The room of Tannie Lettie smells of mothballs and Oupa’s medicine. Isak finds one of Ouma’s pins on the floor with a strand of grey hair twisted around it. He drops to his knees, lifting the bedspread. The plank is still loose and the shoebox of Tannie Lettie is still there. He opens the box. It is empty, except for a handful of torn petals.
From her room, his mother shouts in a shrill voice. Down the passage, the radio is switched off.
He puts back the box and plank, pocketing Ouma’s pin.
In the kitchen Raatjie lays the table, rudely dropping the place mats.
The boys wait for their father to sit before pulling out their chairs, slyly staring at Raatjie’s glass eye, the weekend work of David. Their father sits down, still wearing his city clothes and crocodile leather shoes.
The ribbed hare hops across the lawn in the midday sun, straight to the dog’s water bowl on the back stoep. They watch it drink weakly before the grace is said.
The curried silt is from pig trotters, made by Ouma, for their father. The yellow jelly slips off the knife, staining the white tablecloth as Raatjie cuts it into blocks and slides it onto their plates. Their father doesn’t notice the blobs of gelatine. He gets up and places the radio next to him, reading a newspaper from the north while they eat. There’s a photo of the troublemaker from the Eastern Cape on the front page and his name is easy to remember for a black man.
The Minister of Agriculture is talking on the radio, when suddenly his father sweeps the radio off the table, breaking the antenna. The battery falls out and the radio stops playing. They do not speak. With lowered heads the boys eat the silt, while the man toys with the salt and pepper cellars in the shape of windmills. Even the evergreen cypresses are yellowing.
“Go and call David and the rest of the volk,” he commands Isak. “Tell them to bring the tripod.”
Outside the dog with the smiling face barks and the hare hops into the undergrowth as the dog makes a chase for it. The sky is cleanly swept, a band of blue so pure. Raatjie sits on the stone wall at the wash line, skirt hitched up for the breeze to blow under, waiting for them to finish so that she can go back to the barracks and the brew.
He runs down the hill to where the men are drinking and playing dominoes. He watches a while and they ignore him for they have no fear of him.
“The grootbaas is calling for you. He says you must bring the tripod.”
The men curse his father loudly but it is the brew that makes them difficult and the long week past. They pack up the board game and each one takes a last slug at the communal bottle before obeying the baas. The baas is baas and that is that.
On the ridge his father paces up and down. The men come stumbling up the hill towards the disused borehole, while he lights one cigarette after the other. They carry winches and chains and the spider-legged tripod is pulled by a tractor.
“Get ready to dismantle.” His father doesn’t speak to anyone in particular. He turns his back on them and the borehole.
The men quieten. Even those with liquorice breaths listen, for the shadow of the man with the silver hair falls upon each one of them. To the right, Petrus and the other boys slide down the dam wall on a butter bush, their naked bodies smeared with clay. Isak stays with the men and his father at the pump. The men are ham-fisted and struggle to mount the tripod that straddles over the borehole’s opening. Eventually the winch releases the heavy chain and hook that descends into the hole. Everything is too slow for his father. He snaps at David while grinding the stubs under his crocodile leather shoes. Alongside, the boys squeal with delight as they slide faster and faster down the lubricated embankment.
As the first pipe appears at the mouth of the hole, his father steps forward.
“Stop.” His eyebrows draw together. “Drop a little.”
The pipe reveals a wheel of greased bearings, enclosing the rod. David steadies the hook and himself with the winch as the other men rush forward to clamp it securely. With great care the eight-foot pipe is dismounted and rolled to one side, then the process is repeated as the next section of pipe is lifted to the surface. Isak keeps count. The butter bush gripped between the boys’ thighs looks inviting. He feigns disinterest but he notices that none of them have taken the slide from the very top, not even Petrus, yet he remains at the hole. The seventh pipe is lifted and the men warm up to the job. His father secures the pipe himself as the men take a smoke break. David back-peddles on the winch and the pipe drops without warning, trapping his father’s finger in the collar. Piet Plesier grabs the collar, wrestling with the enormous weight while David winches up to no avail. His father’s ring finger is in the collar and his brow folds over his eyes. He pulls at his hand so that the sinews and veins of his neck bulge, while all the men shout themselves into soberness and run about. But his father is silent, lifting the collar with the other hand, until his finger comes out, shorter and bloody and David swoons on top of the tripod.
He strides over the ridge, the corners of his tweed jacket flapping in the wind and from behind his father’s back is straight, his chin on his chest and the hand with the damaged finger is pressed into his shirt.
Up on the ridge the men have found their voices as they lift the pipes furiously.
In the kitchen scullery is a pig’s head. His father slices off the pig’s cheek with his left hand and wraps the raw meat around the bleeding stump of a finger. They walk back the way they have come, there where the blood lies on the rocks.
The borehole is disconnected completely and the hole boarded up, until one day when it rains and the earth is filled with water.
FOUR
He gets up to listen. The words mean nothing to him. He returns to the boy in the bed, who lies crying under Ouma’s blanket. They lie under the blanket and their pupils enlarge in the dark, pupils darker than burnt wood.
“Boetie, I’m scared.”
Isak pulls his brother closer and counts the lines of the shutters that fall on the bed, lines of light and dark. He scratches Danie’s back and the harsh cadence does not touch him, nor the jarring sounds that fill the spaces around them, separating them for the man and woman who belong to another world.
Pressing in his stomach is a doll with a square head. A doll with holes for eyes and a slash for a mouth and his brother hugs the stick figure of a doll while Isak rolls his eyes to see Jesus on the wall above them, walking on the water.
* * *
The dog, Kalbas, with the smiling face, is shivering. He pricks up his ears and sits at the door whining. It is cold. He unlocks the door and they walk out, boy and dog, into the garden with its graveyard trees, pointing heavenward. The dog whimpers, his tail between his legs and Isak frowns, rubbing his eyes with his fists to see better.
In the middle of the lawn is a round object, shining, the size of a small plane, balancing on insect-like legs, glowing like a firefly. It makes no sound, vibrating gently, and Isak is not scared, just curious as the object spins faster and faster, ascending without a sound. It floats towards the mountains and the moon. He follows it until it becomes a pinprick of light. The dog licks his hand. He lies down on his bed but he cannot sleep, nor the dog that will not come into the room again.
Kalbas sits on the stoep and barks at the moon and the memory of the night.
* * *
Dominee reads Psalm 140. He prays for rain and forgiveness. He asks God’s blessing upon the valley and its people, people like them. Ouma and Oupa are tired. They climb into their bed that went to and came back from Bechuanaland. Just before midnight the first quake comes, hard and devastating. It roars like a river in flood under the earth’s crust, pure energy that rocks and shakes everything and everybody. The mountains on the southern side of the valley burst into flames as