Reasonable foresight—rare for them—spoiled this plan.
“Then we’ll just have to start killing guards in camp,” Willem said.
“Ja . . . ja.”
As the plan took shape, they would look for a lone guard. Klaas would distract him by falling down as if stricken, and when the guard bent to offer help, Willem would steal his rifle and shoot him. They would run back to the tent as if nothing had happened.
“But what if the guard doesn’t try to help me?”
“Then you get up and we look for another guard,” Willem said. “They won’t suspect us.”
“But what if the guard tells on us?”
“He won’t know it was a plot if it doesn’t work . . . and if it does work, he’ll be dead and he can’t tell anybody.”
“And we can keep doing it until they’re all dead and the camp will be set free,” Klaas said.
“And we’ll be heroes.”
“Legends.”
They sealed their agreement on the plan by alternating punches on the shoulders, each harder than the last, until Willem admitted pain.
Maples certainly would fall for the trick. I was suddenly angry at the boys.
And if it failed? “We’ll still be heroes,” Klaas said. “At least for a while.”
Yes, I thought, until they were hanged.
“Japie would have been good at this, ” Willem said.
“Ja,” Klaas said, offering a brief eulogy for a boy they knew who had died of wasting sickness the previous week.
“Bad way to pass,” Willem said.
“Oh, typhoid is worse,” Klaas argued, triggering another grim debate as the two boys, in whispers, weighed the drawbacks of various deaths. After listing symptoms and miming effects, they arrived at the best way to die in camp: being shot by a guard. Quicker, less suffering, greater dignity.
“Or,” Klaas suggested, “if you can tell you are getting really sick, then it would make sense to just attack a guard and hope he shoots you. That would save time . . .”
“And suffering. I was almost shot by a Tommy firing squad,” Willem bragged.
“No, you weren’t.” Klaas rejected Willem’s claim so eagerly that he raised his voice loud enough for everyone to notice.
“I was. Six of them . . . all lined up . . . wanted to shoot me as a spy.”
“They did not.”
“Lettie,” Willem called to me. I looked up as if lost in thought. Both boys stared at me, blanket pulled back to their shoulders. “Firing squad . . . me?”
I looked at Klaas and nodded my head.
Suddenly, Willem was his hero. I started to write notes on this exchange but thought of another invasion by the commandant and knew the consequences. Still, I was saddened that boys not yet ten spent time considering their deaths and plotting the deaths of others. I was further saddened that their arguments made so much sense.
DAVID COPPERFIELD WALKED WITH me most days; I carried his unending struggles in my hands. When it rained, I pulled my scarf over my head and shoulders and leaned forward like an old woman to make a lee to protect my book. When it was too foul to be outside, I burrowed beneath my blanket to make a tent inside the tent, and my shrouded place became England in the last century. I left space alongside the tent wall to let in enough light to read by, but it felt dark and misty, exactly the atmosphere I wanted for my time in England with David.
Within a few pages, Dickens convinced me I was right there living beside the young English boy. I liked David and felt . . . what? Akin. That’s the word. And I was, in a way, since Moeder’s grandfather had been born there.
I had pictured England as a place of palaces and wealth. So to hear of David’s difficult life came as a surprise. Our lives on the farm were hard in many ways. But not like David’s. And he seemed such a good-hearted little boy, doing his best, trying to see the good in people. I did not see how David could be an enemy of my country. But his stepfather felt like an enemy to anyone with a sense of humanity; he abused and bullied David in the way some of the Brits treated those of us in camp.
I was so happy that I yelled aloud when David passed his threshold of tolerance with his stepfather’s beatings and bit him on the hand. I wanted to be like David. After teaching Willem and Cee-Cee one day, I asked them if they wanted me to read Dickens to them. Willem was gone before I had finished the sentence.
“Can I come with you under the blanket?” Cee-Cee asked.
“Of course.”
Cee-Cee liked when David was called Master Davy. Sometimes I read for hours, my throat so sore and lips so dry that it was hard to go on. She would point at words and ask what they were. That was how I started to teach her to read. It would be my gift to her. I hoped she would always remember that I taught her, and she would think of me when she was old enough to read to her children. After a while she would just fall asleep in our little nest.
Sometimes when she dozed, I’d hold the book to my face and smell it, thinking that it had been in Maples’s tunic, next to his chest. He’d held the cover and touched every page.
Rachel Huiseveldt asked several times whether she could crawl under the blanket with us and hear the story. I looked at Cee-Cee for her opinion. She squinted. I told Rachel there wasn’t room. “Master Davy is for us,” Cee-Cee whispered once we were covered. And he was. It wasn’t the same as having Janetta to walk with and share womanly things. But it was warm and familiar and it was nice to hold Cee-Cee as we read how someone else’s strength carried him through a difficult life in a hostile place.
But when I held her now, she felt barely there.
19
March 1900, Venter Farm
Moeder and I must have been a sight, colliding in a scramble from our bedrooms in our nightclothes, her with the rifle in her hands and I with a lantern. A shout came from the darkness: “It’s us.” Vader cut loose a high whistle from between his teeth. It had been a few months since their first visit, and the horses’ ribs stood out in a row of shadows along their flanks.
“I was ready to shoot,” Moeder said when Vader climbed the stairs. He hugged her, and she winced as his bandoliers dug into her chest.
“You wouldn’t have hurt us with that thing,” he said, pointing to her small rifle. “How are you?”
“Later . . . I’ve got some good news for you.”
Moeder turned for the kitchen and had a fire going under the coffeepot and buttermilk on the table by the time the men got the horses settled.
Schalk was the first in the kitchen.
“Did we scare you?”
“We were ready,” Moeder said, still in her nightdress.
Oupa Gideon lifted his glass and did not place it back on the table until it was empty. “You would not confuse us with a column of Tommies,” Oupa said.
He studied Moeder. “Putting on weight?” he asked. “Lazing about?”
“We are here to witness, not to judge, Gideon,” she said.
“More likely you’re taking it easy on the girl.”
“Bina’s a good hand,” she said. “We couldn’t do it without her.”
“I could help if we were going to be here long enough,” Schalk said.