than cheating. So Abel became our only transport, and he would refuse to take us places. Ever defiant, my mother would take minibuses to get to church.
Losing the car also meant losing access to my dad. We had to ask Abel for rides into town, and he didn’t like what they were for. It was an insult to his manhood.
“We need to go to Yeoville.”
“Why are you going to Yeoville?”
“To see Trevor’s dad.”
“What? No, no. How can I take my wife and her child and drop you off there? You’re insulting me. What do I tell my friends? What do I tell my family? My wife is at another man’s house? The man who made that child with her? No, no, no.”
I saw my father less and less. Not long after, he moved down to Cape Town.
Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”
—
When we first met Abel, he smoked a lot of weed. He drank, too, but it was mostly weed. Looking back, I almost miss his pothead days because the weed mellowed him out. He’d smoke, chill, watch TV, and fall asleep. I think subconsciously it was something he knew he needed to do to take the edge off his anger. He stopped smoking after he and my mom got married. She made him stop for religious reasons—the body is a temple and so on. But what none of us saw coming was that when he stopped smoking weed he just replaced it with alcohol. He started drinking more and more. He never came home from work sober. An average day was a six-pack of beer after work. Weeknights he’d have a buzz on. Some Fridays and Saturdays he just didn’t come home.
When Abel drank, his eyes would go red, bloodshot. That was the clue I learned to read. I always thought of Abel as a cobra: calm, perfectly still, then explosive. There was no ranting and raving, no clenched fists. He’d be very quiet, and then out of nowhere the violence would come. The eyes were my only clue to stay away. His eyes were everything. They were the eyes of the Devil.
Late one night we woke up to a house filled with smoke. Abel hadn’t come home by the time we’d gone to bed, and I’d fallen asleep in my mother’s room with her and Andrew, who was still a baby. I jerked awake to her shaking me and screaming. “Trevor! Trevor!” There was smoke everywhere. We thought the house was burning down.
My mom ran down the hallway to the kitchen, where she discovered the kitchen on fire. Abel had driven home drunk, blind drunk, drunker than we’d ever seen him before. He’d been hungry, tried to heat up some food on the stove, and passed out on the couch while it was cooking. The pot had burned itself out and burned up the kitchen wall behind the stove, and smoke was billowing everywhere. She turned off the stove and opened the doors and the windows to try to air the place out. Then she went over to the couch and woke him up and started berating him for nearly burning the house down. He was too drunk to care.
She came back into the bedroom, picked up the phone, and called my grandmother. She started going on and on about Abel and his drinking. “This man, he’s going to kill us one day. He almost burnt the house down…”
Abel walked into the bedroom, very calm, very quiet. His eyes were blood red, his eyelids heavy. He put his finger on the cradle and hung up the call. My mom lost it.
“How dare you! Don’t you hang up my phone call! What do you think you’re doing?!”
“You don’t tell people what’s happening in this house,” he said.
“Oh, please! You’re worried about what the world is thinking? Worry about