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THULA THULA
Annelie Botes
Tafelberg
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
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She stands back to study the sign on the gate, rain dripping from her hair. The sign is green, the capital letters white.
UMBRELLA TREE FARM
GERTRUIDAH STRYDOM
NO ENTRY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
The pliers feel cold in her hand. She’s glad she made the sign yesterday and painted it. Put it up as soon as she returned from the funeral in town.
She gathers the cut-off bits of wire and puts them and the pliers in the pocket of her black funeral pants. Walks through the gate and pulls it shut behind her. Slips the loop over the hook. Drapes the chain around the frame and the gate post. She clicks the lock into place, her eyes fixed on her bony hands. They seem older than twenty-six years, an old woman’s hands.
Umbrella Tree Farm. Hers and hers alone. No one will come through the gate without her permission. She wants to be alone. For the greater part of twenty-six years she was nothing, with no say over her boundaries. No place was hers alone except for the stone house she’d built deep in the mountains on the overgrown southern slope. And the corner table behind the maidenhair fern in The Copper Kettle, where she and Braham Fourie used to meet for coffee before she cut him off.
She walks slowly to the house, ignoring the drizzle. Inhales the scent of the lavender hedge that borders the garden path. Even in the late winter the garden is lush, flourishing.
It had always been her job to close the gate and keep the Bonsmara cattle out of her mother’s precious garden. When she was small her father turned it into a game. He’d let her out at the gate, then place a peppermint in her hand as he drove through. She always held out her left hand because her right hand was sticky and stank of piss and rotten fish.
When she was older getting out at the gate and away from him was a release. She no longer held out her hand. ‘Take your peppermint, Gertruidah, it’s your reward for the pleasure along the way.’ She stood like a pillar of salt. ‘If you don’t take it, we’ll melt it inside you tonight and then I will be the one eating it. Are you going to take it …?’
She’d take the peppermint and toss it among the agapanthus beside the gate.
At eighteen, when she was in grade eleven, she got her licence and manipulated him into buying her a car. Then she never went anywhere with him again. On Mondays she drove to boarding school alone, returned alone to the farm on Fridays.
And she never ate anything tasting like peppermint again.
When she was small it took seventy steps to reach the bottom stair. Seventy steps of praying: Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child. The steps became fewer as her legs grew longer. By the time she was seventeen she counted fifty and that’s how it stayed.
It’s been fifty steps for nine years now.
The slate stairway fans out gracefully in the distance, a stone column on either side of the bottom step, each topped with a brown clay pot with gypsy roses spilling out from it. For the first time in her life the stairway holds no terror. Because beyond the stairs, behind the teak front door, there’s no one who can possess her body or penetrate or destroy it. No one to trample her boundaries or make her dance naked in the moonlight. The rider who claimed her for his mare is dead.
Respected Bonsmara farmer. Outrider. Bareback rider. Abel Strydom. Her father.
Ten steps. Another forty and she’ll be there.
Also gone from behind the teak front door, the woman who could turn her hand to anything and ought to have known better than to pretend to be deaf and blind. She’s dead too.
Green-fingered gardener. Stalwart of the Women’s Agricultural Union. Pillar of the community. Sarah Strydom. Her mother.
Fifteen steps. Another thirty-five and she’ll arrive at the stairs.
They died four days ago on their way to the Communion service. An accident on the farm road – Abel was never a man to take his time. Judging by the wreck they’d hit the kudu at full speed, its horn piercing Sarah’s heart and pinning her to the back of her seat.
Abel broke his neck.
When police brought the news she pretended to cry.
This morning she buried them in the town cemetery. She’d refused to have their corpses on her land. ‘Bury them in town,’ she told the undertaker after she identified their bodies on Sunday morning.
‘Gertruidah, your grandmother and brother are both in the family graveyard …’
‘I will decide where they’re buried.’ He raised his hand in protest but she silenced him. ‘I want to finalise the arrangements right now – it’ll be at eleven on Wednesday morning.’
She was dying to get back to the farm. To be on her own, to feel joy, to cry over twenty-two broken years. To reach back into the safety she remembered from when she was a little girl who still believed in fairies and the tooth mouse, before she’d begun to fear the turning of the doorknob at night. ‘Do anything you like, just as long as everything goes smoothly. Tea, cake, ribbons, wreaths, caskets, anything.’
‘At least choose the caskets.’
‘Choose them yourself.’
‘But, Gertruidah, the different styles and prices …’
‘You heard me, you choose.’
A large crowd turned up for the service. She knew what they were whispering to each other: So tragic that the Lord called them so soon. Still only in their fifties, with so much to offer the community. The big question now was who would farm on Umbrella Tree Farm and keep an eye on Gertruidah?
She watched dry-eyed as the caskets were lowered into the ground. All she could think of was the chain and lock she’d buy at the co-op before driving back to the farm. Stop at the store for some food. Don’t forget cough medicine for Mama Thandeka. Sugar and jelly babies for Johnnie.
Twenty steps. Only thirty remain.
At the funeral no one but she knew the truth about Abel and Sarah Strydom. Then she looked up and saw Braham Fourie in the crowd on the far side of the grave, his eyes fixed on her. So there were two people present who knew the truth.
She pretended she hadn’t seen him. Once, in her grade eleven year, she’d allowed him to glance inside her secret room – now, like countless times since then, she regretted it.
Twenty-five steps. The halfway mark.
The funeral-goers scattered flowers onto the caskets. But when the basket with light pink wild chestnut flowers reached her, she demurred. She would not offer them a flower. She locked her fingers behind her back, kept her hands away from the grave. Hands that had been too close to Abel Strydom too many times.
‘Go
