I shook my blanket and wrapped it tight as I could stand. The tent ropes moaned in the predawn. Through a rift in the fast clouds I saw a few stars, but the wind pulled a veil across them. I listened for activity in neighbors’ tents. I knew Ouma van Zyl had nothing. Other than shaking canvas, there was silence from the Van Tonders’. If they were able to sleep, I would not disturb.
I looked toward the reservoir but hadn’t seen anything that way. I walked to the east; Maples would not be on duty yet, I didn’t think, but if I saw him he might have ideas.
The sounds of an uneventful morning seeped from the next tent. I cleared my throat, seeking permission to enter. A group was circled, holding hands. They stopped their prayer, opened their eyes, and welcomed my entry.
My words were thick.
“. . . lost my sister . . . coffin . . . wood.”
“Go to the coffin maker.” The oldest woman pointed farther to the east. “God be praised, child.”
The wind folded back the brim of my kappie and carried the stench from the latrine pits. My gut tightened again and I pulled my blanket over my nose and cursed into it.
It was still short of full dawn, but a dozen stood in single file outside the coffin maker’s tent, as they might have at a shop in town, waiting to buy goods.
The last in the row turned. “Only cloths,” she said.
The line moved quickly, some heading to the morgue tent, others just back to their families to prepare for services.
“My baby sister died,” I told the man. “My mother sent me.”
“No wood . . . no coffins,” he said. “If you can find wood, I’ll build one, but there’s none in camp. None for miles.”
“My mother sent me,” I repeated.
He held up a square piece of canvas, part of a tattered tent.
“If she’s small, this will do,” he said.
I remembered how Cee-Cee would hide under her quilt at home, giving herself away with her giggling. The canvas piece was half the size of her quilt. She would fit.
I stood taller and focused on the man’s eyes, stressing my situation. He seemed familiar with the look.
“I am a carpenter,” he said. “A carpenter with no wood. What can I do?”We both squinted against the wind. He folded the canvas piece and handed it to me.
When I reached the tent, Willem sat at the far side with Rachel, who mouthed her porridge next to Cecelia’s body. They prayed and sang weary hymns through the morning until Willem moved away and pulled himself inside his blanket.
Moeder returned from the reservoir with Cee-Cee’s still-moist dress. I helped change her.
We gathered for the walk to the cemetery, a group from a nearby tent falling in behind, eyes down, carrying a young boy on a blanket. He was dressed in a black suit, a white scarf tied under his jaw to keep his mouth from falling open as they walked.
By the time our silent convoy reached the table-flat rise of land at the edge of the camp, several other groups were gathered around mounds and shallow clefts in the earth.
Two of the older men approached Moeder and offered to dig, their heads lowered, holding shovels across their chests like rifles. One apologized that the site was not ready; they never knew how many would be needed each day.
We stood like a windbreak of trees along one side. When a small trench was rent in the rocky ground, the dominee finishing up at a nearby grave was called to oversee the service for us. He recognized Moeder but could not remember Cecelia’s name.
He opened his book and thumbed through the readings.
Out of the depths of misery,
I cry with heart and mouth
To thee who can send salvation
Oh Lord, look upon my pain.
We could scarcely hear him above the wind but recognized the verse. We repeated the final line of the stanza. Lord, look upon my pain, we said. Amen.
I expected more, but other groups waited. The preacher nodded his head to the diggers, who shoveled the rocks gently onto the small bundle. It sounded so loud, like those stormy days on the veld when the first stones of hail touch ground, slowly to start, before drumming louder, and then sometimes striking with enough force to bring down grown sheep. I took Moeder’s skirt in my fist; she placed her palms over my ears until the sound was gone.
“A marker?” Moeder asked.
“No wood,” said one of the men, stacking the final stones on the uneven mound. He retrieved a bottle from a mealie sack. He gathered soil and small rocks to pour into the bottle to weigh it down.
“Write her name on this.” He handed a piece of paper and a pencil nub to Moeder.
“A bottle?”
The man nodded, beard blown horizontal.
The pastor offered his Bible so that she could use it to hold the paper flat. She paused.
Cecilia Venter
“Lammetjie”
Geboren February 1897
Overleden September 1901
She tucked the paper into the bottle and wedged it among the rocks that topped the small mound. Grit from a distant place stung our faces. I turned from it and saw several other families in mute clusters, planting other children beneath bottles, waiting for the preacher to offer words that would be carried off by the wind.
PART III
The Water and the Blood
30
October 1901, Concentration Camp
Living on the veld taught nothing about the real value of space, creating the illusion that it was limitless. The great open distances of our land, which had once felt like a warm invitation, now stretched out on the other side of the camp’s fence like a cruel taunt. After weeks of slipping beneath the surface of an imaginary river as a means of withdrawal, a storm provided an alternate escape. I drew close to the tent wall and put my ear to the canvas, which in my mind became the sail of a great ship. When it fluttered, I was upon the open sea, shouting orders to my men, who pulled the sails taut to speed us away to wherever my mind commanded. I sailed to countries and islands Oupa Gideon had mentioned, places that sounded so foreign I doubted they were real. Zamboanga—after all, how silly did he think me? People came to the harbor to see the first ship captained by a woman. And I was treated to meals of fruits and meats and sweets and glorious liver.
We would be off again when the ropes resumed singing to a beat set by clapping canvas. And for a while, I was not merely adrift in the current of time; I was the one in control, the one steering the giant, spinning wheel. I plotted our course by the stars and by whim. And I took Oupa Gideon with me so that he could learn the sea as his grandfather had. Behind that wheel, we drank coffee and ate hard biscuits, and half our world was the night sky.
I might spend an entire afternoon “sailing” and only return to my family once the air grew still in the evening. When I stood, my legs wobbled from having been at sea. I was glad to have surrendered touch with the earth that had been pulling so hard at my bones.