Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 13
‘Gertruidah, I …’
‘Only you will know why you stay with him, Ma. I’m sorry I didn’t blow out his brains with his own .303.’
‘Me too, my child.’
He didn’t speak to her for weeks. Blissful peace at night.
And for weeks on end she heard her mother say: Me too, my child.
In twenty-two years that was the closest Sarah ever came to an admission, a confession.
She smashes the jar of mayonnaise against the bottom step. Empties the basin over the wall.
Tomorrow, even though it isn’t Easter, she will go and draw a cross in the sand and sit down next to it and cry.
After a while she loses count of the number of times she drags the basin outside. The pots and pans. The cutlery drawer. Cake tins, plastic containers, red and green baking equipment. Dishcloths, tablecloths, placemats, tea cloths. Dinner service, glass bowls, lamps, flowerpots, candleholders. Everything that can break she smashes against the sun room’s outside wall. New homeware will be a blessing.
‘You’ve been left comfortably off,’ the lawyer had whispered at the funeral tea. ‘Next week, once things have settled down, I’ll drive out to Umbrella Tree Farm and explain everything to you.’ You’d swear she was incapable of reading a will herself. ‘Call me if you need a little cash.’
No one needs to know about the money in the stone house.
She finds more things to get rid of. The tinned food goes into the laundry. She’ll drop it off at Andrea’s.
Rows of preserves in the pantry. Pickled fish, olives, quinces, capers. First prizes at the Women’s Agricultural Union for Sarah’s handiwork.
All the bottles turn into fragments against the sun room wall. Before she goes back inside, she drinks some of the tea. Catches her breath at the tank. Her shoulder aches from wrestling with the crowbar. She must compose her thoughts. On Monday she’ll phone the builder in town and ask him to send a team. Bricklayer, carpenter, painters. Yale locks to replace the lever locks on all the doors. The floors must be sanded and varnished. And she wants the staircase demolished and redesigned.
Next week she and Mabel will drive to the neighbouring town to select clean homeware that doesn’t give her the creeps. So she can lock a series of doors behind her.
While she’s unpacking the chest freezer, the clock in the passage strikes five. She hears a car engine in the distance and fetches her .22 from behind the kitchen door. There are five cartridges in the magazine. Whoever is at the gate had better know she’ll hit the ground right next to his little toe, shooting from the hip at fifty paces.
Abel taught her useful things too. Bricklaying. Irrigation. Welding. Rearing cattle. Shooting, with a marksman’s precision. The air gun. The .22. The .303.
She recalls the sunny day when she and her father went to the vygie camp with the guns and ammunition and a picnic basket.
Place the butt against your right shoulder, Truidah. Relax. Wrap your left hand around the stock. Do you see the little groove inside the sights? Do you see the bead, it looks like a tiny post? Good. You’re going to aim for the tin can on the fencing-pole. Now line up the top of the post with the centre of the groove … Right? Now line up the post with the tin … Right? Place your finger on the trigger. Lie dead still … Remember, you don’t pull a trigger, you just touch it lightly. Don’t blink. Before you shoot, make sure the sight line is right: tin, post, groove.
She heard the whistling sound in the same instant she saw the can topple. Something inside her chest swelled with pride.
She loved her father.
It felt so right to be out with him in the vygie camp, outside in the sun. She hit the tin twenty times. Missed just twice. In a short while they were going to walk through the red grass and drink coffee under the wild olive tree. Eat the meatballs and fat cakes with eucalyptus honey her mother had packed. She wished they never had to go home.
She was thrilled the day he announced they were going to cook lamb’s tails over the fire in an open cave in the fountain camp. She hung onto his words while he told her about the rock paintings in the bat cave. They would pack coffee and bread rolls and climb up there when the weather was good, he said. Then he would show her where the Khoisan people drew antelope and tiny moons on the cave walls, with deep red berry juice.
In the planting season they ploughed the pumpkin field; with her on his lap holding the John Deere steering wheel. In the harvesting season he said they were the biggest pumpkins ever grown on Umbrella Tree Farm; it had to be because she’d ploughed so well.
She loved her father. More than the most precious thing on earth.
The engine comes closer. Five cartridges are enough.
She leaves the chest freezer open. In the pale orange afternoon light she stands barefoot at the top of the stairs, the barrel of the .22 pointing to the ground. The sign makes her instruction and warning patently clear.
A truck pulls up to the gate. It’s Auntie Margie. She leans the .22 against the pillar at the top of the stairs and walks towards the gate.
‘Gertruidah, I keep phoning but there’s never any answer. Mabel says you’re here but she’s not allowed in the yard. Braham’s also looking for you. He says you must call him back or he’ll drive here. So I’ve come over to check if everything’s all right.’
‘Everything’s all right, thank you, Auntie Margie.’
‘And this sign, Gertruidah?’
‘I want to be alone, Auntie Margie, for a long time.’
Auntie Margie looks at the chaos in the front yard. It makes her uncomfortable, as if she owes Auntie Margie an explanation. ‘I’m cleaning up a little …’
‘That’s fine, Gertruidah.’ She opens the door of the truck. ‘Give me a call if there’s anything we can do to help.’
She leans against the cold frame of the gate long after Auntie Margie’s truck has vanished in the distance. Listens to the raw calls of the Egyptian geese, and longs for Braham. In the English class he’d introduced them to Mary Oliver, an American poet who loved solitude and nature: ‘Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine …’ she wrote in a poem called ‘Wild Geese’. Shore birds or the phases of the moon, Mary wrote about all of them in language that was easy and unadorned.
She wishes she could tell him about her despair and that he would help her find a place where she belonged. She drops her head onto her arms, murmurs the words as if she heard it from his lips only yesterday:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting …
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
She had tried to be good. She had walked on her knees and repented. But she’d found no one to tell her despair, no one who could make her feel less lonely. She’d heard the call of the Egyptian geese, but without Braham would she ever find her place in the family of things?
In the cooling afternoon she wishes she could turn back the clock to her grade eleven year. She would’ve told her parents she was pregnant right away. She would’ve had an abortion and avoided the irreparable damage to her soul.
She was eighteen and in grade eleven. Humiliating to be so much older than everyone in her class. Twice she’d stayed behind, in grade one and grade eight. Her report said she’d failed to meet the requirements to pass and would have to repeat the year. That’s why she was the oldest in her class. Aside from being the eldest, she was also sometimes the skinniest, and sometimes the second fattest. Andrea was always the fattest.
There were times when she wanted to be fat and ugly and sweaty, so Abel would leave her alone in disgust. Then she would eat constantly like Sarah, but without the laxatives. She’d stuff herself with chocolates until her skin was covered in pimples; prune trees in the garden and tie the branches behind the tractor to drag them away; run with Bamba in the veld. And go to bed without bathing on purpose to stink.
At other times she wanted to be thin and beautiful. Then she’d stop eating, and live on apples and water. Scramble up the mountain; swim to and fro across the river to burn kilojoules. Now and again she gave in to hunger and afterwards shoved a finger down her throat.
From grade ten onwards she wanted to be the thinnest and prettiest all the time. For the new English teacher. He was small in stature, of average height, and he wore glasses. There was nothing macho about him. The first time he was introduced during assembly as Mr Fourie, he looked a little severe in his dark blue tweed blazer.
And still he moved her. Especially when during English she discovered that he also had a way with words, more than any English teacher she’d ever had. He could let a word ring, make it sing, let it linger. English sounded different in his mouth.
She decided she didn’t want to be a pudgy girl he’d barely remember one day, and from her first day in grade ten she barely ate. The hostel girls were pleased. More food for their plates. For the first time she mattered; she had something that everyone else wanted.
I’ll have Gertruidah’s dessert. Gertruidah’s baked potato is mine. I want Gertruidah’s rice and gravy. I’ll trade with you, Gertruidah: my lettuce for your slice of avocado pear.
She was in the bathroom long before the morning bell, scrubbing away the smell of pee. She’d always refused to take part in sport, but now she started playing tennis. Not at all because she wanted to, but because Braham Fourie was the tennis coach. Anything to be close to him.
Her father was pleased, and happily paid for an expensive racket, tennis clothes and sports shoes. He sometimes invited her to play with the adults but she refused. She preferred to play a set against him before the visitors arrived. She was an eager student, because while they were on the court he was her father. Even if he touched her in the course of demonstrating a technique, it didn’t make her shudder.
Hold your racket this way to play a forehand stroke, Truidah. This way to play a backhand stroke. Get a strong grip on the racket. Don’t watch your opponent; keep your eye on the ball. Put your weight on your toes. Anticipate your opponent’s tactics. Toss the ball higher when you serve; swing your racket further back to hit a more powerful shot. Next week we’ll practise the lobs and drop shots.
She soaked up every piece of advice. She wanted to impress Braham Fourie.
‘Good shot! You’ll be playing me off the court, next!’ Her father smiled at her, the sun bouncing off his white teeth. ‘You’re good at rushing up to the net for the drop shot. Look,’ and he gestured to her to come closer, ‘once you have your opponent up at the net, hit the ball cross-court into the corner. Or lob the ball over his head, make him run back, then he has to play the return shot while he’s off balance. That’s if he gets there in time …’
No sooner had Braham Fourie unpacked his suitcases in his hostel flat than he was elected deacon, for the hostel ward at that.
Then her father did something for which she was endlessly grateful. He invited Braham Fourie to join Umbrella Tree Farm’s tennis corps. The man can play, he said, even if he does looks puny. Saturdays became the centre of her existence.
She stopped going to the veld with Bamba.
Anthony’s Bamba had died long ago, in her grade one year. Bravery, and the instinct to protect her, had made him take on a puff adder. She’d grieved, slept badly, hardly touched her food. Spent hours under the cypress tree where Johnnie had buried him. Then she heard her mother tell her father he should get her a new Jack Russell.
Be quiet, Truidah … If you’re quiet, Daddy will order you a new puppy from the Farmer’s Weekly for Christmas. Now take off your pants and sit on my chest, with your legs over my shoulders. Come on, move closer …
Afterwards, when the tiredness flooded her body so she couldn’t move, he always reminded her not to talk.
Thula, thula. Shhh, shhh.
At the end of grade one she got a Jack Russell for Christmas. The cutest puppy. She named him Bamba too. As if she wanted to keep Anthony alive.
She doesn’t want to think about Bamba’s death now. For fourteen years they’d been inseparable. Three shots before he lay still. The last two cartridges she fired into the air. A salvo. One mustn’t think about death too often or too much. Or the fact that Braham Fourie never died in your heart.
From the day she got a hiding because she’d laughed at Andrea’s mother, she’d avoided the tennis court.
Then Braham Fourie became part of Saturdays.
Her and Bamba’s veld excursions came to an end. On Saturdays he slept on the buckskin in her bedroom, with the door shut so he wouldn’t be a nuisance, while she helped her mother at the thatched lapa with the snacks and hors d’oeuvres. She served lemon punch and ice water between sets. Washed glasses and dished up the food. Cleared away the dirty plates, emptied the ashtrays.
On Sundays she took Bamba into the veld. They walked through the red grass, and she dreamt of Braham. She imagined he was walking beside her. She picked blackberries for him to taste, peeled a wild fig. Showed him the cloud patterns in the sky and the bushbuck tracks on the ground. The way the moorhen concealed her nest beneath a blanket of leaves if she went away for a while. Two baby hares cosy in their fur-lined nest.
Nothing but dreams. Far-fetched dreams.
Now and again she felt close to her mother in the lapa kitchen – but only now and again.
One winter’s night she told Abel she would choose anything he liked from the bottom drawer of the dressing table if he’d buy her a tennis-ball machine.
She got the tennis-ball machine.
Sometime later she posed in the moonlight in front of the window wearing a black suspender belt and fishnet stockings on condition that she could attend a tennis clinic in Pretoria during the spring holiday. The clinic was expensive. Flight tickets, hotel accommodation.
Dancing in the moonlight took an hour at most.
The tennis clinic meant a place in the school’s first tennis team.
Stinky Gertruidah didn’t stink any more. Stupid Gertruidah was clever at tennis. Matron ordered the other girls to stop teasing her about the bed-wetting because she’d been born with a bladder defect. It would be repaired with surgery as soon as she was fully grown.
A story Sarah had fabricated.
One day when she was eating her jam sandwich beside the rubbish bins behind the school hall, Andrea came around the corner like a dog that had been kicked and asked if she could sit with her.
‘Go ahead, sit.’
‘There’s something I want to ask you, Gertruidah.’
‘So ask.’
‘What is a bladder defect actually?’
‘I don’t know, Andrea.’
‘But I’ve heard you have a “bladder defect”.’
She understood right away. ‘That’s my private business.’
‘Please, Gertruidah, tell me how they’re going to fix it.’
‘That’s for the urologist to decide, Andrea. Why are you asking something like that?’
‘Because … I also have … a bladder defect.’
She felt cold with fright. She had known it all these years, from the time when they were small and Andrea had wanted to lick her. She tossed the jam sandwich away; the ants could eat it. The words echoed inside her. I also have a bladder defect … also a bladder defect. So she’d been wrong in believing a magistrate was an honourable man who would never abuse his daughter. She played along, so Andrea would leave. ‘I’ll tell you as soon as mine has been fixed.’
‘Thank you, Gertruidah, thank you, thank you, thank you.’
The drawer in the dressing table, however despicable, had its uses. When you’re small you have no sly ulterior motives. Your tiny body just hurts, time and time again. But your father tells you that’s how love works and you believe him.
But you don’t stay small forever.
The time comes when you’re old enough to know that night leguans don’t exist, but that cheque books and credit cards can buy compensation. Knowing there’s a part of Abel you can control makes you powerful. You become insolent. Manipulative. Spiteful. Sarcastic. It’s sweet revenge, turning your parents into puppets when it suits you.
The car, for instance.
A few days before the start of her grade eleven year her father sent her into town to fetch dipping fluid, teat ointment and a part for the windmill. The town was quiet. Driving past the car dealership she spotted a white Corsa on the display floor. She decided she wanted the Corsa. Being driven to school and back by her father on Mondays and Fridays had to end. The roadside favours too. She went inside and enquired about the price. Her father would have a fit. That’s my car, she told the salesman, my father will come pay for it during the week. It’s my eighteenth birthday present.
Back at home her father sent her to put out salt licks in the taaibos camp and see if the cattle had water.
‘No, I won’t. I’m not a farm labourer.’
‘Lord, Gertruidah, don’t make me …’
‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. You want me to go to church but maybe it would be better if you resigned from the church. Because you must be an embarrassment to God …’
‘Go put out the salt licks, Gertruidah, and stop provoking me.’
‘I’ve asked the dealership in town to reserve a white Corsa. I told them Pa would come and pay for it later in the week. And I’ve made an appointment to get my driver’s licence.’
He flayed her with his eyes. ‘You’re out of your mind, Gertruidah!’
‘You know best how far out of my mind I am, Pa. And why.’
When school started, she pulled up outside the hostel in her white Corsa. Sometimes it felt good to have something other children didn’t.
But often you wished that what you did have belonged to someone else instead. Like the child that moved inside her for the first time on Good Friday in her grade eleven year. Like a cinnamon dove’s chest feather in the breeze.
By the time Abel and Sarah came home from Easter Communion she was still crying beside the cross in the sand. Because she’d waited too long to have an abortion. Because now Braham Fourie would despise her. Because she didn’t know if the child would be deformed. Because she wouldn’t know what to say if someone asked about its father.
