Some of our people could never forgive Tante Hannah’s loyalty to Oom Sarel. It was said that an unburned farmhouse stood as the sign of a traitor. But Tante paid her toll. Her farm was in ruins, crops in cinders, and stock long dead.
Although my sleep was mostly sound, one common nightmare replayed the scene the night that I was attacked; it was so real I could almost feel Maples’s breath, and taste the blood from his hand in my mouth, and hear the scrape of metal on his ribs. The vision arose of both Maples and Oom Sarel, Moeder standing over them humming “Rock of Ages” just as she had that morning when we heard the rifle shots. “Be of sin the double cure / Save from wrath and make me pure.” I woke feverish when I saw how perfectly it happened, a double cure, Maples and Sarel both dead, almost as if Moeder had planned the whole thing to work out exactly as it did.
I scolded myself for being suspicious of even my mother. In a way, I didn’t care whether she had had a part in how it all happened near the end. When I thought of the times I was most near collapse—the day we arrived at camp, the day we buried Cee-Cee—she pulled us close and kept us standing. Straight as a post and rooted deeply, she was our strength.
But I supposed it was natural that the naive openness I had once carried had hardened into suspicion after seeing how others could treat us, how some were willing to simply march in and take what was ours. I didn’t think any of us would forget that or tolerate any hint of it. I think most of us wanted, evermore, to be unbothered and apart.
I decided on one thing I would not write about: the war. At least not the battles. Someone else could write about the war’s big stories. I would write only about my little part of it, the part I saw myself. We each had our own war.
Everything continued to change. I was back on the farm, yes, but very little was the same. There had been a war that took me from this spot, only to deposit me here again, a different person—far closer to the woman I would become than to the little girl I had been. Did we really go through so much just to return here? It seemed such a long and horrible path just to get home. But that was the real story of it all for me . . . that was my Great Trek.
We all built our truths to serve our needs. They were like our oaths and vows and covenants—all had been firm, but so few were permanent.
The lesson that came through this trek most intact was the one that Bina had taught me: deeds live. I learned that they not only lived but had to be carried.
I knew I would write about the night I spent on the veld with Vader and Schalk, the night I heard the lions and the drums. And how, at the time, I wanted nothing more than to have Vader comfort me and hold me and assure me all was well. I had hated that he refused to hug me close. But I saw his wisdom now. The best thing was for me to deal with the fear on my own, and once I learned that I could do it, it was a strength that would never leave me. For me, in the worst days, when everything else had been pared away, that remained.
The wind picked up again. I pulled a cochineal beetle off a prickly pear and squeezed it the way Schalk had shown me, so that its red-dye juices oozed. I dabbed the dye in spots on the back of my left hand, three in a row in the middle, and four others at cross corners. I blew on it to dry it, hoping the small constellation would seep into my skin and stay there forever.
But I knew it would fade.