In the shadow of South Africa’s great escarpment, the Ngwangwana river meanders east towards the Indian Ocean through a valley green and fertile. The banks are lined with weeping willows alive with the twitter of busy weaver birds, and beneath the sparkling surface, if you stand with the light just right, you can see rainbow trout. The soil is dark and rich. No wonder my parents sold everything, cashed in their meager life savings, and borrowed enough money from the Land Bank to keep them in debt for the next thirty years.
Near a giant solitary oak with unobstructed vistas of the blue escarpment, my dad plunged a shovel into the ground and turned the first sod. Squatting on his haunches he took a dark clod in his hand, ground it between his fingers, closed his eyes, breathed in, and gave thanks for his good fortune. He might have been penniless, but he smiled like he was the richest man in the world.
From the hessian sack full of strings, stakes, and papers, he lifted out his old Leica, and called me, his only daughter, out of the rusted family Valiant where I sat reading, afraid of the size of the emptiness on the other side of the window. I was lithe, freckled, and topped with a mop of unruly red curls inherited from a distant Scottish clansman, beneath which, I’d been told, I was endowed with a natural, country-girl beauty. When I’d been clicked into posterity, I turned my attention to the old oak. Circling the trunk, I fingered the rutted bark, looked up, found the easiest line, and lifted myself into the cool foliage that would become in the years to follow my sanctuary from the inevitable confusion of a white girl in South Africa. From my leafy rampart I looked down on Dad pacing out foundations, gouging corners in the dirt with the heel of his boot into which he pounded small wooden stakes, all tied together with a tight yellow string. When I fell asleep cradled in the fork of the trunk, he smiled, wiped his brow and went back to work till the light failed him. Then he drove his shovel into the dirt, dusted his hands and looked out with a sigh.
He requisitioned the help of an old stonemason, and the house began to take shape. When they broke for lunch, I dropped from the tree and wandered over. I asked Dad why the old man sat alone and ate? His hesitation was obvious. “It’s just their way.”
Taking my sandwich, I went to sit beside the old man. In the silence of an unshared language he smiled, tilted his billycan and searched inside it with his spoon.
Occasionally I came down from my tree to help stir the cement in an old wheelbarrow, carry river stones, hand tools to the old man for whose soft voice and obedient toil I was developing a quiet affection. Filled with what I deemed equal love for both men, I felt ashamed for not loving Dad more. Then I felt bad for loving the old man less, so, to appease my divided loyalties I apportioned my labor equally—after cleaning river stones and delivering them to the old man to set in the fireplace, I drifted to other end of the house where Dad was planing floorboards. I swept up the wood shavings and tossed them on the fire where we’d begun to warm our hands against autumn’s first chill.
When my mum brought my brother home from boarding school one weekend, and I caught her kissing my dad in the corner of an unfinished room, I went at once to join the old man working alone setting a stone lintel above a door at the far end of the house.
Under a frail sun slung low in the autumn sky the last bundles of thatch were lashed to the roof, and along the ridge, swallows gathered. The old oak tree unraveled and blew away in flurries across the veld. The old stonemason packed up his tools, tipped his hat, and bid us farewell, leaving us alone to face our first winter. Finally, ceremoniously, Dad ushered us through the front door. The walls still smelt of bag-washed lime. He lit a fire in the fireplace and set paraffin lamps around the room. Surrounded by an enormous silence, our shadows thrown fourfold up against the walls, we played cards on the floor, and the mountains turned white overnight.
From the hill behind the house Dad pointed out the river glinting in the distance, and the mountains pale blue through the haze. Tight against his leg, I watched him sow his dream with a sweeping arm. He began with fences crisscrossing the veld that he lined with trees: oaks, poplars and deodars. He bought his first cows and milked them into a bucket under the early morning stars. He borrowed a tractor and a scoop and gouged deep triangles into the earth and watched them filled by streams gushing down from the mountains in spring. He turned the soil and planted. Crops grew. Before the swallows gathered again on fence lines, the fields turned golden brown and he lifted his first potato harvest. The farm summoned me with a voice I could not ignore. While Dad strode out measurements making silent calculations in his head, I knelt in the turned soil with the crows and starlings and egrets pulling worms from the plow’s wake. In the pond outside the dairy I lay muddied to my armpits with my nose against the water, immersed in the world of crane flies and tadpoles, while inside the house Mum and Dad sat solemn faced at the kitchen table poring over piles of unpaid bills.
Dad, fluent in Zulu, dispatched his tacit expectations to a growing labor force arrived in ones and twos on foot from the location, that place designated by the government to black men and their families, and by whose hard work and strong backs the farm took on a life of its own fueled by borrowed money come due. The phone began to ring more often and I told the stern sounding men that Dad was out on the lands, could he call them back, but Dad only told me not to answer the phone anymore. Then he did the unthinkable: he left the farm for days at a time to implore lenders’ patience, to ask for extensions. He returned stone-faced, but unbroken.
One day clouds gathered above the berg as they did most afternoons, this time darker and more foreboding. Looking up, Dad summoned the workers in from the fields, ordered the windows shuttered and the vehicles moved undercover. The wind picked up, and it grew cold. The sky turned a sinister green-gray. With a roar, the storm descended. Hiding under the kitchen table with my head between my knees, I felt the house shaking and the roof creaking, and I thought of the old stonemason and how much faith we’d placed in a man who wandered the country with nothing but his bag of tools, his trowel and his mortar board, and his big, bony, calloused hands. While I thought these things, the dams filled, overflowed, and broke away, discharging brown deluges that shook the ground, all of it poured into the river become a raging torrent. Cows, splashing and bellowing were plunged beneath the surface again and again until they emerged far downstream sideways and lifeless, turning slowly in foaming brown eddies.
It was dark when the storm finally let up and I felt hollow inside for what sunrise would bring. I fell asleep to the sound of water dripping through a hole in the roof into a bucket.
When I awoke, Dad was gone, but I found Mum shooing two bewildered, swollen-eyed cows away from the kitchen door. A gentle sun peeked through the broken windows as if to inspect the calamity wrought in its absence. The wooden floors had been rinsed and mopped and the shattered china and shredded paintings swept up and thrown onto a pile in the back garden to be set alight. When Dad came home late for breakfast, he was wet and dirty and his boots caked with mud. With hard face and obstinate heart, he announced that the storm had devastated them. There was nothing left.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, full of dread.
“Start again, of course!” he replied punching his palm with his fist. “What else?”
With that, he devoured his breakfast and I didn’t see him again until bed time. Lying in darkness on the cusp of sleep, aware of the blanket covering the empty window frame billowing inwards as he opened the door, I heard him come quietly in to kiss me goodnight. I felt the bed sag as he sat on the edge, something he seldom did. I feigned sleep for fear of seeing defeat in his face. He might have been talking to me, or in his exhaustion he might just have been mumbling to himself, that he needed help re-building, an extra pair of good strong hands. That, and the smell of diesel, wet wool and sweat on his skin renewed my faith in the universe, and I knew then that everything would be okay.
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(Photo of Poolers’ family farm)
- Father Land by Ralph Pooler - May 26, 2022