by Isla Morley
Opening the backpack, I grasp the box and stumble over the boulders, black and slippery, to the veil of the falls. The pellets of water plaster down my hair, and I have to rub my eyes to see the scrap of blue between the treetops. In this cleft of the earth the roaring, soaking downpour shakes free as though the heaven-sent leak cannot be patched, and the long wait ends. I lift the lid, and with one shake, Cleo is an ashy mound no more. She is free.
I shall soar,
bid adieu to telluric shores
and bonjour, upon winged hope,
to birth, to life once more.
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? I was worried . . .” Greg says when I walk into the house. “What have you been doing?” He points at my legs, muddy and scratched, dotted with mosquito bites.
All the way home, I have thought of what to tell Greg. Perhaps that children were not to be cooped up, perhaps recite the line from Rhiaan’s poem. But with each step, the words came no closer.
His face is furrowed with concern, his frown deepening when I cannot reply. “Sit down.” He ushers me into the living room. “What’s going on?”
For a moment it is a horrible thing, a treacherous thing I have done. Ebullience makes way for guilt.
After a long silence, when I am convinced that the grain in the wood floors is not going to reconfigure into the script I seek, I look up at him.
“I let her go.”
He is tempted to rush at me with questions, but stops and frowns, spying the backpack at my feet. Grabbing it, lifting the flap, he finds the koa box. He knows before he lifts the lid, and begins to shake his head. Like me, Greg has come to know the weight of her in the box, knows now that the box has an unbearable lightness.
“No, Abbe.” He shakes his head, and shakes it till I think he must be sick from dizziness. “No!” He hurls the backpack across the room, sending the lampshade crashing to the floor. “SHE IS MY CHILD TOO!” Greg’s face is swollen in anger, his fists clenched, and when he looks at me he might as well have an ax in his hand for how closely he resembles my father. “God damn you, Abbe. God damn you!”
IT WAS THE DEATH OF HER, having hope. People die for things far less audacious. I have never figured out what made her go from the woman of suicide prayers and unstitched seams to the one who was hopeful enough to summon the help of a man who smoked Van Rijan plain. Was it because neither a gin bottle, nor Dead Man’s Curve, nor a pot of boiling oil did the trick? I don’t know, but one thing I did know: from the moment my mother lifted her scrawny neck to look me in the face, she was as good as dead. And hope had done it just as surely as my father’s ax meant to.
A neat row of neighbors lined our side of the street; women who stood elbow to elbow, aprons lifted to conceal their gaping mouths or to cover the wagging tongues, I could not tell which. Mercy wasn’t what my mother wanted, even if the housewives rustled from their orderly kitchens were ready to give it. “Pity’s for cripples,” she said, ushering me into the car before my father’s truck returned. “Don’t ever let anyone make a cripple out of you, Abbe.”
She turned the key in the ignition and the car gave a dry heave. Again she turned it, stomping her foot on the accelerator in her own private tantrum. Just as she banged her hand on the steering wheel and sniffed at the tears she had been trying all this time to keep from spilling, the faces of Mrs. Folliett and Mrs. Beasley and the two widows from across the street peered through our windshield.
“Let out the hand brake, Mrs. Spenser,” instructed Mrs. Folliett. My mother did as she was told and slowly the car moved backward, out into the waiting street. When my mother turned the wheel so we faced the hills and threw the transmission in gear, we felt the weight of the women’s collective will shift to the back of the car, where it leaned and heaved and panted till the darn car sputtered to life. If my mother had looked back, as I had, she would have seen the housewives slowing to an idle in the middle of the street, watching us with something as close to envy as I have ever seen.
Later, at the farm, after Beauty had made up the beds in the spare room with wind-whipped sheets, I told my grandmother what had happened. And then I cried the bone-marrow-tired cry for which sleep is the only cure. When I awoke to the predawn crows of the roosters it seemed impossible that the previous day had only just passed. Had I not awoken to a better story or a future more far-off? Was I still to face the question of What now?
My mother’s bed was both empty and made, and for a horrible minute I wondered if she had, in fact, run away without saying goodbye, just as my father had accused her of attempting to do. Hastening through the farmhouse, I found her neither in the bathroom, nor in the kitchen. Beyond the back door was my mother’s car, still parked next to the outhouse, and beyond it the chicken coop, where the silhouettes of Beauty and my mother bent to the task of collecting eggs. Shivering more from relief than cold, I drew nearer to their hushed voices just as they rounded the coop and headed behind it to the wattle tree, where the chickens too stubborn to roost on racks lay their double yokers.
“I need your help, Beauty; I don’t know what else to do,” I heard my mother say. I was only a few feet from them, seconds away from when they would turn and see me against the rising sun.
“Don’t worry, miss,” Beauty promised. “We going to help you make it all better.”
How? is what I wanted to ask. How was an old sangoma going to fix a white woman’s worries? How was a maid too poor to do anything but clean house going to remedy a wrong so set in its ways? But before I could ask anything, my mother turned around and saw me. Noting the absence of a dressing gown and slippers, she scolded me back indoors as though catching a cold were the greatest of our worries.
That afternoon my mother made me a promise I later found out she could not keep. “It’s only for a few weeks,” she said, unpacking my clothes from the suitcase but not her own. I was to stay at my grandmother’s house while she went back home and “sorted things out” with my father. There was no arguing with her; the gin-riddled mother of the spare room was one of steely resolve, if only on this point: I was not to return with her.
“It’s not safe for you to go back, Ma,” I begged. “He’s going to kill you.”
“Nonsense!” she snapped. “Your father is ill, Elizabeth—very, very ill. I’m going to see he gets what he needs. And then I’ll come back for you.” Only her hands gave her away, trembling as she smoothed out the collars of my shirts.
Yes, but what was it she needed? Surely not the home where her kitchen table was chopped in two. And what about what I needed?
Her admonitions did not stop me from pleading, even when I stood on my grandmother’s red stoep to watch her load her suitcase in the trunk of the car. “She doesn’t want to go back there, Grandma; make her stop!” I begged my grandmother. What my mother wanted and what she needed weren’t the same thing, according to my grandmother. In her estimation it was a thing called “Gilead’s balm” that my mother needed. And when Beauty, who had made one of her mysterious treks to the kopje earlier that day, came to the car and gave my mother a parcel wrapped in newspaper, I assumed she was being handed just that.
“What did Beauty give you?” I asked when my mother mounted the steps to kiss me goodbye. She smoothed back my hair, cleared my cheeks of their teary trails, and ignored my question. “It won’t be for long. I promise.”
“Don’t leave me, Ma,” I cried, but she shook her head firmly as if to free her hair from the last shards of porcelain and said, “I’m not, sweetheart.”
Then she got in her car, turned the ignition, which started on the first try, and drove away.
FIFTEEN
Odd-numbered years, it seems, have the unenviable task of signaling an end to things. One: the end of infancy; thirteen: the end of childhood. Twenty-one and you can kiss goodbye all the excuses that come with being a minor. Twenty-nine: the end of young adulthood; sixty-five: the end of a career. Even-numbered years, though, get to flag new beginnings. Six: big school; sixteen: driving; eighteen: v
oting (and in my country, drinking and conscription). With forty comes the permissiveness of a midlife crisis, while sixty gets you senior menus and discount movie tickets. Somewhere between twenty-nine and death, almost assuredly on an odd-numbered year, spouses set aside marriage vows, write carefully worded Dear Johns, pack suitcases, and hire lawyers. Both my age and my marriage are on odd-numbered years.
AT FIRST I step over the envelope on my way to the kitchen. The morning gusts have knocked over the skinny vase that nobody bothers either to fill with flowers or put away, and blown the table clear of clutter. Sunday’s worship bulletin, Greg’s grocery list and the coupons paper-clipped to it, the TV guide, and the envelope all form a haphazard path on the parquet floor. A bill, I think; as good a place as any.
Two sips of tea later I bend down to pick it up, and it is only after I turn it over that my chest begins behaving like an accordion. I stare at my name written out in full in Greg’s neat cursive, marveling at how closely it resembles my mother’s. Greg has gone to the effort of buying special stationery for the occasion. Rather than his customary yellow legal pad, he has chosen parchment the color brides wear when honesty rather than chastity is the virtue to be showcased. Stiff at the folds, his letter is one continuous neat script. No errors. Copied out.
Dear Abbe,
I have tried and tried to reach you, but I cannot. I cannot comfort you with the right words—the words that will bring you back to me—or the right actions. I had desperately—I see now, vainly—hoped that our trip to Tahoe might shorten the distance between us. It seems only to have made things worse. “Love is not enough,” you said a few months ago, and I brushed off that comment as a product of a heated argument. But I now believe you are right. Love is not enough. Not mine, at any rate.
I cannot help but wonder whether you stopped loving me a long time ago, or only after I was no longer “Cleo’s daddy,” even though I know it doesn’t make any difference. Whatever the case, I know I cannot make you love me any more than I can get you to accept my inadequate offerings of love.
A part of each of us died with Cleo, and though we have both wished at times that it was not a part but the entirety, we are still faced with the incredible challenge of living without her. Perhaps living and loving was too tall an order. Even though I cannot yet forgive you for dispersing her ashes without me, I feel you have done me a favor. I see now that the only way to really honor Cleo’s memory is not just to go on living as a function to be endured, but to live on. Fully. I don’t know how I am going to do that, but I am going to give it my best shot.
I am going to take the church appointment in Fresno in June, but in the meantime, I will be in Ohio spending some time with my family. I leave next Tuesday. What you want to do about the house is your call (one that doesn’t need to be made anytime soon), but I really don’t see how we can hold on to it, given my additional living expenses and reduced salary. Of course, I will do everything I can to help.
I apologize for writing this letter instead of talking to you. Somehow whatever I say ends up being the thing I least intended. What I hope you will understand from this, Abbe, is that I cannot live and die at the same time; I must choose. Know that you were always my first choice.
Greg
I leave Greg’s letter on the table and go upstairs to our bedroom. From the back of the closet I retrieve the two suitcases, still with Nevada tags on the handles. Among his socks and underwear, his favorite shirts and half a dozen ties Greg will need on the mainland, I pack a few of Cleo’s things: the framed photo of her as a baby, the pink pocket Bible Jenny gave her on the day of her baptism, the rattle he bought her, and a couple of baby blankets. In a tiny box, the blue velvet one that has spent all these years in the corner of my underwear drawer, I place my wedding band. While the birds come to the feeder for their morning feast, I sit down on his side of the bed and stare at the circle around my finger, envelope-white where a promise once lay.
MY MOTHER WAS DIFFERENT when she came back to the farm, after I had called and begged for her to come. Perhaps I expected her to look as though her head were still on a chopping block, still half dead or wrinkled from wishing it so hard. I was quite unprepared for her purposeful step and a face that didn’t quite crease into a smile but looked satisfied nonetheless. It was not something I could put my finger on, this alteration, but there was one difference I identified immediately: the absence of her wedding band.
“It keeps falling off,” she explained, and it was true that her hands looked like a connect-the-dots drawing. But she could not fool me: she was going to leave him.
That my mother was going to leave my father I was certain—the first time she came to visit me. By the second visit, two weeks later, I gnawed my fingernails to the quick and had my doubts. When she showed up a third time, I knew for sure that the only person my mother intended to leave was me. Better a liar than a fool, I resolved the Sunday of my mother’s fourth visit.
The lie meant to punish my mother was formed as she got up at dawn, while she quietly dressed, folded something into an envelope, and then tiptoed out of the room. Before following her, I rehearsed the lie, confident that if it did not prevent her from leaving, it might very well make her feel bad enough for doing so. I peeked in the envelope she had tucked in her purse. Addressed to Beauty, it contained five tenrand notes and nothing else. Where she had come up with the money was as perplexing as why she would give it to Beauty.
“Go back to bed,” my mother suggested when I sat down on the porch swing next to her. “It’s too early to be getting up.”
“You’re up!” I snapped back.
My grandmother, in her gown and slippers, gray hair in a single braid down the length of her back, joined us and there was no going back to bed for anyone. Not even for Beauty, who straggled out of her kaia fully dressed when my grandmother called to her window where the paraffin lamp stood burning. It might have made a grand picture if someone had been there to take it—the four of us collected on the red stoep, waiting for the day. Had I known I was not the only one to face it with dread, I might have said something else. Or perhaps I might not have said anything at all. But I was seventeen then, on an odd-numbered year, and it seemed to be a year strung with one ending after another, only for me.
“Why don’t you leave him?” I asked just as the sun peeked out from between the fynbos.
“It’s not that simple, Abbe,” my mother answered, glancing at Beauty.
“Grannie left Oupa,” I prodded. Even though a scandalous thing whispered in backhanded conversations—an old woman divorcing her husband after so many years—it had not been hard. Oupa, already feeble both in spirit and mind, surrendered without much of a fight and shuffled off even eagerly to Downey Homes in Constantia. “Neutered the ol’ bugger,” my father described it, who stopped coming to the farm when my grandmother had Beauty eat her meals with her in the dining room instead of alone at the kitchen table.
“This is different,” she said.
“How?”
“In my day,” my grandmother interjected, “a woman never left her husband, no matter how bad things got. You put up with all sorts of shenanigans for the sake of the children. Even when they left home and had children of their own, you put up with it because you were afraid of being lonely.”
“You weren’t afraid of being lonely,” I insisted.
“Yes, well, one day I realized it can be quite a lonesome thing to live with someone who is no longer there.” It was apparent, suddenly, that I was not alone in wishing my mother would give up my father, or whatever it was that drew her back to his whereabouts. It also seemed that my grandmother had said the one thing that would convince my mother to stay, for good this time.
Instead of agreeing, my mother turned to me and said, “We’ll be together one of these days, you’ll see.” As though I were a child, as though I could live off “you’ll see’s” and “I promise’s.” Had my mother forgotten I had watched her, pressed between my father’s moods lik
e a flower in the pages of a thick book, go brittle? The only thing left to see, surely, was the moment she went from a dried flower to a handful of crumbs. My lie, steady as a boot, came crunching. “I don’t want us to be together! So why don’t you go, and don’t bother coming back!”
When my mother drew a sharp intake of breath and rose slowly from her seat, her back to the glowering sun, it seemed the first draft could just blow her away.
Later, after receiving from Beauty her tin of tea or whatever it was my mother said calmed her nerves, she headed for her car. Shading her eyes from the sun with her free hand, she squinted in my direction. She would not have been able to see me, in the shade of the fruit trees, watching her from around one of the massive trunks, but she knew I was there. I both dreaded and hoped she would come to me, and kiss me and make it all better. Instead, she got in her car and drove back to the house I had once thought of as home, to a man I once thought of as father.
It was only after my grandmother had driven off to church that I went back to the house. Entering my room with the timidity of a stray dog, I searched for something she might have left behind. Would it be a book this time, or a photograph, or perhaps her perfume? I glanced around the room: clothes strewn hastily on the floor, the disheveled bed by the window, hers neatly made, a drawer of the bureau open like the mouth of a panting dog. And then there it was, on my school case. Not something of hers at all, but a new thing that was to be mine alone. A sealed envelope with my name centered tidily on the front of it.
