by Isla Morley
One morning a middle-aged man roasted by the sun hobbled to the front of the fellowship hall and leaned heavily on his cane as he bent down into the mike Greg had just set up for the service. “I murdered a man,” he confessed. Someone in the breakfast line cleared his throat, the rest of them turned to listen. “I murdered him because I never did like the look of him. Didn’t like what he said to me one day, and I did it lickety-split, without thinking. But here’s the thing: You take away someone’s life, whether you’re thinking about it or not, and your own life goes with it too. I’m a shadow here today, my brothers, but I’m here because Jakes told me about the Man who puts flesh on your bones again, breathes into you again. I ain’t saying I got life yet, but I’m saying I got hope, and if it’s good enough for me, it can be good enough for you.”
“Amen!” one ex-con applauded. And then another. I think that must be the closest I have ever come to being saved, listening to that pock-faced, yellow-toothed Hawaiian with a cane and flip-flops giving up the glory.
And that’s how I want to remember Jakes, sweeping up the human leftovers along with their scraps of hope, serving them cheapo breakfasts as though a feast for kings. Giving a kidney to his brother couldn’t have been more typical of him. In exchange, God dished out death—which was typical too, if you ask me.
“I don’t think I can go,” I tell Jenny.
“No one’s asking you to.”
VENGEANCE IS MINE, says the Lord. You get the regret, he might have added instead of the bit about feeding the hungry, even if they happen to be your enemies. Beauty must have got tired waiting for the Lord’s hand to smite her enemies, must have just had it up to here with feeding her enemies. No one knew that Beauty even had enemies, let alone what they had done to become them. Come to think of it, none of us knew much of anything concerning Beauty: not how old she was, nor how it was that she had arrived at my grandmother’s farm the year the Great Drought ended. She never spoke of children or a husband and no one, to my knowledge, asked. That she had a private life was only alluded to once or twice a year when she would walk down my grandmother’s gravel driveway with a small bundle of belongings on her head and not return till a week later smelling of shakeys, the fermented beer sold for less than a bottle of milk. That she had any clothes other than the crisply ironed gingham dress with a starched white apron over it and her neat doek tied over her hair was debatable. If you never looked down past her modest hemline that would make any Methodist proud, you might mistake Beauty Masinama for a woman of standing. But it was her lace-up shoes, scuffed and worn, that spoke of muddy lean-tos and buckets for toilets, of people who didn’t live on the farm, some of whom should never have dared put a foot on it.
The knitting had been my grandmother’s idea when Beauty, after having a weeklong vacation, returned to the farm with paraffin breath and trembling hands. At first my grandmother warned Beauty about her drinking: “I don’t want this to become a problem,” she said. “Madam doesn’t know anything about my problems,” was Beauty’s retort, and you could have knocked old Edith over with a feather when she heard it. But my grandmother was not about to give in that easily. Her second suggestion was a trip to the OK Bazaars, a local market, which was to have just the right solution, both to Beauty’s bad habit and my bad attitude.
My problem, as my grandmother put it, was a matter of “cutting my nose off to spite my face.” I could not separate the guilt I felt for how I had treated my mother from the anger I felt toward her, so I was going to knit them tightly together into whatever sweater pattern my grandmother had her heart set on. Who knows what complexities Beauty was going to knit together? Two pairs of aluminum knitting needles and a bucketful of yarn later, Beauty and I cast on identical rows of stitches in the hopes that with steady effort we might produce something akin to the picture on the pattern cover, to say nothing of finding solutions.
Not much more than a dozen rows later, a man who identified himself as “Stompie” came to the back door asking for Beauty. It seemed, then, that one-plain-one-purl was not going to do the job for Beauty. I watched from the kitchen window as she opened the front door of her kaia for the man with the yellow eyes and sloping shoulders, and then followed him inside. When they had not emerged half an hour later, I returned to my knitting alone, to replay the conversation my mother and I had on the phone the night before. If I had learned anything from my father, it was how to avoid saying sorry. Even when I had willed myself to call, to say the words I had rehearsed for days, I still could not get past the accusatory tone to anything resembling an apology. I did not want to hear how sick my father was when I asked her when she was going to come fetch me. “Take him to the doctor if he’s that sick; you’re not a nurse!” I had said, even though we both knew he would rather rot than be “some goddamn quack’s pincushion.” Besides, he could not have afforded the medical services, refusing any deductions from his paycheck to profit the insurance business. If there was anyone my father mistrusted more than a doctor, it was an insurance man.
Just then I heard the crunching of gravel and looked up in time to see my mother’s car pull into the driveway. She got out, waved at me with a grin (yes, that was my mother smiling), and went around to the side of the car. Only then did I notice the passenger. Without his beer belly, my father looked almost healthy as he got out of the car and shaded his eyes against the glare of the tin roof and my wrath. But as he stood stooped in front of me, I could see the sickness strung from his mouth to the gorges where his cheeks once were.
“Been behaving yourself?” my father asked, his breath corpsey. Lovely to see you too, Dad.
If I thought his ailment might do anything to soften his temper, I was wrong. While we all sat stiffly on the stoep, it seemed that there wasn’t one thing to talk about that did not involve my father’s bodily functions. “Can’t even have a decent crap anymore,” he announced. “I keep telling her to quit feeding me that goddamn mush!”
By way of explanation, my mother said, “His teeth are getting loose.”
“Because they aren’t put to work anymore! Keep telling her a goddamn steak would sort them out!” It might have been all poop-and-porridge talk had Beauty not walked out with a tray of tea, set it down, taken her usual seat at the crook of the veranda, and picked up her knitting from the basket. That did it.
“You pay your kaffirs to sit around all day now, Edith?” he asked my grandmother, staring at Beauty’s unwavering profile.
“Harry, please—” my mother began, but he interrupted her with his raised hand.
“Hey, for all I know my daughter does all the work around here.” When had my father ever considered what I was doing?
“What goes on in this house, Harold, is none of your business,” my grandmother retorted, “and if you cannot choose language suitable for civilized conversations, I must ask you to leave.”
“You have your monkey sitting out here and I’m the one not being civilized?” He snorted, then coughed till there was no mistaking the acrid smell of urine.
Beauty stood up to leave. “Tchini!” she hissed as she passed my father, who was hobbling to his feet, and for one minute I thought she was going to spit at him, but she walked back into the cool of the house. It was apparent, then, that the farm was overrun with men—the one in the front with his putrid temper and soiled diaper, and the other still sleeping in Beauty’s kaia. The only escape for Beauty was the kitchen, where she paced as though she had one foot in a trapper’s snare.
“I’m sorry, Beauty. She shouldn’t have brought him; I don’t know why she did,” I apologized awkwardly. Beauty muttered a reply in Xhosa, and I caught only one word, hamba—“go.” Instead of packing away the dishes on the draining board, she reached for her medicine bag and headed out the back door to the beckoning hill.
TODAY IS SATURDAY and my head is as clear as a scrubbed-up pancake griddle. I call Jenny and tell her I have changed my mind, that I want to go to the funeral.
“I was just headed there; yo
u want me to pick you up on my way?” she volunteers. I can tell she is pleased.
Jenny does not have to ring the doorbell; I am waiting outside, watching Ronnie cut his mother’s lawn with hand shears just slightly bigger than tweezers. Jenny is wearing a black dress and I am glad because I have on black too. “Don’t wear bright colors to my funeral,” I once told her and Theresa when we were sewing purple paraments for Ash Wednesday. “I can’t stand it when people wear flowery prints and bold colors as if we should skip the grieving and move straight on to the rejoicing. I don’t want you rejoicing at my funeral. I want you crying and wailing, and depressed for an unbearably long time.”
“You’d make a good Samoan,” Theresa told me.
But Jenny argued. “We rejoice because we are resurrection people.” Jenny’s favorite event on the Christian calendar is Easter, which accounts much of the time for her disposition as well as her faith. But to me Easter always elbows its way in on Lent, coming before there is time to shake off the weight of guilt, to strip away our regrets until good intentions finally become good deeds.
Now Jenny is quiet and pale, without a soupçon of rejoicing, and we do not talk till we get to the church. “I’m sitting with her,” she announces, and I nod. Tapa cloths drape the altar rail and are affixed to the pulpit and lectern, and the same gaudy bouquets are back again. Jakes is lying in a black coffin four feet from the front pew where his widow is steadied between her two sons, their heads hung low. Jenny walks to the front, sits next to Theresa, and pulls Tess onto her lap. I take a bulletin and find a pew near the back where a few ex-cons prop each other up. Greg, who does not see me, is seated across the aisle next to Petal. The service begins and we stand for the opening hymn, but the verse is interrupted by a shriek and then angry wailing. Petal’s baby, tipped over on the pew no doubt from trying to reach for a toy, has bumped her head. It is Greg who picks her up, hurrying to the foyer to minimize the disturbance. She will not be pacified, and all four verses and a prayer later, she still wails. Finally, Petal makes her way to the cries.
LATE THAT NIGHT, when we were all asleep—my mother in the bed next to mine, my father on a cot in Oupa’s old study—the wailing began. I thought it was a wounded animal, or a baby, until the cussing started. Looking out the window that faced the kopje from which Beauty late in the day had returned, I saw her in front of the chicken run, sjambok in hand, wild as a warthog. Before her, on his knees, was Stompie, bloodied and pleading for mercy. We ran out to the yard and watched in incomprehension as Beauty tore open Stompie’s flesh with each crack of that deadly whip. Her unrelenting screams terrified me, and as I clung to my mother’s arm I wondered how it was that Beauty, naked except for a tatty slip, hair all sprung out of its clips like Medusa’s snakes, could be this thrashing monster.
She seemed not to hear my grandmother’s reprimand or notice her audience, whose numbers had swelled with the neighboring farmhands. It was my father who sprang into action, dragging the garden hose from my grandmother’s hydrangea bush to the side of the house and spraying the writhing couple like a pair of dogs. Drenched, Beauty turned her mad gaze on my father, and the murderous gleam was still there.
“Ndiya kubetha,” she foamed.
“What’d you say, kaffir girl?” he demanded, throwing down the hose and pushing up his sleeves. I might have translated for him, might have said, “She says she’ll beat you—kill you,” if not for the deepest desire that she keep her word. And with one quick flick of her thick wrist, the wrist that had wrung chicken necks for Sunday dinners, Beauty’s whip etched on my father’s smug cheek a bright red gash.
It was a curse she pronounced then, though none of us could understand what she was saying at the time. But to see her pointing her finger in a sweeping arc across the farmland, to hear her angry chant and the gasps of the villagers, was enough. To my father she was just another bitch in a dogfight, but to Africa’s people she was their sangoma calling on the might of the ancestors, and nothing could be more powerful. Vengeance, that one night in Africa, was not the Lord’s but Beauty Masinama’s.
I INTENDED to pay my respects to Jakes, to remember he had done a decent job of charity even if his roofing skills weren’t worth a damn. But I am distracted by the sounds of Petal’s fussy child, by the dormant urge to comfort a child, by the empty space where her need to be comforted should be. As I join the condolence line a few people from the end, I hear my mother saying very clearly, as though she were talking to my father on the stoep, Please. Be nice. Nice things are what I hear the people in front of me saying, the things you say at funerals: I am so sorry for your loss; he was a remarkable man; we are going to miss him so much; if there is anything we can do. Then I hear the blood drumming a beat in my ears, the war cry of fed-up-tired, and the urge to smite comes charging. Suddenly Theresa and I are face-to-face.
Her expression registers shock and then softens, as though she understands why I am here. We are even, she must think; we have both lost. Truce. But she is wrong and wrong again. Why the tracks of grief down the sides of her cheeks don’t stop me, I do not know. Or the briefest of gestures: her hands lifting to embrace me. Surely I recognize that her eyes are empty rooms with burnt-out lightbulbs—God knows I stare at a couple of them every morning in the mirror. But I stand before them now and bore into that darkness, unafraid, my quick tongue a flickering sjambok. I remember Beauty so vividly. Not the servant, but the avenger. I envision her wet, swaying black bosom heaving from the effort of vengeance. So mighty is the urge to smite my enemy, to force vinegar to her parched lips, that I could be Beauty.
“Damn you, Theresa!” I curse. “Cleo’s dead because of you!” And just like Stompie, she doubles over, winded by my words.
When her eyes find mine, they are hooded. “I, too, have been looking for someone to blame,” she wheezes.
“DON’T LOOK, my girl,” my grandmother insisted, tugging at my elbow after the cops had broken Beauty’s nose. “You have seen enough for one night.” But I still had to look, to see my father hobbling up to the group of farmhands, threatening and swearing till they dispersed into the bush; to see policemen clubbing at Beauty’s back, her legs kicking out behind her till she had been shoved in the back of the van; to see how frantic my mother became.
I broke free from my grandmother’s grip and walked toward my mother while the policemen hoisted Stompie’s bloodied body into the back. “Perhaps we should uncuff them and let them at it,” the one laughed.
“Save us the effort,” snorted the other, and they tipped their hats at my grandmother before getting into the front of the van, as though she had baked them scones for tea.
“Mom!” I called, but she did not pay any attention to me.
“Beauty!” my mother cried, and in reply the face we all had come to love peered out from the barred back window. Just as the van pulled away she spoke to my mother, who had commenced a little jog to keep up with her words.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” Beauty called out to her. “Give us this day our daily bread.”
IF THERE IS A HELL, it might well be a church basement parking lot and I will be assigned to it. Abandoned cars that the finance committee will not pay to have towed away, the piss smell in the corner next to the elevator, the rotting debris in the garbage cans that the custodian has to be reminded to empty. The scene of rushed lunchtime fellatio in red pickups by women who look to be twelve; drug deals, oil spills, spiderwebs the size of afghans, and fluorescent bulbs on the blink. Jenny finds me on my haunches next to her car, having heaved my breakfast at the tires of the silver SUV blocking her in.
“I am not going for another hour or so,” Jenny says tersely. I stand up. “You will have to find your own way home.” Her jaw is set just so, her hands on her hips, and I know she is expecting me to say something. What do I tell her, this friend of Easter? That you nail someone to a tree because you can’t admit it should be you up there?
“I’ll walk,” I tell her, and turn to leave, but Jenny’
s anger wants an audience.
“There might have been a different time, Abbe. There was no reason for you to say it now.”
“I expect you are right,” I reply, turning to face her.
“You should have gotten that out of your system a long time ago; Lord knows she tried to give you the opportunity. But not now. Now it’s time to move on. Do you understand me? Just move on before you change completely into someone no one can put up with.”
“I am someone else,” I say, but Jenny will have none of it.
“You wish you were someone else, maybe, but you’re not. You are still Abbe and you are still going to have to deal with what’s happened. Blaming other people is not going to bring her back.”
I want to tell her she is right, so we can get this over with, but instead, I offer her only my obstinate silence.
She sighs. “We all miss Cleo, Abbe, and we all have regrets. We all wish we could have said or done something different so it didn’t happen the way it did. But all the wishing in the world is not going to change anything. See, but you’re still here and that’s like having a piece of her. It’s all we’ve got left. So please, Abbe, if there’s any part of you that’s going to change, don’t let it be that part.” When I still do not answer, she sighs once more, shakes her head, and walks away.
