Sarah

The girl sat on the wall of the well staring with unseeing eyes into the unfathomable depth. The rough stones of the wall felt hot through the flimsy hand-me-down skirt from one of her sisters. Her unshod feet exposed to the early autumn noon-day warmth, was the same shade as the long, ochre skirt. She rose when the baby cried.

The three-month-old baby boy lay swaddled in a new blanket that someone had donated. Sarah took a seat on the cot in the corner of the single room which constituted her family’s living quarters. She slipped her arm from the long sleeve of her white cotton blouse to facilitate the opening of the bodice and held the baby to her breast, where he eagerly suckled. A feeling of contentment washed over her. This child was the one good thing that had come out of the rape, but the beating she would never forget. She flinched at the memory thereof. The baby pulled away from the breast when sensing his mother’s negative mood.

‘Thula babana …’ Sarah’s singing was surprisingly pitch perfect for one so young. She stroked the tight, black curls so like her own; as much as to calm her as the baby.

It was Sarah’s thirteenth birthday that fateful Thursday morning (preceding Easter) a year ago when it had happened. Fog had hung in wisps over the veld. Frogs had banded together near the damp patches after the good rains of the preceding week. Mosquitoes had swarmed among the clumps of tall grass. She used to relish the peaceful surroundings and had welcomed the solitude on the five mile walk to school from her home on the subsistence farm in the Molteno district. That was why she had felt an overwhelming sense of betrayal when she had been accosted by the unknown youth.

At first, Sarah had felt numb and could not even muster the energy to hate her assailant, however much her mother had tried to instil this emotion in her by her persistent ranting after the district nurse had confirmed their suspicion that Sarah was pregnant. Her father had asserted that Sarah was damaged goods – whatever that meant. How could she marry the youth, even if her father did manage to trace him? Or, maybe, her father wanted retribution in the form of a financial settlement? What was her life worth at any rate; how did you calculate the value of a life?

Initially, the doctor at the medical clinic had informed her parents that Sarah’s loss of eyesight could be attributed to the trauma and that her sight would return in due course – but it never did. Sarah turned her head towards the sleeping form in the crook of her arm and wondered how it was that she could see him smile. Was it a trick of the light or could she really see his perfect features? No, now it was gone again. It was as if a veil had lifted for a split second and she had come face to face with the very reason for her existence.

‘Sarah!’ Nonie called when she returned from her day’s work on the farm. ‘Sleeping again?’ She clicked her tongue and smiled indulgently at this youngest of her ten children, wondering what the future held for the two of them. Her husband had wanted to turn Sarah out of the home – she has become a financial burden and was not likely to attract a husband.

Born from years of experience of raising children, Nonie expertly ensconced the baby in a wrap on her back and left for the cooking area outside their two-roomed corrugated shanty to light the fire to cook their evening meal. They kept a few scratch hens in a pen just outside the door of their dwelling, but since Sarah had dropped the eggs one morning (a precious commodity in this household) Nonie has taken over the task of collecting the eggs. Nonie now did the rounds, collecting the eggs from known spots. She was pleased to see that Sarah had filled the woodbin during the course of the day with scrounged pieces of wood. Sarah couldn’t do much nowadays, but what she could do, she tried to do to the best of her ability.

At the well, the youth drank brackish water from a cracked cup that he had lowered into the pit by a piece of string. When the woman came outside with a baby tied to her back, he ducked out of sight behind the stone wall.

David had been watching the girl earlier that day when she had sat at the well and was tempted to talk to her and ask after the well-being of the baby, but at the last minute, his courage had deserted him. He never expected to feel such an acute longing in his young life. In the end, he had waited and watched in the hope that he would get a glimpse of his child – a boy, he had been told by a kindly neighbour. He had also told David that the girl’s father had beaten her when he had learned that she was pregnant and that she was now legally blind as a result of the beating. He gave her name as ‘Sarah’.

If only he could make amends without having to face a jail sentence, he would do so. David intended to ask Sarah to elope with him. He would marry her once she was of a legal age in two years time. He had landed a job at a chrome mine in Tjibeng Village in the Sekhukhune district in Limpopo and would be able to provide for his family. It is tribal land – the police won’t look for them there. At first, it might be difficult to make ends meet, but neither of them was strangers to poverty. He always held that poverty was not a sin, just an inconvenience. Together they would raise their son, of whom he had high expectations.

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