"No! I don't have time for bloody lame excuses today!" My mother’s voice lashes across the frost-covered lawn.
Right away I stop chipping the ice out of the dogs' food bowls and peek around the corner of the doghouse. At the same time our two German Shepherds charge, barking at a small, blanket-wrapped figure standing at the kitchen door. It is Sophie, the youngest daughter of our washerwoman, Sanna.
"Heel, Bruno! Heel, Rex!" I shout, fling a bowl at them and run to grab them before they can get to her.
I get a grip on their collars, dig my boot heels into the slippery grass, and pull them back to the doghouse.
Sophie mutters something that I can’t hear.
"What is it now?” The intolerance of earlier this morning is still in my mother’s voice.
Morning had begun with my mother angrily stoking the coal stove, making coffee and cooking the dogs' porridge herself because Sanna didn't show up for work.
My mother looms like a dominee in her navy robe over Sophie at our backdoor alcove. Sophie is barefoot on this bitterly cold morning and she shifts from one foot on to the other.
"How is it that she is always sick on a Monday morning when she has to come and do the wash? She's babalas. That's what you people do, drink all weekend long, that beer you brew. Then when Monday comes all of you are babalas and can't work. Yes, well, tell your mother that I, unfortunately, am not that privileged. I cannot send someone to say I am sick. I have to work, sick or not, so I can pay your mother."
I feel sorry for Sophie; she doesn't know my mother or how my mother can get when she flies off the handle.
"Yes, tell your mother she is a lucky woman!" My mother babbles on, though she knows Sophie doesn’t understand much English. My mother begins to close the back door, but then throws it wider.
"And tell her there is no one here who will do her work. The washing will wait for her!" Then my mother bends down, snatches the doormat by her fur-trimmed bedroom slippers and shakes it vigorously next to Sophie. Sophie steps back and recoils deeper into her blanket.
"And you tell her it will do her good to stop smoking that garbage she rolls. No wonder she looks like a corpse!" In one swift movement my mother throws the doormat down and slams the door. Sophie about-faces, scrunches her toes up, and scurries on her heels across the frost. The dogs dart at her again. “Heel! Rex! Bruno heel!” She shrieks and freezes in her tracks. Her face, usually coffee brown, turns milk white. She holds an end of the blanket in front of her as if it will protect her from the dogs. My father says there's nothing that scares blacks more than a large dog. The dogs strain in their collars, but I hold them tightly. Sophie's brown eyes grow wider and wider.
"Dumela," I greet her in her language and smile big to show her I’m not angry with her. She does not move; tears run down her cheeks.
"It's okay, Sophie, I won't let them bite you. You can go ... eh, hamba ... eh, hamba kahle ... walk safely." At last her feet detach themselves from where she stood stuck to the frozen ground and she darts to the road.
I watch her disappear behind the hawthorn hedge.
Sanna started working for us when I could barely pull myself up on the side of our bathtub. Every Monday morning she came walking up the dirt road from the black township, wearing her brightly coloured Basotho blanket around her shoulders and her orange-and-black headscarf. The stomping of her laceless men's shoes sounded her arrival as she turned off the dirt road on to the cement courtyard at our gate.
She always greeted me with "Dumela, clever face, slim gesig" when I opened the back door for her.
Sanna entered our kitchen, bringing with her the scents of thatch grass and a coal fire. After trading her blanket for her apron she cooked mealie porridge for the dogs. Though cooking our breakfast was Cook's job, cooking the dog food on Mondays was Sanna's. Sanna sat on a paraffin crate at the back door drinking her coffee out of a tin mug while she waited for the mealie porridge to be done. When it was cooked she dished up for the dogs and saved the left-over mealie porridge for her own lunch.
It took her all Monday to do our laundry. Everything went under her hands on the washboard. The sheets, pyjamas, socks, shirts, table-cloths, serviettes - everything. She knelt over our bathtub and rubbed the washing between her brown hands. After the washing had dried on the outside line she prepared it for the next day’s ironing.
Cook fed us leftovers in the dining room on Tuesdays since Sanna occupied the whole kitchen with the ironing. She spread the ironing blanket over the kitchen table while her irons heated on the coal stove. On the table in the breakfast nook stood bowls with starch for the table linens and my father’s shirt collars. On the pantry door hung satin-covered hangers waiting for our dresses to be ironed.
One day Sanna said to me, "My girl Sophie, she's like you, just so, so high.” She turned her palm up, fingers bent to demonstrate with the back of her hand the height of her youngest. My mother said that's the gesture the natives make to show the age of their children, not in years but in height. She said they hold the palm up because turning the palm down, they believe, might stunt the growth of the child. My mother said Sophie must be about my age, nine or so.
Another time Sanna, with her eyes shining like two sunlit marbles, said to me, "My Sophie, she is so smart! She is going to school next year there by the nuns at the stone church in the township."
My mother sees me entering the kitchen door.
"Out, Nella, out with those dirty boots," she says and wipes a strand of sweaty hair from her forehead and pins it on the side of her face.
I take my boots off at the back door and hear my father come into the kitchen.
"Who was here?" he asks.
"Sanna is sick again. That was her daughter, Sophie," says my mother.
"Poor thing."
"Not ‘poor thing’! You know yourself that there is always an ailment on a Monday morning when there is work to be done. And now that Cook has gone to her niece's funeral, all the kitchen work is on my hands. You know Emily cleans inside, but is worthless around cooking. If it's not a funeral to keep them from working, then there's always a sickness. But I know what it is with Sanna. She's babalas, of course. It's from that brew they drink. Someone said the other day that those natives even mix lighter fluid and human blood into the mess they drink. On top of everything she coughs so around Nella, I don’t like it. When I tell her to stop smoking, she looks at me as if she doesn't understand me. She's a sly one, that Sanna. I've had just about enough of this. I'm going to pay her off the next time she comes. I’ll look for someone more dependable.
"Did you give Sophie something to eat?"
"Look, Dadda, if you think I have time to feed every skorrie-morrie that comes to my kitchen door, you're mistaken, my dear. If you want to feed them, do it yourself."
"You could have given her something warm ... What about some porridge, Deborah? That's what Sanna eats when she's here anyway. Sometimes I don’t understand you. My God, think for a minute! That child left her house when it was still pitch dark and she walked here in the freezing morning to tell you her mother cannot come to work, and you can't give ..."
"Please, please," my mother interrupts him, "not your charity speech again. Dadda, dish the oatmeal up for you and Nella. There’s eggs and wors in the oven also. I won't have time to eat."
She scurries from the sink to the stove and hands my father the plates. I sit across the table from my father in the breakfast nook and try to eat my oatmeal. We don't talk. The sun streaks through the window over my father's blond hair and across his shoulders. He's wearing his khaki work jacket over a blue sweater. My mother always tells my father what to wear. She says he's the boss horse breeder in our area, and he's got to look like one, even when he's doing heavy “vuil werk” with the horses. My mother slams pots and pans around. I put a tiny glob of butter in the middle of my oatmeal and watch it melt into a yellow eye looking at me. I can’t eat. I sprinkle sugar and cinnamon over my oatmeal. It smells like my grandma's cookies, but I still can't eat it.
"Nella, you sit there staring. Are you through eating?” asks my mother.
"Ja, Ma."
"But you haven't taken one bite, sweetheart," says my father. "Eat, my child, come on, just a few bites. How about a little piece of wors? You can't think on an empty stomach." He looks at me with his chocolate pudding eyes. I know he sees I'm sad.
"Don’t worry love,” he says and squeezes my hand.
I can't swallow. There are tears, lots of tears stopping up my throat.
"If you don’t want to eat, take your plate to the sink and go finish up in your room," says my mother. "I don't want to come in there and find that you have left your bed unmade. Did you feed the dogs?" She doesn't wait for me to answer and adds, "And hurry, you’re going to be late. Dadda, when you go to the farm today, ask Masilo if two of his daughters can come and help on Friday and Saturday. We've got those horse breeders here to wine and dine this weekend, and there's the silver that has to be polished, and the floors and furniture need waxing, Emily can’t do it all. Betty said she would help me with the flower arrangements. But that's a laugh. Where will I get flowers here at the end of winter? The shop will be busy too, with the horsey ladies looking for new outfits to wear at the horse show this weekend. Lord, Lord, and I have only two hands."
My mother's words boil and burble in the kitchen while I finish in my bedroom. I make my bed, brush my teeth and put on my school uniform. My cat is sleeping in a patch of winter sun on the window sill. I put my face in her fur and feel her purr. Next to my cat, I like Sanna and my dad the best in our house; and the dogs of course.
"I'm going to burn the grazing pasture below the township this evening, just leave my food in the warming oven,” my father says.
His work boots crunch across the kitchen floor; he slams the backdoor. Outside I hear him call the dogs to take them to the farm with him while my mother still talks.
"I don't know why I have to do all the work. I stand on my two feet all day in the shop and when I am home I have to cook and clean and wash. I don't care how high the dirty laundry bundle gets. For my part it can get as tall as Mount Ararat, but wash it Sanna will. And afterwards, I will give her her pay, and she can bugger off.”
I don't want to hear any more. I run past my mother and call, over my shoulder, "Bye." Like my father, I slam the backdoor. I slam it to stifle my mother’s anger that is like a pot of boiling porridge bubbling and sputtering and burning where it splats.
I walk to school with my book bag over my shoulder and my hands inside my school blazer pockets.
Sophie must be cold and hungry where she is now walking barefoot down the dirt road. My father said I should eat because I cannot think on an empty stomach … but what about Sophie? Something aches deep inside of me when I think of her.
Our town is sandwiched between large horse, dairy and mealie farms on the side of the train station where the sun comes up, and on the other side where the sun goes down is the black township. Our town, Botharus, has no traffic lights and no paved roads. The main dirt road stretches from one end of our small town to the other. My mother’s dress shop, Deborah’s Modes, sits on this road in the middle of town with the school and most of the shops, the post office and the magistrate’s court. The back windows of my classroom look out on the train station and the coal heap where the coal peddlers come to buy coal. When the Bloemfontein train goes past, our classroom stinks of the coal smoke.
Our house with the Dutch gables is behind a tall hawthorn hedge on the side of the courtyard that separates my mother's clothing store from our house.
I try to forget Sophie and shift my thinking to my father. By now he is on his way to our farm with the dogs in the back of the bakkie. I imagine him at the stables with the new foals. This afternoon he'll load wet burlap sacks and large drums filled with water on the bakkie. He and Masilo will sit inside the cab, and two or three of the other farm workers will ride with the dogs in the back. They'll drive to the pasture near the black township, where they'll light the dead winter grass and follow the fire with the damp burlap sacks to make sure it doesn't jump the road.
They will burn the old veld to make way for new grass in the spring. The green of the first new grass of the burnt veld is my favourite colour green.
I hear the children on the playground and before I know it I’m thinking of Sophie again. I wonder if there’s a playground at the nuns’ place where Sophie goes to school. I think of Sanna who is sick. Sanna, who always has time to play with me when she comes to do the wash. This afternoon when I get home from school she won't be in the bathroom rinsing our sheets. She always rinsed the whites in blue colour rinse. The blue water reminded me of the ocean. A while ago Sanna smiled at me over the blue rinse water and said, "Ah, ah, ah, Sophie is so smart, she can count now by English. One day, Sophie will be a teacher."
After she’d finished washing, she hung everything on the outside line in the sun. One time, while she was outside hanging the wash, I went into the bathroom, took my clothes off and jumped into the tub with the blue water. I pretended I was at the beach swimming in the ocean. Sanna had never seen the ocean. She didn't believe me when I told her about the water that moves up and down. I insisted, "It’s true, Sanna, I tell you, the water comes up like this." I made waves in the tub and said, "These are like the baby waves but at the ocean they are maningi big. Waves come up high like the hills over there."
She looked at me, shook her head and said, "How the water can come so high? Ha ha ha, you are making me the story."
"No,” I said, “it’s not a story, it's true. And you see only this water all around you. You can't see any land or houses or cows or goats or cornfields; it's all just water."
"Everywhere water?"
"Everywhere."
"How come that water does not come here to help us when the mealies are dry and the cows and the sheep do not have the food to eat and the dry is everywhere? How come that water does not come here to help us?"
"I don't know." I had never thought of that.
One time I brought Sanna sea water in a bottle. "This is the water that goes up and down like the hill and is everywhere … everywhere you cannot see the end of this water," I said, waving my arms, trying to show her how far and wide the ocean is. That was the first bottle of sea water with bits of shell and sand in it I gave her. From then on she expected me to return from the beach with sea water for her.
"In there? You put that water inside the bottle?" She looked suspiciously at the water. "Ha, but you said that water was blue like the rinse blue.”
"When all that water is together it is, but the blue doesn't come into the bottle with the water. The blue colour is like the magic. Only the shells and the sand come in," I explained to her, but more to myself. I, too, didn't understand why the water didn't stay as blue as it looked from the top of the mountain.
"I think this water is muti water,” Sanna declared, and from that day on she took the sea water like medicine and swore to Cook that sea water healed better than old Dr Morris's pills.
I walk through the school gate by the winter-dry apricot tree and hear the school bell ring. Sophie will be late for school. I wonder if the nuns will punish her. Sanna says Sophie is smart. But Sanna doesn't know that to be nine years old and still in the first grade isn't very smart. We've trained our animals. Our dogs are trained to herd the sheep and our horses are trained to jump and canter. My mother rides our horses and has won many silver cups for dressage. If the dogs and horses can learn, then I know Sophie can learn, too. What if Sophie could come to school with me? But the blacks and the whites cannot go to school together, it's the law, I know that. Even if she could come, she doesn’t have shoes or a school uniform.
Last summer vacation before we left for the beach Sanna called me to the back stoop. "Come, Clever Face, I brought Sophie. Come see my Sophie. You ask her to count for you. Now she can count, you hear, she can count very good by English ... you ask her," Sanna said proudly.
Sophie wore her summer wrap and a head scarf like Sanna’s. She hung her head and counted for me and my mother to 20. I smiled at her to show her she counted well and not to be scared to be at a white man's house.
“Come, come there’s no time for games. Let them go eat their lunch. There’s work to be done,” said my mother.
“I want to sit with them.”
“Inside, Nella,” said my mother.
In a straw basket on the dining room table were peaches and apricots from our garden. I picked two good peaches and crept to the back stoop. They sat hunched over on the paraffin crate, with their tin plates in their laps, eating their mealie meal porridge with our old throw-away spoons. We keep their plates and spoons separate under the sink. My mother doesn’t allow the blacks to eat or drink out of our dishes. Sanna had poured the leftover gravy from our lunch leg of lamb on their porridge. My mother said the black people don't care for vegetables and desserts; they prefer their own kind of food, which is mealie meal porridge.
After they had finished eating that day, I gave them each a peach. I couldn't remember what my mother said about fruit, whether the blacks liked fruit or not, but I could see that Sophie had never eaten a peach. She wiped and wiped at the fuzz on it and looked at it. She touched the skin with her tongue and the tips of her front teeth, but she didn't bite into it. She took both peaches and tied them in a cloth. I think she must have taken them home for Sanna's other children.
I feel lonely without Sanna when I get home after school. I search through all our closets to see if there isn’t perhaps a bottle of sea water left somewhere, but there's none. I go to the shop to ask my mother if she knows where there might be sea water, but she's busy helping two ladies pick out dresses and hats for the horse show on Saturday. She can't talk to me. My father is at the farm, so I can't ask him either.
I change from my school uniform into my old clothes. I button my thick brown sweater over my flannel shirt and put on my woollen cap. I fill a clean glass bottle with tap water. I pour salt in it and push small shells from my shell collection through the neck of the bottle. Though its pretend sea water, it tastes real. Sanna will believe it's muti water, and she will drink it and get better quickly. I don't want the bundles of dirty clothes to get as high as Mount Ararat like my mother said this morning. I've seen Sanna's raw hands after she's done a large load. I don't want to see her mouth twitch with pain.
I sneak down the cement path between the bare rose bushes. I get through the courtyard gate without anyone noticing me. I’m taking the muti water to Sanna.
The afternoon smells of donkey dung. I start down the dirt road with the train station at my back towards the creek. Here and there chunks of coal have fallen from the loaded coal peddlers’ donkey carts on their way to the township. I follow the large black crumbs like Hansel and Gretel, past the Asterlands’ yard with the bare peach and apricot trees. After Mr Asterland's yard is Mr Carvados's vegetable shop. There's a pile of limp cabbages in the window. Against the dusty wall on the verandah are sacks of oranges and potatoes. We don't buy our vegetables from Mr Carvados, because he's Greek. My mother says we must support our own people. That's why we don't buy from the Indians either.
I turn the corner and walk past the Indian shop. I see my long-legged reflection dimly in the grimy window, behind which are bolts of fabric. My mother says it’s mostly cheap stuff, but Mr Patat raises the price and sells it to the blacks. Mr Patat is sitting warming his slippered feet by a paraffin heater near the door. He sees me and smiles a golden-toothed smile. I nod. He looks at the bottle in my hand. I wish I could tell him about the medicine water that I had mixed to make Sanna better. But I'm not supposed to talk to him.
I walk past the Apostolic Church and switch the bottle to my other hand. It's silent in the churchyard, only the wind rustling through dead leaves piled against the gate pillars.
The road is full of potholes the closer I get to the bridge over the creek. I slip from a hardened dirt ridge and just before I fall into a hole I stop my fall with my free hand. Pinpricks of blood break out on the heel of my hand; I had forgotten my gloves. I lick the blood off and blow on my stinging hand. Not a soul is anywhere, not a dog barking.
Slowly I cross over the bridge. Shadows of the bare poplar trees stretch long over the animal tracks in the dry creek bed. The sun glistens on broken glass and throws shadows of a rusting car part against the opposite bank. I leave a row of silent houses behind me. I hug the bottle against my sweater.
The winter wind has picked up and rustles around in the dead grass and the glass bottle feels icy in my hand. My boots are covered in red dust.
I hurry on. Soon I'm so winded I can't breathe. There's a stitch in my side. I put the bottle down on a patch of dry grass and hold my arms above my head. The stitch slowly leaves me. I clap my hands to get them warm. I pick up the cold bottle again and put it under my sweater, hugging it against my chest. Now I’m walking slowly like my grandpa when he brings a newborn lamb in his arms for me to see. The setting sun is already touching the roofs of the Faurie family's houses. Their houses are strung together like beads on the township side of the creek. They all live there together, the grandmas and grandpas, the mothers, fathers, and children, but no one is outside. From their houses down to the creek is a ploughed patch of land waiting for the spring planting of corn and watermelons.
There are four more houses on the left side of the road. There are the Van Vuurens, the Blooms, the ... I can't remember who lives there … and then there is the last house. Rachel and Anna Peterson live here. I wish one of the Petersons would come out and see me. Then I'd say hello in my friendliest voice and they'd say, "Why don't you come inside, Nella?" Then I would go in and warm my hands by their cooking stove.
The smell of fried onions and tomatoes swirls in the wind. My stomach grumbles, and my legs are tired. Maybe I should go and knock at their door.
I almost let go of the bottle when their bulldog suddenly charges at me from behind their house.
"Voetsek!” I hiss. Its teeth flash in the late sunlight. My heart is drumming in my ears. I remember I should stand still. Then I see the dog is at the end of its chain and can't get to me.
I'm like Sophie earlier today, frozen with fear.
The dog growls at me at the end of its chain. My father says if that kind of dog with the scrunched up nose sinks its teeth into you, it never lets go. I know why they have such a dog. Their house is the nearest to the black township; that kind of dog will scare the blacks away.
I put one foot in front of the other and gradually move away from the dog. Rex and Bruno get wild if someone moves quickly. I don't want the Peterson dog to break his chain and sink his never-let-go teeth into me. Teeth going in like that must feel like nails hammered into flesh. Like the nails hammered through Jesus' hands and feet in the picture in my children's Bible. I clutch Sanna’s muti water more tightly and struggle on along the rutted road. Dust whirls around my feet. The wind bites at my fingers and my watering nose.
"Haahno haa!" a voice calls behind me.
I glance over my shoulder. A man on a donkey cart loaded with coal is coming down the road. He sits cloaked in a burlap sack on the cart seat while the donkey plods obediently forward.
"Dumela, ntombazana."
He reins the donkey in and moves the sack from where it was covering his toothless mouth to speak to me. His gums must be cold like the tip of my nose.
"Dumela, wena," I greet him back.
"The ntombazana must not walk here alone. Where is the ntombazana going?"
“There.” I point to the township, where the sun is sliding into the smoke of the township’s cooking fires far, far ahead of us.
"Hau batu, the ntombazana must go home, the ntombazana must not be here. The dark is coming now-now."
He pulls the sack back over his nose and mouth, shakes the reins, and the donkey slowly walks on. "Sama hantle, go carefully.”
I wave. "Ah hai," he mumbles from behind the sack, turning to look at me and pointing his whip back in the direction of our town, urging me to turn back.
Tonight he will sell his coal. I imagine Sanna will send Sophie to buy a bucket of coal for their bowla.
"We take the five-gallon paraffin drum, then we make holes all around the sides and put the coal inside and light the coal with the matches. The bowla burns all the time inside of the house in winter, and we sleep on our sleeping mats around it. The children, they get so nice and warm," Sanna had said.
"Very dangerous thing, Nella,” my mother had explained when I told her that Sanna did not have a heater. "It just shows you, these blacks have no sense. I've heard of black children who have knocked the bowla over and burned up with their house. Now tell me, who would put such a dangerous thing in the middle of a house, and when it burns in a closed up room, the coal gas suffocates the people inside."
Two black men on bicycles pass and greet me. A group of black women come walking by on the opposite side of the road, as far as they can get from the Petersons’ barking dog. They're wrapped in their blankets and headscarves and bend into the wind. Soon they are far ahead of me up the road. I force my sore legs and cold feet forward. The township doesn't seem to be getting any nearer. Against the last purple ribbons of the sunset I see a cross; that is the stone church and nuns’ convent where Sophie goes to school, I think.
On both sides of the road is open veld stretching all the way to the hills on the horizon. Somewhere here is our summer grazing pasture for our horses and cattle.
I don't know where Sanna lives. "Where lives Sanna, the musadi who works at the horse woman's house?" I'll ask when I get to the township. It wouldn't do to say “the woman with the dress shop”, because my mother does not allow blacks to come in and try on the dresses that are for the white women only – the doctor's wife, the magistrate's wife, and the teachers. Only they can leave their sweat on the dresses; the black women may not leave their sweat on my mother's brand new shop clothes. My mother said her clothes would stink, and they would hang there like rotten fruit on a tree, because no one would want them. Then my mother's customers would drive or go by train to Bloemfontein and buy there. And my mother would have to close Deborah’s Modes.
Sanna has never told me her last name. She has never talked about her husband, the way my mother never talks about my father.
I will find Sanna and give the muti water to her. We will sit around their bowla and get warm. I will tell them about the sound of the sea and the waves so high, so high like the hills. Sanna will laugh and say, "Ha, you make the story. Why, if that water can come so high, it does not come here to help us."
More workers from our white-by-night town are coming home. They pass me, some on foot and some on bicycles, silent and tired. They pay no attention to me. Black people are not allowed in our town after dark. If the police catch them they are beaten and put into jail.
The wind blows stronger and carries scents of rubbish heaps and smoke toward me. Far off I hear township dogs barking, voices, something clanging and the mooing of a cow. Night creatures are beginning to chirp and the stars are coming out.
I should have asked the coal peddler to give me a ride into the township. I’m so tired I want to cry. How could Sophie walk so far both ways? I wonder and look for somewhere to sit. Next to the road I see a shape, a rock dark against the bleak winter grass. I turn off the road and walk carefully towards it. Near it I stop to be sure it's safe to go closer, but it’s not a rock. It's a hollowed-out anthill. Sanna has told me that children trap rabbits and cook them in hollowed-out anthills. Though its nearly dark now, I can make out the black stains on the inside where someone had made a fire just like Sanna said.
I step into the hollow place. It's big enough for me to sit down in. The earthen wall shelters me from the wind. I roll over and lie down. I’ll go to Sanna after I’ve rested for a bit. I close my eyes.
The curved wall holds me in its arms, it holds me the way Sanna has held me. My sweater will be black from the soot in here, but Sanna won't scold me. She will wash it clean.
I must have dozed off. Suddenly I hear shouts, smell smoke, orange light flickers over me. I hear crackling, feet running, dogs barking. I jump up. The veld is on fire. I must do something! Sanna will be happy if I stop the fire with her muti water. I'll help the people with the muti water. She will like that.
I struggle to unscrew the slick bottle top. The bottle slips out of my hands I fight to grab it, but it falls and breaks on the gravelly ground. The water hisses and steams and cooks in the flames. The fire burns on. It burns and burns. It burns the pasture. It burns outside and from within.
The post Muti water appeared first on LitNet.