at the table behind the maidenhair fern.
Freesia lows when she enters the kraal carrying the milk bucket and stool. The white spots on her Friesian hide are tinted pink by the evening light. ‘I’ve missed you, Freesia. I have a lot to tell you.’
She cannot talk to people, only to cows and frogs and to Bamba. They will never betray her.
When she’s done milking and puts the bucket aside, Freesia playfully nudges her. That means she’s itching. Or perhaps it’s her way of saying goodnight.
Did anyone ever tuck her in and wish her goodnight, sleep tight? It doesn’t seem possible. And yet she has a memory of her mother lying beside her at bedtime and, sometimes, Anthony in his striped pyjamas on the end of the bed. Lying in the crook of her mother’s arm and looking at pictures of pumpkin coaches and a shoe full of children while her mother read. She remembers the scent of her mother’s powder and that lying in her arm had felt good.
But perhaps she remembers wrong.
Had being powerless against Abel been an illusion? Had feeling powerless been an escape or had she been programmed to believe sex with your father was normal? Vaguely she remembers bathing with him when she was small. He’d build a tower of bath foam on top of her head and they’d laugh so much her mother would come to see what was the matter. Him washing her tiny body, everywhere, without it seeming wrong. Falling asleep in his lap while he cleaned her fingernails with his penknife. Being carried to bed and kissed goodnight. No nightmares while she slept.
Sometimes she played a wedding game under the wild olive tree. She wore her mother’s high-heeled shoes and her father was the make-believe groom. She’d marry him some day, she said. He laughed and tossed her high up into the air. Brought her berries and sour figs after he’d spent two days in the mountains looking for cattle.
Then Anthony died; her mother went away to the Women’s Agricultural Union conference and everything turned bad. Back then she believed the things fathers did were right because they were fathers. That all fathers turned the doorknob at night. That it was part of loving, like picking you up and giving you a piggyback and playing catch in the yard.
And yet she never talked about it with other little girls.
Are you born with the knowledge that something is wrong even if you don’t know?
She recalls a Friday. Leap year, 2008.
In her shirt pocket, Grandma Strydom’s ruby ring, brought out of its hiding place in the cake tin in the stone house. In her mind she moved the vase with wild chestnut flowers aside and reached her hands out to Braham. It is leap year, she said, will you marry me? A thousand times she heard him say, let’s go to the magistrate’s office right now.
Dreams. Dreams of travelling to France, to the Saint Claire Church in Avignon to visit the chimera of a fourteenth-century poet. It had been Braham who introduced her to Francesco Petrarca. Dreams of turning Umbrella Tree Farm into a prickly-pear farm. Of travelling to Yorkshire to sit at the grave where the poet Sylvia Plath’s journey ended. Of being wheeled into a hospital theatre for an operation to repair her weakened sphincter muscle. Of playing in the final on Wimbledon’s Centre Court and winning. Of marrying Braham.
Without dreams, no matter how far-fetched, she would’ve ceased living long ago. Simply collapsed and died. Dreams carried her away from the horrors.
Her mother’s voice telling guests: Gertruidah exists in an imaginary world and, what is worse, she believes the things she makes up. I can’t bear to think what’ll happen to her when Abel and I are no longer there …
Leap year, 2008. She recalls the swampy February afternoon heat when she got out of her air-conditioned car outside The Copper Kettle. Braham’s car was already there. She was tired. All week long Abel had taunted her with a toy he’d ordered from America on the Internet. A black rubber thing, covered with tiny tentacles. Repulsive.
‘Get some KY jelly when you go to town,’ he’d ordered the night before. ‘Batteries too.’
She would kill him, she swore. ‘Get it yourself.’
He got angry and shoved the rubber thing up inside her. She pressed her face into the mattress and became someone else. A faceless woman on a train to Avignon. Through the train window she watched the vineyards and linden trees covered with tiny yellow-green flowers slip by. She must take a jar of linden honey back home for Braham. Because he was the sweetest thing in her life.
When the faceless woman got off the train, she heard the bedroom door close.
She stood under the shower to wash away the mess. But the water couldn’t reach inside her unclean heart.
Braham would detest her if he knew. When he left her bedroom at night did Abel detest her too?
‘Hi, Braham. Sorry I’m late.’ She slid into her chair behind the maidenhair fern. ‘I had to go to the co-op for teat salve and laying mash. And there’s my mother’s endless shopping list …’
‘I’m glad you’re here. You mustn’t turn off your cellphone …’
‘I must.’ She took the menu from the waitress. ‘Or my father will keep calling about more stuff to get. White grape juice for me, thank you.’ She passed the menu to Braham who ordered a banana milkshake.
‘So, what was your week like on Umbrella Tree Farm?’
‘Terrible. Farming with my father is misery. Don’t ask why.’
‘I’m never allowed to ask why. You’re a mystery, Gertruidah.’
The ceiling fan hummed; she rearranged the sachets in the sugar bowl. Fingered the tiny bulge Grandma Strydom’s ruby ring made in her shirt pocket.
Moments later she shuddered when he slurped up the thick yellow milkshake. They hardly talked because her sense of her own filth choked the words back down her throat.
The afternoon turned out empty.
Leap year turned out to be just another day.
She fetches the flat rock she keeps on the kraal wall and rubs Freesia’s shoulders and back. All the way down to the rump, the haunches. Ribs, flanks, the curve of her stomach. Down, still further down. Then she puts down the rock and continues scratching Freesia’s stomach with her fingernails. The cow grunts.
‘I know you don’t like it when I scratch your legs and head, Freesia. And you don’t like having your teats pulled, I know.’ She picks up the milk stool and carries it round to the other side. Rubs. Scratches. ‘The funeral is over, Freesia. Umbrella Tree Farm belongs to me now. Here, have your biscuits …’ The cow eats the biscuits out of her hand. ‘Tomorrow I’ll clean your pen; it looks as if the rain has gone.’
She pours half the milk into a bucket for Mama Thandeka. It’ll be dark soon and it’s a long walk to the stone house. The chickens make low gurgling sounds when she pours the rest of the milk into the tractor tyre. Tomorrow they’ll peck holes in the sour white mess.
When she turns around to rinse the bucket under the tap, she sees Mabel standing at the entrance of the coop, holding a bread cloth tied with a knot. ‘Here, Mabel, take the milk.’
‘Wait, Gertruidah, I have something to say. Mama’s chest is better. I’ll come
