1The equation had been found and written down, and most of the world had not heard of it. The world was busy. This is a book of that world, which is yours. There are no prophets in it. There is a farmer, and a nurse, and a judge, and a child, and others like them. You will know them. You have stood behind them at a counter and beside them in the rain.
2Begin in a dry country, in the third year without rain.
3A woman named Thandiwe farmed nine fields there, on red ground below a ridge of stones. She was fifty-eight years old. Her husband lay buried under the thorn tree. Her son Sipho was twenty-four and strong, and her granddaughter Lindi was seven and asked too many things.
4In the first dry year the maize failed, and Thandiwe said, "It has happened before." In the second year the pond became a plate of cracked mud, and she sold four of her nine cattle while they still had flesh on them. In the third year the pump at the well brought up air, and then brown water, one bucket in an hour. The price of a bag of meal doubled, and then it doubled again.
5In the back room of the house, on a shelf too high for rats, stood three clay pots sealed with ash. In them was sorghum seed, dark red and round. The people of that valley called it Grandmother's Red. Thandiwe had it from her mother, who had it from hers. No one knew who had first chosen it out of the wild grass. In a good year it gave less than the seed from the shop. In a bad year it gave something, and the shop seed gave nothing. That was why it had been kept.
6There were sixty kilos of it. That was enough to sow all nine fields when the rain came. Ground into meal, it was enough to feed three people for seven weeks.
7Sipho said it first, at the table, over a dish of boiled leaves. "Mother, we are eating weeds, and there is food in the house."
8"That is not food," said Thandiwe. "That is next year."
9"There is no next year for the dead," said Sipho.
10She did not answer, because it was true. It was also not the whole of the truth, and she did not have words for the rest.
11Lindi looked from one to the other. "If we eat the red seed," she asked, "where does new seed come from?"
12"From the shop," said her uncle.
13"And if the shop seed dies in the dry?"
14He did not answer either. He got up and went out to look at the sky, which was the colour of a tin plate.
15In the tenth month of that year a man came up the valley in a white truck. His name was Venter, and he bought land for a company in the city. He was not a cruel man. He drank the water he was offered and he praised the house. Then he named a price for the nine fields, and it was one third of what they had been worth before the drought.
16"The rain is finished in this country," he said. "I have seen the charts. The clever ones are leaving while there is still a price. Next year there will be no price."
17Half the valley had already sold to him. Sipho stood behind his mother's chair, and she could feel him wanting it, the way you feel heat from a wall.
18"A field that is sold is sold for ever," said Thandiwe. "A field that is kept can still be sold tomorrow. I will keep it one more day." And she said the same thing the next time he came, and the time after.
19That night Sipho shouted, and he had never shouted at her before. He said there was work in the city, and wages every week, and taps that ran. He said she was an old woman sitting on a dead farm. He said, "You love a pot of seed more than your own son."
20In the morning he was gone on the meal truck, with his blanket and his good shoes. He did not look back at the house. Thandiwe stood in the yard until the dust had settled, and then she went in and gave the child her leaves.
21Now there were two of them, and it grew worse. The food truck from the district came once in a month, and then it missed a month. Thandiwe sold two more cattle for the price of their hides. At night she would circle Lindi's arm above the elbow with her finger and thumb, to learn how much of the child was left. Each week the finger and the thumb came closer.
22One night she took down the first pot. She broke the seal of ash and put her hand in to the wrist. The seed was cool and it ran between her fingers like water. She stood so for a long time, a hungry woman with her hand in a pot of grain.
23She thought: if I eat this, the child lives until the eighth week, and after that there is nothing, not this year or any year. And she thought: if I keep all of it, and the child sickens in the fifth week, then I have kept seed for a field with no one to walk in it.
24So she did a thing that was neither her son's way nor the way she had spoken at the table. She divided it. One pot she named the hunger pot, to be eaten a cup at a time, and only when the child's arm said so. The other two she sealed again with fresh ash, and she said aloud in the empty room, "Not these. Whatever comes."
25She ground one cup that night and made a thin red porridge. Lindi ate it and asked why it tasted of smoke. "Because it is old," said Thandiwe. "Older than me. Eat."
26In the eleventh month she woke to a sound in the back room. She took the lamp and went in. A man was standing on her stool with one of the sealed pots in his arms. It was Banda, her neighbour across the dry stream, who had five children and had sold his fields to the white truck and already eaten the money.
27He did not run. He stood on the stool and wept, with the pot held against his chest like a child. "They are crying all night, Thandiwe," he said. "I cannot listen to it any more."
28She could have screamed for the valley. A thief of seed, in a dry year, would have been beaten until he could not stand. She set down the lamp instead.
29"Give me that one," she said. "That one is not for eating." She took it from him and put it back on the shelf. Then she took down the hunger pot and poured half of what was left into his shirt, and tied the shirt by its sleeves.
30"That is for their bellies," she said. "When the rain comes, come to my door in the daylight and I will give you seed for the field you rent. But hear me, Banda. If you eat what I give you for the ground, I will not give again."
31He went out backward, as if from a chief's house. She sat down on the stool he had stood on, because her legs would not hold her, and she looked at how little was in the hunger pot now.
32The next day the district truck came at last, and with it a young woman in a green shirt who counted wells and weighed children. Thandiwe filled a tea tin with seed from a sealed pot, two cups, and pressed the lid down hard.
33"They say there is a house in the capital where seeds are kept in the cold," she said. "Is that true, or is it a story?"
34"It is true," said the young woman. "I have seen it. It is like a library, but cold."
35"Then take this there. Write on it Grandmother's Red, and the name of this valley."
36Lindi watched the tin go into the truck. "Why are you giving ours away?"
37"I am not giving it away. I am making it two," said Thandiwe. "A pot can break. A house can burn. A foolish old woman can get hungry in the night. If it is in two places, it does not all die on the same day."
38Then, in the last week of the eleventh month, the sky went black in the west at noon, and it rained.
39It rained as if a river had been tipped over. The children of the valley ran naked and screaming in it. Men who had not spoken for a year sang. By evening the dry stream was running brown, and by the next morning every family that still had a field was in it with a hoe. They planted seed from the shop, bought with money they had borrowed. Banda came to Thandiwe's door in the daylight, as he had been told.
40"Not yet," she said.
41He stared at her. Behind him the whole valley was bent over its rows.
42She took him out to the first field and knelt and dug with her hand. The ground was dark and wet as far as her wrist. Below that it was pale and dry as flour. She held up a fistful of each.
43"My mother had a rule," she said. "She had it from hers. Plant when the wet goes down to the elbow, and not before. One rain is a promise. Two rains is a season."
44"And if there is no second rain?" said Banda. "Then everyone has a crop but us."
45"Then I am a fool, and you may say so at my burial."
46Lindi cried that night. Every other child in the valley had planted. Thandiwe lay awake and listened to her, and she doubted. That must be told too. She was not certain. She had a rule, and a handful of dry dust from under the wet, and that was all she had against the judgment of every neighbour in the valley.
47For nineteen days there was no cloud. The shop seed came up in thin green lines across the valley, and it was beautiful, and on the eighth day it began to yellow. By the fifteenth day it lay down. By the nineteenth it had blown away, and the people who had planted it now owed money for seed that was dust.
48On the twentieth day it rained again, a slow rain this time, three days long, without thunder. On the fourth morning Thandiwe went out and dug. The wet went past her wrist and past her forearm. She laid her elbow in the hole, and it was dark and cold all the way down.
49"Now," she said.
50She had no oxen fit to pull. She and the child and Banda and Banda's wife and the two eldest of his children planted by hand, a heel-hole and three seeds and a foot to close it, across six of the nine fields. Three fields she left empty, and a third of the seed she left in the pot. "The year has lied once," she said. "It may know how to lie twice."
51The red sorghum came up. It was not a good harvest. It was a harvest. The heads were small and the birds took their share, and at the end of it there was grain on the threshing floor, in a valley where there was grain on no other.
52Sipho came back for the reaping. He walked up from the road one morning, thinner than he had left, with a cough from the city and a little money folded in his shoe. He did not say anything. He took a sickle from the wall and went into the field. She did not say anything either. She brought him water at noon, and he drank it.
53In the evening, on the threshing floor, he said, "I would have eaten it."
54"I know," said his mother. "I had my hand in the pot."
55That was all they ever said about it, and it was enough.
56After the harvest the neighbours came up the path with tins and cups and folded cloths. They did not ask the price, for they had nothing. Thandiwe gave each family one cup of seed and took no money. She asked one thing. After their own harvest, each was to bring two cups back, to be kept in a pot at the school, with the teacher holding the count. So the seed that had lived in one back room came to live in forty.
57The white truck came up the valley once more that year. It found no one who would sell.
58As for the tea tin, it reached the cold house in the capital. A clerk gave it a number and wrote two words and a valley's name on a card. It is there still. One of its children you will meet again before this book ends, a long way north of there, in a jar, in the hands of a stranger.
59Lindi asked her grandmother, in the good days after, how she had known the second rain would come.
60"I did not know," said Thandiwe. "No one knows that. I only knew that if I ate the seed, it would not matter whether the rain came or not."
61A seed is one kind of memory. There is another kind, which is written down. Now hear of a book.