A bright lightning bolt of what Lottie would call “divine intuition” hits me. Bosman’s daughter and Darnell knew each other. They were friends.

“Get,” Bosman says in a tone reserved for farm dogs. “Get off my land.”

“Gladly,” Lottie says, and Bosman vibrates with rage at being looked down at, and not for the first time, I’m sure. Mother says that poor white people are dangerous because only a thin layer of skin makes them kings of the land, but it’s not enough to save them from the pity of other whites or the silent contempt of natives who must suffer their cruelty.

“Come.” I snatch Lottie’s hand, and now it’s my turn to drag her away from Bosman.

Mr. Vincent boosts us onto the back of the pickup truck. We squat at Darnell’s feet, Swazi guardians of the dead.

The girl’s fingers clutch the air over and over again, and the sound of her weeping contains all the sorrows of the world. It’s wrong for a white girl to cry for a brown boy, but Bosman’s daughter doesn’t understand the way things are. She’s simple, and her ignorance sets her free from the rules. There’s a lesson in that for me if I could grasp it through the pain in my heart.

Mrs. Vincent starts the engine, and the truck bumps over the washboard corrugations in the eroded field.

“I’ll remember you two.” Bosman points his gun barrel from Lottie to me and marks us out for special attention should we ever meet again. “You better believe that.”

24

A Dark Wind

The sun is hot, the hole is deep, and the coffin is made of pine. Three days after finding Darnell, leather-skinned farmers, from the surrounding area, and their wives bunch together around the grave. The men grip their hats in their hands, the women hold hankies to their eyes. Two Swazi farmworkers crouch in the blazing sun with shovels balanced on their knees, waiting for the ceremony to end.

Darnell’s father, Mr. Parns, stands at the foot of the freshly dug hole, dressed in a clean shirt and khaki pants ironed for the occasion. His face is pinched tight with a grief that burns my eyes.

Darnell’s father knows true emptiness. With the loss of his only child and with his wife passed away, too, he’s all alone to face the future. I do not know how he can bear it. I think of the days after Father leaves us to return to his other family in Johannesburg. Mother cups my cheek and strokes Rian’s hair at every opportunity and murmurs the same soft words: What would I do without you? Tell me that. What will Mr. Parns do without Darnell? With no family at all?

A dark wind lifts dirt into the air. The land absorbs the sobs of the women and the flinty silence of the gravediggers. The long fields and tall hills swallow us all. If I could be anything as I stand beside the empty grave, I’d choose to be a mountain, or the river that flows year after year, its course unaltered, free from pain eternal.