by Isla Morley
I gasp at the realization. “It was poison, wasn’t it?” Beauty does not answer. “Wasn’t it!” On the tip of Shaka’s spear.
“It is not right to disturb the dead for their secrets, umntwana, and sometimes it is better to leave the past behind us.”
“I am not an umntwana anymore, Beauty! She was my mother, he was my father, and I have a right to know!” This time I look at the niece. “Tell her! Tell her I have a right to know!”
After a long pause, Beauty takes a deep breath. “She came to the farm that day, you and her, and she was very afraid. But not like a hyena is afraid; more like a lion who has to protect her cubs. Boss Harry had murder on his breath, she told the madam; she said he would come for her, and for you. It was the madam’s idea to telephone the police, but Miss Louise went pale like a snake belly. Men with uniforms think a good beating is the best way to teach someone a lesson, especially wives who they think are slow to learn. No, Miss Louise said she couldn’t have the policemen come; she was going to think of another way. Your mother came to my door after the roosters had gone to bed. She said to me, ‘I am going to kill him, Beauty; I am going to kill him before he kills us.’ I could see only a mother lion on my doorstep, nothing else. ‘I am going to need your help,’ she said. In my tradition, when a lion comes to your door, you give it what it wants.”
A sangoma trained in the way of the ancestors, Beauty tells me how she offered a remedy as ancient as the hills from which its ingredients were gathered. “I was happy to help Miss Louise, so she and you could be safe.” Her words slide around in my head like tumblers on a ship captain’s table, and a swell of nausea rocks my stomach.
“But he died of kidney and liver failure,” I wanly protest, even while recalling the pestle and mortar on the kitchen counter, Beauty’s medicine pouch. “The doctors would have known if he had been poisoned.”
She shakes her head no. “Impila is a very clever little plant. It can fool the white man’s doctors.” Looking at Nontlé as though this were part of her required coursework, she says, “The only difference between medicine and poison is portion.”
As Beauty explains it, the dose was meant to be administered every day in incremental drops at each meal. After a two-month diet of the deadly sap, my father’s renal system would shut down in such a way as to mimic the results of a lifelong affair with the bottle.
“But it took longer than that,” I say, trying to pick my way through the ruins of memories.
“I told Miss Louise, ‘Leave the girl here; do not take her home with you; I have seen too many people eating from the dish meant for the devil.’ But she missed you so much. She came to visit, but every time she did, your father had days to get better.” Beauty’s voice becomes softer; her eyelids close as though she is reliving an awful decision. “So you see, klein miss, it was my fault she left you; it was me who told her not to come anymore, not until the impila had done its job.”
“That’s why she brought him to the farm that day . . . so she could see me and still give him the poison.”
“Ewe.” She nods, and sighs. “I should have killed him myself that night.”
“The night you were fighting with Stompie?”
“Haai! That stupid inja! He needed to be whipped for all the money he took from me. But it was your father I wanted to kill, coming to the farm, bringing all his sick ways.”
“And so when my mother ran to the police van and you said, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’—”
She nods again. “I was telling her where I kept the poison so she could finish the job.”
The tears finally come. You will do anything for your children, even die for them.
MY MOTHER DIED not even a handful of months after she buried my father. Standing between my grandmother and Rhiaan at her funeral, I felt like a stranger, unable to give the mourners who greeted me the show they expected. How could I tell them that I had been grieving my mother’s absence for years? How could I tell them it was not comfort I was seeking, but a culprit, someone to blame for her death?
I would not have recognized the man who, on the other end of the phone, had made my mother laugh all those years ago. He might have shaken my hand anonymously and slipped by into the broad African daylight had it not been for his remark.
“My condolences to you, young lady,” he said. “You and your brother were the world to her, you know.” Quietly then, as an afterthought, he added, “And your mother was the world to me.” Suddenly I saw my mother as I had never before seen her, as the beautiful pirouetting axis upon which someone else’s world had rotated. Someone whose parting had caused the creases of sorrow on his brow, who had made his gray eyes thoroughly rheumy with grief but who could nevertheless see her more clearly than I ever could.
My mother’s lover was not at all how I imagined him to be. He ought to have been taller than this docile man, ought to have been broad-shouldered and dark-haired like the leading men of paperback romances. He ought to have been a man whose stature would have been a brash stand-up to my father’s burly frame. Instead, the man with the gentle handshake and soft voice was sketched in pastels. He was gone before I could say anything in reply. Later, at the cemetery, when I found my brother reading the headstones of my mother’s earthly neighbors, I asked him about the pallid man with the cane.
“Professor Colin Wellsley, my high school English teacher,” he said.
“He’s the one you dedicated the anthology to!” I suddenly realized, recalling the single line of inscription on the first page of my brother’s debut book.
“That’s right. In many ways, he became a surrogate father to me,” Rhiaan added.
“But he’s the one Mom had an affair with,” I continued, and Rhiaan stared at me as though watching a movie rewind itself.
“Yes,” he said sadly, and returned to the task of reading the headstones. “I know.”
The mourners gathered in the small living room of our old house, around side tables on which Auntie Muriel and Mrs. Folliett had set trays of sandwiches and cream puffs and meatballs on toothpicks. Their mouths, buttoned up earlier in church, now flapped in the breeze of clichés. I retreated to my old bedroom, after hearing gossip passed like napkins: “Did you hear they have to sell the house just to pay off the debts? The children aren’t going to inherit a dime!”
The room was still the same except for my mother’s jar of cold cream on the bedside table and a picture frame serving as a paperweight for a thrift-store novel. The photograph was of Rhiaan and me at the Christmas table, both with lopsided grins and paper crowns. I didn’t even remember the picture being taken.
It was my mother’s scent that billowed out of the closet when I slid open the door. Among a few of my abandoned school uniforms were her dresses and coats, a hanger filled with shoes—all of them new. I searched the shelves for her old clothes, but all I found were more new clothes: slips still with price tags, sweet-sixteen lingerie, and a nightie a bride might wear.
People said it was such a shame; they said wasn’t it just like life that my mother died so soon after my father. It’s often the case, they said; one goes, and the other can’t seem to find a way to go on. What rot! If her new clothes and the freshly papered walls were anything to go by, it was obvious my mother had found a way. She had found a way with Professor Wellsley, Mr. No-One-Friend.
I sat down at the desk in front of the window that blinked out at the apricot tree, the place where first Mrs. Folliett, then the paramedics, found my mother the day she died. Perhaps she had sat down to write a letter to me or Rhiaan, or perhaps she had just sat down to watch the tree, the way I had done many times before.
The tree had taught me about life, death, and resurrection better than any Sunday school class. After a season of endlessly producing fruit, it would lose all its leaves, and by the time the fluorescent lights stayed on almost all day it was just a bare rack. Blackened from the rain, its witchy branches would scrape against my window as if begging to be let in. Most days I wante
d to scratch back, “It’s no warmer in here!” And then, in spring, when I thought I could bear the goblin days no more, I would look out and see tiny pink-brown buds covering the tree. They would appear overnight, and although they did little to alter the mien of the broomstick tree, those buds promised sunshine and good cheer long before I saw them with my own eyes. A dozen winters I spent in that bedroom waiting for the buds, and always they came. If someone had to ask me to define faith, “the old apricot tree” is what I would say. If people wanted something to talk about, it should have been how my mother died when the tree was covered in blossoms.
“SHE DIED three months after he did, you know?” I say.
Beauty nods.
“Nobody really knew why. My grandmother wouldn’t let them do an autopsy.”
“Ai,” Beauty says, shaking her head. “It was not right that she died so young. Miss Louise had life again; she had made her fist.” Beauty raises her arm in the old salute of African power: Amandla! “I have often wondered what happened to the lion at my door.”
“There’s no way to know.”
Beauty looks at her niece and nods her head. “Fetch the bones.”
After she has set the parcel on the floor, the niece helps Beauty out of her bed. I take her other arm and the old woman eases down until she rests on her knees. From the parcel, she unwraps a buckskin, impala perhaps, and lays it out in front of her. She straightens up only slightly as Nontlé removes her doek and replaces it with a headdress of beads, bells, and feathers. Around the old woman’s shoulders she places a colorful blanket, and my grandmother’s old maid has been transformed into a sorcerer. When she says, “The ancestors can tell us things no one else can,” I am surprised to hear the familiar voice and not something that sounds like a record played backwards. Swaying her head till the beads clack and the bells ring like wind chimes, Beauty nods at Nontlé, who empties the contents of the pouch into her wide, craggy hands. Once they are sealed between her fingers, Beauty raises her hands to the ceiling and shakes them, and chants in a tongue I do not understand.
The fragments land in a haphazard fashion, and I am surprised to see not only bones, which look as though they might have been pilfered from my grandmother’s oxtail stew, but shells and stones and the claw of a bird. In Beauty’s right hand Nontlé places a short stick, the end of which is bushy with horsehair, and immediately the old sangoma bends over to examine her wares. Unsatisfied, she begins to run her hands over the objects, Braille-like. Only once does she point to a shell and ask her niece, “Which one?” After she gets her answer, she straightens her back and sits quietly. After several minutes her pearly eyes find mine.
“The ancestors have answered about your mother’s death,” she says.
I nod, afraid to speak, afraid she will decide not to tell me. She makes to get up and Nontlé and I help her rise and get back into bed. The niece then removes her headdress and draws the blanket from her shoulders. While I stand next to Beauty’s bed, the niece packs up Beauty’s magic as though it were an abandoned game of checkers. Only when she leaves the room does Beauty speak.
“Your mother’s death and your father’s death are the same,” she says, shaking her head. “I am very sorry.”
“You mean . . .”
“She died from the poison, yes.”
“But how is that possible?”
Beauty rubs her eyes, moist now. “Very, very dangerous is impila; even when a drop touches the finger it can find a way quickly to the insides. Your mother knew this; I told her. Miss Louise was not afraid anymore; she said if she was going to die, better from trying than from Boss Harry’s hand.”
It is claustrophobic, this little room with its caving ceiling and moving walls. “Beauty, thank you for helping me, but I think I should go now,” I say, wanting, more than anything, to slip free of Africa’s clutches.
“The ancestors have spoken of your death too, klein miss.”
Blood running cold, isn’t that how the expression goes? The chill that has been blowing in through the window is now racing through my veins, and I recall Jenny’s prophetic words, They come in threes.
“It is a warning from the great Qamatha, the One Above All,” she continues.
“Please, Beauty,” I say, “I think I’ve heard enough for one day. There is a lot to take in.”
Ignoring my request, she says, “You are being poisoned too, klein miss, by your own heart.”
“Please, I really must leave!”
This time it is her hand that grips mine. “You have the bird in your path,” she goes on. “The bird is the messenger. Look beyond your immediate situation; the healing is on the horizon if you choose it. Umntwana, you are your mother’s daughter; you now must be a warrior like her.” Beauty releases my hand.
Suddenly in the dusty room the particles of light seem to merge so that I see what Beauty has seen all along. Whether conjured by her magic or my wishing-hard, my mother appears before me. Not the demure housewife with an apologetic slump of her shoulders or the mother who left her child on Africa’s doorstep. Around her eye is not the violet smudge of a bruise but a stripe of red clay, and over her upright shoulder is not a shawl but a kaross. Standing before me is my mother the warrior, beckoned from the plains of Africa’s ancestral grounds. She smiles and it is as though the sun has just risen. I smile back at her, this vision or ghost. And then she is gone before I can decide which. “Now you can go,” Beauty says. “Now it is time for you to go home.”
TWENTY
The taxi, before turning north, deposits me in front of the Bredenkamps’ store. It feels good to stretch my legs, and I am hoping the half-mile walk to the B&B might do my head some good too. Only two cars are parked outside, and on the store’s veranda is a huddle of old tribal men sitting on orange crates and smoking their pipes. I walk into the cool of the store and push through the small turnstile, hoping to put aside—at least for a while—thoughts of witch doctors, avenging mothers, and poisoned fathers.
“Good day to you,” says a male voice, and I turn around to see where it has come from. “Up here,” it says when I don’t see anyone. Leaning out the window of an elevated office above the cigarette counter is a gray-haired man with a beaming smile and a cigarette-clutching hand waving in my direction. Etienne’s manager.
“Hello,” I say to the lined, friendly face.
“Just in time for sausage rolls, straight out of the oven. Four rand fifty each or twenty rand for six!” he says, cigarette gesturing to the right. I follow its direction and see the sign that says BAKERY.
“Thank you, I’ll try one.” I nod, before walking down an aisle of canned food.
I fill the shopping basket with two cans of ravioli, two cans of halved pears, and, on impulse, a jar of artichoke hearts—enough to get me through to Monday’s airplane fare. I wander down the center aisle and take a furtive glance at the office window, and since the manager is no longer there, I take a U-turn down the wine aisle for Pinotage Cheap ’n’ Nasty. Since it is to be a night of indulgences, why not candy too? I peruse my childhood favorites: Caramello Bears, licorice (still sold without wrappers), Smarties. It is my mother’s favorites I reach for—a box of Wilson’s Mint Imperials, its scent infamous for veiling the breath of liquor. At the produce section, I pick out a huge grapefruit and a couple of bananas, then head to the bakery. “One sausage roll, please,” I ask the young girl in her oversized baker’s jacket. She is too shy to look at me directly and, keeping her head bent like a Karoo sunflower that hasn’t seen rain for months, pushes the packet toward me.
On the way to the checkout stand I lean over the stack of newspapers for a copy of this month’s Fairlady. While the cashier rings up my purchase, the manager sticks his head out the window again.
“Find everything, miss?” he asks.
“Yes, thank you,” I reply.
“Got one of them pies, did you?”
“Yes, I did, thank you.”
“If it’s not the best sausage roll you’ve
ever tasted, come back for a full refund,” he says cheerfully.
“Okay,” I say, and hand the cashier two twenty-rand notes.
“Going to get your Lotto ticket?” he asks. “One million rand in the coffers and the big draw is at four o’clock tomorrow.”
“Next time, maybe.”
“Won’t be a next time this big.”
“That’s okay, all the same.”
When I walk out with my two bags, I hear him call “Goodbye,” but the doors close behind me before I can turn around and reply.
THE ALARM CLOCK is missing. I notice its absence immediately, and the groceries drop as I rush to the bedstand and look under it. The clock is gone! Turning wildly, I notice that the apricots are gone too. Cleo’s bunny is no longer at the foot of the bed and my boots, parked earlier on the floor beside it, are gone too. Sal’s locket, which I took off last night and left next to the washbasin, is no more. I run outside and around the back of the kaia, searching madly for the culprit, and succeed only in startling a pair of guinea fowl, which shuffle into the bush. I rush back to the front door of the kaia, heart pounding, feeling the anger rise to my face. Idiot! You lock your doors in Africa, I chastise myself, noticing the padlock is missing too.
“Bugger!” I swear. “Shit!” And then I cry because I have so little anyway and someone has taken my shoes and Mrs. du Toit’s pilfered apricots my mouth was all set to eat. And Cleo’s Easter bunny.
“Thieving bastards!” A nameless black face comes to mind. “Thieving bastards, the lot of them,” I can hear my father say. “Thieves and murderers!” I almost nod in agreement. Why are they always black faces, the ones with the hands that wrench wallets from pockets or pies from windowsills? The hands that stab farmers and their wives on the moonless nights. Hands that grind mountain plants into hemlock.
Picking up my handbag, I race up to the main house. The door is open but the burglar gate is locked.
