Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Limpopo by Sheila Kohler

© 2007 by Sheila Kohler

O. Henry Award-winner Sheila Kohler makes her EQMM debut this month in a painfully suspenseful tale set in her native South Africa. Her seven novels and three collections of short stories have brought her worldwide recognition and translation into many languages. Her most recent book is Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness (Other Press, 2007).

Amy stares at the marks of the tires in the red dirt and the shiny bumper of the blue car, which glints in the light as it goes down the long driveway under the trees. It rained the night before and the earth is wet. She can hear the sound of the river running through the bottom of the garden in the distance. Always, there is the sound of the river running, even in her dreams. She likes to say the funny name over and over again: “Limpopo, Limpopo, Limpopo,” she says. She wonders what the name means.

Her mother has told her she is just going up to the farmers’ co-op for a minute, she’ll be as quick as she can, and Amy is to be a good girl now and mind the baby, who is sleeping like an angel, and the dogs, who are lying under the tree. From the swing, Amy watches the pale blue car go down the muddy driveway and out the gate. She swings back and forth through the blue air, going higher and higher. She stares at the tracks the way she does when her father takes her walking with him in the bush and they are looking for animal spoor. Her father is very good at spotting leopard tracks. There are still a few leopards in the hills, her father says, and he doesn’t want them coming down and stealing his game.

Sometimes her father lets her walk with him, if she walks very quietly at his side and is careful to look for ticks in her socks on their return, when he goes out with the dogs looking for game to cull. Amy’s father, Mark, runs a game farm on the border which he inherited from her grandparents before Independence. Amy is not quite sure what Independence is. All Amy knows is, her father gets up very early in the morning and leaves the house before anyone else is awake, and when he comes home at night, she is sometimes already asleep.

Amy swings through the air, throwing her head back and forth, and stretching out her legs. They look longer, and she feels taller, more grown up, watching the back of her mother’s car disappear and the big garden that stretches away toward the river, which she can see glinting invitingly in the distance like a chocolate brown ribbon. Her mother has never left her alone with her baby brother before, though the co-op is not far from their house. In fact, she has never left her alone, even for a minute, even to go to fetch the eggs in the henhouse, which is right near the house.

But Amy is eight years old now, what her father calls the age of reason, the age when they shipped him off all on his own to boarding school, he says, and it is her father’s birthday today. Her mother is making him his favourite cake, with granadillas and granadilla icing, and she has forgotten something she must have. Amy is old enough to remain with her brother for half an hour, surely, with the dogs to guard them, the two big ridgeback dogs they keep, called Dale and Tony, who are now asleep as the baby is, lying in the shade just outside the house under the seringa tree.

Gladys, the old nanny who works for them and helps her mother in the house, the one who brought her mother up, is too sick today to come in to work. She is lying in her small, smoky room, which is some way from the house. Amy’s mother doesn’t trust anyone else, these days, she says.

Her mother was in a hurry, and the baby was sleeping so soundly, which is such a rare thing; her brother is a colicky baby, her mother says, and anything wakes his lordship. He still wakes up in the night again and again and screams for her mother to come and pick him up and breast-feed him, which wakes Amy, too, sometimes, and makes her mother sleepy and cross during the day. Her mother stumbles around the house in her funny bra, her stained blouse half open, half-asleep. Her mother says she feels like a “zombie” half the time.

Today her mother had forgotten something she really needed for the special cake. Amy heard her say, “Oh dammit!” in the kitchen and slam a cupboard door shut and then step outside and look down at the sleeping baby. Then she looked up at Amy, who was swinging back and forth through the air in her light-blue sundress with the little sleeves like wings, her hair tied back from her face in a ponytail with her favourite blue bow. Such a good girl, my good girl, my angel, her mother often calls her.

Her mother told her to be an angel and hold the fort. She said if the baby should wake up, she could jiggle the pram a bit and he would probably go right back to sleep, she had just fed him, after all, or if that didn’t work she could push the pram back and forth, but she was not to try to pick him up on her own. Amy is not allowed to hold her baby brother except when she sits with him on the sofa and rocks him very carefully in her arms with her mother beside her. Amy thinks this is stupid, as she is sure she can easily hold her little brother without dropping him to the floor, after all.

Amy likes having the whole house, the big garden with all its bright orange, yellow, and purple flowers, with the bees hovering over them, the two dogs, but above all her baby brother, all to herself. She pretends she is the mommy, now, of the new baby boy, and she is the owner of all this vast space. She feels she is the one who has brought it all forth: the baby, the big English pram with the mosquito netting falling down around her baby’s face, and the big blond dogs, and even the river running in the distance. She has invented it all.

She gets down from the swing and struts around the garden in her Clark’s sandals, pretending to be Mommy. She deadheads a few flowers the way Mommy does and pulls out a weed. She thinks it’s probably a weed. She likes the way the cicadas scream again and again, like someone telling the same story over and over again. She likes the way the sun makes everything so very quiet and still at this hour of the morning before it gets too hot.

Amy’s mother, too, likes the silence in the sunlit garden, the warmth of the early-morning air on her face, as she drives fast down the driveway in the car. She has not left the house on her own since the birth of the baby, six weeks ago. In fact, she has not had a moment on her own since the birth of her baby. The baby has been constantly, or so it seems to her, on her breast, sucking at her flesh. Insatiable, a big insatiable boy, who seems never to have enough milk and wakes up almost as soon as she puts him down. Since the birth of the baby, Amy, too, follows her wherever she goes, thumb in her mouth, watching her with her dark brown acquisitive eyes. She even follows her into the bathroom and keeps asking her every five minutes if she loves her. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

Amy was conceived so easily. Too easily, Stella thinks as she shifts gears. She remembers the awkward fumbling in the back of Mark’s car in the dark. It was the first time they had made love; the first time she had made love, if that is what it could be called. When she realized she was pregnant, she couldn’t believe it.

When she gave Mark the news, he said, “No problem, we’ll get married. My parents will be only too happy to let us take over the farm.” Neither of them was twenty years old yet. Stella left the university in Cape Town, where she was studying French, and they moved up north to Mark’s parents’ farm, near the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Stella finds the place very beautiful, and she likes to garden, but she sometimes suffers from the heat in the small house with its corrugated iron roof, and she misses her friends and family in Cape Town. Sometimes, when Mark comes back late at night, she finds the days long and lonely. After Amy’s birth, she had moments of depression when she kept miscarrying repeatedly, and her mother came and stayed with them for a while. A psychiatrist prescribed pills. Finally, this beautiful new baby was conceived. And now, for Mark’s birthday, the baby seems to be finally sleeping sweetly, soundly, replete.

Now she puts her sandaled foot on the accelerator, flying fast down the strip road, her tight skirt slipping up her thighs. She likes this comfortable elastic skirt which clings to her body, and which she wears with a blouse in the house. Unlike other women she knows, she was careful not to put on extra weight during her pregnancy. She is proud of her slim body, her long, lithe legs. She has got her figure back fast. She remembers being on holiday in Italy as a girl and someone calling out to her in the street: “Che belle gambe!”

With the window open, she feels the strong morning sun on her face, her legs. She turns on the radio and sings along with the old Beatles song that is playing: “Here Comes the Sun.” She feels buoyant, light-headed, young. Her body no longer aches. She’s a lucky young woman, she thinks, with her beautiful new baby boy — she had so wanted a boy, she is not sure why, but she did. She has a handsome, young, six-foot-two-tall husband who loves her and watches her as she moves around the kitchen in the morning and says, “You have the most beautiful legs in the world!”; and they have a huge game farm all to themselves. She has a bottle of Champagne in the refrigerator, and she decides that tonight, after they have eaten the cake, they will make love for the first time since the baby was born. Since the baby was born, Mark lies in the bed beside her and groans and keeps telling her he feels like a rocket about to take off.

She speeds fast going toward the co-op, which is not more than ten or a maximum of fifteen minutes away. She calculates: ten minutes there, five minutes to buy the baking powder, and ten minutes back to the house, not more than thirty minutes in all. What can possibly happen in thirty minutes? She knows Mark would die if he knew she had left Amy alone in the house, but she is certain Amy is perfectly safe with the two big dogs at her side. The good dogs would never allow anyone harmful near her children, she knows. They always set up a terrible racket if a stranger approaches, and the local people are frightened of the big dogs.

It is still quite early, not even ten o’clock yet. Amy knows how to tell the time on the big watch with the Mickey Mouse that her grandmother gave her for her birthday.

She gets down from the swing and walks over and peers at her baby brother in his pram, which was her pram when she was a baby, a long time ago. He is, everyone tells Amy, such a beautiful big baby boy. There is something about the way everyone says boy that Amy dislikes. Her mother says he’s the most beautiful baby boy ever, though he wakes her up again and again at night. Even her daddy says he’s the most beautiful baby boy ever. When her father says that, Amy has an urge to give the baby boy a little pinch on his pink arm.

Once, when her mother left the room for a moment, she did give him a little pinch, only a tiny little one, on his leg, but it made him scream very loudly, which surprised Amy. Amy had never heard such a loud scream. Her mother came running back into the room and picked him up. She thought he must have been bitten by an insect because there was a red mark on his skin. “Could it have been a spider?” her mother said and looked at Amy inquiringly.

Certainly he is pink and has her father’s dark hair. “A chip off the old block,” her mother says, looking at her baby and then at Amy’s father and laughing. Her mother looks very lovely when she laughs. The baby reminds Amy a little bit of the kittens, with his eyes shut so tightly like theirs. They had to drown the kittens, as there were too many of them. Thomas, who works in the garden three times a week, put them in a sack and dropped them into the river which runs at the bottom of their garden. Amy wonders how many babies are considered too many before they, too, are put in a sack and drowned in the river. If anyone had asked her opinion, she would have told them she preferred being the only one, but no one did.

When the baby’s eyes are open, they are quite a startling blue, but now they are shut, and her mother has said all babies start out with blue eyes, Amy did too, and that they might turn dark like hers later on. Then her mother would have two dark-eyed beauties. Amy hopes the eyes won’t turn dark.

Babies can’t see at all when they are first born, her mother says. Amy wonders about that, how people can know something like that. She lets her hand just touch the top of his head very lightly in the place where she has been told not to touch him. It’s a soft spot almost like a heart, she thinks, that seems to beat. Her father is always telling her not to touch the baby’s head because this soft spot hasn’t closed up completely yet, and for some reason it makes her want to touch that very spot. She is to be very, very careful, her father says. She presses down very gently on the little beating heart, and the baby stirs, waving his pink arms and legs around.

Her baby brother arrived in the night. Babies often arrive in the night, her mother says. They had to lift Amy out of her bed and wrap her in her blanket so she could sleep in the back of the car while they drove all the way to the hospital, but she couldn’t sleep because her mother was making such a strange sort of moaning noise. She’d never heard her mother cry out like that. The baby was making her mother moan and use God’s name in vain the way her mother had told her never to do.

Her mother kept saying, “Oh God in heaven, the pains are so bad already. How will I bear it?” and her father drove very fast through the night, and Amy was frightened as the car screeched round the curves and her mother kept saying God’s name in vain. It was a long way to the hospital. Her father, too, swore at the state of the roads and the bloody government, and said all sorts of bad words he wasn’t supposed to say. When they finally arrived, they dumped Amy hurriedly on a hard chair in a waiting room with an old lady she’d never seen before and went away for a long time. Amy didn’t like the way the old lady smelled. There was an awful light shining in her eyes, and she couldn’t sleep in the chair, and the old lady kept talking to her and saying her daddy would come soon, he had to stay with her mother because she was making a beautiful new baby for Amy and she was not to cry, which made Amy scream louder and louder. Finally her father did come back after hours and hours, it seemed to her, but only to take her to her grandmother’s house, which was in the town. She didn’t want to stay with her grandmother, who made her eat disgusting boiled spinach and go to bed too early and didn’t even have any TV. And when she came home, the baby was there.

Amy moves away from the pram. She thinks she might take a little walk down to the river at the bottom of the garden before her mother comes back, though she knows she is not supposed to go down there alone.

Babies, in her estimation, are not any fun. She had been expecting to play with her little brother the way her mother kept telling her she would be able to do. “You’ll have someone to play with,” her mother kept saying. But you can’t play with a baby. Instead, he screams or lies sleeping and spitting and pooping, and he smells. Everyone hovers around him and brings gifts for him and ignores Amy for some reason. Everyone coos and says how beautiful he is, which is just rubbish, Amy thinks. What is beautiful about this pink thing? Amy thinks the baby looks a little bit like a pink slug or maybe some kind of worm.

Stella has difficulty finding a parking spot near the co-op. She had forgotten it is a Saturday, and all the farmers and their wives seem to have come in to do their shopping at the same moment. Stella circles around through the dusty, congested street, gets caught up behind a big truck, and honks her horn. Finally, she finds a space and rushes out of the car fast, flies up the steps quickly, and enters the cool of the co-op. There is a long line. A black woman stands in front of her with a big basket of produce. If she had been white, Amy would have asked if she might go ahead of her, as she only has the one item, but she is afraid the woman might think she thinks she is better than her, that she is playing the Madame, and has a right to go ahead, so she says nothing but fidgets nervously, looking at her watch as the minutes pass. She thinks about her baby boy and Amy.

Surely he will sleep for an hour if not more, and Amy will play happily in the garden on her own. She is a good child, her Amy, and very clever for her age, always asking questions about everything. She has been rather quiet and serious lately, just staring at Stella with her big dark eyes, particularly since the baby has arrived. Stella is not quite sure what Amy is thinking about sometimes. She thinks of the day the baby suddenly screamed, a loud indignant scream, and she ran to pick him up only to find the red mark on his leg. Was it really an insect bite? Amy looked a little sheepish, watching her pick up the baby and give him her breast. Was there a glimmer of fear in her eyes?

Why is the woman taking so long? And should she give up her errand and just go home without the baking powder she needs for the cake, after all? She is about to give up when the woman finally moves on and it is her turn. The shopkeeper apologizes for the long wait and seems to want to talk to her. Surely the woman can see she is in a hurry? Stella says something about having to run, grabs the packet, and escapes from the shadows of the shop, running down the steps to her car. To her horror, scratching in her handbag she realizes that in her haste she has shut her keys in the car, and the door is locked.

Amy strolls through the long green reeds going towards the Limpopo river. She says the funny lines she loves, which her mother has taught her about the river: “I am going to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, to find out what the Crocodile has for dinner.” She likes the cool of the shadows in the reeds and the rushing sound of the wind and the running water. The broad, muddy river, churned up by the heavy rains, runs fast here over the stones.

She is getting hot and thirsty and starting to get hungry. Her mother usually gives her a snack, what she calls elevens, because she has it at eleven o’clock. Amy looks at her watch and sees her mother has been gone for over an hour. She knows she is not allowed to go down to the river on her own, but she decides she will just go for a moment. She will take off her socks and sandals when she gets down there and put her feet in the cool water. She’ll splash some water on her face. She knows not to wade too deep into the river because there are crocs in the water and sometimes even sunning themselves on the bank and some of the native people have been caught when they went down to do their washing.

That’s when she hears the sound of her baby whimpering. She will go and see what is the matter with him. Perhaps, she thinks, he’d like to come down to the river with her, too. Perhaps he would like some of the cool water on his face. Surely he must get tired of drinking from her mother’s breasts all the time. Personally, Amy finds it rather disgusting to watch her brother sucking and sucking on her mother’s fat dark nipple. Sometimes a little bit of milk comes out of the side of the baby’s mouth. Now that the baby is there Amy’s mother smells different, too, milky and sometimes slightly sour, and her skin looks different to Amy: pale and thin.

Panicking now, Stella runs down the road to the only garage, which is, fortunately, not very far. The young boy who is the only one there, this Saturday, takes awhile before he understands what she is saying. Finally he says, “How old is your car?” as though that is a relevant piece of information. When she tells him, he says, as Mark did long ago, “No problem, then,” and he goes back into the garage walking slowly and casually though she has explained the situation. He comes out waving a wire hanger triumphantly. She stares at him, and he says, “This will do the trick,” and follows her down the road to her car.

He seems to have had some practice in the art of breaking into cars. She watches, holding her breath as he inserts the wire hanger between the edge of the window and threads it through and down. He fishes down to pull up the lever to open the door. He tries once and misses and then he tries again and misses. Third time lucky, she says to herself and crosses her fingers behind her back.

Amy goes back to the pram and jiggles it the way her mother told her to, but the baby goes on crying increasingly loudly. She peers down at him and sings him the lullaby her mother sings to him, but this doesn’t work either. He doesn’t seem to hear her singing or doesn’t care for the way she sings the lullaby. He cries louder and louder and his face is very pink and he looks angry. Her mother never lets him cry for a minute before she comes rushing to pick him up and give him her breast.

Amy decides she’ll have to pick him up even though her mother told her not to. She doesn’t like to hear the awful screaming noise he is making and nor do the dogs, who are stirring around her nervously and brushing against her legs as though to urge her to do something fast.

She’ll just pick him up very carefully. There is no reason why she would drop him, after all. She carries her big doll, which is not much smaller than her little brother. She thrusts her hands into the pram and scoops him up. She lifts him up quite easily and holds him up with his head over her shoulder the way Mommy does. She knows he cannot yet hold his head up properly. Miraculously, in her arms, he stops crying. She smells his baby smell of powder and urine and something else mixed in between. He feels warm in her arms.

The dogs are still sniffing around her and getting in her way, but the baby is quiet now, and Amy makes her way back into the cool of the tall reeds, the dogs following along. She’ll just take him for a little walk down to the river and put a little water on his face.

Stella tells the young man this doesn’t seem to be working. She looks around her, and thinks she will have to hitch a ride. Surely there is someone at the co-op today whom she knows and would take her back to her house? Or even someone she doesn’t know. A woman would be safer, but at this point she is ready to ask anyone. She knows almost everyone on the farms around here. She has been gone more than an hour now and she is afraid the baby might be awake. He never sleeps for much more than an hour. But now, when she needs them, everyone seems to have left, going back to their farms for lunch.

She sees a man coming down the road in a black pickup truck which looks a little bit like the one Mark had in Cape Town where they first made love. She stands out in the middle of the road and lifts her thumb. He stops, and she looks down into very blue eyes. She’s never seen him before, which is unusual. She is not sure what he is doing here, but he doesn’t look like a criminal to her, though he is not a clean-shaven man. She asks him if he can help her and she explains the situation, exaggerating a bit. Dramatically, she says, “It’s a matter of life or death.” Secretly she hopes the baby might still be fast asleep and Amy probably in the cool of the house having a cup of lemonade to drink, but she wants to make sure.

The man seems to hesitate, looks at his watch. He says he’s in a hurry and he’s not going in that direction. “It won’t take more than five minutes back to my house. Please,” she begs. She sees him glance down at her bare legs, and she hesitates for a moment as he leans across and opens the door. Then she walks around and she gets into his car.

Amy wanders on with the baby quiet in her arms now, and the dogs following as she goes down to the river. It is getting hotter and hotter. It is noon, it says on her watch; she can see if she squints. The baby feels more and more heavy in her arms and he is slipping down gradually. She hitches him up a bit and says the words from the poem about the river. She can hear it in the distance and perhaps the baby can too, because he is quiet.

She steps out into the sudden sunlight of the yellow sandy bank of the Limpopo. “See the grey-green, greasy Limpopo,” she says to her little brother and smiles at him, and it seems to Amy that he smiles back at her. But he is wriggling around now in her arms and he is too heavy for her to hold for much longer, so she puts him down on the sand in the shade of a big brown log, and she sits down next to him and waves a fly away from his face. He seems to like it down by the river as she does herself. Perhaps he, too, likes the sound of the water or the waving of the fever-trees above his head. Or perhaps he just likes lying in the sand. Amy lies back beside him. His very blue eyes are open and he seems to be watching her as Amy gets up and walks away from him. She goes toward the water to just put her toes in. She takes off her sandals and looks back at him and it seems to her that the baby is smiling, but perhaps it is just a shadow from the fever-tree.

The man drives excruciatingly slowly along the strip road. Stella feels called upon to make polite conversation with him, though she is more and more nervous as the time goes by. She asks him if he is new in the area.

He says, “Just passing through,” which seems an odd thing to say. It is not an area that one just passes through. He is not a talkative man, she gathers, which is all right with her. She has no need for conversation. What she wants is to push his foot down on the accelerator and go fast down the road. She says, “I’m so worried my baby might have woken up.”

The man says he doesn’t know much about children as he’s never had any. He says this in the tone of someone who doesn’t care much about children either. He says he doesn’t want to ruin the tires of his car on the strip road.

Finally they are on the stretch of tarmacked road going toward her house, and the man goes a little faster. Stella breathes more easily. She feels a compliment might be appropriate at this point. “This is so kind of you. I really appreciate it. We’ll be there in a minute, now.”

“Time for a quickie, perhaps?” the man says and puts his hand on her leg.

The baby is kicking his legs in the air and whimpering again, so Amy scoops up a little water and carries it over to him in her hands. She pours a little on the top of his head, on his beating soft spot. He seems to like that and turns quiet. She pretends she’s the priest and she is baptising the baby all over again. She says his name solemnly, the same name as her father’s: “Mark, I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” she says as the priest did. She feels very solemn and rather sleepy and she closes her eyes for a minute and remembers the christening.

The whole family had gone to the church in the town for the baptism only a few days after the baby was born. Even her favourite grandmother from Cape Town had come up for the ceremony and wore a hat with flowers in the brim. Her mother had dressed the baby up in the long lace christening gown Amy had worn too, and before her her mother. Everyone had crowded around the font and the priest had poured water on her baby’s head and mumbled the words Amy has remembered. She likes saying these words. Amy goes to get more water from the river to do it all over again. She decides to give her brother a new name, to name him anew with more water.

Stella ignores the man and stares at the road. “Only kidding,” he says, and grins at her, but he still has his hand on her leg. She notices the black hairs on the backs of his thick fingers. “Nice legs,” he says as he strokes. He is driving more and more slowly and her heart is beating so loudly now she feels it must be shaking the car.

“Please,” she says, “just drive me home,” but instead, he stops the car completely and reaches for her. But she is waiting for a move of this kind. She feels her whole body uncoil and spring forth. She throws open the door and flings herself fast out of the car into the sunshine. She almost falls in the dust. She starts to run. She runs off the side of the road and into the bush and as she runs she turns her head and watches as the man goes fast now past her, swings his car with a screech of wheels in the other direction. She can hear the sound of his laughing. He is waving to her wildly, the dust rising and coating the grass at the side of the road. Then she begins to run again, running and running as fast as she can, her legs in the grass, going toward her house.

Amy is hot and feels hungry and tired. She wonders what has happened to her mommy and why she hasn’t come home when she said she would. Amy decides to take off her dress and her ribbon in her hair and splashes water all over her body. She goes a little further into the water, looking around for crocs. The dogs have slunk off into the shade and left her alone. Her mommy has been gone such a long time now. Amy looks at her watch but can hardly make out the hands. She’s getting muddled up with the sun on her head, and now the baby has started up crying again and beating his legs and arms around desperately. He is hungry, too, she understands, and he misses their mother. Why has her mother not come back to them?

When Stella arrives at the house, sweating and panting, there is no sign of the baby in the pram or Amy or the dogs. She hears no sound except the sound of the river running. What could have happened to them? She runs through the house desperately looking in all the rooms, throwing open cupboard doors, even looking behind the curtain in the bath, but there is no sign of them there. Is it possible they could have been kidnapped, eaten by leopards, carried off by marauding natives? All sorts of wild thoughts go through her mind. Or would Amy have thought to go to the servants’ quarters to look for the nanny?

Then Stella thinks of the river, which she knows Amy loves, and starts to run down the path through the reeds that lead down there. She stops and puts her hands to her eyes in the glare. She sees something by the side of the dark river. Something or someone is lying there. She runs across the sand. Amy lies asleep on the bank of the river in the shade of the trees. She has managed to lift the baby up over her and put him on her bare stomach and chest and balance him there. The baby is rooting around with his face down against her chest, looking for her tick of a nipple.