Stones for My Father

by Trilby Kent

  My mother didn’t appear to have heard me. She remained where she was, still as a tree trunk, both arms limp at her sides; a strange, soft, choking noise emanated from her lips. I rushed closer, pressing the flask toward her.

  “There’s just enough here —”

  “Look at him, Corlie Roux,” said my mother. Her voice sounded the way it always did when she was about to rant — full of spite and simmering rage — and instinctively I drew back. But Ma remained exactly as she was, staring at the floor with blank eyes.

  I turned toward the bed. Gertie’s head had tipped to one side, away from me, and I could tell that his mouth was slightly open. Patches of yellow hair had started to grow in place of his beautiful golden forelock, and a few fine wisps still curled about his ears. The white petticoat was wrinkled and sticky with sweat, but my brother looked peaceful. I edged nearer.

  “Gertie?” I whispered.

  The bushman arrow still hung from the leather cord around his neck. I suddenly noticed how bright it seemed against my brother’s gray skin.

  That was when I realized he was dead.

  “He hasn’t moved for two hours,” said Ma. Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. “I’ve been waiting for him to move. He won’t move.”

  I dropped to the ground next to my brother, and extended one hand to touch his cheek.

  “Gertie —”

  “Don’t touch him!” Ma lunged at me, fingers digging like daggers into my arms as she hurled me across the tent.

  I cried out as I hit the ground, but when I went to raise myself, the wind had already been knocked from my lungs, and I gasped for air.

  “Don’t come anywhere near him!” shrieked my mother. Behind her, Hansie sat staring. His face crumpled, breaking out in angry, red blotches as tears began streaming down his cheeks.

  I cowered in the corner where I had landed, desperately trying to form words.

  “He’s my brother,” I wheezed.

  “Yours! Yours!” Ma’s clenched hand swept over the table, sending cups, plates, and a broken lantern across the floor. Hansie screamed and began pummeling the bed with balled fists. “Selfish, insolent girl! Wicked, evil, godless girl!” Before I could slide out of her reach, she grabbed me by one arm and hauled me out of the tent. Behind us, Hansie’s howls grew louder.

  “I didn’t ask for you,” she growled. “If I could have that boy back and you cold in the ground, I would. As God is my witness, I wish you had never been born, Coraline Roux!”

  I could sense that we were being watched, but at that moment, my full attention was focused on my mother. Grief had distorted her handsome face so that it seemed ugly. She grabbed the flask of aloe water and flung it at me.

  “Take your blasted aloe,” she shrieked. “The Devil take you!”

  “I will!” I shouted back. “I’ll leave, and then you’ll only have Hansie, the way you’ve always wanted!”

  “Leave?” My mother dissolved into poisonous laughter. “Where will you go in this godforsaken place?”

  “I’ll look after myself.” And then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I added, “I could have looked after Gert, too.”

  If she’d had the chance then, I think my mother would have tried to kill me. She certainly looked as if she wanted to: every fiber in her seemed geared to wring my neck. But then a British soldier appeared — I recognized him as the one Gert and I had watched picking lice from his legs on the barracks steps — and instantly the light in Ma’s eyes seemed to change.

  “Here,” she called, pointing at me. “Take this girl!”

  The soldier looked down at me, his expression a mixture of confusion and pity.

  “Take her!” repeated my mother. If it weren’t for her rage, I might have thought that she was pleading with him. “Go on, you fool — she’s one of yours!”

  THE DARKNESS OF EGYPT

  Those were the words that haunted me as I lay curled beneath the khaki barracks at the edge of the camp. Winter was just around the corner, and the dry, crisp days were starting to give way to cold nights. Just the other morning, Gert had woken to discover frost flowers forming in the clay outside our tent. What I wouldn’t give for it to be October again, when steaming sunshine and warm thundershowers wrapped us in the earthy smells of the veld. It was still only April, and yet my father’s coat offered limited protection from the chill.

  I fell in and out of sleep, dreaming that my brother was there beside me. I heard my mother’s words, and the words of Sonja Erasmus — she had called me a mongrel, but why? Then, my brother’s voice. “Tell me a story, Corlie,” he pleaded. My mind teemed with imaginary characters — Ntombazi, the little dikkop that was too frightened to fly, the fisherman’s son who discovered a monster on the shore — but before long, their stories began to blur so that I didn’t know where to begin. I saw my brother’s round, white face watching me as I struggled to find the words. I noticed the petulant curl of his mouth, and as he turned away I heard Ma’s voice again. Only, the thing that spoke wasn’t my mother, but a magnificent lioness. The creature’s thick, muscular neck and powerful claws were stained red, and for a terrible instant I glimpsed my own reflection in its gleaming yellow eyes. The next thing I knew, the lioness reared up and let out a glorious roar.

  Later, as I fell into a deeper sleep toward the early hours of the morning, I dreamed that I was walking through a forest. Black trees formed a thicketed ceiling beneath the inky sky, and the darkness had the same touch, the same scent as breathing earth: like the sweet soil that had turned and churned — softly, soundlessly — under my father’s plow. The sounds of leaves twisting on their branches only accentuated the silence. Between the swaying canopy, I could make out distant constellations, like glistening nails pinned to the sky.

  Suddenly, a flash of light tore the sky in half, peeling back the layers of darkness to expose a blinding streak of white fire. I barely had time to cover my eyes before a luminous ball of flames swept across the treetops, trailing a sparkling ribbon of debris in its wake. In a single second, everything was illuminated by a silver light: I could see at once the route that I had cleared on my way through the forest, the sparkling river in the distance, the petrified trees. Dazzled by the sudden shock of brightness, I clamped my hands to my eyes and fell to the ground. Leaves fluttered and crackled; branches plummeted down with thunderous crashing — and then there was silence. A gust of wind whistled through the sighing treetops; another branch cracked and swung, creaking on its sinewy hinge before finally giving up the struggle and dropping with a dull thud to the earth.

  That was how I discovered the grave. I had fallen by the edge of a deep crater, and through the darkness I could make out the forms of a hundred little bodies. I began digging through them, knowing that Gert was somewhere below, suffocating beneath the weight of so many lost souls. When I reached the bottom of the pit, there was nothing: only an empty jockey box. As I turned to throw it up over the edge of the pit, I felt a weight on my arm and looked down to see that it was Sipho’s hand. He, too, was dead: his head lolling to one side, legs splayed, bare feet poking up in the air like tree stumps. “Is it true, kleinnooi?” I heard him ask, although his mouth did not move. “Are you one of them?”

  And then the dream shifted. I was in our house again, although now it was empty. I ran through the rooms, calling for Pa, but there was no answer. As I opened the front door to look outside, I was stopped in my tracks by a wall of sand. I slammed the door shut, but suddenly sand was everywhere: pouring through the windows, seeping through the joints in the floor, falling in heavy sheets against the sides of the house so that the walls shook. I saw that I would be buried alive, and I screamed.

  I hit my head on the underside of the raised barracks floor as I lurched into consciousness. My father’s coat lay in a pile in the dirt about my feet. The empty grain sack that the khaki soldier had given me to lie on was coarse and too thin on the hard ground. I vaguely remembered him struggling to find the Dutch words to tell Ma t
hat if she wouldn’t let me stay in our own tent, there wouldn’t be any space for me elsewhere.

  Outside, no one stirred. A row of tents faced me, blind and silent. I wondered who lay inside them, how many had heard of my shameful banishment. They were unlikely to help me now.

  Footsteps thudded overhead, and I scrambled onto my stomach, dragging myself out from beneath the veranda. The khaki who had taken me from Ma was standing on the steps, yawning, a white spot of shaving cream lingering innocently beneath one ear. When he saw me stand up, he pursed his lips and nodded as if agreeing with something neither of us had said.

  “Corporal Byrne,” I whispered. The words came from nowhere. And then, uncertainly, for I had never spoken his name before, I said again, “Corporal Malachi Byrne.”

  The soldier stopped nodding and squinted at me. He had an alert, narrow face and a restless manner.

  “What did you say?”

  “Corporal Malachi Byrne.” I remembered the badge that he had shown us, the picture of the leaf. “Corporal Byrne …”

  Another soldier appeared on the step behind him, and the first one cocked his head at him. “The kid’s delirious,” he said.

  “Corporal Byrne,” I repeated, wondering what he’d just said. The words made me feel braver each time I said them.

  “Who’s that?” asked the second soldier.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  The second soldier tiptoed down the steps, never taking his eyes off me — as if I was an animal that might be frightened away.

  “Wie is Corporal Byrne?” he asked in my language.

  “My vriend.”

  The soldiers looked at each other. “She says he’s her friend.”

  “I gathered that, Parsons.”

  “Waar is hy?” asked the soldier called Parsons. I shrugged. Gert and I had last seen Corporal Byrne by the river, before we were reunited with the laager.

  “Standerton,” I said at last.

  “Standerton’s miles away,” said Parsons.

  “Look into it,” said the other before tweaking his top shirt button and marching off.

  I knew that the khakis reserved special treatment for prisoners who were willing to reveal the location of rogue commandos. I didn’t have any secret to share — they had already discovered our stores at Tant Minna’s farm, and the laager had long since lost contact with any commando — but I clung to the hope that Corporal Byrne’s name might just buy me continued protection.

  I started wandering the rows of tents. It soon became clear from the looks I was sent that I was going to need all the help I could get. I didn’t dare go back to our tent to retrieve my ration book from Ma, and it seemed unlikely that any of the women who had given me food in the past would be inclined to do so now. The children Gert and I had played with just two weeks earlier now regarded me with squint-eyed suspicion, and I wondered if they thought I might be contagious. As I walked, I became aware of a sharp, sour smell, which seemed to follow me wherever I went. I felt myself flush with shame when I realized that the smell came from my own filthy pinafore, which hadn’t been washed in weeks.

  A group of boys snickered loudly when they saw me approach. They had been sharing a squashed tobacco roll, sucking the smoke loudly through their teeth, shielding it from the wind with grimy palms, and they grinned at me with blackened, bleeding gums.

  “How’s it, Corlie?” one of them sneered.

  “Leave me alone.”

  The next group I encountered was a gaggle of younger children. When they saw me draw near, the girls began to giggle, pussyfooting restlessly with the thrill of mischief. One of them — who was twice my height and as skinny as a reed, with a face like lemons and a bonnet too large for her head — reached out and pinched my arm as I passed by.

  “Corlie Roux’s a traitor,” she taunted. “She’s not a Boer at all.”

  “Get her!” shouted another, and at once the group began launching stones at me. The first few missed by a mile, but as they came closer one caught my hand. I was so stunned that at first I didn’t think to run away.

  “It isn’t true —” I began.

  Another stone hit my shoulder, and I broke into a run. The pack of children chased me halfway across the camp before their mothers started to call them back; it was too early in the day to spend so much energy buzzing about like a swarm of tsetse flies.

  I stopped when I reached an upturned bull cart abandoned at the farthest corner of the camp. It was the kind of cart I’d seen the Tommies use to transport the dead at the end of each day. I ducked beneath it and pulled my knees up to my chin. I wanted to cry then, more than I ever had before in my life — but my eyes were as dry as the veld stretching beyond the prison fence. I rubbed my temples with both hands, confused by the competing desires to weep and to scream. In the end, I must have made some kind of noise, because before long a withered face poked into view.

  “What’s wrong, little girl?”

  It was Errol Joubert, the old man who went door to door trying to sell useless pieces of rubbish. I remembered Annie Steenkamp saying that he would try to sell someone the darkness of Egypt if he thought he could get a fair price for it. Years of smoking a tobacco pipe had turned his gray hair slightly yellow at the front. His cuticles were yellow, too, and his fingernails were as dull and cracked as old ivory keys on a piano. But the whites of his eyes were as clear and cold as frost.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. Before, the space under the upturned wagon had felt almost luxurious; now his stale breath filled the air, and I stretched out my legs to create some distance between us.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing to me,” he grinned. Most of his teeth were missing.

  “You know as well as everyone else,” I snapped. “My ma hates me.”

  “Is that so?” The old man clicked his tongue. “That’s a shame, that is. A crying shame. You know what Jesus said, don’t you?”

  I stared at him, wishing that he would leave me alone.

  “ ‘A house divided against itself falleth,’ ” rasped Errol Joubert. “You know what that means?”

  “I don’t care!”

  A white hand shot out at me as fast as a python’s tongue. The next thing I knew, he had me by one arm, yellow nails digging into my skin like talons.

  “That isn’t the way to speak to an elder,” he hissed.

  “You’re a hensopper! A traitor —”

  “Who told you that?”

  I clamped my mouth shut and tried to pull myself from his grasp. But the old man was surprisingly strong.

  “I came to help you,” he said. I could tell that he was trying to smother my fear with gentle words. “Let me help you.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “You can sit on my knee. Make an old man happy —”

  “If you don’t let go of me, I’ll scream!”

  Stirred to fury, the old man clawed at me with his free hand through the spokes of the wagon wheel.

  “And who do you think will come to rescue you?” he wheezed, battling to hold on to me as I squirmed to the farthest corner of the shelter. “Little whore!”

  I glimpsed his withered arm, the one that was holding me. It was bluish-white and flecked with liver spots, sprouting a jungle of wiry gray hairs. One large vein bulged from his elbow to his hand, where it branched into three or four lumpy blue tributaries. Swallowing my fear, I lunged for the fleshy part of his forearm, sinking my teeth in as far as they would go.

  Errol Joubert screamed, the exact sound a chicken makes just as its neck is being wrung. As he writhed about on the ground, clutching his arm to his chest and howling with rage, I slipped out on the other side of the wagon and scrambled to my feet.

  “Come back here!” the old man cried. And then, in a nasty, desperate plea, “Little girl, come sit with me and Oom Errol will tell you a pretty tale …”

  But I had already fled.

  The copper taste of blood stayed in my mouth for the rest of that day, reminding me of my shame.
I wandered the camp in a daze, following passage after passage between rows of identical tents. There had been a time when I would have quickly become lost, but weeks spent traipsing back and forth with Gert had imprinted the layout of the camp on my memory. Although I didn’t make a conscious effort to avoid the block of tents that had once been home, I managed to keep to the periphery and so avoided encountering any of our immediate neighbors. Some of the faces I saw were new to me — children whose hair had not yet been shorn, women who still thought it would make a difference to complain about the lack of soap and water, who had yet to learn the futility of their rage — while the ones I recognized swam past me like ghosts, silently judging the girl who had been banished by her own mother.

  As I walked, I felt something change inside me. It was as if Corlie Roux were shrinking, pressed in on all sides so that she had no choice but to grow smaller and smaller, shrinking into a tiny ball that was becoming buried in the deepest chambers of her body until — pop! — she hardly existed at all. Just below my skin, I could feel a protective layer begin to spread up and down my arms and legs, around my body, up and over my head. It was as hard as a calabash shell, and Corlie Roux was just a miniscule, sour seed nestled deep inside its armor. The Africans cooked calabash seeds in sugar and ate them as sweets, but not even wild animals would bother trying to eat them raw.

  I am nothing, I thought. No one loves me, and those that did are dead. So be it: I will love no one.

  I repeated this mantra to myself over and over — I am nothing … I am nothing … — until a voice shook me from my trance.

  “Corlie Roux!”

  I looked up, and there before me was Tant Minna. She grabbed me by both arms and hustled me into the nearest tent. It didn’t occur to me to protest.