“This part of it,” she said.
The dominee returned and finished the poem, but I no longer liked it. There was something about angels taking the little flowers. I saw no angels come for Cee-Cee and could not see angels being any part of this place. The vision of angels flying in and lifting her away was beautiful. But it was an insult to the way she had really died, with such fear in her eyes. I thought of her last breath and hoped it was still in my blood, but I knew that it wasn’t and that this fact didn’t really matter as long as I held tight to her spirit.
The announcement caused me to think of Cee-Cee in ways I hadn’t in months. When she died, I took my cues from Moeder. Be strong, in control. Do what you must to get through the day. Take the pain and put it away for later. I’d done that. But when the war had ended and the preacher finished the poem, “later” had arrived.
I’d thought of her death as the product of random illness rather than of war, as if it would have happened regardless of where we had been. But the war killed her as surely as any soldier who fell from bullet or bayonet. It killed her just as it did the others, without explanation or apology, and definitely without the involvement of angels.
It took Janetta’s brother but not Janetta; Klaas but not Willem; Cee-Cee but not me. Some lived, some did not, and others just disappeared. Near the end, I walked past the Van Zyls’ tent on my way for water, and it was gone as if taken by the wind. No word. No good-byes. Nothing but a circle worn in the soil.
MY ROOM AT TANTE Hannah’s was larger than the tent in camp that had held seven of us, then six, then five. I had the room to myself, with a palette on the floor and an old quilt Tante had found. The space overwhelmed me at first; even the sound of my breathing echoed in the emptiness. I spent an hour each night getting comfortable, thankful there was no mud on my blanket, no wet canvas, no disease. A quilt in a dry, quiet room seemed like an unimaginable gift. I never wanted to speak the word “dank” again. And if others coughed, it was in another part of the house and I did not cover my nose and mouth and turn from them. But it took time before I stopped worrying that each sniffle or sore throat was the first symptom of a grave illness.
I dragged my bedding near the window so that I could sleep beneath it and smell the land and see the night sky, which I had started looking at again. It led to predictable thoughts, but I needed to invite good memories to return, if only to balance those unwanted ones that intruded on their own.
Willem stayed in Ouma Wilhelmina’s old room. We had not heard from her, but Tante Hannah did not expect she would be moving back. Tante asked if I might like to go with her to visit her mother in Cape Town once we were “back on our feet,” and I was excited by thoughts of the ocean and the ships in the harbor. We could ride the electric tram and maybe walk to the top of the flat mountain that overlooked everything. It would make our little kopjes seem like ant humps.
Moeder and Tante Hannah slept in the same bedroom. I could hear the sound of their voices at night but not their words.
And when the weather kept us from work on the house or in the fields, I sat with Tante Hannah at the kitchen table for “school.” We tried sorting through the war’s confusing aftermath. We studied the treaty, which so obviously ignored the question of the natives’ standing. We tried to anticipate what that could mean. There were so many of them, and now so few of us. What would happen when the British went home?
“Instability?” Tante questioned. We talked for hours about it, trying to see into the future, and never could find a path that seemed untroubled. And we read how the treaty granted us eventual self-governance over our republics, causing me to ask: Could the whole war have been avoided if they’d done that in the first place?
But all of Tante Hannah’s books that I had loved were burned. So were mine, I told her. I did not tell her how. It made me wonder what happened to Maples’s things. Would Betty be curious what had happened to her David Copperfield? Had they sent all his belongings home to his mother? Would they include the letters that Betty had sent him? I pictured them being shipped back to England inside the fancy chocolate tin with Queen Victoria on the top. How embarrassing that would be for him to have his mother see what Betty had written. I shook my head against foolish thoughts. Maples would not be embarrassed. He was nothing anymore.
It was only then that I remembered that he had a little sister, Annie, and I felt close to her. Somebody would have to tell her about her big brother, to shape words to say that he had died in the war, which was true but not honest. The family would presume he was a hero, and maybe the army would tell them that on purpose. The army probably said such things to the families of every dead soldier in every war. That’s how they kept fooling men into signing up. It was part of the bigger untruth. No one would ever join again if mothers were told that their sons had died in a bloody stack of men in a ditch, or that they’d been stabbed by the mother of a girl they were assaulting in the night. I knew nothing of little Annie except that she deserved better.
We burned David Copperfield in thirds to heat three dinners. I tore the pages out quickly, and I thought of the meal as a present from little David, a brave little boy. He was British, but the war had not been his fault.
We knew it would take time to rebuild our little libraries. Without reading as a diversion, I was open to Tante Hannah’s offer to teach me to stitch again. And this time I concentrated on doing it the way she suggested. When Moeder was working at our place one afternoon, Tante showed me a few of the stitchings she had carried with her for the duration of camp.
“These are my secret,” she said. “I’ve never shown anyone . . . not even Oom Sarel.” There were four of them, all with golden thread on white cloth, the stitching like beautiful handwriting. They bore names of people I did not know. Her unborn children.
I looked into her eyes, dry and clear, reconciled.
“You named them?”
“I did,” she said. “Silly, maybe, but I had nothing else. As bad as it was for your mother to lose an unborn, she had you all when she lost hers.”
“My mother? Cee-Cee wasn’t an unborn.”
“No, of course not, the child she lost when she sent you to my house—when she was butted by a sheep or something.”
“She hurt her back. . . . It was her back. . . . It wasn’t a baby. . . . She said she hurt her back.”
“Lettie . . . I’m sorry. . . . I thought she told you,” Tante Hannah said, pulling me close. “I’m sure she didn’t want you to worry.”
“But she told you?”