Fly Away Home Read Free Page B

hurried off to the church hall. With only thirty minutes before the performance started, and nobody else around, Francina had accepted Hercules’s offer of a ride. He’d gone back to the hostel because he’d forgotten his retractable baton and never conducted his choir without it.
    When he’d come over to her in the dining hall after the competition, she’d been impressed that he didn’t talk about sports as most men did, but about his mother, who was going to be disappointed, he said, that his choir had not won the competition that year. Francina had permitted him to join her at the table, partly because she was in the company of three of her choir sisters and felt that it was proper, and partly because a man who talked of his mother deserved to be treated kindly. She’d agreed to go for a walk with him that afternoon, and not once had she caught him staring at her glass eye the way most people did when getting to know her.
    Back in Johannesburg, she’d looked up the name Hercules in Sipho’s encyclopedia and had been amused to discover that a tall, pointy man with no meat on his bones could be named after a Greek who looked like a white version of a Zulu warrior. With a name like Hercules, what else could he have become in life but a history teacher?
    When Francina and Zukisa were working in the shop, Hercules spent his free time painting. Lady Helen had become a respected center for the arts after a famous artist, S. W. Greeff, had rediscovered the crumbling and deserted town on a walk up the West Coast. Hercules, the dear man, had thought that he could add to the town’s reputation, but his first efforts had caused Francina a crisis of conscience; she didn’t want to hurt him but she never lied. In the end she had reluctantly—and gently—told him the truth. Now, after four years of art lessons, Hercules had disproved the theory that talent could not be taught, and every space on the walls in their flat was taken up by his paintings. Francina could not think of a scenic spot anywhere in the surrounding countryside, including on any of the koppies, that he had not captured in watercolors. He had recently hung a large painting of dairy cows in their bathroom, and Francina found, to her annoyance, that she could no longer relax as she soaked in her tub, not with six pairs of large brown bovine eyes staring at her.
    â€œWhy don’t you have a show and sell them?” Francina had asked Hercules time and again, but he did not believe that his work was good enough to be seen by the public.
    Hercules’s mother would never utter a word of criticism of her son, though Francina had seen the look of irritation on her face when she knocked into one of the many works hanging in the narrow hall to the bedrooms. The small flat felt even more confining with walls of vivid color.
    This tall, skinny history teacher, who Francina’s choir mates had once likened to a giraffe, was a man of surprises. Those silly girls had quickly lost their smiles, though, on the weekend when she and Hercules had their first official date, in Pongola, a small sugarcane farming town near the Swaziland border, and his choir had taken first place in the competition and won the trophy. Her choir hadn’t placed, but she had snagged the greatest prize of all—the man who would become her husband.
    â€œWhile I was painting I was thinking back to the choir competitions,” said Hercules.
    Francina knew her husband was leading up to something. Unlike her, Hercules never made idle conversation.
    â€œI think our choir could do well.”
    Francina couldn’t have been more shocked.
    â€œOur choir? Traveling in a minibus taxi to sing in a scout hall and stay in a school dormitory? Hercules, have you gone mad? It took those white ladies five months to get used to wearing their African-style tunics. And now you want them to go and sing Zulu praise hymns. I think that the fumes from your