About The Promise by Damon Galgut
“SHE’S SITTING IN THE SPOT SHE LIKES, between the rocks, at the bottom of the burnt tree. Where I was when the lightning struck, where I nearly died. Pow, white fire dropping out of the sky. As if God pointed at you, Pa says, but how would he know, he wasn’t here when it happened. The wrath of the Lord is like an avenging flame. But I didn’t burn, not like the tree. Except for my feet.
In hospital two months, recovering. There is still tenderness in the soles, and one small toe is missing. She touches it now, fingering the scar. One day, she says aloud. One day I’ll. But the thought breaks off midway and what she’ll do one day hangs there, suspended.
What’s happening now is that somebody else is climbing the hill from the other side. A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing, till she’s looking at a black boy, also thirteen years old, wearing ragged shorts and T-shirt, broken takkies on his feet.
Sweat sticks cloth on skin. Pull it loose with your fingers.
Hello, Lukas, she says.
Howzit, Amor.
First it is necessary to beat the earth with a stick. Then he settles himself on a rock. Easy to speak to each other. Not the first time they’ve met up here. Children still, on the verge of not being children any more.
I’m sorry about your mommy, he says.
She nearly cries again, but doesn’t. It’s all right when he says it, because Lukas’s father died too, on a goldmine near Johannesburg, when he was only little. Something joins them together. What she just remembered spills over, she wants to tell him about it.
It’s yours now, the house, she says.
He looks at her, not understanding.
My mother told my father to give it to your mother. A Christian never goes back on his word.
He looks down the hill to the other side, where he lives, in the crooked little house. The Lombard Place. That’s what everyone calls it, even though old Mrs Lombard died years ago, before Amor’s grandfather bought it to stop that Indian family moving in and let Salome live there instead. Some names stick, some don’t.
Our house?
It’ll be yours now.
