ANOTHER SAMPLE from "A Green Island in a Black Sea"

 

ANOTHER SAMPLE from "A Green Island in a Black Sea"

 

CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR

 

THE DEVLIN CHILDREN

While commotion grew in the Devlin household with the tension between their parents breaking into periodic outbursts, then the murder of the gardener, then the ambulance coming to pick up their mother, Robbie, Ruthie and Rosie remained in the midst of the school year confounded by each episode but clueless as to what was going on.

They were doing an extra school term with their American spring leading to South Africa’s fall and winter, which didn’t increase their happiness.  Rickie, being too young for school, enjoyed listening to his siblings complain about school.

Ruthie and Rosie were enrolled in St. Theresa’s Catholic Convent and Academy.  They wore uniforms of heavy coarse material with vertical black and gray striped jackets with the school’s crest over the left jacket pocket, along with a white shirt and black tie, black sweater, and skirt that touched the knees, and calf length black socks and black patent leather shoes. 

St. Theresa’s was a series of tall gray somber buildings in the style of European gothic architecture, with the church and convent of the same baroque style.  Missionary Dominican nuns from Ireland were the girls’ teachers.

Robbie was enrolled at the King Edward VII School in Houghton, which was a community just outside Rosebank.  Robbie wore a similar uniform to his sisters only with shorts to his middle thighs.  The public school in the British tradition was known for its academics and athletics.  Several South African Springbok rugby players had graduated from King Edward’s.

Ruthie, who was tall for her age, was promoted to the next grade, as she represented an embarrassment to children her own age.  Only seven, she was nearly as tall as the nuns.  It was clear school officials didn’t think her passport accurate until they met her tall parents.  Ruthie displayed the Nordic chiseled features of her father with a precocious independent streak that seem to mimic his manner.  She was chosen for the gypsy chorus in the Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of “The Wild Swans,” although she despised the play's director, Sister Mary Teresita, for reason.

Robbie was nine, but small for his age.  He was given the lead in the American play,  “Oklahoma.”  Devlin never saw the play because he was on the road.  In fact, he never attended any school functions after the initial orientation, as his work took him across the country or to meetings during scheduled school affairs. 

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Rosie, in particular, could not get used to dressing and sitting down to a formal dinner cooked by Gabriel, and served by him and Asabi with white-gloved hands.  Nor did she like the fact that mommy sat at the far end of the long dining table with her father at the other end with her and her sister on one side and her little and big brother on the other, making everyone seem worlds apart.  But that was not her major complaint.

“Why does Gabriel serve us those little potatoes every meal?” she asked her mother.

“Because they’re good for you.”

“Is that why he has to put them in our lunch, too?”

“In your lunch?” her mother looked at her husband.  “Do you know anything about this?”

Devlin shrugged his shoulders.  “Honey, what is wrong with the potatoes?”

“Daddy, he makes them into chips, but when it comes time to eat them at school they’re soggy.”

“I like them,” said Ruthie, “I’m too hungry at lunchtime to worry about them being soggy.”

“But is Rosie right?  Are they soggy?”

Ruthie touched her little sister’s arm.  “Yes, they are soggy and Rosie ends up giving them to me.”

“Sarah, I think you should have a word with Gabriel about that,” Devlin said, “or better yet, show him how to make shoestring potatoes.”

Not happy, she replied, “Yes sire.  Leave it to mother to solve the problem, sire.”

Devlin waited for a smile, but none creased her face.

The children weren’t very nice to Josiah.  It was mainly because they didn’t know him, and weren’t used to being around dark colored people.  They called him “Shadrack,” and often made fun of him as he worked in the garden.  It was unfortunate because Josiah could see they loved his garden, especially the roses, and would have shown them what he did to make them grow if they had been of a mind to learn. 

Devlin mentioned this to Sarah but she cringed at the suggestion.  “I don’t want my children to get too familiar with black people.  Why would I want them to fraternize with a Negro?”

The children heard rumors from classmates that Bantu were aborigines.  They didn’t know what that meant but thought it must be bad.  They were also told that Bantu ate food with their hands.  Ruthie didn’t see where this was bad.  “We eat hamburgers with our hands, slide food under our forks, and we see other white people in restaurants eating fish and chips with their hands.  Are we all aborigines, too?”  Ruthie never took anything at face value because someone said it was so.

The children would wander beyond the gate of the estate to watch Bantu women passing by carrying laundry on their heads.  Even little Rickie found this fascinating.  “Look, mommy, look at the ladies!”

When Devlin came back from one trip to Cape Town, Rosie tried to demonstrate to her father how women carried laundry on their heads, and forgot there was glass in the basket she tried to balance with shards of glass splintering across the floor as it toppled off her head.  Fortunately, she wasn’t cut.

Asabi was a favorite of both girls.  They thought she was terribly pretty, and loved her for reading Dr. Seuss books to them.

One day Ruthie came home with her face so red that Robbie asked her what had happened.  “Kids at school bully Rosie because she is pudgy and wears glasses.  She was playing marbles with other girls and won.  Then this red headed fat girl stole Rosie’s marbles, pulled her by her braids against the soda machine.  She also stole Rosie’s lunch money.  When Rosie told me this, I went looking for this girl, found her and beat the crap out of her.  I told her if she ever touched my sister again I’d sit on her head until she puked.

“The red head went to Sister Superior and told her what I had done, not what she had done. That was the first time I got my hands slapped with a ruler in front of my class.  After that Rosie and I walked together holding hands to let everyone know we were sisters.”

Ruthie was not only tall for her age, but reflected maturity far beyond her years.  Every Friday all the girls in each class went to confession in the church.  For two weeks, Ruthie hid between buildings while everyone went to confession, and then broke into the line when they were returning to class. 

She didn’t like entering a little box called a confessional, and looking at a man with bad breath through a web-like window, where he proceeded to talk in some gibberish that she was told was Latin, and wait for her to confess her sins. 

The priest would probe her with embarrassing questions, questions no one else had ever asked her, such as did she touch herself, did she touch others in their private parts, did she lie, cheat, steal or swear.  She would say, no, and the priest would say, “no Father,” and so she said “no Father” to every one of his questions, only to have the priest ask her if she thought she was a saint. 

She had no idea what he meant, but decided to say “no Father” to that as well, which got her off the hook with three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys for her penance.  But after that, she avoided the whole ordeal, that is, until a nun from another class saw her come out from between the two buildings.  She was punished with the ruler for that as well.

Ruthie told Rosie about what she had done and about being discovered, but no one else.  Whatever Ruthie told Rosie was safe because she adored her older sister.  Bad as these acts were, Ruthie thought it would get to her parents when she cheated on a health test. 

She didn’t know the answers, and girls were circulating a cheat sheet in the girls’ bathroom.  The girls put answers under their felt hats.  Ruthie’s hat fell off when she bent down to pull up her stockings with the answers falling right at the feet of her teacher, Sister Mary Teresita. 

Her knuckles were beaten blue with a ruler for that.  It stung so much that Ruthie peed her pants right in front of the entire class, while she held back her tears.  Nothing had ever happened to her before that was more humiliating than to feel pee running down her legs with snickering across the classroom like braying springbok. 

If that was not enough, she was the only left-handed person in the class with all the inkwells of each desk on the left side of the desk for right-handed students.  How did the nuns handle the problem?  They attempted to force Ruthie to become right-handed.  When she would try to sneak writing left handed, Sister Mary Teresita would slap her left hand with a ruler. 

One day Ruthie took the ruler from the nun and hit the nun across the back of the nun’s knuckles in front of the whole class.  The nun took the ruler from her and slapped her in the face, neck and shoulders with it.

Such actions were kept from her parents, as no disciplinary procedures were directed against children of high-ranking foreign executives.  International corporations carried the mother lode of expenses of parochial schools. 

Sarah and Dirk Devlin had no knowledge of this brutal treatment, not even from their own children.

Robbie’s school was in the tradition of Great Britain’s private schools.  He had a tough time being accepted because he was small but aggressive, egging on bigger boys, which made trouble for him.  He received similar treatment to that of Rosie without a big brother to defend him.  Again, this never reached beyond the siblings themselves. 

With their mother in a melancholy state a good bit of the time, and their father practically never home, the three siblings gravitated to a form of deviancy bordering on juvenile delinquency.

They set Josiah’s tool shed on fire, and then laughed from the sanctuary of the house as they watch the gardener frantically attempt to put out the fire and save his tools, plants, chemicals and fertilizers, not realizing that the tool shed could have exploded into a massive fire bomb, possibly killing the gardener and spreading the explosion to the main buildings on the estate.

When they were bored with nothing to do, they would make mud balls, and launch them over the seven-foot wall of the estate.  Rosie would act as look out for when the natives were coming down the walk outside the wall. 

Robbie and a friend from school climbed up on a ladder and put firecrackers down the chimney when construction workers were working inside Josiah’s house.  Fortunately, they failed to go off. 

Delinquency wasn’t natural to Robbie.  He got good grades in school and followed the rules.  Although physically small, he had a sense that he was the eldest sibling and took care of his brother and sisters, listening to them, keeping their secrets, and suggesting what they should and shouldn’t do, including not telling mom and dad. 

One day little Rickie saw Josiah put on a plastic suit and a net over his head with a canister over his shoulder and walk to a tree and spray something into the tree.  Later Rickie walked over and saw hundreds of dead bees on the ground.  He scooped them up and put them in a bucket and set the bucket on fire, believing he was making honey until his mother caught him and spanked his bottom for playing with matches.

Being in a strange society with no real friends, they bonded as siblings and learned to watch each other’s back. 

Only nine, Robbie was already a gifted athlete even though frail and small.  There was music in his body, which is typical of athletes who hone their instincts to do what others cannot imagine doing. 

Devlin would come home and take Robbie to a tennis club nearby and volley with him for an hour or so.  Robbie wasn’t but four-five but he could handle a tennis racquet with skill and had already learned to use the power of his opponent’s speed against him.  Others in the tennis complex would stop what they were doing to watch this father and son play tennis with clear evidence that the son had superior skills to that of the father. 

The children had no experience with death.  When Josiah was murdered, they weren’t informed but saw Asabi crying, and Gabriel whispering to their mother.  What was most confusing was how broken their father seemed to be with the death.  They had never seen him with such a long face.  He was no longer interested in playing tennis with Robbie.  It seemed when he was home he wasn’t there, and when he was gone he no longer called to see how they were doing. 

This prompted Ruthie to ask, “Why are you so sad about Shadrack?  He was only our gardener.”  Devlin put her on his lap, looked into her beautiful blue eyes, and asked Rosie to crawl up on his lap, too.  Rosie brightened then leaped on top of Ruthie.  Once the two girls were settled, he asked Robbie and Rickie to come over.  They did. 

“I’m going to tell you a little story about life.  Let us call life the fulfillment of our greatest wish, a wish that only we know about, a secret we have never shared with anyone.  We carry this life, which is our greatest wish, wherever we go, and know that it is there although no one sees it.”

“Is this a true story?” asked Rosie.

“I’ll let you decide,” Devlin said.  “You could call it a ‘made up’ story, but made up stories can be true if we think they are true.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, daddy,” said Ruthie.  “How can something made up be true when it is made up like stories we read in school?”

“Okay, can we agree we can learn something from a made up story?”

Robbie said, “Yes, like Oklahoma is a made up musical but I think it is true about the people it describes, is that what you mean?”

“Yes, Robbie, that is what I mean.”  He looked at his children.  “Are we in agreement on this?”  They nodded.

“Now, let us say the fulfillment of a wish is to have a garden, and to have the freedom to attend that garden as you like without interference.”

“Like Shadrack’s garden, is that what you mean, daddy?” asked Ruthie.

“Yes, like Josiah’s garden.  I think we can say the garden was his life.”

“And when he died, daddy, that was taken away from him,” said Ruthie.

“Yes, life, the fulfillment of his greatest wish, was taken from him.”

Ruthie could see in her father’s eyes something was taken from him, too, but wasn’t certain what it was.  She was disappointed with the story, but was sure she wouldn’t forget it.

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