“Stop. . . . It was not your fault,” she said. “He was the one who attacked you, Lettie, it’s his fault he’s dead.”
I wanted to make excuses for Maples. His girlfriend. The war. He wasn’t made for this. He had gone mad. I had, too. It really wasn’t him. It wasn’t any of us.
We held each other, sorting through thoughts.
“What is his burn barrel?” Moeder asked.
I told her of Oom Sarel’s jobs, carting bodies in the night, and taking typhus waste from the hospital and burning it in barrels outside the camp.
“It is a good plan,” she said. If he could get Maples to the barrel, no one would find him. I tried to think of the path to the far side of camp and how Oom Sarel would manage the cart with his bad shoulder, given the weight of the body.
We prayed from our hearts, and Moeder called for the Bible. I lit the candle that Maples had given me, and she read from Romans: “He is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
She read passages at random after that, softly, so that no one else awakened. I listened to the words for hours but kept seeing Maples, and his sad eyes, and I thought of his words and his mouth and his callused hands and his chocolate. And everything was more confused, except for those few things that felt more clear. I shook my head to concentrate on Moeder’s words, on her prayers. Focus. God and wrath and wrongdoer. Yes. Her face now lifted to heaven, I could see the words as she spoke, drifting, gathering above us, rising like the thin smoke on the nights we burned the book of words. Wrath and wrongdoer . . . Maples and his green eyes . . . and I focused on her prayer again, and the words emerged slowly and were so heavy she had to strain to be rid of them, and she aimed them to heaven, but they arced down slowly to my ears.
I shook my head again and pinched my eyes. I noticed that it had grown light and blew out the candle.
We slept for a few hours, perhaps, when a blast rolled across camp with such force it seemed the tents shook. We clutched each other in unison. It sounded like the thunderclaps on stormy nights on the veld . . . if five or six of them had struck at once.
I backed in tightly against her. We both knew it was a firing squad, and it caused me to shake again. She pulled me close and hummed in a whisper I could feel against my neck. I recognized the song: “Rock of Ages.”
PART IV
Alone Together
35
May–June 1902, Venter Farm
Memory lies, and its cruelest deceit is allowing us to believe that things go on whole and unchanged. While in camp, I had thought of home as many times as there were stars. But I had not thought of the farm as it was burning, nor imagined how it might look after the British had picked clean its bones. The weight of memories from a lifetime in the building suppressed the images of the final flaming minutes.
When we started for home, I pictured my room and my bed and the parlor and kitchen as they had been. And through the long day’s walk from where we had been deposited, I thought of sleeping the night in comfort. I misplaced the word for being alone and took a dozen steps before recalling it. I thought of Moeder playing the organ, and the smell of cooking luring me toward the kitchen.
The outline of the blue gum tree was the first to form in my vision, and then the thorn tree, a jagged silhouette against the evening sun. And between them stood a tall, straight man with sloped shoulders. It was Oupa Gideon, taller than ever. He stood alone. He had made it home. Thank you, God. I would never doubt again. It had all been a lie. A mistake.
“Ma . . . Willem . . . it’s Oupa.”
“Where?”
I pointed.
“Lettie . . .”
I lifted my skirt and ran in his direction. Oupa rose as I got closer, growing taller and taller. It was so like Oupa. So tall, so lean, so strong.
Lungs failing, I bent to suck in air. When I tilted up, my vision cleared. Between the two trees and above the foundation stood the stone hearth and chimney, the only part of the house left intact and upright. I sunk to the path. I rose only when Moeder and Willem pulled at my arms and brought me to my feet.
“It’s not Oupa, Lettie,” Willem said. “He’s dead . . . remember? Shot.”
Willem surged ahead with energy from some reservoir I lacked. He had started sorting through the shattered leavings before we reached the stoep. The stairs were unbroken, and the foundation mostly unharmed. But the floor sparkled with pieces of our life: shattered china, glass crystals from the hutch, and glass shards from the cracked photo frames. Each of our footfalls ground the pieces smaller. Moeder and I stopped after only a few steps and surveyed the room.
Nothing I could see was of value, just pieces of things. The organ was a jumbled pile, with the largest bits gone to the British or other scavenging jackals. The bellows and some keys were visible in the dimming light.
“We’ll get another,” Willem said, taking Moeder’s arm.
She lifted both hands in front of her, fingers curled.
“We will . . . Moeder,” I added.
“More important things first,” she said, dropping her arms to her side.
We stood still, held in place by the sound of broken things.
She stomped her feet. “The foundation seems sound,” she said.
“We can build on it,” I said.
Moeder turned in a slow dance.
“They had less to start,” she said. “Everything was brought here or built here.”
I waited for her to expand, to reassure us that if they could do it back then, we could, too, now. But I was glad she did not because I did not know how to build an organ or make delicate teacups. These things at our feet had been family things, antique and irreplaceable.
We had some rations from the British and were told we could get some seeds, maize, and the like, from the Repatriation Board. However, I could not see Moeder approaching the British with her hand out. It would be one of the things that I would do to spare her the indignity. I would be the one in the family to deal with them. I had a history of accepting things from them.
The evening light died in an instant, as if a candle had been blown out, and the night was clear and not too cold. We backed into a corner where the hearth held together short wings of two side walls. A thin moon reflected off mica flecks in the hearthstones, and across the way, the curved iron headboard of Moeder’s bed leaned against a fallen wall stud, its reflection like an animal skeleton.