The Thunder Sheet

Tracey Lincoln here, thirty-four years old, and technically the most responsible person in Mohale's Hoek this weekend. The arrangement was based entirely on that premise, anyway.

Don Biggs handed me the keys on Friday, along with a list of chores written in pencil on the back of an old feed receipt. He was headed off to spend two quiet nights at his cousin's place in Mafeteng, and I could tell by the way he folded the list twice that he expected it to be followed.

"Water the garden in the evening, not the morning. The mule gets her mash at six. And don't let Ruth talk you into anything," he said, which was a very funny thing to say to a woman who had been talked into things by Ruth Dempsey for twelve years, ever since our postgrad year when we were both twenty-two and she convinced me that climbing the water tower was a good idea.

"I make no promises I can't keep," I told him.

He sighed the sigh of a fifty-nine-year-old man who has been around both of us too long, and drove off in his bakkie with his overnight bag tied down in the back.

The list had four items on it. Water the garden. Feed the mule. Latch the gate. Lock the back door. I read it standing in the kitchen garden, which is this beautiful plowed rectangle inside a low stone wall, rows of beans and pumpkins and young maize, all of it turned over by Don's mule, whose name is Dumisani and who regards all human beings as unpaid staff.

I did the responsible thing first, I'll admit that. I fed the mule. I latched the gate. I even watered a row of beans, out of some residual instinct toward being the nice, reliable person everyone expects me to be.

Then I looked up at Ruth's house, which sits on the slope above the garden, and I saw her porch.

It was a disaster. Not a bad disaster. A half-finished, ambitious disaster, strings of lights going up in swoops, cardboard cutouts of river fish painted silver, a banner that said something I couldn't read at that distance. Ruth was on a stepladder with a staple gun in her hand and an expression of pure war on her face.

"Tracey!" she called down. "You're house-sitting, which means you're officially on my property's side of the contest. Come hold things."

The neighbourhood porch decoration contest is, to be honest about the scale of this, the single most important annual event in our little corner of the district. Jed Hawthorne has won it four years running with a display that involves more electricity than some villages see in a month. Ruth has come second every year, and every year it has eaten a little more of her soul.

So no, I did not finish the chore list. I walked up the hill.

By mid-afternoon the porch looked like it was a stage set for a play about a river that had been drinking. Ruth had a plan, and like all her plans it had one part that made no sense to anyone but her.

"The thunder sheet," she said, pointing at a big sheet of metal, maybe a metre across, hanging from a hook under the eaves. It was split clean down the middle, two halves hanging side by side.

"You split your thunder sheet."

"I split it on purpose. When the lights come on, I pull the rope, the two halves slap together, and it sounds like the river cracking open. Very dramatic. The judges will weep."

From next door came a voice that could sour milk at thirty paces.

"Sounds like scrap metal falling off a truck," Jed Hawthorne called over his fence. He was thirty-seven, built as a fence post that lifts weights, and he was already stringing his own lights, which blinked on and off in a pattern that suggested he'd hired an engineer.

"Your mule could win and it'd still be ugly," Ruth shouted back.

"At least my mule doesn't rust."

"You bought that mule last year, Jed. Everything about it is secondhand."

I held the garland while they went another two rounds, and I laughed more in that hour than I had in the previous month. That's the thing about Ruth. She makes the world feel like a place where shouting at Jed Hawthorne over a fence is a reasonable way to spend an afternoon.

The garland was the heavy one, the rope of dried maize husks and river stones she'd been building for days. It had to go across the full width of the porch, which meant I had to stand on the stepladder's second step and stretch, and Ruth had to guide the far end from below, and neither of us is what you'd call a professional rigger.

"Left. My left. Your other left. Tracey, the hook is right there."

"I see the hook. The hook and I are negotiating."

And then the garland swung, or I overcorrected, or the hook simply decided it had suffered enough. Whatever the cause, my elbow caught the thunder sheet, the split halves jumped their hook, and roughly a square metre of theater-grade metal came down off the eaves, rang once like the end of the world, bounced off the porch rail, and clattered over the low stone wall into the garden.

The sound it made hitting the pumpkin patch was even better than the sound it made falling.

The problem was Dumisani.

Dumisani did not share Ruth's artistic vision. Dumisani heard the sky break open in her own paddock and made the entirely reasonable decision that her life depended on leaving it. She went through the bean rows first, which was merciful, then through the pumpkins, which was not, and then did a lap of the stone wall dragging her rope behind her as a parade float would.

We went after her, because what else do you do. Ruth vaulted the wall. I climbed it like a person with dignity, and then immediately lost the dignity to the mud between the rows, because Don had watered the garden the previous evening and the garden was not kind to footwear.

I went down on both knees in about eight centimetres of the richest, blackest, most committed mud in Lesotho, and it was there, on my knees in a ruined pumpkin patch, with a mule trotting past me like she had somewhere better to be, that I started laughing.

I mean really laughing. The kind where you can't breathe and your ribs hurt and somewhere in the middle of it you realize you're crying and don't care. Ruth caught the mule, tied her off, and came back to find me still down there, wheezing.

"Are you dying?" she asked, and then she looked at me, mud to the thighs, mascara gone, face upturned, and she started laughing too, and for a while neither of us could