When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (21 page)

Was it something
about
the children?

About
one
of the children?

Was it about
him?

Eh!

What had he done wrong?

He began to cast his mind back over the week that Baba had been away. But no. Mama had been fine until Baba had come home and talked to her in their bedroom. Was Baba disappointed in him for
waiting at the gate instead of going all the way up to the highway? He thought about that for a few seconds before dismissing it: Baba would probably have been angry with him if he had put himself
in danger by going near the fast highway traffic. What could it be?

Was Baba angry that Benedict and Petros had greeted each other?

When Mama’s cell-phone rang, Benedict felt as relieved as Mama and Baba looked.

It was Zodwa.

Eh!
How could he have forgotten? Getting up from his cushion, he stood looking at Mama hopefully, clasping his hands to his chest. Without him even noticing, two of the fingers on his
right hand crossed.

Listening to Zodwa, Mama began to smile. It was a proper smile, a real one, not pretend.
Yes!

Pushing the button to end the call, she nodded at him and he rushed to hug her, then they told Baba about it together. He hadn’t wanted to tell Baba about it before, when it could have
turned out to be just another disappointment.

‘Benedict has had a wonderful idea,’ Mama began. ‘A way to save my business.’

‘
Eh!
I need some good news like this!’ Baba looked genuinely pleased, and Benedict beamed.

‘Baba, you know that lots of people here become late?’ Baba nodded. ‘And you know that afterwards, after a month or two depending on their church, their family does a ceremony
to wash away their sadness and to ask the ancestors to protect them?’ Baba nodded again.

‘Pius, they have to slaughter a cow! When they’ve already spent so much on burial. It’s not just once in a while but too, too often. People are struggling!’

‘Baba, I asked my friends at school. If somebody really doesn’t have money for a cow, they can kill a goat instead, or even a chicken. The important thing is the ancestors want some
blood, else they won’t protect the family. But the family has all come together, and a small thing like a chicken doesn’t give them much to eat. Now, what if they have a cake as well as
the chicken?’

‘
Eh?
’ Baba scratched his head. ‘A cake? But now you are talking of changing people’s culture. That is not an easy thing to do.’

‘But a cake costs a lot less than a cow, Pius.’

‘And culture is not simply a matter of cost, Angel. A practice can be expensive, outdated, even dangerous, but if people justify it as culture it will still remain.’

‘It will remain only as long as there is nothing better to replace it! Please listen to Benedict, Pius. He put it to Zodwa and Jabulani so beautifully.’

‘Baba, it’s not about changing a culture, it’s not about replacing what people do now. It’s about starting a new fashion. It’s a way of celebrating somebody’s
life after all the sadness about him being late. A cow is just a cow, Baba. Okay, they can slaughter it for the ancestors, but that’s about the ancestors looking after them. What about the
late person who’s gone? The cow doesn’t say anything about that person, about who he was in his life. Say he worked as a pineapple picker. His family can remember him with a cake like a
pineapple. Or say he was a teacher. He can get a cake like a giant piece of chalk—’

‘Or a chalkboard duster,’ said Mama.

‘Yes. And then everybody can be looking at the cake and remembering him and talking about his life, and they won’t see that the meat they’re getting isn’t a whole cow or
is just a goat or a chicken.’

‘Or they won’t mind,’ said Mama, ‘even if they do see. The cake will be so lovely they won’t complain.’

‘I see. And Zodwa agrees with this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they vote, Mama?’

Zodwa had said that she wanted the decision to be made by everybody at Ubuntu, on account of people needing to get democracy wherever they could in a place where votes didn’t count for
very much.

‘Yes. And tonight she took the idea to the late Ubuntu’s brother, the man who actually owns the business.’

‘He agreed?’

Mama nodded, and Benedict knew that Zodwa had helped her brother-in-law to see that he had had the idea himself, just as Mama and Zodwa had planned. ‘He just wants a percentage of the new
branch of the business.’

Over the tea that Titi made for them, Mama told Baba that they would start with a pilot project, the kind of small trial that Baba always said was the way to begin any new venture, and that Mama
would do the baking at first, training other ladies to bake and decorate in the second phase as the project grew, so that by the time Mama left Swaziland the business would have two feet of its
own.

Benedict counted on his fingers. ‘It helps people to celebrate the life of their late nicely, it gives Ubuntu Funerals an edge, and it gives Mama more business. It’s for winning and
winning and winning, Baba.’

‘
Eh
, I have not been speaking into empty air!’ declared Baba. ‘My words have not been wasted. I am a proud man tonight. Very proud indeed.’

His chest swelling, Benedict knew that it was time to make Baba even more proud. He cleared his throat before he spoke.

‘Mama, I want a percentage, too.’

‘
Eh!
’

He expected Baba to slap him on the back, shake his hand, laugh with joy, clap his hands together. Anything. Anything except shake his head, which was what he began to do. Baba told him he
should have built up to it, he should have talked about how the idea had been his and about how much money could come to the business – and to Mama – because of his idea. Then he should
have said exactly what percentage he wanted – two, five, ten – and justified why it was right for him to ask for it. That was how a man negotiated.

Baba didn’t need to say it, but that was how Benedict had shown he wasn’t yet a man.

Mama was in trouble, too. She hadn’t negotiated any financial arrangements with Zodwa, and Baba was going to have to step in and put something on paper. He would need to—

‘Pius,’ Mama tapped on Baba’s watch. ‘News.’

When the tea he had shared with Mama and Baba woke him in the night and he tiptoed across the passage to the toilet, Benedict heard Mama and Baba talking in the lounge in the
same hushed voices they had used in their bedroom.

‘Angel, this disappointment is cutting through me like a machete through a ripe melon.’

‘Uh-uh-uh.’

Benedict used the toilet quietly, not flushing in case the noise of it woke up the whole entire house. The voices were still there as he slipped silently back across the passage towards the
boys’ bedroom.

‘How will we manage, Pius?’

‘We’ll find a way. What choice do we have?’

Crawling sleepily into his bed, Benedict knew for sure that something very big had happened.

W
HEN DANIEL AND MOSES SHOUTED FROM THE
garden that the Ubuntu Funerals van had arrived, Benedict was at the dining table
chatting with his sisters as they tidied away their homework books.

‘My mama always had homework of her own,’ Faith remembered. ‘She was always preparing tomorrow’s lessons.’

‘
Eh!
’ said Grace, nudging Benedict with her elbow. ‘Imagine if
our
mama had been deputy head of a school!’

Benedict rolled his eyes for Grace’s sake, though in truth he wouldn’t have minded. He imagined all the books that might have been in Faith and Daniel’s house.

‘Remember how exciting it was when we got to spend time with our baba?’ Grace’s hands stopped what they were doing as her eyes seemed to focus on something far away. ‘It
was so nice when he wasn’t at the factory morning to night. Eh, it was a real treat when he was home with us.’

‘
My
baba was
never
home.’ Faith’s voice was sad. ‘I don’t really remember him.’

‘Our mama’s a bit blurry for me, too,’ said Benedict, ‘even though she was home all the time.’ He glanced at the framed photograph on the wall. Because it was
always there to look at, the two people in it – his baba and his baba’s sister – were very clear in his mind, which meant that his baba’s sister – Faith and
Daniel’s mama – was less blurry than the picture inside him of his own mama. But he didn’t want to say.

‘She was always sewing,’ remembered Grace, ‘and trying to knit. Eh, do you remember my blue jersey? Short short short.’ She indicated somewhere high above her waist.
‘She got bored and stopped here.’

Benedict didn’t remember. ‘Do you think Daniel and Moses remember much?’

‘Not Moses.’ Grace shook her head. ‘He wasn’t yet three, and it’s more than four years since.’

‘Daniel wasn’t seven yet,’ said Faith, ‘and for us it’s only two years since. He remembers things, but he doesn’t want to talk about anything from
before.’

‘
Eh
,’ said Benedict. ‘What is in those boys’ heads but football?’

‘Like our baba,’ said Grace. ‘When it wasn’t work, it was football.’

‘Mm. And he used to run to keep fit.’

Faith began to giggle, and Grace joined in.

‘What?’ Benedict couldn’t see what was funny.

‘Imagine Baba running!’ The girls couldn’t stop giggling.

Benedict smiled as he tried to imagine Baba trying to bend down past his round belly to tie the laces of a pair of running shoes. Baba would bend to pick up a book, yes. But running shoes?
Uh-uh.

He was still smiling when his brothers called from the garden.

He had long since returned
King Solomon’s Mines
to the public library unread, but he had made a drawing of the map that was in the book. He folded his copy of the map now, putting
it in his pocket before carefully re-folding Baba’s large map of Swaziland.

Mama wanted the girls to clear the table quickly and go to their bedroom, where Titi was having her afternoon nap, but Zodwa and Jabulani said there was no rush, there was something they needed
to do outside first. Benedict went out with them while Mama made tea.

Their faces were very serious.

‘Maybe...’ Jabulani looked at the two boys wrestling on the grass.

Benedict sent his brothers to play down at the other house.

Then, placing the plastic bag he was carrying on top of the stack of plastic chairs on the veranda, Jabulani removed from it a large bottle full of golden liquid, which he handed to Zodwa.

Zodwa examined the bottle carefully. ‘You see this?’ she said, showing it to Benedict. ‘This is for you.’

‘For me?’ Looking at the label, Benedict didn’t understand. He was never going to drink whisky! It was only for grown-ups!

Zodwa’s finger underlined the words
Famous Grouse
before tapping at the label’s picture. ‘This is a grouse, nè?’

Benedict nodded. He hadn’t seen a grouse, but he had seen a guineafowl, which looked a similar sort of shape.

‘We went to a
sangoma
to ask the ancestors about this new part of the business,’ said Jabulani, locking his hands together and shaking them up and down. ‘She threw the
bones for us.’ Jabulani’s hands flew apart, and Benedict imagined the
sangoma’s
collection of bones and shells scattering all over a grass mat, just like in the picture in
one of the books about Swaziland in the bookshelf. The place where each thing landed could tell a
sangoma
what the ancestors were saying about how everything was and how it was going to
be.

‘She gave us some
muti
,’ said Zodwa. ‘You know
muti
, nè?’

‘Medicine,’ said Benedict.

Zodwa nodded. ‘She said that for the business to succeed, ours is to slaughter a chicken—’

Jabulani interrupted, putting a hand on Benedict’s shoulder and speaking quickly. ‘Don’t worry, nè? We’re not going to slaughter a chicken at your
house!’

‘No, no. That is why we have this.’ Zodwa tapped at the bottle again. ‘It’s modern. We used a chicken at Ubuntu Funerals, but for here we’ll use this. We knew it
would upset you to have the blood of a chicken sprinkled around the outside of your house—’

‘Though I don’t mind making another small casket!’ Smiling, Jabulani squeezed Benedict’s shoulder.

‘A grouse is family with a chicken, nè?’

Benedict nodded. How kind they were to think of him! He knew that when he ate a piece of chicken it meant that the chicken had been slaughtered, but he really didn’t want to watch it
happening right in front of him. Their concern for him made him feel a bit like Abraham must have felt when God told him no, he didn’t have to sacrifice his son Isaac after all, a goat would
do just as well.

Tears stung at the back of his eyes as they all became solemn.

Giving the neck of the bottle the kind of sharp twist that would end a chicken’s life, Zodwa unscrewed the lid and released the spirit, all three of them walking all the way round the
outside of the house as she sprinkled the liquid slowly onto the ground.

Benedict wasn’t quite sure what his mind should be doing, if he should be praying or what. He decided to think about beautiful cakes and high piles of Cake Order Forms, and whenever Zodwa
poured a little more quickly and the bottle of Famous Grouse made the same
gloop-gloop-gloop
sound as the call of a Burchell’s coucal, he tried not to focus on listening for an
answering call from behind the hedge of yesterday, today and tomorrow bushes. The bottle emptied as they finished a full circle of the house.