The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

  “Madagascar?” I was stunned. “Why would he not come home to us?”

  “Is he going to try to come back and fight?” Willem asked. “Can he keep the war going?”

  Schalk raised his hands as a shield against more questions. But I had so many. What about Moeder? What about us?

  “What did he say? At least tell us that,” I said.

  “He said that Moeder would understand.”

  She understood. We all knew she did. She probably expected it. That might have been why she said that the war wasn’t completely over. But I did not understand. Not then. I thought it was foolish of Vader then. And I still thought it was foolish when he returned a year later, having gained nothing from his pride. But I was so happy to see him that I did not complain. Neither did Moeder.

  BINA WAS BENT OVER, clearing weeds from the garden spot, when we got home from Tante Hannah’s one morning. She was half her size, and her shoulders sloped; her robes were threadbare and dun. She worked slowly and had to use her hands on her knees to rise to standing. But it was her; we heard her singing almost as soon as we saw her.

  “Bina,” I shouted.

  “Peace,” she said.

  “Peace,” I answered. “I’ve been so worried.”

  “You knew I would come back to you,” she said. “Come here, child.”

  She hugged me.

  “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.

  “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.

  Some of our people could never forgive Tante Hannah’s loyalty to Oom Sarel. It was said that an unburned farmhouse stood as the sign of a traitor. But Tante paid her toll. Her farm was in ruins, crops in cinders, and stock long dead.

  Although my sleep was mostly sound, one common nightmare replayed the scene the night that I was attacked; it was so real I could almost feel Maples’s breath, and taste the blood from his hand in my mouth, and hear the scrape of metal on his ribs. The vision arose of both Maples and Oom Sarel, Moeder standing over them humming “Rock of Ages” just as she had that morning when we heard the rifle shots. “Be of sin the double cure / Save from wrath and make me pure.” I woke feverish when I saw how perfectly it happened, a double cure, Maples and Sarel both dead, almost as if Moeder had planned the whole thing to work out exactly as it did.

  I scolded myself for being suspicious of even my mother. In a way, I didn’t care whether she had had a part in how it all happened near the end. When I thought of the times I was most near collapse—the day we arrived at camp,
the day we buried Cee-Cee—she pulled us close and kept us standing. Straight as a post and rooted deeply, she was our strength.

  But I supposed it was natural that the naive openness I had once carried had hardened into suspicion after seeing how others could treat us, how some were willing to simply march in and take what was ours. I didn’t think any of us would forget that or tolerate any hint of it. I think most of us wanted, evermore, to be unbothered and apart.

  I decided on one thing I would not write about: the war. At least not the battles. Someone else could write about the war’s big stories. I would write only about my little part of it, the part I saw myself. We each had our own war.

  Everything continued to change. I was back on the farm, yes, but very little was the same. There had been a war that took me from this spot, only to deposit me here again, a different person—far closer to the woman I would become than to the little girl I had been. Did we really go through so much just to return here? It seemed such a long and horrible path just to get home. But that was the real story of it all for me . . . that was my Great Trek.

  We all built our truths to serve our needs. They were like our oaths and vows and covenants—all had been firm, but so few were permanent.

  The lesson that came through this trek most intact was the one that Bina had taught me: deeds live. I learned that they not only lived but had to be carried.

  I knew I would write about the night I spent on the veld with Vader and Schalk, the night I heard the lions and the drums. And how, at the time, I wanted nothing more than to have Vader comfort me and hold me and assure me all was well. I had hated that he refused to hug me close. But I saw his wisdom now. The best thing was for me to deal with the fear on my own, and once I learned that I could do it, it was a strength that would never leave me. For me, in the worst days, when everything else had been pared away, that remained.

  The wind picked up again. I pulled a cochineal beetle off a prickly pear and squeezed it the way Schalk had shown me, so that its red-dye juices oozed. I dabbed the dye in spots on the back of my left hand, three in a row in the middle, and four others at cross corners. I blew on it to dry it, hoping the small constellation would seep into my skin and stay there forever.