The Lost History of Stars

  “Let me see.”

  She tilted my head down so that she could get close enough to see. She groaned louder.

  “Lice,” she said.

  “No . . .”

  “Yes . . . you scratched yourself bloody.”

  “No . . .”

  I cried and turned to bury my head in my blankets, but I knew there would be more vermin hiding there.

  “What?” Willem heard the shouts.

  “Lice,” Moeder said. “Don’t go near her. Feel your hair.”

  “Ahhhhhh,” Willem said. “We’ll have to put her in the dipping trench.”

  Blood on my face and hands, I struck him with both balled-up fists, shouting curses. I had never punched someone and did not know how, so I hit him the way you beat a drum.

  Mevrou Huisveldt yelled at me to stop and then urged Rachel to back away from me, as if I carried the worst contagion.

  “Probably got them from you in the first place,” I yelled at her.

  Moeder pulled me off Willem, who had ducked to miss the blows but never struck back in defense.

  “We can’t do anything until light,” Moeder said. “Just sit there by the tent flap . . . and don’t scratch.”

  “I can’t stop.”

  “Sit on your hands. . . . Close your eyes and don’t think about it. . . . Pray.”

  God, make me strong. God, make me strong. God, stop this itching. God, destroy lice. God, make me strong. Don’t think about it, Moeder said. Yes, you tell someone to sit in the dark and close her eyes, and you expect her not to think about vermin crawling on her scalp. You try not thinking about them. How many are up there? Like an army. I imagined their little pinched faces, marching in formation, each in a little khaki uniform, digging into my flesh with tiny picks and shovels. I couldn’t help clawing at them.

  “Lettie . . . stop. . . . That only makes it worse. . . . Pray.”

  God, make me strong. God, bring the daylight. God made two great lights, the greater one to rule the day. And as if accompanied by a chorus of angels, he answered my prayer. A lightness seeped through the tent flap.

  “Moeder . . . it’s getting light.”

  “Get up, then.”

  “What now? Reservoir?”

  “Lye soap . . . if we can find any. . . . Let’s look, first.”

  Even though I knew the lice were there, I could not stop scratching, and when I pulled away my hands, the blood was flecked with them. I shivered, looked away, shivered again.

  “Lettie . . .”

  “What?”

  “I need you not to argue about this . . .”

  “What?

  “The hair has to come off.”

  “No . . .”

  “Has to.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it . . . now.”

  Yes. God, help me to be strong . . . right now. I quieted. But my hair? It was the only thing about myself that I liked.

  “Are you certain?”

  “No other way.”

  “No other way?”

  “No.”

  Her face was calm.

  “Fine . . . do it, Moeder . . . all of it.”

  She retrieved shears from the tent. In the middle of the row, with women passing in first light, I stood in just my nightclothes . . . exposed to ridicule and to such cold that my lungs burned with each breath.

  “What is it?” a woman with a bucket asked.

  “Must be lice,” her companion answered.

  “Ugh.”

  “She’s filthy with them.”

  “Move on,” I said. “I’ll be beautiful, anyway. I’m young. . . . It will all grow back. Watch. Watch and see.”

  The snipping was so loud. Bits of hair caught the breeze and fluttered as they fell, landing like starlings. The women backed away as Moeder tried to pluck the lice and nits from the comb and shears.

  I hummed one of Bina’s songs: I am water. . . . I am the river. My hair will grow back thicker, with more waves, I told myself.

  “Willem, stomp on them,” Moeder said. “Then wipe your shoes and pull out her bedding. . . . We’ll have to be rid of it.”

  Children pointed at me. I responded with laughs, although sometimes it sounded like crying.

  “Still beautiful,” I said to Moeder. I was proud; I was strong.

  “Good girl . . . yes, you are,” Moeder said. “Still beautiful.”

  Willem took the cue and hid his disgust, but he felt his head with both hands.

  Moeder washed my bare head and struck matches to kill the most stubborn. They popped and gave off a stale smell.

  “I hate lice, Ma,” I said.

  “I know, they’re gone now.”

  “I remember when they were on the sheep and you hurt your back that day.”

  “I hurt my back?”

  “When we tried to dip them to kill the lice . . . you hurt your back.”

  “Yes . . . my back. . . . Willem, get my mirror,” she said as if it were urgent. “It’s on the cot.”

  “No, Ma . . . I don’t want to see.”

  “It doesn’t look bad. It will grow back.”

  “Willem, get my mirror, and the brush from my bag, too.”

  “No . . . Moeder . . .”

  Willem handed them to her.

  “Lettie, here, take them.”

  “I don’t want to look.”

  “Then don’t. . . . It’s not for now. . . . You can have them for when it grows back. It won’t take that long. And you can have this to brush every day.”

  “Mine to keep?”

  “Yes . . . to keep. Just keep thinking about them and how beautiful it will be when the hair comes back.” Moeder took my face in her hands and looked closely. She leaned in slowly. I had no idea what sort of treatment she was trying now. She kissed me exactly in the middle of my forehead, barely touching, and for the length of a single heartbeat. She then did the same on each cheek. She was so gentle and loving in that moment that I was convinced the lice were worth having.

  But it detonated Willem.

  “She gets a present for this?” Willem asked.

  Moeder, going from silk to steel in an instant, stared with such force it drove him backward. “But . . . ,” he said. Moeder closed in on him, and he ran back to the tent.

  Cee-Cee watched the commotion without comment or fearful look.

  “Well,” I asked, “what do you think?”

  “I will brush it for you,” she said. “When it grows back.”

  I HOLLOWED OUT A hole in the ground . . . cleft for me . . . and climbed inside, pulling the dirt over me like a blanket. Seclusion was impossible in the tent, making solitude a mental exercise. But thinking myself in a trench started to feel like death. A better imaginary escape was submerging myself in water. I could hear sounds, but they were muffled and unclear. Minutes floated past my face, one at a time, drifting to the bottom, where they gathered into hours. When no ripples disturbed my private river for a time, I surfaced to reality. If others were asleep or distracted, I used Moeder’s mirror—my new mirror—to reassess my baldness and submerge again.

  Sometimes I didn’t rise to eat, and no one bothered me. Moeder might ask me a question, but the words were absorbed by the water surrounding me. Once the hours had stacked into days, I crawled out again and studied the crop of stubble that pioneered the white landscape and darkened over the red blotches. Within two more days, it was thick and softening.

  I breathed deeply and tipped my head to Moeder for an examination. She approved. I went first to Ouma van Zyl’s out of guilt over not having fetched water for several days. She had heard of my public shearing, so she understood. All three children were sickly. She was worn and smaller still. She looked at my kappie pulled down tight but did not comment.

  I avoided Maples for another week after my shame, each of those days feeling like three. When I finally saw him on my way for water, he noticed immediately.

  “What happened . . . lice?”

  I thought hav
ing my kappie pulled down would hide it. He noticed but didn’t seem surprised or even bothered. Shouldn’t he be bothered? I reached to shake his hand, with a note cupped inside the palm in the way he’d shown me.

  “You should have seen the lice I used to get in my leg wraps. . . . If we camped in one place too long, our kits would be crawling with them. . . . Had to boil the clothes of most of the regiment.”

  “But did you have to cut off all your hair?”

  “Many of the men did . . . all the time. . . . It grows back. It looks fine already.”

  I asked about his work.

  “Extra duties.”

  “Why?

  “Punishment.”

  “For what?”

  “They wanted to remind me they don’t care for my attitude.”

  “That was all?”

  “I think they’ve been watching me,” he said.

  Praise God, that means they’re watching us both.

  “I was already on probation.”

  Praise God, so am I.

  “Your probation?”

  “From when I was in the field . . . things . . .”

  “What things?”

  “Too many questions.”

  I stopped, amazed by my restraint.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m just knackered.”

  “Better than bald,” I said.

  “No . . . truly . . . you can hardly tell.”

  He looked more than tired.

  “You don’t like it here, either, do you?” I said.

  “Better than being under fire, but at least that’s . . . what? Manly, I suppose. Marching in the heat . . . being together after a battle. But here, it’s different.”

  “Worse?”

  “Different.”

  “Your friends?”

  “Don’t have many.”

  “I don’t, either,” I said.

  “Two of a kind, then?”

  “We both have short hair,” I said. “What about the other Tommies?”

  “Don’t always care for their ways,” he said. “Things they do, things they say . . . who they are.”

  He closed his mouth tight, signaling the end of my questions on that topic, too. He backed up a few steps, turned, and walked . . . the first time I could recall that he ended a conversation. Trouble in the field? Things he’d done? I went over each thing he said as I walked back to the tent; I would prepare proper questions before our next meeting. I worried that if he was being watched, it might disrupt his contact with Tante Hannah.

  Having buried myself in a hole or hidden underwater for almost two weeks, I was surprised how tired I was, just walking a short distance. I wanted to end the day with the best use of time: cuddling with Cee-Cee, reading to her from the book, or making up more stories of my own that would make her happy. I did not care what Mevrou Huiseveldt or anybody else said: there was magic, or maybe it was muti, in that little girl’s laugh. I’d spent too much time walking, too much time with Maples, too much time with the Van Zyls, too much time concentrating on books, too much time hiding in my own shell . . . and too little with Cee-Cee.

  “Come here, lammetjie,” I said. “Let’s curl up and read some more of the Master Davy book.”

  She came close and shook her head.

  “Too tired,” she said.

  Dear Tante Hannah,

  Thank you for the news about Vader and Schalk. I have been so worried about them, and Oupa, too, of course. You would not recognize me. I had to have my hair cut off. Lice decided I looked like a nice home. I was worried about my appearance, but since I’ve been shorn, I’ve seen a number of others in camp with the same style. Willem and Cee-Cee are fine. Tante, I worry we’re under a special watch. I don’t know what Oom Sarel does with the British, but do you think you could find out why they seem to be watching us? Love you and hope to see you soon.

  Your Lettie

  Sleep provided escape, too, although it was often so shallow it allowed neither clear dreams nor rational thought, like trying to study the stars through layers of clouds. But it was an excuse to put off chores and dealing with others until morning, or until the sounds of whistles brought me to wakefulness.

  I assumed it was just the echo of a dream, then, or Mevrou Huiseveldt’s snoring or foul winds, when I thought again of the lions roaring that night on the veld. The canvas of the tent quivered and then compressed like the head of a native’s drum, except we were inside the drum. And then cannon fire landed so close it could only be the men coming to free us. The explosion of a shell thrust darkness from the tent. From the flash came the smell of sparks, not powder. It was lightning. The canvas took on an erratic pulse as the muscles of a storm flexed and recoiled and flexed harder.

  “Get up, Lettie,” Moeder called, loudly enough to awaken everyone in the tent. “Loosen the tent ropes . . . not all the way, just give them slack so the water runs off.”

  I ran out in my bedclothes, slipping with the first step outside, my arms up to the elbows in mud. I couldn’t stay upright or regain traction, so I crawled around the picket of tent stakes, creating slack with the slip knots. I worked my way from windward to lee . . . until my wet night skirt twisted around my ankles, forming a hobble that pulled me down face-first. Relaxed lines would keep the storm from pulling up the stakes and taking it all away. But it left the tent pole unstable.

  “Lettie,” Moeder called from the middle of the tent. I could barely hear her over the whining ropes and clapping canvas. A lightning strike froze her image, like the flash from the photographer. I could see her arms raised, leaning into the pole. Willem knelt at the base of the pole while the Huiseveldts huddled on their bed and screamed. I shed my outer bedclothes, which had become a sodden anchor.

  “Did I loosen too much?”

  “No . . . but we have to hold the pole.”

  Above the clamoring storm rose shouts from the Van Zyls.

  “Ma?”

  “Ja . . . go.”

  The path across the row was a flowing stream. Amid the howls of straining tent ropes, I leaned into the wind to make progress. But mud pulled at me, sucking a shoe from my foot, and when I broke free, I fell forward. The wind had pulled out several of the Van Zyls’ tent stakes and collapsed the windward side, so that I could not find the flap. I gave up and slid on my stomach beneath the tent wall, greasing my bedclothes tight to my body.

  “The pole . . . I can’t hold . . .”

  The sick children groaned in the darkness, throats so constricted they struggled to scream.

  “I’ve got it. . . . Tend the children.”

  With no purchase, my bare foot slid, leaving me on all fours, clinging to the pole. If it came down, the tent would become a sail and carry everything off. The floor of the tent was nearly as wet as the rows outside. I pulled myself hand over hand on the pole. I turned my feet at angles and dug in. I leaned into the wind; I could not fall again.

  The children quieted as their grandmother gathered them on the drier side of the tent. They sat huddled, shivering with sickness under mud-caked blankets, listening to the storm and screams from outside. The pole slipped and struck my shoulder; my upraised hands had gone numb with lack of blood. I leaned against the pressure of the pole, holding it lower for a time, hugging it to my chest.

  Lightning struck a hundred times, so near that it sizzled, the children gasping with each bolt. I pictured it striking the tent pole and frying me in place.

  I thought of Moeder and the turpentine, and Oupa dealing with his thumb hanging loose without ever a word. I leaned in harder as the wind pushed the pole against me. I thought of little David, in the Dickens book, toiling in a warehouse at only ten. My feet slipped by bits through the night, stopping my heart every time, once awakening me from a quick sleep when I was nearly to my knees before I recovered.

  I thought of Bina’s working chants, making it all go easier, time passing in the lines of a song rather than in minutes. I started humming, trying to harmonize with the wind.
I could not look back at the children or the old woman but knew they were looking at me, all of them, willing me to be strong.

  And then it stopped, near dawn. I could not feel my feet or my hands, but everything else throbbed, so that I could hear my pulse in my neck. And above that pounding, the rhythmic wheezing of the children’s struggling breaths.

  AN UNNATURAL CALM FOLLOWED the torment of the night. I finally unclenched and tried to rub the knots from the muscles I had strained for so many hours. I restaked and tightened the ropes on the Van Zyl tent so that it would stand and then did the same with ours, pushing through air that still crackled with so much electricity that my hair sprouts stood out. Because we had loosened the ropes, the water had sluiced away from our tent and the inside was moist but not too thick with mud. I rolled into my blanket and shivered myself to sleep for a few hours.

  When I woke, I was blind. Struck blind by God for my sins. Had I not paid a just penance through this awful night? I rubbed my face with still-throbbing hands, and dim light returned to my world. Mud had dried to my face and crusted over my lids while I slept. Relishing sight, I rose to fetch water. Queues would be long at the pump station, and it was barely above freezing.

  I looked for my shoe outside the tent, but there was no sign of it. Walking with one shoe kept me off balance, and I considered taking the other off, too. But the mud that seeped between my toes was so cold that my foot went numb again. At some points I sank halfway to my knees.

  The deluge had made the pump water a thick brown. The weight of the mud on my skirt threatened to pull it off. The families were awake when I returned, buckets half-empty from water spilling over the edges when I lost my footing.

  Moeder sorted through the family’s bedding, stretching blankets out with Willem holding one end, flapping them to dry them quicker. Cee-Cee was still asleep in a tight bundle.

  “Moeder?” I tilted my head toward the Van Zyl tent.

  “Of course.”

  The children quaked under sodden blankets, probably colder than if they had been naked. Ouma van Zyl stood but looked to be asleep with open eyes. Children gasped and then shivered, repeating the cycles. But they smiled at me.

  “Can’t get these things dry,” she said.

  The rain had stopped, but there was no sun, and nowhere to dry the bedding. Ouma van Zyl was helpless, and the children in piteous condition—no, perilous condition.