Come Sunday: A Novel (32 page)

It was a curse she pronounced then, though none of us could understand what she was saying at the time. But to see her pointing her finger in a sweeping arc across the farmland, to hear her angry chant and the gasps of the villagers, was enough. To my father she was just another bitch in a dogfight, but to Africa’s people she was their
sangoma
calling on the might of the ancestors, and nothing could be more powerful. Vengeance, that one night in Africa, was not the Lord’s but Beauty Masinama’s.

I INTENDED to pay my respects to Jakes, to remember he had done a decent job of charity even if his roofing skills weren’t worth a damn. But I am distracted by the sounds of Petal’s fussy child, by the dormant urge to comfort a child, by the empty space where her need to be comforted should be. As I join the condolence line a few people from the end, I hear my mother saying very clearly, as though she were talking to my father on the
stoep
, Please. Be nice. Nice things are what I hear the people in front of me saying, the things you say at funerals: I am so sorry for your loss; he was a remarkable man; we are going to miss him so much; if there is anything we can do. Then I hear the blood drumming a beat in my ears, the war cry of fed-up-tired, and the urge to smite comes charging. Suddenly Theresa and I are face-to-face.

Her expression registers shock and then softens, as though she understands why I am here. We are even, she must think; we have both lost. Truce. But she is wrong and wrong again. Why the tracks of grief
down the sides of her cheeks don’t stop me, I do not know. Or the briefest of gestures: her hands lifting to embrace me. Surely I recognize that her eyes are empty rooms with burnt-out lightbulbs—God knows I stare at a couple of them every morning in the mirror. But I stand before them now and bore into that darkness, unafraid, my quick tongue a flickering
sjambok
. I remember Beauty so vividly. Not the servant, but the avenger. I envision her wet, swaying black bosom heaving from the effort of vengeance. So mighty is the urge to smite my enemy, to force vinegar to her parched lips, that I could be Beauty.

“Damn you, Theresa!” I curse. “Cleo’s dead because of you!” And just like Stompie, she doubles over, winded by my words.

When her eyes find mine, they are hooded. “I, too, have been looking for someone to blame,” she wheezes.

“DON’T LOOK, my girl,” my grandmother insisted, tugging at my elbow after the cops had broken Beauty’s nose. “You have seen enough for one night.” But I still had to look, to see my father hobbling up to the group of farmhands, threatening and swearing till they dispersed into the bush; to see policemen clubbing at Beauty’s back, her legs kicking out behind her till she had been shoved in the back of the van; to see how frantic my mother became.

I broke free from my grandmother’s grip and walked toward my mother while the policemen hoisted Stompie’s bloodied body into the back. “Perhaps we should uncuff them and let them at it,” the one laughed.

“Save us the effort,” snorted the other, and they tipped their hats at my grandmother before getting into the front of the van, as though she had baked them scones for tea.

“Mom!” I called, but she did not pay any attention to me.

“Beauty!” my mother cried, and in reply the face we all had come to love peered out from the barred back window. Just as the van pulled away she spoke to my mother, who had commenced a little jog to keep up with her words.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” Beauty called out to her. “Give us this day our daily bread.”

IF THERE IS A HELL, it might well be a church basement parking lot and I will be assigned to it. Abandoned cars that the finance committee will not pay to have towed away, the piss smell in the corner next to the elevator, the rotting debris in the garbage cans that the custodian has to be reminded to empty. The scene of rushed lunchtime fellatio in red pickups by women who look to be twelve; drug deals, oil spills, spiderwebs the size of afghans, and fluorescent bulbs on the blink. Jenny finds me on my haunches next to her car, having heaved my breakfast at the tires of the silver SUV blocking her in.

“I am not going for another hour or so,” Jenny says tersely. I stand up. “You will have to find your own way home.” Her jaw is set just so, her hands on her hips, and I know she is expecting me to say something. What do I tell her, this friend of Easter? That you nail someone to a tree because you can’t admit it should be you up there?

“I’ll walk,” I tell her, and turn to leave, but Jenny’s anger wants an audience.

“There might have been a different time, Abbe. There was no reason for you to say it now.”

“I expect you are right,” I reply, turning to face her.

“You should have gotten that out of your system a long time ago; Lord knows she tried to give you the opportunity. But not now. Now it’s time to move on. Do you understand me? Just move on before you change completely into someone no one can put up with.”

“I am someone else,” I say, but Jenny will have none of it.

“You
wish
you were someone else, maybe, but you’re not. You are still Abbe and you are still going to have to deal with what’s happened. Blaming other people is not going to bring her back.”

I want to tell her she is right, so we can get this over with, but instead, I offer her only my obstinate silence.

She sighs. “We all miss Cleo, Abbe, and we all have regrets. We all
wish we could have said or done something different so it didn’t happen the way it did. But all the wishing in the world is not going to change anything. See, but you’re still here and that’s like having a piece of her. It’s all we’ve got left. So please, Abbe, if there’s any part of you that’s going to change, don’t let it be that part.” When I still do not answer, she sighs once more, shakes her head, and walks away.

Jenny is right, but she also could not be more wrong. Cleo, every bit pure, held back none of her brightness from the world, and when she died, whatever sparks of it were in me went with her. I have only my own light by which to make my way, a light so dim it might as well be from that sick moon the night Beauty was taken away. The light that cast only enough of a glow to show how the slain were also the slayers, how the victims were also the villains.

PILGRIM IS ON THE DOORMAT when I get home, a lazy paw on the wing of a female cardinal struggling to flop away from his grasp.

“Pilgrim!” I shout, and slap him several times before he releases his prey. The bird’s beak opens and closes in silent yelps. As I cup my hand around her I can feel her rapid heartbeat. She rests her head on the top of my finger, and I head out to the garage where the cage is stored.

I asked Greg to stop bringing injured baby birds home from the church after the fifth one died in my hand. It was too much to bear. From their nests in the big royal poinciana, they fell with such regularity you would think that the parents, after all that effort, would be a little more vigilant about their offspring. But the chicks plummeted to their crippled, exposed existence on the walkway, flapping around in the hot sun till a cat’s claw or Greg’s hand found them. He would put the baby bird in the cage, but it was I who removed it and placed it on my chest and chanted prayers to save its life. Not once did they work. “Leave them in the cage at your office,” I told him finally.

I put this female cardinal in the cage. Hearing the phone ring, I leave the bird to die in peace, and head back inside to answer it.

“Hello?” I answer.

“
Mevrou
Elizabeth Deighton?” echoes a woman with a thick South African accent.

“Yes?”

“Please hold the line for Mr. Pietrus Slabbert,” she instructs. A beep-beep, and then I hear my grandmother’s attorney bellow across the continents.

“Elizabeth, how are you,
my klein blommetjie
?”

“Piet, you old
doring
!”

He laughs, never tiring of being called a thorn. “Good news: we have a buyer for the farm. I have an offer of eight million rand on my table,” he says.

“For cow pastures?” I ask incredulously.

“Not for long.”

“They know about the orchard and the soil?”

“These guys are developers from Johannesburg,
skattie
, they couldn’t care how
vrot
the soil is as long as they can pack on top of it a ton of concrete and a flashy sign that says Kabbeljou Resort and Spa. We’re talking five-star luxury here.”

“Oh my gosh, Piet, that’s great! What do I need to do?”

“Get Rhiaan to give you power of attorney and catch the next plane out here to sign the papers. They have given us a week.”

“That’s crazy—everyone’s on spring break. Getting a flight anytime before Easter is going to be near impossible.”

“Do what you can,” he says before hanging up. I look around my house. “I might get to keep you yet,” I whisper.

Supper is the avocado from Mrs. Chung’s tree and a cup of tea, taken during my phone call to Rhiaan.

“Can’t you go back and sign the papers?” I ask, but he tells me he is already behind his editor’s schedule, that he has to be in New York with his agent and publisher next week to discuss a promotional tour for his new material.

“What’s wrong with you going?” he asks.

“Two things, actually. First off, I don’t have the money for a ticket, and second, I’d really rather not go and face all those old ghosts.”

“In matters of finance I am only too happy to assist. Consider it a return on my investment. But as to the matter of ghosts, let me remind you of Dickens.”

“What does he have to do with it?”

“In Dickens’s stories, old ghosts always have things their hauntees must hear.”

Before bed, I go out to the garage to dispose of the little bird. Quite incredibly she is sitting on the cage’s perch. She looks at me without blinking. I’ll be darned, I think, and return to the house to fetch her a little tray of water and a tiny piece of daily bread.