A Blade of Grass (24 page)

D
URING THE NIGHT
the weather changes and an unseasonable, sluggish heat descends upon the farmhouse, pushing away the usually cool breeze and replacing it with a torpid, airless atmosphere. Tembi wakes in the darkness with her nightdress twisted and bunched into a painful knot under her back. She kicks off the blanket and sits up on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.

Why is it so hot? The nights are never this hot, not even in the thick days of late summer. With the edge of her nightdress she wipes away the thin film of perspiration from her face. Even the normally cool flagstones are warm under the soles of her feet as she rises and walks out to the corridor, feeling her way against the thick farmhouse walls.

At Märit’s half-ajar door Tembi pauses and listens to the soft sounds of breathing, then goes on to unlock the front door and step out to the veranda.

Out here the air is just as stifling. A hot wind moves across her face, blowing out of the night from the east somewhere. Above her head not a glimmer of starlight breaks the thick darkness, as if the sky too is heavy with this blanket of dead air. Not a sound disturbs the night, and the hot wind moves in silence.

The wind blows steadily with a constant flow, the air pushing forward in relentless streams, and in this flow there is a faint odor of decay, of something rotten out there in the night, a corruption that the wind brings on its unceasing current.

Is it the chickens? Tembi wonders. Does the odor of their slaughter still linger about the farm, almost three weeks after Michael disappeared? Or
is there a death somewhere else in the night? She moves around on the veranda, seeking escape from the sour wind, but there is none, and eventually she sinks down into one of the chairs.

Where are her people this night? Where is Michael? She fears for him, alone out there. He needed so little from life, he demanded so little from the world, he stepped so lightly on the earth. Yet even the little he asked for was taken from him. She remembers the deadness that replaced the light in his eyes, and she fears for him. Because it is the dead hour of the night now, because she is alone and it is the hour when the human soul feels its solitude most, Tembi succumbs to her fears. Her own breath seems insignificant in the face of this nameless wind. Her own desires and hopes seem small. The night crushes her.

She has always accepted the world as it is—the veldt, the sky, the birds and animals—always there, part of some eternal wholeness that is constant. When tragedy and death and the presence of evil have come into her life she has borne them. She has always had faith and hope, and she has believed in something called God, some goodness at the heart of life. But can God take away her mother, and her father, and Märit’s husband—all without reason? Can God cut down the lives of the strangers who came to the farm? Can God send an innocent and harmless man like Michael to wander speechless into a troubled land?

In this black and infinite night, with its smell of corruption and decay, when her own weak heart beats feebly in the void, Tembi fears that there is no God, and that this wind blows from a place where God is absent—from a place where there is no hope.

A soft footfall sounds from the doorway, and Tembi turns her head to see the pale presence of Märit.

“Can’t you sleep either?” Märit asks.

“It’s too hot,” Tembi answers, hearing her own voice as if it comes from far away.

When Märit collapses into the other chair, Tembi reaches out and takes her hand, reaching for hope, and for faith, for life. “Your skin is cool, my sister.”

“Is it? I don’t feel cool in the least.”

“Do you smell this wind?”

“Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it. And it smells bad. What do you think it is? Where does it come from?”

“From a bad place, where there is nothing.”

Märit starts to remove her hand, but Tembi grasps it, pressing it against her forehead. “Leave your hand here. It’s nice and cool.”

“Are you feeling ill? You sound so strange.”

“It’s nothing. I’m hot.”

After a moment Märit says, “What do you mean, ‘from a place where there is nothing’?” She leans forward trying to see Tembi’s face.

“Do you ever wonder what is happening out there? How is it that nobody has come to the farm in all these months except for Michael? Not the neighbors, not anyone from Klipspring, not even the police have come back. In all these days only one person has come to this farm—a man who cannot speak. There is something wrong out there. The whole world feels empty. Perhaps the world has passed us by, forgotten us.”

“I hope so,” Märit says fervently. “I don’t want other people to come here again. We don’t need anybody else. We don’t need anything from the world. It just brings suffering. I just want us to be alone here, on our farm.” She removes her hand from Tembi’s forehead and reaches into the pocket of her night coat for her cigarettes. There are fewer each day and she rations them now.

She lights the cigarette, and holds the match up for a moment, trying to see Tembi’s face. Tembi turns her head away. The scent of tobacco obscures the smell of decay in the night.

Märit extinguishes the match. “Do you think I’m being selfish to want these things? I know that there are others living terrible lives. It’s easy for us here, really. We have food and drink and shelter. There are many others who must be without that. But is it selfish to just want some peace? Haven’t we suffered enough?”

“I don’t know,” Tembi says in a strange and faraway tone that frightens Märit because she has never heard this tone in her voice before. “I don’t have answers to these questions.”

Märit smokes in silence. The taste of the smoke in her mouth is hot and stale, and when she exhales, the wind takes the smoke into the night.

Tembi rises and says in a numbed voice, “I think I will try to sleep again. You must too.”

Märit stubs out her cigarette on the railing. “We still have the fruit to pick tomorrow.” She follows Tembi into the house, pausing to bolt the front door. At Tembi’s bedroom door she says, “If it is still hot like this tomorrow we can swim again.”

From the darkness Tembi says, “Yes, we can swim if you like,” and her voice is flat and listless.

Silence returns. The heat remains. The wind blows, hot and relentless, and always with the undercurrent of decay.

T
HE SKY
is a bleached gray color when Märit steps out to the veranda in the morning. A long yellow smudge lies across the horizon. The air is thick and heavy, a weight upon the land.

When Tembi appears a moment later, Märit says, “Did you sleep?”

“A bit.” Her face has an unhealthy pallor that shows her exhaustion. “It’s so hot.”

“The wind has stopped. The smell from last night is gone, at least.”

“I think there is a storm coming.”

“But there are no clouds.”

Tembi points to the layer of yellow haze low in the distance. “Did you see that?”

“What is it?”

Tembi massages her face with both hands, sighing wearily. “I think we should bring in as much of the fruit today as we can. We must gather in what we can. And the vegetables. I have a strange feeling.”

“What kind of feeling? A bad storm? Hail?”

With a shake of her head Tembi goes back into the house.

The women work slowly because of the heat, pulling the peaches and apricots from the branches in the orchard and piling them into baskets. When the baskets are full, Märit loads them into a wheelbarrow and carries the load to the sheds. Here she lays out the fruit on wooden shelves, leaving a small distance between them so that they do not touch. Otherwise they will rot, Tembi has told her.

Every so often Tembi pauses in her labor and looks to the east. There is a suspension in the air that precedes a storm in the country, a pregnant hush, as if all the earth were holding its breath, waiting for some event to unfold. Yet there are no clouds, only an uncanny light that seems to flow out of the dark smudge on the horizon.

Märit looks up at the sky and says, “I don’t think rain is coming. There are no clouds. Maybe it’s a bushfire.”

“Maybe. I’m going to climb up the windmill and have a look.”

Märit waits at the bottom as Tembi clambers up the rungs in the center of the structure. The blades of the windmill are not moving, their usual creak and whirr stilled in the oppressive atmosphere. From the small platform beneath the blades Tembi peers out across the veldt.

In the distance she can make out a house, the van Staden farm, the road to Klipspring, and the river winding beneath the trees that line its banks, showing as a green path in the brown veldt. But there is no movement anywhere, and when she turns to survey the other directions there are only the koppies and the gullies and the acacia trees and no sign of human life.

The smudge on the horizon has changed, is moving, expanding, trailing ragged edges as it rises, the way rain clouds do when seen from afar. But the color of this cloud is not the color of rain, it is that of yellow mud, like the clay that is sometimes found along the riverbanks. And in the center of the cloud is a darkness.

As she clings to her perch high above the deserted country, Tembi sees a ripple flutter across the grass and the trees as a wind moves across the veldt from the east, from the direction of the obscured horizon, and the wind reaches her, the hot wind, bringing with it the odor of decay.

Something flits past her in the air, like a leaf, then another. A grasshopper lands on her dress, clinging for a moment before she flicks it away into the wind, its wings making a quick papery sound. The windmill blades above her give a slow turn.

“Tembi! Come down. It’s dangerous up there,” Märit cries from the ground.

With a last glance at the cloud, which seems to have spread and moved closer, the darkness at its center expanding, Tembi hurries down the ladder.

There are more grasshoppers down here, flitting through the air. Märit
is brushing them away as they try to settle on her dress and arms. “What did you see? Where are all these grasshoppers coming from?”

“The wind is bringing them. I don’t know what it is.”

The light changes suddenly, the mud-colored cloud obscuring the sun. A large grasshopper lands on Tembi’s arm with a rattle of papery wings and she shakes it off quickly. The insect falls onto its back, wings quivering.

“These are locusts!” Tembi exclaims. She stamps her bare heel onto the insect and a yellowish ooze leaks from the crushed body, and the smell rises, the smell of decay that is also in the wind.

“We have to close the shed doors and get into the house! Come on!” She grabs Märit’s hand and pulls her along. “It’s a swarm of locusts.”

The cloud is almost upon them and the air is full of khaki shapes fluttering past their heads. In the center of the cloud the darkness seethes with turbulence.

The women reach the shed ahead of the swarm and bolt the doors, then start towards the house. Tembi suddenly stops and turns in the opposite direction. “Go into the house and shut all the windows!”

“Where are you going?”

“Go in the house! I’ll meet you there.” She sets off at a run towards the kraal.

And then the swarm is upon the farm, blotting out the light.

The moment that the swarm appeared Tembi knew what was happening. She has heard the stories from the old people, how a yellow cloud appears suddenly from the east, before the harvest, a cloud made up of thousands of insects that cover the surface of the land. And the plague consumes everything in its path, every blade of grass, every leaf, every stalk.

Her first thought is to try to save the fruit and maize that is in the other sheds. She runs to fasten the doors. Then she remembers her garden, her five small plants, and she races desperately towards the koppie. She can bear to lose almost anything—but not her garden! Her fear gives her strength and speed as she runs towards the koppie. Insects flash past her head, descending upon anything that is green, some of them even lighting on her shoulders, on her hair, but she does not pause to brush them away.

The swarm has not yet reached the koppie, but some individual locusts
have already found her plants; already their hungry jaws are upon the tender shoots.

Too late, she thinks, too late.

Without heed for the barrier that protects the garden, Tembi pushes her way through the thorny branches, her fingers pulling the locusts from the plants, crushing the insects, flinging them aside. Her eyes fall upon the plastic water bucket and she upends it, settling it over the plants as a cover. With her bare hands she scrapes pebbles and soil up around the edges of the bucket, sealing it so that no insect can enter.

By then the air is thick with the locusts, but still she takes the time to find some heavy stones to weigh down the bucket. She wants to stay here, to protect her garden, but the swarm is too heavy. Locusts are crawling on her neck and arms, down the front of her dress, across the face.

She runs back towards the house, which she cannot even see now through the yellow cloud. Everywhere the air is choked with whirring insects. The steps and veranda are slick underfoot, the door is covered with locusts. But the handle is locked. With the side of her palm Tembi wipes away a space and pounds on the door.

“Märit! Märit!”

There is no response and she thumps both hands on the door. “Märit, let me in!”

I
NSIDE THE HOUSE
, Märit runs from room to room, slamming windows and doors shut. There are locusts in the kitchen already, where the back door is ajar. Grabbing a dishtowel Märit flails at the insects, but it is useless, so she bangs the door shut.

In the living room the air is thick with insects, their bodies squashing beneath her feet. Where are they coming from? Then she sees the stream of locusts pouring from the fireplace.

There are matches in her pocket, there is kindling and paper in the grate. Quickly she bends to the fireplace and touches a flame to the paper. Smoke rises as the kindling catches, and the stream of insects parts to avoid the flame. Those in the grate sizzle and crackle in the heat.