At first we said, “it will help to pay for the funeral,” Nokukhanya’s final gift after an age of pensioned usefulness. Umnqandi did it with a kitchen knife quickly before the thumb was cold. Brandy kept it fresh so that the pension official, behind his brown table and book of matching prints, gave a little sniff and suspected nothing.
After the funeral, which boasted two cows for more than 600 visitors singing hymns in the hot sun, we sat around the jar and stared in silence. “One more month,” Sinoxolo said and we nodded, quieting our consciences that grandmother’s digit was kept thus occupied while shethumblessmet the ancestors. Then it was school fees, and then our mealies failed, and then the truck needed a new tire … until it became a kind of twelve-year pact. We fooled ourselves into thinking she would be proud of her productivity at such an age.
But on her 110th birthday the mayor arrived with his councilors to pay their respects to the oldest woman in the province. They brought a white cake and a photographer. They found the jar and its tired occupant and after that grandmother’s thumb got to rest.
John Shaw is a an American physician who worked in a district hospital in South Africa from 1994 through 2000.
Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
