“We have to bring her home,” he said in a way that invited my opinion.
I thought of us digging into the rocks and disturbing her. I knew I could not be there for that; I could not see that canvas bundle again.
“I think we need to let the ground heal up over her,” I said. “She’s resting there.”
“Then at least I’ll make a proper marker,” he said.
I wanted Moeder to decide. After dinner, Schalk told her his idea.
“Ja, but later,” she said.
He fashioned a board cross, the long piece angle-cut to a point. He spent almost a full day carving her name in the wood. But it was nearly another year before we went back to that place. We had been waiting for Vader, but he had still not returned and the time seemed right. The valley looked so small and barren except for grass; it was so hard to imagine hundreds of tents and thousands of people there. The cemetery was all that was unbothered, and the mounds were too many to count.
We had to split up to search through the bottles, Schalk carrying Cee-Cee’s cross over his shoulder. There were so many bottles reflecting the light, as if some strange crop of glass had sprouted in this field. Rain had seeped through the corks of some of them, leaving the names nothing more than sad dark smudges. I felt guilty looking at them, as if disturbing their rest. But how else to know? Schalk was the one who found Cee-Cee’s bottle. He hammered in the cross he’d built. Moeder offered a number of readings from the Bible, giving our little one a more proper service than her first. And when she finished, she placed the bottle in her small bag and brought it back home.
FROM BENEATH A LIGHTNING-STRUCK snag on the tallest nearby kopje, I could see all the way to where the weight of the massive sky pushed down the edges of the earth. The wind rose from those edges and bent the grasses in waves across the high plain. The brush rattled a warning that the breeze was climbing the hill. A hawk nearby rode the updraft toward thin horsetail clouds. The breeze carried the scent of all that it passed crossing the veld. I inhaled and held it deep.
I would come to the hilltop even though it was a long walk and there was still so much work that needed to be done on the farm. But Moeder always approved when I asked permission to get away for a while. Time had grown lighter again, less resistant to my passage through it, and I no longer had to plot against it. I lost track of the small increments that used to dominate my thoughts, and came to note only its larger cycles.
I spent an afternoon watching the leggy secretary bird catching snakes, tossing them in the air as if it were a game, and then pouncing on them with lethal claws. Birds had the gift of flight, and that had saved them during the war, I presumed.
To the west, afternoon warmth rose in pale shimmers. There were fewer springbok and impalas, and no lions; the lions had probably followed the antelope into some country away from the war. I told Schalk that I wanted to go back and spend a night camped in the bush with him again, just the two of us, or maybe bring Willem, too. I wanted to hear lions again; I wanted to hear them in the night and then fall fast asleep even as they roared. I wanted Schalk to see that I was now made of stronger stuff, hardened now, like kiln-fired clay.
Much of the veld had been burned, but it was coming back in spots, with the weeping love grass pioneering. Most of the rest was just scabland, anyway, which was still beautiful in the way its color changed during the day. I tried to write a description of the quality of light late in the afternoon but could not arrive at the fitting words.
I wrote bits about the grasses and the soil to which they were all rooted—the soil that reflected the sun and swallowed the floods, the soil that was rent by the farmers and the natives, the miners and the rivers and the grave diggers.
At times I studied my old notes. I could see how my writing had changed, the late entries pared down to scrawled fragments as I gradually lost my words. From the pencil marks and word combinations, I could sense those times when my mind had come untethered. I spent days sorting through the notes to decide what was hallucination and what was real. It was on that hilltop one afternoon that I decided that every bit of it was real.
I saw how silly I had been in the early notes about people, back when I tried to capture their identity with a few words. We were all so many things that fit together and then sometimes came apart. When a part was taken away, the other things that remained had to change shape to fill the space, like water. And we couldn’t know what parts were the most important until the others fell away.
As I went through the notes, I sensed I’d been hollowed out. The camp had made me see the order of the things that we surrender. What goes first? Consideration? Compassion? Friendship? And then it gets down to faith, or maybe it’s family and then faith, or maybe even memories. It was only when everything was taken away that you got to see what was at your core. And if you could hold on to that, that singular meaning, you went on; if you couldn’t, the collapse was complete.
The words in the journal were what I carried home. They occupied space and had weight, and each was precious. I hoped writing would help me sort through the pieces that had broken off and find ways to put them back into place.
So, I might describe the way Klaas Huiseveldt died and his empty eyes were pulled open for a last photograph. But more important might be to tell how no one wanted to occupy that small portion of the tent where he liked to sleep and play. But when one of us finally did, it seemed all right.
I might write of Bina’s sayings and her lessons about water and the vessels that carried it. Or maybe the need for holding on to the spirits of the dead. But the best example of those spirits were the sad, empty shadows of children that clouded Tante Hannah’s every day, living only as gold thread on pieces of cloth.
I would tell of how Oupa Gideon had given me the gift of the night skies, although the stars never once guided me somewhere I needed to be. I would someday write about Oom Sarel and Vader and their relationship and their connection to their own father—and the secrets that were the sparking flint rock of their conflicts. But that would take a while to understand.
After all, I still did not understand the currents in my own mind, the sins and doubts and weaknesses, and the things I learned to feel although I sometimes wished I hadn’t. And Moeder? It would take years to learn all she had gone through.