She sat on a bale, turned her hands up, and blew across her bloody palms.
I remembered the time Oupa nearly severed his thumb with a saw. He poured turpentine on it and bound it tightly with a cloth. But when it festered several days later, he had Vader slaughter a goat, and Oupa sat for hours with his hand in the still-warm stomach cavity. He soon pronounced it healed, and it was never addressed thereafter. I saw the wedge where flesh had been gouged from the base of his thumb almost every time he gestured while telling a story or pointed to the stars on our secret nights together.
I found the turpentine on a shelf, but the cap was so tight I strained to break the seal. The smell of it cleared my head. Moeder lifted her hands, skin worn raw, the palms seeping blood, red meat showing in angry rows. Only a few months earlier I had seen her rubbing mutton fat on her hands each night to keep them soft and womanly.
“Pour,” she said.
“Ma?”
“Pour.”
She stretched her fingers wide and opened the palm beyond flat, breaking open anything that had started to heal.
The turpentine splashed and mixed with the blood and ran between her fingers. Moeder opened her hands wider still. The smell burned so deep it brought tears. I could not imagine the feel of it on blistered, open wounds.
“Pour,” she said again.
She had set her jaw and was biting hard enough that muscles flexed on the side of her face. Pale with dust, she sat motionless until she could regain her breath. She inhaled in small gulps and blew on her hands and then waved them in the air to speed the drying.
“Do you want me to kill a goat now?” I asked.
She looked up, curious, but did not ask for an explanation.
“Put the can away. . . . Let’s go.”
When we reached the house, we heard laughing in the kitchen. Tante Hannah was on the floor on all fours, with Cecelia on her back, riding her like a horse, kicking and giggling. Tante made horse noises, fluttering her lips, tossing her head.
“What is this?” Moeder surprised me with her tone.
Tante startled at her question and sat upright, bucking Cecelia to the floor. Cee-Cee laughed again, as if it were part of the game.
“I was going to get supper started for you all, but I got distracted playing with Cee-Cee instead,” Hannah said.
“Aletta, watch your sister.” I led Cee-Cee to the table by the hand. My back had stiffened so that I could not bend to pick her up.
“Willem,” Moeder called. He would pay for having left Cee-Cee with Tante Hannah.
Moeder washed the field off herself and splashed water on her face. But touching her hands to her face brought the scent of turpentine into her eyes. She straightened again, stretched her neck from side to side and back to front, allowing a small groan to escape.
“Bina . . . potatoes.”
“White woman with a black shadow doing the work,” Hannah mumbled.
Moeder looked at her sister-in-law without expression. “There are more of us,” Moeder said.
“Ja, I know . . . all your children to tend,” Tante Hannah said. “If you have work to do . . . you and Bina . . . the children could come to our place so you wouldn’t have to worry about them. I would take them. I would . . . they would enjoy it.”
“Who does your work?”
“I get it done. We get it done. There’s not that much.”
“How do I value a gift that most satisfies the giver?” Moeder asked. “We’re fine. Your schooling Aletta is enough.”
Cecelia chattered at her doll.
“Set the table, Lettie,” Moeder said.
“Right away . . . then I’ll make tea,” I said. “Tante Hannah . . . tea?”
“That would be nice,” she answered, easing into a smile for me.
The family ate, but Moeder kept her hands to her side until Tante Hannah went home and the little ones had gone into the parlor. Bina knew Moeder was hiding her hands, and held her own palms open as an invitation to see Moeder’s.
“I’ve got muti for that,” she said.
“Later,” Moeder answered. “Bible reading now.”
Cee-Cee asked for her to play “The Eagle Hymn,” the name she had given to a piece that contained the line On eagles’ wings we soar. It always made me imagine floating on the warm winds above the veld. I wanted to hear that, too. Moeder told Cee-Cee it was too late for the organ, but I knew the truth was that she would have been unable to stretch her fingers to the keys.
When she came to get me in the morning, her hands were still pinched into claws, but she had already made breakfast and we were off to the field again before the sun cleared the horizon.
16
March – April 1901, Concentration Camp
If Moeder caught me slipping out deep in the night, or the newly watchful guards snatched me up, I had an excuse prepared: latrine. Who could argue the timing of nature’s demands? To make my ventures less of a falsehood, I always stopped first at the latrines before I wandered farther. The appalling place was less trafficked in the middle of the night, and I preferred it that way. Many kept buckets outside their tents, since some refused to walk all the way to the pits, especially in the cold or rain. But I never mastered the use of the bucket, which was tricky as well as humiliating.
The night made it more private, but rarely completely so. Thinking I was alone one night, I jumped when a woman dealing with diarrhea groaned near me. In the way that so many feelings now clustered in surprising combinations, sympathy and disgust collided. I was very sorry for her but delighted it wasn’t me. I pitied her condition while hating her nearness.
During my daylight walks, I discovered a favorite spot at the most distant edge of the camp, where I could turn my back on all the tents and all the people and all their problems. Except for a few kopjes rising in the distance, the land was featureless for miles. Most of the year it was nothing but lion-pelt colors from tan to brown, unchanging all the way to the indistinct horizon. There was terrain, but it was mostly internal, carved by streams into dongas and spruits that split and converged like wrinkles in old skin.
The sky, though, was endlessly active, showing white hot to lucid blue, or raging black with storms, or spotted with clouds that gave shape to the shifting winds. At times, the winds pitted your skin with grit, or carried rain and hail in extravagant amounts. But the sunsets that bled in layers across the horizon were God’s reminder that only he could brighten such a desolate pit with infinite beauty.
Being at the fence line was a freedom by degrees. But even an illusion of freedom was welcomed, and I think that’s why Moeder was patient with my absences. Besides, it wasn’t as if I could wander off and get lost. But every move now carried a risk. Not just to me, but to the rest of the family, too, if the commandant was to be believed.