Stones for My Father Read Free

known as Afrikaners and were the first of two white tribes to settle the land.
    The second tribe was British, and they fought us for control of the gold mines, land, and Africans. The war that had broken out just weeks before my father died was supposed to see off the British for good — hence its name,
Tweede Vryheidsoorlog:
the Second War of Liberation.
    So far, apart from food shortages and a visible absence of men, life had continued as normal in our corner of the Transvaal. Tonight, as a warm wind blew in from the east, all I could hear was the lonely clattering of a windmill from across the veld.
    Tucking my legs beneath me, I curled up on the heather and folded one arm under my head. I tried toimagine my father lying deep in the earth beside me, tried to imagine the steady rise and fall of his chest, the way his mouth pulled downward when he slept. I imagined threading my arm through his, squeezing it gently as I used to when we would sit together on the veranda, counting the stars late into the night.
    I fell asleep.

    Sipho discovered me the next morning, curled around my father’s tombstone like a cat.
    “Kleinnooi?”
    As he squatted beside me, I was aware of his bony kneecaps, his bare toes digging into the earth for balance.
    “Eh?” I sat up and brushed the dirt from my shift, embarrassed by his presence. Sipho continued to stare at me, full lips parted but speechless. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow in the corners. Long eyelashes curled up toward a high, smooth forehead.
    “You slept outside,
kleinnooi
, all night?”
    “I’m fine, Sipho.” As I made a motion to stand, he leaped up and offered me his hand.
    “Hungry
,
kleinnooi?”
    I nodded, and Sipho cocked his head toward home.
    The servants’ huts were located on the far side of the
koppie
, overlooking the scrubland where they kept a few goats and chickens. Sipho was the only son of my father’s farmhand, Bheka, who had joined my uncles oncommando over a year ago. Like me, Sipho had been left behind with his mother and two younger siblings — twin girls, Nosipho and Nelisiwe.
    Most Boer children grew up with a
matie
, an African playmate. Sipho had been gifted to me two weeks after I was born, when he was six months old. His father called my father
baas
, and Pa called him Bheka; if Pa hadn’t known his name, he would simply have called him
kaffir
, which was what we usually called a black person.
    While my parents directed the labors of Sipho’s parents, Sipho and I played at being equals. We dug grooves in the ground and used dried beans to play
oware
, or we gathered our siblings for a game of
mbube, mbube
, where one of us would pretend to be a lion stalking impala. Sipho showed me how to track animals by looking for fresh droppings and disturbed bush, and how to read the direction and speed of hoofprints in the dust. He taught me the difference between the curving marks left by a puff adder and a mamba, and how to recognize the spitting bugs that could blind a man with their acid saliva. He said that we needed only to listen to the earth, because it spoke better sense than most men, most of the time. He told me about the San tribesmen who hunted kudu over many days, staking their prey by outrunning it, and about the glorious victories of old. When the river was high we would fish, and when the sun grew too hot we would explore the nearby caves, which were decorated with ancientpaintings. I told Sipho about Piet Reteif, the Boer leader who made a covenant with God and saved hundreds of Boer lives at the Battle of Blood River, and Sipho told me about Shaka, the warrior who united all the Zulu tribes under one banner and used a buffalo-horn formation to defeat Europeans armed with guns and canons.
    Now that we were getting older, my mother said that it wasn’t proper for me to spend so much time with Sipho. Soon the games of
oware
and
mbube, mbube
would have to come to an end, as would the fishing trips, tracking, and