Moeder’s eyes flared as if she had heard the voice of the devil. She stepped closer, tilting her chin toward his face.
“Matthys would gut you if he saw you.” She made a motion of a knife starting low on his stomach and rising up to his breastbone. She stepped forward so quickly he flinched and raised his good arm.
Mevrou Huiseveldt shouted for her to stop, and her children cried from behind her.
Moeder paused and then reached for the paper. “Yes, I have a message.”
She wrote a few words and gave it back, careful not to touch his hand.
“Read it,” she demanded.
“Susanna.”
“Read it.”
He read aloud: “Matthys, better to die in battle than return in defeat. Susanna.”
He folded it and put it in his pocket.
“I worry about you . . . and the children.”
Moeder inhaled for such a long time she seemed to swell. She looked at his right arm, which hung limp at his side. She moved the pencil to her left palm, with the point forward, and then closed her fingers around the base of it. She stared at his face—no, specifically at his right eye. Taking aim.
Mevrou Huiseveldt shouted again and began crying herself. Moeder turned to her. “Quiet . . . woman,” she shouted.
Oom Sarel had slipped from the tent by the time Moeder turned back. She seemed stunned that he had run off. She tilted her head back and growled toward the peak of the tent—not a word, not a scream, just a sound from deep inside. And when she had emptied her lungs, she inhaled and turned to me with unexpected calm.
“Here, Lettie . . . this is for you.”
She handed me the pencil to keep. I later used it to write about the day, and my mother’s hatred, and the way it was turning her into someone I had never seen.
5
Early October 1899, Orange Free State The soil smelled of old bones baked by the sun; I imagined them the dusty remains of the natives who had lived here long ago, although they could have belonged to animals, since bones are all the same once they’ve been gnawed bare.
It was my first time sleeping on the ground in the bush, and I strained to conform to the uneven earth. A steady drumbeat, soothing as a mother’s pulse, calmed the night. But drums from other native villages soon alternated, as if questions posed by booming, deep-chested men were being answered by distant women with rattling wood-on-wood voices. A night of tribal passages, I assumed. I pictured frenzied dances by firelight to celebrate someone’s coming of age.
The hypnotic rhythms surrendered to a rumble that seeped from the core of the earth and rolled in waves across the veld until it clenched a deep, vague place low in my gut.
“Pa . . .”
“Go to sleep.”
“But Vader . . . what’s happening?”
My father sat up in his bedding and leaned toward the campfire, his face emerging shadowy gold from the darkness.
“Lions,” he said.
“More than one?”
“Yes, Aletta, it usually is.”
Several roared at once, knotting that place inside me.
“They’d probably go for us first,” said my brother Schalk, so calm he didn’t roll over. “You would be . . .”
Another roar muffled his words of comfort.
I would be . . . what . . . safe from harm?
I would be . . . what . . . in no danger?
“Schalk . . . I would be what?”
“You would be their little dessert.”
“Dessert?”
“A sweet melktert after they made a meal of Pa and me,” Schalk said.
Only my brother would laugh at the possibility of being eaten before dawn.
“They won’t get you,” my father said, “or us.”
“What do we do?”
“Go back to sleep.”
Given the pace of my heartbeats, I believed myself capable of running the many miles to the safety of home or springing to the very top of a tree if necessary. But the one thing I knew I could not do was fall asleep. I told myself to be brave; I had promised not to be a bother if they allowed me on this hunting trip, which was expected to be the last for a while, as the British were said to be gathering at our borders.
A lion punctuated a roar with several deep coughs and a softer grumble: Yesssss, I thought it said. Sleep, sleep, sleep . . . if you dare.
“May I sleep by you, Pa?” I was already on my feet when he answered.
“No . . .”
I froze in place. My face chilled.
“Stay there,” he said.
“But—”
“Aletta . . . we’ll be gone soon; you can’t be such a little girl.”
“I’m not, Pa, I’m twelve.”
“Aletta.”
“Fine.”
Schalk could tell by the tone of that single word that I was about to cry.
“Be brave, little one,” Schalk said.
“Schalk . . . ssstttt.” My father silenced him with a whistle through his teeth. “They won’t come near the fire.”
With a poke stick he speared the coals at the core of the fire, and it flared bright and angry. I stared into it and it made a crackling laugh at me, and ghosts dancing in the smoke waved their wispy gray arms. I tried to look beyond the radius of the firelight, but the night was as I’d never seen: not merely black, but thick and textured, like the felt of my father’s hat. And as I squinted, spots flashed . . . reflections off the great cats’ yellow eyes.
The spots moved. They circled. Stalking outside the curtain of light. Pacing, waiting for the fire to fail, patient, quiet and patient, until the moment they could pounce. I pulled myself tighter. I gasped and blinked with force. They scattered.
“They’re here, Pa, I see them.”
“No, they’re not, Aletta. Go to sleep.”
I blinked again, as hard as I could. They withdrew. Waiting.
“What if . . . the fire goes out?”
Several lions roared, each louder in succession. They were not within striking distance of us after all. At least not the ones we could hear.
“Lettie, those may be, what, Pa, five miles away?” Schalk asked.
“Maybe.”
“You can hear them that far?” I asked.
“Sure, I almost wish one would attack me sometime,” Schalk said. “Men who live through it always say the same thing.”
“Praise God Almighty for his salvation?” I whispered from the tight ball I had become.
“All they talk about is the lion’s breath,” Schalk said. “They say you’ll never smell anything so awful. You’ll never forget the stench. More than anything else, they remember the sickening breath.”
I looked at my father for his confirmation that Schalk was insane. But he only stirred the fire.
“Lettie . . . it’s fine to be afraid,” my father said. “The Book says: ‘The lion hath roared . . . who will not fear?’ ”
He pulled his small Bible from his chest pocket but by firelight could not find the passage.
“In the morning, I’ll read from Peter . . .”
“Be watchful, the devil is a roaring lion . . . ,” Schalk said, quoting the line Father referenced.
“The devil ‘prowls’ like a roaring lion,” my father corrected.
“Except if they’re stalking you, they often don’t do you the favor of offering a warning,” Schalk said.
“Neither does the devil,” Father said.
“So I’m to be frightened when they roar, because the Bible says it is to be so,” I said, “but I should be frightened even more when I don’t hear them?”