So much depends upon a rusted wheelbarrow

Her red pumps were cracked and worn, but she’d polished and buffed them so they shone as she struggled up the rocky slope in the dust, pushing a rusted wheelbarrow, its wheel gone flat. She wore a sleeveless, threadbare but well-ironed summer dress. At first I thought she was pushing a load of rags and blankets, but then I saw two large socks hanging over the edge. They seemed to have feet in them. Then I identified bony cheeks, a grizzled beard, an old man’s parched and parted lips. 

I was sitting next to a teenaged boy on a sack of beans in the back of a pickup truck with no brakes driven by Alan Hutchins, the aging Scottish chemistry professor who ran the local charity. He was a Quaker and an admirer of Mother Theresa, and he invited me to join him on his rounds as he delivered bricks of lard wrapped in waxed paper, sacks of beans or cornmeal, packets of salt, candles, matches, and soap to “the poorest of the poor.” We’d visited an old woman with rags tied to her feet and a man with no legs who lived alone in a tiny mud house and got around by pulling himself forward with his hands and arms, dragging his body across the ground. We were on our way up the hill to a middle-aged schizophrenic woman in a lean-to when we paused by the red shoe woman.

Alan shouted a question to her in Sesotho. She put down the wheel barrow, shaded her eyes, and responded with a stream of rapid-fire Sesotho punctuated by shouts. I whispered to the boy next to me,

“What’s going on?”

Sotto voce, he answered, “The hospital does this. They leave the grandfather by the road. They say he is dying, but death takes time. They need beds for people who can be helped. So they leave him by the road. She ask what she must do. They tell her take him home.”

My translator took on her voice, her attitude, still keeping his voice low, out of respect for the woman and the dying man. “‘How must I take him home?‘ she ask. They tell her not their problem. Agh, shame! To treat the old man so disrespect. So she go home, borrow this thing--” he gestures to the wheelbarrow.

The young man in the passenger seat of the pickup jumped out with a big rock, deftly placed it behind a rear wheel. Alan shifted the truck into neutral and stepped out, and the teenager and I followed. Each of us took an arm or a leg, and we lifted the old man, all akimbo, limp and silent, into the back of the truck, nestling his head in the lard, propping bags of beans around him so he wouldn’t roll. Then we carefully placed the wheelbarrow over his feet, adjusting sacks of cornmeal as the teenager and I climbed back in. The woman squeezed into the front with Alan, the young man ran back, retrieved the large rock, ran to the front of the truck and hopped in as Alan shifted into first gear.

The truck jolted over rocks and boulders, wheezing uphill and shimmying down as Alan steered it in a zigzag path to keep it from picking up too much speed. The old man made no sound. Pressed up against him, I took his limp and unresponsive hand in mine. His glittering eyes were alive and focused on some point far away, somewhere I couldn’t see. His head in a wool knit cap rested on melting lard. I stroked his hand, comforting myself, and I said, stupidly, in my baby-Sesotho: Robala hantle, Ntate. Sleep well, father. 

He wasn’t listening. He didn’t care who lifted his body, who held his hand or spoke or was angry or wept. He didn’t care whose shoes were polished or how much anybody contributed to food for the poorest of the poor. All that was over for him. He had left the plane of caring. His eyes remained open, awake to the fierce blue sky, the relentless sun. 



Note: this is a continuation of a memoir begun here, continuing here, the most recent preceding episode here.

Photo: I have kept the negatives and contact sheets from hundreds of black and white photos I made in Lesotho. I don’t know what to do with them, but I can’t throw them out.