Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  For the past few nights, in the lighted warmth of the kitchen, she and Jem cradled their mugs of coffee and planned where they would plant each rosebush and bulb, how they would dig into the poor orange earth of the graveyard and backfill the holes with good compost. The weather has been on their side. A light rain fell all day, leaving the cold soil wet and friable. Their spades scrape and stab into the tomato-coloured mud. It’s hard work. The night air is chilling the sweat as soon as it appears and Sam’s hands are starting to ache but she pushes on until at last the ground is ready.

  As the eastern sky turns from navy to deep blue, she and Jem unwrap the little hessian bundles and plant the baby rosebushes into their fresh burrows of bone meal and compost. Then they push bulbs into the turned earth between them. Some will flower next winter when the roses are bare, some in spring, and others will bloom in summer, their strident faces poking up between the rose buds.

  Jem stretches out his back and surveys their handiwork. There’s not much to see, just a bunch of sticks poking out of disturbed soil. He’s sure nobody will notice before the sap rises and the leaves burst out.

  ‘Now all we need is some more rain for their first watering.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’ Sam points west to where the sky is being swallowed up by a dark shadowy shape blowing in over the mountains.

  ‘Perfect timing, hey?’ Jem looks to where the scudding clouds are just starting to fold over their helpful moon. ‘Clearly your ouma put in a good word for us.’

  ‘She sure did.’

  Jem pulls the girl into a hug, and Sam breathes in his familiar smell of soil and sap and green things waiting to grow.

  ‘It’s going to be beautiful come spring,’ she whispers into the scratchy wool of his jersey. The tears are hot and then icy on her cheeks, but she lets them fall.

  PART THREE

  THE COPPER-FEATHERED EAGLE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SAM RIDES JEM’S old motorbike into Main Street. When the tar was first laid a few years before, it had been raw and gleaming, turning the town into the equivalent of a khaki-clad farmer wearing a shiny leather belt, but since then, the constant coatings of Karoo dust have made it barely discernible from the surrounding farm roads.

  Sam brings the bike to a stop outside the Super Saver. The heat of the road rises up and simmers between the skin of her calves and the cracked leather of Anneke’s old horse-riding boots. Sam’s been wearing the boots, along with a motley assortment of Anneke’s old clothes, ever since she’s been big enough to fit into them. The boots are her favourite. Without their hard soles, she’d never be able to kick-start the arthritic old Yamaha to life.

  She climbs off the bike to wrestle the bent kickstand into doing her bidding. It hasn’t been the same since she lost control of the bike on a patch of loose sand last month and skidded into a boulder. She curses herself, again, for having been so thoughtless.

  ‘When’s your grandpa going to fix that old thing?’ Mr Vosloo asks when she walks into the store. After the glare of the street, the shop is gloomy, even with the buzzing blue light coming from the fluorescent tubes above the aisles. Sam blinks, spots Mr Vosloo restocking the hanging rack with packets of batteries, and remembers to smile.

  ‘It’s not like that old Engelsman to let something go unmended, is it?’ he says.

  ‘I haven’t told him yet, Mr Vosloo. Don’t want a lecture.’ Sam adds just the right amount of conspiratorial tone into her answer. Mr Vosloo grins.

  ‘You kids. Dewalt’s just the same. Wants to be a big man and go playing with the grown-up’s toys, but is too poep-scared to take the fall when something goes wrong. Isn’t that right, Betty?’

  Betty, dark and wordless at her post behind the till, gives what is most likely a nod.

  ‘Hi, Betty.’ Sam picks up a basket and heads to the aisles. She hears another customer enter the store behind her, and freezes when she hears Mr Vosloo’s obsequious greeting:

  ‘Good day, Mr le Roux!’ She glances sideways to see Mr Vosloo almost bowing to the great grape-grower. Tertius le Roux. Jem’s sworn enemy seems to have grown taller since Sam last saw him almost six years ago at Anneke’s funeral, and his farmer’s moustache is even bristlier. She ducks down behind a shelf, pretending to read the ingredients on a packet of biscuits that she has no intention of buying.

  ‘I hear your lovely daughter has returned to the bosom of her family,’ Mr Vosloo says, and Sam scowls. Who the hell says ‘bosom of the family’? Does the shopkeeper think le Roux will spend more in his store if he talks like an idiot from the eighteen hundreds?

  ‘She has.’ Le Roux’s answer is brisk, but polite. ‘With her husband, Charlie, and my little granddaughter.’

  ‘Ag, that’s lovely, hey? Must be nice to have all the family together.’

  ‘Ag, ja, it’s good to have Liezette home.’ The warmth in le Roux’s voice doesn’t sit neatly with Sam’s mental picture of him. This is the man who thought Anneke’s garden wasn’t worthy of the water which he had no rights to. She resists the urge to peer around the shelf to check if his fingers are crossed behind his back.

  ‘And her daughter, little Delia, is a treasure,’ le Roux adds.

  The laroo-girl is a mother? Sam can’t imagine her as anything other than an otherworldly creature galloping through a blossoming orchard.

  ‘I heard you bought Liezette a new horse, to celebrate her homecoming,’ Mr Vosloo says, and for a moment Sam smiles to think of the laroo-girl riding out again, half human, half horse.

  ‘What a lucky girl, hey?’

  ‘Yes.’ Le Roux must have had enough of discussing his daughter with sweaty old Mr Vosloo, because he is suddenly back to business: ‘Just the newspaper today, please, Betty.’ Le Roux pays Betty, says polite goodbyes, and then leaves. Sam exhales. If he’d noticed her, would he know who she was? Probably. Her Anneke-hair is always a dead giveaway.

  She returns the biscuits to their shelf and gives a little jump when she realises that Mr Vosloo is now staring at her, folded arms resting on the bulge of his prodigious gut.

  ‘You and my Dewalt are about the same age, aren’t you?’ Mr Vosloo’s chatty mood has obviously not been satisfied by le Roux’s brief visit. Sam remembers Dewalt Vosloo. He was one of the boarder boys she and Keegan used to run from each time the school holidays came around.

  ‘Yup. Seventeen next week.’ Sam selects a packet of green Sunlight soap bars, a box of Five Roses tea.

  ‘I heard that your arty-farty teacher said that you’re not going to classes at her house any more.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Sam picks up a bag of oats.

  ‘You’ve got to be careful. Can’t do much in life without a matric, you know, girly.’

  ‘I’m still going to do matric next year. I just decided correspondence would be better.’

  Bottle of orange juice. Small block of white cheddar. Sam adds it up in her head as best she can to make sure that she’s got enough cash to cover it.

  ‘Isn’t studying by correspondence just making things more difficult for yourself?’ Mr Vosloo shakes his head and his jowls quiver. ‘Not to mention all you’re missing out on by not hanging out with kids your age. My Dewalt just wants to party non-bloody-stop!’

  ‘Yes, well, you know.’ Sam gives a vague sort of shrug and shoves her basket onto the counter by the till. ‘Ring me up, please, Betty.’

  Betty punches the price of each item into the ancient cash register in silence. Mr Vosloo eyes her like a hawk. He always has, even though she’s been working in his store for ten years and in all that time, has neither made a mistake nor said a single word.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Mr Vosloo gives Sam an exaggerated wink.

  ‘I’m not sure what you—’

  ‘The pilchards! Your grandpa’s pilchards. I know that old souty can’t go a day without a stinky pilchard sandwich.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sam’s face blazes hot. She almost trips in her haste to reach the tinne
d food aisle. ‘Thanks for reminding me, Mr Vosloo.’

  Her fingers tremble as she hands the tin of pilchards to Betty. ‘Add that on, please.’ Betty looks at Sam with wet, black eyes before returning her attention to the till.

  ‘Good girly. Your grandpa will thank me, hey? Don’t forget to tell the old man I say hi and that he needs to pull himself towards himself and get better soon.’

  ‘Will do. Thanks.’

  Sam leaves the Super Saver as fast as she dares.

  *

  When the familiar roar of Sam’s motorbike splits the drowsy hush of Main Street, Keegan is hunched at his computer, annihilating alien civilisations with clicks of his mouse. From his bedroom, the sound of the engine is faint, but he’s kept his earphones off to ensure he won’t miss it. He pauses the game and is out of the house, on his bicycle and out of the gate in moments.

  Keegan pedals hard, jolting over scrubby lawns and hurtling around corners. Sam’s forays in town have become progressively fewer and briefer over the past few weeks. Even with all his planning, he might miss the chance to talk to her today.

  Relief shivers through him when he arrives outside the Super Saver to see Sam’s mud-spattered old Yamaha leaning on its wonky kickstand. He just manages to slow his breathing down and wipe the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt when she comes out of the store. Wisps of Sam’s lemon-pith hair are sticking up all over the place from where she took off her motorbike helmet earlier, turning her head into a dandelion that glows as she steps into the sunlit street.

  Her face, however, is tired and tight-looking. Keegan imagines the thick braid sucking the strength out of her to make itself more magnificent.

  ‘Hey,’ he calls, and then again louder, because his voice came out all croaky. ‘Hey, Sam.’

  ‘Keegan.’ His name in her mouth is bone-marrow-melting. He grins and trots over.

  ‘It’s weird at school without you,’ he says. Nice way not to sound needy, Keegan, he thinks. Way to go.

  Sam glances back to where Mr Vosloo lurks in the gloom of the shop. She fidgets with the straps of her backpack.

  ‘You’ll adjust, I’m sure,’ she says, and smiles to see that the lock of brown hair on Keegan’s crown is standing up, just as it always has. ‘Speaking of adjusting, have you recovered from the shock of me asking to borrow your old laptop?’

  ‘Not really.’ Keegan had been speechless last month when Sam had handed him a newly purchased 3G dongle and asked him to set it up so she could use the internet at home. ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’

  ‘Your mother insisted. She said she couldn’t let me do the rest of my schooling via correspondence without it.’

  ‘You must really have been dying to get away from me then, hey? To let evil technology into your house?’ Keegan says, trying to pretend for both of them that her leaving doesn’t hurt.

  ‘That’s not why I did it, man.’ Sam gives him a playful push on his shoulder. ‘I needed to be home more, that’s all.’

  ‘Is your grandpa doing OK? He’s been sick for ages.’ Sam bends down and wipes at the dust on the scuffed toe of her boot. ‘Is he getting any better? Is that why you dropped out of school? To look after him? There are people that can do that, Sam, you don’t have to like… stop your life or anything.’

  ‘I didn’t drop out and I’m not stopping my life.’ She hefts the backpack on to her back. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’

  ‘I know your grandparents went all weird and reclusive when your ouma got sick all those years ago, but it doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing now.’

  ‘Honestly, Keegan, when have I been anything but weird in your opinion?’

  ‘Well, either way, it’s strange without you there, like I was saying.’

  Keegan follows Sam back to her bike, and watches as she pulls the straps out from inside her helmet before sliding it on. It’s an old-style one without a visor, so she has to wear sunglasses to stop things flying into her eyes. Keegan wonders how many bugs she’s swallowed since she started riding the bike into town, instead of sitting beside Jem in the bakkie like she used to.

  ‘Think you’ll change your mind and come back?’ In the ensuing silence, Keegan sees his own reflection in the dark lenses of Sam’s sunglasses. Skinny and stupid. He looks away, suddenly shy.

  ‘I guess I’ll see you round here, then,’ he mutters.

  ‘Of course.’ The refrigerated orange juice bottle in Sam’s backpack is a patch of cold against her spine.

  ‘Email me next time you’re coming in to town.’

  ‘I’ll try and remember.’ She fights the kickstand up again, and straddles the bike.

  ‘If you owned a cell phone like a regular human, you could SMS or WhatsApp me when you get here, and we could meet up.’

  ‘Bye, Keegan,’ Sam says, and kicks the motorbike into life.

  Keegan stands in the centre of the wide street and breathes in the dust cloud that Sam leaves in her wake. It tastes dry and bitter, like the Karoo itself.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ON THE RARE, clear days when he’s working on a piece that’s going to turn out just right, Charlie Rowan ceases to exist. His breath becomes the hot-sugar smell of maple on the lathe, and his heartbeat the jump of the saw in his hands. On days like this, the timber seems to know what he wants it to be, bending and shaping itself into the back of a chair, or the base of a side table, without him having much to do with it at all.

  But on all the other days, wood is war.

  It bites and hisses beneath his useless fingers, lashes out and trips him, splits and splinters and draws blood where it can.

  As soon as he opens the workshop door and the morning sunlight falls past him and on to the battered bench and the worn woodworking tools that he inherited from his late teacher, with their scuffed handles, brass fixings, and coal-coloured points, he can feel it. What was merely a pile of logs and planks the evening before has transformed into something needy and sentient overnight: a moody lover. Sometimes it’s all blissful curving openness that greets him, and the waiting wood is smooth-limbed and spice-scented. Those are the days when Charlie becomes every knot, grain and notch of it. But on the wilful days, the workshop smells musty when he pulls open the doors, and a claggy grime of dust and resin seems to cling to every surface. At once, his body is heavy with doubt and all he can hear is the mechanical grinding of the ‘fear-of-fucking-up’ gears turning behind his temples.

  Charlie doesn’t want to associate this feeling with Liezette, but each time he feels that weight and that pressure, it’s her voice he hears in his head.

  When he first met Liezette, his woodworking concern was little more than a few commissioned pieces for friends and a few items sold at local market stalls on Sundays. Despite the fact that he was sleeping on an old mattress in the draughty built-in veranda of his dad’s little house in Plumstead, the ‘kind-wood’ days far outweighed the bad. At night, he would drop onto his sleeping bag beside his dad’s muddy-pawed mutt called Elmo and sleep like the dead, wood shavings still curled between the hairs on his forearms.

  And then an exclusive store in trendy De Waterkant began hounding him for pieces. In amongst the brushed steel and glass items that adorned the immaculate shop floor, his creations stood out like vital, growing things, seeming to burst from the polished floorboards in an effort to reach the light. It was here, in amongst the wildly priced goods (his own included, he was wide-eyed to note), that he met Liezette.

  Liezette had huge green eyes made even larger by carefully applied black eyeliner, dark hair and long, white limbs with freckles that looked like sprinkles of cinnamon. She’d run her slim fingers over the solid chunk of burnished wood that Charlie had worked into a lamp base with an intensity that had left him breathless. He didn’t know it then, but despite her thrift store outfits and cultivated urban arty-girl look, Liezette was a creature moulded from wine and money. She shared a shabby flat with a friend in Gardens, but a steady stream of support fro
m her daddy flowed down from a vineyard north-east and into her charity-shop-bought pockets. Privilege seemed to coat Liezette like the bloom on a ripe grape, and every time Charlie touched her, he imagined a little bit of it rubbing off on him. As soon as they moved in together, the demand for his work went into overdrive. Hand-crafted artisan furniture had suddenly become the ‘must have’ item.

  Soon Charlie was working such long hours that the calluses he’d cultivated over years of carpentry wore right back into blisters, raw patches that Liezette would soak in bowls of warm water and cider vinegar before kissing them gently and bandaging up his hands before bed. In their wedding photographs, you can see the pink shiny bits of sore skin on the edges of his fingers.

  Back then, there were still more kind-wood days than bad ones, but Charlie was starting to find it harder to feel his way through each piece. He felt shaved down too thin and lifting at the edges, like a poorly worked veneer. Some days, he just lay on the floor of his workshop in amongst the sawdust and tools, and slept.

  And then Delia arrived.

  Charlie had not been in any way ready to have a child. He’d been furious with Liezette when he discovered she’s gotten pregnant on purpose despite his well-aired views on the subject, and then hated himself for resenting her obvious, glowing joy. Every millimetre of girth that grew around her midriff added a fresh layer of pressure, each one like a coating of varnish, thickening and hardening over the grain of him until there was nothing to see but rigid dark.

  Of course, his heart had just melted when he first held the tiny, black-haired little bundle that was his newborn daughter. He’d gazed down at her squidged up features and impossible eyelashes and felt the same sense of oneness that he did on a kind-wood day.

  But the wood didn’t feel that way.

  In the years after Delia’s birth, it became more and more recalcitrant. It rebuffed his advances like a jealous lover, spitting and furious, refusing to be shaped. His hands bled and his eyes stung and the flow of finished pieces slowed in direct proportion to the orders that poured in.