Lessons in Life: A Series - Death of the Blameless

I never met her; I did not know she had moved to the little village she would perish in. And yet she lives in my mind now; a symbol of the price of turning a blind eye to your neighbour’s plight.

Many would later say that moving into the house that once belonged to a man who was brutally murdered by young boys was a sign that she would not live long. But of course, that was just an excuse people used to cope with what they witnessed; a smidgeon of comfort to move past the horror.

Her story will find a chapter in the village’s gory history books, along with the story of my childhood friend;

Nathi was my best friend when we were five years old. My mother and his mother were childhood friends. Secreted away from the brutalities of apartheid while my mother worked in the city, Nathi’s mother was my second mother. I am told that when we were babies his mother would breastfeed us both, and when my mother came home, she would pretend “breastfeed” us too. Nowadays that practice would probably lend someone in jail.

With political rivalry at its highest, Nathi’s father did not like that his mother was a supporter of a political party that rivaled his. Today I would say that Nathi’s father was on drugs, because what happened remains inconceivable to me. So infuriated with his wife’s allegiance to another party he became convinced she was passing on his party’s secrets to hers; he resolved to kill her. It was a night that she had taken Nathi into her bed with her, believing her husband would not be returning that night as it had happened so many times before. It was later discovered that he had lain in wait in their tool shed.

As he raised his spear to plunge into her covered body, he never thought to remove the blankets first, if only to make sure his aim was true. Today I take solace in imagining that Nathi never knew what happened. One second he was sleeping soundly in his mother’s arms, the next, a spear had pierced through his heart, clean through his small five-year-old body. Crazed by the mistake he had made, Nathi’s father never got around to killing his wife.

Nathi’s story is still told in the village. My little daughter knows it, she knows of how I lost my best friend and confronted death at five years old.

This woman’s story is one that will also be sown in the fabric of the village, a legacy of a time when everyone minded their own business. I remember how the village hunted Nathi’s father like a dog while he ran in the mountains, afraid and knowing his life was worthless to the bloodthirsty villagers. I remember how the police rescued him from clutches of a cluster of young men who were beating the life out of him. And then I recall the blasé attitude that this woman’s death was greeted with; the carelessly-told stories by her neighbors about how her lover would beat her up in the dead of night. I shudder at the tales of the horrors he visited upon her four-year-old daughter, and I hang my head in shame at how nobody did anything.

She came to the village with her lover who was born there. They rented the dead man’s house from his aunt who also lived in the village. I have gathered, although one cannot trust village gossip completely, that from the day they moved in to the day the man’s screams called the neighbors to his home, he would beat her and make her watch while he practiced lewd sexual acts on her child. It is said that he was not the father of this child

When she made the short trip, past two houses up, in to the local shop to buy a bug killing spray, she had had enough. She had experienced life at its worst and she knew she could endure no more. Carefully cutting a hole so as to pour the contents into a glass, she made juice for her little one and diluted the poison with it. She then made her child drink. And sat and watched her die. She then drank the remainder of the poison and died too. Her lover found them a day later and policed ruled a double suicide.

I do not know if bug spray can kill humans but the shopkeeper confirms that the woman did buy a large can, the same can that was found empty in her home, and the same substance that could be smelt in the child’s juice glass. The most horrendous aspect of the story to me is that soon after the murder and suicide; the neighbors claimed that the woman had tried to strangle the child twice before resorting to poison. If this is the truth, why did they do nothing? What kind of people are they to sit and do nothing while a child is being harmed?

I have since seen the man who lived with this woman; he is a quiet man, dark with sunken eyes. Even if I hadn’t heard the stories about him I would still be afraid of him. This woman and her child were taken home to be buried; I often ask myself why she didn’t go home. I will never know the answer; I suspect she too, would not have an answer.