IN THE KINDERGARTEN RUN by nuns, I stare out of the windows in the direction of the farm. A ruler cracking down on my head jolts me back to the singing of Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, or the farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hey ho the derry-o, the farmer in the dell. The nuns never tell us what a dell is or why we should sing hey ho the derry-o just because the farmer is in it.
Again and again the farm lures me away from the nuns and the singing. On the farm Jonas spikes snakes on a pitchfork and giggles spitty gums at our shrieks when he flings a dead but squirming snake at our feet. In the Zulu compound on the hill, bubbles gargle out of the nostrils of a sheep’s head in a black three-legged pot. When chicken heads are axed, the headless chickens dart about the compound chased by Zane and Jamani and the other Zulu boys and me, their beady-eyed heads still shivering on the block. The chickens zigzag haphazardly, tricky as the bounce of a rugby ball.
In the Zulu huts: a smell of woodfire smoke, the taste of corn cobs on the flames, the feel of putu pap squeezed inside a fist. Newspapered walls and cheap, chipped china and grassmat floors and Soweto jazz on the radio. Beds propped high on bricks out of reach of the stumpy tokoloshe. My father laughs at the Zulu men for being scared of a short-ass, baboony thing. I just hope the tokoloshe is after Zulu boys rather than me and will go for Jamani in the backyard rondavel.
At the door of Lucky Strike’s hut in the compound, his old, elephant-skin father sits on a stump, gazing runny, tobacco eyes across the deep kloof to the hills, where the past hides among dassies and monkeys. The past was when he stood at the gate of his kraal in the setting sun, counting the fat cows he would pay for a barrow-hipped wife. Counting cows in the days before the long foot-trek to Jo’burg and the white man’s mines.
But Jo’burg is far away and I only know life at school and on the farm, where Zane and Jamani and I chase lizards and end up with a tail wriggling in our fingers as the lizard flees into a black crack. We pelt each other with clay down by the river. We fish the river for black bass and bluegill, with bamboo rods and earthworms on the hook. Sometimes we see a likkewaan in the river and fling stones at it, as if it is a crocodile.
My blind, batty great-grandmother, Grandmama Rudd, is to visit from the old home in Pietermaritzburg.
– Why do we have to fetch her? I whine in the Chev on the way to pick up Grandmama.
– The farm air is good for her, Gecko. Now, you be sweet to her, you hear? My mother frowns.
I just sulk and fiddle with the radio dials.
– One day I will be old and I hope you will come and fetch me to visit, she teases.
I dare not tell my mother that I sulk because of Grandmama’s stale smell and the stink of her pee in the pot under her bed and her creepy, flaky-skinned hands, and her blind, smoky eyes. She scares the wits out of me, the way she blindly floats her long white hair and bloodred gown through the cool dark of our house.
Grandmama has a habit of ghosting out of the gloom, giving me a swift kick up the ass. Out of the way Box, she grunts. I skid across the pine floorboards that Beauty waxes on hands and knees. Box was the dog my mother and father gave me on my first birthday. They said I patted him, tugged his ears, rubbed his nose on my chin, then dropped him into my toy-box and closed the lid. So it was that my birthday dog came to be called Box.
One day Box ran away and though we called him for days he never came back. After Box went, my father came home with the black Labrador pups, Dingaan and Dingo.
Box is long gone, and I believe Grandmama knows that it is me and not Box in her way. Somehow she senses I hate her potty pee and flaky hands, so she foots me across the floorboards. I wish she was dead.
The only time I do not wish Grandmama dead is when she tells the story of the ice girl, and the story of Jake-up-a-tree. Grandmama married a man in England in the days before motorcars and aeroplanes and her smelling and blindness. They went out to Canada to find gold. There, in a shantytown, a girl died in winter. She fell through the ice while skating and they broke the ice downriver to fish her out. They could not bury her in the frozen earth, so she was kept in a box till spring. In the spring they lifted the lid of the box to discover that the girl’s hair and fingernails had grown. When a Red Indian called Jake died in the same frontier town, they did not bother to make a box for him but put him in a sack and strung him up a tree until graves could be dug again.
– Tell me the story of Jake-up-a-tree, I beg her again and again.
Sometimes she tells me, but mostly she just drifts hobgoblinly through the dark.
When Grandmama dies in the old home in Pietermaritzburg I get to go to her burial. It is funny to see my father, the farmer, in a suit and tie, his hair Brylcreemed down, his Italian shoes gleaming.
– Like a real gentleman, my mother smiles.
She kisses him on the cheek. I feel so happy, I almost forget we are all fancy just to see Grandmama dead.
In the church Grandmama Rudd lies in a lidless coffin. My mother and father think I might dream about Grandmama if I see her dead, but I want to. Though I was scared to death of her alive, I feel no fear of her dead. Perhaps it is because I know she can no longer drift up darkly from behind.
Granny Rudd has railwayed all the way down from Zebediela in the far northern Transvaal to bury her mother. I am all wound up for she is to stay with us on the farm afterwards and will play dominoes and mikado with me.
– The old dear’s in heaven, my mother whispers to Granny.
I stare long and hard at the wrinkled face and ghost hands of Grandmama. I feel no pity for her, just a longing to pinch her skin to see if it is as cold as frog skin.
Granny Rudd winks at me, as if to say: sweet boy. If she knew I had wished her mother dead she would not wink at me.
– Are you sad your mother’s dead, Granny? I whisper, but it carries over all the sniffling and fidgeting.
Granny sobs and my father cuffs me on the head. I wish I could lasso the words, but they float out of reach, out there among the sweet incense and the fluttering candle flames and the Holy Ghost. Like dragonfly wings. I am sent out in shame. Fool boy, the sour frowns of the grown-ups say.
Out to where Beauty is looking after Zane, who is kicking a yellow beach ball among the gravestones.
Sun-melon yellow. Sunflower yellow. An undead colour.