The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 3

  I relaxed and pulled back the duvet, beginning my fussy ritual of placing my pillows. I thought he’d given up, you see. How wrong could I be? The worst was still to come.

  ‘I want to go to the coast this Christmas.’ He meant the East Cape coast, where we both grew up.

  ‘You know I don’t go to the Eastern Cape, ever.’

  ‘What is it about that place? What happened to you there?’

  ‘Nothing!’ I bellowed, cornered now by the tightness of the duvet, held down by the weight of his body. ‘It was perfect. It was a perfect childhood. It’s the most wonderful place in the world. I just don’t feel like going back. One can’t travel backwards. We’ve left there. Why can’t we leave well alone?’

  And it was perfect, I thought, as he finally gave up and slammed into the bathroom. The perfect place to grow up, to be a child.

  The smell of the jasmine, that youthful harbinger of Christmas, of end-of-year holidays, began suddenly and inexplicably to suffocate me.

  1966 … Seventeen days to Christmas

  I was carried, coiled in sleep, from the car, too dark and dreamy to join in the half-heard greetings and embraces. My cheek against his jersey, I could smell my father’s strength in the sweat of his body. But the chill of the night air feathering my hair carried, inevitably, the essence of the farm – that foetid mixture of soil, coal smoke, chickens and pigs.

  Warmth embraced me as we passed from the veranda, my father’s feet shushing on the smooth stone, into the wooden echoes of the old house. In its musty smell of old books and excitement I could discern our passing through Oupa’s library. And then the passage, with drifting aromas of newly-warmed bread and vegetable soup. Yes, surely it must have been soup. It was always soup. The smell of welcome, of murmured greetings in the sleepy darkness.

  And then the smell of sleep in crisp, clean cotton and woolly blankets, soon to be kicked off in the closed-in heat of the shared room.

  I awoke early, in the brisk clarity of just-risen light. I sat up quietly, rejoicing in the stomach-coiling excitement of the crowded kip-kips and the strident, competing call of roosters. The other animals, the few cows and pigs, were too far away for me to hear. But I strained to catch – I could picture them grunting their greeting – those wriggling pink piglets, born just before our previous visit. Bigger now, I was sure, but not yet gross and unsympathetic in their scaly-skinned imperviousness.

  Standing on my bed I could gaze through the window at the constant, grating belt of the generator, stolid in the settled dust of the yard. Curtains were never drawn in our family – my father believed in the rightness of waking with the morning. But here on the farm, we children would always wake earlier than he, to his chagrin. Built on, to accommodate the first grandchild nearly sixteen years before, our room now contained three narrow, spring-based beds beneath the largest windows in the house. My father’s sleep would be broken only when the strangled early sun could force its way through wood-framed panes to reach the bed. In our room it burst unrestrained through the wide, modern metal windows, which were Ouma’s pride.

  The squealing creak of my bedsprings brought my brother, Michael, instantly upright in the bed. ‘We’re here, we’re here,’ he yodelled, bouncing on his bottom and flinging his pillow at me. Just as suddenly he subsided, with a sigh of ennui and a glance backwards at the other bed. My elder brother Neil, superior in his almost sixteen, teenaged status, was groaning exaggeratedly and shaking his head, wearing his grown-up-bewildered-by-puerile-antics-of-siblings expression. Michael, at twelve, swung wildly between unrepentant childhood and unappreciated attempts to emulate the exalted age and behaviour of his brother.

  ‘Oh my God, can’t you piks run outside and make that noise?’ Neil’s groan betrayed the slightest catch at the end, a faint memory of childhood’s piping squeals.

  ‘Oh shut up, you’re not so grown-up, you vrot backside.’ Michael’s humiliated fury was transposed into motion as he leapt from the bed and raced from the room, grabbing one of the pile of swimming towels left for us by Ouma.

  I can remember the sudden quiet return to the room and the distant skree-bang of the screen door. It’s funny; I can still remember every feel and smell of that holiday. Every minute has the clarity of a glass-encased specimen. I often think of it as one of those ornamental snow-filled domes with a castle or church inside. I never thought, until now, that I would be leading anyone inside that dome to taste the bitterness trapped, hidden inside the castle. But now that I have begun, I must do what I have been avoiding for so long, and finally confront its ghosts.

  I often wonder when exactly the awfulness began. At the start, everything was as it always had been, as it should be. And I do want you to feel that, to know that that’s how it really was. It’s just that now, knowing what happened, it seems to me that the violence didn’t just collide with the peace of my world in one gigantic crash. From the moment we arrived, it seemed to slither insidiously into the joy of the prosaic everyday, into the innocence of roast chicken and the happiness of baby chicks. But perhaps it’s only in hindsight, in knowing what was to come, that I feel as if a malign force was festering all the time we were there. Perhaps it’s the memories of that suggestible child, who died that holiday and was replaced by this dark-filled shell, which makes me remember it as a grub nestled in the heart of a perfect pear.

  That morning, the first morning, all I wanted was to feel the farm, to touch it with eager eyes, to smother my face in its smells. Standing on my bed, I thrust my head through the small rectangular hole in the meshed-metal burglar bars where the window catch was intended to fit. My bed being the one directly below the window, I used this hole every year to catch my first-morning sight of the farm. This year I revelled in being tall enough to stand, rather than having to kneel on the window sill to peer through the gap in the bars. It was a small ritual of mine to see if I could peer past the side of the generator and spy some of the chicken hoks. Yes, there was Petrus emblazoned in the bright early sun, doing something in one of the hoks, I couldn’t see what. I twisted my head that little bit more but he moved, disappearing from my field of vision. Oh well, that was enough anyway, I thought, tugging my head back.

  I can remember quite clearly the suddenness of my lazy happiness flooding away, and the horror of being trapped. Nameless panic drenched my mouth with the taste of vomit. The clutch of the metal, grown monstrous now, appeared to grow tighter. In the child that I was, everything receded but the panicked need to free myself. I can’t remember if I screamed but I know I was fighting, scratching, kicking to escape from that crushing band. Then a rough bear-hug held, then quieted me, and the world took on again its more familiar proportions.

  ‘You raving bloody idiot,’ said Neil. But his fingers were gentle as he pushed and prodded my head straight and guided it back through the hole, my rough, boy’s haircut tugged upward.

  ‘Can’t you see you’ve got too big to do that?’ he said, laughing now in his exasperated grown-up way. But he hugged me roughly until my sobs subsided. Then, embarrassed at his sentimentality, he gave me a swift slap across the cheek. ‘Oh, foolish, foolish idiot,’ he said, sighing and settling himself back into bed with his book.

  I wiped my face and my smeared nose with my pyjama sleeve and sank back down on my bed. But it wasn’t the same. Somehow I no longer felt like wallowing there in that first-morning-on-the-farm feeling. My legs were still shaking and I felt like a fool in front of my awesome older brother.

  It was more than that though. The room had shrunk back to its ordinary size, but the terror of its sudden trap would not leave me. Now I just wanted my Oupa. Slinking from the room, I could hear behind their closed door, the sounds of Ouma and Oupa rousing.

  ‘Come in, quickly,’ said Ouma, with her quick, no-nonsense smile, as I wavered at the tentatively opened door. Oupa held up the side of his bedclothes and I ran to be embraced by his enveloping smile.


  ‘Have you held me in your dreams, Oupa?’ I asked in our small ceremony of welcome and leave-taking. In many ways, the strands of my childish reality were stitched together by my vital little rites, carried out with great seriousness and intent.

  ‘Every dream has embraced you and held you to my heart,’ he replied with his dreamy, poet’s voice.

  ‘Ja, but that’s now enough of the nonsense of the two of you,’ Ouma said, her voice brusque, her eyes warm. ‘It’s now time for the Lord’s words. And I’ll have no whispering and wriggling from the two of you, you hear? If you stay in here,’ she said, her brisk features set in my direction, ‘you will show respect and hold yourself still. And you, Johnnie,’ she said with the exasperated frown she used to mask her love – I think she feared mawkishness above all things – ‘try to remember you are an old man, not mos ’n kind.’

  ‘Yes, my dear.’ This was Oupa’s standard reply, chastened and meek. But Ouma never quite managed to harry the twinkled glint of a smile from Oupa’s eyes which brought him, as reply, Ouma’s scowl of suspicion, in constant vigilance against his affectionate mockery.

  I loved the soothing sound of her rough Afrikaans voice reading aloud the psalms from the Bible. As an unspoken expression of love for my Oupa, she always read from the English Bible although he could have understood the Afrikaans perfectly well.

  ‘“The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing; to show that the Lord is upright: He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”’

  I’m almost sure those were the lines that concluded her reading. I remembered them and later paged the psalms searching for them – Psalm 92. The Lord’s words which, at the time filled me with the joy and certainty that comes from control over the universe. For I knew, with the sure knowledge of absolute belief, that nothing really bad could happen as long as I was good and loved God.

  ‘Let us pray,’ intoned Ouma, and I joined in fervently, sure and steadfast in my role as the righteous cosmic goalie for all whom I loved. ‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’

  I missed the early morning swim with my father that morning, but joined Michael and Daddy in the coal-stove heat of the kitchen as they rubbed themselves dry. Michael, as usual, was kidding Dora and whipping forbidden-before-breakfast soetkoekies from the jar on the Dutch dresser. Dora, her vast bulk heaving and shuddering, never showed displeasure. Her mouth, with only a yellowed tooth stump here or there, was always smiling. Her laughs began in raucous descent from her wide-flung mouth and travelled like a quaking avalanche down the great, swelling mountain of her body.

  ‘I’ll smack your bottom,’ said Michael and darted forward, Dora’s vast bottom creating an unmissable target. ‘Can’t you catch me, Dora? Can’t you?’

  Her mountainous bulk heaved and wobbled with mirth as she took one plodding step towards Michael, whose skinny legs moved, colt-like, around the scrubbed kitchen table. In his black school bathing costume he reminded me of the stick insects I liked to collect. His knees were the only rounded part of his angular, prickly body and while he looked awkward, he moved astonishingly fast.

  ‘Hai, klein Master. You!’ she gasped, leaning on the table to rest.

  ‘Now don’t you children drive Dora mad,’ said my father, intervening at last, but indulgently. ‘She has the breakfast to see to. How are you, Dora?’ he asked in the hearty, slightly louder than usual tone he used for our Africans. ‘You’re looking good as usual, even more mafuta than last time. Your husband must think you’re a fine figure of a woman.’

  Dora collapsed into shuddering hilarity, one hand still supporting herself against the table, the other covering her downcast face. ‘Thank you, Master,’ she said at last. ‘But my husband is dead now, these three years.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sorry, Dora. I forgot. But do you mean a fine mafuta girl like you hasn’t found another one? Shame on you.’ He retreated while she shuddered some more, shook her head and wiped the tears, of laughter I thought, from her face with the edge of her spotless apron.

  Breakfast was eaten, all of us together in the dining room, dark but for the wide stream of sunlight illuminating the sparkling motes and fairies dancing in the air. The smell of newly applied polish, hot porridge and bacon mingled over the white starched tablecloth, which was already showing signs of my having breakfasted at it.

  ‘Do you want to go round the farm with me – see the changes?’ Ouma asked me.

  ‘Ja, please, Ouma,’ I said eagerly. ‘Can I have some more milk, please?’

  ‘Not ja, say yes,’ interjected my mother, holding the milk jug just beyond my reach. ‘And for goodness’ sake, say milk, not mulk.’ She poured it for me.

  ‘Nothing wrong with ja,’ replied Ouma, looking sharply at her. ‘It’s your language after all. Don’t think you’re too good for the first language you could speak.’

  ‘Oh, Ma, don’t start that again.’

  My mother’s mouth was set in anger but as I watched her, a welling sheen leapt to her blinking eyes. I had never seen my mother cry. I didn’t think mothers did. And I had never seen real anger between her and Ouma. But then, as the silence stretched around us, Oupa slipped in a silly joke – something about sheep I think – and everyone laughed.

  ‘What do you mean, changes?’ I asked suddenly.

  ‘Well, my kind, we’re getting old now, you know. We couldn’t keep up this huge old farm ourselves. We’ve got enough to get along with, with the chickens and a few pigs. And a cow or two for milk. We didn’t need to struggle with all those sheep.’

  ‘Where exactly have you sold from, Ma?’ asked my father.

  ‘You’ve sold our farm?’ The realisation suddenly clutched at me. I stared at her, disbelieving. ‘Nobody told me.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t need to know, my kind. It was our decision,’ said Ouma mildly. ‘Ag, it’s that hard land, from where it runs into the Zuurveld,’ she continued, turning to my father. ‘We never really kept enough sheep to make it pay. A man called Van Rensburg has bought it – a stock farmer. He’s started clearing some of the bush and trees. He thinks he can make a go of it with cattle and sheep. He seems a good farmer, experienced. And, dankie God, he took on the boys we couldn’t keep any more.

  ‘En nou, kind?’ she asked, turning to see the silent tears dripping unwiped off my chin.

  ‘How could you do that, Ouma? It was our farm – our special place. You didn’t tell me.’

  I couldn’t explain to her. I couldn’t express what I wanted to say; that we loved that part, the dusty part where the sheep grazed; that it was my secret place; that sometimes we could see little buck there on the sharp edge of the world at nightfall, or coax the guinea fowl down to scratch at the chickenfeed we threw for them.

  ‘Magtig, you are a funny child. Imagine being sentimental about that great dustbowl.’ She finished on a sigh, her mouth clamping tight in exasperation. Yet her eyes had softened. ‘But I tell you what, you can still walk over there. Go introduce yourselves to Mr Van Rensburg. I’m sure he won’t mind to see you on his land, now and then.’

  ‘It won’t be the same though.’

  The fever of grief had passed, but my heart still felt clutched by a rough sadness. I couldn’t have put it into words, and I’m not even sure that I can now. You see, it had nothing to do with avarice, or with an ‘our farm is bigger than your farm’ feeling. It was that wild expanse. It touched and fed a wildness deep inside me. Like a small animal, I had the feeling I could gallop for ever. It had a sense of freedom that smoothed all concerns, and was salve for all my city wounds. Whoever had refused to be my best friend, or wouldn’t sit with me at break-time or whatever, evaporated into insignificance on the farm, beside the exhilaration of racing across that grassy,
scrubby land, an aura of soft dust rising around me, while the hadedas called eerily, plaintively, overhead.

  ‘Come now, I’ll show you we still have more than enough land,’ said Ouma practically, reaching for my hand.

  Afterwards, after that holiday, I couldn’t lose the thought of how bad I’d been. I could never confide in anyone. How could people continue to love me if they knew how rotten I really was? It was bad and wicked to be so selfish, to have felt such virulent anger against them. One should never feel such anger against people. It always oozes out somehow, malevolently, to do harm. Why can’t I, even now, free myself from the thought that it was me and all my unharnessed anger, which set off everything that was to follow?

  ‘Kati, Mikey,’ called Ouma, before we stepped off the stoep, the heat apparent even in the shaded early morning. A slight breeze whispered through the stoep from end to end, rumpling my short hair. In response to Ouma’s call, two bounding horse-like dogs appeared around the side of the house and threw themselves at us. Laughing, I was knocked from my feet and rolled and romped, licked and slavered on. Two years earlier these Ridgeback Boerbuls had been roly, rumpled, fleshy pups, named by Ouma in an uncharacteristically sentimental moment, after my brother and me. Walking beside them around the farm, I put my arms out nearly horizontally to keep a hand on each back.

  Ouma walked me first across the lawn, pointing out her flowers, striking in their effusive display. But, characteristically, Ouma’s garden was a practical spectacle, regimented from the smallest, most delicate blossoms in front, to the tallest towering majestically behind.

  Reaching the flower beds at the very bottom of the lawn, we turned towards the farmhouse, pausing before starting back. Over my head lurked that gentle giant, the wild fig tree, its powerful trunk astride, its thick branches all-encompassing, its shade generous.

  Only here, on this cultivated lawn, did the grass smoothly carpet the rolling earth. It spread before us frilled with flowers to the stoep, where I could see Oupa wisped with pipe smoke. As usual he sat on the wooden bankie, patched with sunlight. Inexplicably, he preferred it to the stuffed chairs lining the wall, which grew more enfoldingly sunken each year.