23I Know YouIt takes Mr. Vincent, Mr. Moses, and two senior boys an hour to haul Darnell’s body up the slope to the where the land is flat. The stand of green bananas is below us, and all around is dry grass and a wide, flat sky. Mountains loom in the distance. We lay Darnell in the shade of a marbled rock, and Lottie and I go and sit under a scrawny indoni tree. After two hours of close contact with the corpse, I’m glad of the break. Grateful for the silence. The childish injuries on Darnell’s body still tear at my heart: the scrape on his knee, two broken fingernails, and the bruise under his eye. Small hurts. Easy to fix. Death can’t be fixed.Mr. Vincent sends Gordon Number One and Barnabas Phillips to see if Mrs. Vincent is back from picking up supplies in Howard’s Halt. “Tell her to put sheets and a blanket in the back of the pickup truck, and to park in the field just inside the Bosman farm,” he says. “I don’t care whose land she has to cross to do it.”“Yes, sir.” Barnabas and Gordon take off at a sprint, and I think tonight Gordon Number One will visit Miss December’s probationary hut to try and forget the weight of Darnell’s body pressed to his shoulder and the low murmur of Lottie Diamond’s voice whispering comfort to the dead.Lottie and I huddle in the thin shade and wait for Mrs. Vincent to arrive. I curl my hands in my lap to stop them from shaking. Outside I’m calm, but inside I’m filled with dread. No matter how many times Lottie and I shower or douse ourselves in talcum powder, the stink of death will stay with us.A faint machine noise comes from far off and Lottie sits up straight. She peers across the field.“What is it?” I ask. Mrs. Vincent is fifteen minutes away.“Pickup truck.” Lottie scans the horizon. “Driving fast.”Mr. Vincent wipes his glasses on the tail of his shirt, and Mr. Moses points at a dark speck that quickly takes on the shape of a rusted red truck with a cracked headlight.“Bosman.” Lottie pulls me to my feet. “Those are his sons in the back.”Mr. Vincent and Mr. Moses pass a look between themselves as the truck speeds straight toward us, the tires churning dirt into the air. “Stay where you are, girls,” Mr. Vincent says. “I’ll handle this.”Lottie sighs. Americans think that the whole world is America, but this is the British protectorate of Swaziland, with its own guns and warring tribes. Smiles don’t fix anything here.The truck screams to a stop a few yards from us, and I cough up dust. Three white boys, scrawny teenagers in grubby clothes, sit on the edge of the truck tray with rifles balanced across their knees. A sandy-haired girl crouches between them with her face hidden in her hands. The driver’s door opens, and a tall man wearing khaki pants and a blue work shirt gets out. He grabs a rifle from the dash and swings it onto his shoulder, the way hunters do before they set out.Mr. Moses whispers, “Stay calm, ladies, and keep back.”Four armed white men: Lottie and I already know well enough to steer clear. We eye the boys with their guns, and the man with his. The father, Bosman, spits on the ground and walks straight up to Mr. Vincent. White man to white man.“Mr. Bosman.” Mr. Vincent smiles his wide American smile and goes to shake the farmer’s hand. “I’m Edward Vincent.”Bosman ignores the greeting and growls in Afrikaans: “This here is my land. What are you doing on my land, kaffir-lover?”I blush for Mr. Vincent. Kaffir-lover is the worst insult that one white man can call another. Not that Mr. Vincent understands. Missionaries mostly speak English, with a smattering of Zulu words thrown in to prove their commitment to being here in southern Africa. Afrikaans is another matter.“What did he say?” Mr. Vincent asks Mr. Moses, who shrugs. Mr. Moses is from Durban, where decent mixed-race people speak English and poor whites speak Afrikaans.“Go and help, Adele.” Lottie gives me a shove even though she takes Afrikaans classes and speaks the language too. It’s only fair, I suppose. She translated for Mama Khumalo and talked Darnell Parns’s soul out of the valley with her words.I reluctantly go over to Mr. Vincent, and Lottie follows, two steps behind. Bosman takes in Mr. Vincent’s dirty clothes and flyaway hair with contempt, and I’d turn back and hide behind the rock with Darnell except that Lottie is right behind me. Then she’s right beside me, and somehow her presence makes me feel safer, even with the rifles so close.“You two belong to him?” Bosman motions to Mr. Vincent with an ugly smile, and my cheeks burn at the insinuation. Lottie huffs out a breath. If she had a stone, she’d throw it.“He’s the American principal,” I say before Lottie has the chance to tell the man to shut his fat mouth and go home to his fat, cross-eyed wife, or whatever insult comes into her mind. “Mr. Vincent doesn’t speak the tongue.”“Bad luck,” Bosman says. “This is my country. My farm. We use my language.”“What’s he saying?” Mr. Vincent asks, frustrated.“He wants to know what you’re doing on his land,” I tell Mr. Vincent. Kaffir-lover is an insult that I can’t bring myself to say out loud in front of adults. And the sly suggestion that Lottie and I are Mr. Vincent’s girlfriends is too filthy to repeat.“Tell him that we have an emergency.” Mr. Vincent combs rough fingers through his hair and peers at the sunburned farmer standing with a rifle hitched onto his shoulder like he was born with a notch in it to fit the gun. “We’ll be off his land soon.”I translate from English to Afrikaans in a shaky voice. The wounds on Darnell’s body scare me, but Bosman’s lopsided grin scares me more. He is full of hate, this one. He enjoys being mean.“What emergency?” Bosman makes a show of scanning the empty field. “I don’t see nothing here but a foreigner and his half-castes walking on my land without permission.”“Mr. Bosman wants to know what the emergency is.” I change Bosman’s ugly words to nice ones, but Mr. Vincent isn’t fooled. Bosman’s scorn is obvious.“There’s been an accident.” Mr. Vincent’s American accent takes on a sharp edge. “A Keziah student died in the ravine below. We’re here to retrieve the body.”Bosman rubs sweat from the back of his neck while I translate. His eyes are a peculiar shade of green flecked with yellow, which reminds me of Socks the cat when she hunts lizards in Mrs. Thomas’s garden.“And where’s this dead coon?” Bosman asks.“He’s in the shade of the rock over there, Mr. Bosman.” Polite Adele throws pearls before swine, hoping to make things nice. “We’ve sent for a pickup truck from the school to bring him home.”“Well, now.” Bosman pretends to think, an excruciating sight. “A dead colored on my land is bad luck. You’ve got to move him.”“We will,” I say. “The pickup truck is on its way. Ten minutes, tops.”“No,” Bosman says. “Now, now.”Now, now means right away, this minute, no delays. I don’t understand.“What?” Lottie demands in Afrikaans. “You heard what she said. The truck will be here in ten minutes.”“Not my concern,” Bosman replies with grim satisfaction. “I don’t want no dead coon on my land. Move him.”“Are you befoked?” Lottie demands, and the boys on the back of the truck go still. Befoked means “fucked in the head,” a stunning insult coming from the mouth of a mixed-race girl. Lottie, Lottie . . . what have you done?Bosman swings his rifle from his shoulder and fires a shot over our heads. The crack makes me jump and my ears ring. Birds fly from the indoni trees, and the girl in the truck screams in short, sharp bursts, a human siren. Bosman laughs at my terrified expression and Lottie’s pale face. He likes that we’re afraid of him.“What happened, Adele?” Mr. Vincent grabs my shoulder and pulls me away from Bosman, who really is befoked. “Tell me.”“He . . . he, uh . . .” I stop to clear my throat. “He wants us to move Darnell off his land right away. I told him that a pickup truck is coming, but he doesn’t want to wait for it. We have to go.”“And the gunshot?” Both Mr. Vincent’s feet are planted in Swaziland now, a country where “Love thy neighbor” is an almost impossible commandment.“Lottie wanted to know why we had to move Darnell.” I tell half the truth. “He shot the gun to hurry us up.”“God help me.” Mr. Vincent flexes his fingers open and shut, open and shut. “What difference will ten minutes make? Ask him.”A waste of time. Those of us who are from southern Africa know Bosman’s type. We meet them at police roadblocks, in stores, and standing guard in their front gardens to protect their personal kingdoms from the jealous eyes of natives and half natives who dream of taking everything they have. They are obsessed, Mother says, with white ruin and black revenge.“He won’t listen to reason, Mr. Vincent.” Mr. Moses breaks the standoff. “Between you, me, and the girls, we’ll be able to move Darnell across the border. It won’t take long.”Bosman’s finger lies across the trigger guard, and something like hate wells up inside me. Voices from the past echo inside my head. Rules are rules! That’s how things are! Keep sweet and avoid trouble! I’m sick of how quickly the laws of this stupid world roll off the tongues of teachers and aunties and parents, off my tongue. Things could so easily be different if the serving ladies gave the poor students an extra portion of mashed potatoes. If Bosman chose to be kind instead of cruel. Or if Father lived with us instead of splitting his love between two families.If.If only things were different.“Adele.” Lottie tugs my sleeve, and I wake from my daze. Bosman stands a half yard in front of me, with a searching expression that turns my stomach inside out. He scans my face, trying to place me.“I know you, girl,” he finally says. “You were born to sell yourself to a man with money.”My heartbeat drums so loud in my ears that it might actually send me deaf. I have never, ever been talked to with such loathing and contempt. My skin crawls, and I want to spit and scream and run, to hide my face from the ugliness of Bosman’s words. This filthy man actually thinks that he knows me.“Come.” Lottie grabs my hand and squeezes tight. “We have to fetch Darnell.”“He . . .”“I heard him.” Lottie pulls me back from Bosman and the red pickup truck with its load of sullen white boys. The girl stays crouched between her brothers and hums a broken tune, which softens the sharp feeling of hatred that I have toward her father and the way things are.I will leave this farm.But the girl, she has to stay.• • •The men shuffle-step Darnell across the open field, with Lottie and me walking beside them like pallbearers at a country funeral, our straight-backed bodies and our silence adding dignity to an undignified parade. We pass the red pickup, and the girl starts to cry with body-shaking sobs. The dead body, now stiff-limbed and unnatural, scares her.Bosman snaps, “Shut her up before I do.”The girl continues to wail, and I wish she’d button it. She has to swallow her tears and suffer in silence, because otherwise, sure as Jesus rose from the dead, she’ll get the stick when she gets home.The youngest and skinniest of the boys reaches out and pats the girl on the back. He murmurs soft words, and I’m surprised by the tender gesture and relieved when the girl drops her cries to a hoarse whisper.We gain a small, hard-won distance from Bosman and his family. Mr. Moses slows his step and says, “Watch yourself, Mr. Vincent. There’s a trench right here.”A zigzag scar cuts the length of the field, deep in some parts and wide and shallow in others. Erosion. The land is too exhausted to grow crops, and I bet food is scarce in the Bosman house. No wonder his children are scrawny.“Hear that?” Lottie stops and cocks her head to one side.“I hear it.” I shade my eyes to block the slanting sunlight and pick out a white speck on the horizon. The school pickup. Mrs. Vincent, who usually drives at ten miles an hour, races across the rough ground at high speed to close the gap with us.“Thank you, Lord.” Mr. Vincent’s faith is instantly renewed.“Hallelujah,” Mr. Moses adds.They lay Darnell on the ground and wait to be rescued.Bosman’s work boots crunch the grass as he strides over to us. We are still on his land, and he wants us off it, no matter what.Lottie walks out to meet him, with her chin raised. She stands directly in his path, and no mixed-race girl in her right mind stares openly at an angry white man with a gun the way she is right now. We are supposed to look at the ground. We play dumb. We try to disappear. That’s the way we survive.Instead of becoming invisible, Lottie pins Bosman with a cool stare. I run to her.“Come . . .” I tug her skirt to warn her to behave, but she shakes me off. She’s Swazi. She knows the penalty for daring to challenge a white man, but she does it anyway. Lottie is insane. She wants Bosman to know that she finds him loathsome.“What you looking at, coon?” Bosman demands in Afrikaans.“You,” she says in a loud, clear voice: another challenge.Bosman spits on the ground, and the girl in the truck stops crying. She huddles close to her brother, her muscles tense in the strained silence that must always come before her father loses his temper. I step closer to Lottie, and freeze when Bosman’s fingers grip the butt of his rifle. I don’t move. I’m scared of dying before my life has properly started, but I stick by Lottie’s side.“Leave,” Bosman says. “Get off my land.”“We will.” Lottie stands her ground while Gordon Number One and Barnabas Phillips help the grown men roll Darnell onto a blanket and lift him onto the back of the school truck. The boys climb on board, and Mr. Vincent slams the back shut with a loud bang.The sound starts Bosman’s daughter off again, and this time, her brother’s soothing words go unheard. She throws her arms over the side of the tray and clutches at the air with her fingers, trying to hold on to something invisible.The girl’s face is exposed for the first time; she’s around fourteen, with slanted eyes and flat facial features that are so like Darnell’s that I take a sharp breath of wonder. The girl is white and Darnell is mixed-race, but they are the same. They are both simpleminded. The girl’s wild, clutching fingers suddenly make sense. She’s reaching out to Darnell, trying to hold on to him by magic.A bright lightning bolt of what Lottie would call “divine intuition” hits me. Bosman’s daughter and Darnell knew each other. They were friends.“Get,” Bosman says in a tone reserved for farm dogs. “Get off my land.”“Gladly,” Lottie says, and Bosman vibrates with rage at being looked down at, and not for the first time, I’m sure. Mother says that poor white people are dangerous because only a thin layer of skin makes them kings of the land, but it’s not enough to save them from the pity of other whites or the silent contempt of natives who must suffer their cruelty.“Come.” I snatch Lottie’s hand, and now it’s my turn to drag her away from Bosman.Mr. Vincent boosts us onto the back of the pickup truck. We squat at Darnell’s feet, Swazi guardians of the dead.The girl’s fingers clutch the air over and over again, and the sound of her weeping contains all the sorrows of the world. It’s wrong for a white girl to cry for a brown boy, but Bosman’s daughter doesn’t understand the way things are. She’s simple, and her ignorance sets her free from the rules. There’s a lesson in that for me if I could grasp it through the pain in my heart.Mrs. Vincent starts the engine, and the truck bumps over the washboard corrugations in the eroded field.“I’ll remember you two.” Bosman points his gun barrel from Lottie to me and marks us out for special attention should we ever meet again. “You better believe that.”