Come Sunday: A Novel (44 page)

“Well, I never,” mutters Rhiaan, who grazes his hand along one of the trunks and inspects a branch.

“They are back from the dead,” is all I can say.

“Lazarus trees,” he muses. “Do you suppose they produced any fruit?” He crouches to the ground and cranes his neck to look under the trees. Shaking his head, he examines the leaves. “This is quite possibly new growth.”

“What do you suppose it means?” I ask.

“Several possible explanations. I would hazard that someone has gone to the trouble of taking care of them.” We both look around expecting
to see someone step into the path to take credit, to ask,
Whom do you seek?
Nobody does. “Come on, let’s go ask inside; ten-to-one the teacher will know who is responsible.” Rhiaan strides along the beam of solving a conundrum while I draw back into the shade. Life has found a way to trump death. Again. It seems silly to cry now, even a little. It is sillier still to believe in curses, in curses being broken. Perhaps the tears have nothing to do with curses but the recognition of a great act of mercy: that someone cared for and took pity on these trees, and in so doing overcame disease or, worse yet, neglect. Someone who loved something not because it was theirs to love, but because it was a thing of beauty. It was a thing of beauty even when all there was to see was twisted piles of kindling.

Someone is calling my name. Just for a moment I wish it were the gardener. “Abbe! Come along! We don’t have all day,” Rhiaan hollers, and I hurry up to the front door, which he holds open. A tall Ndebele woman walks from the parlor into the hallway to greet us, a petticoat of students encircling her to have a look at who has come to visit. She introduces herself as Teacher Mavis, and Rhiaan apologizes for disrupting her lesson.

“It is an honor to meet you both,” she says, although her tender eyes seem to be saying something else. “We have been waiting for you, and the children have prepared a gift to say thank you for the years you have let us stay here.” She invites us into the classroom while the children scramble back to their desks. She addresses them in Xhosa, and in reply several children come to the front of the room. Dressed in clothes that are either too small or too big, they huddle against one another in front of the blackboard and giggle shyly until the tallest girl at the back taps her shoe against the polished wood floor and starts the song. The others answer antiphonally, clapping hands their only accompaniment. It is a traditional Zulu song about the children of the village running to meet their mothers, who are returning from the town with treats they have traded for their crops.

When the children have finished their song, Rhiaan and I applaud. While they return to their seats, one boy remains. “This is Bumlani Mabele,” Teacher Mavis tells us. “He has been with us for three years.” The
boy, who looks no older than eight, stares at his leather sandals, scuffed and worn. His trousers, while clean, end two inches above his ankles. His knitted sweater, with sleeves rolled up several times to his wrists, is tucked in neatly at the top of his pants.
“The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat,”
he recites, staring beyond us as if to some boat that has left without him.
“They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five-pound note.”
Teacher Mavis smiles fondly at him and I cannot help but think these orphans, mismatched and without flocks of their own, are owls and pussycats and piggy-wigs sent packing out from under their pea-green roof.

As Teacher Mavis takes us through the other rooms—three with bunk beds packed tightly together, the fourth a makeshift clinic—there is very little to remind me of the months I spent in this house. But reminded I am, not by furniture and the faces of people long gone, but by the views—those outside every window and those that dance across my mind.

“The places the children are moving to—are they good schools?” asks Rhiaan. Teacher Mavis nods, again with her sunset eyes. “Yes, they are very good. It is only sad the children will be split up. Some of them have been together many years; they are like sisters and brothers to one another.” Rhiaan’s face is suddenly blotted with guilt—we are breaking up a family.

In the kitchen at the stove is a second staff member who attends a large stainless steel pot already bubbling with stew for the children’s midday meal. One of her feet is pumping an invisible organ pedal so that her entire body rocks to and from her pot. “This is Nomsa.” Teacher Mavis introduces us, and Nomsa wipes her hand on her apron before giving us each a clammy handshake, still rocking. “Stay for lunch, stay for lunch,” she says, eyes fixed over our shoulders, grin off-kilter, before returning to her organ pedal and pot.

“Nomsa used to be one of our special students; she has been here from the very beginning,” explains Teacher Mavis.

Rhiaan tells Teacher Mavis that we will probably wander around the property for a little while longer before we leave for a noon appointment in town. Piet is expecting us to arrive at his office to sign
the final contract before the buyer’s representatives show up with any last-minute requests.

Just before heading out the back door, I turn to her and say, “By the way, who is the person who has been taking care of the apricot trees?”

She shakes her head. “Nobody,
nkosikazi
.”

But from her pot, Nomsa disagrees,
“Qamatha, Qamatha.”

“What is she saying?” Rhiaan asks.

Before the teacher can interpret, I answer, “God. She is saying God has.”

Nomsa smiles and nods.

The back veranda has two large trestle tables pushed end to end, and functions as the outdoor dining room. It has a commanding view of the overgrown clump of wattle trees and the
kopje
, which serves more as a milieu than a backdrop.

“I don’t think there was ever a time when I came to the farm that I didn’t hike up there,” Rhiaan says wistfully. “It always made me feel like I had climbed to the top of the world.”

“You want to go up there now?”

“Are you up to it?”

“Sure,” I reply. “If I get tired you can give me a piggyback.”

He shakes his head. “Unless you weigh what you did when you were eleven, I think that option is out of the question.”

“If you know what’s good for you, brother dear, you will steer clear on matters of a woman’s weight.”

We head out on one of the well-trodden trails, and it winds its way through the knee-high
fynbos
to such a degree that sometimes we are headed in the direction of the hill and sometimes we appear to be switching back to town. After twenty minutes of walking from one grasshopper conversation to another, we begin a gradual ascent that becomes suddenly steep. Rhiaan hands me the bottle of water as we pause to catch our breaths. Even from halfway up the view is commanding.

“You can’t say you’ve ever seen Paarl if you have never seen it from the top of Grandma’s
kopje
,” Rhiaan announces.

I want to correct him; it is Beauty’s hill, not Grandma’s, if it is a
hill at all. More like a dispensary is this place, rationing out, as it did,
muti
and magic, cures and curses.

After ten minutes we arrive at the summit, which is strewn with boulders the size of shopping carts. Rhiaan scrambles to the top of one and belts out a throaty yell. “My God, it feels good to be up here.”

I find a boulder for a bench that overlooks the valley. The farmhouse with its green roof looks like a model. To the south, the town of Paarl sprawls out like a picnic on one of Cicely’s quilts. Beyond are the mountains of Du Toitskloof. Rhiaan sits down next to me and hands me a fistful of Cape daisies. “One forgets how beautiful it is here.”

I nod. “I wish Cleo could have seen this.”

“She would have loved the farm; can’t you just picture her playing hide-’n’-seek in the orchard?”

“Bossing all the schoolkids around, more like it!”

“That too.” He chuckles.

“You never brought Frannie and Claude here, did you?” I ask him.

“No.”

“Why is that?”

He shrugs. “I can’t say for sure. Partly because it is always a bit painful coming back, to the empty nest, so to speak.” After a pause, he continues, “But I suspect part of it is that this place represents a time in my life of which I am not entirely proud.”

“I think you can be proud of what you did, Rhiaan. You took a stand; most people weren’t that brave. I wasn’t that brave.”

“I ran away, sis; one can hardly construe that as bravery. Everyone thinks of it as political exile; I wanted to believe it myself. But I always wonder if things might have been different had I stood up to Dad, had I stuck up for Mom.”

It occurs to me that this brother who I thought saw my mother more clearly than any of us also sees her in part. I consider adding the piece that might bring her closer to being whole for him. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Mom had to learn to stick up for herself.”

“You may be right,” he says, sounding as though he means the contrary.

“I am, and she did.”

“She did what?”

“Stick up for herself.”

Whenever we disagree, Rhiaan pulls rank, and he does so now simply by shaking his head. My two-mindedness tapers into a pencil-sharp point.

“Remember Beauty, Grandma’s maid?”

Rhiaan shrugs. “The one who used to pilfer Grandpa’s scotch.”

“No she didn’t!”

He laughs. “Come on, Abbe—don’t tell me you still believe all that nonsense about her being a
sangoma
and brewing up magic potions in Grandma’s kitchen. She was an alcoholic who qualified for Grandma’s charity.”

His condescension is irksome. “She was a
sangoma
, Rhiaan, not a drunk. In fact, I found out she is still alive, and I went to see her the day before the robbery.” My brother’s response is to retrieve from his pocket his pipe and tobacco pouch. “She knew things about our family I didn’t know, stuff I bet even you don’t know.”

Holding the lighter to the nest of tobacco, Rhiaan tokes on his pipe till a spindly coil of smoke dribbles from his mouth and disappears. There seems to be a danger of Beauty’s story going the same way, so I say, “It’s something I think you
should
know.”

Rhiaan’s response is to raise one eyebrow lazily, as though this statement doesn’t warrant the energy of raising both.

“She told me she helped Mom poison Dad.” There.

Shock, I expect; at the very least, speechlessness. Maybe a denial, a call for evidence. But not laughter, which is how Rhiaan now responds.

“It’s true!” I protest.

He gears down to a smile and tries to rub my head before I pull away. “Come on, Ab.”

“It
is
true! I saw it, back then. Beauty had a vial of poison stuffed in a loaf of bread in her
kaia
. Mom was using it to kill Dad. Beauty says that Mom got sick from handling the stuff, that she ended up dying from it herself.”

I recount the story, a single cord braided with strands from both my own memory and Beauty’s recent account, and conclude with the
vision I had of our mother as a warrior. I see immediately it is a mistake to include this part. Although Rhiaan has been quiet throughout the telling, he gazes over the farm. If he is convinced of anything, it is my slant toward melodramatics. “You don’t believe it, do you?” I ask.

“It’s not what I believe that matters.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rhiaan takes another puff of his pipe, exhaling patience. “I don’t know that it matters how Dad died or how Mom died or who was to blame for what. They died. End of story. What seems to me to be the issue is how the rest of us are going to live our lives.”

“Of course it matters! It matters what Mom did because it changes who she was. And who she was influences who
we
are, how
we
act. Or at least how
I
act. Realizing that she finally took charge of her own destiny, instead of being pulled along by one current or another, is what made me do what I did the night of the burglary. It’s as though Mom was telling me: You have two choices—you can die, or you can die trying. It’s in the trying that she lived, and it’s in the trying that I feel I started living again.”

“What you did, Abbe, is not because of who Mom was, but because of who
you
are. I don’t think you can give credit to other people for things going right in your life, any more than you can blame them for when they go wrong.”

It seems futile to continue arguing, particularly when we notice two pickup trucks pull into the farm’s driveway, spewing up dust in their rush. Along the roadside, across the street from the farm’s entrance, stops a dirty-yellow bulldozer, its mandibles coming to rest in front of it.

“Who are they?” I ask.

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Rhiaan stands up and squints into the distance. “It looks to me like the developers.”

“But our meeting is at Piet’s office, isn’t it?”

He nods.

“Then what the heck are they doing here?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”

Slimy from perspiration and bothered by the lazy flies looking for a
free ride down the hill, I arrive at the farmhouse substantially more agitated than when I left it. It has nothing to do with my aching collarbone or my fatigued muscles, and everything to do with the particular way the man with the red cap is gesturing with one hand, swinging it from the plans rolled out on the hood of his car to the fields. Rhiaan, on the other hand, is composed concern.

“May I help you?” he asks several feet before we are face-to-face. The pickups are company trucks, BOLAND CONSTRUCTION, INC., according to a sticker on the car door.

“Sorry, who are you?” The man with the cap is peeved at the interruption.

“Rhiaan Spenser, and this is my sister, Elizabeth. We are the owners of this farm.”

“That’s not what I have been told,” he says. “Hammerson and Sons—that’s who owns the place now. Bit of a
kakhuis
, if you ask me, but I—”

“I’m sorry, but what did you just say?” Rhiaan is clearly vexed.