Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [31]
I nod.
The sisters take me outside to a car and someone drives me to the Dickinsons’ farm which is next door to our farm but no one tells me why we are going there. I say, “Where are Mum and Dad?”
Someone says, “They’re coming.”
I shrink my head into my chin. “They’re going to kill me,” I say.
“What? They won’t kill you.”
I nod and start crying again. “I let Olivia drown.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
I look out of the window at the spiky-topped fields of pineapples that the Dickinsons grow. The pineapple fields have dissolved into orange and green blurs through my tears. It was my fault. It was definitely my fault. I kick the seat in front of me out of sheer, trapped misery. I wish it was me lying dead, instead. I am going to be in trouble for the rest of my life.
Olivia is lying on the spare bed at the Dickinsons’ house. Someone has washed all the duck shit off her face and has combed her dark curls where the algae had been clinging. Her hair has never had comb marks in it, in life. In life her hair was a soft, brushable halo. Mum used to brush out the brown-shining curls with a light-bristled blue brush. I think, Then she’s really dead.
There are some flowers from Cierina Dickinson’s garden on the pillow by her head. I stare and stare at her face. I wanted her to be alive. I was the one who prayed her into life that day with the missionaries. Now it is my fault she was dead. I had looked the other way and Olivia’s life flew out of her body because I wasn’t taking care of it. Here she is, her skin a blue-gray pallor, lying on the Dickinsons’ spare bed with summer violets around her head and she is not breathing.
Then Rena’s two daughters, Anne and Ronelle, appear. Ronelle takes me by the shoulders and says, “That’s enough,” and she and Anne take me for a walk.
Anne says, “You won’t see her again. She’s gone to Jesus.”
Which is a lie. She has not gone to Jesus. Her body is still on that bed. Jesus has not suffered her to come unto Him. I press my lips together. My throat hurts because there will never be enough crying to get rid of the sorrow inside.
Mum and Dad come back from town and I run down the driveway where I have been walking with the Viljoen sisters to meet them. Dad catches me in his arms. He is crying silently, both his cheeks are wet, and his face is drawn and gray. He dries his tears on my neck and says, “You’re so brave, Chookies.”
But I feel as if he won’t say that once he finds out that Olivia is dead because of me. She’s dead because I haven’t been paying attention. I think, He’ll probably hate me then. But I don’t tell him what has happened. The lump in my throat makes it hurt to swallow.
That night Vanessa and I sleep in Mum and Dad’s room, except none of us sleep. It is the first time in my life that I have lain awake all night from beginning to end. I listen to Mum’s soft, drugged sobs. Aunty Rena has given her some pills: “You need to take these to help you sleep.” Dad is a hump in the dark, perched up against the wall. He smokes one cigarette after another, the red glows of their cherries traveling steadily to his lips. Vanessa is very quiet next to me on the floor, very still. I know she has gone deep and still and inside herself. I whisper her name into the acrid-smoke-smelling density of our collective grief, but she won’t answer.
She knows, I think to myself. She knows I killed Olivia and she hates me now.
And she’ll hate me forever.
The next morning I go into Olivia’s room and look in the cot. The bed is still rumpled from her body from the morning before. Her toys are spread about on top of her sheets. Her pajamas are folded up on her pillow. Mum has buried her face in Olivia’s bedclothes and when I come in, she looks up at me. She says, in a smothered voice, “It still smells of baby.”
For a long time after that, Mum was very quiet most of the time. The Burma Valley farmers pool their money and write us a check so that we can