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extract – The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg
Cia is my sister and I am her leader. The two of us are sitting on the flagstone steps outside the kitchen door eating our peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Cia peels hers apart, as she always docs, and slowly licks out the filling, while I squash the slices of bread together between my palms until they turn doughy and ooze peanut butter and jam goo, then gulp it down.Sometimes we take tea like the Afs do, dunking our sandwiches into our green enamel mugs, then taking a dripping bite, followed by a swig, which we swill around in our mouths before swallowing. We have to pretend our sandwiches are nothing like the dainty little crustless quarters we're served, but are instead hunking Af door-stoppers. Anyway, it's called mixing cement and we aren't allowed to mix cement. If we get caught – spluttering cement and giggling – Mum hollers at us not to be so disgusting all our disgusting little lives. We only do it to sort of charf like Afs and in the end we always go back to the peeling-and-licking and mashing. Afterwards we loll around lizardly on the rough stone, licking crumbs off our fingers.
Cia is smaller than me, but not by much, and she's been here as far back as either of us can remember, but we've found that somehow, being bigger and older, I know all the things that Cia does not so I am the induna.
'What shall we do now?' she asks, after a while.
'Don' know,' is my reply. So we saunter on down to the swings – just worn tyres sawn in half and hung from a branch of an old acacia tree if I'm being truthful – in which we coil ourselves up, twisting the rope tighter and tighter until it will twist no more, then kicking off with our feet and spinning wildly undone. I feel a little ill but, still, it's a good way to pass the time.
Not for Cia, though. She's rocking dolefully now, waiting for something, any thing, to disrupt the steady rhythm of our day. Over the years that have passed – seven and a half for Cia, eight and three-quarters for me – our days on the farm where we were both born have come to have a sameness about them, a metronome of ritual metring out the well-worn path of the sun across the faded blue sky.
And there's nowhere but the farm. It's far to the end of it – to the fence line that takes the fence boy days on end to get around – and far from there to anywhere. Dad says it's only twenty miles down the dirt road to Umtali, but twenty miles sure feels far when you're hanging on the back of the Landie.
Normally, after swinging, we plop ants into the ant-lion lairs under the swing tree. Ant-lion lairs are tiny ant-lion-made craters in the earth. Ants who slip (or get pitched) into a crater never get out – the sides are way too steep and too loose to climb – but the ants bust a gut trying, and that's what springs the trap: the dirt avalanche they set off, scrabbling frantically up the embankment, rouses the slumbering ant-lion. He claws his way out from a secret chamber beneath the lair and eats them alive.
But today is different. Today Cia gets just what she's been waiting for: an ear-splitting shriek pierces the air. We elbow out of our tyres and race down to the Afs' khaya towards the shrieking.
We arrive to find a chicken slaughter under way. Even though as many chickens hatch on the farm as are slaughtered, still Cia and I relish the slaughters. We clamber up the sides of the compost heap to get a bird's eye view from a warm nest of rotting vegetation churning with fat green chipolata worms.
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We aren't really allowed to skulk around down by the khaya like two mongrels, but we go on down there and have us a good look. The compound buildings are low and squat with dark doorways yawning in the whitewash. All the farm workers live there, with their wives and picanins, about forty families. The compound is ringed by rickety mud huts with roofs made of bits of stick and hay, like in the three little pigs, and there are hordes of picanins scrambling about in the dirt courtyard that's been pounded and brushed bald. They are named Sipho, Themba, Javu and whatnot; they have scabby knees and belly-buttons that stick out like shiny black marbles. They stare at me and Cia something rude, but old Blessing's always nice to us. She squats down by the fire and gives us a hunk of sadza dipped in sugar to suck. Our grandfath, Oupa, says we’re naught better than a pack of scavengers.The chickens that are going to die today have already been caught from the chicken run and brought to the executioner's block, the stump of an old tree – decently out of the other chickens' sight. They huddle together in their cage, clucking quietly, but to me it sounds quietly hysterical. The executioner, who is also our old houseboy Jobe, is standing by, an axe clasped in his hand, ready to behead the condemned chickens. Blessing, Jobe's wife, is busy plucking dead chickens at a galvanized sink a short way off, the water bloody and roiling with feathers. And while the whole business of the beheading makes for a great spectacle, it is really for the aftermath of a killing that we watch and wait. We sing the chorus from 'Here Comes the Axeman to Chop Off Your Head' in the interval.
'Chip, chop! Chip, chop! The last man's dead,' Cia yells lustily.
Then, pinioning a chicken by the neck, Jobe swings his axe, He slows for a heartbeat at the height of his arc. There is a sharp intake of breath from Cia, and she grips my wrist as the blade falls, severing the chicken's head. We flinch, And then, incredibly, headless and lifeless, the chicken wrenches free and proceeds to run in wild circles, blood spurting from the gaping artery. Cia's nails dig deeper and deeper into my flesh as the chicken performs its dance of death, until at last, drained of its lifeblood and spirit, it falls, Only when it lies Utterly still does she let go, leaving behind small white crescents in my skin, I hear a warm, damp sigh close to my ear. Over and over we watch, stricken, as a chicken, dead but still alive, dances for us,
It is late afternoon by the time we head wearily back along the winding track towards the farmhouse, our shadows grotesque by the time it comes into view. I am shadowed, too, by foreboding.
The old house feels like a ruin, somehow. The pillars stationed along the length of the front veranda are being slowly strangled by Zimbabwe creeper, and a frilly grey lichen is feeding off the gangrenous roof slate, Inside, the house is high-ceilinged, cool and dark, but the 'art deco' tiles, imported from Europe for the entrance hall, are fractured now, crisscrossed with dark veins, and the Zambezi teak beams in the rest of the house are rotten in places. They creak and groan in the night as if tortured in their sleep by something that prowls up there in the eaves.
Its name is Modjadji, the rain goddess, and it was built by our great-grandfather in 1912, which is so long ago that there is no one still alive who remembers it. The year is carved in relief on an oval white plaque set into the plaster of the Cape Dutch gable. Sometimes I think of the hands that carved it in 1912, dead hands. It was Great-grandfather who first staked the surrounding land in the shadow of the Vumba mountains, which are in the east of our country, Rhodesia. Oupa tells over and over the tale of how Great-grandfather had to toil for years to hew the farm from the savage African land. It was his blood, sweat and tears that watered the earth, and every generation since has borne his legacy, It is Cia's and my duty to bear Great-grandfather's legacy too, when the time comes, although it is a crying shame we aren't sons.
There is a faded sepia daguerreotype of Great-grandfather, framed in ornate pewter, standing on the mantel above the stone hearth in the voorkamer, Sometimes I hoist Cia up so she can snatch it down, and we pore over it, somehow yoked to this echo of the past, To be honest, though, in his old-fashioned collar, with his stiffness and haughty chin, Great-grandfather looks rather forbidding, It's in his eyes most of all – they're colourless and polite. After a while, I have to turn away. If I look at that portrait for too long, I can feel his ghostly eyes watching.
Outside, the decay goes on, but it is a glorious kind of decay. Decadent. The air is sultry, perfumed, but with a sweetly sick scent – 'putrid', Oupa says, It seems to soften the light, veiling the too-vivid colours in the garden, 'Bloody obscene,' he says of it, shaking his head. 'Like a Parisian bordello.'
