The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  ‘And so, what’d they say?’

  Joe closes the fridge again. ‘Well …’ he turns to gaze out at the shadows ‘… I suppose I now realise how scummy all sides turn out to be in a vicious struggle like this.’

  ‘Well,’ I snap, irritation breaking through my concern, ‘it’s taken you long enough.’

  He pauses for so long that I think I’ve closed him up again. But, as if I haven’t spoken, he continues at last. ‘Until that interdict came up, I suppose I expected someone to care that people were dying. But they don’t, you know. They just use it as a prod on the other side. Both sides use the same prod and everyone refuses to accept the smallest jot of responsibility.’

  ‘But you still haven’t told me what they said … about the violence this week.’

  ‘Well, there sat management, pretending to the most awful shock, but really smiling at the moral higher ground they perceived it was giving them. “We must state,” they said at the start, “how we condemn these actions of strike supporters. We have always held the utmost concern and care for those dealers who stock our products.” Oh please, really! A more cynical statement it would be hard to devise, especially considering they’ve absolutely refused to compromise or negotiate at all, throughout …’

  ‘Well, that’s predictable, I suppose. But what did the union say?’

  ‘… So, while I was still boiling with indignation over management’s statement, in comes the union with a bland refusal to accept any responsibility either. “Oh,” they say. “We can’t be held responsible for the responses of the community. For the legitimate anger generated in the community. We can’t do anything about it. The ball is in management’s court. It’s easy for them to fix, they just have to meet our demands. That’ll stop the violence.”’

  ‘And what about their claim to the press that the violence was orchestrated by management?’

  ‘Oh that! That never came up at all. I think that was just a little snippet to give them some martyred-victim-of-the-struggle status in the community. I don’t think anyone even seriously believes it. No, in talks the violence was just something to be used, something that would “stop just like that” …’ he clicks his fingers in front of my face, ‘… “if management would only shift from their position”.’

  ‘So’s that been more or less the tone of the entire week of talks, so far?’

  ‘Ja, neither side will move. No one really cares about the injuries and deaths. That’s just part of the chips that both sides use to bargain with … You know, Kate, I don’t know why I bother.’

  ‘Well, neither do I if you’re so put out just because human beings don’t live up to your fairy-tale expectations. I can’t give you your faith back. I’ve never had any. I’m sure you, the great idealist, still believe there’s some good in the cause … Only don’t expect that from me. That’s not my role.’

  ‘No, you can’t give me back my faith. But you know something I’ve just realised? You can’t bear for me to be without it. You’ve never had any faith. That’s true! But you can’t handle me being without. You’ve sucked off my faith and idealism all these years, dragging me down with you. But you still expect me to carry the full burden of keeping it alive. You can’t get off your butt, there in the protected haven of your own selfish, cut-off little world, and help me now that I need it.’

  ‘I can’t see what I can do for you, Joe. I can’t give you what I don’t have.’

  Joe turns abruptly back to the window. He stands there a moment with his hands clenched, breathing heavily. He lifts one tensed arm and briefly hits the window frame with the side of his large fist.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, his voice strangling with the effort of trying to control his emotions. ‘But all these years I’ve believed that you’d surprise yourself at the resources you’d find, if you dug deep enough. If only for your own survival. But really, if this’s the way you want it, then fine. Watch me go down. But bear this thought in your shuttered little mind. Can you survive without my hope and idealism to support you?’

  ‘Well …’ with a forced high-pitched titter, ‘I’ve always wondered how you’ve managed to survive with your dangerous level of optimism, with that raw sensitivity to everything and your unreal belief in people.’

  Turning suddenly towards me, he erupts: ‘You’re a damaged half-person. By what, I’ve never discovered. You latched on to me because I’ve always been damaged in the opposite way. I was damaged by being unformed, by being the overprotected child, by believing in Father Christmas too long. We’re two damaged halves that sucked off each other for our survival. Can you afford to let me lose everything, to sink into your abyss, without giving me the slightest help?’

  ‘This conversation is futile, Joe. There’s no point to it. I don’t even know what you expect of me and I’m sure, that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to give it anyway.’ I pause, trying to find some way out of this dangerous maze.

  ‘Tell me some more about the talks. I’m interested. Really.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what more I can tell you.’ He sighs and sinks to a kitchen chair, his elbows on the scrubbed wood of the table. He rubs both large hands over his face, distorting his eyes into slits before letting them go. ‘Both sides sit there taking extreme positions and bristle at each other. Neither side will give an inch in case the other side thinks they’re showing weakness.’

  He pauses, gazing at me with those raw, aching eyes of his. I think he’s finished talking, as I sip my ice-cold wine and lean against the wall. But, after a long silence, he continues.

  ‘It’s dragged on so long now that the rank and file is tiring. It’s nearly Christmas time. They need money. They don’t need to lose their jobs, which looks like the conclusion to this unless things end soon. And some are, understandably, caving in and going back to work … you heard that, didn’t you, on the answering machine? Anyway, management’s using this in the most cynical way. “Oh,” they told us last week, “but we’re so pleased that some strikers are beginning to realise how good we are, how fair our original offer was.” That just makes me boil. But the union’s no better. “We’ll never give in. We can make this strike last for ever. We can destroy the company.” And, I suppose, what they don’t add: “We can make the strike-breakers extremely sorry they were even born. And then blame it on management.”’

  ‘So it looks like this could drag on long past Christmas? For ever, in fact?’

  ‘Ag, that’s what they say. I don’t believe it. I think the situation’s against it. The strike’s actually crumbling as we speak. People are drifting back to work in greater numbers. Union leadership and management are caught in this bind of posturing. But actually the rank and file realise it can’t go on for ever. They can’t sustain it.’

  ‘And you, Joe? Can you sustain this work?’

  ‘I don’t know any more, Kate. I just don’t know about anything. I don’t even know what I believe. I feel like everything’s crumbling, all at the same time …’

  He stands suddenly, almost toppling his chair, and makes for the kitchen door. I think that’s the end of it. But at the door, he pauses.

  ‘… Us too,’ he says, turning his dissolving face towards me. ‘I don’t know how we can hold things together. It was always me, you know, me with my hopeless optimism thinking you’d get better, that we’d come right in the end …’

  I will not look up at him. I am intent on my tearing nails, and the scrumpled newspaper in front of me, as he says: ‘… I haven’t the strength to hold things together any more. I don’t even think I’ve the strength to believe in anything. What can we do, Kate? What is there left for me here?’

  1966 … One day to Christmas

  The heat began to grow in the day’s embryo. I could feel it even there, surrounded by the dark smell of fecund fruit. I could taste it, the day’s heat still to come, in the juice dripping from my sucked peach, plucked with
the chill still on it.

  I was walking the ritual route, through the orchard to the swimming place, baptising the day with a ceremonial swim, early enough to catch it fresh, dust-free and unspoilt. It was my own small offering to Jesus, an unspoken prayer for the day, that special day, the day before Christmas.

  It wasn’t too late. There was still time before Christmas. And this was the day of waiting, of anticipation. You could hold it in your hands and feel the possibilities for Christmas to come. Now perhaps God would make everything well. Now was the time for Him to heal the farm, heal this day of promise – for Him, if only for Him, and the celebration it pleased Him that we should hold. Surely God knew that for us this was a time of birth, not death and violence; a time of rejoicing, not mourning. He would make it OK for us to glory in the story of His baby.

  I stepped from the musky dank of fallen fruit into the glowing hope of the sun. My feet, hard from years of gravel roads and thorny grass, planted themselves on the settled grey of chill ground, producing small blossoms of dust. I could hear the strident boast of the cocks parading before the day. And the first zing of insects, triumphant in the early sunlight.

  The water was still, darkened by shadow, and I could lower myself gently into its wallowing caress almost without ripple. I hadn’t swum for days and days, not since that day … but I didn’t want to think about it on this morning of such taut-strung hope.

  For days I had had nothing to do with the farm. I had crouched in Oupa’s library, mooning in my self-pity. And angry, so angry at life, even with God. But most of all I was angry with this farm, this living, breathing organism that had worked so hard all my life to convince me of its perfection, and then laughed as it ripped it all away. And underneath there were no banks of flowers, soft animals and unconditional love. Behind that curtain of deceitful perfection lay entrails, the smell of death, hateful feelings and flesh ripped dark and bloody … Oh Jesus, gentle Jesus, hold me from thinking of it. Hold me from seeing it every time I close my eyes.

  Each day since, I had fought and fought myself to keep the nausea away from my mind; each time I looked at something it was coloured suddenly by a wash of dark blood. It lapped over the flower garden, swelled and submerged the sinking fig tree; it covered the chicken hoks and smeared the wooden stoep.

  But now this water would wash it away. The clear chilling freshness of God’s special place at this, His very special time, when the morning was still new, this would cleanse my mind and prepare the day to come.

  And it seemed that it did, as the day rose in its fulsome heat and a small blossom of joy appeared suddenly in the very pit of my stomach. The smell of bacon sizzled from the kitchen and the jar of soetkoekies stood in its rightful place.

  ‘The baby chicks are expected today. You can come and watch as William unpacks them if you like.’ Ouma stood at the breakfast table, brushing her curls back with both harassed hands. She was staring at me closely, anxious lines puckering her forehead. This was the only way she knew to reach me. I had watched her detachedly these last few days, sorry for her brusque struggle to help me, but tied by my anger and my self-pity, unable to reach back in acceptance of her small consecrated gestures of Christmas cake and koeksusters.

  ‘Oh Ouma, I’d really smaak that. It’s them I love best of all the animals.’

  She smiled suddenly, dropping her raking hands. As usual her tightened face was sweetened and rounded all at once by her slow smile. She ran a hand across my hair.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ she said. And then she turned, bustling to the kitchen.

  ‘Dora, Dora, make sure the Christmas pud is boiled today, sien jy, and the chickens must be plucked, and the meringues. I’ll come in and make the meringues this morning. William, Wil-l-iam …’

  Her voice faded behind the screen door’s skree-bang. The rest of the family ate in silence. Looking at me, my father drew in a breath to speak. Oh please, I thought, don’t let him ask me. I turned to Oupa and caught the slight shake and frown he sent across the table to my dad. And then he smiled at me and covered my clenched hand with his.

  ‘How’re you getting on with King Solomon’s Mines? Enjoying it?’

  ‘Ja, Oupa, it’s great. You know, it’s kind of like the kind of story you can really get inside. And you can forget everything, I mean, where you are and everything, while you’re reading.’

  ‘Well, that’s as it should be. That’s the best kind of book, isn’t it? I think you’ll find you’ll want to look for books that can do that for you periodically all your life. In fact, I think if a person were to live buried in and surrounded by books, it would be the perfect haven, the best possible sanctuary that life could provide.’

  And later, from the low embracing branches of the wild fig tree, it seemed as if God had heard me. The breeze shuffled and shushed through the large leaves and riffled the pages of my book in the growing day. And when I looked up from the cool of my place to the shimmering heat across the lawn, Oupa waved and nodded to me from his smoke-wisped place on the stoep.

  I watched as Kobus, trailed by Jonas, scuffed bent-headed to the edge of the stoep. They waited, kicking at tufts of grass with their bare feet. When Michael raced out to join them, they whooped off together around the side of the house, arms windmilling through the wild heat.

  I waited there in the arms of the tree, sitting motionless even as the faint growl of the truck reached me – I knew it was still valleys away. Only when I heard it revving and gear-straining to make it over the rutted farm road into the yard, did I leap down.

  And they were there, boxes and boxes of deafening cheeps carried swiftly hand-to-hand into their windowless hut. I sat in the fragrance of fresh sawdust, watching the frenetic yellow darting of frantic fluff. Unpacked, they huddled on to each other under the yellow light of the central warmer.

  Ouma and William communicated silently, reading each other’s lips and signing with their hands. The noise was deafening, one loud continuous high-pitched barrage of melded cheeps. Coiled among them, I could feel their pattering feet and brushing wisps of down against my bare crossed legs. I could catch and cradle them in my hands, hearing their cheeps separate from the beating chirrup in the room as I lifted them to my cheek. Released, each scurried into the whirling mass of pressing yellow bodies and its tiny sound merged again into the whole.

  I sat there a long time after the others had gone, feeling the gentle newness of the chicks, the fresh unspoilt innocence of birth and the softness of the farm envelop me in its brushing yellow warmth. I sat, stroking the writhing mass of wriggling down, feeling it separate into tiny living beings as they pattered across my legs to disappear again on the moving floor. I sat, feeling the heat build from the central warmer, until Ouma appeared in the doorway with her peremptory beckoning arm and summoned me to lunch.

  All she was feeling at that moment – exasperation, love, and relief at my recovery – leapt from her simple heart and scrummed there across her plain farm face as we walked hand in hand back to the house.

  ‘I love you, Ouma.’

  ‘Ja, my kind, ek’s ook baie lief vir jou.’

  ‘Where are you taking me, Ouma? Aren’t we going back for lunch?’

  ‘Ja, but first I thought it was time for you to choose your own chicken. I thought you’d maar enjoy that.’

  She led me to the hok of scrawny-necked teenage chickens, where their silly frenzy made me laugh again. I couldn’t stay cross with them, they were such idiotic, lovable creatures.

  ‘So which one do you want, my kind?’

  My own chicken, mine! For Christmas obviously. I could take it home, let it run around the garden. I could feed it myself and find its eggs. I could eat my own eggs for breakfast.

  ‘Oh that one, Ouma. Thanks, Ouma, thank you. I just love that one, with the black speckle on her wing.’

  I’ll call her Sheba, I thought as we walked hand in hand to the house.
She looks like a queen. A name like that would make a chicken proud.

  The family was seated as we appeared. All except Michael, who scrapped and scrambled his panting way into the dining room, only to be sent to the bathroom with me to wash our grimy hands and faces.

  ‘So, sis, what’cha been doing? You know what? We’ve been go-carting down the farm roads by the back there. It’s just so lekker you can’t believe it. It’s kif, like flying. Wanna come after lunch?’

  ‘Ja, I think so. Will you go with me the first time?’

  ‘Ja OK. But don’t act like a sissy in front of Kobus. I said you were OK, almost like a boy, so he said OK, you could come with us.’

  Lunch gulped its way into our two dusty, impatient bodies as the family ate slowly in the heat of the soporific afternoon, their easy chat a low desultory buzz. We escaped as soon as we could, Michael and I, cadging a whole bowl of peeled prickly pears from the fridge.

  ‘Ag, please, Dora, please. There’s still time to peel more for tomorrow. Shh, don’t tell Ouma, hey. Or I’ll smack your bottom, smack smack smack,’ said Michael, clutching Dora around her vast, chuckling middle and swiping his small hands at her swaying behind.

  ‘Hai hai hai, klein Ma-aster,’ she said, wiping her mirth-filled eyes with the edge of her doek. Shaking her head she held the bowl in front of us.

  ‘And who will peel more, and pluk them from the bosse? Your ouma she want them for Christmas breakfast.’

  ‘You, Dora, you will,’ said Michael, shouting with laughter as he wrestled for the bowl which she held forward and then snatched beyond his reach. ‘Because you love us. And you won’t be so mafuta if you run up the hill one more time. Thanks, Dora. We love you, Dora.’ He managed to scrabble his fingers on to the rim and we escaped the kitchen, giggling over our conquest.

  We ran quickly through the closed courtyard, where Ouma had enclosed the dogs for the rest of our visit. I couldn’t look at them as they lay panting in the thin shade at the edge of the house. I didn’t think I could ever talk to them again, or pet their scrumpled muzzles. I hated them.