies have cars. We could travel in convoy. And stay in a hotel. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Zukisa?” He looked beseechingly at his daughter.

Zukisa looked from her mother to her father and nodded slowly.

“They'd be inspired by the other choirs, Francina. Don't you remember how we used to feel the music, feel it reverberating off the walls of those shabby halls?”

Francina thought about those times with her people more often than she cared to admit. Sometimes her dreams were filled with voices praising God in the beautiful words of the Zulu language.

“But we'd have to sing in English.”

Hercules shrugged. “We'd manage a Zulu song or two, as well.”

Hercules, who could coax beauty even from the most reluctant voices, could surely manage it. He'd converted the sick-bird singing of the choir of Lady Helen's Little Church of the Lagoon to a glorious wall of sound that brought people to their feet, clapping and stomping and reveling in the presence of God.

This year, the town of Lady Helen would elect a new mayor. Hercules would make a good mayor. He wasn't a politician as Mayor Oupa had been, or a showman like the current mayor, that brightly attired artist, Richard, with his thick shoes made from recycled car tires and his short pants that exposed his calves. Why the residents of Lady Helen had elected him Francina would never understand. No, Hercules would be the best sort of mayor: thoughtful, rational, fair and accessible. He said he was not comfortable talking in front of a crowd, but didn't he talk all day long to a classroom full of children? He said he wouldn't know how to draw up a budget and stick to it, but wasn't that what he did for his family every year? Lady Helen would benefit from Hercules's gentle wisdom, and Francina planned to ensure that the town was given the opportunity. So far there was only one candidate, and that was the incumbent mayor.

Francina snipped off the thread of the completed hem on Ingrid van Tonder's dress. She had lost count of how many dresses she'd made for Reverend van Tonder's wife, her first ever paying client. Ingrid looked far more elegant and comfortable in Francina's flowing designs than in the poorly made synthetic fire hazards she used to wear.

“Why don't you go up to the flat,” Francina told her daughter. “Delicate work like sewing on beads is hard on your eyes.”