When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (32 page)

W
HEN NOMSA FINALLY WENT BACK TO SCHOOL
, Benedict sat next to her in Auntie Rachel’s Hi-Ace.

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said to her quietly. She nodded but said nothing back to him.

On the way home from school, he tried again. ‘I’m sorry I was mean to you, Nomsa.’ She said nothing. About your letter.’ She nodded.

Benedict wasn’t sure what else he could say. While the other children chatted and giggled, he and Nomsa sat in silence.

It wasn’t until Auntie Rachel drove over the cattle-grid at the farm’s entrance and Benedict saw the shed where the cows slept at night that an idea came to him.

‘I can show you an owl if you like.’

She looked at him. ‘Where?’

‘Here in the shed. Do you want to see it?’

‘Is it late?’

‘Uh-uh. It lives there.’

‘Okay.’

‘Later this afternoon?’

‘Okay.’

Nomsa thought the owl was exciting, even though it was sleeping and it didn’t wake up to look at them.

‘You should bring Vusi to see it,’ he said to her.

‘Why don’t you bring him yourself?’

‘He’s your brother now. He’ll be happy to know he has a sister who likes birds.’

‘You think so?’

‘Mm.’

‘Really?’

‘Mm. So will you bring him to look?’

‘Okay.’

‘Good.’

Benedict told her about giving the owl a mouse to eat, and then he told her about the hoopoe, King Solomon’s queen, that was buried in the special royal casket under the lucky-bean tree in
his garden. She didn’t know what a hoopoe looked like, so he took her to the Mazibukos’ lounge and showed her in Uncle Enock’s book.

Benedict saw her smile that day, for the very first time. Even before, when they had looked in the snake book together, her eyes had still been hard. But when she smiled as she thanked him for
showing her the birds, her eyes softened and he found himself grinning back at her.

Eh!
What if his new sister was like her? Imagine!

He didn’t want Josephine to feel uncomfortable, to struggle to fit in as he could see Nomsa was. And he didn’t want to behave badly when it came to a girl, not again. He wanted to be
very sure that he didn’t. As he left the Mazibukos’ house to go up to his own, the small sign welcoming bees and butterflies to one of Mrs Levine’s flowerpots gave him an
idea.

He went straight home to work on it, and after supper that night, when Mama and Baba were by themselves at the dining table, he went to them with his piece of paper already neatly folded.

‘Baba, do you have an envelope for me? And a stamp?’

‘At work. Why?’

‘I wrote a letter.’

‘A letter?’ asked Mama. ‘That’s nice. Can we see?’

Benedict hesitated. It wasn’t nice for somebody to read a letter that wasn’t theirs. But it really wasn’t a secret, so he handed it over to Mama.

She unfolded it carefully. It wasn’t special paper or anything, just something that was going to be thrown away at Baba’s work, but he had written in his neatest writing on the side
where there wasn’t any printing, and he had done a small drawing of an owl like the one he had shown to Nomsa in the shed.

‘Read it to me, Angel.’

‘Dear Josephine,’ Mama began. She and Baba looked at each other, and she needed to clear her throat before she read on. ‘Hello. Welcome to our family.’

That was as far as Mama read before she needed a tissue from the underwear inside her T-shirt.

Baba took the letter from her and carried on reading. ‘When you come to live with us I will help you. I am the eldest boy.’ Baba looked up from the letter to smile at Benedict. Then
he read on. ‘Grace and Faith like music. Moses and Daniel like sports. Me I like books and animals. What do you like? You are welcome here. Your new brother Benedict.’

‘
Eh!
’ said Mama, into her tissue.

Baba’s eyes were bright. ‘Good boy,’ he said, patting Benedict’s shoulder. ‘Good boy.’

For safety, Benedict slipped his letter to Josephine inside the back of the bird book until Baba could bring him an envelope. Then he settled down on his cushion to read about different kinds of
owls. The one in the shed down the hill was a barn owl.

Mama and Baba talked to each other softly.

‘I never thought of writing to her, Angel. I wrote to her school principal, I sent money to the family that’s taken her in, but I never thought of writing to her.’

‘
Eh
, Pius, I feel ashamed! It isn’t her fault who her father was.’

‘Or who her mother was. We’ve been thinking only of ourselves, our own disappointment.’

‘I’m going to write a letter, too. It can go in that same envelope. And I’ll put in a photo of one of my cakes.’

‘And a photo of all of us. I’ll choose a nice one.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

After the owl, Nomsa didn’t have much time to spend with Benedict. She had missed a lot of school, and Mr Magagula was making sure that all of her teachers gave her
plenty of extra work to help her to catch up. Some days she even stayed behind at school for extra lessons supervised by Miss Dube, and then Auntie Rachel went back to fetch her or she came home
with Mrs Levine.

Mrs Levine had Sifiso and two other children to help in their homes after school now, and she had bought a pale blue Corolla with money that belonged to Mr Levine, who could whistle.

Sitting up at the dam late one afternoon, Benedict tried to choose the best things that he could show to Nomsa when she at last had time to come up there with him. The frogs and tadpoles, for
sure. The weavers’ nests hanging over the water, definitely.

When Petros came back, Benedict wanted to introduce him to Nomsa. Okay, he wasn’t supposed to be spending any time with Petros, but he didn’t think that Nomsa would tell. She seemed
like somebody who knew how to keep a secret. Nomsa could speak to Petros in siSwati, and then she could translate into English for Benedict. Petros had so little English, and Benedict still had so
little siSwati, but with Nomsa they could talk to each other so much better. Petros would be able to tell Benedict more about his ancestors, his girlfriend and his gold. Maybe all three of them
could work together to understand Mr Quartermain’s map, and go on an adventure to follow it. Nomsa could ask the geography teacher at the high school about what the Kalukawe and Lukanga
rivers were called now. She mustn’t show the teacher the map, though. The teacher might want some of the gold, and if it was real and not just pretend like Auntie Rachel said, it was already
going to be shared between Benedict, Nomsa and Petros.

Eh
, imagine if Petros and Nomsa were his brother and his sister! Benedict thought that might feel very good, better than having two big sisters who didn’t pay him much attention and
didn’t even like animals, and better than having two small brothers who were only interested in boys who knew how to kick a ball and never wanted to talk about anything serious.

He wanted to talk to Nomsa about
umcwasho
, the new law for girls that the king had made on the Reed Dance day. Uncle Enock said it wasn’t a new law, it was an ancient law that was
back for a modern reason. If a girl was between fifteen and eighteen, she had to wear a string of blue and yellow beads around her head with a long, thick woollen tassel in blue and yellow hanging
down from it at the back, and that was to show everybody that she was a good girl who had never fallen in love with a boy or a man. If she fell in love with a boy or a man from now on, then her
family had to pay a fine of one cow. If they knew who the boy or man was, his family had to pay the same fine, too.

Girls who were older than eighteen, up to twenty-four, they had to wear tassels of red and black, and they weren’t allowed to fall in love or marry, otherwise they paid a fine of one cow,
just like the younger girls. The tassels were called
umcwasho
, and girls were going to have to wear
umcwasho
every day for the next five years.

The king said the
umcwasho
law was about stopping the spread of disease, but Auntie Rachel said it was about controlling women just as the hoopoe had advised King Solomon to do. Mama and
Baba both said it blamed girls for spreading disease, but Titi said it meant a man couldn’t marry her by smearing her with red ochre, and she had decided to wear the red and black tassels
even though she was a
kwerekwere.
Innocence Mazibuko had chosen to wear the blue and yellow tassels, even though she wasn’t yet fifteen, but Nomsa said she was never going to wear
them, even when she got to the right age. Benedict wasn’t sure, but he thought that might be because of Mr Thwala.

Two of the dairy cows had been stolen on account of people needing to pay fines, so Uncle Enock had hired a Buffalo Soldier to guard the shed at night, and now the cows had to go out for grazing
with two men instead of just one.

Benedict waved to the two men now as they went past with the cows on the far side of the dam on their way towards the milking shed down the hill. When the noise of the cows sent a large flock of
red bishop birds up from the reeds, Benedict decided he would go and look for nests there as soon as all the cows had gone past. He would love to show Nomsa a red bishop. With its black face and
bright red head, back and collar, the male looked very much like a priest from the Church of Jericho.

The female was dull and brown, and difficult to tell apart from so many other kinds of bird. It was like that with birds: the males were bright and colourful, and danced around to attract the
females. Which was just the opposite, Benedict recognised, of how it was with people. For centuries male birds had been having a Reed Dance ceremony of their own.

Male birds would never put on bright colours like
umcwasho
to tell females to stay away. No. For them, wearing colours was a way of marking themselves out and making themselves more
attractive; that was entirely what a peacock’s big, beautiful tail was for. Benedict wondered if the colourful
umcwasho
tassels might not make girls look more attractive to boys,
too.

He didn’t go to the far side of the dam very often: the cows trod a well-worn path there on their way to and from the field on the part of the plateau that was on the other side of the
clump of trees, so there wasn’t much grass to sit on. The plateau ended a little way behind where the cows walked, and the trees and bushes there were thick and wild as they extended up the
steep mountainside. Benedict squatted there quietly, waiting for the red bishops to settle back into the reeds at the edge of the dam.

While he waited, he wondered how long Petros would stay on the farm before he went back to Nhlangano again for his wedding. If his own family was still here, Benedict would ask Mama to make the
cake for Petros’s wedding.

Something pushed against his back.

Eh!

Jumping up in fright, he leapt away from the bushes, landing in a wet round of fresh kinyezi from the cows.

Krishna jumped up at him.

‘
Eh
, Krishna! Look what you made me do!’ Pushing the dog away, he looked around for a patch of grass where he could scrape off the
kinyezi.
But everywhere was just mud, soil
and even more
kinyezi.
Krishna moved away from him and ran a small way into the bushes before turning back to him and whining. When Benedict walked away to look for some grass, she came at
him again, jumping up and wagging her tail.

She must be missing Petros even more than Benedict was. The dairy manager was inside the dairy office or the milking shed all day, he didn’t come up here with the cows like Petros did.
Krishna was probably lonely for Petros. Down in Nhlangano, was he lonely for her, too?

‘What is it, Krishna? Do you want to play?’ Benedict looked around for a stick to throw for her, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she went into the bushes again and turned
to look at him, whining. Thinking she might be hurt in some way, he went towards her. She ran ahead a little then turned to look back at him.

‘Okay, we can play catch.’ Following her, he plunged into the bushes.

Fighting his way through the thick undergrowth, he chased her quite some distance up the steep hill until he tripped over something and arrived head-first on the ground in an area where there
was much more space between the trees. As Krishna barked at him, he looked around, leaping to his feet in fright before his mind had fully recognised that very near to his face was a snake!

Eh!

But no, it was only half a snake!

Very carefully, he nudged at it with the edge of a
kinyezi-
covered shoe. It didn’t move. With Krishna still barking at him, he looked back and saw that what he had fallen over was a
spade. Had Samson been up here, killing snakes? Krishna didn’t give him time to think about whether or not it was a safe place to be. Hurling herself up at him, she barked right in his face
then ran forward, wanting him to follow. As he did, he realised that something smelled very bad.

A small square of muddy white paper on the ground caught his eye, and he bent to pick it up. It was a black-and-white photograph that he had seen before, and it set his mind racing. Staring at
it hard, he could almost hear Baba’s voice telling him to check that he wasn’t adding two to two and getting six instead of four, but his heart began to beat at the rate of a
humming-bird’s wings, and, seeming to leave his mind behind, his legs took him back through the bushes and all the way down the hill and into the Mazibukos’ lounge without even wiping
his feet or knocking, where Auntie Rachel took one look at him and wrapped him in her arms until he’d told her everything. Uncle Enock came home at once and organised some men from the dairy.
They had to go right away, it didn’t matter that it would soon be dark, and Benedict had to show them where, he was the only one who knew. But his legs didn’t want to work, and Uncle
Enock carried him on his back all the way up the hill. He didn’t have to go into the bushes with them, though, Krishna was waiting there to show them the way, and Mavis from the other house
was suddenly beside him, out of breath and holding his hand way too tight.