by Isla Morley
Jenny is right, but she also could not be more wrong. Cleo, every bit pure, held back none of her brightness from the world, and when she died, whatever sparks of it were in me went with her. I have only my own light by which to make my way, a light so dim it might as well be from that sick moon the night Beauty was taken away. The light that cast only enough of a glow to show how the slain were also the slayers, how the victims were also the villains.
PILGRIM IS ON THE DOORMAT when I get home, a lazy paw on the wing of a female cardinal struggling to flop away from his grasp.
“Pilgrim!” I shout, and slap him several times before he releases his prey. The bird’s beak opens and closes in silent yelps. As I cup my hand around her I can feel her rapid heartbeat. She rests her head on the top of my finger, and I head out to the garage where the cage is stored.
I asked Greg to stop bringing injured baby birds home from the church after the fifth one died in my hand. It was too much to bear. From their nests in the big royal poinciana, they fell with such regularity you would think that the parents, after all that effort, would be a little more vigilant about their offspring. But the chicks plummeted to their crippled, exposed existence on the walkway, flapping around in the hot sun till a cat’s claw or Greg’s hand found them. He would put the baby bird in the cage, but it was I who removed it and placed it on my chest and chanted prayers to save its life. Not once did they work. “Leave them in the cage at your office,” I told him finally.
I put this female cardinal in the cage. Hearing the phone ring, I leave the bird to die in peace, and head back inside to answer it.
“Hello?” I answer.
“Mevrou Elizabeth Deighton?” echoes a woman with a thick South African accent.
“Yes?”
“Please hold the line for Mr. Pietrus Slabbert,” she instructs. A beep-beep, and then I hear my grandmother’s attorney bellow across the continents.
“Elizabeth, how are you, my klein blommetjie?”
“Piet, you old doring!”
He laughs, never tiring of being called a thorn. “Good news: we have a buyer for the farm. I have an offer of eight million rand on my table,” he says.
“For cow pastures?” I ask incredulously.
“Not for long.”
“They know about the orchard and the soil?”
“These guys are developers from Johannesburg, skattie, they couldn’t care how vrot the soil is as long as they can pack on top of it a ton of concrete and a flashy sign that says Kabbeljou Resort and Spa. We’re talking five-star luxury here.”
“Oh my gosh, Piet, that’s great! What do I need to do?”
“Get Rhiaan to give you power of attorney and catch the next plane out here to sign the papers. They have given us a week.”
“That’s crazy—everyone’s on spring break. Getting a flight anytime before Easter is going to be near impossible.”
“Do what you can,” he says before hanging up. I look around my house. “I might get to keep you yet,” I whisper.
Supper is the avocado from Mrs. Chung’s tree and a cup of tea, taken during my phone call to Rhiaan.
“Can’t you go back and sign the papers?” I ask, but he tells me he is already behind his editor’s schedule, that he has to be in New York with his agent and publisher next week to discuss a promotional tour for his new material.
“What’s wrong with you going?” he asks.
“Two things, actually. First off, I don’t have the money for a ticket, and second, I’d really rather not go and face all those old ghosts.”
“In matters of finance I am only too happy to assist. Consider it a return on my investment. But as to the matter of ghosts, let me remind you of Dickens.”
“What does he have to do with it?”
“In Dickens’s stories, old ghosts always have things their hauntees must hear.”
Before bed, I go out to the garage to dispose of the little bird. Quite incredibly she is sitting on the cage’s perch. She looks at me without blinking. I’ll be darned, I think, and return to the house to fetch her a little tray of water and a tiny piece of daily bread.
EASTER
SEVENTEEN
The occupant of 43A is the Easter Bunny! Just how many Easter egg confectioneries can she tuck under her arms? After she has shoved her load into the overhead compartment, she wedges her overblown girth into the seat next to mine and turns to give me an apologetic smile for the bits that spill over.
“They are for my grandchildren. Chocoholism runs in our family!”
My face must be doing something that is an indication for her to keep talking.
“Those duty-free shops are just the best, aren’t they?” A ten-hour layover in a nondescript airport in a nebulous time zone can do things to a person, I tell myself, so make allowances. But then: “I bought me one of those fancy Chanel perfumes. Smell?” She thrusts her wrist into my airspace and all I can really make out is the need for a shower. “And a carton of Peter Stuyvesant only cost forty-nine dollars. Who can quit at those prices is what I’d like to know.”
Seated across the aisle must be her husband, because after failing to get much more than a tepid response from me, she spans the gap with her huge arm and knocks him. “Freddie, how much you say that Bacardi cost?”
Holy Week, once again, has been a blur. Either it has raced by or else it has taken as long as a small-town parade, I can’t decide which. Either way, time ceases to make sense. Upside-Down-and-Back-to-Front Week, that’s what they should call it. I slip the airline-issued blindfold over my eyes, an added precaution against any further conversations about chocolate-covered eggs or duty-free tobacco, and wait for Easter or touchdown, whichever comes first.
It is the captain’s voice over the airplane’s PA system that gets me started—the lump in my throat, then the tears. His guttural r’s tripping over one another in greeting: “If this is your first visit to the Cape of Good Hope, welcome; for those of you returning, welcome home, welkom tuis, and Happy Easter.” As we make the bumpy descent through the clouds, twenty years vanish with the altitude. Table Mountain rises like the shin of the continent. Sprawled at its foot is the city of my birth, just beginning to stir.
Even before we land, the beat, the pulse, the drumming of Africa can be felt, the pennywhistle calling to join the dance. From a distance, the Cape is tidy and well behaved. There are no battle cries, no signs of spilled blood on the doorstop of Africa, no phalanx of people toyi-toying its way through dry riverbeds. Have the swords been beaten into plowshares? Does the lion lie now with the lamb? People say it is a different Africa, this one to which I return. Unrecognizable even. The captives have been set free, debts have been forgiven, land returned to its rightful owners. The Land of Jubilee, you might say. Or, on this early Easter morning, the Land of Resurrection. We will see, but for now, for me, it is an Africa of ghosts. I take a deep breath, pinch my nose, and blow to relieve the pressure.
THE FACE of civilized suburban society opens the door. With a pair of pruning shears in one hand, a quick apology on her lips, and a trail of corgi dogs behind her, she is understated wealth. My God, I think, the Queen.
“Sorry, didn’t hear the doorbell . . . I’m pruning the roses out in the back,” she says, her voice surprisingly high for a woman who is at least a foot taller than me and twice as wide. And then, “Can I help you?”
“I called earlier,” I say to the overweight canines that have begun their business of smelling my legs.
She shakes her head slightly, gray curls bouncing to and fro, and looks at me quizzically.
“About your ad in the Visitors’ Guide,” I explain. Bredenkamp B&B was featured last in the list of bed and breakfasts in the pamphlet at the concierge desk. I called it first because it was the cheapest.
“Oh yes, of course! It has been in there for months, but nobody has ever inquired. Ladies!” she snaps, and I realize she is addressing the dogs, which instantly duck and retreat behind her.
“It is still
available?”
“Well, yes. As a matter of fact you will be our first guest! Let’s go take a look. Hold on a mo’,” she says, and she hurries into the house. She turns back to me and beckons. “Come in, come in while I get the key before you catch your death.”
She leads me into her kitchen, warm and thick with the redolence of stew.
“Molo mama,” I greet her maid, baking at the stove.
“Good morning, missus,” she replies in perfect English.
“My manners! Forgive me—that’s Delia, and I’m Susannah Bredenkamp, and this is my mother, Antjie du Toit,” she says of the stooped pale old lady entering the room, birdlike hands clutching a cigarette.
“How do you do. Elizabeth Spenser—Abbe for short,” I say, surprised that I am using my maiden name, and shake hands with everyone. The Queen Mother takes note of me shaking Delia’s hand. “Funny time to show up, isn’t it, on Easter Monday?” she asks.
Before I have a chance to answer, Susannah, who has been mumbling “Spenser, Spenser,” says, “You’re not related to Harry and Louise Spenser, are you?”
“Yes, I’m their daughter.”
“Oh my—what a small world,” she replies.
“Lord Almighty! A prodigal, I should say,” adds Mrs. du Toit.
“You knew my parents?”
“Not very well.” She turns to the old lady. “Mother knew your grandmother quite well, didn’t you, Mom?”
“A difficult man, your father,” Mrs. du Toit answers with the luxury of bluntness only advanced years afford. “Don’t know how Edith’s girl put up with that kind of nonsense.”
“Mother!” Susannah chastises.
The old woman continues, “Yes, well. Your mother was very kind. Donated a lot of books to the children’s center before she died—a shame to go that early. Of course your grandmother’s contribution helped fund the project from the get-go.”
“Mother is one of the benefactors of the little day care center for children with learning disabilities,” Susannah explains to me.
“Bloody government wasn’t going to do a thing about it,” she grumbles, and I see Delia nodding. “As usual. Fingers up their bums, the bloody lot of them!”
“Scoundrels, madam,” adds Delia.
“You must excuse my mother,” chuckles Susannah. “She has very strong opinions that she thinks are a waste if kept to herself.”
“Better than having no opinions at all, like some people around here,” she retorts. “Delia, when you get a minute, bring me in a cup of tea,” says the old woman, retreating to the outer room.
“Nice to meet you,” I say hastily, hoping to have heard her speak more of my mother and grandmother, but she is already gone.
“Doesn’t hear too well anymore,” says Susannah, and then changes the subject.
“Your brother, then, is Rhiaan Spenser, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, he is.”
“A champion of the underdog,” she continues. “The voice—or the pen, rather—of people who felt the way I did back then.”
She reaches for the shelf and brings down an old coffee tin and extracts from it a small key. “Just going to show Miss Spenser the kaia, Delia, won’t be a minute.”
She leads me out the back door and along the path that goes around the side of the house and down the hill to a tiny cottage. The aloes are chest-high, their blooms long since spent.
There is a padlock on the green Dutch door that takes some jiggling, but it finally unlatches and Susannah pushes it open and brushes away the cobwebs.
“It is really quite small,” she begins apologizing, “and rather musty. My husband got a bee in his bonnet about having a B&B, as if the shop isn’t enough of a headache.” Susannah explains that her husband is the proprietor of the local grocery market, which also serves as a post office and a feedstore, and although he employs a manager to run the day-to-day operations, he spends many nights trying to make the columns of his profit-and-loss balance. “I don’t know if it is suitable for your purposes,” she tests.
“I’m here only for a week—to wind up my grandmother’s trust,” I say. “I don’t need anything fancy.”
I step into the dark single room and immediately feel it is the right space. There are two small windows, each no bigger than a shoe box. Beneath one window is a single bed with a faded patchwork quilt and a bedside table with a crocheted tablecloth and a small lamp. On the other side of the circular room is a Formica table with two chairs. A cupboard with two doors is mounted above the sink—a porcelain bowl set into a matching pinewood cabinet. There is a single picture in the room, a rendition of Jesus with hippie hair and blue eyes contemplating the left corner of the ceiling. I follow his gaze, but there is nothing to see except a few spiderwebs and a brown stain in the shape of a shoe. An exposed bulb hangs from the middle of the pitched ceiling. I pull on its chain and it sends its artificial yellow glow a few feet around the room.
“This used to be the maid’s quarters back in the old days,” says Susannah.
“Yes, there was one just like it on my grandmother’s property,” I say, recalling the paraffin lamp in Beauty’s window.
“Is it her farm that is going to be sold? I heard there are plans for a luxury resort near here—I hope it isn’t hers.”
“Actually, it is.”
“Put my foot in it, didn’t I? You might not mention it to my mother. She’s bound to persuade you otherwise.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t go to the council meetings, but from what my husband says, most of the folk want the Paarl area to stay the way it is. They don’t want it to be turned into one of those glitzy atrocities plaguing the rest of the Cape, and they are all a bit put out that the developers prevailed—or rather, money prevailed.”
“Well, things do not stay the same, do they?”
“So they tell me. I’ll give you a few minutes to look around. Take your time and come up to the house for a cup of tea when you’re done.” And suddenly I am alone in this small space with its smell of a thousand wood fires, an incense luring memories of another kaia from another time.
IT WAS NOT for something particular I was looking, the morning after Beauty’s arrest, when dawn first poked its head over my windowsill and I could keep from fidgeting no longer. I can’t even be sure if I was looking for anything at all. Anything concrete. Perhaps I was just hoping to find something that could explain why the man with yellow eyes had come to the farm in the first place, something that could explain why the tight space of Beauty’s kaia could not contain their fight, what it was that had sent her into the puddles of light with a sjambok in her hand and murder in her voice.
Instead of shrunken heads on spikes or a shrine of witch magic, Beauty’s was a room as conventional as any bedroom in my grandmother’s farmhouse. There were no clues, no signs, no big black book of curses and spells. And I might have been convinced that it was just a room with a bed on bricks next to a washstand and a table if it weren’t for the unmistakable odor of mystery among the scent of clothes laundered with Lifebuoy soap. The odor of something unknown, something that had reeled in the little man, that had turned Beauty upside down and shook her until, dislodged, all the anger spilled out. It was the smell of knobkieries and long knives, of secrets and chants, of toi-toi, of anarchy. A smell that made me linger and want to run at the same time.
It was a punishable offense to go snooping about in other people’s business, corporal if the snooping took you to the off-limits quarters of black people. There were laws governing the freedom of movement of people between white and black neighborhoods, and I felt I was breaking every one of them when I walked around Beauty’s room lightly touching each object: lamp, tin cup, television. Her kitchen was a table with a basin, a jug, four stacked cans of beans, and a bread box. I opened the lid and in it, upended, was half a loaf of stale brown bread.
Give us this day our daily bread. Isn’t that what Beauty had recited as she was driven off in the police van? Had she mea
nt this bread? Flipped like a shiny coin, the thought spiraled wildly. Heads or tails? I held my breath and picked up the loaf. Immediately I saw the thing that convinced me that Beauty’s last sentence had not been a prayer but an instruction, for hidden in the gouged-out center of the loaf was a small glass vial.
A rose wants picking, as does a scab or a secret—you cannot help it—which is why, when my mother surged into the tiny room, I was prying from its yeasty bed the little bottle.
“Put that down! PUT THAT DOWN!”
I looked at her, bewildered.
“What in God’s name do you think you are doing, Elizabeth!” she demanded, snatching from me the bottle and then the loaf. “Did you open it?” she yelled, but I was too busy staring at the spectacle of madness before me. “DID YOU OPEN IT?”
“No,” I bleated, but she asked again and a hundred times more. “I didn’t, Ma, I swear.”
After replacing the bottle and the bread in the bread box, she yanked me by the wrist outside and around to the back of the kaia where the faucet was. Turning it on full blast, she held my hands beneath the torrent, and rubbed and rubbed with her nightgown till we were both soaked.
So aghast was I by my mother’s uncharacteristic show of emotion and so embarrassed that I had been caught in the unpardonable act of riffling through someone else’s private belongings that I began to cry. Not to mention the matter of a secret I had discovered, a secret I had been inches away from tasting.
“Don’t you ever, ever, take things that don’t belong to you,” she scolded.
“But I wasn’t—”
“Or touch anything that doesn’t belong to you. And don’t you ever, ever go back in there again! Do you hear me?” I nodded. “I said, do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
She shooed me back into my bedroom and then, trembly and psychotic, went to the bathroom to throw up.
