A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto

that he is without a wife, and the beer softens the loss that he feels when he sees his daughter, who has become a young woman while his gaze was elsewhere, while his eyes were upon other things. He looks across at Tembi where she pours beer from a calabash. Some young man will want to marry her soon, and then that young man will find that there is not enough work on the farms, so he will go off to work on the railways, or in the mines, or somewhere else in the cities, for who can truly be satisfied to live here and be paid in salt and sugar and a portion of the harvest, and a handful of coins?
    Elias drinks more beer to cloud these thoughts. What else can he do? he asks himself. That is the way things are.
    Tembi watches her father, always aware of him. This man in his new city clothes. But his face is not as it once was, it is not the face she remembers. The face of her father is now in that place called memory. This man is not the person she remembers.
    She remembers the glad laughter that sprang from his mouth when she would run down the hill to greet him as he came up from the bus stop, his arms filled with parcels and his face so eager for the sight of his family at the end of a working week.
    She remembers sitting in his lap, as a small child, while he ate his mealie-pap and stew, and how he spooned morsels into her mouth as she rested in the crook of his arm, half asleep in her happiness.
    She remembers the long road to the place where the bus stopped, when he went off to the mines, and she remembers walking with him, dragging at his hand to slow him down, to prevent his going. She remembers how he sent her back after a while. She remembers the long road to the bus thatwould take him to the train that would take him to the mines in the city. A tall man on the road with a suitcase in one hand and a swing in his step. And even as he walked away from her he faded, like a mirage in the summer heat, wavering at the edges, losing shape, becoming a blur, becoming a memory. This man, this stranger. Her father.
    Tembi takes a plate of food from one of the women and brings it to her father.
    “Will you eat, Father?” She waits while he sets his gourd of beer down and accepts the plate in both his hands.
    “Thank you, daughter.”
    He holds the plate on his lap and looks up at Tembi. She stands above him now, she is a woman, no longer the girl who sat in his lap. “My daughter,” he says.
    A light appears in her eyes. “Yes, my father.”
    He shakes his head and says no more. His eyes are bloodshot with tears, his throat is closed, his heart is locked, his thoughts are dulled—with beer, with distance, with loss, with sorrow—all the things that fill a broken heart. He looks away from the light in his daughter’s eyes, a dying flame that he cannot rekindle.
    “I am sorry, daughter,” he says. “For everything. For our lives.”
    “Yes, Father,” Tembi says, and lets her hand rest on his shoulder.
    And in this moment, this moment of touch between father and daughter, her hand on his warm shoulder, she knows that he will not come back after today. Tembi knows, with a sudden knowledge of the inevitable, that he will not come back. He will walk down the long road into the mirage one last time, a man with a suitcase in his hand, and his shape will become a blur and not come back. This man, this stranger.

12
    A FTER THE BURIAL , after the funeral, after the grieving, life must go on.
    In the weeks that follow, the small boys must herd the cattle to pasture in the fields. There are the maize crops to attend, the fences to be maintained. In the orchard, where apricots and peaches grow, the farmer must spray the fruit against the depredation of insects. In the vegetable garden, the women must water the soil and pull the weeds. In the chicken coop, the eggs must be collected and brought to the house. And in the dairy, where Tembi usually works with three other girls, the milk must be poured into cans and the butter churned.