Free Come Sunday: A Novel by Isla Morley

listening!
    It was anticipated that black boys would grow up to be troublemakers, recruits for the feared Umkhonto we Sizwe , but when white kids caused trouble with their college campus sit-ins, their threats of civil disobedience, the fathers of South Africa were quite at a loss. “This country is going to the dogs,” my dad would snarl, watching on TV as SADF troops fired tear gas into the college crowds, “and it doesn’t help a goddamn inch when kaffir -loving Commie buggers like your son encourage these terrorists! Think they know everything! Well, let me tell you something, when he goes into the army they’ll knock the bloody shit out of him. That’s what he needs, not some limp-wrist professor spoon-feeding him a pack o’ lies!” Did she ever argue with that? All I remember is her serving dinner, washing the dishes, and cleaning the counters, and the more he fumed the more she scrubbed. She would stop only when Rhiaan came home from varsity with a sackload of laundry and a fistful of poems for her to glue in a scrapbook.
    “I don’t know that I would agree with that,” Rhiaan now argues.
    “You weren’t there, Rhiaan. Things changed; she changed.”
    “I was still around, just not to the same extent. But Mom and I talked on the phone. She told me things.”
    “She told you things you wanted to hear.”
    “That’s not so. Mom told me things she couldn’t tell anyone else. Not Dad, not you.” And it is always like this when we speak of the past:Rhiaan rewriting our family history from my mother’s letters. If I so much as hint that she might have been less than honest with him, he gets very quiet and looks as if I have jabbed him with a hatpin. The most we have been able to do is concede that each owns a piece of our mother, a piece that, try as we might to make it otherwise, does not line up snugly with the other.
    “All I am saying is she didn’t have to tell me anything; I was living with it,” I say.
    “I think part of being a good mother—a good parent—is choosing between which things you tell your children and which you don’t. You are not going to blurt out things to your child, even if you think she is old enough to understand, when there’s a damn good chance it is going to pull the rug out from under her.”
    “It’s just better to have secrets then, is it?”
    “Would you tell Cleo all your secrets?” Sometimes people mistake my openness for transparency, but not my brother. Rhiaan knows there are places I tuck things away, and behind labels like “openness” is as good a place as any.
    It is an unfair answer to his winning question, but I give it anyway: “Well, we will never know, will we?”
    “Come here,” he says, and I feel my brother’s arms close around me, concluding the first conversation I have had in days. Maybe it is because Rhiaan is threaded through my past that I can talk to him, or maybe it is because I know he is not going to respond with any religious platitudes.
    Jenny walks out. “Don’t hate me for this, but I have lunch ready—if you’d rather wait, that’s fine with me. It will keep.” Rhiaan rubs his stomach. “And I think your husband might need some reinforcement.”
    “Oh?”
    “He’s on the phone to your mother-in-law and it doesn’t sound good.”
    It never does. “Give us a few minutes,” I tell her.
    “You’re lucky to have a friend like Jenny,” Rhiaan says when she has gone back inside. “Wouldn’t Dad be pleased to see you finally have ablack woman in your kitchen fixing your meals?” He means it as a joke, as a dig at our father’s racist ways, but it just resurrects all the old feelings.
    My father, an impatient man even at the front end of a twelve-hour day, became unrestrained after Rhiaan left for college. There were brooding silences that lasted for weeks, interspersed only by the rat-a-tat-tat of his curt insults. If my mother made the mistake of speaking during the eight o’clock news broadcast, if the