A Blade of Grass

by Lewis Desoto

  After the Relocation there was no work, nor was there farming. The land was too dry and too hard to take the seeds. Already some of the men had gone to the mines in E’Goli, the city of gold, because when there is no work there are always the mines. Elias left to work in the gold mines in Johannesburg. But in E’Goli a man must live in a hostel with other men, and send his money home, and only visit his family during the weeks allotted to him. And if he stays away longer than his allotted time, or wants more days with his family, then he loses his place in the mine, for there are always others waiting. Some men take town-wives whom they can visit on a Sunday, for who can be alone fifty weeks of the year? Other families are created, and men become strangers to their wives and their children. Yet when asked, a man will say that this place or that place in the far country is still his home. But Elias only knows his home for two weeks in the year, and the home that he thinks of is now in that place called memory. On this farm called Kudufontein he is a visitor; he knows this as he receives the condolences of those who live in the kraal. His home is not here.

  The sorghum beer makes him a little drunk, it clouds his grief and softens the thoughts he has about what his life is now that he is without a wife, and the beer softens the loss that he feels when he sees his daughter, who has become a young woman while his gaze was elsewhere, while his eyes were upon other things. He looks across at Tembi where she pours beer from a calabash. Some young man will want to marry her soon, and then that young man will find that there is not enough work on the farms, so he will go off to work on the railways, or in the mines, or somewhere else in the cities, for who can truly be satisfied to live here and be paid in salt and sugar and a portion of the harvest, and a handful of coins?

  Elias drinks more beer to cloud these thoughts. What else can he do? he asks himself. That is the way things are.

  Tembi watches her father, always aware of him. This man in his new city clothes. But his face is not as it once was, it is not the face she remembers. The face of her father is now in that place called memory. This man is not the person she remembers.

  She remembers the glad laughter that sprang from his mouth when she would run down the hill to greet him as he came up from the bus stop, his arms filled with parcels and his face so eager for the sight of his family at the end of a working week.

  She remembers sitting in his lap, as a small child, while he ate his mealie-pap and stew, and how he spooned morsels into her mouth as she rested in the crook of his arm, half asleep in her happiness.

  She remembers the long road to the place where the bus stopped, when he went off to the mines, and she remembers walking with him, dragging at his hand to slow him down, to prevent his going. She remembers how he sent her back after a while. She remembers the long road to the bus that would take him to the train that would take him to the mines in the city. A tall man on the road with a suitcase in one hand and a swing in his step. And even as he walked away from her he faded, like a mirage in the summer heat, wavering at the edges, losing shape, becoming a blur, becoming a memory. This man, this stranger. Her father.

  Tembi takes a plate of food from one of the women and brings it to her father.

  “Will you eat, Father?” She waits while he sets his gourd of beer down and accepts the plate in both his hands.

  “Thank you, daughter.”

  He holds the plate on his lap and looks up at Tembi. She stands above him now, she is a woman, no longer the girl who sat in his lap. “My daughter,” he says.

  A light appears in her eyes. “Yes, my father.”

  He shakes his head and says no more. His eyes are bloodshot with tears, his throat is closed, his heart is locked, his thoughts are dulled—with beer, with distance, with loss, with sorrow—all the things that fill a broken heart. He looks away from the light in his daughter’s eyes, a dying flame that he cannot rekindle.

  “I am sorry, daughter,” he says. “For everything. For our lives.”

  “Yes, Father,” Tembi says, and lets her hand rest on his shoulder.

  And in this moment, this moment of touch between father and daughter, her hand on his warm shoulder, she knows that he will not come back after today. Tembi knows, with a sudden knowledge of the inevitable, that he will not come back. He will walk down the long road into the mirage one last time, a man with a suitcase in his hand, and his shape will become a blur and not come back. This man, this stranger.

  12

  AFTER THE BURIAL, after the funeral, after the grieving, life must go on.

  In the weeks that follow, the small boys must herd the cattle to pasture in the fields. There are the maize crops to attend, the fences to be maintained. In the orchard, where apricots and peaches grow, the farmer must spray the fruit against the depredation of insects. In the vegetable garden, the women must water the soil and pull the weeds. In the chicken coop, the eggs must be collected and brought to the house. And in the dairy, where Tembi usually works with three other girls, the milk must be poured into cans and the butter churned. Life must go on. The dead are buried and the living must labor.

  Ben Laurens must work his farm. Märit Laurens must work too, in the house, because there is nobody to cook and clean, to do the work that Grace used to do, for Tembi has not come to the house in the two weeks since the burial.

  Nor does Tembi return to her duties in the dairy with the other girls, to the cool shed with its warm sweet smells and the liquid gurgle of milk pouring from the big silver cans, to the thick cream clotting in the tubs and the regular grind of the butter churn. From this she is excused, for she is without parents now. And if at mealtimes she sits silent with her plate, and barely makes answer to the conversation, she is excused, for she is without mother and father now, and mourns, and her life is a question.

  Tembi goes to the grave of her mother and lies on her back across the prickly dry grass, gazing up into the faraway sky, where sometimes the trails of jets seem like indecipherable writing on the blue of the sky. Sometimes a bird alights on the ground nearby and scratches in the grass for insects, not noticing Tembi in her stillness. Sometimes a thin trail of ants tracks across her outstretched arm, where she lies so still, lost in the sky. In the distance cattle low, the windmill turns, the beat of a hammer sounds, voices call, the breeze moves through the willow trees on the riverbanks and life goes on. Underneath her body the earth seems to vibrate softly and steadily with the pulse of life. Tembi thinks of her mother, lying in the bosom of this living thing that is the earth.

  When she rises and leaves her mother to the earth, Tembi goes to the secret place behind the koppie, to the dry hard place where the earth does not mourn. Here is refuge.

  Here she finds the place in the rocks where the sun falls and warms the earth. Crouching down, she examines the soil, her eyes searching for signs of growth. With the tip of her index finger she tests the moistness of the ground. Although the garden is damp and free of weeds, and no animal has been digging, there is still no sign of any growth.

  How many days has it been since she planted her five seeds? How many days has she come with her pail of water to let the thirsty earth drink? She counts the weeks. Already the season is turning from spring to summer. Will anything grow here? Is her desire to make the fruit come up out of the earth a foolish notion, a waste of time, leading only to disappointment?

  In secret, Tembi brings a small pail of water from the washhouse and carefully lets the earth drink, so that the soil turns dark and moist, and gives off that scent that rises after the rains. She presses her finger on the soil and it is soft and warm, like a living thing, like the flesh of a body. The small area on the surface of her finger, where it touches the earth, where it touches the living body, is the place that binds her to the earth, that anchors her.

  Tembi scoops a little more water into her palm from the pail and lets it trickle onto the soil. And a little more. And again, five times in all. Once for each seed hidden in the embrace of the earth’s body.

  Setting the empty pail aside s
he leans her back against the flat, warm surface of the rock, shuts her eyes, and dozes. The sun moves in its slow eternal arc across the sky, and when the sunlight touches Tembi’s face, she wakes, dazzled by the light, dazzled by the brightness that falls on all living things.

  When she opens her eyes to see her garden, to see all living things, Tembi sees also a small lizard motionless on the flat rock not more than two feet from her hand. A tiny green creature no larger than one of her fingers that watches her with its small black eyes, black like river pebbles. The green color down the lizard’s sleek back is green like the shoots of new grass in the spring, and there is a thin dark green, darker like a eucalyptus leaf in mid-summer, down the center of its back. Like a line drawn with a thin paintbrush. The lizard’s belly is pale green, and so are the insides of the legs, and the part under the mouth, where a faint beating pulse quivers. All as green as the grass and the leaves.

  The small black eyes are like the pebbles in the river, alert, glistening like jewels, and she knows the lizard watches her. When she blinks, the lizard makes a quick dipping movement of its head, dainty and quick, like a leaf moved by a puff of wind.

  A longing comes over Tembi; she wants to stroke her finger across the smooth underside of the mouth, the way one would stroke a cat. She wants to feel the beat of the creature’s heart, the pulse of the secret heartbeat of the earth, the vibration in all living things.

  Tembi raises her finger gently, but the lizard flicks its body around—a flash of green, quick as the blink of an eye—and it is gone into a crevice of shadow. Gone into the earth.

  13

  THERE IS ANOTHER PLACE where Tembi can go, another refuge.

  Along the sandy road that borders the farm she walks, past the fences that enclose the fields, to a small plot of land set back from the road, where a small church stands. A church built once by a farmer in the district, when travel to the town was more difficult. But it is a place of worship no longer in use, for there is now a bigger church in Klipspring, where the farmers and their families pray on Sundays, and even the farm workers prefer the outdoor worship led by the Reverend Kumalo of the Living Water Assembly Church.

  So the church stands empty of prayers. The building has fallen into disrepair, the roof leaks, and many of the windows are broken, the glass replaced by sheets of scrap wood. But the building is not without use.

  On Sundays, on the day when there is no work to be done, some of the children from the neighboring farms come to the church, the children of the workers, but they do not come to worship, for this building is now a school. It is not a proper school, like the one in Klipspring for the white children, a sturdy brick edifice paid for by the government, where there is reading and writing, arithmetic and history. In this school, standing back from the sandy road, there are no set lessons, there is no official curriculum, and there are only a couple of shared textbooks. Attendance by the pupils is intermittent, for it is not required by any government regulation, and what child would not rather play by the riverbanks on a Sunday, when there is no work to be done on the farms? Who would not rather hunt for weaverbird nests in the willows, or find the hive where the bees hide their honey?

  But Tembi attends anyway. The teacher is a man called Mr. Simon, who works in the post office in Klipspring as a sorter of parcels in the back room of the post office—a man who has attended three years of high school himself, and is thus considered educated by the workers of the farms.

  Mr. Simon is paid by the parents of the children who come to the school on Sundays, and when there are few children his pay is paltry, but still he persists, for he teaches not to be paid but because he is a man with a vision of the future, of a time when it will be necessary for the children of farm workers to be able to read and write.

  Tembi attends the school every Sunday. She loves the books Mr. Simon reads from, she loves her own ability to read and to write out the exercises Mr. Simon sets. There are few books in Mr. Simon’s school, but there is the Bible, which he always brings with him, and he reads the stories to Tembi and he explains to her how the words are so beautiful, how they tell of the deepest longings of those who wander in exile.

  She loves to hear him talk, for Mr. Simon has traveled in the country, has been to Johannesburg and Cape Town and Durban. He tells Tembi about the ocean, the crashing waves, the smell of salt in the air, the feel of hot beach sand under bare feet. He tells her of the outside world.

  On this Sunday, Tembi walks along the road that skirts the farm. From the kraal the wood-smoke scent of cooking fires lingers above the trees, the weaverbirds chatter in the willow trees; from somewhere across the river drifts the haunting refrain of voices singing a hymn.

  Here is the old church, the school. A small building with a peaked roof, once painted blue but now bleached by sun and rain and wind. A simple wooden cross still stands aloft on the steeple.

  Tembi mounts the steps to the front door and reaches for the handle. Then she sees the chain looped through the door handles, and the iron padlock. The school is locked. But why is the school locked? she wonders. Why lock this door when there is nothing inside to steal? And where is Mr. Simon? She grasps the chain in her hands and pulls it and tugs at the door. Why is the school locked?

  Tembi steps down from the little porch and walks around to the side of the building, to one of the windows that still has glass, that is not boarded up. Rising up on her toes she grasps the windowsill and peers into the building.

  This is a church without an altar, or pews, or stained-glass windows. There is the chair where Mr. Simon sits, where the altar once stood, and there is the small blackboard he uses. There is his table, salvaged from a kitchen somewhere. There are the two benches for the pupils. And there are the books that Mr. Simon brings, and in those books are doors that open something in Tembi, and the doors lead to a road down which she can travel, and she knows that at the end of the road is a gift she will one day grasp. She knows this. It is why she is at the school today.

  But where is Mr. Simon?

  Tembi raps on the window with her knuckles, then after a moment goes around to the front door again. She shakes the chain and pulls at the lock. Their purpose defeats her. Why is the school locked?

  As she stands there, a shiver moves across her shoulders, as if someone has touched her, as if she is not alone, and she turns slowly to look.

  Within the deep shadows under the trees a man on a horse is watching Tembi. He is dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts and long khaki socks that come up to his knees. On his head he wears a wide slouch hat of the kind favored by older farmers in the district. But he is a young man. The stock of a rifle shows in the scabbard next to his saddle.

  He says nothing, sitting very still, watching her, and his horse is very still too, its head held high from the pull of the reins clutched in his hand. A young man, with a scraggly blond beard.

  Tembi recognizes him. He is from the neighboring farm. She thinks he is the son of old Koos van Staden. He sometimes rides his horse across the fields here, galloping through the cattle so that they scatter and the small boys have to round them up again.

  He gives a quick kick to the horse’s flanks, and it trots forward across the clearing towards Tembi, and then he pulls on the reins so that the horse halts, obedient to him.

  He smiles down at Tembi, but she sees that his eyes are without a smile in them. “Class is dismissed,” he says.

  Tembi does not understand his words. The language she understands, yes, for he speaks in Afrikaans, which is the language between the farmers and the workers everywhere, but it is the meaning of them that she does not understand.

  “Where is Mr. Simon?” she asks. This is his school, he will tell her why a chain and padlock bar the entrance.

  “Mr. Simon? Who is this Mr. Simon?”

  “This is his school. He is the teacher.”

  The horse drops its head to nibble at a tuft of grass and the man jerks the reins taut in his hand. The horse throws up its head and sh
ows the whites of its eyes.

  “Oh, it’s Mr. Simon’s school.” His lip curls. “And what does this Mr. Simon teach you in his school? Huh? That all this land belongs to you, that it will be yours one day, that you people can drive us off? Hey?”

  The horse makes another attempt to nibble at the grass and he yanks the reins hard so that the bridle bites into the horse’s mouth.

  “Well, this school is closed. For today and forever. So you can just voetsak off.”

  Tembi recoils at the word. It is an insult, used only on dogs.

  She shakes her head and mumbles, “I will wait for Mr. Simon.”

  He kicks at the horse’s flanks, forcing the animal forward, towards Tembi, and the big head of the animal pushes her back against the door. The padlock digs into her back. The young man smiles at Tembi again, but again there is no smile in his eyes.

  He leans down from the saddle, close to her. “How old are you, meidjie?” He reaches out to touch her breast. Tembi slaps his hand away.

  His heels dig in at the horse’s flanks, forcing it towards Tembi, and its hooves scrabble on the steps, plunging down inches from her bare feet. She sees the animal’s big frightened eyes, the whites showing, and she smells the sweet grassy smell of the horse’s breath and the thick smell of its sweat.

  “I told you,” the young man hisses down at her from between clenched teeth, “class is dismissed. There is no more school for you here.” The big head of the horse is pressing her against the door, and it turns its head away from her, showing frightened eyes.

  Tembi screams. The horse rears back in alarm, almost unseating the rider.

  As the man struggles to bring the horse under control, Tembi leaps from the porch, landing with a jarring thud that tumbles her to her knees. Then she is quickly up and running. Without a backward glance she is across the clearing and into the trees.