"Day of Vow" by Kola Bouf

Day of Vow
Note: Use the scroll bar of the text window below to read the first part of the story, then go to page 3a for more.

She stuck with it�being a glassmaker. When you make glass, there's an experience as it forms when the matter is so fiery liquid and lava-taffy hot, becoming more and more of itself like the ocean that it is literally intoxicating and otherworldly hypnotic. Like something from Mars or hell or inside the sun. Beautiful as anything you could dream about paralyzed. That's how it felt having the privilege and the blessed luck to make glass for a living.

It wasn't a normal job for a South African woman, educated or otherwise to occupy�but Zorina had been doing it since she was eight (the house maid's curious little daughter back then), and now at seventeen, no one at the furnace could match her craftsmanship. The Theron family was making quite a name (not to mention a pretty penny) for itself because of this quaint little wonder, and Zorina, too, had an obsessive interest in their manorborn. Miss Lindy and sweet little Cribbitch could absolutely send one.

But the person who really intrigued her, even more than glass, was the Theron family son�nineteen year old polo champion Noble Theron�who had raped Zorina when she was thirteen. The Theron's called him "Golf". He was tall and handsome, chilly white with an innocent soldier boy's face and warm glacier-blue eyes. He fascinated Zorina to no end, mainly because he had lived for a while in what she considered to be life's promised land�America; and then, too, because he had raped her and then seemingly forgotten all about it (as if she had just imagined the whole thing)�and this only increased Zorina's pain until all she could do was pass out from it (have a nervous breakdown) or become fascinated by the source of that pain.

"Haven't I told you not to call me Golf when we're alone, Zora?"

"Yes, Noble", she always replied with as feminine an incantation as possible.

At the mere sight of him, Zorina always felt dizzy in the tummy and weak in the knees. Like most white men in South Africa, Golf moved about like a stern wire coathanger.

"And do sit down, girl. I want your delightful company more than any breakfast. You know that."

On the veranda's cool dawn, the sun barely up and cloud white butterflies fluttering about the garden, Golf Theron took his milk with a spoonful of cognac and his oatmeal with cream and sugar. They sat together; two extremely secretive people. Zorina more than him�because only she knew about the little match box that she kept in her skirt's front pocket and the tiny black pellets inside (rat turds). Only she knew how metallic and perfectly formed they looked, like little black rice pods, as she took a few out each morning and stirred them into his oatmeal right after her mother cooked it up. And every morning, for years, he had eaten it all down, and that's what helped Zorina justify her love for him. She thought that she must be as poisoned and tricked inside as she was by now. Her being raped at Theron Estate and violently burned at school and his stomach full of rat turds made them seem perfect for each other.

"So you've heard about the tennis match?", he asked Zorina.

Her face, a lemony ice-tea color, was instantly lit with a grin. Like all the other South African black girls, she had cheered the arrival of Venus and Serena Williams (Americans!) and had been overjoyed to see a girl who looked African play tennis and beat the turd out of Amanda Coetzer, South Africa's white champ. All over the country, in the streets and dirt roads, the blacks had cheered and rooted: "Go Venus!, Go Venus!" As if Venus was the South African. So yes, Zorina had heard. Her mother had even made a keg of beer for the ghetto's celebration and black fathers had danced barechested in the streets with VENUS written across their hearts in the bloodiest red paint they could find.

Golf Theron blushed and gave a cave-dark grin. He whispered across the table, "I was rooting for Venus, too."

Heat covered Zorina's forehead. Like it did every morning when Golf was done with breakfast. Because that's when he always rose, towering over her�and swaggered on by, deliberately brushing his athletic hairy leg against her lean brown arm. For a split second, she remembered his weapon of authority; erect-the only manpart she had ever known. His mighty white skin touched her clean brown embarrassment. His white tennis shorts, the ones that Zorina's mother washed and ironed in stacks each week, seemed so fresh and pure; so sunshine bright and snow white.

Whiter even�than the sickle shaped burn seared into Zorina's right buttock like a potthole of saintly white ashes.

"Carry on, Zora."

In a breathy voice.

"Yes�noble."

But once he was gone and her mother had cleared away the dishes he left behind, Zorina always managed to turn back into herself. Humming some American pop song ("I Can't Tell You Why" by the Eagles) as she left the veranda and passed Miss Lindy's gazebo, the swing set for Cribbitch, the heavenly green arc of field and forest that shaded the horse stables�and finally, on down the dirt road past the creek, her favorite place in the whole world� the Theron furnace.

Three brick chimneys pointed up from the old building like a crown and the trees on either side of it seemed ageless and ancient�brittle gray and undying. Zorina's mother always told her that "trees are loyal beings." The furnace house was made of granite with a cobblestone floor inside the entrance hall. On the hook outside, she always hung her sweater before placing a sack lunch in the little locker that made her feel accomplished and important, because it had her name written across it in typed ink. Golf Theron had done that.

Ebaneezer called out, "That you, Milady?"

"Yes it is!", Zorina hollered back with a grin.

He was having breakfast in the nook. His face pink like strawberry ice cream and his chin and cheeks always foaming with a white unkempt beard. He was a fat, stinking soot-covered Santa Klaus-looking man with ale on his breath and gas passing from his arse every twenty minutes�but he had a heart of gold.

Zorina entered the nook. "Balu inside already?"

Ebaneezer nodded and farted.

Balu was the new glassmaker from Cape Town. He was Indian and had a wife who was half-black, half-Korean�and since the two of them were legally coloured (which is a higher class than plain old black in South Africa), they didn't allow their two children to play with Black, kinky-headed kaffir kids. Balu had told this information to Golf Theron (to affirm, as coloured South Africans do, his loyalty to whiter sensibilities) and then Golf had turned into Noble and told Zorina. So Zorina didn't like Balu�because she knew a lot of Indians, Asians and mixed race people that were like that. In fact, according to her dead father, Africa was infested with them.

The other glassmaker on the premises, Othello, he was mixed-race, but he wasn't like that at all. For whenever whites called a black person "kaffir"�it was as if they had called Othello himself that terrible word. He considered himself an African and would say it out loud to anybody's face. His wife, however, was as ugly as raw liver according to Zorina's mother. He could've had his pick instead of choosing a girl who was so darkskinned and walked and talked with the smell of sex in her personality. Him being such an eggcreme pretty fellow with a good job and so ruggedly mannish with those big soccer legs and that curly Italic hair (his father was Italian-Lebanese and his mother was a black South African woman, herself part Indian). Wasting himself on some low class chocolate kaffir bitch, Zorina's mother would say. Here he was now.

"Greetings, Zorina!"

"Hey�top of the morning, Othello! How's Lissa Mondi?"

"Oh, mighty good going. The baby kicked this morning and Lissa graduates from nursing school next Saturday. I'm inviting everyone for stew and bread. You bring your Brenda Fassie albums, Zorina!

"I'll have to sneak them past Big Mama", she laughed.

The flames resemble pieces of hellfire tumbling around like clothes in a washing machine. Capable of baking the face six shades if one doesn't wear a protective mask. It's hot like an oven down there. The sweating is unavoidable and yet the skin beneath the sweat remains dry, parched and crackly. The blistered smell of the liquid glass as it's looped and spun, twirled or blown�transformed from recipe to imagination to creation's beauty both challenges and resists Zorina everytime, but her standard of taste is not a will bestilled.

"Hers are special", Balu whispered enviously whenever she set a sea-crystal wine goblet atop the cooling board.
"She's gifted", snorted Ebaneezer, as if Balu had better recognize that he is not the big maestro he thought he was back in Cape Town. He's just a talented backup singer now.

"Damn, that's pretty", said Othello as he glanced at the intricate spheres, the way the light was alive beneath the precise layers of Zorina's spooling sheath. He got a lump in his throat just looking at it. Her creations looked more like jewelry than tablewear.

"It's all in the wrist", bragged the little brown girl.

"No, no�the heart", smiled Othello, tenderly.

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