When the Ground Is Hard

by Malla Nunn

  “What?” Lottie says in a sleepy voice.

  I look again, and the bony hand is gone. But I saw it. Right there. “Do you believe in spirits?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “They don’t exist.”

  Nonsense. Everyone, even the missionaries who finished high school, believe in good Christian spirits. Mostly the Holy Spirit, but that counts.

  “How do you know for sure?” I ask.

  “If they did exist, then my father would be here every night to tell me a story and to kiss me good night, but he’s gone and gone. Just bones in the ground.”

  “Your first father?”

  Delia says there have been too many to count. Some white, some mixed-race, some black.

  “I only had one father,” Lottie says. It’s silent for a moment. Then very quietly, she says, “And he loved me.”

  Her words cut through me. Her father loved her. She’s certain of it. She knows it from the roots of her cropped hair to the tips of her toes.

  Of all the reasons to hate Lottie Diamond, that father, with his stories and his kisses, is perhaps the best one of all.

  6

  Surely Mercy and Goodness Will Follow Me

  We line up for Monday morning inspection, little soldiers on parade. The junior girls stand in the front rows, and the senior girls in the back. Down the road, where we can’t see them, the boys do the same.

  Matron inspects the junior girls for dirty fingernails, dirty necks, clean shoes, and clean underwear. Mrs. Thomas does the same, and I see from her thin mouth and glassy eyes that her sad mood has gone and that this morning she is ready to be cruel. She makes a show of inspecting Delia’s shoes for dust, but we all know that she won’t punish any of the girls whose parents might withdraw them from Keziah and send them to boarding school in South Africa. Sweat breaks out on my top lip when she cuts through the lines and comes straight for me. Since my demotion, I don’t know where I stand in the order of things.

  “Hands,” she snaps.

  I hold them out. She checks my fingernails and the grooves of my knuckles. This morning, I washed extra hard to get any trace of the native medicine off my skin, so I know I’m clean. She doesn’t ask to see my underwear, which, in any case, is new and trimmed with lace. Mrs. Thomas moves on to Lottie.

  “Skirt up.”

  Lottie lifts her uniform to show her underwear. The rest of us keep our eyes to the front, but some girls titter at the thought of what Lottie wears under her uniform.

  “Make sure you have a fresh pair on tomorrow,” Mrs. Thomas says, and moves to the next girl, this time to check behind her ears. We are checked at random, but the poor girls get extra attention because they are in imminent danger of falling into bad habits. Lottie is inspected three or four times a week. This is how we start each day, scrubbed clean and closer to God.

  The view from the middle row is different from where I’d normally stand in the front row. Sandi Cardoza’s braids shine with Vaseline, and a red ribbon trails down her back. Delia whispers something to her, and together they laugh.

  I have to get back into the group today . . . before my being out of it becomes permanent. My reintroduction has to be natural, a return to the way things ought to be.

  The Elephant claps her hands to get our attention, and her wig wiggles. It’s funny, but no one laughs. “To breakfast. Nice and quiet.”

  “Yes, Matron.” We turn and march to a long brick building that houses the kitchen and dining hall. A typical Keziah breakfast waits for us inside: bowls of stiff porridge, mugs of sweet tea, and slices of white bread with jam.

  We keep to the middle of the dirt road. A dust cloud trails behind us, and the sky above us is an endless stretch of blue. We march past neat garden beds and small lawns trimmed with machetes. Behind the orchards and on the other side of a low wire fence are tall trees and a thick stand of wild bananas that grows down to the river’s edge.

  I think of Lottie out there at night, jumping the fence and fording the river to get medicine from Mama Whatever-Her-Name-Was. My shoulder feels much better, the pain now a dull ache that I barely notice. The medicine worked, but I didn’t thank Lottie this morning. She was wrong to take the impago.

  * * *

  • • •

  After breakfast, we march to the chapel for a beginning-of-the-January-term prayer meeting. We attend chapel three times a week, and again on Sunday, so that God is always at our shoulder.

  “Right, left, right, left.” Brenda, a senior girl with a permanently blocked nose, calls out the rhythm, and we fall into step. Behind us, Gordon Number One leads the boys. There are four Gordons at the academy, all sons of Scottish men who passed through Swaziland or else took up farming the land. Gordon Number One’s father comes to every speech day and awards ceremony, and Delia told me that Gordon Number One will go to a university in Scotland one day.

  We near the red brick chapel. It has a peaked iron roof and a small graveyard on the side nearest the school boundary fence. The five graves are decorated with artificial flowers in bubble-topped plastic containers that help to keep the colors bright. Whenever we pass the graveyard, we hold our breath, to stop the spirits of the dead from entering our bodies and stealing away our souls. The American missionaries tell us to stop believing in native superstitions and to put our faith in the hands of the Lord Jesus above, but we all know that African spirits are stronger than American spirits, so we hold our breath, and that way we stay alive.

  On the near side of the chapel is a concrete baptism pit. When it rains, the pit fills with water and makes a home for the frogs. On baptism day, the pit is filled to the top by hand and the frogs are scooped up with nets. Some backsliding students have been baptized three or four times. It helps that the newly baptized get a pat on the back from Mr. Vincent and an extra helping of dessert after dinner. The devil is cunning, but the good Lord has steamed pudding and sponge cakes on his side.

  In the distance, a black dot appears on the dirt road that leads though the thick bush to the school grounds. The chug, chug of an engine grows louder, and my heart sinks. It’s Mr. Parns’s blue tractor, and I know the ugly scene that’s coming. It happens every term. Mr. Parns begs his son, Darnell, to get off the tractor and go back to school, and his son, Darnell, screams and begs to go back home, while the rest of us look on, helpless.

  “To the right. To the right.” Brenda directs us off the road, and our carefully arranged lines break apart. We clump together on the roadside as the tractor pulls to a stop a few yards from chapel. Mr. Vincent, the American principal, walks down the chapel stairs to talk to Mr. Parns, a short and bald mixed-race farmer with a sunburned face and a forehead cut with deep furrows from worrying about late rains and failed crops.

  Mr. Vincent, on the other hand, is tall, with a smooth face and thick caramel-brown hair. He wears brown trousers, a brown sweater—no matter what the weather—a crisp white shirt, and a brown tie. His nickname is the Brown Bear, for obvious reasons. Mr. Vincent peers at Darnell through his thick glasses and welcomes him back to the academy for another year. Mrs. Vincent, his wife, smiles and nods in agreement. Americans are smilers. It suits them. They have straight white teeth, and their breath smells of mint.

  Darnell, who is fifteen but can’t work out simple math problems or read simple words, sits on the tractor fender with red eyes and a snotty nose. He won’t look up.

  “Come on, boy,” Mr. Parns says, embarrassed. “Time for school.”

  “Home,” Darnell cries. “Home, Pa. Home.”

  “Acchh . . .” Peaches shivers with disgust. Darnell has sloped eyes, flat features, and a broad face. Delia and all of us in the group agreed that it was bad luck and bad judgment to have a half-wit mixing in with normal students. His ugliness might be contagious.

  “Quiet down, girls. No talking.” The Elephant slaps a switch across her palm to show that she means business. Peaches z
ips it and grabs Natalie’s hand for comfort.

  “Take him home.” Lottie’s low voice comes from my right, and I’m startled to find her at my shoulder. Did she deliberately stand next to me?

  Lottie nibbles her bottom lip as Darnell clings to the tractor fender and begs his father to “Please, please, go from here.” Mr. Vincent tries to move Darnell, but he won’t budge. Americans think that being nice solves problems, but Mr. Vincent has to get rough if he wants to detach Darnell from his father’s tractor.

  Darnell throws his head back and howls, “Home. Home!”

  “Gordon Number One and Barnabas. Over here, please.” Mr. Vincent calls on the two biggest boys in the school for help. Both Gordon Number One and Barnabas Phillips are broad-shouldered and muscled from working their fathers’ farms during the holidays, and we girls watch them walk by with bright eyes.

  Mr. Parns loosens his son’s grip on the blue metal while the others pull. Darnell peels away from the tractor like an orange rind. Gordon Number One holds him in a tight embrace, and Darnell will make himself sick if he keeps screaming “No, no, no” in his slurred voice.

  It’s a terrible scene, and I’m relieved when Barnabas and Gordon Number One drag Darnell in the direction of the big-boys’ dormitory. Like always, Darnell will run away from school this week or the next, but for now, at least, the ugliness is over.

  “Let him go home,” Lottie mumbles, agitated. “What’s the use of keeping him here?”

  Lottie’s rambling is none of my business, but surely she can see the use in getting an education, in learning to better yourself.

  “He has to learn how to read and write,” I whisper back. “It’s better than staying on the farm.”

  “Not if he can’t learn.” Her jaw clenches. “He’s slow. Surely even you can see that?”

  “Even me?” Again, I’m the one with the problem. It’s infuriating. “What do you mean, ‘even me’?”

  The Elephant turns, all ears, and points a meaty finger at us. “Joubert. Diamond. Come forward, please.”

  Lottie goes first, and I follow. My mouth feels dry. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. My heart slams inside my chest, and the sound magnifies inside my ears. Because of Lottie’s stupid mumbling, I’m about to be punished in front of the whole school. The boys shuffle closer, to get a good look, and I wish I had sense enough to stay away from her.

  Lottie stands in front of the Elephant with a blank expression. Her walls are up, and she stands behind them.

  “Yes, Matron?” I am polite, even though Matron has the switch in her hands and she will use it no matter what I say.

  “Tell me what you did wrong.” The Elephant knows, but she needs to hear us confess.

  “We talked when you said not to,” Lottie says, and holds her hand out with the palm up and waits to be punished. The way she does it is almost insolent, a challenge to Matron to do her best and see how little Lottie cares. Physical punishment is a part of our education. Pain is supposed to teach us to remember the rules and to follow them; it guides us on the right path. But if the pain can be absorbed effortlessly, then the punishment is pointless.

  The Elephant grits her teeth. She knows when her power is being challenged, and she’ll take her frustrations out on the both of us. I’ve been hit before, but rarely. My wall is built of smiles and politeness, and it will crumble the moment the switch stings my palm. Compared to Lottie, I am a weakling, but I cannot, I will not, fall farther down the social ladder while the whole school watches.

  “Sorry, Matron.” I stick my hand out next to Lottie’s. “We broke the rules. We should be punished.”

  Matron hits Lottie’s palm three times, hard. Lottie blinks in time with the switch, and the cords in her neck tighten under her skin. Good. Now I know what to do. Matron moves to me, and I also get three hard hits. I blink three times, tense the muscles in my neck, and hold the sound of a gasp in my throat.

  Sweat breaks out on my forehead, and three red welts cut across my palm. I hold back tears and imagine that I’m standing safe behind Lottie’s wall. Matron sucks her teeth, annoyed by our closed mouths and blank expressions: our lack of contrition. It seems we’ve learned nothing from our punishment. She’d hit us again to teach us a lesson, but we’re late for chapel, and Mr. Vincent and the senior teachers are waiting. The Elephant is ranked below the teachers, and she works to their schedule.

  “In line,” Matron says. “Quickly now.”

  We fall into place and—left, right, left, right—we march to the bottom of the chapel stairs. I lose sight of Lottie and glance backward and sideways to see where she’s gone. She’s nowhere close, but Delia and the pretties are one row behind me. Peaches blushes at my public humiliation, but Delia smirks. She loves to feel superior. Mrs. Thomas and the Elephant wouldn’t dare hit her in public, because her parents would transfer her out of Keziah, so, in her mind, my beating confirms that she’s special. She’s better than me. She’s better than everyone else. I’ve seen Delia turn on other girls for being too ugly, too fat, or just too pretty and, knowing that the same thing could happen to me, I worked hard to keep Delia sweet. I complimented her skin, her hair, and her singing voice, which is actually thin and too high. I didn’t think she’d ever turn on me. My mistake.

  Sandi and Natalie pretend that I’m invisible. They can’t be seen with a girl who gets the switch in front of the whole school on the first day of term, a girl who shares a haunted room with Lottie Diamond. My hand clenches into a fist, and the cuts sting. I’m sure now that I’ve lost them for good.

  * * *

  • • •

  After chapel, we break up and go to our classrooms. All except the really poor students, who have to report to the office to collect used textbooks with scribbles in the margins or sometimes a rude drawing of a penis that the staff missed covering up with black marker.

  I take the concrete path that cuts across the central lawn and forks in the direction of the senior classrooms. A parent donated gallons of paint to the academy four years ago. Now all the classrooms are blue. The science room got two coats before the paint ran out, so it’s darker. Jacaranda branches shade the corrugated iron roofs and add a dash of green to the blue landscape. Toward the end of the year, the trees will bloom purple and cover the lawns with dead flowers that pop under our feet.

  Mr. Newman, a mixed-race teacher from Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, calls the roll for science class, and if Lottie doesn’t get here soon, she’ll be punished for tardiness. I don’t care if she’s late. After all, the native medicine was paid for with my impago and it was her stupid mumbling that got me hit outside of chapel. Still, my head turns in the direction of the main office, where the poor students are lined up to get their secondhand books. She’s two from the front, and she won’t make it in time.

  We take our seats in the classroom the color of a rainy-day sky. Scarred wooden chairs and desks are ranked in five straight rows, with the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, right next to the blackboard. Mr. Newman, who smells of aftershave and leans too close to girls, starts the lesson with a basic “name three planets, three trees, and three mammals” test that all but the thickest of the students will pass. Mr. Newman is lazy, and teaching us new things requires effort.

  Halfway through the test, Lottie knocks on the door and asks permission to join the class. Mr. Newman picks up a ruler from his desk and raps her twice across the knuckles, the price of entry. Last night, I was sure that dead Lorraine’s ghost was out to get me. But this morning, I think that maybe Lottie is right: spirits don’t exist. If they did, then her father, Mr. Diamond, would take the ruler from Mr. Newman and smack him across the knuckles with the metal edge till his skin split.

  * * *

  • • •

  Monday’s lunch is boiled potatoes with boiled spinach greens and fried onions. The teachers serve themselves first and sit at the teachers’ table at the front of the
long dining hall with big windows that let in the light. Boys and girls in their final year go next, and then the rest of the students line up by descending grade and age. The little ones go last, which is fair because they are small and have to learn patience.

  I take a plate from one of the kitchen ladies whose job it is to make sure that the food is distributed in the right amounts. Full-fee-paying students get generous helpings while the poorer students get smaller ones. Delia says that’s how things are, and we can’t change the situation. There are rules. If your parents pay full fees, you get a full plate. If your parents pay less, well . . . That’s how it’s always been, she says.

  I scan the length of the girls’ table for an opening close to where I need to be. There’s a prime spot one down from Delia and almost opposite the other three girls in the group. Talking my way back in with them will be hard, and, once I’m back inside, keeping on Delia’s good side will also be hard. But that’s all right. I’m used to laughing at her jokes and agreeing with her opinions. Being on my own is uncomfortable, and I’m not ready to give up my coveted spot inside the circle of top girls.

  I take a short breath and move slowly. My instinct is to run and claim the seat, but I can’t appear too eager for their company. I may not be the ‘diamond’ daughter of a Christian marriage but I’m their equal when it comes to pretty dresses and pocket money and canned goods to trade. I am no beggar. I wander over and slide my plate down onto the table like I have nothing but time.

  “How is it?” The greeting is meant for all four girls, but I speak directly to Natalie van der Sell, who is pretty but stupid and who I’ve let copy off my tests for years. “Were the holidays good?”

  Natalie is also a boaster, so there’s no way she’ll ignore the question or fail to embellish all the wonderful things that happened to her over the four-week break.