![]() Still, Hendrina’s hidings were legendary. But they were fine Christian men and would not be faulted for lack of effort. ![]() It was not easy beating goodness into a body the way you would hone your favorite knife. Drinking mampoer, our fathers shook their heads at the discipline they’d been forced to instill. We were all beaten regularly and could guess the weapon and length of a flogging by the shape of the welts: thin strips for whips, stubby straps for canes, the compact geometry of a buckle repeated over again. And these were the times Hendrina was beaten by her pa. After all, there were wagons to mend, oxen to rest, cattle to fatten and tend with a mix of grease and tar, which fixed broken bones and cuts and sprains equally. ![]() Our party stretched out haphazardly, marooned on a never-ending plain that was broken only by the long deserted charred remains of kraals and scattered rock formations that had resisted the erosion of rain. Most often, though, we didn’t go anywhere. By the time the temperature cooled, we’d add only two or three miles more before dark. Then we waited for the thunderstorms, which electrified the veld and turned the air to glass. We only ever eked out a few miles before the heat of the day obliged us to rest. What a sight we must have been, in-spanning the oxen when the koppies were still shadows against a dull sky. Our party was a hundred wagons large with almost a thousand cattle churning the sweet grass to mud. They also said, the cock is king of his dungheap, so. It’s a blue horse of a different color, our mothers said when there was something they lacked. Cow shit collected to waterproof canvas walls. Sheep tails must be melted for candle wax. This far from a town, we all played our part. And so ours were, too, even with the chores. They were dusty and sweaty, but their fingernails were clean. Our mothers were sewers and menders and butchers and cooks and medics and farmhands and washers and god-fearing women, who went to Church and prayed each night before bed. Mostly around Graaff-Reinet, where our fathers were farmers. And we were not idle ourselves those two years we walked. She could not help that her gestures made our own achievements look small. The muscles on her arms just hardened to the size of small apricots as she urged the oxen on our Joshua crossing the Jordan. Though the waters were swollen and struck the boulders with great force, she did not scream. Not that steering a wagon was easy fording the Orange River, Hendrina’s transom snapped. Which would have been terribly sad were it not for the spectacular efficiency of such a demise. Indeed, Marta bore her first child in her parents’ wagon and perished before they’d had time to wash the bedclothes of blood. We saw no evidence that they would not be the same beds on which we’d die. These were the same grass-stuffed mattresses on which we slept and on which we would likely give birth. Hendrina was a voorloper for her parents, who did not have servants enough for her to wait in the back on lattice beds like us, stitching the hours into trousers and sheets (mended trousers, mended sheets nothing was ever new). So she insisted on this acute and awkward angle between breast and knee as she called to all sixteen of the wide-horned oxen for hours on end: Kleintjie and Swartjie and Grootjie and Erasmus and Mompara and Moses and some others and Lui. Seated, she believed she possessed an air of competence. Hendrina was a slight girl and when she gripped the riem, she had to double over to perch on the wagon’s chest. If anything, we were embarrassed for our friend. So we didn’t love her simply because she drove a wagon across the country at fourteen. Our Hendrina was published in The Chicago Quarterly Review in Fall 2018 and received a special mention in the 2019 Pushcart awards.
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