Stones for My Father (13 page)

Gert twice returned to our tent with blood smeared across his upper lip, but Ma put that down to a burst vessel brought on by the dry air. In a place where several people died every week, no one paid much attention to nosebleeds — and so Gert continued to be sent out to collect kindling with the other children until the day he fainted. Even then, we assumed it was only the heat. Ma didn’t believe in headaches, so we’d not worried when he’d said that morning that his eyes were sore.

In the end, it was Marieta who first noticed the cluster of tiny red spots on his chest.

A
fter two days, Gert started refusing food.

Ma said that aloes and egg whites were the best cure for typhoid, but neither was to be found in the camp. I spent an entire day wandering along the tall wire fence, gazing out at hardy clusters of spiky green aloe plants fringing the hills just a hundred yards from where I walked. Women had begged the British soldiers to let them go out to collect the plants to treat their ailing children, but permission was never granted. As for eggs, they were considered too fragile to be worth shipping to the camps. Heila Du Preez had once lured a few hens in through a hole in the fence, but these birds — apparently mangy, poor layers, anyway — had died off just before we’d arrived.

I found Heila scrubbing her nephew’s breeches over a barrel of gray water. The boy, Frikkie, squatted nearby.
A few days earlier, he had been bitten by a brown button spider. We knew it must have been a brown button spider because a black one would have killed him in no time at all. The bite site was white, encircled by an ugly red rash, and today Frikkie was dabbing at it with a wet cloth.

“You need aloe for that,” I said.

Frikkie looked up at me, squinting into the sun.

“What do you think
this
is?” he retorted. His aunt snapped the breeches at him.

“Mind your tongue, Frik!”

I knelt at Heila’s side and lowered my voice.

“Where did you find it, Heila?” I asked. “If you tell me, I promise I won’t say a word.”

Heila resumed her scrubbing, avoiding my eye.

“Please, Heila,” I whispered. “It’s for Gert. Ma thinks it could be typhoid.”

She looked up at me, and I saw anger vanish from her gaze only to be replaced with something new. Fear.

“How does she know?”

“He has the rash. At first we thought it might be dengue fever, but Lettie Lourens thinks his nosebleeds might have been a sign.” I lowered my eyes, praying that she might take pity. “Ma says we need aloe and egg whites for a poultice.”

“The hens are dead.”

I hesitated, taken aback by the edge in her voice. After a moment, Heila Du Preez rose and disappeared into the tent. She returned with a skin flask, which she
passed to me. Tilting it between my hands, I felt a dribble of fluid inside.

“The khakis thought it was only water.”

I almost extended my arms to embrace her, but something about the way she held herself stopped me.

“Thank you, Heila,” I said. “Thank you, thank you …” I turned to go back to our tent.

“Corlie Roux.”

I stopped and turned, terrified that she was going to make an impossible demand. “I’ll bring more kindling tonight; I promise,” I blurted. “And some mealie meal, too. Ma is so worried about Gert she’s hardly eating —”

“See Lynette Bekker about the eggs,” she whispered, not looking at me as she returned to her scrubbing. “The Tommies keep chickens near their barracks.”

Lynette Bekker spent one day each week working in the barracks laundry, services for which she was paid in mealie corn. Thanking Heila a second time, I hurried on.

As I made my way between the rows of tents, I said a silent prayer — not so much for my brother as for myself.
Please, God
, I thought,
don’t take Gertie. You already took my Pa, and Sipho, and my little
apie.
You can’t take my brother, too
.

When I had left the tent that morning, my brother’s eyes were rolled back in his head as he slept. Agnes helped Ma to change him out of his sweat-drenched breeches and into a clean petticoat that had once belonged to Antjie. I hadn’t wanted him to wear anything that had belonged to someone who was now
dead, but it wasn’t the time for me to protest. Gert had been moaning and mumbling to himself all through the night, and none of us had slept well.

That morning I had crept close to my brother’s side and whispered in his ear.

“Pull yourself together,” I had said. “There will be a lot of work for us to do when the war ends, and you’ll need all your strength. The first thing we’ll do is get the farm up and running — that’s what Pa would want. The khakis can’t keep us here forever, Gertie …”

Ma had pushed me aside before I had a chance to say anything else — before I had a chance to tell my brother that I loved him, that he was my only friend in all the world besides Sipho, that I couldn’t bear to think of going back to our farm without him — and in that instant, I realized that she would have preferred me to be lying in that bed.

“Are you trying to smother him?” she had snapped.

Yes, it was true: my mother would rather I died in his place.

Ma refused to admit that he was delirious. “He’s been having bad dreams,” she said to our neighbors, to explain why we all looked even more exhausted than usual. “Night terrors, that’s all.”

But I knew there was more to it than that, and — judging by the way she watched over him — I was pretty certain that she did, too.

“I thought the immunizations were supposed to keep our children healthy,” I’d heard her mutter to Agnes in
the early hours of morning. “Otherwise, what are they good for?”

“Khaki propaganda,” she replied.

I was jolted from the memory by the sounds of a scuffle behind one of the tents. Poking my head into a narrow passageway, I watched aghast as two women tore at each other like a couple of enraged cats. On the ground lay an overturned tin of condensed milk, the contents of which had already begun to seep into the yellow ground.

“Thief! Thief!” cried several other women who had also sought out the source of the noise. The two scrappers — a burly, red-faced
vrouw
with hands like spades, and a wiry younger woman whose hair had become unpinned in the fray — tumbled to the ground.

Without stopping to think, I made a dash for the tin. If I could only save a few drops of milk, it would keep Hansie fed for another day and we could give the rest of our water to Gert —

“Another one!”

A hand hit me roughly on the side of my head, and I hit the ground with a yelp.

“Scavenger! Thief!”

I was hauled to my feet and shoved to one side as a crowd of children descended upon the now empty can. When I looked up, I recognized Sonja Erasmus — one of the women from whom I had taken regular handouts over recent weeks. She glowered at me with eyes like raisins planted in a swollen, doughy face.

“Snatch and grab, will you? While the women behave like children, the children behave like animals!” She smacked me again, and despite myself my eyes smarted. “You’re nothing better than a stray, Corlie Roux. We may have fed you our scraps, but you were never welcome in our tents. Brazen greed! That’s the thanks we get for taking pity on a mongrel, for turning a blind eye to your mother’s sins …”

I wriggled away from her and ran as fast as my feet would carry me, not stopping until I reached the Bekkers.’

“Ma!” I cried, holding out Heila’s flask as I burst into our tent. “Aloe water, Ma! And Lynette Bekker promised that she would try to steal us an egg tomorrow —”

Inside, the air hung thick and heavy. For almost two days, Ma had kept the tent sealed so that Gertie could sweat out the fever. Despite our best efforts, dozens of flies swarmed about the bed. Hansie knelt next to my brother, swatting at the flies whenever they tried to settle on him.

“An egg, Ma,” I repeated. “And you know what that means: we can put the whites in a poultice and we can eat the yolk …”

My mother was standing in the middle of the tent, staring at the ground. Agnes and her daughters were not there. On my way, I had passed Nandi carrying the day’s water ration back to the tent. The tiny girl had gripped the bucket’s rope handle with chafed fingers,
concentrating hard so as not to spill a single precious drop as she shuffled down Steyn Street. Had it been any other day I would have stopped to help — but in my excitement about the egg I’d rushed straight past her.

My mother didn’t appear to have heard me. She remained where she was, still as a tree trunk, both arms limp at her sides; a strange, soft, choking noise emanated from her lips. I rushed closer, pressing the flask toward her.

“There’s just enough here —”

“Look at him, Corlie Roux,” said my mother. Her voice sounded the way it always did when she was about to rant — full of spite and simmering rage — and instinctively I drew back. But Ma remained exactly as she was, staring at the floor with blank eyes.

I turned toward the bed. Gertie’s head had tipped to one side, away from me, and I could tell that his mouth was slightly open. Patches of yellow hair had started to grow in place of his beautiful golden forelock, and a few fine wisps still curled about his ears. The white petticoat was wrinkled and sticky with sweat, but my brother looked peaceful. I edged nearer.

“Gertie?” I whispered.

The bushman arrow still hung from the leather cord around his neck. I suddenly noticed how bright it seemed against my brother’s gray skin.

That was when I realized he was dead.

“He hasn’t moved for two hours,” said Ma. Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. “I’ve
been waiting for him to move. He won’t move.”

I dropped to the ground next to my brother, and extended one hand to touch his cheek.

“Gertie —”

“Don’t touch him!” Ma lunged at me, fingers digging like daggers into my arms as she hurled me across the tent.

I cried out as I hit the ground, but when I went to raise myself, the wind had already been knocked from my lungs, and I gasped for air.

“Don’t come anywhere near him!” shrieked my mother. Behind her, Hansie sat staring. His face crumpled, breaking out in angry, red blotches as tears began streaming down his cheeks.

I cowered in the corner where I had landed, desperately trying to form words.

“He’s my brother,” I wheezed.

“Yours! Yours!” Ma’s clenched hand swept over the table, sending cups, plates, and a broken lantern across the floor. Hansie screamed and began pummeling the bed with balled fists. “Selfish, insolent girl! Wicked, evil, godless girl!” Before I could slide out of her reach, she grabbed me by one arm and hauled me out of the tent. Behind us, Hansie’s howls grew louder.

“I didn’t ask for you,” she growled. “If I could have that boy back and you cold in the ground, I would. As God is my witness, I wish you had never been born, Coraline Roux!”

I could sense that we were being watched, but at that
moment, my full attention was focused on my mother. Grief had distorted her handsome face so that it seemed ugly. She grabbed the flask of aloe water and flung it at me.

“Take your blasted aloe,” she shrieked. “The Devil take you!”

“I will!” I shouted back. “I’ll leave, and then you’ll only have Hansie, the way you’ve always wanted!”

“Leave?” My mother dissolved into poisonous laughter. “Where will you go in this godforsaken place?”

“I’ll look after myself.” And then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I added, “I could have looked after Gert, too.”

If she’d had the chance then, I think my mother would have tried to kill me. She certainly looked as if she wanted to: every fiber in her seemed geared to wring my neck. But then a British soldier appeared — I recognized him as the one Gert and I had watched picking lice from his legs on the barracks steps — and instantly the light in Ma’s eyes seemed to change.

“Here,” she called, pointing at me. “Take this girl!”

The soldier looked down at me, his expression a mixture of confusion and pity.

“Take her!” repeated my mother. If it weren’t for her rage, I might have thought that she was pleading with him. “Go on, you fool — she’s one of yours!”

T
hose were the words that haunted me as I lay curled beneath the khaki barracks at the edge of the camp. Winter was just around the corner, and the dry, crisp days were starting to give way to cold nights. Just the other morning, Gert had woken to discover frost flowers forming in the clay outside our tent. What I wouldn’t give for it to be October again, when steaming sunshine and warm thundershowers wrapped us in the earthy smells of the veld. It was still only April, and yet my father’s coat offered limited protection from the chill.

I fell in and out of sleep, dreaming that my brother was there beside me. I heard my mother’s words, and the words of Sonja Erasmus — she had called me a mongrel, but why? Then, my brother’s voice. “Tell me a story, Corlie,” he pleaded. My mind teemed with imaginary characters — Ntombazi, the little dikkop that
was too frightened to fly, the fisherman’s son who discovered a monster on the shore — but before long, their stories began to blur so that I didn’t know where to begin. I saw my brother’s round, white face watching me as I struggled to find the words. I noticed the petulant curl of his mouth, and as he turned away I heard Ma’s voice again. Only, the thing that spoke wasn’t my mother, but a magnificent lioness. The creature’s thick, muscular neck and powerful claws were stained red, and for a terrible instant I glimpsed my own reflection in its gleaming yellow eyes. The next thing I knew, the lioness reared up and let out a glorious roar.