Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  An older man asks Fuze a question, or a barrage of questions; he speaks as though he has some right of ownership or kinship over me, but his tone brings only mild, formal answers from Fuze, as if to encourage the catechism.

  It winds down and with a whoop the old man darts at me, seizes me under the arms and swings me onto the back of one of the three oxen still walking their circle around the crusher. The beast turns its head and shows me a crazed eye and the nearer tip of its horn, but does not baulk at my weight or the great cheer that meets this manoeuvre, and I catch my father’s pleasure in this as I look back at him. I turn my head to watch him in the way that the men watched me, over the shoulder.

  I must make two circuits before they will let me down. The ox’s hide prickles like tweed through my breeches and there is no handhold that I can find but the old man’s hand on my back. I am high off the ground and the ox stinks, and there is forbidding heaviness in the poles that lead from the yoke to the gears of the machine, and violence in their ungoverned shifting as they knock against the boss. Shining eyes lift to me, and there is shouting, and in recollection, at least, my pagan soul confirms that here I am, the prince of Missenden.

  Bourbon, or Green Natal (I am seven; I cannot tell them apart) is being fed between the new crushers, an operation so satisfying that it mesmerises me, and after the business with the ox is over I stand and watch the men point the dark stalks at the meeting of the rollers’ curving edges, see them caught by their endless turning towards one another, and hear, or imagine I hear, the superb crushing.

  But I have seen the sugar mill in operation before – even my sisters have seen it. The initiation waits inside, where I am to bless and be blessed by the work.

  There are cauldrons in the refinery, and the boiling house itself is a cauldron, and chokes me with the smell of it, the hot-spit stench. Steam and roaring fires, constant movement, men stiff-limbed with the more perilous work, or sleepy with the mechanics of their endless stirring … They make a ceremony of my overturning a scoop of lye into a vat, for which I am cheered as busy men will cheer, with half their minds on something else. So clearly are the men of the refinery holding kindness in place over their impatience that I want Father to hurry through the rituals of this visit, and take us away from there. He will not hurry, though, and explains each vat, paddle, sieve and tray, and the ‘process’, too.

  I am permitted to read off the numbers on a machine that takes the measure of the juice, but I know that the energy of the moment, the direction of it, tends not to what I hear or what I read out, but to the directing of it by Father. Today I am a solemn part of the ‘process’, but my utility stops at the shape of my face, the stiff cloth of my jacket and britches, the outline of me that is moved about the long, billowing room.

  We have, among our work of visiting the source of Missenden’s wealth, an errand for Mother: in a corner of the refinery lie rows of bulbous, conelike sugar moulds, like the many chrysalises of a forest of giant moths, or the eggs I have seen on the underside of a lemon leaf, neat in their rows but larger by a force of millions; each one is the size of Father’s lower leg.

  I believe these were part of the profligate setting-up of Missenden’s works some years before; if we ever did, we no longer do cast our own sugar cones, but by some process keep the sugar looser so it can be packed in double bags for some other manufactory to take further. And here are the old-fashioned moulds, of no use in a place where every made thing – and every man – buys its place with usefulness.

  Our errand is to fetch these to Mother, who wants them for planting pots. They are appealing things, pointed, curved and matched in long rows, one to the other, with a sort of miraculous regularity for vessels made of clay by men’s hands. The appeal of using them is strong, and even as they lie in their inert rows and the men leave their work to begin to pass them, hand over hand, out the doors and to the wagon there, I can picture them lined up in shorter rows outdoors, perhaps settled with their pointed ends half-buried and their mouths receiving earth and seeds and water, to make a regular laboratory, a system by which to log and collect the secrets of the living plants. Which is perhaps to say that I can in recollection picture what they would in fact become.

  This is my chief memory of the big day: the great amphorae so shaped to suit a man’s spread hand, passed from man to man up the line, into the sun. There is a puff adder surprised among the moulds and swiftly crushed with only a stutter in the work; we accept that there is usually a snake.

  Father stays at the refinery; I am sent back with a driver and our brittle cargo. I sit on the driver’s bench by his side and feel I have traded for the moulds myself – that I am bringing them to her. Not all will be planted in the earth; a few dozen are settled between planks laid like the risers on a stairway, held upright and kept portable – swappable, according to her developing taxonomy of which plant belongs with which. Again, here, in their regularity and shape, they are fit for purpose. A handful of river stones in the pointed end, then earth to the brim, as domestic and settled a nursery for Mother’s seedlings as could have been devised with only this in mind. A breeding factory of her own.

  Having visited the works, I need not go again. In fact, I must not, unless as the priest-mascot of the irregular ceremonies of the place – called to mark a record harvest, a new machine, perhaps an important visitor.

  There is in fact no place on Missenden where I might go alone, if you count my shadow as corporeally separate from me, as I might forget to do. Griffin’s guardianship of me is constant and complete, although she still also has the guarding of my sisters from at least some of the perils of their world, if not so many as seem to threaten me.

  This – her having to watch out for them as well while never not watching me – makes of us a two-peopled animal whose regard is usually directed outwards. She, my absolute sidelong shadow, looks towards them, and so directs my gaze, too, so that, in having constant or near-constant regard for their safety, there steals into my mind a protectiveness over them, enough of it to give me the air of being on loyal and kindly watch over my big sisters.

  The curious part of this is that they allow – or even appreciate – this. I blush to recall my pompous years – my warnings about recklessness, my moralising about what girls do, my comments to our mother about ‘my sisters’, their errors and disobediences – and claim them as having been only two in duration. However mortifying, though, I recall too that I am encouraged in this. For such consideration I am called ‘our brave Cosmo’ and ‘the girls’ protector’, though truly I am a sign against trespass. I am the quarantine flag.

  6

  THE BOY AND THE MEN have set up two tents and stretched more canvas from a tree for a kitchen. They have offloaded the goods to one side of this, and Mrs Chetwyn and Griffin are left to disperse the pile while the men make plans for a more durable shelter, then leave with a pair of oxen and the horses to bring in the makings for it from the river and the copse. For much of the way they must cut their road, and the going is immensely slow.

  She and Griffin work themselves briskly. The day grows hot, but of a pleasant heat that is cured by stepping into the shade of a tree. Mrs Chetwyn soon shucks her jacket and works in fewer petticoats, and chooses one of Chetwyn’s wide-brimmed straw hats over the proper close bonnet that hides her hair but leaves her face to wither in the sun. She stitches a havelock to Sophronia’s bonnet; the folds of it protect her neck. Somewhere in their baggage is a soft, deep cap that is more suited, but there are the animals to disperse, and only then may they go hunting for caps.

  The chickens are in two cages; before they can be set free of these their new bars must be raised, which Griffin under-takes to do. She selects canes from Fuze’s pile and with brisk twists of her hands she knots and winds twine around these and forms a bottomless cage and into this they empty the flustered bundles. The rooster leans back to beat his wings and register his claim; the hens cock their heads to read the ground, and set about it. Before the sun
rises tomorrow morning half of them will be bloodied feathers and the rest scattered and still alive only by grace of their killer’s satiety, but for now they make a domestic picture in their slight cage.

  Mrs Chetwyn is driven by an impulse to complete the camp before the men should return, and so, although there can be no question of a deadline, she pushes herself at every task. She could not have said why she so fears the idea of being found in disarray, but the thought of Chetwyn or the Boer child stepping up to assist with a task drives her on. What she has begun, she must complete. She refuses to consider the unnamed dread behind the work, the image she has of their small party on the vast Earth, darting and reaching to claim an inch of differentiated space that is theirs only as long as they exist as a blur. They cannot be still and allow the emptiness to close in about them, to nest on their skin and in their skirts.

  The tall, narrow woman and the smaller shift boxes and lay planks on these, and seat Sophronia to bring each plate and cup out of the crate to set in piles and lines; they hang cloths and make a larder, drag chairs and ploughshares to their correct fellows, tidying away their goods and the camp in an unfolding, unhalting stream that gains speed as though they are working against a shot to end the race. None of the three slackens, nor questions their haste, and in due course they decide that they are done.

  Mrs Chetwyn stands in the shade, removes the hat and looks about her. Behind her is one of the tents, with the horsehair and feather mattresses raised on empty crates, and trunks for tables and a hanging set of canvas shelves. The floor is canvas, and there is a washstand, a china basin and its ewer. A mosquito curtain mists the bed. To her left, the kitchen patch, a crowded space of cups, plates, pots, boxes, the plank table, barrels. To the right, some small distance away and situated so that its side completes an open square facing towards where the sea is, over the horizon, the second tent. Griffin will sleep there, among the rugs and furniture and those tools that must be kept from the dew.

  The men come into sight, leading oxen that drag a residual tree. Most of its branches have been lopped off and tied to its own denatured trunk. Chetwyn, hallooing as he comes within earshot, is mantled with heaviness, ahead of the men and beasts and this torn fletch. Mrs Chetwyn watches them for the moment they see what the women have made of the place. Collected and welcoming – what could there be to justify even an eye-flutter? – she betrays no trace of the agitation behind the ordering of it, of her race to have a household appear on the open ground. She discounts her meditations on setting up a home by reminding herself that she has done it twice before in a matter of months.

  Long after they settle for the night, Fuze lies awake in his blankets on the cart bed, picking over the day, unweaving it as he might take apart a basket he was busy with to address a flaw.

  The growth around the harvested tree had been so thick that although they severed the trunk with turns at a businesslike chopping axe, it did not fall free but hung at an angle among the branches of its fellows, and they had roped it like a beast and smacked its flanks to drag it clear, and this came with a ripping sound.

  He had seen himself as if from across a field: a man leaning all his strength against a cut tree to free its body from its stump and swing it out of the choking bush – a man already half vanished into an extra skin of dark and pale cloth, working in a new way. He, the wagoneer, the Boer boy and the Captain had all four strained at it, but two had redirected part of this force into also directing the work of the other two. Fuze had recognised in himself the distance the wagoneer affected as he obeyed the Boer boy’s directions but did not acknowledge them, as if to keep something from touching his body. It left him stiff as a hide shield.

  Fuze is also troubled – irritated, if he has to name it – that not every new thing is better this side of the Thukela: still whole trees must be cut down perilously, clumsily, at all. As they tore the tree down and then forth from the forest, he saw, or decided to see, a faltering in the Captain. He can see that it is not a small matter to set yourself to remake the world. A man must ponder what of him could survive such work.

  Forked trunks, sharpened at one end, uprighted into the augured hole. The hole packed with small stones and earth stamped firm. Cross poles, lightly trimmed to angles, laid across the forks. Pins, driven into holes drilled through post and beam, driven home. Deep within the hole, a blade of hard wood set to split the pin as it comes and wedge it tight against its walls. Sledgehammer it home and slap the beam to hear with the hand its soundness.

  A room sketched in outline by posts and beams seems already to contain an inside and an out. It could stay like that forever, Mrs Chetwyn thinks – the idea of a house. Is this not what is intended, after all?

  But wattle saplings: chopped to length, chopped until they make a pile of laths so wide and uniform it proves industry. Rig a sled of hacked runners, canvas and boards, tie it to an ox and drag from the river a gleaming heap of clay already frosting white under the sun. They have the recipe and so walls rise, the laced wattle packed with anything they can find, clods and stones and turf, and smoothed with muddy clay. Two windows will have glass: she has insisted – glass, a horsehair mattress and a proper bed, unanchored to the bedroom floor, swaying on a metal frame.

  Directed by the Boer boy by way of Chetwyn, the women start a pile of the oxen’s leavings. Mrs Chetwyn shovels the warm, bread-scented mess into her bucket. Because it, too, comes from Missenden, she cannot remember to be disgusted.

  They are one another’s audience as the walls rise and hot food flows from the tent kitchen. A pair of thatcher’s men arrive at dawn and are met, squatting some distance from the home tents, when the Chetwyn party wakes. Their master is expected soon and meanwhile they will start a materials heap of their own. They leave one bag of tools in Griffin’s tent and set off with Fuze, scythes over their shoulders, the way they came, leading the redder ox on a string. By day’s end they are back, the ox a ponderous haystack under heaped stooks of grass. Day by day this is their rhythm as the walls rise and the floor’s stuff gathers in its midden.

  Mrs Chetwyn and Griffin have some variation in their theme: now water from the barrel, now the barrel itself to the river under direction of the wagoneer, now a buck to skin, now hens to rob, dead hens to count (Mrs Chetwyn takes to moving their cage into the tent with her at night). It is a ceaseless movement of stretching and bending, of close, small work and sweeps of the limbs. She deepens an acquaintance with her body, with its twin fillets of (she dares to think it) muscle along her spine, and across her incredible stomach a band that is the definition of competence, of strength.

  There is a still passage: she pins paper to a board and each afternoon consults Chetwyn and Fuze, if he is by, and works on her project of mapping the land. She is heavier by the day but this does not feel like an illness; she watches herself, when she ought to be unwell, stand sure and steady, or lean peacefully against their home tree, waiting.

  Women come one morning, approaching at a slant, eyes not rising as far as Mrs Chetwyn’s face. They have baskets, carried up Missenden’s wide slope on their heads. In these are pumpkins, sweet potatoes, cobs of maize. Chetwyn is out with the daub party today, fetching clay, so Fuze, busy with the stuff at the building end, fetches a tin trunk to manage a trade of beads for fresh food.

  The women do not leave, but settle under a tree while one of them nurses her baby; they look over their beads, sorting them by colour. Fuze returns to his wall. Mrs Chetwyn meanwhile hurries to her tent to fetch the Zulu grammar. She has it, and for a moment considers approaching the women directly, but instead says, ‘Fuze,’ clears her throat and says his name again, with more intent, and he leaves his work and stands before her, his head tilted in a question.

  Fuze and she do not often stand like this, face to face. She has the direction and management of Griffin, and Chetwyn superintends the man. Mrs Chetwyn nods her head at him and clears her throat. She opens the Companion at the place she has kept, and reads out the bewildering sylla
bles, the vowels never paired, consonants crowded together at the start or the end in unpronounceable propinquity, the mysterious words.

  There is no phrase offered by the Companion for exactly what she wants; she settles for one that comes close. She says, ‘Tiyala imbeu …’ An enormous sentence looms: ‘Kukula ngesi kukulo, ase ahlakageke cake amagabede.’

  She breathes out, relieved. Fuze hears: ‘Plant the seed!’ and ‘Harrow it with the harrow until the clods are broken!’ An eyebrow flexed, he holds up his hands, mittened with drying clay, and she sees her error and rushes in – ‘No no, Fuze, not you – them – could you negotiate with them a price for digging and planting a kitchen garden for me … if they would? If you could?’

  Restored to her own tongue, Mrs Chetwyn falls into natural expressions and gestures and Fuze’s brow clears. He is already rubbing the clay from his hands and nodding. The women have something more to sell, and he will set the price for them.

  Everyone knows that it is the women who farm the mealies and pumpkins beside the natural villages of the natives; that the men do not lift a hoe nor break sod. Even so, Mrs Chetwyn is taken aback by the easy commanding air of the three women as they discuss the lay of the garden they will cut for her, describing the space with gestures quite as a man would. They agree among themselves and swing splintery new Chetwyn mattocks into the earth.

  They had lifted their heads and looked impassively at Fuze when he approached them, and held their regal silence until one of them made some comment and all three burst into laughter – at Fuze’s expense, if his shoulders and ducking head were the signs Mrs Chetwyn took them to be, as she watched from her domestic cluster. At his expense, but not unfriendly. A reminder of their relative ages, she would guess. He returned to her with their price and left for his daubing, stripped of several years and all his swagger, fleeing their teasing laughter.