A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto Read Free Book Online Page B

warm pullover on cold mornings. So that we can pay the schoolteacher for your lessons. So that you can have sandals to wear instead of going with bare feet. That is why.”
    “But why do we need extra money? Doesn’t the Missus pay you enough? You should ask her for more. And my father should work here on the farm. Ask Baas Ben. He has money.” All her impatience with her mother’s stolid, accepting ways comes out in her complaint.
    “Do you blame me, Tembi? Do you blame me for this life?”
    The girl scuffs her foot in the sand and shakes her head.
    “Come then, daughter, give me my bag. I must go.”
    She takes the bag and leans forward to place a kiss on Tembi’s cool forehead. “Things might be different one day, God willing.”
    “How will they be different? Is God going to change things for us? Is that what you expect?”
    “Hush, child. I won’t hear such words from you,” Grace answers, stepping across the cattle grate that lies between the road and the driveway. “You must look after everything while I am gone. All right?”
    Tembi pouts.
    “All right, Tembi?”
    Tembi suddenly reaches for her mother’s warm hand and holds it to her cheek and presses her lips to the calloused palm.
    “Go well, Mother,” the girl says.
    “Stay safe, my child,” comes the reply from the darkness.
    E LSEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS , as the dawn approaches, there is a celebration, or rather the tail end of a celebration. The occasion is the return of two young men who have just the day before come back to the district after completing their two years of national service in the army.
    They are local boys who have grown up in this district. Their return has been cause for a party, especially because they were both fortunate enough not to have been sent across the border on one of those quiet little incursions that the army makes—punishing raids against exiles and dissidents who don’t adhere to the creed of apartheid—expeditions, unannounced to the public but nevertheless common knowledge, that always result in a death or two and leave many other deaths behind.
    A party, for two young men who returned home without being shot at, without having to shoot at anybody, without having to kill anybody. Although they were ready, as they told their friends, and it was too bad they didn’t see any action, too bad they weren’t sent out on a raid. They were ready, and can be at any time they are called. Ready to do what has to be done. But the truth is they are farmers’ sons, more suited to cultivation and husbandry than destruction, for all their bravado, and they are glad to be back on the land, to be home.
    They drive home now, Carl and Eugene, neighbors, friends since childhood. The party began at the farm of Carl’s parents, with swimming, then a braai —a barbecue—with beer in a big iron tub filled with ice and all the neighbors from the other farms there to welcome the two young men home. Later the young people go into Klipspring to the Retief Lounge at the hotel and there is more drinking, until the party becomes too rowdy and they are refused service, so they go on to The Roadhouse, just outside of Klipspring, where you can buy a drink after hours and no questions asked, where they close the place down. By then it’s just Carl and Eugene who decide to drive to Eugene’s house, because he says he has a bottle of brandy there and will cook bacon and eggs as the sun rises.
    They pile into the car after a small argument over who is to drive, who is the least tired, but it is Carl’s car so he drives. The night is dark once they are away from the lights of Klipspring, but Carl knows the route, he is familiar with these roads that wind across the veldt between the farms.The headlights sweep across the vegetation and the strange half-light they create is melancholy, but familiar.
    Grace hears the sound of the car’s engine as she walks along the road in the stillness of the dark and her heart lifts with the knowledge