“Oh, we learned that,” he said. “Some would wave the white flag, and when a column came up to get ’em, they pulled down and shot ’em up.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said, but then I thought of some who were capable of it.
“There were times when we’d bivouac in tall grass and the Boers would set fire to it all, and we’d suddenly be running for our lives and get confused by all the smoke, and bullets would just come ripping in at all angles, not caring a bit what they hit,” he said. “I found a low spot and flattened out inside it. I was in there cozy when an officer jumped in, too. Couldn’t believe they were just firing into the smoke. Officer said something I’ll never forget: ‘Nothing blind as a bullet.’ ”
These were not the stories I heard from our men. It sounded like the experience of Ouma van Zyl, except these blind bullets were being fired by the other side. I soured at the topic and it must have shown. I started walking.
“Wait,” he said. “It’s not all like that.” This soldier, this boy, seemed aching to talk, as if he had no one else in the whole British army who would listen to him.
“We heard of one of your men who was so sad about killing one of ours, he was on his knees praying so hard for him that we just walked up and took him prisoner. We saw others risk their lives to save their friends. Unbelievably brave . . . racing through open fire to rescue a wounded man. Some helped wounded Tommies . . . sheltered a man from the sun, or gave him their last canteen of water. There’s some fine men . . . and there’s scoundrels . . . like our army.”
“Like the ones who called us spies?”
“Who is that?”
“Your commandant . . .” I stopped in case Maples might be in league with the commandant.
I could not imagine Maples among those setting fire to our house. Most of the time, he didn’t seem to know a war was being conducted. His talk this day was the first that caused me to imagine him involved in anything more dangerous than breaking up a hen fight among caged women. But each time I readied to tear into him, he deprived me of the pleasure by agreeing with me.
“You say our rifles are better?”
“By a sight . . . magazine load . . . smokeless powder,” he said. “You can’t see where the bullets are coming from. . . . Just start flying past. You don’t need to hear about all this. It’s not good for you . . . or anybody.”
“Maybe I’ll write about it someday.”
“You can ask your men about it.”
“That’s just one side of it.”
He smiled a bit; I think he liked for a moment to think of himself as more than just the guardian of the eastern fence line.
“This little bit, then. Your men never miss. . . . Make every cartridge count. They hide in those trenches and just start plucking us when we ride up. Officers had never seen such a thing, troops popping up from the ground with no warning.”
“The warthog backs into its hole so it can come out fighting,” I said. “My brother Schalk told me that.”
“Well, it works. Our officers said we underestimated your men . . . especially the way they know the land. One captain said that as your numbers go down, the quality of the men fighting goes up, and as our numbers go up, the quality of our soldiers goes down.”
I thought of Oom Sarel coming to camp while Oupa, Vader, and Schalk were still fighting. It proved Maples’s theory.
“The prisoners I saw were very solemn . . . never a curse word or threat,” he said. “They weren’t all very bright, and they smelled like rotting meat, but they were very pious . . . praying every night and singing hymns. One night . . .”
“What?”
“Sure . . . here’s a story for you to write about,” he said. “Sometimes one side or the other would call for an armistice to collect the wounded . . . or what have you . . . and we’d just rest in our camps with a holiday from war. We did that one afternoon and then the evening cooled and the moon came up full, making everything silver. Across the valley, in their camp, the Boers started singing. We couldn’t believe we could hear them so clearly.”
“They always sing,” I said. “Usually hymns.”
“That was it . . . and we recognized the hymn right off . . . ‘Old Hundredth’ . . . like a church choir on the other side of the clearing. Some of our men then joined in, too. Then all of us. We were all singing together; they could hear us and we could hear them. It was beautiful. I’ll never forget that afternoon and evening.”
“Then what?”
“When the clock ticked over to the end of the armistice, we could hear the breech bolts of Mausers start clicking. . . . Time to go back to work.”
“Right then?”
“In the morning . . . but I kept thinking about that time.” He sang in a timid voice:
You faithful servants of the Lord,
Sing out his praise with one accord,
While serving him with all your might
And keeping vigil through the night.
I tried to picture the scene, two armies so close that they could harmonize, yet knowing what the next day might bring. Danger did not seem so near in this camp. It was not easy for us, but we did not have to consider the flight of so many stray bullets.
“Faithful servants of the Lord,” I repeated.
“You know it?”
“Of course.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “That’s all we ever heard from the men we captured. God and duty. God will protect us . . . God’s will. A minute wouldn’t pass without thanking God and quoting scripture. Not a one could fight without a Bible in his pocket.”
“Our way.”
“But God offers a lot of different advice.”
I tilted my head.
“The Joiners in here . . . God told them to surrender; God told them it was the best thing.” He lifted both arms and looked to the sky. “God tells some to fight and some not to fight. Has anybody in this country ever done anything that God didn’t have a say in?”
“Just because your army is godless . . .”
“We are not godless. . . . It’s just that you are so . . . so bloody Godful.”
“A coward will cling to any excuse,” I said.
He nodded. I nodded. I looked at the sky; he looked at the ground. I was ready to move on.
21
May 1900, Venter Farm
We considered ourselves capable farmers in the absence of the men. Our only real problem arose when Moeder injured her back when we tried to rid the sheep of lice. The sheep had been clustering like clouds in a storm front, rubbing against one another, almost sparking from friction. Moeder parted a clear space on the back of one, and blue lice raced from the light to the safety of the thick wool. With a small growling noise, she announced that we would have to send them through the dipping tank.
The men had complained of the sheep for years at the time of dipping. Neither Oupa nor Vader cursed nor blasphemed, but their screams at the sheep made their frustration obvious. “Stupidest animals alive,” Vader yelled one time. “Sent by God to vex us.”
We found a bottle that bore a simple label in Vader’s hand: “Sheep.” There were no instructions for mixing. They had never foreseen anyone else’s having to take over when lice invaded. Bina and I filled the dipping pool with water, and Moeder poured in the dip mixture. Willem rounded the sheep up and drove them down the thornbush chute into the tank. The men were right: they were stupid. And stubborn in the chute. They shook and balked and protested in their crying-child voices. And they came up coughing after Moeder forced their heads under.
A fat ewe particularly objected and tried to back out the chute, getting hind legs caught in the thornbush wall. It panicked further and twisted against the binding branches. The ewe screamed in pure, ignorant fear as Moeder pulled it by the front legs. It kicked at her, crying like death into her face, its eyes flashing desperate white, and then it loosed a piteous wail.
Moeder reached farther to grasp the wool at its rump. The ewe twisted and raged, b
urying the thorns deeper in its hocks. Moeder bent lower, nearer the shanks, and lifted. Nothing. Lower, harder, with her back and shoulders and legs. When she screamed, it shocked the sheep into silence. She released the ewe and fell backward. When she opened her eyes, she gasped sips of air, teeth clenched. I jumped into the chute and pried the animal free from the other side with Willem’s help.
“Breathe, now, breathe,” Bina said, leaning over Moeder, trying to block the sun from her eyes. She inhaled with a catch and panted again, arms crossed tight at her stomach. She looked flushed and gave off heat.
“Oh, dear God . . . Matthys . . . ,” she yelled with more panic than pain.
“He’s not here,” I said.
“She knows,” Bina said. “Be still.”
She lifted Moeder’s head into her lap and spoke softly. “Are you carrying . . . is that your worry?”
Moeder nodded toward Willem and me. “I don’t want them to see.”
“Be still,” Bina said. “Then we get you to bed.”
Bina hummed low. The sound filled space and pushed away distraction, as when Moeder pumped the organ bellows with just one finger on a key. It steadied Moeder’s breathing.
“Take Willem and the little one and go to Tante’s,” Bina told me. “Spend the night. Your mother needs quiet. She hurt her back; she’ll be all right. Stay a full day. I’ve got muti for this.”
I wanted to stay and help. But I trusted Bina, and my duty would be to the little ones. Tante Hannah welcomed us and began telling us all the things we could do. I had to interrupt her to say that Moeder had hurt her back and we were sent to spend the night.
“Delightful,” she said.
The next morning I helped Tante Hannah make breakfast, and later she accompanied us home. It took Moeder two days to get back in the field, and she was slower, more deliberate, and very quiet.
22
June 1901, Concentration Camp
Water grew heavier, the buckets stretching my arms and fingers. I fetched for our family, for Ouma van Zyl most days, and now for the Huiseveldts, since Klaas had taken a cough.
The line formed before dawn. The cold reached down and chilled me from the inside, so that I could feel the exact shape of my lungs. I thought of the men on commando, wherever they were, and I hoped they had fires and blankets and a safe place to spend each night. I pictured them still with the coffee and rusks and biltong we had packed for them when they left, but I knew that was impossible.
The pump wheezed a three-note groan, up-down-up, coaxing the stubborn water upward when everything in its nature told it to go the other way. Some women brought pitchers; others, enamel basins. We had a bucket, and so did the Huiseveldts. I studied the water each day, admiring the way it adapted to its container, caring nothing about shape, only direction. Some days I could see through the water to the silver metal at the bottom of the bucket, and at the right angle, I could see my reflected image. Other days, especially after a storm, it was brown as a puddle in an ox path.
This day, it was near freezing, and my knuckles stung from the weight of the buckets. Maples leaned against the fence post and looked out to the east. Three women walked toward me. I put my water buckets down and retied my boots until the women turned up a row.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning . . .”
“Hallo . . . isn’t that what you usually say?”
“Bina, our native girl, says ‘peace’ . . . her tribal word for peace, at least. . . . That’s how they greet each other.”
“Peace?”
“Yes, the first thing she says when she sees me.”
“Peace,” he said.
“Right.”
“You’re wearing your apron again,” Maples said.
“Pinafore.”
“I’ll have to tell Betty.”
“Betty?”
“Betty . . . my girl back home,” he said.
“A servant?”
“No, my sweetie.”
“You . . .”
“Sure . . . haven’t I told you? I’ve told you how much I miss her. . . . That’s why I call this Betty.” He pointed to his rifle. “Whenever I hold her, I think about holding Betty.”
He pulled his rifle to his chest and petted the barrel as if he were about to dance with a slim, rigid girl.
“We write letters almost every day,” he said. “I’ve mentioned her to you.”
“I have to get the water to my family,” I said, walking on.
“I’m sure I told you about her . . . haven’t I?”
He stepped alongside me.
“We were seeing each other for half a year before I left,” he said. “I’m worried she’ll tire of waiting.”
Shame.
“I told her she should go and complain to the minister of war. If she yells at him the way she has at me sometimes, they’ll probably call the whole thing off and bring everybody home.”
Wonderful, his girlfriend is connected to government officials. “Does she know him?”
“That was in jest,” he said. “She works at the Provincial Laundries with a hundred other girls. She stirs steaming pots all day. She comes home exhausted. She wears an apron like yours, and it gets stained from bleach every day.”
“Must look a fright.”
“But she cleans up. Takes forever . . . all the skirts and layers of things . . . like the queen . . . rest in peace. She wraps her hair up around on top of her head and holds it up with a hundred pins.”
“What color?”
“Color?”
“Hair.”
“Brown, shiny brown . . . and thick. It goes to her waist when she lets it down.”
“Do they wear kappies?”
“The bonnets like yours? When it’s sunny . . . so not much. They wear hats . . . some with feathers and flowers, the size of a platter. She asked me to pick up some ostrich feathers and bring them home. I’ve got a bundle of them for her, and porcupine quills—they were everywhere out there—and some shells from a beach near where we landed.”
“You’re taking much of our country back to her.”
“That will have to do until I pick up some diamonds,” he said. “I thought about sending my chocolate back to her, but I needed it more than she did.”
The last time he’d said he considered sending it home to his mother. That proved he was a liar and couldn’t be trusted.
“I mentioned you in a letter to Betty.”
“Oh . . .”
“Told her that you are a little Boer girl reading Dickens—she sent me the book—and that you’re trying to learn things about us and the war because you want to be a writer.”
“Little girl?”
“Right . . . about twelve, right? . . . That’s what I told her.”
“Twelve?”
“Right . . . and you remind me of my little sister, Annie . . . she’s eleven.”
Little sister? Twelve?
“I’m fourteen,” I said, raising my voice without intending to.
I walked away resolved never to speak to him again. When I neared the tent, Moeder was out in front looking for me.
“Put the buckets down,” she said. “What took so long?”
“Long line,” I said.
“Willem, get out here,” she said toward the tent. She pulled him to her side. “Lettie, have you been bothered by any guards?”
“Me? No. What is it?”
“A guard swept up Willem and took him in for questioning,” she said.
“I said nothing to them,” Willem said.
“What did they want?”
“They asked him if he was plotting against the British,” Moeder said.
“He’s nine, Ma,” I said.
“I know. . . . Has anyone talked to you? Followed you? Asked you about our family?”
“No, Ma, nobody.” I squinted sincerely, hoping to mask the lie.
“Lettie, be careful,” she said. “Trust no one. For some reason they think we’re up to something.
. . . They thought Willem was making plans to kill guards.”
23
June 1900, Venter Farm
I demanded privacy when I stripped down to bathe at home. I convinced myself I was more womanly each time. Maybe I didn’t look it, but I felt it. And I worried about even taking time to consider the matter after Oupa Gideon had planted in me the gift of guilt. In a sermon not long before the men left, he railed against the sin of pride. “All is vanity and a striving after the wind,” he said. I was only curious about my growth, and I had never heard curiosity listed among the many sins on his list.
Moeder voiced her “amen” the evening of that sermon but then took me to her room and showed me how she held her silver hand mirror with one hand and shaped her hair with the brush in the other hand. The brush set had belonged to her mother, who taught her to pinch her cheeks for color and to brush her hair in certain ways. Moeder taught me those things that night. She unpinned her hair, still spiraled from the day in braided coils, it fell thick past her shoulders. She swayed so that it fell to one side where she could brush it. I memorized the move and tried it when she handed me the brush and mirror.
“Taking care of yourself is merely tending God’s gifts, and it honors him when you are at your best,” Moeder said. That would also be my interpretation from that moment forward, and as much as we appreciated the Gospel that Oupa preached to us, Moeder and I shared the belief that he knew nothing of women.
I could see that the work and chores in the field had made me stronger, with veins branching just beneath the skin of my leaner hands. My face was no longer as round and childlike. Bina noticed. She told me one day that my face was starting to tell a different story. She smiled and said she needed to start singing a different kind of song for me. The song was lively, and she slapped her hands on a woven basket to add a rhythm. I liked it.
This night was cold, and when I pulled the pelt quilt up so that the fur warmed my chin, I seemed to melt into sleep more than fall into it. And in my dream, Oupa came to get me and pressed his finger to my lips again so I would not alarm anyone. I smiled. His finger smelled of his tobacco and of dirt and campfire. He whispered, “We’re home.”