Do you want the whole mongrel rabble with their so-called Scottish surnames and mission-station affectations here on your front stoep, Milla? Over my dead body, he said, enough is enough.
You tried to keep the peace by seeing to it that enough bags of flour and pails of milk found their way over the drift to the labourers’ cottages. And you tried to establish goodwill by regularly going to buy a chair or a little table from the family business in Suurbraak. The five Okkenel brothers, all of them like OuKarel with the high brow and the green eyes and the sharp nose, looked at you with shrewd understanding and knew just how to fix a price that accorded with your feelings of guilt. With the passing of time you realised that it had been a mistake to abolish the sharecropping. It was their only source of capital for buying good timber for furniture and there was enough wheat left after they’d sold the surplus to supply the whole clan with bread flour.
Jak would not hear of reinstating a sharing. He dreamed of a completely mechanised farm that would require only one or two pairs of hands.
There was never a contract, he said, your mother kept the people here for her own convenience, we are under no obligation. The fewer of them the better.
You were ashamed of the attitude. Where were the people to go? It was their land as well, after all, their place, and they also had to work and eat.
Why did you keep your mouth shut, Milla? What were you scared of? Why could you never think that there were other possibilities? And Jak, why did you tolerate his bluntness and his selfishness and his vanity? You were bemused at the time by the short stories you read in the magazines. The heroine who exclaims with flushed cheeks: Now I’ve had enough, now I’m leaving you! Otherwise not a single magazine would sell hereabouts, you thought. But you thought no further.
You tried to assess other wives’ husbands dispassionately and you couldn’t really see that you were in a worse position. Jak was still the most attractive and the most intelligent of the lot. Not one of the women you knew was ‘fulfilled’, as they said. You could see that in their faces. But they were unshakeably loyal. It was Basie this and Fanie that and Thys came first clap your hands. Especially those in your circle of friends. And yet everyone was always starved for company. Always somebody who wanted to listen. Not one of the women you knew of who didn’t get lonely on a hill-farm. Not that the exchange of commonplaces could keep you going.
For a few months at a time you could keep a reading group going, or a music-appreciation group, but the women sat taciturn in your sitting room. As if the music of Schubert and Brahms and Mahler embarrassed them. Bach was acceptable. Sounded sufficiently like church. The books that you lent them they returned unread to the half-moon table in the hall and for the rest spoke of patchwork and complained about their servants who stole soap.
What failed most miserably was the walking club for amateur botanists that you tried to get going. You didn’t know all that much yourself, but you’d inherited your father’s books on trees and fynbos and as child had learnt the first principles of plant identification at his knee. But after you’d invaded the foothills a few times with the little ladies, stumbling along in their Sunday-best shoes, and their dresses that snagged on everything, and the anxious out-of-breath countenances solely concerned about what they had to serve their husbands for supper, you gave it up. You were not like them, you thought, you’d been born to more adventurous ways.
But you lost the way the first seven years on Grootmoedersdrift, and the loneliness started getting you down.
Your mother was a last resort when you were too lonely.
Then take me to Barrydale, you said when Jak wanted to go away on his expeditions on public holidays or for long weekends after lambing time or sowing-time.
Not that you really wanted to be with her all that badly, because her you could never satisfy. She was even worse after Pa’s death. She set snares for you, to test you, you felt. The quarrels were even more intense than at home with Jak. Against your mother you had no defence.
That was the summer of ’53. Ma had problems with her workers on the farm. She made you feel you had to find a solution. You accepted the challenge, wanted for a change to show her one needn’t be a victim of circumstance, needn’t allow other people to become victims.
You’re making a bed for yourself, is what she said, when she heard what you wanted to do. You’re meddling with things you’ll never hear the end of.
You were standing in the pantry, 16 December 1953, you wanted to take food to the workers’ huts. You were standing with a cooked leg of lamb in your hand which you wanted to pack to take to the people.
What on God’s earth are you doing now? she inveighed. Are you trying to bribe them? and then I’ll be left with the mess when you’ve left.
That was the last straw. You started shouting at her.
So what will ever be right and good for you, Ma? I thought you wanted me to help you, I thought I had to help your people here, on your behalf? What do you want me to do then? I want to give you the best I have, my faith, my ingenuity, my love, my courage, the best years of my life, and you’re still not satisfied? Why can I never be good enough for you?
You were so beside yourself, you could have sunk your teeth into the meat and torn it apart, but you only lifted it up in your hands. This is my body, you thought. You dropped it at her feet. She folded her arms and looked at the meat on the ground.
Or do you want to take me apart and reshape me over and over again until I am to your satisfaction, to a T? Will I be right then?
You’re wasting food, she said.
She turned her back on you. You were incensed. You took a step backwards.
Then it rose up in you. You started saying it. You could not stop. She turned round when she heard the new tone. You spoke quietly, to her face.
Or is your problem that you don’t know exactly how you want me, Ma? Is that your real problem? Because there is no image on which you can base me? Because there is only a hole there where you are, a silent hole in the ground? Well, I am something, Ma, you hissed, I am not nothing, I am somebody and I know what I want from life and I know what to do to get it. I will provide for myself.
That was the only time in your life you’d ever seen her scared. Her pupils dilated and her mouth gaped, but she said nothing. You pushed past her. It was she who was left on her own in the pantry.
That was the first and the only time. After that she was different with you until her death.
I wash my hands of you, she came to tell you later that evening at your bedroom door. Just that, and closed her bedroom door.
You were alone with the plan which would change your life.
The whole story of how it all started, nobody knew except you and Ma. Not even you yourself understood it very well. All your life you’ve wanted to record it, just for yourself, to try to gain some clarity. But you never got round to it. It was a skipped chapter. You couldn’t bring yourself to do it.
threshold kerbstone step do they brood over these barricades dally dawdle halt camouflage the tread the stumble-step nightly from window to bed the foot that falters on the fringes of carpets the bump in the garden path how did it begin? was it all the comings and goings of my years right over the pebble in the shoe right over the heel-wart regardless of the toenail growing in was it the hot sand? that running with one sandal? that lunging-after and catching by the neck of the white-foot hare? was that where the germ entered my heel the iron around my ankle the black pound-weight swinging from the bridge of my foot? foot that drags foot that hangs foot that sleeps and everywhere that milla went the lamb was sure to go.