“Take it.”
Petrus cups his hands for the beating heart. The second heart is placed in his hands, leaving both chest cavities empty.
“Pass.”
Petrus tips the palpitating heart of the swallow into the canary’s chest and the canary’s into the swallow’s chest. With tweezers, Isak shifts the heart into position then begins to sew. Pinching the chest between forefinger and thumb, he sews neat stitches like the girls do in class.
The boys wait. Danie embracing the cage and Petrus holding the gun. The birds lie motionless, side by side, one dull, the other brilliant.
Eventually, Petrus picks up the swallow and presses his ear against its chest, listening, then he does the same with the canary but neither responds. They hang limply in his hand. “Dead is dead,” he says to the others.
Isak stares at the dead birds, while Danie rocks back and forth on his heels.
* * *
Despondently, they sit and reconsider the operation. Petrus sprinkles tobacco along the length of the paper then rolls it up, one for him and one for Isak, while Isak checks the gun.
“Why doesn’t Koos come home any more?” Isak sucks in his cheeks, drawing heavily, thinking of the 1960 Chrysler parked in front of David and Raatjie’s house. Koos was his mother’s favourite, the only brown boy to get matric.
“Dunno.”
“He can do what the other volk do from the city, work in his holiday time to earn more or is he so rich that he doesn’t have to?”
“What rubbish about rich?” Petrus spits out pieces of tobacco. “Koos is at the barracks, just doesn’t want to see people that’s all, and he’s vrek tired from driving the lorry every day.”
“Doesn’t want to see the baas,” Isak corrects him.
“The baas is no baas of Koos, Koos is his own baas.”
Danie’s back is towards them. The small boy carves a stick figure from a branch with Petrus’s knife. Isak drops his voice. “What’s he so tired from anyway? He doesn’t drive the lorry himself, he is just the helper for the baas of the lorry, Raatjie told me.”
Petrus ignores him, snapping twigs while Danie chips away at the wood.
“Is he scared of something?”
“Shurrup!” Petrus jumps up. “If you going to mess with me like this, I’m leaving.”
“He doesn’t even greet my mother.”
“Your ma’s moer, man. He owes your ma sweet nothing.” Petrus stomps off angrily, mumbling.
“Ma paid his school fees and his matric suit and … and … your house is anyway our house, ‘cos it’s our farm, so everything is ours, poeskop!” Isak shouts after him.
“He forgot his knife.” Danie holds up the knife.
“It’s ours, the knife is Pa’s.” Isak stomps on the dead birds.
“But it’s his knife now,” Danie insists. “Pappa gave it to him.”
“What do you know?” Isak snidely remarks. “I’m off.” Without waiting for Danie he makes for the dam wall behind the barracks.
Raatjie’s house is closest to the dam wall. The wall is double thick clay because of the houses below. Isak slides down into the grey bushes, the gun slung over his shoulder. From here he can see the back of her house, the orchards, office and the road to town.
Her garden has roses rescued from the rubbish bin, wrapped in newspaper and trenched in. Roses just the same as in his ouma’s garden. Raatjie’s roses are still blooming. There are sunflowers too, rising above the weeds with oversized heads and Koos is there, darker skinned and sharp like his mother.
Koos is making a bonfire. With quick dashes back and forth he feeds the fire. In and out he runs with boxes, dumping them into the flames and there is a grimness on his face as his head spins around looking to the road that leads to the farm.
The team is sawing the pear orchard to the ground. Behind them a white van with meshed windows drives slowly towards the office. His oupa comes shuffling out onto the stoep, slowly raising his cane, pointing towards the barracks.
All of a sudden a figure runs from the river towards the bonfire. From the lightness of running he knows it can only be Petrus, gesturing and shouting. Koos hears him and the sight of Petrus running seems to make Koos wild as he stamps the papers and books with his gumboots.
Petrus flings the gate off its hinges and tackles Koos. They fall onto the ground, rolling over each other, while the white van comes closer.
Isak lifts his head to see better. “Oupa won’t like it one little bit that Koos is buggering up David’s gumboots like that.”
The van stops. Koos loosens himself, running to the fire, fanning it with a cardboard box. Then the van is moving again, this time to Raatjie’s house, the van of Sergeant Kloppers who loads troublemakers in the back on weekends.
The heat from the fire is so great that Koos must shield his face. He runs towards the dam, vaulting over the barbed-wire fencing, dropping down into the bushes while Petrus slinks around the back of the house on all fours, Raatjie’s cat rubbing herself against his legs, meowing.
The van pulls up behind Koos’s Chrysler. The sergeant gets out, languidly lighting a cigarette as he walks around the car, peering through the windows, then he walks over to the fire. With his boot he scrapes some of the burning paper closer, picking it up, before throwing it back.
Petrus disappears around the furthest side of the house and the cat sits disappointedly in the sun, staring at him in the bushes. Instinctively, Isak falls forward as the sergeant looks up towards the dam wall. He holds his breath, keeping flat on the rock, hearing the crackling of the fire and the melancholy chain saws.
Cautiously, he lifts his head, looking straight into Koos’ face. They are so close he smells the fear from the flared nostrils and the smoke caught in his perspiration. Koos’ eyes are dark black. Silently he mouths a word, drawing an invisible line with his finger across his throat. Isak understands.
* * *
They study each other. There is nothing else to do. The van door clicks open and they wait for the van to move away.
Koos stands up. He shows Isak that he must not move. All along the dam wall he runs with a bent back and thin legs in gumboots. Isak does not look around. When Koos stood up, he looked like the stick figure that Danie was carving.
He wanders down to the pear orchard that Oupa planted before the big war and it is a graveyard of stumps, rooted to the sky.
* * *
At last the saws are still. Then the barking of the dogs begin while his parents are away north, dogs all over the farm. First the long-tailed mongrels of the barracks, then those at the prefab house of the white foreman. Finally the three on the hill. All through the night they bark until it becomes part of the night sounds, as trains come and go, a sound that you forget about over time.
The blue Ford appears one day in the driveway around noon, covered in dust. His father gets out, banging the door like teachers do at school when they haven’t had a holiday for a long time, and his mother is nervous, the white gloves on her hands soiled with nicotine.
Isak and Danie run to the car and stop. Isak holds out his hand but his father just nods briefly, his eyes running over the changed landscape. His mother rubs his head and that of Danie. Her mouth is smiling, but that is all that is happy on her face and Isak wonders if they are angry because of them.
Their