A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

I get up and stagger out to find the children. I have no idea how long I’ve been sleeping and am now having a paranoid anxiety attack — thinking they drugged me so they could take the children.

I find everyone not far from where I left them: Nate on a ladder, working with the villagers to fix a water heater; Ricardo playing with a group of boys; Ashley helping to cook dinner. It is about as wholesome and bucolic as you can imagine.

“You’re sweating,” Ashley says, and it is then that I see I am drenched in sweat, that during my nap I have soaked through my clothing.

I nod and retreat without saying anything. I return to the school, to our rooms, and take a shower. Londisizwe finds me there. “How is it going? Has my umuthi begun its work?”

I nod.

“Are you okay?”

I nod again.

For dinner, everyone else eats a beautiful feast. I am given a bowl of porridge and another cup of tea. This time it is a greener, grassier tea. I drink it quickly and almost immediately throw up.

“I must have been allergic to something in it,” I say, apologizing to Londisizwe.

He shakes his head. “That tea makes everyone throw up.”

I look at him as if to ask, then why would you give it to people to drink?

“If I told you you’d throw up after drinking the tea, would you have drunk it? In a little while, I will bring you another tea, and I promise it will not make you vomit.”

After dinner, there are fireworks. Sofia has hired a pyrotechnic team to put on a show. The children’s faces are filled with delight. Even the older people have rarely if ever seen fireworks. Londisizwe brings me a new cup of tea, and this one tastes sweet and pleasant, and I drink it quickly, in part because I am distracted and just want to get on with things.

Explosions fill the sky. Red peonies, blue rings, golden dome-shaped weeping willows, fire-hot chrysanthemums, spiders, heavy golden glittering Kamuros fire up into the night, like snowflakes, like a bouquet of fine flowers, like gems or shooting stars. I wonder how far away they can be seen, and even though it seems against the grain of the celebration, I wonder what it costs.

As the fireworks whistle and hum, crackle and bang, my stomach begins to rumble, flatus starring ancient archetypical gases, primitive evolutionary elements — carbon dioxide sulphur, methane, ammonia. Enormous bilious clouds that I imagine are colored blue and green and look like gigantic, unevenly formed iridescent soap bubbles rise up out of me, wobbling, expanding — exploding. Never as scatologically invested as some, I am impressed by what is coming out of me; at one point it feels timed to the fireworks.

The show ends with the traditional bright-white salute of fireworks, low to the ground, with an enormously loud report echoing off the hills. As the white smoke billows away, each child is given a fiery-hot sparkler to wave through the air. I watch vigilantly.

And then there is ice cream — enormous cardboard bins brought from Durban of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, which spent the night on dry ice. There are children here who have never had ice cream before, and again it is just an amazing thing to see children and adults enjoying themselves so much.

That night when we return to our quarters the children complain they can’t bear to be around me: I smell disgusting. I drag my bed into the hallway of the school and debate going outside, and would except that I am afraid of the dark.

The next day after breakfast we give out the backpacks and pencils and all the things Sofia ordered as gifts. The children are polite, grateful, trained to curtsy to the white people. They are gentle, a little fragile, as though their right to life is still precarious. One of the boys gives Ricardo a tin truck he’s made out of soda cans; the girls give Ashley a beaded necklace and a small basket; Sakhile gives Nate an old tribal headdress made of animal skin and beads; and then he hands me a small pouch that contains an old piece of rhino horn filled with a magical ingredient that gives warriors invincibility. “It is mixed with animal fat and rubbed into the wrists. It is good for sex, gives dogs a hard-on.”

“Thank you,” I say.

Londisizwe brings me a kit containing the supplies I will need for the next three days — teas labeled for breakfast, lunch, and dinner — and reminds me not to eat any animal flesh while I am taking the teas and to drink a lot of water. He also gives me some teas to bring back to America. “Drink this one the day you get back,” he says, “it will help loosen what you are still holding. And then drink these once a day for three days — and then as needed when you start to feel like you are becoming your old version again. They will free you.” Just before I go, he brings one more cup of tea, “for the road.” This one tastes vile, like horseshit that has been soaked in beer and left for days — it is fermented, dark, foul; I have a very hard time drinking it.

“Perhaps I made a mistake,” he says, taking the cup back when I am done. “I put some cinnamon in and tried to make it more pleasant — I should have left it as it was.”

Two Land Rovers arrive to pick us up; there are white men at the wheel who introduce themselves as Dirk Kruger and Pieter Goosen, and two black men who are helpers are introduced only as Kopano and Josia and take our bags.

We go. The village recedes into the distance — we watch for as long as we can; I’m sure everyone there is still outside waving. The children begin to cry, first Nate, then Ash, and finally Ricardo, who says, “Why am I crying? I am happy and sad at the same time.”

“It’s like when it’s raining and there’s a rainbow,” Ashley says.

What to do with the strange sense of having been there and gone so quickly? It feels as though we haven’t done enough, and yet what more should we do? This is the life of the village; does it need to be fixed?

We spend hours talking about the village and about the people we met. Nate is thrilled to have shared this world, and that things went well. The guy driving the car is trying to participate by saying things like “So you had a good time, eh?”

We drive for a couple of hours before coming to the waterfall, which is truly spectacular. “This one breaks even the hardest of nuts,” Pieter says as we get out of the car. “If you’re game, we can go for a bit of a hike,” he says. And on cue, Josia and Kopano open the back of the second Rover and get out walking sticks, ropes, and harnesses for the children.

Overcome with stomach cramps, I excuse myself and go into the woods. I have diarrhea and then move to another spot and have more and then more. In the end, I am holding on to the branch of a tree, my pants completely off and wrapped around my neck and shoulders as I involuntarily projectile-squirt shit into the woods. My body empties and seizes and empties and seizes. “You all right in there?” one of the guides shouts every couple of minutes. “Make sure nothing comes up and bites you on the ass.”

“I’m fine,” I weakly call back, not because I am but because there is just nothing to say. “Why don’t you go on ahead without me,” I suggest.

“We’ll take the kiddies for a walk and meet you back here in an hour,” one of them says. “I’ll leave the car unlocked. There’s water — be sure you drink when you’re finished in there.”

When they come back, they are all glowing. “It was amazing, we did belaying and climbed up this amazing rock,” Ricardo says.

“The waterfall was so beautiful, I could feel the spray on my face,” Ashley says. “And I saw a rainbow — isn’t that cool? Because I said the word ‘rainbow’ this morning, when we left the village, and there it was. …”