The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

From a forgotten moment in history comes an inspiring novel about finding strength and courage in the most unimaginable places.
 
In turn-of-the-century South Africa, fourteen-year-old Lettie, her younger brother, and her mother are Dutch Afrikaner settlers who have been taken from their farm by British soldiers and are being held in a concentration camp. It is early in the Boer War, and Lettie’s father, grandfather, and brother are off fighting the British as thousands of Afrikaner women and children are detained. The camps are cramped and disease ridden; the threat of illness and starvation are ever present. Determined to dictate their own fate, Lettie and her family give each other strength and hope as they fight to survive amid increasingly dire conditions.

Brave and defiant, Lettie finds comfort in memories of stargazing with her grandfather, in her plan to be a writer, and in surprising new friendships that will both nourish and challenge her. A beautiful testament to love, family, and sheer force of will, The Lost History of Stars was inspired by Dave Boling’s grandfather’s own experience as a soldier during the Boer War. Lettie is a figure of abiding grace, and her story is richly drawn and impossible to forget.

Release date: June 6, 2017

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

September 1900, Venter Farm

The first warning was so delicate: Moeder’s hanging cups lightly touched lips in the china cabinet. By the time we turned to look at them, stacked plates rattled on the shelves from the vibration of hoofbeats.

“Ma . . . they’re coming,” Willem said, his voice so calm I didn’t believe him. “It’s them.”

“Is it just our men again?”

“Too much dust, it’s them . . . the British.”

“Lettie, take your sister. . . . Willem, turn out the stock. . . . Bina, gather food,” my mother said with rehearsed precision.

“I’ll get your point-two-two,” Willem said, retrieving the rifle my mother kept in her bed on the side where my father had slept before the war. The weapon was almost as tall as my little brother.

The British swept upon us like a grass fire, and by the time we reached the stoep, two dozen soldiers had dismounted; more were pouring into the barn and rounding up stock. Mother had drilled us for this moment every day since the men left almost a year earlier. Her first rule was that the children were not to speak. Not a single word, no matter what the Tommies did. Say nothing, she told us, pointing her finger as if to jab the rule inside us.

“Where are your men?” the officer at the front of the group shouted.

“Out killing British,” I yelled, my silence lasting no more than five seconds.

My mother and the soldiers focused stares on me.

“We know they’ve been here. . . . You’ve been supplying them and that makes you spies,” the officer said. “They destroyed the rail line near here . . .”

“Were many killed?” I asked.

“Lettie . . . shhhh.” Mother turned to me with such force that I feared she’d aim her rifle at me.

“Yes . . . Lettie . . . shhh,” the officer mocked, approaching the stairs. “We’ve been getting sniped at for miles, and you give them support. We could hang you from that tree. All of you.”

I was enraged. They were at our house, with their fat British horses and their knives on the end of their British rifles. Here . . . in our country, at our house. They were no longer a vague threat, some distant rumbling in the night. They were here, looking into our faces. I stood tall and narrowed my eyes at the officer. The fool. I took a step toward him, sending hatred in my gaze. I am small . . . but dangerous.

“Do you have more to say, little girl?”

Little girl?

I raised both hands above me and shook my fists at him . . . and made a growling noise through my teeth.

The officer laughed. “Will you hurt us with your dolly?”

I had gathered my little sister’s things when the soldiers rode up. I still had Cecelia’s doll, Lollie, in my shaking hand. The British were not threatened.

“Stop laughing at her, rooinek,” Moeder shouted, turning the .22 at the officer.

“Put it down, missus . . . ,” the officer said. “What—”

A pebble bounced off the officer’s shoulder. Willem had fired his slingshot at him from the corner of the stoep.

A dozen soldiers lifted weapons; half aimed at Mother, the others at Willem. Two Tommies twisted at her rifle, a small-caliber shot pinging into the sky before they could wrench it from her.

“We’ll shoot her right now,” the officer said to Willem. “You’ve attacked us with a weapon and she fired a shot. We could hang you all right now. Or put together a firing squad.”

Willem waited, considering . . .

“Put it down, Willem,” Mother said. Willem turned and cocked his head to her. He placed the slingshot on the stoep.

“Bring him here . . .”

He looked so small, a barefoot eight-year-old under a too-large hat, wiggling as two soldiers dragged him by the arms. They stood him in front of the officer, and when they released their grip, Willem straightened into a post.

“Where are the men, boy?”

Silence.

“Where are the men, boy?”

Silence, with a defiant stare.

“You know the penalty for being a spy . . . and for attacking an officer,” he said, signaling for men to come forward. “Firing squad.”

I screamed and Moeder pulled at the soldiers holding her arms. She tore free from one, but another came from behind and coiled an arm around her throat. My mouth dried so quickly that I couldn’t speak. I turned to pick up little Cecelia and shield her eyes.

Five aligned in front of Willem in such a straight line it was clear they had been drilled.

“Stop it, he doesn’t know where they are. . . . None of us knows,” Moeder said. “They haven’t been home. . . . They could be anywhere.”

The officer ignored her, focusing on Willem.

“Where are the men, boy?”

Silence.

“Brave officer . . . threatening a little boy,” I said, barely able to raise a sound.

Willem broke his focus on the officer to glare at me.

“It’s no threat. . . . Where are the men?”

Silence.

“Ready . . .”

Moeder twisted again, and the soldier lifted so hard against her neck he squeezed out a choking gasp.

“He doesn’t know,” I said. “They never tell us where they’re going. No, wait, they never come home. They haven’t been home.”

“Aim. . . . Where are the men?” The officer screamed it this time.

Silence.

Soldiers’ rifles angled toward his center, Willem inhaled to expand his chest toward their rifles. He curled his bottom lip over his top.

The tension in my arms pinched Cecelia so tightly she raised a wail, so long and at such a pitch that the officer and the men recoiled from their rigid stance.

“As you were,” the officer said.

The squad lowered weapons.

“Fine boy you have there, ma’am,” the officer said to Moeder. “They usually start crying and tell everything they know the second the squad lines up. He’s the first one to just go mute.” He offered his hand to Willem to shake but withdrew it empty when Willem sneered. “But you’re still spies, and we’re taking you in. You have ten minutes to get what you can from the house.”

Mother spent the first moments staring at the officer, and then at every Tommy who walked past her, studying each man’s face as if memorizing it for later.

Willem and I scrambled into the house to get our bags as two of the soldiers carried our chests and tossed them from the stoep. In the parlor, a soldier started up at mother’s organ, a man at each shoulder. Offended by their nerve, Moeder rushed at them. She was blocked by the men. The Tommy played so well I stopped to listen. His playing was equal to Moeder’s as he read off the sheet music that had been open on the stand. Three sang in ragged harmony as Moeder stood helpless.

Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in thee;

Let the water and the blood,

From thy wounded side which flowed,

Be of sin, the double cure;

Save from wrath and make me pure.

The singing felt so out of place but struck me as the perfect prayer.

Let me hide myself . . . yes, I thought, please, dear God.

Save us from wrath . . . yes . . . yes . . . now, please.

Another soldier pushed through and smashed the keys with his rifle butt, startling his fellows, and the organ rendered a death moan until the soldier beat it breathless.

“Stop . . . ,” Moeder screamed. She had promised never to satisfy them by showing emotion. But the organ . . . how could they?

I pulled Cecelia tighter to my hip when the Tommies became more violent. One smashed the glass of the china cabinet and crushed the contents with repeated rifle thrusts. The force of the sound stunned me, as if the glass shards themselves had flown into my flesh.

Pictures of ancestors were ripped down, and the painting of Jesus was knocked to the floor when they tore into the walls with their axes. It took them only a few wild ax chops to discover the silver setting and valuables we’d hidden behind a false wall.

“What did you think you were saving?” one asked. “We’re going to dynamite the place in a few minutes, anyway.”

“Get them out of here,” said the officer, now bored by our presence.

They herded us with the tips of their bayonets. Our native girl, Bina, carried the largest basket of our belongings on her head. We stepped outside into a chorus of death wails. The pig produced a heartbreaking squeal as it was speared; one sheep after another raised pathetic pleas that turned into bloody gurgles when the knives were pulled across their throats. And beheaded chickens spun through their frantic death dance by the dozens.

I ran toward the sheep until a soldier turned and pressed his bayonet hard to my breastbone.

“Don’t you touch that child,” Bina yelled, dropping the basket to come to my side.

“It’s not your war,” he screamed at her, although the rifle pointing at her chest seemed evidence that it was. “We’re not here to fight kaffirs, too.”

Men dragged several freshly killed sheep to the well and threw them down. At the house, nails screamed when boards were pried loose from the walls and floors. The wood was hauled out and orderly stacked on a wagon—treated with more respect than we were.

Appetite for destruction peaking, the officer yelled a command and the Tommies dispersed. The explosion sucked the air from my lungs and sent pieces of the house splintering into the sky. I could feel the heat on my face and was convinced I could see the sound waves roll across the tall veld grasses. The house burned black and loud, the uprights groaning like a wounded thing before it collapsed in upon itself.

THE THINGS OF OUR life rose as smoke and faded into a high, gray haze. Fire consumed in minutes what had taken generations to accumulate. Had it really been just half an hour since the teacups betrayed their approach? Twenty-five minutes since I had shaken a doll at a British officer? Fifteen minutes since the organ cried and Jesus once again held his silence while beaten to the ground? Half an hour by the clock . . . a week’s worth of heartbeats . . . a lifetime’s tears?

The Tommies rejected most of the things we tried to bring and heaped them on a pile burning near the barn. We were left with some bedding, clothing, and a few other small things we could carry. To the open mouth of her satchel, Moeder had tossed whatever food she could that would not spoil—biltong and rusks, mostly. She packed the family Bible and swept some personal things off her bureau before the khaki-clad locusts swarmed in to devour the rest.

Oupa Gideon would have been so disappointed if he’d seen us; we had maintained less order than our headless chickens. I had gathered up my notebook and some bedding and then helped Cecelia with her clothes and her doll. Willem carried his slingshot in one hand and his little riempie stool that Vader had made him in the other. Moeder shouted at him to put on his boots, which he wore only in the coldest months. The Tommies snatched his slingshot and tossed it on the fire. One tried twisting the stool from his hands, but Willem’s kicks made it not worth his bother.

They marshaled us toward an ox wagon. A soldier pushed my mother with a hand low on her hip.

“Don’t . . . push . . . me . . . ” She turned on him with her fists. Our house was burning, our stock being slaughtered as we watched, and that push was a final insult.

He swung his rifle off his shoulder so that the bayonet was at her throat, the tip still wet with sheeps’ blood, dripping a roselike pattern onto the front of her dress.

“Well, you’re not staying here.”

He pulled the bayonet back, but only an inch.

“We’ll find somewhere,” she said after a deep breath.

“Have you heard of the families that tried to stay out . . . women with children who thought they could live off the land? . . . You know what happened to them?” the soldier asked. “Bands of angry kaffirs raped the women and killed the children. You want to be used like that, missus?”

“No . . . no such thing,” Bina shouted.

“Want to risk it?” he asked Moeder. The soldier slung his rifle back over one shoulder and attempted to lift her onto the wagon.

“Don’t you touch her,” Willem yelled.

He ignored Willem and put both arms around Moeder’s waist to lift her so that her thrashing boot heals could not threaten his shins.

Willem glared and closed in.

“Tucker . . . that’s enough,” shouted another soldier, of sufficient rank to cause the Tommy to release her. “Back away, or help her climb up. They’re not animals.”

She made one last shove at the Tommy’s arms, handed her bag to me, and mounted the wagon on her own.

Bina came last, our large basket on her head.

“Go . . . ,” a soldier said, making small stabbing motions with his bayonet. “Go to your people.”

Bina’s eyes showed white and she tried to push around the soldier to get to the wagon, but he caught her across the throat with his rifle stock. She dropped in a pile, our things scattering around her. On her back, bayonet now at her throat, she could only watch as our wagon pulled away. I held both arms toward her, hugging the air between us, and focused on her eyes until they faded with distance.

I recognized the family in the wagon. We did not know the Prinsloos well; they were Doppers who lived near the railway and stayed to themselves. Their kind rarely joined in Sunday sermons or Nachtmaal services and struck me as joyless by choice. They were already backed toward the front of the wagon with their few possessions, eyes fixed on our flaming house. The children squeezed closer to their mother, as if trying to hide beneath her skirts.

I lost my footing and arrested my fall with a hand to the greasy cart bed. It had been used to haul livestock and was still slick with wastes. We stood holding on to the back gate of the wagon, staring at the burning farmhouse and at the gray mounds of dead sheep.

Cecelia had been a little trouper, only four, but doing as she was told, staying close to me. But when the Prinsloo children started wailing, she gave in and did not stop until the jerking of the oxcart forced her to hold on. We collapsed into our pile of belongings—except for Willem, who vomited over the side of the wagon. Embarrassed, he kept his back to us, but I could see the pumping motion of his head. Staring down a firing squad and then watching our home destroyed warranted a purge, I thought. Sapped of emotion, he collapsed in place and slept without stirring.

I was ashamed that he had been the strong child. I was older; it should have been me standing up to the officer, defiant against a firing squad. Instead, I shook a doll at them. I did nothing but make them laugh and provide them with an amusing story to tell over supper.

We had not eaten since breakfast, and Moeder apologized for having forgotten water. She asked a soldier where we were being taken and was told only “a place of concentration.”

When she turned her back to the fire cloud above our house, I recognized her look, staring without focus. She was making a plan.

“At least we’re together,” I said to her. She did not seem to hear. And we weren’t all together, anyway. What would happen to Bina now? What would happen to Tante Hannah, my aunt, and her nearby house? Surely they would burn her farm next.

My stomach became unsettled with the rocking of the wagon, and I thought of our ancestors, the Dutch sailors accustomed to the motion of ships at sea. I studied my mother again. I knew she would soon tell us to be smart and calm; God would guide us.

Our wagon merged in line toward the end of a caravan of perhaps a dozen others. The heat wilted Willem and Cecelia. I took off my white pinafore and spread it like a buck sail on the back corner of the wagon to shade them. I began to tell them a story, just something I made up to try to take their minds off what had happened, to distract them from the smell and the filth, the heat and the hunger. Moeder fed us biscuits. It took some effort to gnaw them soft before swallowing, and that made them seem more filling. It would tire our jaws if not fill our stomachs. I was soon so dry I could not go on with the story.

By dusk, the soldiers outspanned and we were allowed off the carts. Many children, driven by thirst, ran to roadside puddles, fell on their bellies, and drank muddy standing water, even as their mothers shouted for them to stop. The soldiers handed out tins of bully beef as supper for the hundred or so women and children. We were allowed no fires to cook, as it might draw the attention of our scouts. The night was beautifully clear, and I pointed out my favorite constellations to Willem, who sat on his little stool as if he were displaced royalty on a portable throne.

It would be four days in the open wagon before we reached the “place of concentration.” After climbing from the wagon each evening, I could turn in all directions and see a dozen pillars of smoke rising to join the stained clouds. But my eyes were gritty with dust, so that sometimes it looked not like smoke on the rise but like dark, punishing storms raining down with devilish accuracy on farmhouses and barns.

More wagons joined our caravan each day. By the time we were off-loaded, some of the children who had drunk from the puddles were already sickened with a disease whose name I had never heard. And perhaps confused by the ordeal, I was certain I had seen an apparition in our new enclosure: a man who looked a great deal like Oom Sarel—my father’s brother.

2

September–October 1900, Concentration Camp

A sprawling city of white bell tents spread in a grid across the valley, row by row, column by column—densely concentrated. We had eaten little on the trip and had such a small ration of water that my insides were like dry leather. My eyes stung from fatigue, but each time I closed them I saw the colorless outline of our house aflame. I had stared so hard that the image was etched onto the surface of my mind.

The Tommies shouted at us to gather and make ourselves orderly for an officer’s remarks. We would soon see the rules of the camp posted everywhere, he told us, and it was his job to be certain we understood them from the start. He would read them in detail for the benefit of “the many illiterate” among us.

Moeder remained straight and solid while Willem and I cleaved tight from opposite sides. Cecelia slept through it all in Moeder’s arms. The wagon had been so crowded, and I so reluctant to lie in the animal wastes, that I had held on to the back gate, standing much of the trip. When we were off-loaded, the ground continued to roll beneath me and I strained to keep from faltering.

The officer cleared his throat and resumed shouting.

“No letter shall be posted without being read and approved by camp censors,” he announced. He turned his head across the span of our group, but looking above us rather than at us. We had no idea where to write to our men, and no means of getting a letter to them. I would have no problems following that rule.

No bad language was allowed, he said. My parents were more strict about that than any British officer might be, so I did not curse as it was, except in my mind, and I doubted the British could police that. I thought a damnation of the officer as a test. He did not respond, so I was safe. I committed to silently cursing them every day.

No critical remarks were to be made against the British sovereign or government. I broke that one on the spot. Moeder gave me her “hush” look.

No lanterns could be burned after 8:00 p.m. except in case of illness. I knew I would want to read and write at night but soon discovered that candles were too scarce to allow it.

Tents were to be kept clean. My mother was already meticulous to the point of annoyance. She might work around the clock trying to sweep dirt off a dirt floor.

And nothing could be hung on the wire or fences, he said. I was not sure why we would need to or why it was forbidden, and it was not a controversy in camp until I made it one.

That first morning, they called us refugees, which I didn’t understand and came to despise once I did. Refugees, we were told, were not allowed to leave the tent after dark. I would break that rule often because I could not check on the stars in the daylight. They could force me to live inside these fences, I supposed, but they would struggle to keep me from studying the stars. I had promised my grandfather I would always do that when possible.

I was used to rules; from as early as I could remember I’d followed the guideposts planted by Oupa Gideon and my parents and by the Bible we studied every night. I saw them all as commandments, and I respected them, mostly, because I respected those who made them. But those were our rules.

The British neglected to provide rules regarding the ways in which many thousands in this camp were to live in an area roughly equivalent to the space we had used for planting oats on the farm. Oupa Gideon always said that no one should live within sight of his neighbor’s hearth smoke. But I would see the faces of more people on my first day in camp than I had in my entire life. More frightening to me was the idea that they were looking back at me, judging.

The camp rules became meaningful to me in only one way. I discovered that these British guidelines were printed on one side of a sheet of paper. I had brought along my notebook for a journal, but those pages were limited and dear. The sheets of rules provided an almost inexhaustible supply of paper for anyone brazen enough to rip them off the posts at night, when no one could see.

The British army may have created a vast empire, but my reading of the news led me to know that its leaders showed poor understanding of conducting a war in our vast country. So it should not have surprised me that camp organizers had not recognized the need to make a rule prohibiting the stealing of the rules.

THE GALL OF THE British to call this a refugee camp, portraying themselves as humanitarians providing food and shelter to thousands of homeless, when they were responsible for our being homeless in the first place. I would not hide my contempt. Whenever I saw a guard, I twisted my face tight and shot him through with looks of scorn.

They treated us like stock from the first moment, herding us into separate fenced kraals. Among those now imprisoned, we were called the Undesirables because our men were still on commando and refused to surrender. Some of the British called us Irreconcilables, which I preferred, as it sounded more defiant. I did not appreciate being considered undesirable, but I would proudly admit that I would never be reconciled to the British presence on our land.

A fence inside the fences kept us from the Boers who were there under British protection. They went by different names, too. The Tame Boers were those who would not fight. The Hands-Uppers were those who had surrendered to the British. And the Joiners were the worst, being traitors who not only surrendered but agreed to help the British, in actual combat, or with scouting and spying. We considered them all traitors and decided that they were fortunate to be protected from us. If they did not fight against the British, they might as well be British, we believed. In exchange for selling their country to the devils, they received more and better rations in camp, and soap and candles and small things to make their lives easier.

We heard talk of the British putting ground glass in the flour, or fishhooks in the bully beef. The meat was such gnarled gristle that we might not have noticed hidden glass or metal if it were in there. Meals were an unchanging series of mealie pap, canned beef, meal or samp, condensed milk. No vegetables. No fruit.

The maggo. . .