Parched (3 page)

Sarel never saw the little boy or his parents again. And they never went back to the city.

When the car turned onto the homestead, relief hung in the air like clouds ripe with rain. They were home. They were safe. Sarel's mother clipped bright green spears from the garden, slit them in half, and pressed the gooey underside against the cut, clicking her tongue and smoothing Sarel's sun-bleached hair away from the slicks of tears on her cheeks.

Her mother had always used aloe to soothe a burn or to heal a cut. She had grown the succulents in her garden all year round. When the gourds and climbing beans and sour figs had all bloomed and died back, the aloe stayed. And year after year, as the drought thinned the other plants and cut the crop in half, and then in half again, the aloe remained.

Sarel pushed herself up off the stones. Maybe the aloe had survived the fire. She could get some for Ubali, make him better. Make him stop licking.

Sarel scuffed up the stairs and through the burnt yard, shading her eyes. The air was thick with smoke, and a layer of ash smothered the ground. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe.

North and east of the homestead, the earth was burned black, straight to the horizon, where a hazy smudge marked the city skyline. To the west stretched bare desert, blurred by undulating waves of hot air. A dry riverbed cut a trench in the dirt to the south, ending abruptly at the base of a low rise encircled by layers of chalky minerals that had leached out of the rocks beneath. The hill was crowned by a copse of sweet thorn trees—the only green things for miles.

Where the house had been, a few black lumps rose out of the char: a cooking stove, the backless frame of a metal chair, a pile of jumbled mattress coils, and a crumbling stack of chimney bricks. At the base of the stove was a lidded jar: a familiar, stout shape. Flour. Sarel's stomach roared.

She waded through the char and hefted the crockery onto her hip. Kneeling in the dirt, she pried open the lid. Like everything else, it was black inside. Sarel closed her lips over a lump of singed flour and ground it between her teeth, tilting her head back to force the paste down her throat. Her eyes watered, and she had to clamp her hand against her mouth to keep from spitting it out again.

The pups padded up to her and whuffled in her face, licking traces of flour from her fingers and thrusting their noses into the jar. The garden. There might be something to eat in the garden. Sarel wavered to her feet and kept walking.

Behind the blackened foundation, a knock-kneed windmill listed in the breeze. The dry well beside it was filled with dust. Beyond the new graves, in the middle of the yard, the kennel stood upright, glinting dully in the sun.

The roof had burned and fallen through the gaps in the chainlink. The dogs panted without any shade, their ribs pumping like bellows. Their tin watering trough was coated with a layer of ash.

The garden lay to the south of the kennel. Sarel's footsteps stuttered as the black ribs of tilled earth came into view. Ruined. Like everything else. The ache in her chest began to burn hot and hard. Tears seeped out of her eyes, cutting trails through the soot that caked her cheeks.

Nandi pressed against her and rubbed the underside of her jaw against the girl's hip. Sarel dropped her hand to worry the soft edges of Nandi's ear between her fingers.

“Nandi.” Sarel's voice cracked and she slumped to the ground, holding the dog's face between her palms. Her mouth worked, her breath coming hard and ragged. “What do we do?”

The wild aloe grew out on the flats. She wasn't supposed to go beyond the post-and-rail fence that wound around the homestead without one of her parents by her side. She was too young to be out there alone. But all that was left of the fence was a circle of singed holes in the ground.

This place was her home. And they were her dogs now.

She would have to do this, all of it, alone.

Musa ran through the coal-black night. He tripped over loose stones and discarded scrap metal that littered the clogged city streets, ducking in and out of shadows. He fell again and again, until the skin on his knees and palms was ragged and bloody. He ran for hours over pavement that was buckled and potholed from years of neglect.

Musa's breath scraped through his parched throat—so loud he was sure the sound would give him away and lead the men with their guns right to him. Through any door, behind every tattered window shade, someone could be watching, ready to turn him in. They would hand him over for a single bottle of water.

So Musa ran and didn't look back. The air rattled through his lungs, and his every pulse stabbed at the sores on his ankles and wrists.

When the sky over his shoulder began to pale, the ruined pavement and the press of ramshackle buildings gave way to packed-dirt roads and a few scattered shacks. Musa kept running until he crested a low rise, his feet stuttering at the sudden absence of anything man-made. He stopped, swaying on his feet, and turned to look back the way he had come.

The city filled his vision, the smoggy sunrise bleeding through the gaps between buildings. He squinted, looking for a plume of dust, listening for the sound of an engine revving. But the air was still, and the city, for now, was quiet.

Maybe no one was chasing him. Maybe Sivo had died back there.

Musa turned to face the dusty wasteland that stretched to the horizon: brown dirt, brown grasses, and a few rocky brown hills. Even the trees were brown: leafless skeletons jutting out of the cracked earth.

His body begged for rest, but he couldn't stop. Not yet. Musa limped into the desert.

When the afternoon sun was at its hottest, when he was moments away from collapse, Musa's footsteps led him to the half-buried roots of a baobab tree. He looked up through a tangle of branches casting a web of shade over him.

A thread of song scraped past his throat, lifting into the air and smoothing the pain from his face. Scraps of a lullaby—Dingane's favorite.

I'll find it for you, Umama,
Dingane had said each time their mother finished the song.
I'll find the secret of the baobab tree.

But it was the younger brother who had heard the water stored in caverns inside the massive trunk.

Was that why, Dingane?

Musa laid a hand against the bark.

He could hear it now, a tinny hum tickling the base of his skull. Musa plucked a long, hollow blade of brown grass and worked it into a crease in the bark. He sucked until his cheeks ached, sucked until he thought he would faint. Until water began to trickle onto his tongue.

He drank, his legs wobbling beneath him.

Musa left the straw in place and slung a leg over a low-lying branch. He climbed into the canopy, settled into a wide notch, and sank into sleep.

The aloe grew in the west. Sarel remembered that much from before.

She walked away from the homestead alone. The sky before her was smeared with the grays and butter yellows of dawn. The wind plucked at her tattered cotton shirt and teased the frayed ends of her shorts. Her hands were jammed into fists, her bottom lip caught between her front teeth.

Before she had taken a dozen strides, Nandi loped up to her, tail swinging, nose lifted to catch the scent of the place they were headed. The pups hurried to follow. And then the whole pack was with Sarel, trotting up or falling back, but always surrounding her.

Just like before.

It had been their habit every day, Sarel and her mother, to set out into the desert with a small jug of water, a rifle, and at least five full-grown dogs. Sarel would carry a satchel over her shoulder, the wind lifting it away from her back and cooling the sweaty skin beneath. Coming home, it would bang against the backs of her knees with each step, full of the tough-skinned fruit or tubers they'd gathered.

Every bush and blooming grass was a lesson. Sarel's mother taught her which cacti held water, which grasses made for the tightest weave, what trees had long taproots reaching deep down to hidden pools of water. She learned the secrets of soil and rocks. How limestone, dolomite, and sandstone pulled rainwater down, tunneled it through tiny pores and stored it underground, away from the greedy sun.

Sarel and her mother had always walked away from the city, away from trails others might be wandering. And they never went far. They were out and back every day before the sun was even a quarter of the way across the sky. Her father met them at the gate each time, with a fresh cup of water and a kiss for them both.

They shared the water, drinking it slowly, one sip at a time. In this desert, in this drought, it was good to be careful. No one knew how long the water would last.

Sometimes they found wild onions for dinner; sometimes they brought home a handful of seeds or a shoot wrapped in a damp towel. Always they waited until the sun dragged its heat below the horizon to tuck their treasures into the garden soil and dribble a teaspoon of dishwater over each one.

As Sarel walked, her mother's instructions came back to her, warning her away from burrows and snake holes in the dirt, nudging her toward hollows in the ground where the water might be close enough to the surface to feed the roots of a hardy desert plant.

Without the hoofed animals carving their steps into the hard ground each day, the wind and tumbling weeds had blurred the familiar paths. Sarel and the dogs returned to the homestead that afternoon with nothing but dusty throats and blistered feet. All she wanted was to dip back belowground, to lie on the cool grotto stones and forget about the aloe. Forget about everything.

But the dogs were thirsty. So she shook the soot out of their drinking trough and wiped it clean with her palm. She pulled a pair of tin buckets out of the charred rubble where the shed had been and banged them together until most of the ash was gone. Sarel stepped onto the well-worn track between the kennel and the grotto, skirting the rocky hummocks that marked her parents' graves.

Tiptoeing down the spiraling stairs, Sarel let the wire bucket handles fall into the crease of her elbow and trailed her fingers along the pebbled walls. Her head dropped belowground, her eyelids fluttering closed as cool air, thick with memory, washed over her skin.

Breathing deep the smell of wet stones, she stepped to the edge of the shallow pool. She lifted a tin ladle off a hook in the wall and dipped it into the water, then filled her buckets slowly. Light flooding down the stairwell bounced against the water and rippled over the mosaic walls.

Her father had made the grotto for her mother. He had dug down into the earth, carving stairs that curved around the edge of a dusty cave, and mortaring stones, bits of pottery, and mirrored shards into the walls. Sarel and her mother and father had come down often to hide from the heat of the day, the sound of their low voices and laughter bouncing against the curved walls.

With the buckets no more than three-quarters full, Sarel scuffed back up the stairs. She glanced around as her head peeked aboveground. But no one was there, just Chakide and Bheka, panting in the heat, ears back and chests heaving.

Sarel's shoulders hunched forward under the weight of the water, and her brow pinched in concentration. Her feet carried her in a slow glide so she wouldn't spill a single drop.

Sarel emptied the buckets into the trough and stepped away through a thicket of wagging tails as the dogs rushed forward to dip their heads in for a long drink.

They licked their wet jowls as they pulled up from the trough, coming to rub a jaw against her ribs or to duck an ear under her fingers. Sarel set down her empty buckets, and the ache under her ribs eased just a little.

She left the dogs under the glaring sun and slipped back down the curving stairs. She lay on the cool grotto stones and pinned her arms against her ears to muffle the sound of Ubali's licking. Sarel felt the weight of a warm body leaning into the curve of her spine and she turned into it, pressing her face into Nandi's fur.

Musa stayed in the baobab tree for two days, wandering in and out of memory, of nightmare, drinking until the skin no longer hung from his face like that of an old man, until the ripping pains in his belly eased.

Slowly, the memories ordered themselves, his mind sifting through images he had shut out all those weeks in the darkness, when chains shackled him every day to the same filthy corner. Memories of his mother holding him around the waist and splashing a precious cupful of water over his face. Placing dowsing sticks in his hands and lifting his forearms to just the right height, saying, “Steady, now. Listen, my little Musa. Listen.”

He remembered running to his brother, Dingane, with the news: “I can hear it! I can hear the water—just like Umama!” And stumbling away, nose gushing with blood, blubbering, bewildered by Dingane's burst of anger.

He saw his mother lying on her bed, her face gray and slick with sweat, her mouth opening and closing again, as if there were something she needed to tell him. He saw the door burst open and burly men in Tandie colors dragging Dingane by the collar into the room, shouting, pointing at Musa. He remembered Dingane's nod, and his wide, panicked eyes. And then the rough hands, grabbing Musa and dragging him out the door, pulling him away from his mother's outstretched arms.

He remembered the voice, Dingane's voice, that whispered through the rusted gap in the corner of the shack. Calling his name. Begging for forgiveness. Whispering that Umama hadn't survived the sickness.

Musa held his ribs as sobs shook through him. His eyes burned and his throat ached, but his body couldn't spare any water for tears.

A moth lifted away from the branch above his head, twirling upward, leaving silent trails of dust in its wake.

Each day, the water stored inside the tree sank a little lower. Each day, Musa moved the drinking straw closer and closer to the ground. Even the baobab couldn't hold water forever. He couldn't stay there anyway, in the crown of a tree a half-day's walk from the city.