9

Someone is humming. It is a deep, undulating note, pitched so low that it could be the murmur of men around a fire, except that occasionally a word breaks through the surface of sound and then it is heard to be a woman. The soft, unfaltering tones enfold the listening child in the warm security of the one thought: Mother.

Another voice, that of a much older woman, calls out: ‘Someone is happy,’ and the first one breaks off her song to say, ‘Yes Mama.’ The words are rising in ripples of laughter which pass effortlessly into the song again so that you could not say where the one ended and the other began. Emboldened by the admission, she sings louder, phrasing the actual words at moments when they touch her happiness: ‘…after time, a long time…a lonely time…a shadow on the road… and the cattle lowing at sunset…’

He is in a small room, sitting on the floor, dividing his attention between his mother’s voice—feeling absolutely safe in the sound of her presence—and the dizzy droning of a big, grey fly swinging drunkenly into the window high above his head. It has been trying to get through all afternoon and now its stupidity seems enormous. Don’t they learn, he wonders. Don’t they know about glass and seeing things through it. It is quite obviously exhausted. Every few seconds it drops to the windowsill and rests there or crawls around in circles before rising and trying again. Closing his eyes he can actually catch small chips of sound each time it butts the glass. Suddenly it is Mother he hears again and follows a wave of her song through to the next splash of words… ‘kine lowing at sunset’. When he opens his eyes he has forgotten the fly and looks down at the cotton reels between his outstretched legs, but can’t think of a game.

There is a smell of woodsmoke in the room and he knows without turning that behind him in the backyard a fire is burning in a paraffin tin with many holes in its side. He also knows that it is late afternoon, because the light from the window has moved across the floor and up the opposite wall where it is now a square of bright orange next to the door. There is nothing in his world of that moment that he hasn’t touched with a thought or his own hands. Nothing is new; not the cotton reels, or the bed, or the old black shoes under the bed, or the boxes and things in the corners, or the smell of woodsmoke and his mother’s voice. Everything is where and how it should be, and he is comforted.

‘What time tomorrow, my child?’ It is the old voice speaking.

The song stops. ‘He says to be here all day Mama.’

‘Just like a man. The whole day.’

‘What is one more day, in so many years Mama.’

‘So many years my child.’

‘Yes Mama.’