Stones for My Father

by Trilby Kent

  Text copyright © 2011 by Trilby Kent

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books, 75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York, P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010928790

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kent, Trilby

  Medina Hill / Trilby Kent.

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-260-8

  I. Title.

  PS8571.E643S76 2011 jC813′.54 C2010-903163-6

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  v3.1

  In memory of those who came before me — the sons and daughters of the prairie and veld.

  ALSO BY TRILBY KENT

  Medina Hill

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  Ntombazi

  The White Tribe

  A Pillar of Salt

  The Great Trek

  The Orphan

  The Ox Whip

  A Knife for Gutting Fish

  Her Husband’s Gun

  Undesirables

  Herod’s Work

  An Egg

  The Darkness of Egypt

  The Calabash Shell

  Bethlehem

  The Sea of Galilee

  Epilogue

  NTOMBAZI

  My mother once told me of a dream she had as a young girl, in the days before the English came. She had dreamed of a child, a boy, with ruddy cheeks and blue eyes like my father’s, and a gurgling laugh that could make even Oom Jakob smile.

  I was not that child. My mother would have to wait four long years before another baby came along, not counting the one that was stillborn shortly after my third birthday. Eleven months later, Gert arrived: a squalling, sticky, red-faced putto whose body was all out of proportion and who smelled like parsnips and brine. When my mother laid eyes on him for the first time, the look on her face told me that this, this was the child of her dream.

  “You see, Corlie — eyes just like his father’s,” she said, while Tant Minna fussed about the bed with clean towels and a basin of hot water. “And so much hair, boytjie!”

  There were many things that set Gert and me apart, but — as far as I could tell — those were the important ones. Gertie’s hair grew into golden curls, while mine remained coarse and tawny. Gertie’s eyes were the color of veld violets, while mine were like pools of muddy water. When Hansie was born a few years later, he was the same: blond and bouncing, with cornflower eyes and my Oupa Wessel’s jug ears. No one ever thought to comment on my looks. My arms were too skinny and my front teeth overlapped slightly. The skin on my nose turned pink and peeled after just a few minutes in the African sun.

  “My little rooineus,” Pa used to say when, as a young girl, I would clamber into his lap and lock my arms around his shoulders. Rooinek was the word we used for the English — “rednecks,” because they burned so easily in the sun — but my father’s name for me was always used with a smile and a wink.

  My mother never called me anything but Corlie. If she used my full name, Coraline Roux, I knew that it was time to make myself scarce by hiding in the cattle sheds.

  She’d used my full name the morning I dropped a jar of peaches in the kitchen. The impact sent juice splashing across the slate tiles and a million shards of glass cartwheeling about the floor. When my mother bent to salvage some of the preserved fruit, she must have cut a finger with a piece of glass because immediately she shot upright with a gasped “Godverdomme!” and cuffed me sharply about the ear.

  “Get out of here,” she snapped. “Take your brother to Oom Flip’s. He owes us a box of tobacco.” Despite her godly airs, my mother was a prodigious smoker. Pa had never approved of her pipe habit, but Pa wasn’t around anymore to tell her so. My mother’s face had turned quite red, the veins in her temples bulging where her hair had been scraped back into a severe bun. “Are you deaf, girl? Do you want me to get the sjambok?”

  The whip was made of rhino hide and had only ever been used by my father for cattle driving. I didn’t wait for a second threat but scarpered right then and there, grabbing Gert’s hand as I passed him on the stoop and hauling him behind me until we were safely out of view from the house.

  Oom Flip wasn’t really our uncle. He owned the trading shop halfway between our farm and Amersfoort, about an hour’s walk under a high sun. Oom Flip se Winkel sold everything that we couldn’t grow or raise or make ourselves, such as tobacco. The shop smelled of leather and dried fish, and the sour beer that local men brewed from sorghum. Sometimes, when his wife wasn’t around, Oom Flip would pass us a couple of syrupy twisted doughnuts as a treat.

  Beyond the dirt track that led to Amersfoort, a gray-green plateau scattered with aloes stretched all the way to the Drakensberg Mountains. The jacaranda tree next to our clay-brick house was the tallest thing for miles. From where we paused atop a koppie, the white farm buildings behind us seemed to huddle close to the dry land as if to escape the sun’s searching glare. On one side of the hill were fields of hardy, fragrant lavender plants buzzing with bees drunk on wild nectar; on the other, clusters of crackled spurge shrubs and an expanse of yellow grassland. In the distance, a shepherd herded a few goats across the rugged terrain. The smell of hot, sweet grass filled the air.

  “What if there are khakis?” asked Gert as he stumbled along beside me. “What if they see us?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “There aren’t any English here — they learned their lesson at Bergendal. The Transvaal is free Boer country now.”

  My little brother scowled down at his feet. There’d not been time to collect our shoes from the house, and his toenails were black with grit. When the heat grew so fierce that even the crickets seemed to droop during their music-making, I would often discard my pinafore and stockings and make do in the grubby shift that had grown stiff with Ma’s zealous scrubbing. For the boys, it was easier: Gert seemed to live in the same pair of breeches, with just a single suspender to preserve his modesty. Even Ma agreed that in these hard times it was only sensible to keep our better clothes intact for winter.

  After we had been walking for several minutes, my brother pointed at a herd of springbok edging along the horizon.

  “We should be hunting,” he murmured. “If Pa were here, we’d be eating eland and blesbok every night.”

  “Shut up,” I said. Gert knew full well that there was no point in talking as if Pa was coming back. There was no coming back from where Pa had gone.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “We’ll ask Tant Sanna for some mealie bread at the shop.”

  We kept walking.

  “Tell me a story, Corlie.”

  It was a request that he knew I wouldn’t be able to resist. Ma always said that my stories would only get me into trouble, that a good Boer girl should spend more time learning how to skin game and mend her brot
hers’ pants — and less time spinning lies for their amusement. “Twelve years old and still wasting your breath on fairy tales,” she would say. “It’s high time you turned your mind to the Bible, my girl. There are plenty of stories in the Good Book — and all of them true, not just the silly ideas of an idle domkop.”

  But the Bible didn’t have stories about the tokoloshe that lived under my bed, a mischievous spirit that could make itself invisible by swallowing a stone. The Bible didn’t have stories about men who survived in the desert by gutting an oryx and drinking the contents of its stomach. The Bible didn’t even have the best story of all — which Pa had told me himself as soon as I was old enough to understand — about how the Boers trekked for many years through wild and dangerous bush before settling in the Transvaal. “Africa defeats some people and redeems others,” Pa used to tell me. “The Boere can’t be defeated by Africa, because it is ours. God gave it to us.”

  But Gert had heard these stories before, so I decided to tell him a new one. It was a tale that I had been working on for several days, about a queen who wore a luminous boa constrictor as a cowl and a little green gecko as a brooch. Ostrich feathers decorated her hair, a necklace of cowrie shells circled her neck, and her dress was made of red-bush leaves and zebra skins. I called her Ntombazi, after the Zulu queen.

  I was halfway into the story when my brother let out a howl of pain, crumpling to the ground and grabbing his left foot with both hands.

  “What is it, Gertie?” I dropped to my knees and pried open my brother’s clasped fingers, already imagining the worst: a scorpion bite, perhaps, or a snake …

  “An arrowhead!” My brother’s round face lit up; he hadn’t even noticed the crimson blood rising in a bubble from his big toe. He turned the flint point this way and that, studying its carved edges against the sky. “Bushman. I wonder how old it is …”

  I ripped an aloe leaf from a nearby plant and pressed it against the wound. “Is that better? Can you walk? Shall I help you?”

  Gert shot me a scornful look. “Ag, no!” he said, pushing me away with his other heel. My brother was only eight, and already he was learning to talk like a big man. “I’m not a baby, Corlie.” He stood up, all the while examining his precious trophy. “I’ll bore a hole through it and wear it around my neck,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  At Oom Flip’s, the shopkeeper’s wife gave us some fudge to suck on while she cleaned Gert’s wound with rubbing alcohol. Tant Sanna was a buxom old auntie with the haunches of a warhorse and whiskers as thick as sewing needles sprouting from her chin. My brother squirmed a bit, but he was too proud to cry the way he might have if it had been Ma tending to him. When Oom Flip came in, bearing two magnificent pumpkins from their garden, he grinned at the sight of us.

  “Been in the wars, eh, Gert?” he asked, his voice rumbling like distant thunder as he set the pumpkins on the counter by the till. “Let’s see to that.”

  Oom Flip may have drunk like a fish, but when he was sober there was no one more kind to us. Within moments, he had bandaged my brother’s toe with a strip of linen ripped from a dishcloth. He even remembered to slip me a handful of pear drops, my favorite treat in all the world.

  “How’s your ma?” he asked. “Still no trouble from the khaki scum, I hope?”

  “No, Oom.”

  “She’s been lucky.” He wrapped Ma’s tobacco in brown paper and handed the bundle to me. “Word has it the commando’s had a hell of a time keeping the Tommies to the ridge. The day the British Lion gets us in his sights —”

  “Pa said lions are a damned nuisance,” I told him.

  Oom Flip roared with laughter. “You take that tobacco back to your ma with Flip’s best regards,” he said. “Tell her to make it last — there won’t be any more until the khakis reopen the railway line from Jo’burg.”

  When we arrived home later that afternoon, tobacco in hand, my mother greeted us with a shriek of panic.

  “What happened?” she demanded, hastening to untie the makeshift bandage that Oom Flip had wrapped around my brother’s toe. At the sight of dried blood, she drew her breath sharply. “What did you do to him?”

  Gert brandished the arrowhead from his pocket, narrowly slicing my mother’s ear. “Look, Ma! I’m going to put it on a string and wear it around my neck like a Zulu warrior —”

  “It could have been anything,” continued my mother, ignoring my brother’s excited chatter even while she pressed him to her chest. “The khakis might have left poisoned pieces of metal for us to step on, to infect the herds. Why weren’t you paying closer attention?”

  I stared at her, not knowing what to say. You sent us, I thought. It’s your fault we were on the Highveld.

  “She was telling me a story about Ntombazi,” interjected Gert.

  My mother grabbed me by the arm and shook me roughly. “More lies!” she shouted. “Heathen lies! We’ll see how fit you are to spin tales once I’ve beaten the devil out of you —”

  I wrenched myself out of her grasp, twisting my arm so hard that I felt my shoulder pop, and ran as fast as I could toward the koppie where my father lay buried.

  “You can think twice before coming back, my girl!” Ma shouted after me, her voice cracking through the dusty air. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that she was clutching Gertie to her skirts, weeping soundlessly while my brother continued to admire his little stone treasure.

  THE WHITE TRIBE

  Just six weeks before my father died, a consumption virus had been discovered in some dead buffalo on Samie’s Kloof. By the time my mother had gathered enough marula bark to make a poultice for the fever, Pa’s neck had swollen to such a size that he found it difficult to turn his head. Bluish abscesses formed beneath his jaw, stretching and tautening as his neck glands expanded — until at last the skin started to rupture. The doctor said that it was scrofula, but by that point having a name for the sickness made little difference: my father had shrunk to a shadow, the purple circles under his eyes scooping hollows in his handsome face.

  As Hansie was only a few months old at the time, he was the first one to be isolated. Within a few days, the doctor said that it would be best if Gert and I went to stay with Hansie at a neighboring farm. The next thing I knew, we were standing atop a koppie with my mother and Tant Minna, murmuring prayers over a mound of freshly turned earth.

  That evening, the evening my mother shouted at me not to come home, I returned to the koppie where Pa was buried. Two years had passed since President Kruger declared war on the British, and already Pa’s name was starting to wear from the makeshift headstone.

  Morne Andries Roux

  17 Februarie 1859 – 22 Desember 1899

  The slate was badly chipped and had begun to crumble and flake at the corners. Someone had scratched a line through the words that our farmhand had carved with Pa’s horn-handled knife — someone, perhaps, who believed the rumor that my father had wished to make peace with the British. In the early days of the war between the Boer republics and Britain, all Boer men had sworn that they would never take the oath of neutrality that the British had offered us. Anyone who did would be labeled a hensopper, or hands-upper: a coward and traitor to the Boer cause. My father had not been a coward, but to him the safety of his family and his farm were more important than Boer pride. To some of the men in Amersfoort, however — to the ones who called themselves Bittereinders, because they would fight to the bitter end — this was defeatist talk.

  By now, every family was affected. Fathers, brothers, and sons were all fighting on commando. My own Oom Jakob had been killed in the raid at Mafeking. Soon, Gertie would be old enough to go and fight with my cousins, some of whom were only ten when their families sent them out into the bush with a rifle and enough ammunition to last several days. One of them, a lad of twelve named Tjaart who I’d sat with in school, had been killed after only a week. These days, the elders spoke of him as a hero, even though as far as I could remember there hadn’t ever been anythin
g remarkable about him in life. The mythology that grew up around Tjaart was bigger than he ever could have conjured up on his own had he lived. The men used it to buttress their spirits, to put fire in their bellies.

  I was sure that if my father was still alive, he would be fighting with them.

  The grave was piled high with rocks, and I added another stone to the mound before crouching on the soft earth. Closing my eyes, I tried not to think of the day of the funeral: the way the coffin had lurched back and forth on the shoulders of four local men who were too old and frail to be on commando and who were barely strong enough to support even my father’s wasted body.

  Try as I might to summon a picture of my father’s healthy face, the image of the lurching coffin would not go away — so at last I opened my eyes and focused instead on the tombstone. I remembered my father chopping wood outside our house, splitting great logs into kindling, and telling me that the word splinter was the same in English as in Dutch. I liked the mystery of English words, the way the sounds were crisp and clean, not guttural. I used to roll them around in my mouth, savoring the thrill of speaking the enemy’s tongue. Besides the names that no one could escape in those days — Queen Victoria, Lord Kitchener — the only English words I knew were gold, farm, and church.

  Those were the words that summed up the history of my country. Two hundred years before I was born, French, Dutch, and German settlers fleeing religious persecution in Europe had sought a free life in southern Africa. They worked as farmers and worshipped at Dutch Reformed churches. They became known as Afrikaners and were the first of two white tribes to settle the land.

  The second tribe was British, and they fought us for control of the gold mines, land, and Africans. The war that had broken out just weeks before my father died was supposed to see off the British for good — hence its name, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog: the Second War of Liberation.

  So far, apart from food shortages and a visible absence of men, life had continued as normal in our corner of the Transvaal. Tonight, as a warm wind blew in from the east, all I could hear was the lonely clattering of a windmill from across the veld.