A Blade of Grass

by Lewis Desoto

  So he does not trouble himself too much with politics. He is careful in his dealings with the other farmers in the district, he is careful in his dealings with the workers on the farm, he is careful with the land.

  Now he is in the place where he always wanted to be. Now he has what he wants. But first he must plant the seeds. He takes the jar from his pocket and shakes the soil out, onto the earth.

  As he turns his hand brushes carelessly across the barbed wire and one of the barbs catches the fleshy mound at the base of his thumb. A sharp jab. He jerks his hand back and the barb pulls, digging into the flesh.

  It is nothing, a small cut only, the kind a farmer grows used to in his labors. Yet when he looks down at his palm the drops of blood oozing from the cut fascinate him, the redness of the blood, so dark. A trickle runs across his palm as he tips his hand and the drops fall to the soil, down to the place where he will plant the seeds. He watches as the blood drips into the soil, darkening it, mixing with it.

  A slight tremor passes through Ben, a pulsation of cold, as if someone has called his name. He looks up, startled, but he is alone.

  He reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief, which he uses to dab at the cut as he walks up to the house.

  THE STRIDENT PEAL of the telephone startles Märit. The phone does not ring often in this house. She hesitates with her hand over the receiver as the bell shrills again, then lifts it to her ear.

  “Kudufontein Farm,” she says.

  “This is Sergeant Joubert in Klipspring. Can I speak to Meneer Laurens?”

  Märit leans to look out the window. “He’s in the fields. Can I help you, Sergeant? This is Mevrou Laurens.”

  “No, excuse me, Mevrou, but I must speak to your husband.”

  “Well, I can take a message to him if it’s urgent. He can call you back.”

  “If you can fetch him, I will wait, Mevrou. It is important.”

  “All right. Just a minute.” She puts the receiver down on the table and steps out to the veranda to call Ben.

  When Ben comes to the phone, Märit listens to the one-sided conversation, to Ben’s questions—“What?” “How?” “When?”

  She paces back and forth, watching his face as a deep frown creases his brow.

  “Yes, yes, of course. Thank you.” He reaches up and takes off his hat, as if he has just remembered he is still wearing it.

  Ben listens a moment longer, staring down at his hand, where Märit notices a thin red cut across the skin. “All right. I’ll come now.” He replaces the receiver.

  “It’s Grace,” he says.

  “Grace?”

  “An accident of some kind. They think she was hit by a car.”

  “How badly is she hurt? Where did this happen?”

  He reaches out a hand and rests it on her arm. “She was killed, Märit.”

  Märit’s gray eyes widen. “Killed?”

  “She is dead. Her body was found at the side of the road not far from here early this morning. The police are pretty sure it was a car that hit her.”

  “But don’t they know? Who reported it?”

  “A hit-and-run.” He sits down and rubs a finger back and forth across his palm. “They don’t know.”

  Märit glances towards the kitchen and lowers her voice. “Oh my God. Her daughter. Tembi.”

  “She was the one who served us breakfast this morning?”

  “We have to tell her. Oh God.”

  Ben rises to his feet and touches Märit on the arm again. “Not just yet. I have to go into town first, to the police station. I have to talk to them.”

  “She was going to see her sister—no, her cousin. Who would do such a thing? Oh God, Ben, what can we do?”

  Ben folds her into his arms, stroking her back, lifting the heavy coils of hair from the nape of her neck and stroking the cool skin of her neck. “I’ll talk to the police. We have to be sure it is Grace before we say anything.” He looks at his watch. “I’ll drive in now. I said I’d come immediately.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t stay here. I have to know.” She walks quietly to the kitchen and sticks her head through the door, but there is no sign of Grace’s daughter.

  “Tembi?” Märit calls softly. Opening the back door she peers out, but does not see the girl.

  When she rejoins Ben, he says, “There is her husband as well. He will have to be contacted.”

  “If it is Grace.”

  Ben nods. “We will have to find out where he works.”

  “In the mines,” Märit says. “Grace said something about him working in the mines in Johannesburg.”

  “We will have to ask the daughter.”

  “If it is Grace.”

  THEY ARE BOTH SILENT on the first part of the drive as the car takes them along the sandy road towards the junction.

  “Where did it happen?” Märit asks, her eyes on the brush and ditches on the side of the road.

  “The sergeant didn’t say. On the road near the farm is all he told me.”

  “Somewhere along here?”

  “I don’t know.” He concentrates on his driving.

  Two figures appear ahead, two men, one carrying a paper parcel in his hands.

  If he were alone Ben would stop and let them sit in the back of the pickup, as he usually does when he drives into town and sees Africans on the road. There is no bus between the farms and the towns, and no worker can afford a car. Usually he stops. But not today.

  “Don’t drive so fast,” Märit says as they pass the two men.

  Ben eases his foot off the gas pedal until they turn onto the paved road, then speeds up again without being aware of it.

  Three months on the farm and he feels that he is moving forward at last, and now this. He looks sidelong at Märit. “Did you get to know her at all? Grace, I mean.”

  “Not really.”

  “I just wondered—the two of you together in the house. You know, if you became friendly in any way?”

  “We talked a bit, but I didn’t know her. Or anything much about her. Just that she had a daughter, and that her husband worked in the mines.”

  Her tone is distant, causing Ben to glance at her again. Märit’s own parents passed away not so long ago. Ben remembers this same withdrawn, distant expression on her face in the days afterwards. He wonders if he had proposed marriage impulsively, out of concern, pity even, and the desire to make her happy again after her loss. Sometimes he doubts that he can make her happy. Sometimes it occurs to him that he might have brought her into a place to which she is unsuited. Perhaps he has made a mistake, perhaps they both have.

  In those first months of courtship he had believed she shared his dreams of a farming life, away from the city, away from the prospect of a faceless life in a faceless office, becoming faceless oneself. In those first months of sexual enthrallment perhaps they had both believed the wrong things about each other. What he had taken to be something distant in her, something hidden, is instead something closed. He fears sometimes that he will never know the depths in her.

  “It doesn’t remind you…does it?” Ben says, “The daughter…losing her mother. I understand how it could affect you…”

  She gives him a wan smile and moves closer on the seat. “No, it doesn’t. I’m all right. I just worry about Tembi.”

  The telephone poles spaced along the side of the highway speed past and she counts them unconsciously, following the dip and rise of the wires, the way she did when she was a girl traveling somewhere with her parents.

  Märit reaches for Ben’s hand and holds it in her lap, running her fingers across his. “You’ve cut yourself.”

  “On the fence.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No.” He shrugs. “A little.” He does not tell her about the blood dripping into the soil, or the inexplicable sadness he felt at that moment.

  “I’ll put something on it when we get home. You don’t want an infection se
tting in.”

  Märit watches the dip and rise of the telephone wires. A single white cloud drifts in the blue sky. The tires hum on the road, on the empty road.

  At the police station in Klipspring the sergeant is waiting for them. He shakes hands with Ben and greets Märit before explaining the circumstances.

  “The body is here, in the back,” he says. “If you would come through and identify her?”

  Ben looks at Märit. She shakes her head and says, “I can’t. I’ll wait outside.”

  Märit puts on her sunglasses against the glare and lights a cigarette. How do you tell someone that her mother is dead? Who among us can announce Death? Who will announce it now to Tembi, to her father, to the workers on the farm?

  Ben steps out into the sunlight at last, his face pale, his mouth drawn into a thin line.

  “Is it…?” Märit asks.

  “Yes.” He takes the cigarette from her fingers and draws deeply. “They think a car hit her as she was walking in the dark.”

  “What will happen now? What will we do? We have to contact her husband. We have to tell Tembi.”

  Ben gives the cigarette back to Märit. “The police will do it. They’ll contact the mine and notify Elias.”

  “Elias. I didn’t even know his name. But how will they find him?”

  “The records are on file here. Everybody is on file. They will notify him and he’ll come home.”

  “And Tembi?”

  “A native constable will go to the farm and talk to the bossboy—Joshua.” When Märit shakes her head, Ben adds, “It’s better. They have their own ways. We can’t just call Tembi into the house and tell her. She needs to be with those she knows, with her own kind.”

  “I suppose so. But what about the body?”

  “It will go back to the farm later today. Let them deal with it, Märit. They have their ways. I’ll talk to Joshua later about the costs and the burial. We can’t do much more now.”

  Märit nods and climbs into the pickup. Ben starts the engine and says, “We’ll go to the hotel and have a drink. I think we both need it. Let the constable go out to the farm and talk to Joshua first.”

  “I can’t understand how someone could just drive off and leave her lying at the side of the road. She might still have been alive. How could I let her walk into town like that in the dark, alone?”

  “I didn’t know,” Ben says. “I didn’t think of it.”

  “No, we didn’t think of her. We didn’t ask.”

  11

  AND SO THE DAY of the burial arrives, on a day of late spring sunshine, on a farm in the remote countryside.

  There will be no work done in the fields this day. Instead, on the banks of the river there is a singing of hymns and the chanting of prayers. The Reverend Kumalo leads the procession, enrobed in the sky blue cloth of the Living Water Assembly Church, walking at a stately pace with a wooden cross held aloft. Behind him, a donkey pulls a cart with the coffin. The women follow behind the cart, wearing their Sunday clothes, each with a blue sash tied across the waist. The men come after, many of them wearing their work clothes, for they have no special clothes for such an occasion. They have doffed their hats, and hold them clutched in their hands.

  The women wail. Their ululations, high and piercing, banish the sound of the river, the rippling and running of the water across the rocks, banish the cooing of the doves in the branches of the eucalyptus trees and the chatter of the finches in the reeds. For why should the river laugh on such a day, and why should the birds sing? The women wail, and in their midst is Tembi, who neither wails nor cries but walks in silence.

  At the rear of the procession as it wends its way up from the riverbank to the cemetery near the koppie come the white man and the white woman. A little apart from the rest. Strangers here. He wears a dark suit and tie and carries his hat loose in his hand like the other men. The woman is dressed in a sober, dark blue dress with a white lace trim at the sleeves. Her handbag is black and she has draped a rectangle of black gauze across her hair. She walks with some difficulty on the rough track, the heels of her shoes catching in the uneven ground.

  The procession makes its way up from the river, across a field, and to the foot of the small hill where the cemetery of the people rests. Here the dead of the farm cease their labors. And here another place in the earth has been prepared.

  The women sing.

  In the land of ageless days, lies a valley four-square

  It shall never pass away and there is no night there.

  Ku yosulw’ inyembezi, nokufa nezinsizi

  Ayibalwa iminyaka, ubusuk’ abukho.

  God shall wipe away all tears, there’s no death, no pain, nor fears

  And they count not time by years, for there is no night there.

  The procession halts while the coffin is hauled down from the cart. The hymn singing ceases.

  The Reverend Kumalo stands with his head bowed and his eyes upon his Bible until silence falls. He makes a gesture with his head towards the waiting men. The casket is lowered, the soil is heaped upon it.

  The Reverend Kumalo speaks a short prayer and then looks towards the white man expectantly. Ben Laurens is not a religious man; he attends the church in Klipspring on Sundays, but only out of a desire not to offend his neighbors, who consider church attendance a sign of a man’s moral standing. He realizes now as he steps forward that he knows no prayer suitable for the occasion. Jumbled fragments heard in church move through his head, mixed with bits of poems and psalms learned at school. He is one of those men who never thinks about God, or the scope of the infinite, or the difference between what he knows and what is unknown in the universe. Privately, he thinks of religion as a childish activity. There is birth and there is death. In between is life for the living and that is the end of it.

  But at this moment he must say something to these faces watching him—expecting him, he assumes, to define why and how death came, and what can be done about it. He tries to remember what was said at that other funeral he attended, when Märit’s parents were buried. So far from here, in such different soil. He can recall only a portion of a psalm, and he recites those words that he remembers.

  “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me…Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the rest of my days, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’”

  Silence follows this recitation. The faces that look at his are neither friendly nor hostile. Ben turns to the Reverend Kumalo, who nods his head slowly in approval.

  “Grace was a good woman,” Ben says. “May she rest in peace.” He has no other words to offer.

  A moment of silence follows, a long moment, before Ben realizes what is required of him now—his absence. He seeks out the faces of the daughter, Tembi, and the husband, Elias, and inclines his head to each of them, then he turns and takes his wife’s arm and they depart.

  The farmer and his wife walk back alone across the field to their house behind the trees, while the funeral party makes its way to the kraal, where the mourners will mourn. Because the farmer and his wife feel themselves strangers here today, on their own land, because they have a sense of not belonging here today, although they do not acknowledge it openly to one another, they agree to drive into Klipspring. At the Retief Hotel they will sit in the comfort of the dining room, with its linen tablecloths and heavy silverware, with the framed prints of faraway landscapes on the walls. And there they will talk of other things and not of death.

  On the hillside, next to the grave, Tembi does not join the wailing of the women or the singing of hymns. She wears a white blouse under a dark pinafore, and around her waist is the light blue sash that her mother wore on Sundays. A light blue doek is knotted turban-like on her head.

  Tembi’s face is impassive, rigid, and her large brown eyes show nothing of her sorrow. Something in her heart prevents any outward expression of grief. Neither s
orrow nor regret shows, but in her heart is the realization that tears are finished now. She watches the spadefuls of reddish earth as they fall onto the coffin. It is good, rich earth, suitable for growing. She thinks of the seeds in the earth and how they come up each season after the winter. Why should a human soul not do the same? Will her mother grow into life again in that rich soil, like the seeds, if tears fall upon them like rain? The thought is childish, she tells herself, and she is no longer a child. She can never be a child again. The time of childish things is finished, and there is no growing of souls in the earth when the winter is done.

  In the kraal the slaughtered calf is on the spit. There are many to feed. The jugs of milky sorghum beer are passed around. The Reverend Kumalo doffs his fine sky blue robes to reveal an ordinary business suit underneath, a little shiny at the seat and with a discreet patch on one elbow. He receives the envelope of banknotes, passed on from Ben Laurens via Joshua the bossboy. There is also a bottle of brandy and two plump chickens given by Grace’s husband, Elias.

  The women hang up their hats and put on aprons to prepare the food. The men roll cigarettes or light pipes and drink the milky beer that is passed around in gourds.

  Tembi stands a little apart and looks at her father. Her father is here. But who is he? This man who sends money, who pats her cheek affectionately, who visits once a year, this stranger of her blood?

  Even before the Relocation he had become a stranger. When she was but a child he went to work away from home, leaving early on Monday mornings with some of the other men from the village for his job in the sugar mill, and because the hours were long and the mill was a great distance away, he shared a room in the town there, only returning to his home on the weekends. And then he was tired, and wanted to sit in the sun or tend his small vegetable plot.