Free A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto Page A

reeds. For why should the river laugh on such a day, and why should the birds sing? The women wail, and in their midst is Tembi, who neither wails nor cries but walks in silence.
    At the rear of the procession as it wends its way up from the riverbank to the cemetery near the koppie come the white man and the white woman. A little apart from the rest. Strangers here. He wears a dark suit and tie and carries his hat loose in his hand like the other men. The woman is dressed in a sober, dark blue dress with a white lace trim at the sleeves. Her handbag is black and she has draped a rectangle of black gauze acrossher hair. She walks with some difficulty on the rough track, the heels of her shoes catching in the uneven ground.
    The procession makes its way up from the river, across a field, and to the foot of the small hill where the cemetery of the people rests. Here the dead of the farm cease their labors. And here another place in the earth has been prepared.
    The women sing.
In the land of ageless days, lies a valley four-square
    It shall never pass away and there is no night there.
    Ku yosulw’ inyembezi, nokufa nezinsizi
    Ayibalwa iminyaka, ubusuk’ abukho.
    God shall wipe away all tears, there’s no death, no pain, nor fears
    And they count not time by years, for there is no night there.
    The procession halts while the coffin is hauled down from the cart. The hymn singing ceases.
    The Reverend Kumalo stands with his head bowed and his eyes upon his Bible until silence falls. He makes a gesture with his head towards the waiting men. The casket is lowered, the soil is heaped upon it.
    The Reverend Kumalo speaks a short prayer and then looks towards the white man expectantly. Ben Laurens is not a religious man; he attends the church in Klipspring on Sundays, but only out of a desire not to offend his neighbors, who consider church attendance a sign of a man’s moral standing. He realizes now as he steps forward that he knows no prayer suitable for the occasion. Jumbled fragments heard in church move through his head, mixed with bits of poems and psalms learned at school. He is one of those men who never thinks about God, or the scope of the infinite, or the difference between what he knows and what is unknown in the universe. Privately, he thinks of religion as a childish activity. There is birth and there is death. In between is life for the living and that is the end of it.
    But at this moment he must say something to these faces watching him—expecting him, he assumes, to define why and how death came, andwhat can be done about it. He tries to remember what was said at that other funeral he attended, when Märit’s parents were buried. So far from here, in such different soil. He can recall only a portion of a psalm, and he recites those words that he remembers.
    “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me…Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the rest of my days, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’”
    Silence follows this recitation. The faces that look at his are neither friendly nor hostile. Ben turns to the Reverend Kumalo, who nods his head slowly in approval.
    “Grace was a good woman,” Ben says. “May she rest in peace.” He has no other words to offer.
    A moment of silence follows, a long moment, before Ben realizes what is required of him now—his absence. He seeks out the faces of the daughter, Tembi, and the husband, Elias, and inclines his head to each of them, then he turns and takes his wife’s arm and they depart.
    The farmer and his wife walk back alone across the field to their house behind the trees, while the funeral party makes its way to the kraal, where the mourners will mourn. Because the farmer and his wife feel themselves strangers here today, on their own land, because they have a sense of not belonging here today, although they do not acknowledge it