Come, little child, come! And dance and sing because we are the place you come from! You come from the hearth, you come from the wind, from the glow of the wood, from the soot-black chimney that sucks up sparks and that speckles the lily with ash, you come from the smoke that turns the sun red as copper and the moon as yellow as gold.
And from that day the little girl was good and sweet and a child like every other child and she was baptised with the name Good.
And the woman taught her to bake and cook and wash and iron and sweep and polish and knit and sew with needle and thread. And she taught her to read and to write. And she tied a ribbon in her hair and showed her a mirror and she said:
See, now you are a human being.
And she took her to the forest and the sea and the fields. And she taught Good the names of the plants and the fishes and the animals and the bugs and the flowers, the months and the days and the time for sowing and the time for reaping and the lambing-time and the shearing-time and the psalms and the hymns of thankfulness. And Good wore a red dress and learnt hard and was in everything she did as good as her name. And Good wore a green dress and she grew up and got strong and had good manners and said her prayers and ate at table with the farmer and his wife and slept in her room at the end of the passage. And every evening the woman told her the story of how she had rescued her from the pitch-black hearth and made of her a child in the house and a human being in the mirror. And the woman’s breath was sweet and her hands were soft on Good’s head. And sometimes when the woman’s husband beat her, she crawled into Good’s bed at night for comfort and slept by her till morning.
And then one day after seven years something happened that changed everything.
The woman was expecting her own baby.
Out she said to Good. Out of my house, from now on you live in a little room outside in the backyard.
Take your things!
Here’s a suitcase!
And off with the red dress and off with the green! Here is your apron and here is your cap keep it white and here is your dress it is black and here is your bed next to the dogs’ kennel and here is your plate and your mug of tin and from now on you’ll eat alone.
And here’s your book to learn how to farm and the Bible, see to it that you look after your soul and here’s a big white cloth learn to embroider nicely to decorate your room.
From now on you’re my slave. You’ll work for a wage.
And Good’s heart was very very sore. But not for long and then it grew as hard as a stone and black as soot and cold as a burnt-out coal. And she took the suitcase filled with the dresses and shoes and things of the child she’d been and went and buried it deep in a hole on the high blue mountain across the river. And piled black stones on top of it. And trampled it with her new black shoes and cocked her crooked shoulder and pointed with her snake’s-head hand and said:
Now, Good, you are dead.
Nobody noticed anything of Good’s mourning because she cried without tears. Every day she kept doing her work faithfully. Fed the dogs, scrubbed the kitchen floor, cleaned the fireplace, polished the silver and buffed the table to a shine and rubbed the sheets in the soapy water till they were staring-white and ironed them in knife-sharp folds and stacked them in neat piles in the linen cupboard. She plaited onions and packed pumpkins and slaughtered sheep and plucked geese and cut lucerne with the sickle and brought flowers from the garden and arranged them in vases, the roses, the lilies, the grass.
And the woman said: My good slave, your work is good.
But Good looked at the woman’s hands folded around her stomach that grew bigger and bigger with the child she was expecting. And her mouth was bitter as aloe and her insides were filled with bile.
And after eight months and two weeks in the middle of the morning the woman got birth pains and she said to Good:
Come with me, I’m going to my mother over the mountain. But pack everything that I need, a knife and scissors and forceps and cloths and towels and water and fire, because this child may well want out before noon.
And when they were halfway there, then the woman screamed: The child wants to come!
And there beneath the high sun next to the road where the waterfall foams, Good made a bed of snow-white cloths, and she poured water into a snow-white bowl and she whispered between the woman’s snow-white legs:
Come, little buttermilk, come come little bluegum-flower, come out, snow-white lamb of my même, come!
And the woman she blows and the woman she strains and the woman she farts. And Good she runs and Good she pulls and Good she spits and Good she pushes, and she calls and she curses and she prays and she pleads but the child is stuck like a key in a lock.
Help me! the woman cries, grey are the cliffs and black is the river, Good, I’m going to die, help me!
And Good takes a knife and she takes forceps and scissors and she takes a deep breath and she cuts open the woman’s stomach from top to bottom. And when noon struck in the church towers on both sides of the mountain, then she took the child out of the blood and the slime and she cut the string and she cleaned him and she covered him in cloth and she gave him a name that only she knew about.
You-are-mine she called him.
And he grew up on her breast and she washed him when he was dirty and gave him milk when he was thirsty and rubbed his tummy when he had winds and cooled his forehead when he had fever, and cradled him and comforted him when he cried and sang to him and dressed him and undressed him and put him to sleep every evening in her room in the backyard before she took him into the house. Taught him to walk, taught him to talk and swim and dance and fly and blow on the curved horn of the ram.
I am a slave but You-are-mine, she always whispered in his ear before she handed him over to his mother.
And his mother looked on at Good teaching the child to walk and talk, teaching him to swim and dance and fly.
And she listened to them calling each other by blowing on the horn, the child and his minder far over vlei and hill.
And every evening Good told him how she had rescued him from the grey cliffs and from the black river and chanted rhymes and asked him riddles and hummed songs on blades of grass between her lips by the fire in the outside room and with her little laundry-mangle hand made him shadow-pictures on the wall.
And the woman eavesdropped at the door. She could see through the chink and she could hear through the keyhole and she was jealous, but what could she say and what could she do?
And Good caught the little boy silver fish in the sea, and copper frogs in the dam and showed him the blue butterfly in the forest, and made him trousers of red velvet and a shirt of green cotton and embroidered the Good Shepherd and the Wise Virgin in white on his pillow slips.
See, you are a human being, she showed him in the mirror, and You-are-mine.