Free A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto Page B

openly to one another, they agree to drive into Klipspring. At the Retief Hotel they will sit in the comfort of the dining room, with its linen tablecloths and heavy silverware, with the framed prints of faraway landscapes on the walls. And there they will talk of other things and not of death.
    On the hillside, next to the grave, Tembi does not join the wailing of the women or the singing of hymns. She wears a white blouse under a dark pinafore, and around her waist is the light blue sash that her mother wore on Sundays. A light blue doek is knotted turban-like on her head.
    Tembi’s face is impassive, rigid, and her large brown eyes show nothing of her sorrow. Something in her heart prevents any outward expression of grief. Neither sorrow nor regret shows, but in her heart is the realization that tears are finished now. She watches the spadefuls of reddish earth as they fall onto the coffin. It is good, rich earth, suitable forgrowing. She thinks of the seeds in the earth and how they come up each season after the winter. Why should a human soul not do the same? Will her mother grow into life again in that rich soil, like the seeds, if tears fall upon them like rain? The thought is childish, she tells herself, and she is no longer a child. She can never be a child again. The time of childish things is finished, and there is no growing of souls in the earth when the winter is done.
    In the kraal the slaughtered calf is on the spit. There are many to feed. The jugs of milky sorghum beer are passed around. The Reverend Kumalo doffs his fine sky blue robes to reveal an ordinary business suit underneath, a little shiny at the seat and with a discreet patch on one elbow. He receives the envelope of banknotes, passed on from Ben Laurens via Joshua the bossboy. There is also a bottle of brandy and two plump chickens given by Grace’s husband, Elias.
    The women hang up their hats and put on aprons to prepare the food. The men roll cigarettes or light pipes and drink the milky beer that is passed around in gourds.
    Tembi stands a little apart and looks at her father. Her father is here. But who is he? This man who sends money, who pats her cheek affectionately, who visits once a year, this stranger of her blood?
    Even before the Relocation he had become a stranger. When she was but a child he went to work away from home, leaving early on Monday mornings with some of the other men from the village for his job in the sugar mill, and because the hours were long and the mill was a great distance away, he shared a room in the town there, only returning to his home on the weekends. And then he was tired, and wanted to sit in the sun or tend his small vegetable plot.
    After the Relocation there was no work, nor was there farming. The land was too dry and too hard to take the seeds. Already some of the men had gone to the mines in E’Goli, the city of gold, because when there is no work there are always the mines. Elias left to work in the gold mines in Johannesburg. But in E’Goli a man must live in a hostel with other men, and send his money home, and only visit his family during the weeks allotted to him. And if he stays away longer than his allotted time, or wants more days with his family, then he loses his place in the mine, for there arealways others waiting. Some men take town-wives whom they can visit on a Sunday, for who can be alone fifty weeks of the year? Other families are created, and men become strangers to their wives and their children. Yet when asked, a man will say that this place or that place in the far country is still his home. But Elias only knows his home for two weeks in the year, and the home that he thinks of is now in that place called memory. On this farm called Kudufontein he is a visitor; he knows this as he receives the condolences of those who live in the kraal. His home is not here.
    The sorghum beer makes him a little drunk, it clouds his grief and softens the thoughts he has about what his life is now