Stones for My Father by Trilby Kent Page A

found shot in a field not far from their abandoned farm. While we ate, Smous Petrus would read aloud from his family Bible, an enormous book bound in black leather with metal studs down the spine. After the meal, the men would spend the heat of the day polishing their rifles and taking stock of ammunition, while the women shook out blankets and mended clothing, darning socks and stitching rag quilts and stopping only to bicker over whose turn it was to borrow Suzette van der Westhuizen’s crochet needles. The older boys were in charge of greasing the wagon wheels and grooming the horses, important tasks that I knew Gert wished he had been invited to do. At dusk, those boys would accompany a party of older men down to the river in search of game; sometimes they would come back with a wood pigeon or two, but most nights we had to satisfy ourselves with porridge and biltong, and perhaps a few sour figs.
    More and more, as the days passed, I found myself counting the hours until the sun would sink below the fringe of treetops on the distant horizon. I could usually check on my little monkey after supper, while the rest of the
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remained huddled around the fire, singing songs and listening to Oom Sarel’s tall tales. In just two weeks, the vervet had grown considerably — its head was now virtually in proportion to its large ears and wide,expressive eyes — and I could tell that the time would soon come when it would need to learn to forage for itself. Not just yet, though: the cracking of a tree branch or the whinnying of a horse was still enough to send it scrambling into the folds of my coat, and it continued to suck drops of goats’ milk from my fingers with the contentment of a newborn.
    One evening, Gert sidled in next to me on the campfire bench, his wide eyes telling me of some dreadful change. It had been his turn to feed the vervet, and immediately I sensed that something was wrong.
    “He’s caught a gecko,” whispered my brother, not looking at me but staring straight into the flames as he fiddled with a bit of kindling.
    “Where?”
    “How do I know? He’s taken it into the jockey box. I think he’s going to eat it.” Gert tossed the stick into the fire, then picked up another. I watched him peel the bark off, strip by strip.
    “It’s what he’s supposed to do,” I said at last. “He’s becoming wild, that’s all. Maybe we should let him go.”
    “But he’s still tiny, Corlie.” Gert slid me a nervous look. “Won’t you go and see, at least?”
    When I opened the lid of the jockey box, I prepared myself for the worst. And yet what I discovered inside took me entirely by surprise.
    My little monkey was cradling the flickering green lizard to his chest, cooing softly as the gecko wriggled against the blanket of fur.
    When I returned to the campfire and told Gert, he dropped the stick in his hand and faced me squarely. “You’re making it up, Corlie.”
    “No, I’m not — you can go back and see for yourself. He’s adopted the lizard — just like we adopted him. Perhaps he’s lonely.”
    “So he’s not going to eat it?”
    “It didn’t look that way to me. We feed him enough as it is.”
    And so it was that my brother and I found ourselves tending to two small creatures: the orphaned vervet and the gecko it had taken on as its own. Strange as it may sound, we never once saw the lizard try to escape from my
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. Instead, it stoically endured the vervet’s long bouts of affection — stroking, cradling, and picking off bits of dirt or imaginary fleas — before curling itself up under a clump of grass that we had put in the corner of the jockey box. This lasted for almost a week — and then one morning, Gert discovered that the little gecko had fled.
    “A bird might have got it,” he whimpered, trailing behind me as I swept the periphery of the
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. “It must have left the box when I took
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out before breakfast.”
    As soon as it became clear that the gecko was not