Come Sunday: A Novel (31 page)

“Amen!” one ex-con applauded. And then another. I think that must be the closest I have ever come to being saved, listening to that pock-faced, yellow-toothed Hawaiian with a cane and flip-flops giving up the glory.

And that’s how I want to remember Jakes, sweeping up the human leftovers along with their scraps of hope, serving them cheapo breakfasts
as though a feast for kings. Giving a kidney to his brother couldn’t have been more typical of him. In exchange, God dished out death—which was typical too, if you ask me.

“I don’t think I can go,” I tell Jenny.

“No one’s asking you to.”

VENGEANCE IS MINE, says the Lord. You get the regret, he might have added instead of the bit about feeding the hungry, even if they happen to be your enemies. Beauty must have got tired waiting for the Lord’s hand to smite her enemies, must have just had it up to here with feeding her enemies. No one knew that Beauty even had enemies, let alone what they had done to become them. Come to think of it, none of us knew much of anything concerning Beauty: not how old she was, nor how it was that she had arrived at my grandmother’s farm the year the Great Drought ended. She never spoke of children or a husband and no one, to my knowledge, asked. That she had a private life was only alluded to once or twice a year when she would walk down my grandmother’s gravel driveway with a small bundle of belongings on her head and not return till a week later smelling of
shakeys
, the fermented beer sold for less than a bottle of milk. That she had any clothes other than the crisply ironed gingham dress with a starched white apron over it and her neat
doek
tied over her hair was debatable. If you never looked down past her modest hemline that would make any Methodist proud, you might mistake Beauty Masinama for a woman of standing. But it was her lace-up shoes, scuffed and worn, that spoke of muddy lean-tos and buckets for toilets, of people who didn’t live on the farm, some of whom should never have dared put a foot on it.

The knitting had been my grandmother’s idea when Beauty, after having a weeklong vacation, returned to the farm with paraffin breath and trembling hands. At first my grandmother warned Beauty about her drinking: “I don’t want this to become a problem,” she said. “Madam doesn’t know anything about my problems,” was Beauty’s retort, and you could have knocked old Edith over with a feather when
she heard it. But my grandmother was not about to give in that easily. Her second suggestion was a trip to the OK Bazaars, a local market, which was to have just the right solution, both to Beauty’s bad habit and my bad attitude.

My problem, as my grandmother put it, was a matter of “cutting my nose off to spite my face.” I could not separate the guilt I felt for how I had treated my mother from the anger I felt toward her, so I was going to knit them tightly together into whatever sweater pattern my grandmother had her heart set on. Who knows what complexities Beauty was going to knit together? Two pairs of aluminum knitting needles and a bucketful of yarn later, Beauty and I cast on identical rows of stitches in the hopes that with steady effort we might produce something akin to the picture on the pattern cover, to say nothing of finding solutions.

Not much more than a dozen rows later, a man who identified himself as “Stompie” came to the back door asking for Beauty. It seemed, then, that one-plain-one-purl was not going to do the job for Beauty. I watched from the kitchen window as she opened the front door of her
kaia
for the man with the yellow eyes and sloping shoulders, and then followed him inside. When they had not emerged half an hour later, I returned to my knitting alone, to replay the conversation my mother and I had on the phone the night before. If I had learned anything from my father, it was how to avoid saying sorry. Even when I had willed myself to call, to say the words I had rehearsed for days, I still could not get past the accusatory tone to anything resembling an apology. I did not want to hear how sick my father was when I asked her when she was going to come fetch me. “Take him to the doctor if he’s that sick; you’re not a nurse!” I had said, even though we both knew he would rather rot than be “some goddamn quack’s pincushion.” Besides, he could not have afforded the medical services, refusing any deductions from his paycheck to profit the insurance business. If there was anyone my father mistrusted more than a doctor, it was an insurance man.

Just then I heard the crunching of gravel and looked up in time to see my mother’s car pull into the driveway. She got out, waved at me
with a grin (yes, that was my mother smiling), and went around to the side of the car. Only then did I notice the passenger. Without his beer belly, my father looked almost healthy as he got out of the car and shaded his eyes against the glare of the tin roof and my wrath. But as he stood stooped in front of me, I could see the sickness strung from his mouth to the gorges where his cheeks once were.

“Been behaving yourself?” my father asked, his breath corpsey. Lovely to see you too, Dad.

If I thought his ailment might do anything to soften his temper, I was wrong. While we all sat stiffly on the
stoep
, it seemed that there wasn’t one thing to talk about that did not involve my father’s bodily functions. “Can’t even have a decent crap anymore,” he announced. “I keep telling her to quit feeding me that goddamn mush!”

By way of explanation, my mother said, “His teeth are getting loose.”

“Because they aren’t put to work anymore! Keep telling her a goddamn steak would sort them out!” It might have been all poop-and-porridge talk had Beauty not walked out with a tray of tea, set it down, taken her usual seat at the crook of the veranda, and picked up her knitting from the basket. That did it.

“You pay your
kaffirs
to sit around all day now, Edith?” he asked my grandmother, staring at Beauty’s unwavering profile.

“Harry, please—” my mother began, but he interrupted her with his raised hand.

“Hey, for all I know my daughter does all the work around here.” When had my father ever considered what I was doing?

“What goes on in this house, Harold, is none of your business,” my grandmother retorted, “and if you cannot choose language suitable for civilized conversations, I must ask you to leave.”

“You have your monkey sitting out here and
I’m
the one not being civilized?” He snorted, then coughed till there was no mistaking the acrid smell of urine.

Beauty stood up to leave.
“Tchini!”
she hissed as she passed my father, who was hobbling to his feet, and for one minute I thought she was going to spit at him, but she walked back into the cool of the
house. It was apparent, then, that the farm was overrun with men—the one in the front with his putrid temper and soiled diaper, and the other still sleeping in Beauty’s
kaia
. The only escape for Beauty was the kitchen, where she paced as though she had one foot in a trapper’s snare.

“I’m sorry, Beauty. She shouldn’t have brought him; I don’t know why she did,” I apologized awkwardly. Beauty muttered a reply in Xhosa, and I caught only one word,
hamba
—“go.” Instead of packing away the dishes on the draining board, she reached for her medicine bag and headed out the back door to the beckoning hill.

TODAY IS SATURDAY and my head is as clear as a scrubbed-up pancake griddle. I call Jenny and tell her I have changed my mind, that I want to go to the funeral.

“I was just headed there; you want me to pick you up on my way?” she volunteers. I can tell she is pleased.

Jenny does not have to ring the doorbell; I am waiting outside, watching Ronnie cut his mother’s lawn with hand shears just slightly bigger than tweezers. Jenny is wearing a black dress and I am glad because I have on black too. “Don’t wear bright colors to my funeral,” I once told her and Theresa when we were sewing purple paraments for Ash Wednesday. “I can’t stand it when people wear flowery prints and bold colors as if we should skip the grieving and move straight on to the rejoicing. I don’t want you rejoicing at my funeral. I want you crying and wailing, and depressed for an unbearably long time.”

“You’d make a good Samoan,” Theresa told me.

But Jenny argued. “We rejoice because we are resurrection people.” Jenny’s favorite event on the Christian calendar is Easter, which accounts much of the time for her disposition as well as her faith. But to me Easter always elbows its way in on Lent, coming before there is time to shake off the weight of guilt, to strip away our regrets until good intentions finally become good deeds.

Now Jenny is quiet and pale, without a soupçon of rejoicing, and
we do not talk till we get to the church. “I’m sitting with her,” she announces, and I nod. Tapa cloths drape the altar rail and are affixed to the pulpit and lectern, and the same gaudy bouquets are back again. Jakes is lying in a black coffin four feet from the front pew where his widow is steadied between her two sons, their heads hung low. Jenny walks to the front, sits next to Theresa, and pulls Tess onto her lap. I take a bulletin and find a pew near the back where a few ex-cons prop each other up. Greg, who does not see me, is seated across the aisle next to Petal. The service begins and we stand for the opening hymn, but the verse is interrupted by a shriek and then angry wailing. Petal’s baby, tipped over on the pew no doubt from trying to reach for a toy, has bumped her head. It is Greg who picks her up, hurrying to the foyer to minimize the disturbance. She will not be pacified, and all four verses and a prayer later, she still wails. Finally, Petal makes her way to the cries.

LATE THAT NIGHT, when we were all asleep—my mother in the bed next to mine, my father on a cot in Oupa’s old study—the wailing began. I thought it was a wounded animal, or a baby, until the cussing started. Looking out the window that faced the
kopje
from which Beauty late in the day had returned, I saw her in front of the chicken run,
sjambok
in hand, wild as a warthog. Before her, on his knees, was Stompie, bloodied and pleading for mercy. We ran out to the yard and watched in incomprehension as Beauty tore open Stompie’s flesh with each crack of that deadly whip. Her unrelenting screams terrified me, and as I clung to my mother’s arm I wondered how it was that Beauty, naked except for a tatty slip, hair all sprung out of its clips like Medusa’s snakes, could be this thrashing monster.

She seemed not to hear my grandmother’s reprimand or notice her audience, whose numbers had swelled with the neighboring farmhands. It was my father who sprang into action, dragging the garden hose from my grandmother’s hydrangea bush to the side of the house and spraying the writhing couple like a pair of dogs. Drenched, Beauty
turned her mad gaze on my father, and the murderous gleam was still there.

“Ndiya kubetha,”
she foamed.

“What’d you say,
kaffir
girl?” he demanded, throwing down the hose and pushing up his sleeves. I might have translated for him, might have said, “She says she’ll beat you—kill you,” if not for the deepest desire that she keep her word. And with one quick flick of her thick wrist, the wrist that had wrung chicken necks for Sunday dinners, Beauty’s whip etched on my father’s smug cheek a bright red gash.