When the Ground Is Hard Page 3

  Rian steps closer. He understands everything that just happened to me. He sees it in my face and hears it in Delia’s distant giggles and in the way that no one on the bus will look at me.

  “Don’t worry, Adele,” he says. “She’s not worth it.”

  “Thanks,” I say quietly.

  Mother blows me a kiss as the Ocean Current lurches from the stand and joins a line of buses snaking their way to the main road. I crane my neck out of to the window to keep her and Rian in my sight for as long as possible. They grow small in the distance. The Ocean Current turns onto the road heading south, and Rian and Mother are swallowed by the surge of disembarking passengers and pickup trucks.

  “Bet that feels nice, hey, Lottie?” Lazy-Eye Matthew snickers. “Take a mouthful while she’s there.”

  I realize that I am leaned across Lottie with my breasts pressed close to her face. We’re not touching, but you know what it looks like. Lottie stares out of the window at the native women cutting grass in the fields and ignores Matthew. She doesn’t even blush at his words. It’s like there’s a wall around her that cannot be breached by bad words or rough hands.

  3

  The Road to Keziah

  The journey is slow, and I am bored. Slow because the dirt road is eaten away by potholes and washboard gullies that make the wheels of the Ocean Current shudder and bump at twenty miles an hour. Plus, cows have the right of way, so the bus stops and starts and chugs behind lazy herds of long-horned native cattle walking from one grass patch to another.

  Boring because the scenery is the same as the last trip: Mud huts sprout from fields, distant mountains loom on the horizon, and rivers scattered with stones snake through the valleys. Stray dogs and stubborn goats dot the side of the road. Barefoot black children run to a tin-shack school somewhere. Out there. We travel in heat and dust, but I can smell rain coming too.

  The trip is doubly boring because I get motion sickness, so reading Jane Eyre is out and I have no one to talk to. I’ve always nodded hello to Lottie whenever we crossed paths at school, because Mother hates snobs and remembers hiding in doorways when the children with nice clothing but mean hearts came her way. Now I’m one of the nice children whose father has money for fees, and Lottie is the poor girl with worn shoes and a faded school uniform. I can see that her hem has been let down many times and the side seams let out so she can squash into the fabric for one more year.

  Lottie ignores me. I don’t want to talk to her either, but her silence is aggravating. If she had sense, she’d try to win me over. This is her chance to make a first-class friend who might, with luck, one day buy her a bread roll or a licorice stick from the school shop. She doesn’t even try. That’s the Zulu in her: too full of pride to bend with the wind and too quick to fight. Her loss.

  The bus slows on a sharp bend, and the engine whines as we begin our slow crawl down the side of a mountain. A car pulls up behind us and blasts its horn. The bus conductor sticks his arm out of the window and holds up his hand to make a stop signal. He can see the road ahead while the car driver is blind to what might be waiting. When the way is clear, the conductor will wave the car through. Simple.

  The driver of the car presses the horn to make more noise. As if that will clear the road or straighten the blind turns. The conductor holds up his hand with stiff fingers. Stop, his signal says. Do not pass. The car engine revs. My heart speeds up. You have to wait for the right signal. That’s how things are.

  The car swings wide and accelerates past the Ocean Current. I suck in a breath and hold it as stones ping the side of the bus and the car engine roars.

  “Idiot,” Lottie whispers. “He won’t make it.”

  The red-haired Green brothers, in second class, crane their heads out the open window and yell, “Go, man. Go!”

  My jaw locks tight as the bus driver pumps the brakes to slow us down so the car has room to swerve around whatever the bus conductor saw on the road ahead. Dust hazes the air. The Green brothers cough and spit dirt from their mouths. Ernest, the older boy, shouts, “He made it! He made it!”

  Thank the Lord. We are safe. Lottie was wrong. Her life is full of bad things, but the worst thing to happen today was my demotion to third class. That’s enough.

  Slam.

  The Ocean Current shudders and begins to spin across the narrow dirt road. My body jerks forward, then backward, and the world outside speeds up and slows down at the same time. The mountainside flashes past the windows. Then clouds. Rocks. An aloe tree with bright-orange flowers. Terrifying blank space, and the sound of the wind tearing through the windows.

  Children scream. I scream, a strangled sound that comes from deep inside my throat. We are going to die. All of us mangled together at the foot of the mountain.

  “Inkosi yami.” The bus driver calls to God, hoping for extra traction, and swings the wheel counterclockwise to avoid the steep drop-off on the other side of the road.

  Mrs. Button, who lives in the pink house behind the mechanic’s workshop, says English roads have safety rails and reflective markers sunk into the tar, no matter where you drive. In Swaziland, we only have the power of prayer and pine coffins for those who plunge down, down to the valley floor.

  The Ocean Current groans and comes to a sudden stop. Bodies twist and turn at strange angles. My right shoulder slams into the seat in front of me, and hot pain tears through my muscles. I grunt and grab my injured shoulder. It hurts like the devil.

  “Look . . .” The Bartholomew twins recover first and press their noses to the window. “Look, see?” They squeal and point. “There’s the car. And a cow.”

  Those who aren’t crying or hugging friends rush to the right side of the bus to catch the action. I squash closer to Lottie to avoid Lazy-Eye Matthew, who has pushed across the aisle to get a better view of the accident that almost killed us. Sweaty underarms and faces lit up by morbid curiosity shove closer.

  My hip bumps against Lottie’s, but she doesn’t flinch. Instead, I notice her paler-than-normal skin and the bead of blood leaking from a cut in her bottom lip. She must have bitten down on it during our almost-crash to stop from screaming. I don’t recall her making a single sound as the Ocean Current spun toward the drop-off.

  The others ooh and aah and say, “Oh my goodness.” I don’t want to see what’s outside, but what choice do I have? I may be seated with the bottom-shelf students, but when we get to Keziah, reliving the screaming, the squeal of the brakes, the car, and the cow will help me fit back in with the first-class students. Besides, Lottie isn’t scared. If she can be brave, then so can I. I ignore the pain in my shoulder, scoot over, and force myself to share her view.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  A blue sedan lies on its side with its wheels spinning slow circles in the air. The front fender and the hood are smashed in to a quarter of their normal size. Broken glass covers the ground and twinkles like dewdrops in the tall grass that grows on the roadside. If the driver is alive, he’s being quiet about it. Farther down the road is the cow, also tipped on its side. If its head wasn’t twisted in the opposite direction to its hooves, you’d think that it had fallen asleep on the mountain pass. Mercifully, there is very little blood. Just a red crust around the nostrils.

  “I hope it’s dead,” Lottie whispers. “Please, let it be dead.”

  You see, I think, that’s the problem with being poor. Lottie could have said, I hope it’s alive. Let it be alive, but she didn’t. She lives under a black cloud: too many fathers, a mother who sells roasted peanuts on the roadside, and, according to Delia, a rusted iron cot with a corn-husk mattress to sleep on . . . so it’s no wonder she can’t see the bright side to any situation.

  “It moved.” Lazy-Eye Matthew’s good eye flickers. “The car moved.”

  The blue sedan rocks from side to side and tilts dangerously close to the drop-off. Half a yard more and it will spill over the lip and tumble
two miles to the valley floor. A bloody palm slams the cracked window, and the car rocks again. The driver is alive. He’s trying to get out, but if he keeps moving . . . My heart jumps into my throat.

  “Stay still,” I mutter. “Stop moving or you’ll die.”

  Lottie turns her stony blue gaze onto me. It’s chilling.

  “Let him fall,” she says. “He killed the cow and he could have killed us, because he was too important to wait. He deserves to drop.”

  She means it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Lottie’s harsh judgment stuns me. Nice girls don’t wish death on anyone, and if they do, they keep it to themselves. They smile and stay sweet. Lottie doesn’t understand the rules. She says what’s on her mind . . . just like that.

  There’s no time to reflect on the truth of Lottie’s words. The driver’s bloody palm slaps the broken window again and then again. The car rocks. The bus driver, the conductor, and the teachers from the Cross of Nazareth scramble from the Ocean Current and run for the blue sedan. They grab a tire, a sliver of fender, a door handle: any part they can reach and hang on to. A few of the older boys from first, second, and third class rush outside to help right the car.

  “Umuntu omkhulu,” the bus driver calls out in Zulu.

  A great thing.

  “Siza naye,” the ticket seller and the baggage handler respond.

  We come together.

  The rescuers breathe in and breathe out in time. Muscles strain. Arms tense. My stomach knots. The men and the academy boys chant, “Umuntu omkhulu. Siza naye. Umuntu omkhulu. Siza naye” in unison. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle to hear them singing together, working together. One breath. One mind. One body. I’m terrified that the sedan will slip from their hands, but another part of me is thrilled by the ancient chant that echoes against the mountainside and down into the deep valley.

  Delia and Sandi Cardoza, her new best friend, cling together and sob loud enough for me to hear them all the way at the back of the bus. I will never admit to Delia or to anyone else that the native voices touch a place deep inside me. When I hear them, the dreams of England we are taught to have in school are a million miles away and I cannot imagine why anyone would leave my country’s lazy rivers and the bright mountain aloes bursting orange against the hard rocks.

  For a rare minute, I am at home in my brown skin, at home in Swaziland. The ceaseless chanting and the smell of rain on the wind holds me exactly where I am: caught between terror and the aching beauty of the land.

  Metal groans, and the blue sedan flips toward the rescue crew. They jump back to avoid being crushed, and the wheels hit the ground. The students on the bus cheer. A pale face soaked in blood lolls against the cracked window. The ticket seller rushes back to the car with a crowbar and jimmies the door open. A skinny white man in a dark-brown suit slides onto the road like a rag the maid uses to clean the floors. The man’s right eye is swollen shut, and both his legs are twisted in different directions.

  My mouth opens, and a high-pitched squeal comes out. I am not alone. Lottie is frightened too. Her fingers curl around mine, and I squeeze tight. She acts tough, but underneath it all she’s a sixteen-year-old girl who hates the sight of blood, just like me. I go to untangle our hands. Not in a mean way, but nicely. I don’t want her to think our being close goes beyond this minute. And that’s when I realize my mistake. Lottie’s hands are neatly folded in her lap. I am the one who’s reached out to grab her. I am the one doing the clutching, the holding.

  I jerk my hand away from Lottie’s, and my face flames.

  4

  Know Your Place

  We tumble out of the bus and onto the dusty grounds of Keziah Christian Academy, hours late. The car crash affected us all differently. Most students are subdued and exhausted. Others are excited and energized. Lazy-Eye Matthew and the Green brothers can’t stop talking about the accident: the roar of the car engine, the spinning wheels, and the driver’s bloodied face.

  “You saw it,” Lazy-Eye Matthew says. “White people aren’t special. They’re meat, just like us.”

  I can’t wait to get off the bus and forget the day that passed. Plus, I’m starving. In first class, I would have swapped Delia half an orange for a boiled egg, or a piece of buttered bread for roasted peanuts. But Lottie had nothing. Not a carrot or a turned-brown banana. Nothing! Eating in front of her would have been awkward, so I kept my impago box closed and starved instead. When I get to the big-girls’ dormitory, I will gorge on whatever Mother packed me for the trip. It’s bound to be better than the stewed meat and cabbage they serve us in the dining hall.

  The skinny black man who packed the suitcases onto the roof of the Ocean Current throws them down to the skinny black man who originally threw them up to him. They fall into a rhythm. Grab, throw, catch, place in a row. Grab, throw, catch, place in a row. I stand back with the other students and wait for the unloading to finish. Only then can we pick up our suitcases and go to our dorms.

  Matron, who lives in a green cinder-block house attached to the little-girls’ dormitory, comes out to greet us. Matron is fat and brown, and wears a black wig that flips up at the ends. From her two-room house, she hears every suspicious rustle and bad word, no matter how softly it’s spoken. We call her Matron to her face, and the Elephant behind her back. It’s the perfect nickname for a hefty woman with sensitive hearing, and even I use the name, but only when I’m absolutely sure there are no adults around to hear me.

  Matron claps her hands, and we fall into four straight lines on the side of the road that leads past the orchards, the kitchen gardens, the low-roofed classrooms, and the big-boys’ dormitory built on the edge of the dried playing fields.

  “Come, come,” Matron says. “Quick sticks.”

  Take too long and Matron will single you out for public punishment. Either a flick of a switch against the back of your legs or a long lecture on obedience and respect for your elders. I prefer the switch. It’s quicker.

  Lines form. I move to the end of the first row and find that my usual place is taken by Sandi Cardoza. Of course. I’ve been dumped, and I have to find another space quickly. No way will I be the first student punished for tardiness this term. That honor is usually reserved for Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Lazy-Eye Matthew.

  I slot in beside the scrawny Bartholomew twins and three down from Lottie Diamond. At Keziah, boys and girls make separate lines. We never line up together, and from now until the end of term, the different sexes will eye each other with wary curiosity and intense longing.

  “Welcome,” Matron says when the last of the bags flies from the roof of the Ocean Current. “What will you do from now on, boys and girls?”

  “Bring honor to the Lord,” we respond.

  “How will you behave?”

  “With goodness and mercy.”

  “Who will you fight?”

  “Temptation and the devil.”

  “What is your reward?”

  “My reward is eternal life.”

  I glance sideways as the answer to Matron’s question slides off my tongue with no effort and even less thought. Lottie Diamond keeps her mouth zipped shut. Every school term starts with the same call-and-response. Lottie knows the answers to Matron’s questions. We all do. She simply does not care to say them.

  * * *

  • • •

  Matron dismisses the boys, who pick up their bags and march in two lines toward the male dormitories on the far edge of the school grounds. From now on, we will march from one end of Keziah to the other: stomp, stomp, from morning assembly to our classrooms, then from our classrooms to chapel, and from chapel to whatever duties we must perform to keep the school spick-and-span. We sweep the roads, pick fruit from the orchards, wash the dormitory verandahs, weed the gardens, and do domestic chores for the staff, who don’t have maids to chop vegetables and fol
d the laundry . . . The devil makes work for idle hands, so we are never idle.

  I grab my suitcase and swallow a groan. My shoulder aches from where it hit the seat in front of me and from the weight of tinned peaches and canned meat called Spam inside, which are good for trading favors. Lottie picks up a cotton sack from the luggage line and swings it across her back like it weighs nothing. That’s because there’s probably nothing in it but a brush, a change of underwear, and a moth-eaten sweater.

  “Adele.” Matron calls my name. “Come here, please.”

  Being summoned by an adult is never good, but I can’t think what I’ve done to get Matron’s attention so quickly. I wrestle my suitcase across the freshly swept dirt to where Matron stands in the shade of a wisteria tree bursting with purple flowers. The bus driver, the conductor, and the baggage handlers crane their necks to examine a large piece of machinery still lashed to the roof of the Ocean Current.

  “Yes, Matron.” I stand with my arms by my side and my gaze pinned to the tops of my shoes. Making eye contact with an adult is a sign of disrespect, and I always follow the rules. Ants scurry across the dirt, carrying crumbs that have fallen from the clothes of those who ate their impago on the bus. My stomach rumbles.

  “Now listen, Adele. Some things have changed.”

  My head jerks up at Matron’s overly sweet tone. “What things, Matron?”

  “Well . . . Mr. Cardoza is very concerned that his daughter fit in at Keziah. He heard we had trouble with the power generator, and he donated a new one so everything goes smoothly. He wants Sandi to be comfortable, so she’ll be sharing a quad room with Delia, Peaches, and Natalie.”