When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (34 page)

He didn’t want to worry Mama, but he did have to go back up to the dam. He had to find the answer to the question that had woken him in the night, making him sit up in his bed.

Why did Petros have a spade with him?

The area around the dam was very quiet. The men had taken the cows to a different field today, there was no longer any reason for Krishna to be barking or whining there, and even the birds
seemed to be holding a silent vigil. The only noise came from the traffic on the Malagwane Hill, and the quiet of the plateau made Benedict nervous.

He had worried that he might not be able to find the exact place in the bushes again, but there was a clear path now, flattened by Uncle Enock and the men from the dairy going in and then coming
out again with Petros. Benedict followed the path, stamping his feet and talking loudly to himself in a deep voice so that anything that might be lying in wait would think that he was very big and
had somebody else with him. Here was where he had fallen, and here was where he had found the photograph. The bad smell was gone now.

He looked around, scanning the ground for any signs of recent digging. There were none. Maybe the snake had attacked Petros before he had even started. Squatting down, he looked again. From that
angle, looking back towards where he had tripped over the spade, he noticed a slight mound under some thick undergrowth just next to a tree. He might as well start there.

Shouting hymns from church now, he pulled at the branches on top of the mound to unearth them.
Eh!
They weren’t growing there, they were just lying on top. He cleared them away.
Then, with his small spade, he began to dig. It wasn’t long before the tip of his spade struck something hard, and with his heart beating with excitement about finally finding the treasure,
he hurried to clear the soil away. Whatever it was had an odd shape, and it took a long time to dig it up completely. By the time he was brushing off the last of the soil with his hands, he had
moved on from hymns and had recited his way through every times table that he knew, and sweat was dripping from his forehead.

Turning it over, he stood to look at it, whistling now like Mr Levine. There were no arms, and the ends of its legs were gone, but it was definitely the figure of a small child. Was this the
Indian gift that Petros’s great, great ancestor had stolen from the Portuguese? It was made of stone but, like Mrs Zikalala’s white plastic sandals, it still bore a few tiny patches of
gold. Okay, so it had had gold on it once upon a time, but it was really just stone now. And it certainly didn’t look special enough to be the kind of stone that Auntie Rachel could believe
in. But Petros had thought of this as treasure! How could that be?

Benedict whistled and stomped as he thought.

Maybe if you had only one thing in the whole entire world that came from your family, maybe you could think that one thing was worth the same as gold. And maybe you could even think your
girlfriend’s family would accept it in place of cows for
lobola.

Benedict looked at it carefully, trying hard to see it as valuable. Something at its neck caught his attention and he bent to examine it. It looked like a bubble of dried glue. He traced the
join with his fingers. Yes, the head had been glued on to the body.

Suddenly an idea began to come to him of what it was that he had found.

What had first looked like an underpant carved onto the figure could just as well be a nappy.

Could it be...?

Eh!

Imagine if the story in the Bible wasn’t true!

Imagine if King Solomon
had
cut the baby in two!

It had happened in ancient times, so long ago that the baby could easily have turned to stone, just like the slice of tree on Auntie Rachel’s bookshelf.

Eh!
This baby could prove that King Solomon wasn’t wise after all.

How could he be wise, really, if he had followed the hoopoe’s advice not to respect ladies?

Mama didn’t believe it was once upon a time a baby, not even for one second. But Titi thought it was.

‘The Bible tells us the baby was never cut in two,’ Mama reminded them.

‘But books can lie, Mama. Baba said.’

‘Maybe other books can lie, Benedict, but the Bible is the word of God. And anyway, how is a baby going to turn to stone?’

‘A lady turned to salt.’

‘It can be a miracle, Auntie.’

‘Uh-uh.’

They sat together and talked and looked, until at last Titi and Benedict had to agree with Mama that what they had thought just didn’t make sense, and that, really, it was just an old
stone statue that once upon a time had been covered in gold.

Titi ran a finger over the last small traces of the gold. ‘Can it be worth money, Auntie?’

Mama shrugged her shoulders and asked Benedict what he wanted to do with it.

For months he had dreamed of finding treasure, and now he had found some and it was disappointing. Okay, it wasn’t a pile of gold that could stop Baba from having to work in countries all
over Africa, but everything was always worth something, to somebody. Maybe it was even worth a lot. Somebody might want to buy it.

It wasn’t Benedict’s to sell, though, it belonged to Petros.

But Petros was late.

Eh!

At last he came to a decision: Petros’s treasure must go to his grave with him. And it had to be a secret because, number one, it was always a secret for Petros, and number two, nobody
could steal it if nobody knew.

There was also a number three, but Benedict didn’t say: if the Bible
had
lied about King Solomon not cutting the baby in two, it was probably best that nobody else found out.

‘Good boy,’ Mama said, giving him a squeeze and planting a kiss on his forehead. ‘Good boy.’

In the office of Ubuntu Funerals, Jabulani looked uncertain.

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ he said. Then he smiled. ‘Anything is possible, nè? But to be buried with your dog is too un-Swazi.’

‘He was a
shangaan
,’ said Benedict. ‘From Mozambique.’

Benedict could feel Mama looking at him. She knew everything now. Okay, not everything, just that he and Petros had talked, even though he wasn’t supposed to talk to Petros on account of
Petros not being right in his head. But Mama couldn’t say anything about that now. It wasn’t right to say anything bad about the late.

‘Jabulani,’ said Mama, holding the bundle in her arms in the same way that she would hold a baby, ‘that boy had no family except his dog. They were always together, like a
brother and his small sister. Now, how would you feel if your sister was buried in the disrespectful way that a dog is buried?’

Jabulani tutted, shaking his head.

‘His dog’s name was Krishna,’ said Benedict, ‘but he called her his treasure.’ He placed a hand on the bundle in Mama’s arms. Titi had helped Mama to sew the
statue up in the old blanket that Baba kept in the back of the red Microbus for just in case.

‘His treasure,’ echoed Mama, holding the bundle to her more tightly.

‘They’ll want to be together in Heaven, too,’ said Benedict. ‘Uncle Enock thinks there’s a Dog Heaven and a People Heaven, but I know there’s only one Heaven
for all of God’s creatures. Our hoopoe is waiting for us there, Jabulani. She’ll thank us both for burying her so nicely.’

Jabulani was smiling now.

‘In that very beautiful casket that you made,’ Mama added. ‘Such excellent craftsmanship.’

‘Mama and me, we knew you’d understand.’

‘
Eish!
Okay, nè?’

‘Thank you, Jabulani!’

‘Not to mention.’

Jabulani called one of his staff over to organise for Petros’s dog to go into his casket with him, and Mama mopped at her forehead with a tissue. Benedict knew it wasn’t just the
weight of the stone that had made her sweat. Mama always kept the secrets of her cake customers, but she didn’t like having secrets of her own to keep. This was a secret that only Mama, Titi
and Benedict knew.

It was the right thing to do. The treasure was all Petros had, and he had no child to give it to, no other family at all; Uncle Enock had said. Petros’s only family was Krishna, who was
lucky on account of not having to go and wait to be chosen at the dog orphanage: she was going to live permanently with the dairy manager. He was happy to keep a dog that was comfortable around
cows, and her barking might tell him if somebody was trying to steal a cow to pay the fine.

The King had to pay the fine himself on account of breaking his new law by taking a fiancée who was only seventeen and bringing her to live at his palace. Hundreds of girls went and threw their
umcwasho
tassels at the King’s mother’s house to make his family feel ashamed.

The new fiancée wasn’t Queenie Zikalala. Mama said Mrs Zikalala must be very disappointed, but Baba said she should be glad about not having to find more than a month’s salary to buy
a cow to pay the fiancée’s part of the fine. Grace said, in a high-pitched voice, that this
wasn’t
the year for Queenie, Mrs Tungaraza.

It was almost time for
Incwala
, the kingship ceremony that happened every year, and Uncle Enock and Vusi were starting to talk about it. In the middle of November, men
had been sent on foot all the way to the coast of Mozambique to collect some of the Indian Ocean in a calabash, and when they and the other men who had been sent to rivers were all back with the
waters for the king’s
muti
, it would begin.

It was sacred and secret and confidential, and not even Uncle Enock knew everything that happened, even though he’d been taking part with his own age group since school. A black ox would
be slaughtered to make the king’s powers fresh and strong, and afterwards, when the bones of the ox were burnt, the ancestors would send rain to put out the fire and then it would be okay for
everybody to eat the new harvest. Vusi was going to walk for many kilometres with other young men to gather
lusekwane
branches at night, and the elders were going to use those branches to
build the special enclosure where the black ox would be slaughtered.

Benedict looked up the
lusekwane
in Uncle Enock’s tree book, where it was called a sickle bush, but it didn’t say anything there about what Vusi and his friends knew for sure:
its branches would wither in the hands of any boy who had been naughty with a lady.

Auntie Rachel showed him a photograph of a big group of young men carrying the branches, all of them wearing just a
kanga
skirt with an apron of animal skin.

‘It looks like a moving forest,’ she said. ‘Like Birnam Wood coming to high Dunsinane hill.’

‘Sorry?’

‘
Ag
, it’s something that happens in a play.
Macbeth.
Soldiers carry branches to disguise themselves as a forest so they can sneak up on the king and kill
him.’

Benedict was startled. ‘King Mswati?’

‘
Ag
no, man. It’s just a story.’ Leaning forward with a tissue, she wiped away a splodge of milk from either side of his upper lip.

Benedict wasn’t so sure about stories: they could be just pretend, or they could be real. Uncle Enock and Auntie Rachel had said that Petros’s talk of having treasure was just a
story, just pretend. But it was real, he really did have treasure.

‘Auntie Rachel, you know Petros?’

‘
Ja?
’

‘Whose ancestor is he going to be?’

‘Hey?’

‘He didn’t have any family. Who’s he going to look over?’

‘
Eish.
’ She shrugged. ‘I guess he can be our ancestor here. And the dairy workers’.’

‘And Krishna’s and the cows’?’

She smiled. ‘
Ja
, why not?’

‘So will you do the cleansing ceremony for him?’

‘We haven’t talked about it, but I suppose we can. But we not slaughtering a cow, hey?’

‘No, it’s okay, it can be just one of your chickens, and you can have a remembrance cake, too. I’d like to buy it for him from my percentage.’

‘
Ag
no, that’s so sweet!’ Auntie Rachel looked like she might need the milk-splodge tissue for her eyes.

When the Ubuntu Remembrance and Celebration Cakes shop was ready, Benedict went with Mama and Baba to look. It was in the industrial area of Mbabane, just up the road from
Ubuntu Funerals, and Zodwa and Jabulani were there to greet them and to show them around.

The front room of the shop looked more like a lounge, with several comfortable-looking chairs arranged around a coffee table. Benedict recognised the range of brightly coloured cloths covering
the chairs from the roadside market in the Ezulwini Valley.

‘We’ll consult here,’ Zodwa told them. ‘People are better able to think about celebrating their loved ones when they’re relaxed, nè?’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Mama. ‘This is a very happy room.’

‘For happy memories,’ said Jabulani, smiling widely. ‘And look!’ he pointed to a screen attached to the wall, just next to the framed photograph of the king that every
business had to have. ‘This is our best.’

‘
Eh!
’

One by one, photographs of the remembrance cakes they had already made were coming and going slowly on the screen. Mama flattened a hand against her chest. ‘That makes my photo album look
so old-fashioned!’

‘But your photo album can work even by candle-light,’ said Jabulani. ‘Being modern is nice, but we cannot be modern without power.’

‘Power is important,’ said Zodwa. ‘Change cannot come without it, nè?’

‘Sometimes power cannot come without change,’ said Baba.

‘That is true,’ said Zodwa. ‘And neither can come without support, nè?’

As the grown-ups nodded, Benedict had the sense that they were talking about something more than just electricity and screens with pictures, something complicated that he wouldn’t
understand and should probably not ask about.

Zodwa led the way from the front room into the large kitchen behind it, where there were six ovens, each with a gas tank standing next to it. Down the middle of the room was a long table where
the ladies Mama had trained were busy decorating cakes, and along one side were shelves where the cakes would sit when they were finished. While Mama chatted with the ladies and admired their
cakes, Jabulani took Baba and Benedict to the far end of the room, pointing out the sinks for washing up and what he said was a kettle, though to Benedict it looked like an enormous tin can with a
tap near the bottom.