The Dusty Oakvilla Farmhouse
Growing up a cowboy
There are days when the Natal sun comes slanting in so low and slow, That you’d swear it was being lazy, like the tractor driver after lunch. And on those days—red-dust, still as death—you remember things. Things like a boy’s room, just off the stoep’s missing corner. Yes, the stoep wrapped round our house like a plaaswife’s apron, But it left out one side, the side with my bedroom. That’s where the wild fig grew, like a lone prophet A fig tree thick with whispering leaves, and in it, a Hammerkop’s nest Crumpled together like an old man’s thoughts.
I used to lie in bed, staring at that nest, Beneath a cowboy bedspread, Lone Ranger in fading thread. Outside, the sunbirds pecked at Leonurus, Their wings a kind of hymn, too fine for any church. I wore plaid shirts and plastic guns on my hips Like a Kalahari Clint Eastwood, Until one day Pa came along with the real thing A Finnish rifle, cold and straight-shooting, And an Italian shotgun with the smell of cordite and old men’s stories.
You see, on that farm, we grew potatoes Not just a crop, but a calling. Pa said meilies was for eating, but potatoes were for love. And Ma made them a dozen ways Boiled, fried, roasted, mashed, each one a hymn to simpler days. To this day, I bite into one and I am six again, Dust on my knees, sun on my back, Listening to Martial eagles cry from the copper phone lines Before dropping like justice on a sun-baked leguwaan.
Some kids grew up with lullabies, I had the creak of tin roofing in the wind And the smell of clay bricks after rain. That house, with its polished red tile stoep, Shone like pride, even in poverty. It stood with shoulders squared against drought and debt and death. And I—dusty, sunburned, gun-slinging in plastic Grew up with hammerkops, sunbirds, potatoes, And the slow, unspoken things that build a boy into the kind of man who doesn’t flinch When the rain forgets your name or the road cracks beneath your veldskoens.
~Roald Bartholomew
