“The stranger.”
Yanela’s arm rested briefly on the sink. Her eyes fluttered to the light, long enough for Ash to know that the thought was new to her. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t know if he completely understands.”
“Understands what?”
She dragged a rag across the sink in a final attempt at keeping order. “The history that is the air that you and I will always breathe.”
The year Ash turned twelve the stranger came and went for the last time in the final week of summer. Each day their mother rose early, fed Zuko and Honey, and left the house. She stood at the edge of the road and waited for the Hilux with the surfboard strapped to the roof to stop and pick her up and take her to the big house that fronted the river at the bend. She stayed away all day. When she returned in the evenings, her face glowed. She kissed Zuko and held him to her like he was still an infant needing the warmth of her breast.
“He’s not a baby, Ma,” Ash told her. “He’s already four.”
She sighed and wiped the moisture from her brow. “I know. But then . . .” She kissed Zuko’s head. “All of you will always be babies to me.”
“Why do you like him?”
“Because he’s my child.”
“No, I mean that man. That stranger.” Dominic. The name stuck, heavy and clumsy at his lips.
“A man needs a woman, Ash. One day you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“Do you need him?”
She smiled at her son. “I don’t need anything. Apart from food. And my children. This world is a free place, Ash. Don’t be tied up with anyone else’s ideas for you.”
The stranger parked his vehicle outside the house in the evenings. He sat with Yanela on the couch in front of the portable television set, his hand high on her thigh. Sometimes he leaned in and kissed her neck. Ash cooked the meat they brought home on the gas stove and served it to them cut into thin strips, the way the stranger liked it.
“Thank you, son,” the stranger said. His teeth gleamed white behind his pink lips.
“Why does he call me son?” Ash asked later. Yanela chopped wood on a dry stump outside. She glanced at him, and shook her head, but she didn’t answer.
“Why is my name Ash?”
She leaned in and put a finger under his chin as though plucking the string of a musical instrument. “You’re what’s left of a fire that burned out a long time ago,” she told him.
Deep into December, more cars arrived at the house on the river’s bend. The stranger no longer fetched Yanela in the mornings. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she put on a headscarf and walked the distance to make beds and wash dishes and peel the vegetables that the stranger and his family would have with their roasts and braaied meat at night. Sometimes he brought Yanela home early in the Hilux, the surfboard a sturdy identity strapped to the roof. They went into the bedroom and locked the door, emerging only an hour later. The stranger stood outside in a pair of shorts, humming and soaping himself from the bucket of cold water Ash fetched from the communal tap every morning.
“Where does he live?” Ash asked his mother.
“In the city.”
“Is he rich?”
“I suppose so.”
“Will you marry him?”
She laughed, and snapped the shirt she held in her hand. Reaching up, she secured it to the line above her head to dry. After that, she seemed to lose herself in her own head.
Ash knew that the stranger came with the summer, and made his way home when the season was over. Ash knew too, without being told, that the stranger was how his brother was able to eat Cheerios for breakfast every morning, how his mother afforded a new dress each year, and how there were always slabs of steak in the kitchen whenever he was in town. Zuko never ate the meat the stranger brought. If his mother offered it up to his mouth, the little boy pressed his lips together and glanced at her as if to ask, why do you make me eat such a disgusting thing? The child whimpered, and looked away.
The last evening the stranger ever visited the house, Yanela was upset when they arrived through the door. Without acknowledging her children, she went through the kitchen and into her bedroom. The stranger barely kept pace behind her on his long legs, his mouth set tight, his eyes dark and not seeing the children. He followed her into the room and shut the bedroom door behind them. All evening, Ash entertained his brother and sister while the adults spoke in strained whispers in the next room. Suppertime came and went and the small children whined. Ash cooked mealie meal for himself and his sister, and he put out the box of Cheerios for Zuko. They ate quietly together at the table, while the adults argued.
When darkness wrapped the house, the bedroom door burst open. The stranger emerged, filling the doorway. He spilled into the kitchen, and moved through into the open outside. The door of the truck’s cab snapped open, and Honey and Zuko ran outside after him. Yanela came to the doorway and called out, “Dominic!” The man paused and turned his head but she remained in the doorway, frozen. For a moment, the stranger seemed about to return to her, but seconds later he left the car and the path, and went to the nearby tree where Zuko now lay on his side, pulling up grass strands from the earth by their roots. The man stood, his fists closed at his hips, gazing down at the boy. Zuko barely raised his beautiful eyes at the attention. His hands pulled and released, pulled and released, a motion that might go on until Ash fetched him to finish his supper. The stranger squatted and said something softly, inaudibly, to the boy. Ash, his sister and his mother watched. The stranger kissed the child quickly on his head, and returned to the vehicle. Without a glance backwards, he pulled himself into the cab and slammed the door, revved the engine and reversed the vehicle before he turned it onto the gravel road.
Later, Ash drifted into sleep with the sounds of his mother softly sobbing. It was the last time the stranger came to the house. Never again did Ash hear his mother cry.
3.
In the house on that small piece of land that backed onto the gravel road there was no telephone. Pine trees grew in patches between stone buildings cobbled together in a country of no snow. There were no horses, no cows and not much of a house either any more, with the roof damaged as it was. Not much of a farm, but Ash called it one because everybody did, theirs the largest stretch set on the other side of the gravel road, the furthest house from the town. The acres that ran beside the river had mostly all been sold off in previous generations to wealthy folk who stayed for summer’s peak and abandoned their buildings and the surrounding lawns in the remaining months. The land had been divided, again and again. But not theirs. In the end none of the permanent inhabitants owned enough of the ground that edged the town to make it work. Ancient women smoked on porches, guarding ground the size of a child’s blanket. Men stood aimless, tonguing the lining of their empty cheeks. The women planted potatoes, a few mealies, butternut, but if the birds didn’t get the produce, the monkeys did. The tomatoes came down with blight. There were women who prayed fervently, endlessly. Some still spoke of God. His mother said it was this that sickened her, rather than the reality of no more seeds, no new clothes, and little to eat. The heat sucked the life from the soil, times of drought turned their flesh to bone and sinew, and the river dwindled. They walked like the living dead, skeletons waiting for the crows to peck the last meat from the diminishing muscle. It seemed everyone got sick eventually.
In another life, they might have moved. She told him often enough. She might have put them on a bus and gone to the city. She said she had a cousin there. She might have found out where her cousin lived, found a job, a place to stay, and a school. The mirage of another life lingered. She held onto her children as best she could, but she held on to her reality more tightly, doubtful of any kind of cosmic safety net at the bottom of the abyss. She sang softly as she carried out her work, as if she carried a secret or