A Sparrow Falls

  Andersland was almost forty miles downstream, and the train had been behind schedule, it was noon already. Mark knew that he would not make it before the following evening – and strangely, now that he was almost home, the sense of urgency was gone.

  He moved easily, falling into that long, familiar stride of the hunter, easing the pack on his back slightly as soon as the newly healed wounds stiffened, feeling the good sweat springing cool on his face and through the thin cotton of his shirt.

  Absence of so many years had sharpened his appreciation of the world through which he moved, so that which before had warranted only passing attention became now a new and unfamiliar delight.

  Along the banks the dense riverine bush was alive with myriad life. The bejewelled dragonflies that skimmed the surface on transparent wings or coupled in flight, male upon female, his long glittering abdomen arched to join with hers; the hippopotamus that burst through the surface in an explosive exhalation of breath, and stared at Mark upon the bank with pink watery eyes, flicking the tiny ears, and wallowing like a gargantuan black balloon in the green swirling current.

  It was like moving through an ancient Eden, before the coming of man, and suddenly Mark knew that this solitude was what his body and mind needed to complete the healing process.

  He camped that night on a grassy bluff above the river, above the mosquitoes and the unpleasant darkness of the thick bush.

  A leopard woke him after midnight, sawing hoarsely down in the river bottom, and he lay and listened to it moving slowly upstream until he lost it among the crags of high ground. He did not sleep again immediately, but lay and examined, with the pleasure of anticipation, the day ahead of him.

  For every day of the past four years, even the very bad days of darkness and ghosts, he had thought of the old man. Some days it had been only a fleeting thought, on other days he had dwelt upon him as a homesick schoolboy tortures himself with thoughts of home. The old man was home, of course, both the mother and father Mark had never known. Always there from his first vaguest memory to the present, unchanging in his strength and quiet understanding.

  Mark felt a deep physical pang of longing, as he recalled clearly a picture of the old man sitting on the hard carved rocker on the wide boarded stoep, the crumpled old khaki shirt, crudely patched and in need of laundering, open at the neck to expose a fuzz of silver-white chest hair; the neck and jowls wrinkled like those of a turkey cock, but burned dark brown and pelted with five days’ growth of silver stubble that sparkled like glass chips; the huge moustaches of glistening white, the ends curled with beeswax into fearsome spikes, the wide terai hat pulled low over the bright toffee-coloured humorous eyes. The hat was always in place, sweat-soaked and greasy around the band, but never removed, not even at mealtimes – nor, Mark suspected, in the big brass bed at night.

  Mark remembered him pausing from working with the whittling knife, rolling the quid from one cheek to the other, then letting fly at the old five-gallon Tate and Lyle golden syrup can that was his spittoon. Hitting solidly at ten feet, spilling not a single drop of the dark brown juice, and then continuing the story as though there had been no interruption. And what stories! Stories to start a small boy’s eyes popping from their sockets and wake him in the night to peer fearfully under the bed.

  Mark remembered the old man in small things, stooping to take up a handful of his rich soil and let it run through his fingers, then wiping them on the seat of his pants with the proud fierce expression on his withered old features. ‘Good land – Andersland,’ he would say, and nod like a sage. Mark remembered him in the big things, standing tall and skinny beside Mark in thick thorn bush with the big old Martini Hendry rifle bellowing and smoking, the recoil shaking his frail old body as, like a black mountain, the buffalo bull came down upon them, blood mad and crazed with its wounds.

  Four years since last he had seen him, since last he had heard news of him. At first he had written, long homesick letters, but the old man could not read nor write. Mark had hoped that he might take them to a friend, the postmistress perhaps, and that they might read them to him and write back to Mark.

  It had been a vain hope. The old man’s pride would never allow him to admit to a stranger that he could not read. Nevertheless, Mark had continued to write, once every month for all those long years; but only tomorrow he would have his first news of the old man in all that time.

  Mark slept again for another few hours, then built up the fire again in the darkness before dawn and brewed coffee. He was moving again as soon as it was light enough to see his feet on the path.

  From the escarpment he watched the sun come up out of the sea. There were mountains of cumulus thunder clouds standing tall over the distant sea, and the sun came up behind them so that they glowed with red and roses, wine and deep purples, each cloud etched in outline by brilliant red-gold and shot through with shafts of light.

  At Mark’s feet the land dropped away into the coastal low-lands, that rich littoral of densely forested valleys and smooth golden grassy hills that stretched to the endless white beaches of the Indian Ocean.

  Below where Mark stood, the river tumbled over the edge of the escarpment, leaping in sheets of white and silver from wet black rock to deep dark pools which turned upon themselves in foam like huge wheels, as though they rested before the next wild plunge downwards.

  Mark began to hurry for the first time, following the steep path downwards with the same urgency as the river, but it was mid morning before he came out on to the warm and drowsing sweep of land below the escarpment.

  The river widened, and became shallower, changing its mood completely as it meandered between the exposed sandbanks. There were new birds here, different beasts in the forest and upon the hills, but now Mark had no time for them. Hardly glancing at the flocks of long, heavybeaked storks and scimitar-billed ibis on the sandbanks, even when the hadedah ibis rose with their wild insanely ringing shrieks of laughter, he hurried on.

  There was a place, unmarked except for a small tumbled cairn at the foot of a huge wild fig tree, that had a special significance to Mark, for it marked the western boundary of Andersland.

  Mark stopped to rebuild the cairn among the grey scaly roots that crawled across the earth like ancient reptiles, and while he worked, a flock of fat green pigeons exploded on noisy wings from the branches above him where they had been feeding on the bitter yellow fruit.

  When Mark went on beyond the fig tree, he walked with a new lightness and resilience to his step, a new set to his shoulders and a new brightness in his eyes – for he walked once again on Andersland. Eight thousand acres of rich chocolate loamy ground, four miles of river frontage, water that never failed, softly rounded hills covered with thick sweet grass, Andersland, the name the old man had given it thirty years before.

  Half a mile further on, Mark was about to leave the river and take a short cut across the next ridge to the homestead, when there was a distant but earth-trembling thud, and immediately afterwards the faint sound of human voices on the still warm air.

  Puzzled, Mark paused to listen, and again the thudding sound – but this time preceded by the crackling and snapping of branches and undergrowth. The unmistakable sound of timber being felled.

  Abandoning his original intention, Mark kept on down the river, until he emerged suddenly from forest into open country that reminded him at first of those terrible devastated fields of France, torn and ravaged by shell and high explosive until the raw earth lay exposed and churned.

  There were gangs of dark men in white linen dhotis and turbans felling the heavy timber and clearing out the undergrowth along the river. For a moment Mark did not understand who these strange men were, and then he remembered reading a newspaper report that Hindu labourers were being brought out in their thousands from India to work for the new sugar cane estates. These were the wiry, very dark-skinned men that worked now like a colony of ants along the river. There were hundreds of them – no, Mark realized that they were in t
heir thousands – and there were oxen teams as well. Big spans of heavy, strong-looking beasts plodding slowly as they dragged the fallen timber into rows for burning.

  Not truly understanding what he was seeing, Mark left the river and climbed the slope beside it. From the crest he had a new uninterrupted view across Andersland — and beyond, eastwards towards the sea.

  The devastation stretched as far as he could see, and now there was something else to ponder. The land was going to the plough, all of it. The forest and grazing land had been torn out, and the trek oxen moved slowly over the open ground, one team following the next, the rich chocolate earth turning up under the plough shares in thick shiny welts. The cries of the ploughmen and the muted popping of the long trek whips carried to where Mark stood, bewildered, upon the slope of the hill.

  He sat down on a boulder and for almost an hour watched the men and the oxen at work, and he was afraid. Afraid for what this all meant. The old man would never let this happen to his land. He had a hatred of the plough and the axe; he loved too deeply the stately trees which now groaned and crackled as they toppled. The old man hoarded his grazing like a miser, as though it were as precious as its golden colour suggested. He would never allow it to be turned under – not if he were alive.

  That was why Mark was afraid. If he were alive. For, God knows, he would never sell Andersland.

  Mark did not truly want to know the answer. He had to force himself to rise and go down the hill.

  The dark turbaned labourers did not understand his questions, but they directed him with expressive gestures to a fat babu in a cotton jacket who strutted importantly from work gang to work gang, snapping at a naked black back with a light cane or pausing to write a laborious note in the huge black book he carried.

  He looked up, startled, and then immediately became obsequious in the presence of a white man.

  ‘Good day, master—’ He would have gone on, but the shiny acquisitive eyes darted over Mark and they saw how young he was, unshaven, his cheap army issue suit was 37 stained with travel and rumpled from having been slept in. It was obvious he carried his entire worldly possessions in his backpack.

  ‘To tell the truth, we are not needing more men here.’ His manner changed instantly, becoming lordly. ‘I am being in charge here—’

  ‘Good.’ Mark nodded. Then you can tell me what these men are doing on Andersland.’

  The man irritated him, he had known so many like him in the army – bully those below and lick the backsides of those above.

  ‘Beyond doubt we are making ground clear for sugar.’

  ‘This ground belongs to my family,’ said Mark, and instantly the man’s manner changed again.

  ‘Ah, good young master, you are from the company at Ladyburg?’

  ‘No, no – we live here. In the house,’ Mark pointed at the ridge of the hill, beyond which lay the homestead, ‘this is our ground.’

  The babu chuckled like a fat dark baby, and shook his head.

  ‘Nobody living here now. Alas! The company owns everything.’ And he made a wide gesture that took in the whole landscape from escarpment to the sea. ‘Soon everything is sugar, you will see, man. Sugar, sugar.’ And he laughed again.

  From the ridge the old homestead looked the same, just a green-painted roof of corrugated iron showing above the dark green of the orchard, but as Mark came up the overgrown path past the hen coops, he saw that all the window panes had been removed, leaving blank dark squares, and there was no furniture on the wide stoep. The rocker was gone, and there was a sag to the roof timbers at one end of the veranda; a drainpipe had come loose and hung away from the wall.

  The garden had the wild untended look of neglect, the plants beginning to encroach on the house itself. The old man had always kept it trimmed and neat with the leaves swept up daily from under the trees and the white-painted beehives set up in orderly rows in the shade. Somebody had robbed the hives with brutal carelessness, smashing them open with an axe.

  The rooms were bare, stripped of anything of possible value, even the old black wood-burning stove in the kitchen, everything except the Tate and Lyle spittoon on the stoep which lay on its side; its spilled contents had left a dark stain on the woodwork.

  Mark wandered slowly from room to empty room, feeling a terrible sense of loss and desolation as the windblown leaves rustled under his feet, and the big black and yellow spiders watched him with myriad glittering eyes from the webs they had spun in the corners and across the jambs of the doorways.

  Mark left the house and went down to the small family graveyard, feeling a quick lift of relief when he realized there were no new graves there. Grandmother Alice, her eldest daughter, and her cousin who had died before Mark was born. Still three graves – the old man was not there.

  Mark drew a bucket from the well and drank a little of the cold sweet water, then he wandered into the orchard and picked a hatful of guavas and a ripe yellow pineapple. In the backyard strutted a young cockerel who had escaped the plunderers. Mark had to hunt him for half an hour before a stone brought him down off the roof in a squawking flutter of feathers.

  Plucked and cleaned, he went into the canteen over the fire that Mark made in the backyard – and while he boiled, Mark had a sudden thought.

  He went back into the old man’s bedroom and in the far corner, where the big brass bed had once stood, he knelt and felt for the loose board. He prised the single nail that held it down with his clasp knife and then lifted the plank.

  He reached down into the opening below and brought out first a thick bundle of envelopes tied with a strip of raw hide. Mark riffled the edge of the pack and saw that not a single envelope had been opened. They were all addressed in his own spiky hand. They had been carefully stored in this hiding place. Yet not all Mark’s letters were there. The sequence ended abruptly and Mark, checking the last letter, found it postmarked eleven months previously. Mark felt a choking sensation in the base of his throat, and the sharp sting of tears.

  He placed the bundle of letters aside and reached again into the opening to bring out the Mazzawatee tea caddy, with the picture of the grandmother in steel-rimmed spectacles on the lid. It was the old man’s treasure-chest.

  He carried the can and the bundle of letters out into the backyard, for the late afternoon light was going fast in the unlit rooms. He sat on the kitchen step, and opened the tea caddy.

  There were forty gold sovereigns in a leather purse; some of them had the bearded head of Kruger the old president of the South African Republic, the others of Edward and George. Mark slipped the purse into the inner pocket of his jacket and in the fading light examined the rest of the old man’s treasure. Photographs of grandmother Alice as a young woman, yellowed and dog-eared with age, a wedding certificate, old newspaper clippings from the Boer War, cheap articles of women’s jewellery, the same as those that Alice wore in the photographs, a medal in a presentation case, a Queen’s South Africa medal with six bars including those for Tugela, Ladysmith and the Transvaal campaigns, Mark’s own school reports from the Ladyburg School and then the diploma from the University College at Port Natal - these the old man valued especially, with the illiterate’s awe of learning and the written word. He had sold some of his prize livestock to pay for Mark’s education, he rated it that highly. Nothing in the tea caddy, apart from the sovereigns, was of any value, but it had all been precious beyond price to the old man. Carefully Mark re-packed the tin and placed it in his backpack.

  In the last light of day Mark ate the stringy cockerel and the fruit, and when he rolled into his blanket on the wooden kitchen floor he was still thinking.

  He knew now that the old man, wherever he had gone, had intended returning to Andersland. He would never have left that precious hoard behind unless that had been his intention.

  A boot in the ribs brought Mark awake, and he rolled over and sat up, gasping with the pain of it. ‘On your feet! Get your arse moving – and keep it going.’

  It was not yet
fully light, but Mark could make out the man’s features. He was clean-shaven with a heavy smooth jaw, and his teeth seemed to have been ground down to a flat even line – very white against the dark suntan. His head was round, like a cannon ball, and gave the impression of vast weightiness, for he carried it low on a thick neck like a heavyweight boxer shaping up.

  ‘Up!’ he repeated, and drew back the scuffed brown riding-boot again. Mark came up on his feet and squared to defend himself. He found the man was shorter than he was, but he was stocky and solid, with broad thick shoulders and the same weightiness in his frame. ‘This is private property, we don’t want tramps hanging about.’

  ‘I’m not a tramp,’ Mark started, but the man cut him short with a snort of brusque laughter.

  ‘You with the fancy clothes, and the Rolls parked at the door – you had me fooled for a moment there.’

  ‘My name is Mark Anders,’ he said. This land belongs to my grandfather – John Anders—’

  He thought he saw something move in the man’s eyes, a change in the set of his mouth, doubt or worry perhaps. He licked his lips, a quick nervous gesture, but when he spoke his voice was still flat and quiet.

  ‘I don’t know nothing about that – all I know is this land belongs to the Ladyburg Estates now, and I am the foreman for the company, and neither me nor the company wants you hanging around here,’ he paused and settled on his feet, dropping his shoulders and pushing out his heavy jaw, ‘and one other thing I know is I like to break a head now and then, and I haven’t broken one for God knows a long time.’

  They stared at each other, and Mark felt a sudden hot rush of anger. He wanted to take up the man’s challenge, even though he realized how powerful and dangerous he was. He had the look of a killer, and the weight and the strength, but Mark felt himself coming into balance, his own shoulders dropping.

  His tormentor saw it also and his relish was obvious. He smiled thinly, clenching his jaw around the smile so that the cords stood out in his throat, swaying slightly up on to the balls of his feet. Then suddenly Mark felt revolted and sickened by the presence of violence. There had been too much of it in his life already—and there was no reason to fight now. He turned away and picked up his boots.