by Zoe Wicomb
This time Nettie was prepared; she had no expectations of Mother Nature. She also chose to believe that Nicholas had no choice, that the baby was so quick off the mark that there was no time to worry about the oumas’ absence. Push, he urged, his hands clamped on her shoulders, claiming that the baby’s head was there, that it was a matter of minutes. Besides, he said, one could not be sure of the old women’s cleanliness. Nicholas, the autodidact, had done his homework; it turned out that there was nothing to it that common sense did not dictate, and he delivered the baby with skill. A boy, they both exclaimed with delight. And relief, for that meant they could put behind them the business of reproduction.
Nettie said tactfully that he should leave the rest, the rituals, to the oumas, who had turned up regardless, to which Nicholas agreed—it was a live boy with everything intact—but not before the old women had washed their hands properly. The cheek of it, offering them a basin of hot water and soap! Ouma Grieta knotted her doek decisively and bit her lip. Ai Goetsega! Such arrogance would not go unpunished, and barely had she muttered the words when a bolt of unseasonable thunder rumbled. Within minutes a mighty storm was unleashed, and as the baby, smacked, washed and swaddled, drew his first mouthful of milk, rain drummed steadily on the zinc roof, drenching the arid land, and Nettie sank into grateful sleep, cradling the boy. They would call him Jacob, after her own father, and in honor of God the Father who had blessed Jacob of bygone days with productive dreams and a handy ladder. But Nicholas thought otherwise; he did not want to argue with God, but Jacob’s treachery, deceiving his father and brother, should not have been rewarded; and his mother should not have connived with her son. So he suggested what he called the French version. Why not Jacques, since Nettie had after all been a Malherbe? They would call him Jake for short, and that should placate her father.
The little girl, Mercy, who at the age of nearly four felt the vastness of the world swirl about her, whose loneliness brought language tumbling willy-nilly, chaotically from her voice box, was over the moon about the boy. The baby was soft and round with a plump face in which she buried her own thin cheeks. He smelled of clean fresh water. He was hers, her very own baby whom she would love with all her heart. She spoke with him in the funny prattle that her parents did not understand, warbling her voice like a bird, knowing that he understood. It was as if a switch had been flicked and all around was glorious light suffusing the dull days. The baby opened his eyes, large and black, and smiled at her, flooding her heart, and Mercia promised baby Jake that she would guard him like the angel that her father said she should be.
There would be no more children, Nicholas said, confident that he could handle the tricky business of contraception. Nettie had done her duty, producing one of each, so there was no need to saddle themselves like poor and ignorant coloreds with a large brood. The children would be raised to the glory of God, and that could only be achieved by strict discipline and chastisement. To that end Nicholas and Nettie pulled in their belts and, turning each coin this way and that, assiduously squirreled away the cents for school fees.
When Nettie died, as quietly as she had lived, Nicholas was puzzled. Why had she said nothing of her illness? Why had she suffered the pain alone? For pain there must have been. When finally she collapsed into her bed and the doctor was summoned, they learned that she had no more than a week or two left. The cancer had consumed nearly all her organs. Her frame was no more than an eggshell. Nettie did not wait for the second week; she made the tremendous effort to speak of the children, to say that Jake should learn Latin, or that was what Nicholas thought she said. And then she was gone.
Mercia was twelve years old. She tried to summon her mother’s spirit, but discovered that there was no such thing. Nettie was simply dead. Jake said that their father had killed her—the words of a grief-stricken child. But no, Jake said, he had overnight stopped being a child, he knew what he was talking about. Mercia, who had her nose buried in books, knew nothing. Old Who-art-in-heaven had killed their mother—of that he was certain.
Would Jacques have turned out to be such a reprobate, such a failure, had Nettie remained alive? Nicholas did not want to know the answer. But he could not help feeling resentful. Why had she died? He had done everything: he had chastised the boy; he had sacrificed and provided. Nicholas had an idea that cancer was something resistible that you let into your own heart, that you allowed its crabbing into your organs. Why else had Antoinette said nothing of her pain? Why had she not allowed him to gather Jantjie Bêrend that grew in abundance all around, the cancer bush that would certainly have cured her? Never again would he put his faith in a woman.
Mercia woke to the clatter of Craig opening the wooden shutters. Sad October light flooded in, licking the corners of the room. Pulling the duvet over her head, she buried her face in the pillow, protecting herself against the shards of icy sunlight. Glasgow was by no means the deep north, but it would be the death of her all the same.
Come again? Craig said. Naked, his arms raised, and holding on to the window frame as if holding up the golden day, he stood distracted, his back to her.
I want to kill myself.
It’s a gorgeous day. Let’s go out, Craig said.
If you won’t come and live in Cape Town, I’ll kill myself, her muffled voice came through the down.
We’ll go to the Pots of Gartness on Endrick Water. The salmon should be there by now, back from the Atlantic trip. All that way they’ve been, to the bountiful Norwegian sea and now, shining silvery and plump, are on their way back home.
As a teenager Craig had cycled for miles to fish on the river, and in autumn there was the spectacle of the salmon leap. He hadn’t been since then; there was no longer the urge to get out of the city, or rather, to get away from his family. The ice-bright day brought back that adolescence, set him off about his mother, who would not let him be, who went on and on, gnawing away in the hope that something would slip out—what did he think? what did he feel?—wanting something he could not give, something he most probably didn’t even have.
Why, Craig asked, as he struggled to drag off the duvet that Mercia clung to, does this remind me of my mother?
Mercia came up for air. Oh stop. You’re a grown-up, so stop whingeing about your mother. Or, be different—whinge about your father for a change.
How often they competed for center stage. Mercia wanted to talk about the melancholia that descended on her in October, how it took years in the Northern Hemisphere before she realized that the sadness came regularly at autumn. Thus no need to whinge.
I am at one with the universe, with the rhythms of the season, she mocked. Just as I am tuned in to the circadian cycle and must mourn the death of each day.
Aye right, with a glass of bevvy. And that, Craig said, shaking his head, was what made him sick of women, made him think of his mother. All that nasty business of the female psyche. Nothing that a good day of fishing in the rain wouldn’t cure.
I have a lecture to write, essays to mark, a paper to finish, a new course proposal to submit tomorrow. Too much to do, she sighed, to go out gallivanting with a mother-hater.
So what’s new. You always have too much to do. But it’s criminal to allow a rare sunny day in autumn to pass you by, especially when the salmon are doing their high jumps. Come on, we won’t be long.
Mercia staggered out of bed. Shocking, but by now she too thought of the chilly autumnal day as beautiful. Let’s live in proper sunshine, in Cape Town, she howled all the same. Craig was busy making sandwiches and a flask of coffee.
Let’s go, he said. And another thing about women, they always need padkos. As for himself, he could go for hours without something to eat.
Mercia punched his bottom with both her fists, pleased that he remembered the Afrikaans word.
So you’d rather have the good old pub, hey! Let’s remember that Scottish pub food is disgusting. And whoever’s heard of sandwiches without butter? That’s what you get these days.
In t
he icy sunlight they set out through the city, on to the open road where the hills rose in the distance, the Dumgoyne a sharply outlined lump clad in tweedy autumnal color. They argued about the window. Craig said it had to be open, to savor the loveliness of the autumnal day, of the burnt-red summer bracken snuggling up to the purple haze of heather. Past the Glengoyne distillery.
My father’s generation would have stopped for a wee dram, Craig said.
Mercia wasn’t listening. If she feared the season, she has always loved the written word, autumn, its disdainful letter M ignoring the N, until it takes a suffix, another syllable for the letters to nuzzle each other, bound in articulated intimacy. Au-tum-nal, she said out loud.
They parked on a lane from where the roar of water could be heard. How could she have forgotten the dizzying beauty of a cold bright day? The hedgerows (oh, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood run wild) having lost their summer lushness, now hosted valedictory vetch in weak purple and heads of tired honeysuckle holding out valiantly. And there was the starred triumph of autumn—berries. Polished red of oval rose hips, hawthorn, purple opalescent sloes, and clusters of bright black beads—surely too late for elder?
All eyes and ears for the water, Craig nodded absently; he didn’t know; like a frisky retriever he bounded down the steep, slippery steps to the falls.
There it was, the breathtaking Pots. The order of a banked river all broken, its waters parted, smashed up with jutting planes of black rock over which white water roared with fury and boiled into icy maelstroms below. Where the rock was less jagged, water cascaded in beaded curtains and, here and there taking the gradient in its stride, settled into still pools. And all within a single sweep of the eye. The trees along the banks had already taken color. In the autumnal spectrum of yellow through to burnt red, beech, oak, and elder huddled together, waiting to be lashed and stripped by the wind. But the day was still, and where the water pooled quietly, brushstrokes of reflected leaf color quivered on the surface, inverted.
Craig, who had been rushing along the path in search of familiar landmarks, came to a sudden halt. There, he whispered, taking her hand, look. Salmon seemed to float effortlessly upstream, then, bracing themselves, gathered speed in order to scale the rapids. As they rose in the light their scales glinted the mineral silver of the sea, the trophy of travel, of having managed the crossing from river to ocean, but alas, the return was not going to be easy. The healthier fish hurled themselves defiantly at the broiling water but their arched, curved bodies would fall back, thwarted—then, only the briefest rest before tackling the rapids once more. Heroic, yes, but Mercia felt embarrassing tears prickle as the indomitable creatures were repeatedly beaten, some cut by the rock as they fell back, leaving trails of blood. In the quiet pools the less vigorous salmon flopped about, exhausted, before taking up once more the quest of that circular journey now so near its end.
Craig explained about the redds upstream where months ago the fish were spawned and to which they now tried to return to make new redds and do some spawning of their own. Clever, yes, but how repellent, Mercia thought, the endless repetition, not only the biological imperative to reproduce, but the need to return to origins, to the very same stream, to make their babies back home. After all that travel and the dodging of dangers—far more radical than any Homeric adventure, as their very organs adapted to the crossing from fresh water to the salt of the sea—this was surely disappointing: the circularity of their lives, and the return all tainted with October blood. Really, she should not have been applauding the few, should not have been rooting for the salmon to perform the spectacular leap, the momentary disappearance in the white spume, before surfacing in a triumphant arc above the rapids, in the calm of the stream where free of the fury they could head upstream. Not yet triumphant, since there would be more rapids to negotiate, more endurance tests before reaching the old spawning grounds, but hopefully none as trying as these at Gartness. Did they remember the reverse journey, the carefree, dizzying tumble downstream through the rapids?
What happens, she asked, when they get home, to the fond ancestral streams?
Well, it’s not only the end of the odyssey, it’s the end of their lives. After the female digs her redds in the gravel of quiet waters and the male does the fertilizing, they’re just about pooped, ready to die and make way for the next generation.
Oh, midst the splendor of water and words like autumnal, she could kill herself after all. Mercia could no longer bear to look. Call it a tourist attraction! It was indecent; the place should be fenced off; humans should be sheltered from Mother Nature’s cruel displays. How awful that return. She for one did not want to see it—the gravel redds murky with spawn and the self-satisfied rumbling of parents, turned into shallow graves where, exhausted by the business of reproduction, the salmon must lie down and die.
Well, they don’t exactly die in the redds. There the new organisms will be growing into little smolts, the small fry, Craig explained.
She shuddered. Had he noticed, Mercia asked, young mothers steering prams in shopping malls or airports, explaining this or that to their little Johnnies in super-loud voices that declared the world a redd, a special place of spawning, of triumphant arrival. Craig laughed. That was not why he had brought her to Endrick, but he agreed. An object lesson in reproduction, base, primitive, animal, and he lifted her off the ground, spun round triumphantly in the slippery mud and declared that they were not ready to die.
Imagine, she said, making a song and dance about the wise salmon, when the wisdom is driven by reproduction, by the fetishizing of origins. No wonder salmon have pride of place in Glasgow’s coat of arms.
Please, he said, no aspersions on Finn MacCool. That’s my Irish heritage you’re scoffing at. You should eat the salmon skin—best pan-fried and crisped—so that like my good self and Finn MacCool you too can gain knowledge of the world, become the oracle. Mercia would have to lighten up; she could see for herself that it was nonsense talk, this being in tune with nature—this wanting to kill herself, Craig said.
So off they went in the bright October light, back to the city for an invigorating bottle of red wine and protected sex.
It was presumably Craig’s Irish heritage and all that crisped salmon skin that made him succumb. Mercia had been called by his sister, Fiona, who asked to meet for a coffee. She should have known; she and Fiona were not really friends. They sat at Gandolfi’s, where Fiona chattered frantically as if warding off an attack of some kind. She ordered too many cakes, which they pushed around on their plates. When finally it was acceptable to leave, as Mercia pushed back the heavy, carved chair, Fiona placed a restraining hand on hers.
Morag is pregnant, she said, and she would rather Mercia heard it from her, and sooner rather than later.
Mercia took a deep breath. When? she asked, ready to calculate the date of conception.
Fiona explained that it was a surprise to them, that the baby was not due until late November.
Mercia said a terse thank-you, and made herself walk out slowly. No running, and hold your head high, no not Johnny-head-in-the-air like her father had taught her; rather, as the Pilates teacher said, with a soft peach under the chin. That is what Mercia mouthed, over and over, as she walked tall through the Merchant City, through Queen Street station, to the Underground: soft peach under the chin. The trick was not to squash it.
So long it was, after Craig had left. Who would have thought that she’d have any tears left, but it felt as if the wound was being prised open. What exactly was Mercia crying for? If Craig had not taken the younger woman to Gartness, hadn’t shown her the leaping salmon, what was it to her?
Such reasoning did not stop the pain.
Shards of autumnal light, the city leaved with October blood, yes, she remembers the day of the leaping salmon so clearly. When she gets back to Scotland, Mercia vows, she will return to Endrick Water. Many years have passed, and no doubt the path on the riverbank would be paved, and there would be
signs prompting the tourist to press a camera button for the picturesque shot, alert her to the best place from which to view through a lens the crazed salmon glinting metallic above the water. She wants to be shot of Craig and his salmon, and since memory is so bound up with place, she believes that all such places must be revisited, the previous memory erased. That trip had left her with distaste for the iridescence of fish scales, for all things circular, for journeys that must end where they started.
Mercia is not home because this is where she started out; she is here in Kliprand, she reminds herself, because Jake wanted her to come. Now a wasted Jake seems to have lost his marbles, keeping out of reach, silent in a room dark and musty with the fumes of alcohol. She knows that she too is in a sense hiding from him, that she too wants to put off talking, put off the unknown decisions that talking will bring. In the meantime, the moderate October heat is comforting, and she does love the familiar view of gray-green scrub with flat-topped mountains looming blue in the distance. She loves that hot, red sand where ancient tortoises sit for days resting in the same scrap of shade as if the earth had not moved, or night had not fallen, tortoises whose purpose it would seem is to endure the passage of time.
So despite Jake, and Sylvie’s horrible chatter, Mercia knows that this is home. There is a part of her, perhaps no more than insensate buttocks, that sinks into the comfortable familiarity of an old sofa. Which is nothing to do with three-legged cast-iron pots or roosterbrood; besides, the light slants onto the floor precisely as it does at the other end of the year in Glasgow—the world simply reversed. But here, is it not conceivable that Mercia could stretch out, boots and all, for a while at least, open her heart, let in the heat and light, and check to see how much of it has mended?
