Graveyard Shift

"Keep your intuition to yourself on this one. Please!" Luke, my husband and leader of our little outfit snarls at me. "Your last stunt cost us dearly."

It is not as if my intuition let us down or made fools of us. Far from it. I was spot on, problem was that the customer did not want the result I found and presented. He was loathe to pay us and Luke had to do some seriously diplomatic horse trading. Horse trading does not amuse Luke, a direct man who likes things open, honest and simple. You see we are an archaeological team who make sure that you do not run into trouble with the Heritage department when you are going to build on an area that is known to have numerous possible important archaeological sites. We were asked to do an assessment of a plot before building could commence. There were sufficient indicators that there might be something of archaeological importance on the site, so we went in and started doing test pits across a large plot. The owner was always present, fuming at the time we were taking and the costs he was accruing. While we worked, I kept on thinking that an area we had chosen not to explore was the place we needed to explore. I mentioned it to Luke and Paul. And Paul, the other member of our team supported me.

"Go. Dig a pit, but for heavens name, do not find anything of interest." Luke snarled.

We marked out a one metre wide square and started digging.

"What are you digging there for?" The owner demanded to know, hopping from foot to foot.

"Just being thorough." said Luke trying to calm him down. Then Paul's trowel hit something. We worked slowly and carefully. I exposed a bone. Human femur. We had just uncovered a grave and the building project had just been put back at least 12 months. The owner was furious, threatened not to pay us and only relented when Luke pointed out that if he did anything foolish, Heritage would be all over him like a very bad rash. It got quite nasty and eventually Heritage had to appoint another team to continue the excavation.

But moving on to the here and now.

Normally a Karoo dirt road stretches straight out for as far as the eye can see but at present we can see about 1 km ahead due to the heat haze which causes the world to shimmer.

Our battered SUV is supposedly air conditioned but the air con gave up some time back and inside the cab it is hot and dusty as the open windows allow clouds of dust to swirl in.

"How much further?" Luke asks getting impatient. A bad night last night has left him tetchy.

"Another 1 km or so. There should be a sharp left turn soon." This from Paul our techie and heavy lifting dude.

"There are no sharp turns in the Karoo, only slow ellipses." I add.

"Jill, only a mathematician could describe a straight road that goes on forever as an ellipse." Luke is not happy with me today and it shows.

"Uhm, sharp left hand bend is approaching." Paul interrupting our descent into a full blown marital argument.

"Shit!" A road sign suddenly appears out of the haze leaving Luke less time to slow down and turn than he would normally allow. We make it though the bend and find ourselves crossing a river bed. Waterless at this time of year. Actually waterless most of the year except when the infrequent rains come and turn the dry river bed into a dangerous, raging torrent. Coming out of the river bed we see the farmhouse on a slight rise. We pull to a dusty stop outside the gate and stiffly I get out and open the gate. Luke drives through, leaving me to close the gate and make friends with an enormous Irish Wolfhound. The dog and I are almost face to face, but his tail is wagging which is vaguely reassuring. Together we follow the SUV up to the house.

By the time I make it to the house the men are standing in the shade of the verandah and the farmer is explaining that he is new here but that he has heard disquieting things about the derelict graveyard on his property, whispers of massacres and unmarked graves. He mentions the Old Enemy (the British) against whom his great grandfather had fought a valiant war. The problem he says is not really the unmarked graves but the fact that his Volk will not go near the graveyard and he has had to go out and chase the goats away from the graveyard before the herders will do their work.

We listen politely and then I trudge back to the gate, accompanied by the Irish Wolfhound. I let Luke drive the SUV through, close up, pat the dog on his head over the top of the gate and climb back into the vehicle.

It is well after midday when we get to the graveyard and so it is scorchingly hot. We do the preliminary survey as fast as possible, GPS co-ordinates, ground penetrating radar and drone imaging. We are a good, efficient team and in less than 2 hours the survey is complete and by late afternoon we are back at the rural hotel, drinking ice cold beer.

"Cummon Jill, lets get the computers processing so we can see what we found today." Paul loves computers and has been itching to get the data processing since we got back. Paul and I get to his room, start the computers running and we wait.

"I see the bruise is almost gone." Paul being diplomatic as usual.

I shrug.

"And no one believes the "bumped into a door" story any more. Oldest excuse in the book that is."

I shrug again and Paul sighs. He is a good friend and concerned about me. His probing just makes me uncomfortable. He knows this and we lapse into an uncomfortable silence.

The the radar results come in first. No unmarked graves or disturbed ground inside or outside the walls of the graveyard. We stayed away from the graves themselves but can see nothing untoward.

"Nothing! Not one unmarked grave." Paul frowns, checks the results again. Nothing.

The 3D image of the graveyard made by the drone imaging tells the same story. Except that standing in the middle of the graveyard is a woman dressed in early 20th century rural dress, hair hanging down to the middle of her back and leaning against a pushchair. She is looking down at the pushchair which is empty.

We both stare at the image aghast.

"What the hell! She wasn't there when we were. We would have seen her!"

"She looks so sad. Her child is dead. Buried there." I say. I can feel it in my bones.

"How do you know?"

I think for a while corralling the feelings, emotions and intuitions swirling in my head.

"Look at her Paul. An empty pushchair and she is standing in a graveyard. Why would a woman take an empty pushchair to a graveyard? Why? If not that her child is there and the chair is all she has to remind her of it."

"Luke is not going to be happy with your intuition doing its thing again."

Paul is pragmatic and is prepared to go with my intuition. He has seen it work a number of times.

We report back to Luke who seems to take the sudden appearance of the woman as a personal affront. We agree to do the same run again but at my insistence we will do a ground penetrating radar scan around where the woman was standing. Luke sneers at my ghost theory driven by my intuition (again) but Paul supports me. I offer to do the scanning and the processing of data so it will cost Luke and Paul nothing but a bit of time. Paul of course refuses to be left out of the computer processing. We go back to the graveyard, Paul does the drone scan and I run the radar trolley across the graves around the place where the woman had been standing, We didn't do that last time as we were looking for unmarked graves and all around that area were marked graves. Back at the hotel we ran the data again, the woman was still there so nothing had changed there, however the radar data was interesting. Just in front of where the woman is standing there appears to be broken ground, typical of a small grave. It lies at right angles to the rest of the graves.

"Small enough to be a baby who would fit in that push chair." Paul says looking at the radar scan.

Luke grudgingly admits that the ghost theory may have some validity and so we go to the farmer Fanie Van Vuuren and cautiously tell him and his wife Elize our tale. He listens carefully to us, looks sceptical, looks at his wife and then they leave the room. We can hear the Elize talking in a very emphatic tone. He tries to counter her and gets talked down. Then he says:

"OK! OK!" and goes to the phone.

"Oom Jacobus? Please can we come visit?"

Thirty minutes later we are sitting drinking coffee on the veranda of Jacobus Louw, an old farmer whose family has lived in the area for five generations.

"Please tell these people the story of the lost baby, Oom Jacobus." asks Elize.

"The story of the lost baby? That happened in the late 1920's. I was a little child then so I only know what my parents told me when I was old enough to understand what happened. The Van Rensburg family lived on your farm then. it was much bigger then but old Frikkie Van Rensburg, he drank and gambled too much and he had to sell a portion of your farm to my Pa to pay off his debts. He came to a bad end did old Frikkie, but that is another story. Frikkie married a lovely young woman from Frazerberg called Nellie Murphy. She sounds English but her family was Irish who came out to fight the British and like many Irish stayed on afterwards. Became Boere Mense. Spoke Afrikaans like a true Afrikaners."

"A year after they were married she gave birth to a lovely young girl. Sarah they called her, she was christened on the farm by Dominee Wessels. Even then there were stories about Frikkie's bad temper. Rumours started about him beating his workers and then, even darker stories about him beating his wife. They stopped coming to church because the community started to question him about his bad behaviour, gambling, drinking and especially about the violence. Eventually he was arrested in Sutherland for public violence and drunkenness. Then came the story that the child had gone missing. The whole community turned out to search for her but they couldn't find the her, she was gone. The workers whispered that Frikkie was to blame but none would openly testify against him. Terrified of him you see. Nellie lasted another year, then she died. Frikkie said in childbirth but my Ma said it was from a broken heart. Sad story."

"Do you perhaps have a picture that shows Nellie?" I ask.

Oom Jacobus thinks for a while, then goes off into the house, returns with a photo album.

"My Ma was a keen photographer so we have lots of photos of that time. Lets see if we can see someone who fits the description. Long hair hanging down the middle of her back. Tall and skinny. beautiful face."

The description matches the woman in the scans and Luke looks at me with a certain air of resignation.

We cluster around Oom Jacobus as he scans through a dusty, battered and ancient album. The first photos are from early 1920. Slowly we move forward in time, Oom Jacobus stopping to tell short tales of the time. Then we come to a page with a cluster of photos. There is a big photo of a bridal party in the middle.

"She would have been at this wedding. Big social occasion it was. There was a bit of a scandal because Frikkie picked a fight with Kobus Schmidt from Groenvlei. It was spoken about for years thereafter. Frikkie got drunk, shouted insults at everyone. Kobus eventually knocked him down and then put him in his car, told Nellie to take him home. Told him never to come back."

While Oom Jacobus had been talking I had scanned the photos. Tucked away as if the compiler of the page had tried to hide it away was a photo of a couple. He looked very drunk and was leaning heavily on the shoulder of a slender, long haired woman. She was unmistakable. It had to be her. It was her. I opened my mouth to speak but Paul beat me to it.

"That's her!" stabbing his finger toward the same photo as I was looking at.

Paul looks at me. "You were right. She is still mourning her child."

"What now?" Luke looking lost.

"We get a priest in, open that grave very carefully. The priest says the Last Rites over the child, we close her up, put a headstone at the head of the grave. Then I stay the night until Nellie arrives and I tell her what we have done."

"Oh for fuck sake. Last Rites is a Catholic thing and you could cause a riot bringing in a "Romaanse" priest." Luke's rant dwindles to a halt in the face of the unanimous glare from the rest of us.

"OK. But it's on your head. Why at night. She was there during the day."

"We didn't see her in the day. She is probably more visible at night.

"I will keep watch with her. But no men! She has suffered enough at the hands of men." Elize says glaring around. Her husband just shrugs.

"OK. But Piet goes with you." he says as an afterthought.

"Piet?" I ask.

"That blerry big dog is Piet." says Elize. "Everyone is terrified of him but he is just such a sweetie."

Back at the farm, we leave the farmer and his wife behind and then drive to the graveyard. We carefully open the grave, eventually exposing a tiny child. I cannot bear to look but Paul tells me later that the skeleton showed signs of trauma.

We have just opened the grave when a group of labourers arrive and stand solemnly at the gate. Not talking, just watching. I phone Elize, tell her what we have found.

"Wait there. I will get the Dominee."

We wait for the dominee to arrive. He is, not unexpectedly a bit cautious that he is the victim of a practical joke, but the sight of the tiny broken skeleton persuades him immediately.

We all stand around the tiny grave, heads bowed as the dominee does a full funeral service for the child. He ends up by calling on the Almighty to grant peace and rest to both mother and child.

We had forgotten a grave marker but one of the labourers hands over a simple cross and we plant it at the head of the grave. We return to the farmhouse for supper and Luke and Paul are given rooms in the farmhouse. After supper Elize and I drive to the graveyard with Piet in solemn attendance. We find that we will not be alone though. A group of four women labourers are waiting at the gate when we arrive. We settle in to wait as the darkness sweeps in. turning the sky to golds and oranges and reds. Soon it is dark and still we wait.

The women start singing softly. It is a hymn I remember from my childhood and it suits the solemnity of the occasion perfectly.

I had begun to doubt she would come in a form we could see when suddenly there is a shimmering at the new grave and Nellie stands looking down at the grave. After a while she stoops down and lifts her shimmering infant into her arms. She rocks it in her arms and hums the hymn softly to it. I make to stand up but Elize stops me and so we sit with the hymn being sung softly in the background. Finally Nellie carefully places the infant in the pushchair, looks at us once and then walks away, slowly fading as she goes. The hymn fades with her.

Elize turns to the singers.

"Thank you. Beautifully done."

She looks at me.

"Ja. Well done you too. Time for hot coffee and bed."

The next morning while Luke and Paul chat to the farmer, Elize ushers me out of sight.

"Your friend Paul talked to us last night after you and Luke went to bed. He's a good man, Paul and what you found in the graveyard disturbed him. Disturbed him enough to talk to us about you."

"That was wrong of him."

Elize shakes her head.

"So I have an invitation to you. Stay with us now. Let the men go home. You take some time to think."

I shake my head.

"Then remember us and when you need a break, call us."

Luke looks around the corner, beckons furiously for me to come. I look away from him, across the vast and open Karoo, remembering the woman and her empty pushchair.