Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  “Susannah!” I call, jabbing the doorbell, hearing it ding-dong down the hall.

  Delia is the first to the door. “What is wrong, madam?”

  “Someone has stolen my things!” I say through the bars.

  Susannah approaches. “Dear God!” she exclaims, pushing Delia aside and unlocking the gate. The hounds, late in detecting a guest, are all fired up and barking, and rush down the driveway as though leading a cavalry charge.

  “What’s missing?” Susannah asks, huffing beside me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I just came back from Langa; the alarm clock is gone, and my shoes, and a few of my daughter’s things.”

  We crowd into the little kaia, dogs too. “Off!” shouts Susannah when one of them jumps on the bed.

  “I left early this morning, but I could have sworn I locked up,” I say.

  “Is anything else missing? . . . Money? Passport?”

  “No, I had them with me in my handbag,” I answer, and then sit down on the bed with my head in my hands, exchanging composure for a cry. “They took my necklace, and the apricots,” I say between sobs.

  Susannah pats my shoulder, “There, there,” then hands me the tissue she has balled up in her sleeve. “It’s clean.”

  “I go get some more apricots,” says Delia, but before she leaves she adds, “Pepsi, madam! I know it was Pepsi!”

  Susannah seems irritated at the suggestion, as though she is tired of refereeing two bickering children. “But he’s not even here today, Delia; it’s his day off.” Pulling a chair from the table, Susannah sits down on it and pats my knee gently. “I am so sorry, Abbe. We will get to the bottom of this, I promise you. People talk around here.”

  “My alarm clock,” I cry.

  “Of course we will replace that, and whatever else you need.”

  “No, it’s my alarm clock from my home.” And she doesn’t understand. She cannot know how it has measured my breath and tears, my longing for Cleo. My favorite clock because it had all its numbers printed on its face, not like the others carelessly skipping numbers—12, 3, 6, 9—as if certain segments of time could just slip by unnoticed. She cannot possibly know what I now admit to myself, that the clock kept a vigil for me while I lost track. Since leaving Hawaii, the hours and days have stacked up without my counting. Other ghosts have elbowed their way in and a youth left years ago has been around every corner.

  My tissue-bearing, knee-patting landlady sits in front of me, “there-there-ing,” while I try to find solid ground. “My daughter died,” I say, looking up and into her face. “She got hit by a car over a year ago and that clock is about the only thing that’s kept me company.”

  “I am so terribly sorry,” Susannah responds. “What an awful loss to bear.”

  I wipe the tears and snot with the back of my shirtsleeve, her tissue soaked and crumpled next to me. “It’s supposed to get easier, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what everyone tells you: it gets easier. But when? When, exactly, does it get easier?” I know I am not going to get the little alarm clock back, just as I am never going to get Cleo back. Not the farm, my grandmother, my mother—they are all gone. Everything and everyone goes, yet nothing, other than grief and despair, steps from the wings and takes up even a little bit of the empty space.

  There are no more words now. There is nothing to say. We sit in the coolness of the round hut and I wish the thief had taken my heart too, useless as it is. Steal it, I shout in the hollows of my head. Take it all! After you have gathered up the goods, lean over and dip into my chest and take that beating, faceless clock too. The one that will not stop ticking and ringing and waking me up to anemic days. Take it, you thieving, faceless coward! Rip it out and begone with you!

  “You are going to be okay,” she says after a while. “You are tough—I can tell.”

  I pat my face and nod as Delia appears at the door with an apron full of apricots.

  “The Ou Missus saw me picking these, madam, and started swearing,” she warns Susannah.

  “I better go tell her what happened,” Susannah says, excusing herself. “Delia, you wait here with Miss Abbe.”

  As soon as she leaves, Delia issues verdicts, judge and jury all in one. “Pepsi and those friends of his always go crazy when it is lottery time. They drink too much and gamble all their money, and get into fights. That Pepsi is a skelm,” she says emphatically. “The madam and the Boss won’t fire him, but one day it is going to be too late.”

  Too Late is the eighth day of the week, one with which I am well familiar. Tomorrow I will sign the papers and then I can leave behind the skelms who rob the poor. I can leave behind Beauty and her spells, leave her to dance upon the graves of my people. I will leave behind a farm lying fallow in curses, a land in its eighth day.

  I DO NOT KNOW what time it is when Susannah pounds on my door, but when I sit up on the bed and look out at her serious expression catching the late sun, I know evening is fast approaching.

  “Sorry to wake you,” she apologizes.

  I wave her in. “No, it’s good that you did.”

  “I spoke to Yvette Dickson from next door and she says she saw a couple of men loitering about this morning. She did recognize one of them as Pepsi’s cohorts. Etienne will talk to Pepsi when he shows up for work tomorrow, but for now the police are handling it. Not that that will do much good, I’m afraid. But,” she continues, “we want you to join us for dinner tonight—Delia’s doing a roast chicken—and we both think you should sleep in our house tonight.” She opens her palm and offers me a miniature grandfather clock. “And this is for you. I got it as a present from Toby last Christmas, but my eyes aren’t good enough to make out the numbers,” she says. “I hope it can do the job, at least for now.”

  I thank her.

  “So is that a yes? You will be our guest tonight?”

  “Yes, I think I will.”

  “How about a nice hot bath for starters?”

  “Sounds good.” I grab my towel, my toiletry bag, and purse. And then, remembering the wine, I grab the bottle and offer it to Susannah.

  “I’ll trade you,” she says, handing me the new padlock with which I lock the door.

  We walk out into the cool evening just as the crickets begin to sing. The sun takes its sweet time to set in southern Africa in the summertime, but come autumn it slips away quickly, between blinks, tugging behind it a dark cloth. While the sky is ablaze, the foreboding clouds race in from the west as if bidden to come put out the fire. By the time we reach the kitchen door, Delia is getting on her coat and putting up her umbrella. Susannah gives her a twenty-rand note from her pocket for the taxi, thanks her, and hurries to see what Mrs. du Toit is calling about.

  “I never did get to thank you for helping me find Beauty Masinama,” I tell Delia.

  “Was it a good visit?” she asks.

  “It was and it wasn’t, but it cleared up some things for me.”

  “We have a saying in Xhosa: Your past is always with you—be friends with it and it will help you find a good future.”

  “Well, we’ll have to see about that. But thank you.”

  “I am very sorry for your daughter,” she offers.

  I nod in acknowledgment as she continues, “My youngest boy is going to die,” she says, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “He’s got AIDS.”

  “How long does he have?” I ask, reaching for her hand.

  “Not many more summers, maybe two.”

  “I am so sorry, Delia.”

  “In October he will be twenty-seven,” she continues. “He has three children.” All we can do is nod respectfully into the voids of each other’s pain. Our children are lost to us, and yet we have to keep from becoming lost to ourselves. Quickly, her stringy arms wrap around me with the ferocity of a desperate mother. “God give you strength,” she says, and then, putting her bag on her head, she sets off down the dark path, having inadvertently cracked the crust around my heart.

  BLOODY DOGS! is t
he last rational thought I have, stirred from a pleasant dream about Cleo by the high-pitched yap-yap-yapping of the Bredenkamps’ dogs. A thought wiped so quickly from my mind as though from a blackboard when their barking is interrupted by three chilling, thunderous claps. Bolt upright in the Bredenkamps’ guest room bed, peering into the clotting dark, I know it even though I have never heard it before. Gunshots.

  Just as quickly come the screams and the men’s voices shouting orders. At the other end of the corridor, words flare from a fitful speech like struck matches: “fucking,” “kill you,” “shoot,” while my brain tries to catch up with my body: You’re awake, it is the middle of the night, act quickly! As if to underscore the thought, the sound of Susannah’s sobs parenthesize my options. The windows next to my bed are barred; there must be a way out, a way to call for help. How long can it take to get to the neighbor’s? How long before they find me in this room?

  The door makes no sound when I open it, a detail for which I am disproportionately grateful, and the passage is dimly lit from the lights blazing at its other end. While the unfamiliar men’s voices get louder, shouting over Susannah’s raving appeals, I steal inches of corridor, edging against the wall, praying, praying to God that I will make it to the front door, swung wide like a dislocated limb. Twenty feet away might as well be China, but then it is surely only eight, and now where the light from Susannah’s room is bright enough that I am illumined, exposed, I have only two feet to go. Just one big step and I am outside. There is a loud male voice approaching from the west end of the house. I can make it. Hurry! I watch the living room doorway and for the shape that is surely to take its place any moment. Now! I take one last step, but my foot catches something large, warm. A footstool? I reach for the coatrack to correct my fall, but it collapses and the crash brings the gun to my temple. “Daar’s ’n vierde een!” “There’s a fourth one!” he yells. To my ear, he threatens, “One sound and it’s finished and kla!” Looking down, I see next to my left foot the bullet-blown shape that was once a corgi.

  Susannah’s Victorian bedspread and matching headboard is splattered with so much blood I am sure it is not just the dogs that are shot. Susannah is sitting in her wingback chair next to her dressing table, nightgown exposing her plump white thighs, her body shivering against the fright. Her hands are tied behind her back and her eyes, pleading at me, are saucer-wide with terror. She watches as I am pushed into the corner on the floor beside her by the man with beaded dreadlocks that clack like Beauty’s headdress. You read about these things happening all the time. You read about how the homeowners fight back, how they find a way to outsmart their captors. It is now for that way I search my mind.

  Pepsi, his gun stuck in the back of his work jeans, is swearing his frustration at Etienne, uncoiling the coat hanger and then twisting it around his employer’s thick wrists. One of Etienne’s eyes has already swollen shut, his lower lip burst like an overripe granadilla. Taking the tie from Etienne’s rack, Pepsi balls it up and stuffs it in his master’s mouth. In beige monogrammed pajamas, sitting on the edge of his bed, Etienne looks more like a schoolboy awoken from his boarding-school bed by bullies in some wicked initiation rite. I feel as though I have stumbled into a private moment, and the shame of seeing him so helpless, of him seeing me witness his shame, is awkward. I avert my eyes and resume the business of watching Susannah’s toes clench and unclench the carpet fibers.

  We hear the third intruder before we see him, shrilly shouting that he has the old woman, laughing that she may not need a bullet after all. When he pushes her into the room, he is a scarecrow no older than eighteen. “Grandma looks tired, Boss,” he says to the captor with dreadlocks. “How about I put her to sleep?” Mrs. du Toit is straining with the effort of breathing. “Mother!” Susannah cries, for which she receives a blow across her cheek with Boss’s gun-clenched hand. By the time Susannah revives, Mrs. du Toit has her arms bound tightly to her body with the telephone extension cord and has toppled over on her side from the inability to right herself on the edge of Susannah’s disheveled bed. Another coat hanger has been retrieved from the cupboard for my hands, and before long the prickle that comes with a lack of blood circulation covers my chilled hands.

  Pepsi and Boss rush out of the room. “If anyone makes a sound, shoot them, Lucky,” orders Boss, leaving our guard to ponder his question aloud: “Who do I shoot first?” Pointing his gun at each of us in turn, he ends on Mrs. du Toit. “Pow!” he shouts. “Pow, pow!” The old woman flinches and he laughs brutally, but just as quickly the grin is gone and his sneering face spits into Susannah’s, who has let out a bloodcurdling cry. The barrel of his gun presses up into the folds beneath her chin. “Make one more fucking sound and you lie with your dogs tonight!”

  While Lucky plays with his gun, reloading and recocking, we listen to the sound of the Bredenkamps’ house coming apart at its seams. Maybe there is a way to overpower him. He is a scrawny kid; we can take him; can’t we take him? Etienne and I? Etienne is making his own calculations—scanning the windows, the floor, the faces of his women. There must be something, some one thing that can get us out of the nightmare. When Pepsi passes by the doorway he is eating a drumstick from Delia’s leftover roast. Under his arm is the sherry bottle that had only hours ago stood on the Bredenkamps’ elaborately set dining table. Soon it will be over, I think—an attempt at rationality; they will have their loot and leave.

  Or will they?

  By the time Susannah’s clock chimes for the third time, the two come back with their duffel bags stuffed beyond zipping and Lucky is clearly fed up with restraint. They talk to each other in their language of clicks, making arrangements about our lives we cannot understand. Mrs. du Toit is pulled to her feet, leaving a damp spot on the coverlet to which Lucky points and laughs.

  “You won’t get away with this,” she scolds as Lucky pushes her out the door and into the living room.

  “Staan op julle!” Boss shouts at us to stand. And Etienne, Susannah, and I are tugged and pulled and pushed out the front door and down to the garage. Pepsi hands me the keys. “You drive!” he says, and opens the driver’s door of Etienne’s Volkswagen minivan. He unwraps the coat hanger wire and I slide onto the cold seat. We now know what Pepsi is really after—the safe in the manager’s office, the safe that has all the last-minute bets for tomorrow’s lottery draw.

  “Why don’t you just take me, Pepsi?” reasons Etienne. “There’s no need to involve the women.”

  “Fucking shut up!” Boss shouts, shoving him and Susannah in the back. After getting into the passenger seat, Pepsi looks at me and barks, “Drive!” With his free hand he retrieves the thing in his back pocket that has prevented him from sitting comfortably. It is the padlock to my kaia. Around Pepsi’s neck, glinting beneath the edge of a soiled collar, is Sal’s locket and the face of my little girl hidden within it. Pointing the gun at my temple, he sneers, “No fucking funny business.”

  The car sputters at first, protesting the cold, but I pump the gas and it jerks to life. I lean on the stick and pop the van into reverse without looking over my shoulder. After bumping down the driveway, the car turns into a deserted street.

  “LET’S GO FOR A DRIVE,” my grandmother said the Sunday after my mother’s funeral. When she turned left out onto Klippoort Highway in her beige Morris Minor and cruised past the wheat fields and the wine farms, never leaving third gear, I wished she would keep on driving. Driving till we crossed the border into a different life.

  “It hasn’t been easy for you this past year, has it?” she remarked.

  I shook my head, rearranging her knitting on my lap.

  “It’s a hard thing to lose someone you love,” she said. For a while the only sound was the motor straining for fourth. “Your mother had a sister, you know,” she announced.

  There are things, I had come to realize, I would never know about my mother. That she had a sibling is one thing for which I am completely unprepared. “I thought she was an only child.”r />
  “No.” My grandmother shook her head. “There was a baby who came after her—six years after her. We named her Rebecca. The sweetest little angel you ever laid your eyes on. And good. Oh my, she never so much as made a peep.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Recited was how her answer sounded. “She died one night in her sleep—cot death, is what they called it. She wasn’t even six months old, but I might as well have loved her all my life.”

  “Why didn’t Mom ever tell me about her?”

  “People deal with difficult circumstances in different ways. Your mother was always one for keeping things close to her chest. Like her father, that way. I think she always felt responsible, that Rebecca’s death was some sort of secret she had to keep. To your mother, keeping secrets was a form of survival, not betrayal.”

  “But you’ve never said anything before either!”

  “Quite right. Quite right.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “Well, for a while I wasn’t able to face the world. I thought I was never going to get over losing my baby. And I was right. I didn’t get over it, I just got past it. But it took another child to help me find my way.”

  “My mom,” I said.

  She nodded. “She came to my bedroom door one day—oh, maybe four or five months after Rebecca had died. She had her doll with her and one of its arms was missing. ‘Can you help me fix her, Mama? She’s broken,’ she said. I got out of bed and helped her mend the doll, and from that day forward I realized what I was called to do—what we are all called to do.” Without glancing at me, she said, “You, me, everyone. We’re menders. Mending the world is the only way we are mended ourselves.”

  She stopped the car on the road between Paarl and Franschhoek, where the mountain stretched out like a lady’s ballroom slipper, and got out. “Your turn,” she instructed. “It’s about time you learned.” And over the fifty kilometers that we sputtered and jerked and stalled home, she took up her knitting and never once glanced at the road to see how I was doing.