Nothing like this has ever happened to us before. Precipitation is more common. Obadiah’s place is empty at morning meeting. The principal sends a boy and the boy returns, stands, waiting to be told to speak. He’s a Standard Three, one of Obadiah’s, and his uniform’s in good order. Gray wool shorts, clean shirt buttoned to the neck. I don’t know his name. He is nervous, and his lips are trembling. He stands on one bare foot. With the other he scratches the back of his leg.
“Well?”
“Teacher says he is sick, Master Sir.”
“Sick?”
“Yes.”
“He’s in bed?”
“No, Master Sir.”
“Where is he, then?”
“On his car, Master Sir.”
“The pile of sand?”
“Yes.”
“Sick with what?”
“I don’t know, Master Sir.”
“Go find out.”
And so we wait in silence, the principal clearing and reclearing his throat. It was unthinkable to pontificate in the morning without Obadiah. The principal fancied himself not only Obadiah’s boss but also his rhetorical better. Every day he declared victory in this battle.
The boy comes back.
“Speak.”
The boy hesitates.
“Out with it!”
“Teacher says he is sick with creation, Master Sir.”
At break we went out there to check on him. Above our heads, a cloud, pallid and lazy, floated by, promising nothing. I watched it scatter and break apart above the Erongos. He was sitting at the top of the mound, on a chair he’d brought from his kitchen. Under one of the legs of the chair, as if driven through by a stake, was his play.
“How’s it, Teacher?”
“Disgusting.”
“So you’ve finished?”
He hid his face with his hands. “Finished?” he whispered. “Finished?”
“Yes, are you —”
“There is no finished. There’s only surrender.”
He took his hands away and gazed for a long time at each of us, but it looked, somehow, as if he were only remembering us. As if we were gone and he was lonely already.
Then he said, “They lie. It’s nothing at all like giving birth. Giving death? Yes. They lived in my head and they came out in the world shriveled, blue.” He thumbed himself in the chest. “I’m a murderer.”
“Who’d you kill?”
“Ignatius and the others.”
“Who?”
He shook his head. We joined him on the mound until the triangle called us back to work.