“More bones . . . same eyes,” she said of me.
As it was each time we saw someone for the first time since the war, we exchanged our inventories.
“Tuma?”
She shook her head, looking from me to Moeder.
“Captured. . . . Made to work on the railroads. . . . So hungry he tried to eat off a buried carcass they dug up . . . rinderpest cow. . . . Died that night.”
Moeder touched her hand and then squeezed. I closed in for another hug so quickly that I nearly knocked Moeder down. Bina patted my back to calm me. I wanted to comfort her, and she ended up consoling me.
“Tombi?” I asked.
“Taken to work for the British. No word.”
She did not ask of Cee-Cee. I expected she knew there would be only one reason for her not being with us. And she waited until we offered information.
“You?” Moeder asked.
“Camp,” Bina said. “That’s all . . . camp.”
“Was it like—” I started, but she wouldn’t let me finish.
“Camp,” she said, wanting no further discussion. She seemed only a fraction of herself. I could not imagine what hardships could have pared away half her body and such a giant portion of her energy.
“I could see you had been here. . . . I just started working,” she said.
“We’re at Tante Hannah’s,” I said.
I asked Moeder if she minded if I worked with Bina that day. When the others were gone, I told her things I could not tell Moeder or Schalk. I told her how often I had thought of her and her sayings and her songs, and how much they had helped me through the days. I wanted to put it in a way she would best understand.
“I carried you with me,” I said.
She lifted her hands to her chest. “I carried you, too.”
I told her about Maples, but without details. It was the first I had spoken of him. I told her the war made him lose his mind. She said that it did that to everyone, some more than others.
I did not tell her about Oom Sarel’s surrendering, nothing except that he died in the camp. I owed him that.
“Tante?” she asked.
“She and Moeder are . . . good.” I held my hands together.
“They need each other. You be good to Tante.”
I explained that Oupa Gideon was lost. And that Vader was among those who would not be tamed. Nothing seemed to surprise her.
“He will come back,” she said. “When it’s right for him.”
She sang as she worked, but she sounded so tired. She had lost her husband and, in some ways, her daughter, too. I thought of the Tommy that day at the farm trying to tell her it was not her war.
I listened to her song and then tried to join in. It was easier to sing with her than to sing the hymns, since her songs often had no tune and I didn’t understand the words, anyway.
“Will you be all right?” I asked her. She stopped singing and looked at me and then across the veld. She raised her hand and fluttered her fingers, her reminder to be like the water. I thought it the perfect response.
“And your . . . people?” I gestured in the direction of her kraal. “What now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A beaten dog will someday bare its teeth.”
It was another of her sayings I would remember. The next day, she somehow discovered a goat with bright yellow eyes and brought it to Tante Hannah’s barn. She then came to stay with us.
SCHALK AGREED WITH MOEDER: everything should come down except the hearth and the flooring. I doubted it would ever feel new. I thought that a house might be like a tree, always carrying its old scars unseen beneath its bark. Schalk had taken over work on the house, along with his constant shadow, Willem, while Moeder and Bina and I worked the fields and Tante Hannah cooked and kept house at her place.
Schalk and Willem tried to make order of what was still good enough to use. Willem stacked the broken bricks that remained, and Schalk cut and sized the few pieces of wood he could salvage. Since we had shelter for now at Tante Hannah’s, Schalk convinced Moeder that we should concentrate on getting the crops and stock restored so that they might sustain us first, and take our time to rebuild the house properly. It would take longer but be more sound for the future.
After Willem collapsed in bed one night, Schalk and I walked, and when he pointed out the Southern Cross, it made us both think of Oupa.
“Let’s watch the stars,” I said.
We sat.
“Were you there when Oupa . . .”
“So quick . . . no suffering. . . . He couldn’t even have known.”
We watched the sky. I allowed time for him to tell me more, but he did not.
“Oom Sarel?” he asked.
“You first . . .”
“We didn’t know. . . . Thought he was just captured . . . probably . . . or . . .”
“Or?”
Schalk seemed to examine my height, as if that would be a factor in whether he should share more.
“Oupa and Oom had a terrible fight,” Schalk said. “Sarel had been in so much pain. He was thrown from his horse when it stepped in an antbear hole, and he broke his shoulder to pieces. It was purple and yellow, and you could see the bones in a lump where they were broken. Some men joked.”
“Why?”
“To be cruel; they said that falling off a horse was the kind of thing a Tommy would do,” Schalk said. “Pa wouldn’t stand for the jokes; he pulled his rifle down on them and said the next joke would be the last. He included Oupa in that threat, but Oupa wouldn’t stop. He kept calling him the antbear. Oom Sarel finally had enough, with the pain . . . and Oupa’s comments.”
“What happened?”
“Oom Sarel screamed in front of a group of men that Oupa should tell us all about the native girl that worked here after Ouma died, and something that he had seen between her and Oupa. And Oupa called him a coward . . . said he killed Ouma with his birth . . . coming into the world sideways . . . like it was all his fault even as a baby.”
“Did you understand?”
“I don’t know. . . . Lettie . . . they kept calling each other names.”
“What did Pa do?”
“I don’t think he had any idea. . . . We both watched them raging . . . Oom Sarel grabbing his shoulder all the while because the bones would grind when he yelled. The next day, Oom Sarel volunteered to scout, said he could do that. I helped him onto his horse. He never came back.”
“Well, he ended up in camp . . . with Tante Hannah.”
I did not say a word about Oom Sarel’s death. If Schalk was curious, he did me the courtesy of not asking. Or maybe Moeder told him about it in a moment they shared. I did not tell him at all about Maples or his death or Moeder’s involvement. I thought that only Moeder and I needed to know about that. I knew she must have given Tante Hannah some kind of explanation, but neither offered that story to me.
We stood and walked, and watched the sky as we did. He asked about Cee-Cee.
I weighed the details that he should know against those that would be burdens.
“Illness . . . we did all we could,” I said. “She was a beautiful little lamb to the end. Just as she’d always been. You can remember her that way.”
“Buried there?”
I told him about the bottle.