The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

“You’ll need your rifle.”

  “Better not to have it. . . . I wouldn’t know who to shoot. And your men wouldn’t think they had to shoot me if I don’t have it.”

  “You don’t know where to go.”

  “Doesn’t matter. . . . Away from the savages.”

  “Savages?”

  “All of them . . . out there . . . in here.”

  “No . . . they’ll see you and shoot you. I know they will. One side or the other.”

  He stepped closer.

  “Come with me.”

  “I can’t . . . Moeder . . . Willem . . .”

  “Bring them.”

  “No . . .”

  “We’ll all escape. We’ll go to England.”

  He pulled at my arm.

  “Not like this.”

  “You’ll come.”

  “Not like this.”

  He pulled at my arm until it felt he was pressing into my bones. He leaned in harder, kissing me, pressing so that my teeth pinched my lips.

  “Stop.”

  “Betty . . . Lettie . . . ,” he mumbled, and he was gone.

  WE BURNED THE DICTIONARY that night to heat water, stopping at M to save the rest for the next night. I did not look at the words before they turned to ash. The ones I needed I already knew, the rest were more valuable as fuel. We no longer bothered waiting until dark to try to sleep but just curled up and slipped off whenever we could. We almost never talked, certainly not bothering with full sentences when a few words would do, and never invested even those few words when gestures sufficed. There was no energy for courtesy. We simply retreated to the portions of the tent that were ours and pulled ourselves in tight. Except for Willem and Rachel, who started sitting together. Somehow they came to feel important to each other.

  I slipped Moeder’s brooch back into her bag when she had gone to the latrine, and if she noticed it had been gone, she never bothered to discipline me. It didn’t work, anyway. I thought through the things Maples had said, as I did every time we talked, reading meaning into every word. But he was so confused. He had asked me to go with him. At least I thought he had. But there were currents of his own that he needed to fight, and they had caused him to come adrift. I warmed at the thought of his kiss and wanted another. But gentler.

  Was it possible for him to leave, or for me to go along? I stacked up thoughts on either side to measure them, but they no longer stayed where I put them; they appeared and faded and took different shapes. I thought of my family and home and surrendering anything that reminded me of reality.

  I walked in a fine dress beneath a giant hat alive with ostrich plumes; I would blink at all who passed. I ambled beside Maples, arm-in-arm. I pointed at the Tower Bridge, my hand heavy with the ring he’d given me—a diamond sunk in a gold band. It sparkled like a star. Schalk had joked at my expense, but he supported my decision to move to England and marry Maples. Willem tried to kill my new husband but his slingshot broke. Moeder and Vader? Well, they only wanted me to be happy.

  IT WAS A THICK night that never cooled. There were fewer people in the tent now, but it felt tighter from the heat. I fought to take in air. I had to be free from the tent—to walk, to stir the air around me.

  Moeder heard me.

  “Lettie?”

  I left without answering, and if she asked more of me, I did not hear. I walked to the nearest fence line. I leaned my face close so that my eyes were inside a wire square, so that no fence was visible. It was like being outside. I could see the shape of a black kopje against the blue-black sky, like the head of some giant emerging from the ground. I wanted to walk there and climb to the top and look down on all this. But standing so long had become an effort and I leaned into the fence for support, and my face ached from the pressure against the wire.

  A breeze fluttered tent canvases, but it just carried more heavy air. I started to look up and scolded myself for my lack of discipline. I didn’t want to think about Oupa, and Orion would force me to. I resented the stars for being so predictable, following their paths as if nothing had happened, and the moon for showing its smug unchanging face.

  “Peace.”

  Would I think of Oupa every time I smelled a pipe, too? Or ate rusks dipped in coffee? My throat swelled and burned, making it harder to manage the thick air. I’d been light headed for weeks, without focused thoughts. I should have prayed but didn’t. Moeder prayed for us and the men every morning and night, but I only mouthed the words.

  “Peace, Aletta.”

  The voices again.

  “I don’t sleep now . . . like you. . . . I walk the camp . . . like you. . . . I hoped I’d find you.”

  “Maples?”

  “I’ve been lonely.”

  “I have, too.”

  “Tell me about your grandfather,” he said. How nice that he wanted to know.

  “My oupa—a great man.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he said.

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “You miss him already?”

  I leaned toward him; it was him, not a phantom voice. He put his rifle on the fence and pulled me in. I cried a wet spot onto his shoulder. I leaned back, but he held tight. It was wonderful, like riding the horse, but too warm, too close.

  “Your hair did come back thicker,” he said. “I told you.”

  He kissed the top of my head.

  “Maples . . . ,” I said.

  “Tommy . . . ,” he said.

  My head felt light again, and breaths were gained only with struggle. He held me too tight.

  “Maples . . . ,” I said.

  “Call me Tommy,” he said.

  He leaned against me harder, and the wire bit into my shoulder bones.

  “Maples . . . ,” I said as he pressed against my chest.

  “You’re fine . . .”

  He squeezed the breath from me, raising a groan I could feel at the back of my throat.

  “Quiet now,” he said, placing a hand to my mouth, calluses scraping my lips, his hands tasting of metal and rifle oil.

  “I want . . . ,” he said.

  I twisted my head away from his hand. “Maples . . . please stop, you’re hurting me.”

  “Tommy . . . Tommy,” he said, pressing so hard my head went back. Pleiades above . . . which turns the shadow of death into the morning . . . my pinafore pulled aside . . . air swept across my legs . . .

  “Betty,” he said. I couldn’t breathe. A whistle blew. I bit his hand and tasted blood and meat. He backed a step. I bent deeply for air.

  He looked up, his eyes reflecting night light. He groaned now. I followed his eyes as they dipped toward his stomach. His tunic was dark, then darker. He stood tall, then arched. And from his chest came the scrape of metal against bone, as when the men butchered game. With a gurgling sigh Maples slumped.

  A sharp edge reflected in front of me, glinting and glinting, reflecting the moon. The steel point tilted upward and away from my vision, and the person behind the bayonet, holding the rifle, took shape in the darkness.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Moeder?”

  My legs gave out, and I fell on Maples. He flexed with a jolt, and I shouted, and he went still. I shook him. He didn’t move. I punched him on the back with my right hand, then both hands.

  “Get up . . . Maples . . .”

  I punched his shoulder blades, my hands wet and sticky.

  “Moeder, you killed Maples.”

  “Lettie . . . stop . . . quiet. . . . I know who it was. I saw what he was doing. I heard you tell him to stop. He was not about to stop. He was crazed.”

  She leaned his rifle on the fence and came to me. I punched at her, too, then wrapped my arms around her waist. They encircled her. I shook so hard I nearly pulled her over.

  “Dear merciful God, forgive me,” she whispered. “We have to plan, we have to get rid of him.”

  “Get rid of him?”

  “Le
ttie . . . they know you were close. . . . They’ll come for us first thing.”

  She was right. And if he simply disappeared, they’d think he had gone off—exactly as he was planning.

  “Get back to your tent . . . both of you. . . . I’ll take care of this.”

  A man snatched the rifle from the fence.

  “Go . . . now . . . go . . . ,” he insisted in a harsh whisper.

  “You . . .” Moeder inhaled the word.

  “Go . . . Lettie . . . take her. . . . Go now.”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “I follow her . . . on her walks . . . many nights . . . to look out for her in case anything . . .”

  “Oom Sarel . . . you followed me? Why didn’t you . . .”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you. . . . You made it clear you didn’t want to see me. . . . Now hurry. . . . I’ll get rid of him. . . . I’ll take him on my cart and burn him in my barrel. . . . No one goes there. . . . No one ever comes near me. . . . No one ever asks questions. . . . But you have to go now.”

  “Wait.” Moeder tried to take the rifle from him.

  “Go, Susanna. Think—they’ll hang both of you if they come . . . and shoot me. This will work. But you have to go now.”

  His appearance had stunned us, so that I hadn’t thought of what trouble we’d face being rid of Maples’s body.

  “Sarel . . . ,” Moeder said, “are you certain?”

  “Ja, go. They’re used to seeing me go out there with my cart and barrel day and night. . . . No one wants to come near me.”

  Moeder scanned the darkness, took my arm, and pulled me to the tent. My chest ached from the pounding of my heart. I strained for air, as if underwater.

  “Settle,” Moeder said calmly. She petted my head as we clung to each other on her cot. I pulled tight against her. I was breathing three times to each of her breaths. Lighted flecks flashed when I closed my eyes. I slowed my breath to match hers, and the storm in my chest stilled.

  I was to blame for it all. For talking to Maples in the first place. For leaving the tent. For not following the rules. I would take responsibility before she could start.

  “I know . . . it was my fault,” I said. “All of it . . . Maples . . .”

  “Stop. . . . It was not your fault,” she said. “He was the one who attacked you, Lettie, it’s his fault he’s dead.”

  I wanted to make excuses for Maples. His girlfriend. The war. He wasn’t made for this. He had gone mad. I had, too. It really wasn’t him. It wasn’t any of us.

  We held each other, sorting through thoughts.

  “What is his burn barrel?” Moeder asked.

  I told her of Oom Sarel’s jobs, carting bodies in the night, and taking typhus waste from the hospital and burning it in barrels outside the camp.

  “It is a good plan,” she said. If he could get Maples to the barrel, no one would find him. I tried to think of the path to the far side of camp and how Oom Sarel would manage the cart with his bad shoulder, given the weight of the body.

  We prayed from our hearts, and Moeder called for the Bible. I lit the candle that Maples had given me, and she read from Romans: “He is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”

  She read passages at random after that, softly, so that no one else awakened. I listened to the words for hours but kept seeing Maples, and his sad eyes, and I thought of his words and his mouth and his callused hands and his chocolate. And everything was more confused, except for those few things that felt more clear. I shook my head to concentrate on Moeder’s words, on her prayers. Focus. God and wrath and wrongdoer. Yes. Her face now lifted to heaven, I could see the words as she spoke, drifting, gathering above us, rising like the thin smoke on the nights we burned the book of words. Wrath and wrongdoer . . . Maples and his green eyes . . . and I focused on her prayer again, and the words emerged slowly and were so heavy she had to strain to be rid of them, and she aimed them to heaven, but they arced down slowly to my ears.

  I shook my head again and pinched my eyes. I noticed that it had grown light and blew out the candle.

  We slept for a few hours, perhaps, when a blast rolled across camp with such force it seemed the tents shook. We clutched each other in unison. It sounded like the thunderclaps on stormy nights on the veld . . . if five or six of them had struck at once.

  I backed in tightly against her. We both knew it was a firing squad, and it caused me to shake again. She pulled me close and hummed in a whisper I could feel against my neck. I recognized the song: “Rock of Ages.”

  PART IV

  Alone Together

  35

  May–June 1902, Venter Farm

  Memory lies, and its cruelest deceit is allowing us to believe that things go on whole and unchanged. While in camp, I had thought of home as many times as there were stars. But I had not thought of the farm as it was burning, nor imagined how it might look after the British had picked clean its bones. The weight of memories from a lifetime in the building suppressed the images of the final flaming minutes.

  When we started for home, I pictured my room and my bed and the parlor and kitchen as they had been. And through the long day’s walk from where we had been deposited, I thought of sleeping the night in comfort. I misplaced the word for being alone and took a dozen steps before recalling it. I thought of Moeder playing the organ, and the smell of cooking luring me toward the kitchen.

  The outline of the blue gum tree was the first to form in my vision, and then the thorn tree, a jagged silhouette against the evening sun. And between them stood a tall, straight man with sloped shoulders. It was Oupa Gideon, taller than ever. He stood alone. He had made it home. Thank you, God. I would never doubt again. It had all been a lie. A mistake.

  “Ma . . . Willem . . . it’s Oupa.”

  “Where?”

  I pointed.

  “Lettie . . .”

  I lifted my skirt and ran in his direction. Oupa rose as I got closer, growing taller and taller. It was so like Oupa. So tall, so lean, so strong.

  Lungs failing, I bent to suck in air. When I tilted up, my vision cleared. Between the two trees and above the foundation stood the stone hearth and chimney, the only part of the house left intact and upright. I sunk to the path. I rose only when Moeder and Willem pulled at my arms and brought me to my feet.

  “It’s not Oupa, Lettie,” Willem said. “He’s dead . . . remember? Shot.”

  Willem surged ahead with energy from some reservoir I lacked. He had started sorting through the shattered leavings before we reached the stoep. The stairs were unbroken, and the foundation mostly unharmed. But the floor sparkled with pieces of our life: shattered china, glass crystals from the hutch, and glass shards from the cracked photo frames. Each of our footfalls ground the pieces smaller. Moeder and I stopped after only a few steps and surveyed the room.

  Nothing I could see was of value, just pieces of things. The organ was a jumbled pile, with the largest bits gone to the British or other scavenging jackals. The bellows and some keys were visible in the dimming light.

  “We’ll get another,” Willem said, taking Moeder’s arm.

  She lifted both hands in front of her, fingers curled.

  “We will . . . Moeder,” I added.

  “More important things first,” she said, dropping her arms to her side.

  We stood still, held in place by the sound of broken things.

  She stomped her feet. “The foundation seems sound,” she said.

  “We can build on it,” I said.

  Moeder turned in a slow dance.

  “They had less to start,” she said. “Everything was brought here or built here.”

  I waited for her to expand, to reassure us that if they could do it back then, we could, too, now. But I was glad she did not because I did not know how to build an organ or make delicate teacups. These things at our feet had been family things, antique and irreplaceable.

  We had some rations from the British and
were told we could get some seeds, maize, and the like, from the Repatriation Board. However, I could not see Moeder approaching the British with her hand out. It would be one of the things that I would do to spare her the indignity. I would be the one in the family to deal with them. I had a history of accepting things from them.

  The evening light died in an instant, as if a candle had been blown out, and the night was clear and not too cold. We backed into a corner where the hearth held together short wings of two side walls. A thin moon reflected off mica flecks in the hearthstones, and across the way, the curved iron headboard of Moeder’s bed leaned against a fallen wall stud, its reflection like an animal skeleton.

  We had heard nothing of our men but had seen others plodding to their homes as we made our way. It had been so long. I was desperate to see Schalk. I thought at first that I could not imagine Moeder’s longing for Vader, but then realized that, yes, I could. Now I could.

  The place reeked of rain-soaked ash, but I picked up the scent of overnight fires from native kraals. I prayed for Bina, for her health and safe return. I listened for drums but heard none, feeling only the rhythm of my throbbing feet. Although exhausted, I found I could not sleep without the sound of Mevrou Huiseveldt’s snoring. The woman plagued me still, even in her absence. I laughed into the darkness at the thought. I untied the dead woman’s boots that had delivered me home, and finally slept without dreams.

  Tante Hannah woke us with a tentative “hallo” from the stairs. I ran to her, and Willem followed. We were wet with night dew, but she gathered us in and squeezed. She smiled at Moeder.

  “I’ve been home for a few days,” she said. “Roof and walls still standing. . . . Everything looted . . . except my stitchwork on the walls. Everything broken or taken . . . except the stitchwork. I am happy . . . and insulted.”

  We laughed softly, and once we started, we each looked around out of habit. But there was no one there to offend. We continued talking, getting louder, testing our limits. Even Moeder.

  After the morning of the rifle shots in camp, Moeder and I did not speak of Maples nor Oom Sarel. It was the only firing squad we’d ever heard, but it was the talk of the camp for months, triggering rumors and speculation among the women. We were both alert to the tent flap, certain the commandant would march in to take us for a date with the firing squad for our part in Maples’s death. All it would have taken was one word from Oom Sarel, maybe as he tried to bargain for his life he had relented and told them that it had been us. Or perhaps someone who had seen me with Maples had made some connection. But each day that passed without our being taken grew less stressful, and my appreciation for Oom Sarel grew in proportion. I came to realize that I had admired Maples’s desire to back away from the savagery of the war—the same attitude that we found so objectionable in Oom Sarel.