I don’t know what Davie told you, but I know that he was wrong on some things. Me, this is how I remember the ordeal. It started in winter. I remember because usually, nothing happens in that time of the year. In 1999, though, something happened in winter.

This is how it started: Little Samantha was born on the tenth of June. Her mother was taken to the hospital in the bakkie owned by Old Man Adam, who lived across the road from Little Sammy’s mother, and right next to Cynthia’s tavern. And this last detail of geography is perhaps the reason the news was spread so widely. Cynthia’s tavern was where everything unravelled. If you wanted reliable gossip, it was there you had to perch yourself with the hope that someone would stumble their tongue into a recent scandal.

I must also confess that sometimes we had to do the perching in relative idleness, for, as I have now said, there were times when nothing happened. In those times, when nothing happened, we had to quench our boredom with Cynthia’s beer and only that.

Coming back to the story, it was a simple thing, the birth of Samantha. By the time all the supper dishes in the village were washed, she had been named and nursed twice by her mother. It was no secret that her father had wanted a son. He was, after all, a man whose Ancestors had burdened him with four other daughters. Perhaps there was a wrong he had done, a wrong he must atone for. And perhaps he could gain a son after this atonement.

But just then, in June of 1999, when everyone agreed that the times were becoming strange, and it was whispered that perhaps his wife’s womb had been corrupted by the long years she had lived in Johannesburg, Little Samantha’s father was saddled with five daughters. There are people who still believe that he did not see it as a tragedy, that when the next morning came, it so happened that the girl he had not wanted had died some time in the night. That same Saturday, Old Man Adam drove his bakkie back to the clinic and returned with the bereaved parents. It was a sad thing to watch them walk into that humble house of theirs.

Old Man Adam was found in the tavern that night, telling tales of how, before he had depleted the fare he received for his trouble of transporting the dead child from the clinic, he had submitted himself to comforting the bereaved.

“Dead, dead?” said Old Man Amos, who never accepted accounts of tragedy after only one telling. He thoroughly wiped the beer foam from his mouth, shook his head, and once more enquired, “You mean dead?”

“Dead, dead,” said Old Man Adam. When he had confirmed Samantha’s death thrice over, Old Man Amos shook his head in disbelief, though this time, the kind that indicated his acceptance of the recounting. The men then gulped their beer and asked Cynthia for refills when they were done.

Some months later, around the time of Christmas, when people started to forget the sordid deal of the dead child, Old Man Adam was found dead in his car under the bridge. It was said that he had been drunk the previous night and that he had had no business driving. He had been heard babbling stories about going to the police.

But Old Man Adam was known for talking for the sake of talking when he was drunk. And so his death was mourned only by obligation. And because he was estranged from his kin, he was not laid to rest in the yard of his Ancestors, but near Little Samantha’s grave.

Then, then Rough Spanner, a man with no front teeth, yet who, if there was meat that needed to be chewed to nothing, he was the one to call, him, Rough Spanner, he said that deep in the night, he heard the cries of a baby near Old Man Adam’s grave. Yowe! That man was never afraid of stumbling his tongue into hard things. He said these things without fear. Because some of us were older, and maybe wiser, we greeted his tactlessness with silence. But Rough Spanner, being Rough Spanner, defied our shunning by repeating his tactlessness more loudly.

“Right there,” he said, “right near the grave. In the night, I am telling you, in the night I heard the cries of a baby.”

“They weren’t cries,” corrected Cynthia, who was often obligated to conform to decency, as several scandals were prone to unfold themselves in the crowded dinginess of her tavern. “They were the screams of a child,” she elaborated. “I heard it with my own ears. Strange things are happening everywhere. I’m thinking that we heard the screams of a child.”

Feeling that the mystery injected by Cynthia was causing his own story to slip away from him, Rough Spanner was compelled to make farfetched amendments to his own recalling. And so, in his renewed telling, he not only thoroughly disagreed with Cynthia’s account of things, but with his own earlier telling. “It was near Old Man Adam’s house,” he said. “And they weren’t screams or cries. You don’t know what you heard, we were all half drunk and we heard a cat.”

To this, Cynthia placed her hands on her hips and started her rebuttal. “Yowe!” came her cry. “You Rough Spanner, in the years you have sat here to drink my beer, have you heard a cat anywhere near it? Heh?”

Now, this is where I think Davie might tell the details differently. He says that Rough Spanner resumed his argument by first pointing out to Cynthia that once she sold her beer, the beer no longer belonged to her, but to whomever had bought it. Davie said, too, that hearing this mild insult being flung at her face caused Cynthia to banish Rough Spanner from the tavern for the remainder of the holidays.

Firstly, there is no sense in this since Cynthia is known for loving money, and she would never chase a customer from her tavern. The second reason I will tell you shortly because I must start by finishing the story that brought you here.

The way I remember it, Rough Spanner said this to Cynthia: “That means nothing. Just because there has never been a cat near the house doesn’t mean there will never be a cat there.” And from this, a new argument (about cats and where they prowled) was born.

Personally, I believed Cynthia’s account, that a child was screaming near Old Man Adam’s grave. But the others who were in the tavern, the others believed that a baby was crying there. You might sit here now and say: “Well, what is the difference?”

The difference is that we’re talking about 1999 here. Strange things were happening everywhere. You know, we found a mutilated child near the river once. It was the new millennium. People thought the world was ending. I’m not trying to make excuses for the ungodliness that was happening, but people thought the world was ending. They were trying to buy their way into some kind of afterlife. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. But that’s what people did.

So a child screaming, it wasn’t a farfetched thing in those days. But a baby, a baby was a hard thing to imagine near a grave. First you had to ask yourself, how did the baby get there in the middle of the night? You see, a child made sense because…actually, it was also strange. But children sometimes go where they aren’t supposed to go. It was easy to see how something like that could happen. You know? But a baby, a baby was something else.

Anyway, the child or baby or cat, it was something to frighten us when we were sober. It looks small now, but in 1999, it made you think. Rough Spanner, who was naturally more diligent than the rest of us, quickly appointed himself as chief investigator in the matter. Twice…no, I’m thinking it was three times, no, no, he was dedicated that man. Anyway, more than twice, I think, he told me, personally, that his grandfather had been a shaman. “Maserumo, I know these things,” he whispered. “What if Old Man Adam’s house is haunted?”

It might be that Rough Spanner wanted to upstage Cynthia by sowing more mysteries into the story. I don’t think it mattered to him whether there was a ghost rising from the grave, or a cat simply obliging its own nature by prowling during ungodly hours. Rough Spanner was so committed to his role as a diligent gossipmonger, that he didn’t listen to what I told him.

“You Rough Spanner,” I said, “don’t start troubles you won’t know how to fix. If you say there is a ghost rising from Old Man Adam’s grave, then you are saying he has not rested in peace. And if he has not rested in peace, you must point your finger to the witch who has bewitched Old Man Adam’s spirit to make it linger in this world.”

Feeling that phlegm was collecting in my throat, I coaxed it out and spit it through the corner window of Cynthia’s tavern. By then, I found that my thirst had returned, and so drank from my glass. I returned to Rough Spanner. “Have you found this witch you speak of?” I said. “Heh? Tell me. Do you know a witch who can turn the ghost of an old man into the screams of a child, or the crying of a babe, or the mewling of a cat? Because if you cannot produce this witch for prosecution, people’s fingers will turn to you. It is you who will be the witch. Also, you Rough Spanner, why have you come here to invite me into your conspiracy?”

Seeing the wisdom of my words, as he, himself, put it to me, he could not continue to whisper these unwisdoms he had concocted. Only days later, it turned out that Rough Spanner’s epiphany, which I had seen flicker in the redness of where his eyes should have been white, was rather shallow. I heard whispers, delivered to my own ears by Old Man Amos, that Old Man Adam’s house was haunted.

“Who told you this?” I said to Old Man Amos. Hanging his head with foreboding, Old Man Amos coughed Rough Spanner’s name as the answer. What could I do after that?

The village was humming with the news that Old Man Adam did not die peacefully. And it was concluded from this, that since he was buried near a child, he somehow channelled her spirit to tell his secret. What the secret was, no one knew. But that there was a secret to be told, whether sinister or benevolent, everyone agreed.

As confirmation, Rough Spanner was heard provoking his Ancestors. “If the old man died in a natural way, then I will give my own life,” he said.

So it came as no surprise that just two weeks after the death of Old Man Adam, Rough Spanner was found dead behind Cynthia’s tavern. Otherwise untroubled by the unfolding of events, Old Man Amos was suddenly startled by Rough Spanner’s fate. First, not believing that Rough Spanner had “simply died,” then, not believing that the death, if it had, in fact, occurred, was natural, he withered even further into his drunkenness.

At this point, as we gathered to lament this latest tragedy, Cynthia suddenly abandoned the role of Rough Spanner’s antagonist to assume that of Old Man Amos’s consoler. “It was his time,” she said. Perhaps, and I say this as her friend, but perhaps, because Cynthia was a hard woman, her words and their intended soothing did not lift the old man’s woes. Old Man Amos was found dead in his bed the next day.

Now I must tell you of the second reason Davie’s version of events is definitely false. He said that Cynthia’s illness ate into her blood very swiftly, in an unnatural way; that she succumbed to the same mystery that creeped upon the old men Amos and Adam, and Rough Spanner. If that is true, how do you explain my longevity? Here, I think I have an answer. I think Davie’s interpretation of things was incomplete.

Wait, perhaps I should tell you these things in a better order. Let me start here: according to Davie, anyone who became entangled in the tragedy of Little Samantha, either by their own will or not, soon succumbed to death. To support this, he claims that Cynthia called a shaman to her tavern to perform a cleansing. In doing this, Cynthia acknowledged a curse that had lingered from Little Sammy’s death. This was the way Davie put it to me.

“How do you name a child who has lived only minutes?” he mourned. “How do you tether a new life to such a burden? That cursed man—” I knew that here, he spoke of Little Samantha’s father, for, by then, nearly everyone agreed that Little Sammy’s father could be blamed for the saga; if not completely, then enough to cast him and his family from the village. “That cursed man,” said Davie, “in his anger, he provoked his Ancestors. Yowe! That man has cursed us.”

I will concede that in some ways, Davie was right. After all, as I have told you, Cynthia was called home by her Ancestors shortly after we buried Old Man Amos. From there, Davie, being a man of the law—and perhaps, along with other younger men, growing tired of assuming the role of gravedigger more permanently than he was used to, Davie was unsettled by the quick succession of deaths. We were all tired of the dying. But Davie… have I told you that Rough Spanner was a maternal uncle to Davie?

Yes, Rough Spanner was a maternal uncle to Davie. You can say that when Rough Spanner died, Davie suddenly discovered that the maternal bond that had so weakly tied him to Rough Spanner had not, after all, prevented him from inheriting his uncle’s diligence. We were all tired of the dying. But, by way of his diligence, Davie was perhaps more tired than all of us.

And as I have said, being a man of the law, he took it upon himself to untangle the matter of the baby or child or cat. And soon after that, with sombre obligation, and without surprise, we buried Davie himself. And his death, as far as I know, and I think you will agree with me here, Davie’s death was the last to be tied to the tragedy of Little Samantha.

With all that I have told you, you could ask yourself: after Davie’s death, had the grave of Old Man Adam grown quiet? Have other people not taken it upon themselves to sustain the whispers ignited by Rough Spanner, all those years ago, when he spoke of hauntings? Has the curse slunk away?

These things I cannot say. What I can say is this: I think I need your help.

I think that without meaning to do so, I have now entangled myself in these tragedies I have narrated to you. I know you are a lawman, but my entanglement is not in the way that Davie once suggested. I called you here because your mother was a shaman, and I once heard a rumour that you inherited the gift from her.

Don’t worry, we won’t have to interpret the ordeal from the beginning. Half the job has been done for us. I think that Rough Spanner and Cynthia solved the mystery of those deaths, of their own deaths, before the deaths themselves unfolded. Somehow, they solved the thing. But they died before they could warn us. Yes, they solved it.

You see, last week, as I walked home from the tavern that used to be Cynthia’s, and I passed Old Man Adam’s grave, I heard a thing that sounded, as I listened more closely, like the cries of a baby. I am afraid, you see. I want to know what you think.

Do you think, because I have heard this thing, that I have reached the end?