‘Marias has been in an accident, quick, help! Marias is injured!’

Everyone in the house ran out to see what had happened. Miriam and Fredo had recently bought an adjoining field. It was overgrown and hadn’t been used in years. Marias had gone out with the farmers to oversee the chopping down of the trees. One of the tractors had got stuck, and Marias and the foreman had gone around the back of it to see what the problem was.

The handbrake of the tractor hadn’t been put on properly and it had rolled backwards, over Marias; he was trapped under the wheels.

The foreman, not wanting to move him, had first secured the tractor then run back to the vineyard, to raise the alarm.

An ambulance was called. The foreman tried driving the tractor forward, to release Marias from the wheels. Marias was screaming and shouting in pain. At least he was still alive.

The workers were going to construct a makeshift stretcher to lift him, but Miriam thought it would be better not to move him until the ambulance came.

When they finally arrived, the paramedics gave Marias a hefty injection of painkillers and he slipped into a deep unconsciousness.

It was obvious to them that half of Marias’s body had been crushed and they moved the unconscious man as gently as they could onto a stretcher and put him in the back of the ambulance. Miriam had gone with them to the hospital.

The worst news ever, for Miriam, was that Marias’s right leg was so crushed it would have to come off to give him any chance of survival.

During his hospital stay, Annette had played the dutiful wife and sat by his side, crying and showing distress while he was in a delirium, and after he had undergone extensive surgery.

But Miriam did not believe Annette. She had always been suspicious of her motives for marrying Marias, and recent gossip about her sudden interest in the farm workers and the vineyard only fuelled her suspicions. She’d voiced her opinions to her husband many times that Annette had only married Marias for what she could get out of the union.

She turned accusing eyes to her daughter-in-law. ‘Where were you, Annette?’ she said. ‘Playing in the fields with the hired help, again?’ Miriam felt bitter. She’d had a good idea what Annette had been up to with Carlos, but had kept quiet, hoping it would run its course. Now she was disgusted; not only had she turned a blind eye, but the wife of her beloved son had been with a farm hand while Marias had been crushed under a tractor, and he was now fighting for his life.

Marias didn’t wake up; he got an infection in his remaining leg, which led to gangrene, and that, too, had to be amputated. A month later, despite the doctors doing everything they could to save him, he died.

Annette was secretly pleased; she hadn’t wanted to play nursemaid to her crippled husband. She knew Miriam would have forced her to look after Marias, out of guilt, if not out of love.