Stones for My Father by Trilby Kent Page B

going to return, the vervet seemed to sink into a deep gloom. We tried to distract him with trips into the forest and ingenious new toys to keep him entertained: a spinning top, a jar full of buttons, a ball woven out of fabric scraps attached to a leather cord. But nothing seemed to restore its spirits for long. No amount of fussing orfood made an ounce of difference — and within just a few days, I could tell that the tiny forlorn creature was beginning to withdraw into itself once again. For the second time in its short life, my monkey grieved.

    It was around this time that I caught Smous Petrus hitting Sipho with the ox whip.
    I hadn’t spoken often to my friend since we’d arrived at the
laager
. The conversations we had shared were limited to practical exchanges — feathering grouse or carrying dried dung bricks from wagon to wagon. I hadn’t even had a chance to tell him about Corporal Byrne — and I was ashamed to realize that the soldier was not something I wanted to share with Sipho. The
laager
didn’t look kindly on fraternizing with kaffirs. Rumors of African attacks were rife, although how anyone could have picked up such information, I don’t know. It was Yvette van der Westhuizen who first whispered to my mother that she’d heard a local commando had been wiped out by an African raid, with only one man managing to escape into the bush where he survived for three days before reaching Standerton.
    “The
kaffirs
were after food, that was all,” she told Ma as they squatted by the fire, cutting bars of soap. “It was nothing to do with the khakis.”
    Betsie Gouws had told us that two natives had escorted the Tommies when they came to destroy her neighbor’s farm. Once the British soldiers had takenstock of the contents, they allowed the Africans to loot the house for whatever food or clothing they wanted. It was a tactic intended to humiliate the farm owners and to reward those natives who worked for the British.
    “Because there’s a war on, they think they can take what they like from us,” said Ma.
    It had been her idea to use goats’ milk to make the soap. She and Yvette had acquired oil from Sanna Wessels and made lye from wood ash; now, at last, the time had come to break the milky white slab into chunks to share among the wagons. I watched them, rolling a bit of soft soap between my palms and wishing that it smelled less of castor oil.
    “If you ask me, we should let the khakis take the kaffirs back to England with them!” Betsie Gouws lowered her voice and pointed one finger conspiratorially at my mother. “The English will mix with all sorts, if it suits them. My Anton says they’ve even got Indians fighting for them — what do you think of that? Dressing up their coolies in a white man’s uniform, and calling themselves a God-fearing people …”
    “The English are hypocrites,” replied my mother. “They pretend to treat the blacks and coolies as their equals, but they don’t trust them any more than we do. You won’t find a Boer embracing an African with his left hand and stabbing him in the back with his right, will you?”
    It was all they could do, those older women: bicker and curse. What did Betsie Gouws know about Indians,anyway? As far as she was concerned, it had been coolie spells that caused some of our cattle to die the year before last. I had half a mind to tell Ma that if she thought my fairy tales were silly, she should consider all the stupid things Betsie Gouws believed in — but of course I wouldn’t dare. I knew that the women moaned like this because they were afraid, frustrated, and exhausted, and all too aware that their hands were tied. If that was what it meant to be a Boer woman, I wanted none of it. I’d stay a girl forever … or else I’d disguise myself as a boy and run away to join the men on commando as a girl guerrilla: I’d wear my hair in plaits and make every shot count, and around the campfire each night I’d learn to drink and