A Blade of Grass (5 page)

F
IRST HE MUST
plant the seeds.

Ben Laurens tips his hat back on the crown of his head and crouches and lifts a handful of freshly dug soil in his fingers, lets it rest in his palm, then trickles it back onto the earth. The men have gone back to the kraal for their midday meal and he is alone now. Shortly he too will return to his house for lunch. But in this moment, before he goes up to the house to join Märit, he wants to be alone and savor the realization of his dreams.

One day there will be a row of almond trees growing along this fence, this newly erected fence where the wire is taut and shiny and the posts are still clean and unweathered. One day he will walk in this very spot with his wife and their children and there will be the scent of almond blossoms in the air to greet them.

In Ben’s shirt pocket is a small glass jar with a screw top, and inside the jar is a handful of soil—reddish, loamy, rich.

When he first came to this country he would often drive up to the border country and meander along the back roads, studying the farms he passed. One day he stopped the car and got out to smell the air, and as he inhaled the aroma of the veldt, the sweet grass, the sun-warmed soil, he had the sudden feeling that he had come home. Taking the empty bag which had contained his sandwiches, he walked a few yards from the road and scooped a handful of the rich soil into the bag. When he returned to his small apartment in Hillbrow, he poured the soil into a glass jar and set it on the mantelpiece. In that jar was the soil of Kudufontein, the beginning of his garden, of his farm.

Land is cheap here, especially so near the border, the troubled border, but that is why Ben can own a farm here, where so many are unwilling to risk a belief in the future. He rises to his feet and rests his hands on the shiny wire, careful of the barbs, and lets his eyes travel the width of his land. He is not naïve, he knows the risks, he knows the history, he knows that there are many who look upon him with envy, perhaps with hate. But Ben is also an idealist, and he believes that if he is fair, if he is just, if he is generous, then he will be understood, not resented, even respected. One day the ways of the country will change, and fair, just men who can farm well will be appreciated, even desired.

So he does not trouble himself too much with politics. He is careful in his dealings with the other farmers in the district, he is careful in his dealings with the workers on the farm, he is careful with the land.

Now he is in the place where he always wanted to be. Now he has what he wants. But first he must plant the seeds. He takes the jar from his pocket and shakes the soil out, onto the earth.

As he turns his hand brushes carelessly across the barbed wire and one of the barbs catches the fleshy mound at the base of his thumb. A sharp jab. He jerks his hand back and the barb pulls, digging into the flesh.

It is nothing, a small cut only, the kind a farmer grows used to in his labors. Yet when he looks down at his palm the drops of blood oozing from the cut fascinate him, the redness of the blood, so dark. A trickle runs across his palm as he tips his hand and the drops fall to the soil, down to the place where he will plant the seeds. He watches as the blood drips into the soil, darkening it, mixing with it.

A slight tremor passes through Ben, a pulsation of cold, as if someone has called his name. He looks up, startled, but he is alone.

He reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief, which he uses to dab at the cut as he walks up to the house.

T
HE STRIDENT PEAL
of the telephone startles Märit. The phone does not ring often in this house. She hesitates with her hand over the receiver as the bell shrills again, then lifts it to her ear.

“Kudufontein Farm,” she says.

“This is Sergeant Joubert in Klipspring. Can I speak to Meneer Laurens?”

Märit leans to look out the window. “He’s in the fields. Can I help you, Sergeant? This is Mevrou Laurens.”

“No, excuse me, Mevrou, but I must speak to your husband.”

“Well, I can take a message to him if it’s urgent. He can call you back.”

“If you can fetch him, I will wait, Mevrou. It is important.”

“All right. Just a minute.” She puts the receiver down on the table and steps out to the veranda to call Ben.

When Ben comes to the phone, Märit listens to the one-sided conversation, to Ben’s questions—“What?” “How?” “When?”

She paces back and forth, watching his face as a deep frown creases his brow.

“Yes, yes, of course. Thank you.” He reaches up and takes off his hat, as if he has just remembered he is still wearing it.

Ben listens a moment longer, staring down at his hand, where Märit notices a thin red cut across the skin. “All right. I’ll come now.” He replaces the receiver.

“It’s Grace,” he says.

“Grace?”

“An accident of some kind. They think she was hit by a car.”

“How badly is she hurt? Where did this happen?”

He reaches out a hand and rests it on her arm. “She was killed, Märit.”

Märit’s gray eyes widen. “Killed?”

“She is dead. Her body was found at the side of the road not far from here early this morning. The police are pretty sure it was a car that hit her.”

“But don’t they know? Who reported it?”

“A hit-and-run.” He sits down and rubs a finger back and forth across his palm. “They don’t know.”

Märit glances towards the kitchen and lowers her voice. “Oh my God. Her daughter. Tembi.”

“She was the one who served us breakfast this morning?”

“We have to tell her. Oh God.”

Ben rises to his feet and touches Märit on the arm again. “Not just yet. I have to go into town first, to the police station. I have to talk to them.”

“She was going to see her sister—no, her cousin. Who would do such a thing? Oh God, Ben, what can we do?”

Ben folds her into his arms, stroking her back, lifting the heavy coils of hair from the nape of her neck and stroking the cool skin of her neck. “I’ll talk to the police. We have to be sure it is Grace before we say anything.” He looks at his watch. “I’ll drive in now. I said I’d come immediately.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can’t stay here. I have to know.” She walks quietly to the kitchen and sticks her head through the door, but there is no sign of Grace’s daughter.

“Tembi?” Märit calls softly. Opening the back door she peers out, but does not see the girl.

When she rejoins Ben, he says, “There is her husband as well. He will have to be contacted.”

“If it is Grace.”

Ben nods. “We will have to find out where he works.”

“In the mines,” Märit says. “Grace said something about him working in the mines in Johannesburg.”

“We will have to ask the daughter.”

“If it is Grace.”

T
HEY ARE BOTH SILENT
on the first part of the drive as the car takes them along the sandy road towards the junction.

“Where did it happen?” Märit asks, her eyes on the brush and ditches on the side of the road.

“The sergeant didn’t say. On the road near the farm is all he told me.”

“Somewhere along here?”

“I don’t know.” He concentrates on his driving.

Two figures appear ahead, two men, one carrying a paper parcel in his hands.

If he were alone Ben would stop and let them sit in the back of the pickup, as he usually does when he drives into town and sees Africans on
the road. There is no bus between the farms and the towns, and no worker can afford a car. Usually he stops. But not today.

“Don’t drive so fast,” Märit says as they pass the two men.

Ben eases his foot off the gas pedal until they turn onto the paved road, then speeds up again without being aware of it.

Three months on the farm and he feels that he is moving forward at last, and now this. He looks sidelong at Märit. “Did you get to know her at all? Grace, I mean.”

“Not really.”

“I just wondered—the two of you together in the house. You know, if you became friendly in any way?”

“We talked a bit, but I didn’t know her. Or anything much about her. Just that she had a daughter, and that her husband worked in the mines.”

Her tone is distant, causing Ben to glance at her again. Märit’s own parents passed away not so long ago. Ben remembers this same withdrawn, distant expression on her face in the days afterwards. He wonders if he had proposed marriage impulsively, out of concern, pity even, and the desire to make her happy again after her loss. Sometimes he doubts that he can make her happy. Sometimes it occurs to him that he might have brought her into a place to which she is unsuited. Perhaps he has made a mistake, perhaps they both have.

In those first months of courtship he had believed she shared his dreams of a farming life, away from the city, away from the prospect of a faceless life in a faceless office, becoming faceless oneself. In those first months of sexual enthrallment perhaps they had both believed the wrong things about each other. What he had taken to be something distant in her, something hidden, is instead something closed. He fears sometimes that he will never know the depths in her.

“It doesn’t remind you…does it?” Ben says, “The daughter…losing her mother. I understand how it could affect you…”

She gives him a wan smile and moves closer on the seat. “No, it doesn’t. I’m all right. I just worry about Tembi.”

The telephone poles spaced along the side of the highway speed past and she counts them unconsciously, following the dip and rise of the wires, the way she did when she was a girl traveling somewhere with her parents.

Märit reaches for Ben’s hand and holds it in her lap, running her fingers across his. “You’ve cut yourself.”

“On the fence.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” He shrugs. “A little.” He does not tell her about the blood dripping into the soil, or the inexplicable sadness he felt at that moment.

“I’ll put something on it when we get home. You don’t want an infection setting in.”

Märit watches the dip and rise of the telephone wires. A single white cloud drifts in the blue sky. The tires hum on the road, on the empty road.

At the police station in Klipspring the sergeant is waiting for them. He shakes hands with Ben and greets Märit before explaining the circumstances.

“The body is here, in the back,” he says. “If you would come through and identify her?”

Ben looks at Märit. She shakes her head and says, “I can’t. I’ll wait outside.”

Märit puts on her sunglasses against the glare and lights a cigarette. How do you tell someone that her mother is dead? Who among us can announce Death? Who will announce it now to Tembi, to her father, to the workers on the farm?

Ben steps out into the sunlight at last, his face pale, his mouth drawn into a thin line.

“Is it…?” Märit asks.

“Yes.” He takes the cigarette from her fingers and draws deeply. “They think a car hit her as she was walking in the dark.”

“What will happen now? What will we do? We have to contact her husband. We have to tell Tembi.”

Ben gives the cigarette back to Märit. “The police will do it. They’ll contact the mine and notify Elias.”

“Elias. I didn’t even know his name. But how will they find him?”

“The records are on file here. Everybody is on file. They will notify him and he’ll come home.”

“And Tembi?”

“A native constable will go to the farm and talk to the bossboy—Joshua.”
When Märit shakes her head, Ben adds, “It’s better. They have their own ways. We can’t just call Tembi into the house and tell her. She needs to be with those she knows, with her own kind.”

“I suppose so. But what about the body?”

“It will go back to the farm later today. Let them deal with it, Märit. They have their ways. I’ll talk to Joshua later about the costs and the burial. We can’t do much more now.”

Märit nods and climbs into the pickup. Ben starts the engine and says, “We’ll go to the hotel and have a drink. I think we both need it. Let the constable go out to the farm and talk to Joshua first.”

“I can’t understand how someone could just drive off and leave her lying at the side of the road. She might still have been alive. How could I let her walk into town like that in the dark, alone?”

“I didn’t know,” Ben says. “I didn’t think of it.”

“No, we didn’t think of her. We didn’t ask.”

A
ND SO THE DAY
of the burial arrives, on a day of late spring sunshine, on a farm in the remote countryside.

There will be no work done in the fields this day. Instead, on the banks of the river there is a singing of hymns and the chanting of prayers. The Reverend Kumalo leads the procession, enrobed in the sky blue cloth of the Living Water Assembly Church, walking at a stately pace with a wooden cross held aloft. Behind him, a donkey pulls a cart with the coffin. The women follow behind the cart, wearing their Sunday clothes, each with a blue sash tied across the waist. The men come after, many of them wearing their work clothes, for they have no special clothes for such an occasion. They have doffed their hats, and hold them clutched in their hands.

The women wail. Their ululations, high and piercing, banish the sound of the river, the rippling and running of the water across the rocks, banish the cooing of the doves in the branches of the eucalyptus trees and the chatter of the finches in the reeds. For why should the river laugh on such a day, and why should the birds sing? The women wail, and in their midst is Tembi, who neither wails nor cries but walks in silence.

At the rear of the procession as it wends its way up from the riverbank to the cemetery near the koppie come the white man and the white woman. A little apart from the rest. Strangers here. He wears a dark suit and tie and carries his hat loose in his hand like the other men. The woman is dressed in a sober, dark blue dress with a white lace trim at the sleeves. Her handbag is black and she has draped a rectangle of black gauze across
her hair. She walks with some difficulty on the rough track, the heels of her shoes catching in the uneven ground.

The procession makes its way up from the river, across a field, and to the foot of the small hill where the cemetery of the people rests. Here the dead of the farm cease their labors. And here another place in the earth has been prepared.

The women sing.

In the land of ageless days, lies a valley four-square

It shall never pass away and there is no night there.

Ku yosulw’ inyembezi, nokufa nezinsizi

Ayibalwa iminyaka, ubusuk’ abukho.

God shall wipe away all tears, there’s no death, no pain, nor fears

And they count not time by years, for there is no night there.

The procession halts while the coffin is hauled down from the cart. The hymn singing ceases.

The Reverend Kumalo stands with his head bowed and his eyes upon his Bible until silence falls. He makes a gesture with his head towards the waiting men. The casket is lowered, the soil is heaped upon it.

The Reverend Kumalo speaks a short prayer and then looks towards the white man expectantly. Ben Laurens is not a religious man; he attends the church in Klipspring on Sundays, but only out of a desire not to offend his neighbors, who consider church attendance a sign of a man’s moral standing. He realizes now as he steps forward that he knows no prayer suitable for the occasion. Jumbled fragments heard in church move through his head, mixed with bits of poems and psalms learned at school. He is one of those men who never thinks about God, or the scope of the infinite, or the difference between what he knows and what is unknown in the universe. Privately, he thinks of religion as a childish activity. There is birth and there is death. In between is life for the living and that is the end of it.

But at this moment he must say something to these faces watching him—expecting him, he assumes, to define why and how death came, and
what can be done about it. He tries to remember what was said at that other funeral he attended, when Märit’s parents were buried. So far from here, in such different soil. He can recall only a portion of a psalm, and he recites those words that he remembers.

“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me…Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the rest of my days, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’”

Silence follows this recitation. The faces that look at his are neither friendly nor hostile. Ben turns to the Reverend Kumalo, who nods his head slowly in approval.

“Grace was a good woman,” Ben says. “May she rest in peace.” He has no other words to offer.

A moment of silence follows, a long moment, before Ben realizes what is required of him now—his absence. He seeks out the faces of the daughter, Tembi, and the husband, Elias, and inclines his head to each of them, then he turns and takes his wife’s arm and they depart.

The farmer and his wife walk back alone across the field to their house behind the trees, while the funeral party makes its way to the kraal, where the mourners will mourn. Because the farmer and his wife feel themselves strangers here today, on their own land, because they have a sense of not belonging here today, although they do not acknowledge it openly to one another, they agree to drive into Klipspring. At the Retief Hotel they will sit in the comfort of the dining room, with its linen tablecloths and heavy silverware, with the framed prints of faraway landscapes on the walls. And there they will talk of other things and not of death.

On the hillside, next to the grave, Tembi does not join the wailing of the women or the singing of hymns. She wears a white blouse under a dark pinafore, and around her waist is the light blue sash that her mother wore on Sundays. A light blue
doek
is knotted turban-like on her head.

Tembi’s face is impassive, rigid, and her large brown eyes show nothing of her sorrow. Something in her heart prevents any outward expression of grief. Neither sorrow nor regret shows, but in her heart is the realization that tears are finished now. She watches the spadefuls of reddish earth as they fall onto the coffin. It is good, rich earth, suitable for
growing. She thinks of the seeds in the earth and how they come up each season after the winter. Why should a human soul not do the same? Will her mother grow into life again in that rich soil, like the seeds, if tears fall upon them like rain? The thought is childish, she tells herself, and she is no longer a child. She can never be a child again. The time of childish things is finished, and there is no growing of souls in the earth when the winter is done.

In the kraal the slaughtered calf is on the spit. There are many to feed. The jugs of milky sorghum beer are passed around. The Reverend Kumalo doffs his fine sky blue robes to reveal an ordinary business suit underneath, a little shiny at the seat and with a discreet patch on one elbow. He receives the envelope of banknotes, passed on from Ben Laurens via Joshua the bossboy. There is also a bottle of brandy and two plump chickens given by Grace’s husband, Elias.

The women hang up their hats and put on aprons to prepare the food. The men roll cigarettes or light pipes and drink the milky beer that is passed around in gourds.

Tembi stands a little apart and looks at her father. Her father is here. But who is he? This man who sends money, who pats her cheek affectionately, who visits once a year, this stranger of her blood?

Even before the Relocation he had become a stranger. When she was but a child he went to work away from home, leaving early on Monday mornings with some of the other men from the village for his job in the sugar mill, and because the hours were long and the mill was a great distance away, he shared a room in the town there, only returning to his home on the weekends. And then he was tired, and wanted to sit in the sun or tend his small vegetable plot.

After the Relocation there was no work, nor was there farming. The land was too dry and too hard to take the seeds. Already some of the men had gone to the mines in E’Goli, the city of gold, because when there is no work there are always the mines. Elias left to work in the gold mines in Johannesburg. But in E’Goli a man must live in a hostel with other men, and send his money home, and only visit his family during the weeks allotted to him. And if he stays away longer than his allotted time, or wants more days with his family, then he loses his place in the mine, for there are
always others waiting. Some men take town-wives whom they can visit on a Sunday, for who can be alone fifty weeks of the year? Other families are created, and men become strangers to their wives and their children. Yet when asked, a man will say that this place or that place in the far country is still his home. But Elias only knows his home for two weeks in the year, and the home that he thinks of is now in that place called memory. On this farm called Kudufontein he is a visitor; he knows this as he receives the condolences of those who live in the kraal. His home is not here.

The sorghum beer makes him a little drunk, it clouds his grief and softens the thoughts he has about what his life is now that he is without a wife, and the beer softens the loss that he feels when he sees his daughter, who has become a young woman while his gaze was elsewhere, while his eyes were upon other things. He looks across at Tembi where she pours beer from a calabash. Some young man will want to marry her soon, and then that young man will find that there is not enough work on the farms, so he will go off to work on the railways, or in the mines, or somewhere else in the cities, for who can truly be satisfied to live here and be paid in salt and sugar and a portion of the harvest, and a handful of coins?

Elias drinks more beer to cloud these thoughts. What else can he do? he asks himself. That is the way things are.

Tembi watches her father, always aware of him. This man in his new city clothes. But his face is not as it once was, it is not the face she remembers. The face of her father is now in that place called memory. This man is not the person she remembers.

She remembers the glad laughter that sprang from his mouth when she would run down the hill to greet him as he came up from the bus stop, his arms filled with parcels and his face so eager for the sight of his family at the end of a working week.

She remembers sitting in his lap, as a small child, while he ate his mealie-pap and stew, and how he spooned morsels into her mouth as she rested in the crook of his arm, half asleep in her happiness.

She remembers the long road to the place where the bus stopped, when he went off to the mines, and she remembers walking with him, dragging at his hand to slow him down, to prevent his going. She remembers how he sent her back after a while. She remembers the long road to the bus that
would take him to the train that would take him to the mines in the city. A tall man on the road with a suitcase in one hand and a swing in his step. And even as he walked away from her he faded, like a mirage in the summer heat, wavering at the edges, losing shape, becoming a blur, becoming a memory. This man, this stranger. Her father.

Tembi takes a plate of food from one of the women and brings it to her father.

“Will you eat, Father?” She waits while he sets his gourd of beer down and accepts the plate in both his hands.

“Thank you, daughter.”

He holds the plate on his lap and looks up at Tembi. She stands above him now, she is a woman, no longer the girl who sat in his lap. “My daughter,” he says.

A light appears in her eyes. “Yes, my father.”

He shakes his head and says no more. His eyes are bloodshot with tears, his throat is closed, his heart is locked, his thoughts are dulled—with beer, with distance, with loss, with sorrow—all the things that fill a broken heart. He looks away from the light in his daughter’s eyes, a dying flame that he cannot rekindle.

“I am sorry, daughter,” he says. “For everything. For our lives.”

“Yes, Father,” Tembi says, and lets her hand rest on his shoulder.

And in this moment, this moment of touch between father and daughter, her hand on his warm shoulder, she knows that he will not come back after today. Tembi knows, with a sudden knowledge of the inevitable, that he will not come back. He will walk down the long road into the mirage one last time, a man with a suitcase in his hand, and his shape will become a blur and not come back. This man, this stranger.