I had not seen Janetta for several weeks. I hated that I hadn’t been there to help her. It felt wrong not to support my best friend. I had tried her tent almost every day, at least at first. The tent, now, was cinched, their crying muted by canvas. I stood and waited, fingers touching the door flap, waiting for clearance to enter that was never granted.
The death of a brother would carry such pain, but how much more was the loss of a twin? She had to feel the death of a part of herself. They shared a connection I could never hope to understand. Would she be harnessed to guilt for having been the one to survive?
I listened harder and waited. I hoped that she had stayed healthy and that her sorrows would fade enough that we could be close again. She did not answer when I called. I went back a time or two, to no effect, until one afternoon I could see the tent flap open as I approached. I pulled up my skirts and ran. All is better. Nicolaas had been healed, the talk had been of some other boy, and Janetta was now free to join me again. Praise God.
“Janetta . . .”
Three women and an old man sat on blankets in a circle. They startled and the man rose as if to fight me off.
“Where’s Janetta?”
“Who?”
“Janetta, my friend . . .”
The man stepped closer to me. “No Janetta,” he said.
She was gone. Her family was gone. No good-bye. No explanation. I wondered whether it had been another product of her mother’s ingenuity. My pulse had gone from racing to a cold stop. Friendships in camp were suddenly not worth the investment. I had told her everything. She felt like my twin, and she was gone. Maybe she had died, too. For a moment I welcomed that explanation; it made her disappearance less of a personal rejection. I knew then that I needed to be closer to Cee-Cee and connect better with Willem. We have only our family, they said, and that had to be enough. We’d been tight as a sheaf, and there was such strength in the collection of us. And when I thought of us pulled tight against whatever might challenge us, it was no longer Oupa Gideon or Vader I pictured at the center of it all. It was Moeder who was the family heartwood and, in her way, the strongest of us all.
15
December 1899, Venter Farm
Bina swept the scythe so smoothly the tall oats seemed to lie down willingly, as if bowing to her. Her hips, rounded like the quarters of a draft horse, tilted and then rolled with each sweep. Smooth and tireless, smooth and powerful, her rhythm made work a dance.
Hard lives had grown harder with the men gone, but I think we wanted it that way. It felt as if we were sharing the sacrifice, working toward a victory ourselves. I came to appreciate the farm as I never had when I did such little outside work. I saw this as proof of Bina’s saying that you can’t know the value of something until you pay for it. And we all were paying with our labors, now. For the first month or so after the men left, Bina had been able to do many of the outside chores herself, but the oat harvest brought Moeder and me to the fields.
It was left to Moeder to guess at the timing of the harvest. All things were drying now and the clumps of weeping love grass were encroaching on the field. We had to pay attention to such things. Moeder tested the firmness of the grain head and judged the color of the stalk. When the morning winds told her there would be several days of dryness, we began.
At dawn, dew reflected rainbows off the stalks, and the oats smelled of musk. Moeder followed Bina to rake and stack the sheaves she had reaped and I tied each around the middle with dry stalks that cinched it all like a tight belt.
Bina sang for us all. Moeder said they were such noisy people, with their drumming and chanting. But Bina’s songs moved the work along, easing it through time, the sweep of the scythe and the rhythm of the song paring the day into tolerable pieces.
Moeder’s plan was that we reap the few morgen of oats in several days. Oupa Gideon suggested she bring the sjambok into the field in case incentive was required. Vader told us that Oupa had been generous with his stick on his sons when they were young, particularly Oom Sarel. But I hadn’t seen him strike Bina, and Tuma only a few times. He cuffed Schalk on the back of the head or across the cheek a number of times when he was younger and had spoken to the adults with a tone Oupa deemed disrespectful. He cited scripture to justify the discipline in all cases. But Bina needed no reminders; she worked at such a steady pace that she did not even appear to tire. I wondered again at the girth that strained her robes, and at her curious pairing with the reed-thin Tuma, who could not have measured one-third her span.
Toward midday, the drying stalks took on the smell of dusty silage, and Moeder announced that we needed to be more efficient. She would take up a sickle of her own and start clearing a row at a slight distance, and I would rake and stack sheaves for both her and Bina. I could see from the start that she tried to emulate Bina’s hip sway. She was stiff, though, and the stalks grabbed the blade and turned it in her hands. She looked so slight compared to Bina. Slender and light haired, she more closely resembled the oat stalks than she did her fellow reaper. She stopped, listened to Bina’s song, and began swinging the scythe in time.
I raced between the two rows. I know I missed some and was not as tidy as Moeder had been, but I tried to keep up with them both. Swipe, step, swipe, step, to the sound of Bina’s song. A dark line of sweat spread down the back of Moeder’s dress. The bending and bunching lit a flame in my lower back. When I returned to Moeder’s row in the late afternoon, I could see she had torn cloth from the hem of her apron and wrapped it around her hands.
The day passed: Bina sang, curious birds flew near, and the heat pressed in from all directions. My heart fluttered each time I heard the scales of fleeing snakes scrape against nearby oat stalks. By quitting time, blood had soaked through Moeder’s hand wrap and dripped down the scythe handle in spiral patterns. Our sweat was powerful and our bodies smelled of yeast. Chaff and straw cleaved to our clothes and gathered in whatever folds of skin were exposed. When we told Bina it was time to stop and she straightened and lifted her head, the sweat-caked chaff aligned like tribal neck rings. She was the color of field dust except in the streaks where sweat had channeled down the rills of her face.
“Enough,” Moeder said to Bina. “Start potatoes and onions for supper.” I followed Moeder to see how I could help. She was still unbent but moved so slowly toward the barn that her small steps were unseen inside the radius of her skirts.
“Ma?”
“Go in the house.”
“I can help.”
“Then look through the cans for turpentine.”
“Another job before supper?”
“Ja,” she said.