Thokozani S.B. Maseko - Like a Lily on a Mountain, Love Grows on Rocky Terrains

The funeral was a quick affair. The woman carrying the baby, who Welcome had noticed didn’t cry even once throughout the whole service, returned to the house with Themba and Mandla. Thabani stayed up on the hill, fashioning a marker of sorts and banging it into the ground.

Welcome waited until nightfall to go up the hill. In the dark he tried to make out the words on the wooden cross stuck at a slight angle by the head of the grave. Finally, he lit a match, blocking the light with his body so that he couldn’t be seen from the house.

IN LOVE AND HONOUR OF

THANDI DLAMINI

DEARLY LOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER,

AND MOTHER

’52 – ’73

There were noises in the distance. The moon appeared from behind a cloud, illuminating the marker as if it was its only purpose for dangling in the sky. From the house he could hear a woman humming softly to a baby, and the voices of men in contention. The back door slammed, and he heard the jangling sound of Themba’s spurs.

“Damn,” Welcome said as he shot one last look at the tomb and rushed up the hill, where his stallion stood quietly waiting.

So Thandi Dlamini was dead, God respite her soul. With a family like hers, she was probably better off. It was hard for Welcome to imagine that boys like the Dlaminis had folks of their own. Folks who might be mourning somewhere for Thandi. It made him wonder about his own relatives.

By now they should have surrendered him up to death.

Chapter 4

Three heavyset men lugged crates and bags from one room to another in Big Bend Farm. Dudu gave orders to the men from her seat, too feeble and disinterested to worry which of their possessions went back west with them, and which were sent to the market or donated to the poor. She had already said to ‘Musa’, short for Musawethu, which things were important to her, and she wished that he would mind the rest himself and leave her to lament her son peacefully.

“Ma’am?” Thando, the senior herdsman of the farm, and one of Welcome’s favourites, came to her. In his hand was a gold pocket watch. He gave it to her and shrugged.

“Found this in his bottom drawer, Ms Dudu. Be a dishonour to lose it now, after all these years.”

She nodded but she didn’t bother to take the watch from her husband’s foreman. It sat in the man’s work-toughened palm the same way it had sat when Musa’s father had given it to him, and Musa passed it on to Welcome on his sixteenth birthday.

“Well, son,” he had said. “Guess this is yours, now.”

The picture of her son’s smile as he received the watch flooded her memory, the dimples which were her own disturbing the lustre flow of his plummy cheeks as he took the prised keepsake.

“Not too quick,” Musa said. “This belongs to you only in trust, son. You know what I mean?”

Welcome nodded seriously, but Musa elucidated anyway. That’s just the way Musa was. He needed to spell every letter out, he made a point to dot every i and to cross every t. That was why he still denied that Welcome was dead. No one saw him, only a hundred rumours, he’d say. But deep in her heart, Dudu was convinced. She hadn’t heard a word from her son for more than a year now.

And she was sure that his son wasn’t without enemies. His prowess in women allowed him to sneak up to more bedroom windows than Dudu liked to imagine. Husbands and dads and brothers all over the area muffled curses at him for messing with their women. “Ms Dudu?” Thando still stood in front of her, his arm still extended, the gold watch still on his palm.

“Take it out of my sight, please. I don’t want to see it. Put it away. Keep it,” she said, her voice a detached whine.

“I’ll keep it for him, Ma’am, if you don’t mind. He’d be deeply livid if he was to return home and never found it.”

Dudu shrugged.

“Thando,” she said quietly, shutting her eyes and leaning back on the chair, “He isn’t coming back. And if he would, he’d find us gone.”

“Aren’t you afraid that it might be a mistake? Won’t you wait a while longer as Musa says?”

“This weird place took everything from me,” she said. “Ripped me off my youth, my health, my children, one after another. Finally, it stole Welcome, the only one I had consoled myself with in seeing him grow up. Then Musa wants to stay? Well, let him. I’ll take the first train to Mpompota come next Friday, and nothing from this world will stop me.”

The squabble had fatigued her. It was obvious that she was dying, but Musa simply wouldn’t say it. It was one of his good intentions as always, to protect her. But he’d failed to stop all the deaths, and the pain and so he wouldn’t be able to stop her now. Doctor Kenny was absurd, too, saying that he understood all she felt and suffered.

She must be really failing her life. How else could she explain Musa’s affirmative to leave this place, the livestock, the horses, and the land? He contended that he left all this because he had no legatee, as if it had been for Welcome’s sake that he had built, from nothing, one of the best producing farms in the south.

Perhaps so, but it had also taken their son’s disappearance, for her husband to appreciate the depth of his love for the boy.

‘Perhaps he’d still be alive,’ she thought. ‘If his father had cared enough to teach him to walk on the right path while he was alive. Yeah, make hay while sun shines.’

***

A motherless baby. Hannah allowed her imagination to float with the wind as she held the Dlamini boys’ nephew in her arms. If only this was her baby; but she understood better than to fantasise herself in the world of ‘if only.’ She had squandered enough time in that world, and its payment had been appalling torture in the end.

Now, she had imprudently consented to keep an eye on the baby while her hosts attended to what they referred to as an important errand. What could she have done? The men were bereaved of their sister, and no one else could mind the baby; but she couldn’t afford to think of him as Mashwa. A baby as fine-looking as he was ought to have a nice name like Patrick, Pat. It had a nice ring to it.

Her thoughts were getting the best of her again, and she reprimanded herself. People rarely have a second chance in this world, and she was aware of that; aware of that better than everyone, maybe. If she couldn’t change the past, she’d better learn from it, at least. The baby in her arms grasped a fistful of her hair and shoved it into his mouth.

“No,” she said softly, unfastening his chubby fingers and kissing his fist in embarrassment. The baby turned to her breast, cuddling her and smacking his mouth as he searched for nourishment.

“No,” she cried again, but this time tears throttled her voice. She was aware how necessary it was for her to leave before this baby stole her heart; the heart she had sealed and locked many years ago. The moment his uncles returned, she had to leave.

She hoped they’d return with Musa. In their somnolent state, she was certain that she could successfully convince them that Musa belonged with his mother. It was a given for every child.

She wiped away a lone tear with the flipside of her hand and blinked back the rest that threatened. She was set to destroy Musa’s father with her bare hands for backing her into this corner to start with. What kind of a father could arrange to sell his own son to a place more backwards than any other on the face of the earth?

‘Even Melethi had TVs now,’ she thought.

Was there any other place here where they buried people outside of cemeteries? She recalled when she had run after Thembi’s babynappers into the Pigg’s Peak Plantations forests and mountains. But then, she’d been close enough to her car to alert the police. She recalled starring down a rifle and being told to ‘get lost’. The police had honoured her for saving Thembi’s life. Thembi was too young to remember her, but Hannah would never forget the hut she had found the baby locked in – dark, grimy, without lighting or running water. And behind the hut, the old family cemetery had stood, a clothesline had run above it, some evidence attesting to the idea that life goes on. But not here, she thought as she touched this, turned that, in the kitchen preparing something for the baby to eat. Here, someone expired; and the moment they returned, with Musa or not, she was leaving. The baby grinned at her as the potato mash in his mouth oozed out.