The Power of One (20 page)

They were the most words I could recall having come from my granpa in one sitting. While he hadn't answered my urgent questions about Nanny, I could see that he had said something out loud that must have been bouncing around in his head for a long time.

“There's a good lad, off you go and play now.” He moved over to resume the tidying up of old Mrs. Butt. I rose from the steps and started to walk toward the house. Smoke was coming from the chimney, and breakfast couldn't be too far away. The clicking of the shears suddenly ceased. “Lad!” he called after me. I turned to look at him. His shaggy old head was almost touching the canopy of roses covering the arbor. “You must ask your mother about your nanny. It's got something to do with that damn fool religion she's caught up in.”

Imagine my delight when I walked into the kitchen to find our two little kitchen maids, Dee and Dum. They saw me enter and with a squeal of pleasure rushed over to embrace me, each of them holding a hand and dancing me around the kitchen. “You have grown. Your hair is still shaved. We must wash your clothes. Your mouth is stained from the fruit. You must eat. We will look after you now that Nanny has gone. Yes, yes, we will be your nanny, we have learned all the songs.” The two little girls were beside themselves with joy. It felt good, so very good to have them with me. While they had only been on the periphery of my life with Nanny, who had scolded them constantly and called them silly, empty-headed Shangaan girls but loved them anyway, I now realized how important they were to my past. They were continuity in a world that had been shattered and changed and was still changing. Now that my mother was following the Lord and could no longer be relied upon, my granpa and the two girls were my constants.

“Me Dum,” one of them said in English, tapping her chest with one hand while covering her mouth with the other to hide her giggle.

“Me Dee,” the second one echoed, the whites of her eyes showing her delight as they lit up her small black face. They were identical twins and were reminding me of the names I had given them when I was much smaller. It had started as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and had simply become Dum and Dee. I laughed as they showed off their English.

The room smelled of fresh coffee and Dee moved over to a tall brown enamel coffeepot on the back of the stove. Dum brought a mug and placed it on the table together with a hard rusk and then walked over to a coolbox on the
stoep
for a jug of milk. She returned with the milk and Dee poured the fresh coffee into the cup, both of them concentrating on their tasks, silent for the time being. Placing the pot back on the stove, Dee ladled two carefully measured spoonfuls of sugar into the mug of steaming coffee, using the same spoon to stir it. It was a labor of love, an expression of their devotion. Dum brought me a
Hempie
stool and placed it in the middle of the kitchen. I sat down and Dee placed the mug on the floor between my legs so that I could sit on the little rawhide chair and dunk the rock-hard rusk into it just the way I had always done on the farm. The two girls then sat on the polished cement floor in front of me, their legs tucked away under their skirts.

On the farm they had simply worn a single length of thin cotton cloth wrapped around their bodies and tied over one shoulder. Their wrists and ankles had been banded in bangles of copper and brass wire that jingled as they walked. Now these rings were gone, and over their slim, prepubescent twelve-year-old bodies they wore identical sleeveless shifts of striped navy mattress cotton that reached almost to their ankles.

While I dunked and sipped at my coffee we chatted away in Shangaan. They asked me about the night water and I told them that Inkosi-Inkosikazi's magic had worked and the problem was solved. They clucked and sighed about this for a while and we then talked about the crops and about the men who had come in a big truck and lit a huge bonfire and killed and burned all the black chickens. The smell of burning feathers and roasted chickens had lingered for three days, but no one was allowed to eat the meat. Such a waste had never before beea seen. How my granpa had sat on the
stoep
at the farm for a day and a night, watching the fire die down to nothing, silently puffing at his pipe, leaving the food brought to him and letting the coffee beside him grow cold.

At last we reached silence, for the subject of Nanny had been standing on the edge of the conversation waiting to be introduced all along and they knew it could no longer be delayed.

“Where is she who is Nanny?” I asked at last, putting it in the formal manner so they could not avoid the question. Both girls lowered their heads and brought their hands up to cover their mouths.

“Ah, ah, ah!” they shook their heads slowly.

“Who forbids the answering?”

“We may not say,” Dee volunteered, and they both let out a miserable sigh.

“Is it the mistress?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Both looked up at me pleadingly, tears in their eyes.

“She is much changed since she has returned,” Dum said.

“She has made us take off our bangles of womanhood, and these dresses make our bodies very hot,” Dee added with a sad little sniff. Both rose from the floor and moved over to the stove where they stood with their backs to me, sobbing.

“I will ask her myself,” I said, sounding more brave than I felt inside. “At least tell me, is she who is Nanny alive?” They both turned to face me, relieved that there was something they could say without betraying my mother's instructions.

“She is alive!” they exclaimed together, their eyes wide. Using their knuckles to smudge away their tears, they smiled at me, once again happy that they could bring me some good news.

“We will make hot water and wash you.” Dum said reaching down beside the stove for an empty four-gallon paraffin tin from which the top had been cut, the edges hammered flat and a wire handle added, to turn it into a container for hot water.

“See, the water comes to us along an iron snake which comes into the house,” Dee said, moving over to the sink and turning on the tap.

“I am too old to be washed by silly girls,” I said indignantly. “Put on the water and I will bathe myself.” Apart from wiping my face and hands with a damp flannel, my mother had let me climb into bed without washing, and I hadn't really washed since the shower with Hoppie at Gravelotte.

The girls showed me a small room leading off the back
stoep
in which stood an old tin bath. Carrying the four-gallon paraffin tin between them, they poured the scalding water into the bath. Then they fought over who should turn on the cold tap positioned over the tub. Dum won and Dee, pretending to sulk, left the bathroom. She returned shortly with a freshly washed shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. I ordered them both to leave the room. Giggling their heads off, they bumped and jostled each other out of the small dark bathroom.

That was a bath and a half, I can tell you. It soaked a lot of misery away. The thought that Nanny was still alive cheered me considerably and made the task of asking my mother about her a lot easier.

After breakfast my mother retired to her sewing room and several people turned up to see her. They were women from the town, and I could hear her talking to them about clothes. When I questioned the maids about this, they said, “The missus has become a maker of garments for other missus who come all the time to be fitted.” On the farm my mother had often been busy making things on her Singer sewing machine and had always made my granpa's and my clothes. Now she seemed to be doing it for other people as well.

Apart from a garden boy who came in to help my granpa, Dum and Dee were our only servants. They cleaned, scrubbed, polished, did the washing, and prepared most of the food, though my mother did the cooking and the general bossing around like always. The maids slept in a small room built onto the garden shed behind the enclosed stone wall, which also housed the kitchen garden and an empty fowl run, the thought of chickens being too much for my granpa to contemplate.

At the time I was not concerned about how we lived, though later I was to realize that making enough to get by was a pretty precarious business in the little household. My granpa sold young rose trees and my mother worked all day and sometimes long into the night as a dressmaker. Between making dresses and serving the Lord, she didn't have much time for anything else.

I whiled away the morning and after lunch gathered up enough courage to venture into my mother's sewing room. She had a new Singer machine with an electric foot treadle. It wasn't like the old one where you had to treadle it up and down to make it work. You simply put your foot on the little electric footrest and the sewing machine hummed away, stitching happily. Dee had given me a cup of tea to take in to my mother, and I had hardly spilled any by the time I handed it to her.

My mother looked up and smiled as I entered. “I was just thinking to myself, I would die for a cup of tea, and here you are,” she said as I gave her the cup. She poured the spilt tea in the saucer back into the cup and then took a sip, closing her eyes. “Heaven, it's pure heaven, there's nothing like a good cup of tea.” She sounded just like she used to before she went away. For a moment I thought all the carrying on with Pastor Mulvery was exaggerated in my mind because I knew I had been very tired. I sat on one of the chairs and waited. “Come in for a bit of a chat, have you? You must have so much to tell me about your school and the nice little friends you made.” She leaned over and kissed me on the top of the head. “I tell you what. Tonight, after supper, when your grandfather listens to the wireless, we'll sit in the kitchen and have a good old chin wag. You can tell me all about it. I'm dying to hear, really. Granpa tells me fat old Mevrou Vorster who we sold the farm to says you speak Afrikaans like a Boer. I suppose that's nice, dear, though thank goodness you won't need to talk it in this town. Dr. Hennie wrote to say you'd got into some sort of scrape with your ear. Is that all right now?” I nodded and she continued, “I'm better now, quite better. The Lord reached down and touched me and I was healed. It is a glorious experience when you walk in the light of the Lord.” She stopped and took a sip from her cup.

“Mother, where is Nanny?” I asked, unable to contain myself any longer. There was a long pause while my mother took another sip and looked down into her lap.

Finally she looked up at me and said sweetly, “Why, darling, your Nanny has gone back to Zululand.”

“Did you send her there, Mother?” My voice was on the edge of tears.

“I prayed and the Lord told me. He guided me in my decision.” She put down her cup and fed a piece of material under the needle, brought the tension foot down onto it, and, feeding the cloth skillfully through her fingers, zizzed away with the electric motor. Then, with a deep sigh, she stopped. Lifting the tension foot, she snipped the cotton thread and looked down at me. “I tried to bring her to the Lord but she hardened her heart against Him.” She looked up at the ceiling as though asking for confirmation. “I can't tell you the nights I spent on my knees asking for guidance.” She looked down at me again and, pursing her lips, threw her head back. “Your nanny would not remove her heathen charms and amulets and she insisted on wearing her bangles and ankle rings. I prayed and prayed and then the Lord sent me the sign I was looking for. Your grandfather told me about the visit of that awful old witch doctor and that it had been at your nanny's instigation.” Her face grew angry. “That disgusting, filthy, evil old man was tampering with the mind of my five-year-old son! God is not mocked! How could I let a black heathen woman riddled with superstition bring up my only son?” She picked up her cup and took a polite sip. “Your nanny was possessed by the devil,” she said finally, satisfied the discussion was over.

I tried very hard not to cry. Inside me the loneliness birds were laying eggs thirteen to the dozen. Forcing back the tears, I got down from my chair and stood looking directly at my mother. “The Lord is a shithead!” I shouted and rushed from the room.

I ran through the Alice in Wonderland tunnels and under the mulberry trees to the freedom of the hill, my sobs making it difficult to climb. At last I reached the safety of the large boulder and allowed myself a good bawl.

The fierce afternoon sun beat down, and below me the town baked in the heat. When was it all going to stop? Was life about losing the things we love the most, as my granpa had said? Couldn't things just stay the same for a little while until I grew up and understood the way they worked? Why did you have to wear camouflage all the time? The only person I had ever known who didn't need any camouflage was Nanny. She laughed and cried and wondered and loved and never told a thing the way it wasn't. I would write her a letter and send her my ten-shilling note, then she would know I loved her. Granpa would know how to do that.

As I sat on the rock high on my hill, and as the sun began to set over the bushveld, I grew up. Just like that. The loneliness birds stopped laying stone eggs, they rose from their stone nests and flapped away on their ugly wings and the eggs they left behind crumbled into dust. A fierce, howling wind came along and blew the dust away until I was empty inside.

I knew they would be back but that, for the moment, I was alone. That I had permission from myself to love whomsoever I wished. The cords that bound me to the past had been severed. The emptiness was a new kind of loneliness, a free kind of loneliness. Not the kind that laid stone eggs deep inside of you until you filled up with heaviness and despair. I knew that when the bone-beaked birds returned I would be in control, master of loneliness and no longer its servant.