right, she thought, all right – pretend you haven’t seen me. And climbing down to the beach, she started across to the boats. As she passed along them, picking her way through the litter of crayfish pots and stretched nets, head bent and watching the sun-baked sand pressing up between her toes, she felt the men staring after her.
They were happy people, simple and direct. Full of laughing gay friendliness, they teased her often, but never for long; first one breaking in and then another, all white smiles and pretty words, as though she were the only girl in the village. This time it was different. The silence and disregard remained unbroken and frightening. It was studied, alien, like something reserved for women who had lost men at sea.
Reaching her father’s boat, the girl hoisted herself over the side. The old man had his back to her and was bent over the open engine-housing.
‘What’s wrong, Pa?’ she asked with a smile; waiting for him to turn; expecting the big sly wink that would place him with her, against the rest.
He turned half towards her. The deep-lined brown face held an odd mixture of discomfort, perplexity13, and sadness.
‘Nothing – the fuel pump – I was just checking the pump.’
‘Are you going out tonight?’
‘Nee, I don’t think so …’ For a moment his eyes lifted to hers, as though he were searching them for the knowledge of something. And failing to find it, he looked away, rubbed his hands down the front of his soiled khaki shirt, and turned back to the engine.
‘You had better get home,’ he said quietly.
Behind the words the girl sensed all she had seen in his face, and the wind that had warmed her on the rocks suddenly cut over the gunwale14, striking cold and unfriendly through the thin dress.
Knowing that the thing he could not bring himself to tell her would have to wait, she left the beach and climbed the grey road that led up towards the shoulder of the headland. The way the men went home to their shacks, nesting in a cluster on the first rise of the mountains. The way Jan used to come to her, singing, tall and lithe, sinewed as a coil of rope. Jan, who had always been so proud of his strength, always so invincible15 …
Until that rain-blasted night when the men carried him on a litter of oars and torn sail, and laid him gently on the kitchen table, his crushed arm draped across his chest. That night a black star had come to rest over Sarie for the first time in all her eighteen years.
After the incident they had carried him to her, because she was his promised woman, and it was a woman’s place to care for her man when he was broken. But he was hurt beyond her aid. He needed the hospital doctors, and they had come and taken him to Cape Town and cut off the dead arm. By the time he returned to the village, he was drinking away his fear of her pity, and so avoided her.
The other people treated him kindly at first, trying not to notice the empty sleeve, but he had drunkenly spat the kindness back in their faces. Soon they were turning away from him, and saying that the doctors had cut off his spirit too.
Sarie had told herself to wait; that her time was when the bitterness had eaten itself out of him. But before it could, he went back to Cape Town, with its easier money and cheap, rotgut brandy.
When she reached the shacks, she turned into the rusty, wire-fenced yard of the first one: a low whitewashed wood and corrugated iron building that leaned back against the slope and faced the sea across a patch of untended vegetables and stunted, wind-scrubbed peach trees.
The gate creaked closed behind her and, even before she had half crossed the yard, the old woman started shrilling, ‘Saaarie! Sarie!’
She sat in her usual place, over the stove; old brown hands gripping the arms of a rickety bentwood chair; jigging herself backwards and forwards. As the girl entered the kitchen – and although it was dark and she needed a little time for her eyes to adjust from the afternoon sun – she noticed that the movement was faster than usual, more excited.
‘Where you been?’ the old woman whined at her. ‘All day you been gone. Gone and left me with no one.’
‘I went down to the town.’
‘Ja. Every chance you get, you go off and leave me alone. Every chance. But you wait, dolla. Something will happen to me one day, or maybe’ – the eyes hooded, the whine changing to a sing-song – ‘maybe something will happen to you. Ja, dolla, and you won’t be here where I can help you.’
Sarie stiffened and a tiny muscle started ticking in her cheek. ‘All right. Like what?’ she asked.
But the old woman was looking down at her crushed black bodice and pulling it straight, all expression gone from her face.
‘Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking maybe … ,’ she said as if to herself, and jogged slowly backwards and forwards.
The girl shrugged, and turning to a small window drew a scarf from the pocket of her dress. Her fingers shook as she untied the coins knotted in one corner, and dropped them into a cracked vase standing on the sill.
‘I took some oysters down to the hotels. They paid me seventy cents,’ she said evenly.
‘Huh!’ The woman was bent on mischief, and struck again, her voice oily and bitter as cascara16. ‘What you want to buy with it? A wooden arm, maybe?’
And when there was no answer: ‘What’s it like, dolla – love with one arm?’
Sarie whirled. ‘You keep you filthy tongue off – ’
The old woman’s high, screamed laughter filled the room, flooding out Sarie’s words on a torrent of malice17 and triumph. She had struck well, and the girl stood glaring at her, too tense with anger to move: oh, to beat the withered face until the eyes mocked no more and the pink gums were still for ever!
Quite suddenly the laughter stopped. The old body thrust itself forward. The wrinkled, vulture neck stuck out. The chin gleamed wet with saliva. ‘Well, you’ll never see him again. ’Cause what he done they’ll hang him for, one arm ’n all! Ja, my dolla.’
Sarie heard the words, and wanted to tell the old woman she was lying, but the kitchen was all dim, and she couldn’t see the chin any longer, and … It was like standing up quickly after bending in the sun too long. You told yourself not to feel it, but you did. And the old sow wouldn’t stop shouting; it was hard to hear when she shouted like that. ‘ … smashed his head like a snoek, brain ’n – ’
‘Shut up!’
Sarie saw the old woman’s eyes pivot to the door; the flapping jaw go slack; the shrivelled body cringe back into the chair, small, quivering, weak. She spun round and threw herself into her father’s arms, burying her face against his shoulder.
‘Get out!’
She heard the chair creak, and a grunting, shuffling, animal sound that ended at the inner door. Then her father’s hand was on her head, smoothing down her hair, and he was crooning softly as he had done when she was a child.
‘My kindjie, my klein liefste, moenie treur nie18.’
Deep grasping sobs shook her body.
‘What was she saying? Pa, what’s happened
