When the Ground Is Hard Page 17

  My heartbeat drums so loud in my ears that it might actually send me deaf. I have never, ever been talked to with such loathing and contempt. My skin crawls, and I want to spit and scream and run, to hide my face from the ugliness of Bosman’s words. This filthy man actually thinks that he knows me.

  “Come.” Lottie grabs my hand and squeezes tight. “We have to fetch Darnell.”

  “He . . .”

  “I heard him.” Lottie pulls me back from Bosman and the red pickup truck with its load of sullen white boys. The girl stays crouched between her brothers and hums a broken tune, which softens the sharp feeling of hatred that I have toward her father and the way things are.

  I will leave this farm.

  But the girl, she has to stay.

  * * *

  • • •

  The men shuffle-step Darnell across the open field, with Lottie and me walking beside them like pallbearers at a country funeral, our straight-backed bodies and our silence adding dignity to an undignified parade. We pass the red pickup, and the girl starts to cry with body-shaking sobs. The dead body, now stiff-limbed and unnatural, scares her.

  Bosman snaps, “Shut her up before I do.”

  The girl continues to wail, and I wish she’d button it. She has to swallow her tears and suffer in silence, because otherwise, sure as Jesus rose from the dead, she’ll get the stick when she gets home.

  The youngest and skinniest of the boys reaches out and pats the girl on the back. He murmurs soft words, and I’m surprised by the tender gesture and relieved when the girl drops her cries to a hoarse whisper.

  We gain a small, hard-won distance from Bosman and his family. Mr. Moses slows his step and says, “Watch yourself, Mr. Vincent. There’s a trench right here.”

  A zigzag scar cuts the length of the field, deep in some parts and wide and shallow in others. Erosion. The land is too exhausted to grow crops, and I bet food is scarce in the Bosman house. No wonder his children are scrawny.

  “Hear that?” Lottie stops and cocks her head to one side.

  “I hear it.” I shade my eyes to block the slanting sunlight and pick out a white speck on the horizon. The school pickup. Mrs. Vincent, who usually drives at ten miles an hour, races across the rough ground at high speed to close the gap with us.

  “Thank you, Lord.” Mr. Vincent’s faith is instantly renewed.

  “Hallelujah,” Mr. Moses adds.

  They lay Darnell on the ground and wait to be rescued.

  Bosman’s work boots crunch the grass as he strides over to us. We are still on his land, and he wants us off it, no matter what.

  Lottie walks out to meet him, with her chin raised. She stands directly in his path, and no mixed-race girl in her right mind stares openly at an angry white man with a gun the way she is right now. We are supposed to look at the ground. We play dumb. We try to disappear. That’s the way we survive.

  Instead of becoming invisible, Lottie pins Bosman with a cool stare. I run to her.

  “Come . . .” I tug her skirt to warn her to behave, but she shakes me off. She’s Swazi. She knows the penalty for daring to challenge a white man, but she does it anyway. Lottie is insane. She wants Bosman to know that she finds him loathsome.

  “What you looking at, coon?” Bosman demands in Afrikaans.

  “You,” she says in a loud, clear voice: another challenge.

  Bosman spits on the ground, and the girl in the truck stops crying. She huddles close to her brother, her muscles tense in the strained silence that must always come before her father loses his temper. I step closer to Lottie, and freeze when Bosman’s fingers grip the butt of his rifle. I don’t move. I’m scared of dying before my life has properly started, but I stick by Lottie’s side.

  “Leave,” Bosman says. “Get off my land.”

  “We will.” Lottie stands her ground while Gordon Number One and Barnabas Phillips help the grown men roll Darnell onto a blanket and lift him onto the back of the school truck. The boys climb on board, and Mr. Vincent slams the back shut with a loud bang.

  The sound starts Bosman’s daughter off again, and this time, her brother’s soothing words go unheard. She throws her arms over the side of the tray and clutches at the air with her fingers, trying to hold on to something invisible.

  The girl’s face is exposed for the first time; she’s around fourteen, with slanted eyes and flat facial features that are so like Darnell’s that I take a sharp breath of wonder. The girl is white and Darnell is mixed-race, but they are the same. They are both simpleminded. The girl’s wild, clutching fingers suddenly make sense. She’s reaching out to Darnell, trying to hold on to him by magic.

  A bright lightning bolt of what Lottie would call “divine intuition” hits me. Bosman’s daughter and Darnell knew each other. They were friends.

  “Get,” Bosman says in a tone reserved for farm dogs. “Get off my land.”

  “Gladly,” Lottie says, and Bosman vibrates with rage at being looked down at, and not for the first time, I’m sure. Mother says that poor white people are dangerous because only a thin layer of skin makes them kings of the land, but it’s not enough to save them from the pity of other whites or the silent contempt of natives who must suffer their cruelty.

  “Come.” I snatch Lottie’s hand, and now it’s my turn to drag her away from Bosman.

  Mr. Vincent boosts us onto the back of the pickup truck. We squat at Darnell’s feet, Swazi guardians of the dead.

  The girl’s fingers clutch the air over and over again, and the sound of her weeping contains all the sorrows of the world. It’s wrong for a white girl to cry for a brown boy, but Bosman’s daughter doesn’t understand the way things are. She’s simple, and her ignorance sets her free from the rules. There’s a lesson in that for me if I could grasp it through the pain in my heart.

  Mrs. Vincent starts the engine, and the truck bumps over the washboard corrugations in the eroded field.

  “I’ll remember you two.” Bosman points his gun barrel from Lottie to me and marks us out for special attention should we ever meet again. “You better believe that.”

  24

  A Dark Wind

  The sun is hot, the hole is deep, and the coffin is made of pine. Three days after finding Darnell, leather-skinned farmers, from the surrounding area, and their wives bunch together around the grave. The men grip their hats in their hands, the women hold hankies to their eyes. Two Swazi farmworkers crouch in the blazing sun with shovels balanced on their knees, waiting for the ceremony to end.

  Darnell’s father, Mr. Parns, stands at the foot of the freshly dug hole, dressed in a clean shirt and khaki pants ironed for the occasion. His face is pinched tight with a grief that burns my eyes.

  Darnell’s father knows true emptiness. With the loss of his only child and with his wife passed away, too, he’s all alone to face the future. I do not know how he can bear it. I think of the days after Father leaves us to return to his other family in Johannesburg. Mother cups my cheek and strokes Rian’s hair at every opportunity and murmurs the same soft words: What would I do without you? Tell me that. What will Mr. Parns do without Darnell? With no family at all?

  A dark wind lifts dirt into the air. The land absorbs the sobs of the women and the flinty silence of the gravediggers. The long fields and tall hills swallow us all. If I could be anything as I stand beside the empty grave, I’d choose to be a mountain, or the river that flows year after year, its course unaltered, free from pain eternal.

  Darnell was almost a stranger to me, but his death has shaken me, and only the heat of Lottie’s body pressed against my shoulder keeps me from running away from the grave.

  Mr. Vincent opens his Bible and says the words “‘By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’”

  Four senior boys
lower the pine box into the ground, and I swear I can’t breathe. I can’t find the oxygen to feed my lungs. I am afraid the pressure that began to build up inside my throat three days ago, when I found Darnell lying in the valley, will tear me apart. Mr. Parns is silent, but I want to scream on his behalf. I want to scream till the hills ring with the sound of it. My heart aches, and my throat burns.

  Lottie grabs my hand, and my fingers will break if she holds on any tighter. The pain brings me to, and I feel her shoulder slump against mine. I grind my feet into the dirt and take her weight. Darnell was Lottie’s friend. She knew him and talked to him and had a sympathy for him that was real and not for show. The scream frozen inside my throat is for all the things that can’t be changed.

  I hold Lottie up, and when the time comes for us to throw dirt on the coffin, I lead her to the graveside step by steady step. For her, I am the mountain. Mrs. Vincent and Nancy Breeland, the best voice at Keziah, sing “How Great Thou Art” and then “To God Be the Glory.”

  Darnell loved music.

  I didn’t know.

  * * *

  • • •

  We return to the big-girls’ dorm with swollen eyes. Our footsteps are slow and drag along the ground. If it was nighttime, we’d fall straight to sleep, but it’s late Saturday afternoon and the hall is filled with curious girls waiting for us to get back from the funeral at the Parns farm. They keep their distance, and some girls take shallow sips of air, to avoid being contaminated by grave dust. Peaches crosses her arms and purses her lips.

  “Crocodile tears.” Delia’s loud voice carries the length of the hallway. “Imagine crying for a dimwit just to get attention.”

  “Shame,” Natalie intones. “What a thing to do.”

  Lottie lets out a ragged sigh and turns to Dead Lorraine’s room. Her defense of our honor will have to keep. She’s spent. I reach across and grab the door handle, exhausted from the service and the heat and the sadness.

  “What would your mother think, Adele . . . the way you’re carrying on,” Delia says. “You didn’t speak one word to that boy when he was alive.”

  The pressure builds inside me. It floods my arms and my fingertips, and makes a hard drumming noise inside my ears. I walk over to Delia. I have no words. The pressure animates my hand and I slap her hard across the cheek with an open palm. Her face jerks to the right, and a red mark blooms across her skin. I lift my hand again, aiming to even out the blows.

  “Don’t.” Lottie grabs my arm and pulls me back. “Only we understand, Adele. Only we know.”

  And that is the saddest and truest sentence I have ever heard.

  25

  Witches and Worse

  Mrs. Thomas lets us eat dinner in our room on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday night, a privilege normally reserved for students who are too sick to get out of bed. Lottie and I are healthy in our bodies, but Darnell’s death has wrapped us in a sadness we cannot shake. Breakfast and lunchtimes are hell. Whispers follow us wherever we go, and the seats on either side of us at the dining table clear as if by magic. Dinner in our room is better, though. We sit shoulder to shoulder, alone but together.

  In the hour before Monday lights-out, I pull open my drawer and I take out a piece of paper and a pen. I write:

  Dear Mother,

  I have a bruise the size of a kaffir lime on my back from when I fell off the path and into the valley. The color of the bruise has changed from red to dark purple to yellow, which Lottie says is a sign that the bruise is about to fade.

  Other things have changed but in the good to bad direction. After the fire we were heroes, Mr. Vincent sent you a letter about that, and little girls carried our books from one classroom to the other. Final-year girls congratulated us. Boys smiled and winked. We were queens.

  Nobody talks to us now.

  We stayed with Darnell’s dead body in the valley and threw handfuls of dirt onto his coffin at the funeral. We live in Dead Lorraine’s room. We survived the fire not because God loves us but because the devil looks after his own. It was him who stayed the flames. We are witches and worse. And if you brush against our skirts, even for one second, you might die.

  It’s cracked but that’s what the others believe. Mr. Vincent gave a special sermon on superstition. “Trust in the Lord,” he said, “only His word has the power to save you from false devils and spiritual corruption.” Nobody listened. Americans! If the Vincents talked to Swazis, even the white ones, they’d know that bad spirits are real.

  My hands are unclean. Lottie and I are unclean.

  All we have is each other and if we really were witches we’d fly far, far away from here, but we are just ordinary girls who stayed with a dead boy and helped to bury him. I don’t regret staying with Darnell. We did the right thing not to leave him there alone and to help lead his spirit away from the valley.

  There is good news.

  Lottie and I still get the Golden Sun Award for bravery. The ceremony and the celebration dinner have been pushed back eight weeks to the last Wednesday of term out of respect for Darnell’s passing and because, I think, Mrs. Vincent wants everyone to leave for the school holidays with good feelings about us. There’ll be roast beef and sponge cake with jam and cream at the dinner, so her plan might work.

  It’s time to go now. The generator is down and the hour of grace candle is low. Shadows crawl over the walls and I dread the coming darkness. My mind won’t stop talking to me. Round and round it goes from the tall flames eating the trees, to Darnell lying so quiet in the valley, to the crack of the rifle shot over my head.

  I’ve changed, Mummy. The daughter you know is different now. I slapped Delia on the face the other day and I was glad! She deserved it and I’d do it again. It turns out that behind my smiles and my good manners there’s an angry and confused Adele Joubert who might, without Lottie’s strength, have watched the school burn down.

  Love,

  Adele

  * * *

  • • •

  I fold the paper, stuff it into an envelope, and write Mother’s name and address on the front. I drop the letter on top of the chest of drawers and lie down with a sigh. I feel better for writing it. For telling the truth. John 8:32. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The Bible makes sense sometimes.

  “Are you going to mail it?” Lottie asks with a sleepy yawn.

  “No way. The letter is for me. To let off steam.” Writing it also helps to remind me that there’s more to the world than Keziah, and that Keziah is only one small part of the world. Mother will never read what I’ve written. The truth has set me free, but it would hurt her to know I’ve become an outcast.

  Lottie pinches out the candle flame between her fingertips, and we lie in the newly fallen darkness. Murmured voices come from the other rooms: talk of boys and clothes, and theories on the bad luck that haunts Lottie and me. I’d rather the girls talked to us face-to-face so we could tell them what it was like to stay in the valley with Darnell, but they don’t really want to know, so they whisper behind our backs and step aside when we pass. Cowards.

  “He did it.” Lottie’s voice fills Dead Lorraine’s room.

  “Who?”

  “Bosman,” she says. “He killed Darnell.”

  I sit up, startled. “Seriously?”

  “Think about it, Adele. Darnell was slow, and Bosman’s daughter is slow. They knew each other. They might have been close.”

  “And Bosman killed Darnell why?” I ask.

  “To keep Darnell away from his daughter, of course. You know how these things go,” Lottie says, and brown boys have died for less: a careless look, a smile, a shoulder bumped against tender white skin. Even Father, who is gentle and turned gray, threatened to buy a gun to keep boys from climbing through my window at night. Not that he’d ever use it. Bosman, on the other hand, has a temper, and a rifle that he deligh
ts in using. Still, Lottie must be wrong.

  “The doctor from the Norwegian hospital said that Darnell fell and broke his neck,” I say. I quote the Swazi Times. “‘His injuries were consistent with an accidental death.’ It was bad luck—an accident.”

  Lottie shakes her head in disagreement. “You saw Darnell climb the riverbank, Adele. No way did he fall over the edge like you did. He was a climber.”

  “Ja, but Bosman has guns,” I say. “Four of them. He could have shot Darnell and buried him only God knows where. It’s stupid to leave a body out in the open for the vultures to find.”

  “True . . .” Lottie punches her pillow into shape. “It’s just . . . Bosman was involved, Adele. I feel it in my heart. And, if his daughter and Darnell were friends, he’d find Darnell and punish him for getting too close because he hates mixed-race people.”

  “Bosman hates everyone, Lottie. Even Mr. Vincent—and he’s white,” I say.

  “One day, when I was visiting Mama Khumalo, Bosman came looking for a Swazi boy who, he said, was on his land. She hid me inside her hut. ‘Don’t move,' she said. ‘Don’t make a sound. Bosman is sick in the head, and mixed-race people make his sickness worse.' She didn’t know why. It just did. And, you saw how he was with us, Adele. You know he’s capable of murder.”

  Bosman is dangerous, no question, but I’m not convinced by Lottie’s argument.

  Accusing a white man of murder is no small matter, and our hearts can’t be relied on to tell us what really happened. Our hearts are broken, and we need evidence of Bosman’s guilt or else the constable at the Howard’s Halt station will just brush us off. Colored girls and their overactive imaginations! Brown girls and their malicious accusations against white men!

  “We’ve got no proof of murder. We don’t even know if Darnell and Bosman’s daughter said one word to each other.” I turn one way and then the other, putting off the moment that I close my eyes and meet the tall flames again, hot and blue around the edges, or else the deep valley and the soft halo of flies floating like rain clouds around Darnell’s head. “Besides, my mind is full. I’ve got no space for Bosman. Or his daughter or his sons. All I want to do is get through to the end of term and go home.”