The Year the Sky Turned Brown Over Our Gate

The gate we were so proud of

When my husband Pieter and I bought the little plot on the district road, the first thing we did was paint the gate. A soft green, the colour of new mielies, and I remember standing back with the brush still in my hand thinking that this was ours now, this scrap of land and the crooked pepper tree and the tin-roofed room we were going to turn into a farmstall. We had saved for years. I had waitressed, he had driven a delivery truck, and the plan was simple. Sell jam and bread and cold drinks to the people passing through, and rent out the two back rooms to travellers who wanted a quiet night away from the towns.

For the first while it worked the way we dreamed. The road was gravel, yes, and dusty in a normal sort of way, the way any farm road is dusty. A car would go by and leave a little tail of pale dust behind it that hung a moment and then lay down again. I planted marigolds along the fence. I hung a hand-painted board that said Fresh Bread, Rooms, Coffee, and I hung my washing on the line behind the kitchen where the sun could reach it. That was the life. Small, but ours.

Then the quarry opened up the valley, maybe eight kilometres past us where the road bends toward the koppies. At first we hardly noticed. A few trucks, going slow. Pieter even said it might be good for business, all those workers driving past twice a day. And for a month or two it was. Men stopped for coffee and a vetkoek. I learned some of their names.

When the red came

I cannot tell you the exact day the road turned against us, because it happened the way a kettle comes to the boil. Slowly, and then all at once. The quarry got bigger. The trucks got bigger and there were far more of them, heavy things loaded with stone, running from before sunrise until after dark. Each one dragged behind it a great rolling cloud, and the gravel on our stretch was a deep rust-red, so the cloud was red too. Not the gentle pale dust of before. This was a thick, blood-coloured fog that did not lie down again. One truck's cloud had not settled before the next truck came and lifted it all up once more, so the air over our gate was never clear. By ten in the morning you could taste it. A dry, metallic grit that sat on the back of your tongue.

My green gate turned the colour of dried liver. The marigolds choked and died. And my washing line, my poor washing line, became a joke. I would wash the guesthouse sheets by hand, wring them, peg them up white and hopeful, and within an hour they carried a fine red bloom, as if someone had thrown ochre at them. I started drying everything inside, draped over chairs and the backs of doors, the whole house smelling of damp cotton, and still the grit found its way in. I would pour Pieter his coffee and there would be a gritty sediment in the bottom of the cup that I had washed and dried and turned upside down not two hours before. You wiped a surface and by the time you had wiped the far end of the counter the near end was dull again. I kept a cloth in my apron pocket at all times, like some women keep a tissue.

I began to read at night about what other people in mining districts did about this, and that was the first I ever heard the phrase dust control, typed with my thumbs on the phone in the dark while Pieter slept. It sounded like something from another world, an engineering word, not something that belonged to a woman worried about her sheets. But I read anyway, because I did not know what else to do.

My boy and his cough

The washing and the coffee cups I could have borne. A woman finds a way. What I could not bear was Willem.

Willem is our youngest, and he has had asthma since he was a toddler. We knew the seasons of it, the cold mornings and the flower season, and we knew how to manage. But that red year his cough became something new. It was a dry, barking thing that started when the trucks started and did not stop. At night I would lie awake and count the seconds between his coughs the way you count between lightning and thunder. I would hear him get up for his pump, that little rattle and hiss of it in the dark, and my heart would fold in on itself. The clinic sister in town looked at me over her glasses and asked, without any accusation in it, whether there was a lot of dust where we lived. I laughed, but it was not a laughing kind of laugh. A lot of dust. I told her the sky was brown over our gate from six in the morning.

We kept the windows shut, which in our climate is its own small cruelty, the house baking and airless. I taped a wet towel along the bottom of Willem's window frame. I wiped his room twice a day. And still, when I changed his pillowcase, the cloth came away pink. A mother can feel very small and very furious at the same time, standing in a child's bedroom holding a pink cloth, knowing that the thing hurting your child is the very air, the ordinary air that should cost nothing and harm no one.

The guests stop coming

The business went the way of the marigolds. A guesthouse sells peace and fresh air and a quiet night, and we could no longer offer any of it. People would arrive, get out of the car into that red haze, and you could see their faces change. One couple, a kind older pair who had booked two nights for an anniversary, stayed one and left in the morning with apologies, brushing dust off their suitcase. I could not even be angry. I would have left too. The cancellations came by phone and by that little booking site Pieter set up. We stopped taking bookings for a while because I could not stand to take a person's money and then hand them a brown sky. The farmstall limped on, but who wants to buy an open loaf of bread from a counter beside a road like that. We covered everything in plastic and it helped a little and looked like a funeral.

I wrote letters. I want you to know that. I wrote to the quarry office, polite letters at first and then less polite ones, and Pieter drove up there twice and spoke to a man in a hard hat who was not unkind but who spread his hands and spoke about schedules and costs. I read more at night. I learned that heavy traffic on an untreated road is one of the worst offenders, and that a proper dust suppression system on a haul road is a real and ordinary thing that mines are expected to put in place, not a favour and not magic. That knowledge did not fix my sheets, but it changed how I stood in front of that man in the hard hat. I was no longer just a tired woman complaining. I knew what I was asking for and I knew it was reasonable.

The morning it settled

I do not know exactly what tipped it. Our letters, perhaps, or the other farmers along the road who had begun to write their own, or an inspector, or simply the mine deciding it was time. But one week the water trucks appeared, and then the crews, and they treated the whole stretch of the haul road past our gate with proper dust suppression, binding the surface so the wheels stopped tearing it up into that endless red fog.

The first morning after, I stood at the kitchen window with my coffee and I did not understand at first what was different. Then I realised. A loaded truck went by, a big one, and behind it there was almost nothing. A faint smudge that thinned and vanished. The far koppies, which I had not properly seen in over a year, stood there sharp and blue against the sky as if they had been returned to me. I called Pieter and we stood there like two fools looking at hills.

I hung washing outside that week. White sheets, on the line, in the sun, and I went out in the afternoon and pressed my face into them and they smelled of nothing but sun and soap. Willem's cough eased over the following month, not all at once, but it eased, and the nights grew quiet, and I stopped counting seconds in the dark. The marigolds I planted again took hold. We took bookings. A family came and the children ran in the yard and I watched them run and I had to go inside for a minute so no one would see me.

I still keep a cloth in my apron pocket. Some habits do not wash out. But I keep it now out of long habit and not out of war, and every clear morning that the koppies stand blue over our green gate, I notice them on purpose, the way you thank something you once nearly lost.