The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  Tucked into the crease at the foot of two small hills, the farmhouse was cosseted by the landscape. The nurturing, rounded hillocks behind the house rippled and undulated, fluffy with greenery, fired with aloes.

  To the side of the house lay the dusty yard where the generator stood. And that’s where we made for, trailing dogs, I dawdling and scampering through the pattering dust of the yard. Beyond it stood the chicken hoks, rows of long concrete structures barred, like cartoon jails, with thick vertical bars. The smell was as familiar as it was delicious – that smell of mealies and fowl.

  ‘Hau, it’s klein Missie,’ said William, removing his cap and holding it with both hands below his waist. ‘Môre, Miesies,’ he said to Ouma, ducking his head.

  ‘Môre, William. Yes, how do you think the klein Missie has grown?’

  ‘Hau, she is grown very big, Miesies,’ he said, flashing his quick grin. He stood quietly then, waiting for Ouma’s instructions for the day. He never picked me up and threw me in the air when she was watching. He and Ouma began discussing the chickens, but they spoke Afrikaans, with a speed and vocabulary which were quite beyond my three years of school. I wandered from hok to hok, sniffing the smells, watching the hens dart and peck frenetically, the combined kip-kips deafening close to. Walking down the line, I found smaller and smaller fowls, coming at last to the ‘teenagers’, those scrawny, long-necked, half-grown chickens, endearing in their ugliness.

  ‘We’re expecting some chicks one of these days,’ said Ouma, catching up with me. I know you love those. You can help unload them from their boxes when they come. Kom nou, run and ask Dora for a pot of that soup on the stove, and for the aspirins in the cupboard. William’s wife is sick again. Ag, that girl is not hardy. She is always sick.’

  I ran to the back of the house, my bare feet slapping and pluming dust, followed by the roistering dogs, their tongues panting for the large bowls of water in the kitchen courtyard. The skree-bang of the screen door propelled me from the smell of coal smoke, familiar and heavy in the courtyard, into the porridgy, soupy smells of the kitchen. It was uncomfortably hot waiting for Dora to ladle last night’s soup and warm it over the range, and I was happy to be out again, walking this time, so as not to spill the soup. The dogs disdained to follow, panting in the shade of the house.

  I wandered past the fig tree and through the orchard, filled with peach, apricot, plum and loquat trees, following the route I knew Ouma would have taken to the boys’ quarters. It was cool under the trees and I stopped at the edge of the shade to eat mulberries. Cramming the ripe fruit into my mouth, my hands and bare feet stained a dark red and I could see a spreading droplet – that was going to mean trouble later – crawling down my T-shirt on to the vest which habitually hung out over my shorts.

  When my elder brother had been younger and less scornful, he and Michael had once covered my face, neck and thighs with mulberry juice from this tree. Screaming ‘Help, she’s fallen’, they had carried me into the house, causing my mother to turn white and jerk upright from her chair, dropping the transistor radio which she’d been holding on her knee. My father beat them, if I recall, but I went unpunished. I think they had thought I was merely a prop to their cruelty.

  Beyond the orchard and the lines of squat citrus, the open land lay scattered with trees – some gums, some wild figs, and many whose names I never knew – and riotous patches of uncleared bush. To the side of one I could see, some distance from me, a small cluster of chattering, clicking women and yelling men, their voices muted by distance. I wondered, but thought they must be beating to death some unsuspecting snake which had been foolish enough to emerge.

  Passing a similar patch of bush, I carefully placed the enamel soup bowl on the ground to delve in my shorts pocket. Finding the greasy scraps of egg and toast I had sneaked off the breakfast table, I carefully placed them just beyond the edge of the undergrowth. I sat for a while in the dirt, hoping to tempt a tentative meerkat to emerge just long enough to drag it away. But when guilt overcame hope, I picked up the bowl again.

  The ground, aloe-speared, dropped away to the swimming place where I could see Michael bomb-dropping into the water, drenching Neil lying reading on the side. As I skirted the reservoir with its shushing line of gum trees, Neil, with the shiny grace of an otter, slipped into the water to duck Michael again and again, till he screamed for mercy.

  Beyond the water, on a rise, were the boys’ houses.

  Here, small children played around the cluster of varicoloured wattle-and-daub huts, smoke pouring from their chimneys. Doors were open to the trampled area of hard earth where women hung washing, scrubbed clothing in bowls, called, laughed and sang together. Babies cried and were shushed, jiggled on blanketed backs. In turn, their mothers would unpin the blankets and sit in the shade of the huts to thrust tired breasts into nuzzling mouths. Their knees grey with callus and dust, six children of ranging size played on the ground with a car they were fashioning from bent wire. A knobbly boy, his face shiny with the crackle of dried snot, pushed an old tyre through the clusters of women with squealing brake noises and uhr-uhrm uhr-uhr-uhrm sounds. Two other children squelched and quietly moulded patches of mud.

  The children stopped as I passed, silent and watchful.

  ‘Molo,’ I said to William’s small son, sitting on his doorstep. He was about my own age.

  ‘Molo, Miesies,’ he said and scrambled to join the other children. The children were always wary of us. If we approached them, they silently scattered and regrouped elsewhere, their large eyes watching. I suppose we never stayed long enough on the farm to get to know them; communication was impossible. We spoke no more than a few words of basic Xhosa, while they spoke a few words of Afrikaans and next to no English.

  It was dark in the hut after the blinding light reflecting off its pale-blue walls. I stood for a moment until I could make out the metal-legged kitchen table and the magazine pages which served as wallpaper. The floor, of packed mud, was newly swept and partly covered by a ragged remnant of red carpeting. The hut smelt of the woodsmoke which always clung to the clothes of the boys and their wives. On a kitchen chair beside the bed sat my Ouma, speaking in her quick, rough Afrikaans to William’s wife, Mary.

  ‘Ag, here she is. Thank you, Kati,’ said Ouma. ‘This will make you feel stronger, Mary. But you should really strengthen yourself up, girl. Too many children, that’s what it is. And the last one so weak it couldn’t survive!’ Ouma clucked.

  The room darkened and we turned to see a tall young man ducking his head to enter the small space.

  The light which had gently silvered Mary’s face and haloed Ouma’s pure white hair was shut off with the dark suddenness of his entry. With his back to the door he stood, dimly blocking out the warmth.

  Squatting on the dirt floor beside my Ouma’s chair, I squinted up at him, thinking that I knew him. But not this anger. I didn’t know this rage which billowed about him in his sombre silence.

  ‘Is dit jy, John?’ Ouma had half turned on her chair and raised her hand to shade her eyes. ‘Kom nou,’ she said in her impatient tone which I knew so well. ‘Staan waar ek jou kan sien. Is jy nou klaar met die skool?’

  So it was William’s son, the boy who had once lifted me down from the roof of the chicken hok, where I had climbed and promptly become smeared with snot and tears in contemplation of the height and the climb down. But he was unfamiliar now in his silent, seething pride.

  ‘I am back, but I am not yet finished with the school,’ he said in English, his gaze direct as he moved alongside the bed. A flicker of disquiet touched the nape of my neck as I sat unnoticed on the floor, picking at my bare toes. Unlike the boys, he didn’t duck his head to look down at his shuffling shoes or chuckle into his cupped hand. And he hadn’t called Ouma ‘Miesies’. I was anxious that he shouldn’t make Ouma angry. I had seldom seen her really furious, but I knew it was frightening. I knew it would go badly with hi
m if he got her all riled up.

  ‘Your father says you are finished now,’ she continued gruffly, in English. ‘You are nineteen – a man. You should be doing a man’s work. Here is your mother, sick again, with five children after you.’

  ‘I see that while I am at school I am called a man,’ he said, his mouth twisting but his cool eyes unchanged. ‘But if I work, I become a boy.’

  Quietly, his mother spoke for the first time. ‘Hai, sonalwam,’ and then I couldn’t understand what she said, but she frowned and shook her head.

  ‘Molo, Mama,’ he said, unsmiling, but with the slightest inclination of his head acknowledging her for the first time. ‘Uvuka njani?’ How are you feeling?

  ‘Andilalanga kakuhle.’ Not much better.

  ‘Well, you can see very well your mother needs you at home now,’ continued Ouma, in her rough but not unkind voice. ‘What have you completed now – Standard Six?’

  Unanswered, she continued. ‘For what do you want more? It can only make you unsatisfied and angry with life, as I see you are becoming. You should speak to the new Master on the next farm. I spoke to him about you and he said he can always use another good boy.’

  I was watching his hands, hooked loosely on the top of his pants just above me. As she spoke they clutched convulsively at his belt. He freed them and crossed his arms over his chest.

  ‘Hau, Miesies.’ Using the term for the first time, he shook his head. ‘I am not made for that kind of work.’

  ‘Magtig, what now? You think you are too good for farm work – the work your father and your grandfather did before you? Or are you not man enough to get down to some hard work?’

  ‘I am man enough for work,’ he said, his eyes glaring. ‘But am I to work for someone like the new Master, who will beat me like he has beaten Albert’s son?’ His fists clenched and he dropped them to his sides, his mouth a thin tight line.

  ‘Albert’s son was beaten?’ Ouma asked him. I think only I, sitting with my bent head level with her lap, had noticed her almost imperceptible start. ‘What did he do to anger the Master so much?’

  ‘The new Master, he say Albert’s son look at the ou Miesies in a bad way. And he say he show no respect. He is not a good Master, that one you have given your boys to.’

  ‘I am sorry for Albert’s son,’ said Ouma quietly. ‘But new Masters sometimes have new ways. I cannot interfere with his discipline. He is now their Master. But I am sure he would never beat them for nothing. If you work hard for him and you show him respect, he will treat you well. He would never mos hit for nothing.’

  I, trying to remain unnoticed by Ouma’s chair, was still anxiously picking at the hard skin on the yellowed soles of my feet, stealing glances up at the two of them. I heard John give a dry gasp, or perhaps he was taking a deep breath after holding it in anger. But as my anxious eyes grasped for his face, wanting understanding, wishing for reassurance, his eyes caught and held mine. But there was nothing in them but desolation.

  ‘You were wrong to give your slave boys to that bad Master.’ The words burst between his tight lips. He wasn’t looking at Ouma now; he was holding me, my unwilling eyes caught by his agonised gaze.

  ‘Do not dare question me or my actions, John, or things will go badly with you.’ Her voice was still quiet, but her coal eyes flared. When I was older and could recall the look and the sound of her anger, I thought that it was then that she most showed, in those glowing dark eyes and taut, high-cheeked face, the French peasant blood of her forebears.

  ‘My boys have never been slaves, and you know as much. Your father has worked here for me loyally since he was a young boy and that is the only reason I will even listen to your nonsense. My people are treated fairly and well, you can ask your own parents. But I had no choice in this. We are old now, too old to run that whole farm. Where else were those people to go? I thank God he agreed to take them. You know their families have lived on this farm for generations.’

  Without a greeting for me, or a word for Ouma or his mother, he turned abruptly and, stooping, left the hut.

  Ouma sighed in the bitter silence he had left. ‘Miesies,’ said Mary, her eyes glistening with anxiety. ‘He is a good boy really, Miesies. He just wants too much.’

  ‘Mmm. Sometimes, Mary, it is dangerous to have a boy who wants too much. Life is hard for all of us … Magtig, kind,’ she said, noticing me crouched by her side, clutching my legs to my chest. ‘Are you still here? Kom nou, Petrus’s wife tells me some kittens were born in her hut.’

  Stretching her hands to her back, she rose from the stiff chair and moved towards the door.

  ‘Drink that soup now, Mary, and make yourself strong for the sake of all your children.’

  I clutched for Ouma’s hand as the blast of sunlight exploded in our squinted eyes.

  We stood a moment in the heat before making for the open door of another hut.

  A few of the women – about four, I think – left their bowls of washing water and their mealie-meal to follow us into Petrus’s hut. Petrus’s wife greeted Ouma with a brief bob and smiled as she led me to the small pile of rags under her table. A thin tabby cat with wary eyes lay suckling four squirming, closed-eyed kittens – two of them pure white.

  ‘It’s your Snowball’s father, you know. He’s the father of all these cats. I hope you see him while you’re here. But he’s wild, he seldom comes near the house. Ag, but he’s a menace,’ said Ouma with a small chuckle, ‘the way he makes all these new kittens for us to deal with.’

  ‘Oh, how I wish I could suck … I mean hold one,’ I said. But the correction of my tangled thoughts was drowned by the spontaneous convulsions of mirth from the women. They laughed, bending double and clapping their rough hands together. Their merriment seemed to go on and on as my face burned and I tried to be heard above them.

  ‘I meant “hold”,’ I said to Ouma, my eyes filling with tears now at the humiliation, at the thought that they must all think me a baby still.

  ‘I know, kind,’ she said, her arms folded. She seldom touched those she loved. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can’t hold these, they are too young. Tomorrow we will search for the bigger kittens I saw near the pigsty. There is another white one there like your Snowball.’

  As we turned to leave, the women parted, still rippling and bending with graceful mirth, like the chuckling reeds near the dam when the wind blew. My face was hot and I smeared my dusty hand across my running nose. I didn’t look up at them as we were hit by the full force of the sun.

  Ouma walked purposefully along the deeply-sluited farm road, rutted like a dry river bed from the rains which came with such power and such force – when they came at all – to the dusty ground.

  ‘Tomorrow the family will come for tea,’ she said as I trotted and ran beside her. ‘Uncle Frans is bringing us a Christmas tree. I think you will decorate it, like you did last year.’

  My heart lightened and I smiled up at her. I suddenly remembered what I had forgotten in coming to the farm, and all that had happened since. We had begun the shiveringly exciting countdown to Christmas – counted out each day in small rituals and tasks like wrapping the presents I had bought, with my pocket money, and opening the small, glittering windows on my Advent calendar each morning as I awoke. All the unchanging family ways, held to year after year in the preparation for Christmas, guarded the safety of my world.

  I smelt and heard the pigs for some way before we reached the pigsty. Laughing at their disgruntled noises, I ran ahead and climbed the sticky creosoted planks of their enclosure.

  ‘Where are the little ones, Ouma? The ones that were small last time?’

  ‘Why, those ones have gone to the market already,’ she said, glancing at me in surprise as she joined me at the fence. And as she saw my face: ‘But old Nellie is pregnant again. She’ll have her litter any day now. I’ll call you when they’ve been born.’


  ‘No thanks, Ouma.’ I climbed down from the fence and turned away, plunging my toes savagely into the soft earth. ‘I don’t want to see them.’

  ‘Magtig, you are a funny pieperige child,’ I heard her exasperated voice say behind me.

  1989 … 22nd October

  The smell of vomit slowly winces into my consciousness just before the pain pounds into my tentatively shifting head. Oh Jesus Christ, not again!

  I squint through my eyelashes to see Joe sliding off his window-side of the bed, his face set whitely in disgust. He only uses that expression on me; I’ve never seen him aim it at anyone else. By the quality of the light flinching its way through my eyelashes, I judge it to be still early. And it’s Sunday; no need for him to get up except to get out of range of me.

  He moves quietly, for such a large man, into the bathroom and dresses without re-emerging. I suppose he is as anxious as I to keep up the pretence that I am still asleep. Tender from a knotted, dream-filled sleep, like a cringing snail, I cannot bear to start a conversation until I am strongly battened down for the day, my armour in place.

  I keep my eyes closed – the light is less painful that way – as I stop blocking my thoughts and allow the slow tendrils of last night to slime their way into my mind.

  ‘So, when do you think FW’s going to release Mandela?’ That was the ‘bright young man’ – ex-student lefty who works for Anglo now and wears pink shirts. He had been talking when we entered the room, late again. A largish child had opened the door to us and then raced away, his flannel gown flapping. Listening to Pink Shirt, our host had waved to us silently and gestured to the couch, while Dressed-all-in-Black had leant over Joe’s lap to pass us the bottle of Chardonnay.

  ‘Hi, you guys.’ That was Mark, our host, a lawyer friend of Joe’s, as Pink Shirt finished talking. The other people in the room smiled or said howzit or – this was Dressed-all-in-Black – lifted a languid arm. No one bothered to introduce me.