Stones for My Father (2 page)

Gert brandished the arrowhead from his pocket, narrowly slicing my mother’s ear. “Look, Ma! I’m going to put it on a string and wear it around my neck like a Zulu warrior —”

“It could have been anything,” continued my mother, ignoring my brother’s excited chatter even while she pressed him to her chest. “The khakis might have left poisoned pieces of metal for us to step on, to infect the herds. Why weren’t you paying closer attention?”

I stared at her, not knowing what to say
.
You sent us
,
I thought
.
It’s your fault we were on the Highveld
.

“She was telling me a story about Ntombazi,” interjected Gert.

My mother grabbed me by the arm and shook me roughly. “More lies!” she shouted. “Heathen lies! We’ll see how fit you are to spin tales once I’ve beaten the devil out of you —”

I wrenched myself out of her grasp, twisting my arm so hard that I felt my shoulder pop, and ran as fast as I could toward the
koppie
where my father lay buried.

“You can think twice before coming back, my girl!” Ma shouted after me, her voice cracking through the dusty air. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that she was clutching Gertie to her skirts, weeping soundlessly while my brother continued to admire his little stone treasure.

J
ust six weeks before my father died, a consumption virus had been discovered in some dead buffalo on Samie’s Kloof. By the time my mother had gathered enough marula bark to make a poultice for the fever, Pa’s neck had swollen to such a size that he found it difficult to turn his head. Bluish abscesses formed beneath his jaw, stretching and tautening as his neck glands expanded — until at last the skin started to rupture. The doctor said that it was scrofula, but by that point having a name for the sickness made little difference: my father had shrunk to a shadow, the purple circles under his eyes scooping hollows in his handsome face.

As Hansie was only a few months old at the time, he was the first one to be isolated. Within a few days, the doctor said that it would be best if Gert and I went to
stay with Hansie at a neighboring farm. The next thing I knew, we were standing atop a
koppie
with my mother and Tant Minna, murmuring prayers over a mound of freshly turned earth.

That evening, the evening my mother shouted at me not to come home, I returned to the
koppie
where Pa was buried. Two years had passed since President Kruger declared war on the British, and already Pa’s name was starting to wear from the makeshift headstone.

The slate was badly chipped and had begun to crumble and flake at the corners. Someone had scratched a line through the words that our farmhand had carved with Pa’s horn-handled knife — someone, perhaps, who believed the rumor that my father had wished to make peace with the British. In the early days of the war between the Boer republics and Britain, all Boer men had sworn that they would never take the oath of neutrality that the British had offered us. Anyone who did would be labeled a
hensopper
, or hands-upper: a coward and traitor to the Boer cause. My father had not been a coward, but to him the safety of his family and his farm were more important than Boer pride. To some of the men in Amersfoort, however — to the ones who called themselves
Bittereinders
, because they would fight to the bitter end — this was defeatist talk.

By now, every family was affected. Fathers, brothers, and sons were all fighting on commando. My own Oom Jakob had been killed in the raid at Mafeking. Soon, Gertie would be old enough to go and fight with my cousins, some of whom were only ten when their families sent them out into the bush with a rifle and enough ammunition to last several days. One of them, a lad of twelve named Tjaart who I’d sat with in school, had been killed after only a week. These days, the elders spoke of him as a hero, even though as far as I could remember there hadn’t ever been anything remarkable about him in life. The mythology that grew up around Tjaart was bigger than he ever could have conjured up on his own had he lived. The men used it to buttress their spirits, to put fire in their bellies.

I was sure that if my father was still alive, he would be fighting with them.

The grave was piled high with rocks, and I added another stone to the mound before crouching on the soft earth. Closing my eyes, I tried not to think of the day of the funeral: the way the coffin had lurched back and forth on the shoulders of four local men who were too old and frail to be on commando and who were barely strong enough to support even my father’s wasted body.

Try as I might to summon a picture of my father’s healthy face, the image of the lurching coffin would not go away — so at last I opened my eyes and focused instead on the tombstone. I remembered my father chopping wood outside our house, splitting great logs
into kindling, and telling me that the word
splinter
was the same in English as in Dutch. I liked the mystery of English words, the way the sounds were crisp and clean, not guttural. I used to roll them around in my mouth, savoring the thrill of speaking the enemy’s tongue. Besides the names that no one could escape in those days — Queen Victoria, Lord Kitchener — the only English words I knew were
gold, farm
, and
church
.

Those were the words that summed up the history of my country. Two hundred years before I was born, French, Dutch, and German settlers fleeing religious persecution in Europe had sought a free life in southern Africa. They worked as farmers and worshipped at Dutch Reformed churches. They became known as Afrikaners and were the first of two white tribes to settle the land.

The second tribe was British, and they fought us for control of the gold mines, land, and Africans. The war that had broken out just weeks before my father died was supposed to see off the British for good — hence its name,
Tweede Vryheidsoorlog:
the Second War of Liberation.

So far, apart from food shortages and a visible absence of men, life had continued as normal in our corner of the Transvaal. Tonight, as a warm wind blew in from the east, all I could hear was the lonely clattering of a windmill from across the veld.

Tucking my legs beneath me, I curled up on the heather and folded one arm under my head. I tried to
imagine my father lying deep in the earth beside me, tried to imagine the steady rise and fall of his chest, the way his mouth pulled downward when he slept. I imagined threading my arm through his, squeezing it gently as I used to when we would sit together on the veranda, counting the stars late into the night.

I fell asleep.

Sipho discovered me the next morning, curled around my father’s tombstone like a cat.

“Kleinnooi?”

As he squatted beside me, I was aware of his bony kneecaps, his bare toes digging into the earth for balance.

“Eh?” I sat up and brushed the dirt from my shift, embarrassed by his presence. Sipho continued to stare at me, full lips parted but speechless. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow in the corners. Long eyelashes curled up toward a high, smooth forehead.

“You slept outside,
kleinnooi
, all night?”

“I’m fine, Sipho.” As I made a motion to stand, he leaped up and offered me his hand.

“Hungry
,
kleinnooi?”

I nodded, and Sipho cocked his head toward home.

The servants’ huts were located on the far side of the
koppie
, overlooking the scrubland where they kept a few goats and chickens. Sipho was the only son of my father’s farmhand, Bheka, who had joined my uncles on
commando over a year ago. Like me, Sipho had been left behind with his mother and two younger siblings — twin girls, Nosipho and Nelisiwe.

Most Boer children grew up with a
matie
, an African playmate. Sipho had been gifted to me two weeks after I was born, when he was six months old. His father called my father
baas
, and Pa called him Bheka; if Pa hadn’t known his name, he would simply have called him
kaffir
, which was what we usually called a black person.

While my parents directed the labors of Sipho’s parents, Sipho and I played at being equals. We dug grooves in the ground and used dried beans to play
oware
, or we gathered our siblings for a game of
mbube, mbube
, where one of us would pretend to be a lion stalking impala. Sipho showed me how to track animals by looking for fresh droppings and disturbed bush, and how to read the direction and speed of hoofprints in the dust. He taught me the difference between the curving marks left by a puff adder and a mamba, and how to recognize the spitting bugs that could blind a man with their acid saliva. He said that we needed only to listen to the earth, because it spoke better sense than most men, most of the time. He told me about the San tribesmen who hunted kudu over many days, staking their prey by outrunning it, and about the glorious victories of old. When the river was high we would fish, and when the sun grew too hot we would explore the nearby caves, which were decorated with ancient
paintings. I told Sipho about Piet Reteif, the Boer leader who made a covenant with God and saved hundreds of Boer lives at the Battle of Blood River, and Sipho told me about Shaka, the warrior who united all the Zulu tribes under one banner and used a buffalo-horn formation to defeat Europeans armed with guns and canons.

Now that we were getting older, my mother said that it wasn’t proper for me to spend so much time with Sipho. Soon the games of
oware
and
mbube, mbube
would have to come to an end, as would the fishing trips, tracking, and storytelling. If the war carried on much longer, Sipho would have to go and fight as a loyal African, as his father before him.

Sipho’s mother was sitting in front of their thatched hut, pounding mealie corn when we arrived. Her head was wrapped in a blue cloth, and her molasses-smooth skin glistened with sweat. Seeing us, she stopped to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun and beckoned us inside. The walls were made of clay and the floor of packed earth, so the hut was cool and dark. They had only two rooms — one for cooking and eating, and one for sleeping — but it felt comfortable to me. There were no preserve jars to break, no shoes to remember, no crocheting or needlework to practice. Just a stove and some straw mattresses, and a tankard of
dop
left behind by the men.

Before I could stop him, Sipho had told his mother about my night on the gravesite. Lindiwe clicked her tongue and removed the wool blanket from her own
shoulders and wrapped it around me. The coarse blanket smelled of sweet smoke and roasted corn. She then turned to the pot on the stove, and tipped the contents into two bowls.

“Eat,” she said. “Eat,
kleinnooi
.”

Soft clumps of rice had settled at the bottom of the bowl, which was filled with thin porridge. I took a sip. Then another. All at once, warmth filled my mouth and throat, at last reaching my empty stomach like a spear.

“
Dankie
, Lindy,” I said. Lindiwe smiled broadly, exposing teeth the color of ivory tusks, and began to untie the knotted ribbon from my hair.

“Does your ma know you were out all night?” she asked in isiZulu, combing her fingers through the matted bits.

I shrugged.

“She’s angry,” murmured Sipho. He knew that confronting an elephant in musth was only slightly less frightening than facing Ma when she was in one of her rages.

“Ja-nee.”

Lindiwe grunted. “
Ja-nee
, yes-no. That’s not an answer,
kleinnooi
.” She began to twist my hair into plaits, humming a low melody until words began to form. “
Likhona ithemba, likhona kuye, thembela kuye, thembela ku Jesu
 …”

I wriggled on the mat. “Not a Jesus song, Lindy. Something else.”

Sipho looked up, grinning, from his porridge.

“O bring my t’rug na die ou Transvaal, Daar waar my Sarie woon …”

I couldn’t help but join in. “
Daar onder in die mielies, By die groen doringboom, Daar woon my Sarie Marais …
” We’d learned the song from a couple of men who’d recently returned from Pretoria, where it had become popular among the Boer commandos.

Lindiwe pulled a face and shook her head, waggling her hands at us. “So much noise, you two! Go, now — out, out. Take these.” She passed us two small loaves of mealie bread and a few shriveled strips of biltong, suddenly looking very serious. “Wrap the bread and meat in the blanket and leave them in the pigeon lofts for the men,
kleinnooi
. Albert Siswe said that their supplies are running low again.”

I considered the meager bundle. “No salt?”

Lindiwe stared down at her palms, shaking her head slowly. “Your ma sent coffee and sugar two weeks ago — there was no salt then, either.”