The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 25

  I hadn’t turned a page for a great many ticks. I was unwilling to let go of the house as if my vigilance, late though it was, gave me some control over the hovering demons and dank fluttering of unnamed darkness.

  In the midst of the silent house, I had to stretch my senses outward to be aware of anything but the quiet and the clock. Desultory chickens clucked in the drowsy afternoon and somewhere far away – maybe the boys’ huts – I could hear children singing. Every now and then I caught the ominous grate of the generator. I reached further outward, trying to sense all that was beyond my small boxed-in haven.

  My father gave a loud snore from the bedroom, jarring the settled silence. And then it was quiet again.

  Dora and the boys had gone off after lunch to their families. I never went near there, their huts or their separate lives, on Christmas afternoons. The garrulous swallowing of beer and loud-laughing celebrations scared me. I was used to everything about life, its merrymaking and its sadness, tuned to a lower pitch. I was used to a certain restraint, which blanketed and muffled all that we did and the way that we acted.

  Tick Tick Tick

  Allan Quatermain again began to ride the afternoon, but inexpertly, falling off and drifting out of my mind’s eye. Each time it sucked more of my energy to pull him back into my consciousness and force him on his journey again. I sighed and tugged my eyes back on to the page …

  What was it that roused us?

  What was it that brought me sharply back to this place, and this time? It seemed the house grew tense around me – its bricks creaking with taut alertness, its floors stretched to high-strung rigidity. I heard no sound from the bedrooms, but I believed in that instant that everyone was awake. It seemed to me that we were waiting – for the inevitable, the predestined. For God’s finishing of what He had begun with us that day, that holiday.

  A wind had begun to blow, one of those rough, East Cape winds that begin suddenly and buffet the morning’s heat from the afternoon. I could hear it shushing through the trees and beating at the roof which creaked in its coarse hands. It would be a dirty wind, the kind which swept dust into your eyes and grit-layered your hair. A window slammed; it must have been in our bedroom. The screen door, battered open with a drawn-out skree-ee, slammed shut again with a powerful skree-ee-bang.

  I think I knew then, or it seems to me now that I knew then. I knew that God meant to toy with us that Christmas. It seemed to me that we all knew it. That we were all waiting for His move. Had we heard something, somewhere in the back of our unconscious senses? Or was it God who, anxious that we be aware of His machinations, had whispered in each of our ears?

  And then I did hear something. I heard his panting footsteps – heavy, running footsteps which pounded across the stoep. I could hear the heaving of wheezed breath as he battered the door. Battered and battered, while I cowered and curled under the desk.

  ‘Miesies, Miesies!’ He was shouting, pausing to wheeze in more breath. ‘Come, Miesies. Come quickly. Iets het gebeur, Miesies.’

  I could hear the family now, beds creaking, voices murmuring, feet thudding on wooden floors. I heard the squeak in the hinge of Ouma’s wardrobe.

  ‘Ek kom! Magtig, wat is dit nou? Just wait a little. I’m coming.’

  And then she padded through, zipping up her dress, her bunioned feet moving past me in her stockings. ‘Is dit jy, John?’ she called, opening the door. ‘Wat doen jy hier?’

  It was he, William’s son. It was shocking to see him there. At the front door. I heard my mother gasp as she came through, her hair tumbled. ‘What is it, John?’ she almost whispered. ‘What’s brought you here to this side of the house? Is there trouble?’

  William’s son was heaving to catch his breath. Crouched below them, I could squint upward past the desk chair and see his mouth working as he struggled to manoeuvre his words past his wheezing chest and working throat.

  ‘Speak, John!’ said Ouma. ‘What has happened? Is someone ill? Is it the politics? Have they come here? Have the political natives come here to the farms?’

  ‘Miesies,’ he said on a sob. ‘There’s big trouble, Miesies. Please, Miesies.’

  ‘What is it, my boy?’ That was my father’s voice, somewhere near the inner door of the library. ‘We can’t help unless you tell us.’ He sounded deep and calm. He would help, I felt sure. He could fix up most things.

  ‘Master, it’s the ou Miesies, on the other farm.’

  ‘Yes my boy? Is the old lady ill? Is she hurt?’ That was my dad again. He would find out what was wrong. He would do the right thing. I was sure he could make it better.

  ‘Ja, Master. She’s hurt, Master. She … it was Johannes, Master. He didn’t mean it, Master.’ The young man – tall, proud, angry, as I’d known him – crumbled away, leaving the inner boy. His hands scratched and clawed at his face. His eyes, the whites very bright in his shadowed face, flew from wall to wall. He sobbed then suddenly.

  ‘O my magtig,’ said Ouma, her cupped hands moving in slow motion to her mouth. ‘And I sent him there. He took my boys because I asked him to. O my magtig. Wat het hy gedoen, John?’

  ‘He was drinking, Miesies. He gave us a dop after lunch, Miesies. The Baas he gave us very strong dop for Christmas. Johannes, he took more than anyone. It was the drink, Miesies. He was very angry from yesterday, but it was the drink that made him do it.’

  No one spoke this time. Everyone waited for him to take his struggled breaths and heave out his dry sobs.

  ‘She made him angry, Miesies. Yesterday the ou Miesies she say he pull up her new flowers. She call him a stupid kaffir. It was in front of Mary, Miesies. The girl … his woman … she works in the house.’

  He paused again for his breath to catch up with his runaway story. Again, no one said anything.

  ‘The ou Miesies, she make him kneel on the grass and hold the flowers to his face. She say this is because he will know them the next time. And she call the Baas then, Miesies. She call the Baas and tell him to sjambok Johannes while he is still holding the flowers. I see Johannes, Miesies. I see he look at Mary while he is sjambokked and the tears come to his eyes. I know then, Miesies. I know something break down in Johannes.’

  ‘What did he do, John?’ My mother’s voice was a whisper. But it came to me distinctly behind my chair. ‘What did he do after he’d been drinking? You must tell us. We can’t help otherwise.’

  ‘He take the ou Miesies … He take her when she go to the dairy in the afternoon. She went to get the cream, for the tea. He follow her, Master. He was mad with the drink. They say … the Baas say he held her down on the ground and used her, Miesies.’

  ‘You mean he raped her, John? He raped her? Is that what you mean?’ My mother’s voice shuddered with trapped hysteria.

  Suddenly I could feel the dark beasts, baying and fluttering, their dank mustiness right here in the room with us. Finally we had let them in. For a long time they’d hunkered, cowardly, on the perimeter of the farm, and of our lives. Now they were upon us. No one could stop what was happening, and what was still to come. We had to ride with it, fly with the damp, scaly-winged creatures with the smell of death upon them.

  That word, the word my mother had spoken, I didn’t know it. But I could feel its reverberations in the room, the horror of its utterance, the spitting of its remains from my mother’s lips. I could feel the end of things in the voicing of it, the shrivelling of childhood, the mutilation of innocence in the naming of it here.

  Skree-bang. The screen door slammed the sound of women’s weeping into the house. Dora’s long wailing cry trailed from the kitchen and snaked its way down my goose-bumped back and into the pit of my vomitous entrails. My hair prickled in sharp needle stabs over my scalp.

  ‘Ja, Miesies.’ William’s son was quieter now. ‘He raped her. He used her hard, Miesies. The ou Miesies is hurt. Her leg is hurt … I think the hip, it broke.’

/>   ‘Oh my God!’ That was my mother. No one chastised her for using God’s name. No one said anything. At last my ouma spoke. Her voice was hollow.

  ‘You must go to your mother, John. And to Johannes’s mother. We will now do what must be done. Has the Baas taken the ou Miesies to the hospital?’

  ‘Ja, Miesies, but I am feared about when he comes back, Miesies. He is mad, Miesies. Mad with the anger. And … and also with the Christmas drink, Miesies.’

  ‘Well, you should be here with your mothers anyway, John. Go now … And John? … You know what he did was evil, nê? You know it’s no excuse – his anger and the drink he took? The Baas has a right to his fury, and his grief. His own mother, John! You grew up with Johannes, he is like your brother – you feel bad for him. But John, you know he will go to jail when he is caught, nê? Maybe even hanged.’

  ‘Ja, Miesies.’ He turned, all the pride sunk out of him, all the angry youth beaten from his bent shoulders and grief-burnt eyes.

  I crouched still, unseen under the desk. I could see Michael’s vulnerable legs twining around each other against the library wall. I could feel that nobody knew what to say. The horror was too heavily upon them. Ouma spoke then, clearing her throat first and dabbing at her nose with a tissue from her sleeve. Ouma would cope, I could see that. She’d cope as she always did, by organising.

  ‘Jim, I think you must go over there and see what you can do to help, especially when Mr Van Rensburg returns. He might want to organise a search party or something. Elaine, you and I must see to our people. We must calm down the women before there is chaos. Johnnie …’ She reached out and squeezed Oupa’s shoulder, more for her own comfort, I thought, than to reassure him ‘… Johnnie, you can’t help much at the other farm. Leave that maar for the younger men. I think the best help you can be is to stay here with the children. And to answer the phone.’

  Compliant to her moulding, the family moved away. But they still walked dazedly, caught up in the web of misty revulsion which clung stickily to the walls of the house.

  ‘Shall I come with you, Dad?’ Neil asked as he came back through the library, the clink of car keys in his hand. Dad stopped, considered, and looked at Neil as he stood, large-shouldered and taller than Dad, in front of him.

  ‘No, son … I think not. I don’t think it would be a good idea. I think the family needs a man in the house now. A young man. I want you to take care of them, OK?’

  ‘OK then, Dad … and Dad? Be careful, OK?’

  I crept out when they’d all gone. Only Michael still clung to the inner door frame, tangling his legs and finally dropping into a flat-footed squat, his back to the frame. I watched as, one by one, he began to squash the ants carrying the grains of sticky stuff back towards the skirting board. The ants climbed unperturbed over their fallen companions. A few began to drag one of the corpses away – one minute a friend, the next, just food.

  ‘Did you understand all that, Kitty? D’you know what he did?’

  ‘Not really,’ I whispered, squatting beside him. After a long while, Neil came and stood in the passage outside the door, rubbing his hand back and forth across his chin.

  He was checking us out, I thought, to see how much we knew and whether we were going to be OK.

  ‘What does “rape” mean, Neil?’ asked Michael, his head shooting up to aim his huge dark eyes at his older brother.

  ‘It’s nothing either of you should know about. It’s a terrible thing – not something men should allow to happen to their women. It’s OK now. It’ll all be sorted out. I think you should both try to forget about what’s happened.’

  We stared at the ants some more. We could hear Oupa talking to Neil in the lounge.

  ‘D’you think we should see what’s going on?’ Michael asked me, without looking up from the dam of corpses he was creating to hold back the stream of ants.

  ‘Don’t know. I’m a bit scared.’

  ‘Ja, that’s OK. But I think we should see what’s happening. Come, I’ll look after you.’

  We left quietly, skimming across the gusting veld with the silence of dusty feet on dusty ground. When we reached the fence nearest to the Van Rensburg house it was late afternoon. Darkness hollowed the ground where the sun could no longer stretch. Hadedas howled their possessed cry into the wind.

  ‘Mr Van Rensburg’s home again. There’s his bakkie,’ Michael said, twining his arms over the top of the fence and screwing up his eyes against the biting dust. ‘Dad’s there too. See his car?’

  We squatted there, watching the darkness scuttle over the bleak landscape. Finally vanquishing the speckled sunlight, it took over the squat house already haunted by its internal horror.

  The yard was entirely in shadow when the bakkies began to arrive – dusty, revving beasts, bucking and straining over the ruts and water-washed striations of the farm road. One after the other, they roared and screeched into the yard, fury in the yowling of their engines and the smoke from their exhausts.

  The men clustered in groups in the yard, hands on wide hips or clasped around shotguns pointing to the sky. They were sweating, red-faced men, with anger in their stillness, violence in their inactivity.

  We could hear the mutter of their discussions and the crack of guns being opened and loaded. From the swamp of sickly light in the doorway, Mr Van Rensburg stepped into the shadows of the yard. The group of men swallowed him in murmured ingestion in the time it took for the wind to drop. It dropped suddenly – as the wind does sometimes in the Eastern Cape when the sun goes down. The spectral stillness enveloped the house and yard as the group scattered. The men strode intently to their bakkies, their tautly-held ferocity given focus and purpose.

  ‘Look, Kitty, there’s Dad.’

  For the first time ever, my dad looked unsure. He stopped at the edge of the yellowish light from the door and half turned, his eyes searching the inside of the house. He moved a step forward, towards the bakkies and the men, but his eyes remained inside. He looked distressed.

  I watched him, dread creeping up my legs from the cooling earth. He was no longer my dad, not the dad I knew and depended on. In the spotlight of my anguish I could see he was no longer strong. My dad …what made him Dad was his strength, his eternal sureness. It was my mom who showed distress, worry, indecision. It was he who comforted, calmed, made everything clear. On this late afternoon, as the darkness slowly blotted out the sun, this last refuge was snatched away from me. The last small hideaway from the awfulness scuttling over my farm, from the evil overtaking us, was no longer firm. It creaked with the rickety danger of collapse.

  ‘Kom now, Jim,’ Mr Van Rensburg called through his open window. ‘Jy behoort met die manne te kom. You don’t want to stay with the women.’

  His decision was made for him and he also stepped into the shadows, joining Mr Van Rensburg in the revving bakkie.

  We waited a long time as the darkness slowly dropped. We didn’t speak, Michael and I, but slowly walked up and down the fence, kicking at stones and running sticks along the mesh. There was no laughter in it, this clinking of sticks undertaken solemnly to feel our bodies still moving, our children’s souls still alive.

  I wonder how long we really waited there, that evening. It felt like the time it could take to end the world. The crickets began to chirrup their chorused joy as our two small figures paced alongside the fence, up and down, up and down. I don’t remember whether we even wondered if we’d be missed. With Ouma and Mom with our people we probably wouldn’t have been. But I’m not sure it would have entered our heads, or if we even cared.

  We paced until Michael stopped and quivered, his small, animal head feeling the air, his nose sniffing. There across the farmlands I could see them too. Careering headlights, throwing dust and revving petrol fumes into the still air. He began to run, desperation tightening the muscles of his whip-like legs. I followed him, adrenaline firing me across the ground
, scarcely feeling the small stones and thorns which stabbed at my blindly running feet. We both wheezed with fear and urgency as we flung our bodies over the fence and ran for the congregated bakkies, their encircling headlights glaring off the dense wall of dust between them.

  This is the hardest part. All these years my tongue has felt glued to my mouth to stop me from talking of this, of naming it, giving it power in my life again. But in a way, that Christmas Day has ruled my life. It took over, possessed me: made me into someone else. It sucked the spirit from me and left me an undead husk of a person with the juice poured out. I was scared to speak of it. I was frightened of releasing the demons on to the world. I couldn’t let it happen again, you see. I had to cage the darkness inside me, never free it to devour those around me. And that very inability to speak of it soured my life and snatched my childhood forever. And of course there was the guilt. The guilt that I couldn’t have seen it coming, that I couldn’t hold out my arms to protect what I loved. That I let it happen, kept silent and didn’t do anything to stop what they did. It wasn’t only what happened there, in that place I loved above any other, that evening. It was everything, the way every small thing that happened on the farm that year, in a way led inevitably to this – to a sudden and violent knowledge of brutality and a chaotic awareness of the savagery of humans and a God who could allow such things and such people to exist.

  My mouth finds it hard to put such things into words. But I shall try.

  We ran to the back of the two adjoining outbuildings, the dairy and the storeroom, and slid our feet up the walls. On the flat roof we crept forward with shuddering fear, our bodies moving to the edge in a compulsion of dread. Lying full length, we could look almost directly down on the milling men. At first I couldn’t see what was happening in the swirling brown cloud. I thought for a moment with relief that they hadn’t found him.

  The men unwound a light from the storeroom, which they hooked to the bar at the back of Mr Van Rensburg’s cab, and I saw him with a flashing start. Johannes crouched in the back, a wounded, cowering animal – his fierce anger gone in this last struggle for survival. He was taut with the shivering, frozen fear of a buck which gazes into the eyes of a lion. But these weren’t lions, these men. At this moment they slunk forward from the shadows like a pack of hyenas, snatching at a weakened creature, taking pleasure in its torment.