The Long Bus

Matchday One, Home to Notwane Pioneers

At five in the morning on the first Saturday of the season, Kabelo Mothibi sat at the kitchen table in his pajamas and named the eleven men who had played the first match in the history of Tati River Rovers.

"Goal, Bakang Sello. Right back, Ishmael Tau. Left back, a boy from Plumtree, we called him Small Dube. Center, Gabriel Nare and myself." He tapped the oilcloth with two fingers for each name, the way he had tapped it for forty-nine Augusts. "Midfield, the brothers Kgosi, both of them, and a Mosotho railway fireman who could not stop laughing. Front, Peter Kesupile, Jacob Tlhaloganyo and a schoolteacher from Bulawayo whose name I have never been able to spell."

Lesedi poured his tea, three sugars, the milk in first because he would notice if it was not. "You have left out the date, Rra."

"The fourteenth of August, nineteen seventy-six. A Saturday. We lost two-nil to the Railway Workshops second eleven and we drank orange squash in the shade of the water tank."

"You remember the squash."

"I remember everything that happened before nineteen ninety," her father said, and looked at the kettle as if it had asked him a question. "After that it is a little crowded."

He was eighty. He had founded the club at thirty-one with eleven railwaymen and a ball he had bought from a shop on Blue Jacket Street with the money from selling a heifer, and he had kept the record of every match the club had ever played in a green hardbound ledger that the club called the Book. There were six of them now, six green ledgers with cracked spines, stacked in a tin trunk in Lesedi's spare room under a cloth her mother had embroidered with a ball and a bus. Inside them were the names of seven hundred and twelve players. Beside each name, in each player's own hand, was the village or the street where his grandmother lived.

That was the rule. Her father had made it in 1976 and nobody had ever been allowed to break it. "A man can lie about where he was born," he liked to say. "He cannot lie about where his grandmother is waiting for him."

Lesedi had kept the Book herself for four seasons now, since his hand had started to shake. She was fifty-two. She did the accounts for a hardware wholesaler on the Gaborone road, Monday to Friday, and on Saturdays she was the team manager of a semi-professional football club that played in a league of twelve clubs from six countries and could not afford its own fuel.

---

From the back room came the sound of a young man falling over a suitcase.

Ayanda Mkhize had arrived from Soweto on Wednesday with that suitcase, a sports bag, a speaker the size of a loaf of bread and a letter from his grandmother addressed to "The Lady Who Will Feed Him." He was nineteen. He had been released in May by the academy of Highveld Stars, one of the two big South African clubs in the league, and Coach Nkosana Sibanda had watched him on a dusty field in Orlando East for twenty minutes and offered him a trial, a room in Lesedi's house and the kind of wage that bought bread and airtime and very little else.

He came into the kitchen in a training top, one sock on.

"Morning, Mma. Morning, Rra." He shook Kabelo's hand properly, the Setswana way Lesedi had shown him on Thursday, left hand touching the right forearm. "Dumela, Rra."

"Dumela, my son. Are you the boy from the Cape?"

"Soweto, Rra."

"Soweto. I played in Soweto in nineteen eighty-three. There was a woman selling fried chicken feet outside the ground who had the loudest voice I have ever heard." Kabelo smiled at the memory. "She called me the old man. I was thirty-eight."

Ayanda grinned. He had a gap between his front teeth and a way of grinning that took up his whole face. "My gogo sells fat cakes outside a ground. Maybe it's the same family."

"Then we are related," said Kabelo, satisfied, and went back to his tea.

---

The meeting had been on Tuesday, in the long brick hall of the Tati Railway Social Club, under the photographs of steam engines.

Rra Oteng Masilo, the treasurer, had read from a printed sheet. He was sixty-four, precise, with reading glasses on a cord and a habit of clearing his throat before any number larger than a thousand. The club had three sections: bowls, darts and football. Bowls paid for itself. Darts made a small profit. Football cost the club the price of a good second-hand car every season, most of it in diesel.

"The committee has resolved," he said, and cleared his throat, "that the senior football team will remain in the cross-border league after this season only if it finishes in the top half of the table. Sixth or better. The top six share the league's end-of-season pool. That pool would cover next season's fuel." He took off his glasses. "If we finish seventh or below, the senior team will play in the district league from next August, and the bus will be sold."

Nobody spoke. Then Coach Nko, who had played for the club for nine seasons and coached it for six, said what everybody in the hall was thinking. "We finished ninth last year."

"Tenth," said Rra Oteng, who did not like to be wrong about a number. "On goal difference."

Lesedi had looked at her father. He was sitting at the end of the front row, in the brown jacket he wore to meetings, with the first of the six ledgers on his knees. She had thought he was not following. Then he raised his hand, slowly, the way he raised it to ask a referee for a word.

"Then this season," he said, "I would like to ride the bus to every ground."

---

The bus was called Nkuku, which means grandmother.

She was a blue and cream thirty-six-seater built in 1989 for a copper mine, bought by the club in 1996 for the price of eleven cows, and kept alive since then by a series of goalkeepers who happened to be mechanics. The current one was Sibusiso Dlamini, thirty-six, from Eswatini, who spent Saturday mornings under her with a lamp and Saturday afternoons in the goal. She had a cracked windscreen held by a strip of clear tape, a horn that played two notes because the third had died in 2011, and a sticker on the back window that said "Please Be Patient, I Am Old" in faded red letters that a supporter had stuck there in 2003.

For the first match she did not need to go anywhere. The Railway Ground was a kilometer from Lesedi's house: a red-dirt pitch with a strip of stubborn grass down the middle, a tin stand that held four hundred, a scoreboard worked by hand by a twelve-year-old named Tebogo, and on the north side, a row of thorn trees under which people parked their cars and sat on the bonnets.

But the signing happened in Nkuku. It always had. At one o'clock, before the players changed, the new men climbed aboard one by one, sat in the front seat behind the driver, and wrote their names in the Book on the folding tray that Sibusiso had fixed to the seatback in 2019.

There were five new men this year. A left back from Gaborone. A tall reserve keeper of eighteen, Kitso Rapelang, still at school, whose mother stood outside the bus window the whole time with her hands clasped. A quiet Zimbabwean midfielder named Tapiwa. Then Thabiso Letsie, twenty-three, a Mosotho striker from the mountains east of Maseru who was an apprentice electrician in Francistown and had arrived in July with his grandfather's blanket rolled in his kit bag. He wrote slowly and carefully, the pen held as if it might bite: Thabiso Letsie. Ha Mohale, above the river, where 'Mè Mamello keeps the ponies.

"That is more than we need," Lesedi said.

"It is where she is," Thabiso said. "If somebody wants to find her, they should know about the ponies."

Then Ayanda. He bent over the tray, wrote fast, and sat back.

Ayanda Mkhize. Orlando East, Soweto, Vilakazi Street side, by the fat cake table. MaMkhize. She is always there.

Kabelo, who had come aboard with his walking stick and settled in the second row, leaned forward to read it. He read it twice. Then he patted the boy on the shoulder.

"Good," he said. "Now if you get lost, we know where to send you."

---

They lost one-nil.

It was a hot afternoon with a dry wind off the Tati River that carried the red dust across the pitch in long low curtains, so that from the stand the players seemed to come and go out of a smoke. Notwane Pioneers of Gaborone were neat and patient and in no hurry. The Rovers were nervous. Ayanda sat on the bench for seventy minutes and bounced one knee so hard that the bench shook. When he came on he beat his man twice, once by simply running past him, and the stand made the noise it had not made in a year, a long rising "Eeeee" that the old supporters used for speed.

Then, in the eighty-eighth minute, a Pioneers corner was flicked on at the near post and bounced off Onkarabile Dikgang's knee and in.

Onkarabile was the captain, a center-back of thirty-one who taught Standard Four at a primary school in Monarch and had the patience of a man who spent his weekdays with forty ten-year-olds. He lay on his back on the red dirt for a long moment looking at the sky. Then he got up and clapped his hands at his teammates, three times, hard, and pointed to the center circle.

When it was over, the Pioneers' captain came across and shook every hand. The Notwane supporters, a busload of them, sang their way back to the car park. Rra Oteng stood at the gate with the cash tin under his arm, counting.

Lesedi found her father in the stand where she had left him, under the umbrella she had tied to the rail. He had the Book open on his knees and was looking at the blank line below the entry from last May.

"You write it," he said. "My hand today is not good."

She took the pen. He told her the words, and she wrote them, in the style he had used since 1976.

*Matchday One. Tati River Rovers 0, Notwane Pioneers 1. Wind from the river, a great deal of dust. About four hundred in the ground. The boy from Soweto is fast. The captain got up first. Sixth place wants something over thirty points in an ordinary year; this is not an ordinary year. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Two, Away to Musina Baobabs

Nkuku left the Railway Ground at four in the morning with nineteen players, two coaches, one team manager, one founder, a cooler box of magwinya still warm from Lesedi's oven, and a smell of diesel that Sibusiso said was normal and Rra Oteng, who had come to count the receipts, said was not.

The road ran south and east through mopane scrub, the trees just starting to put out their copper-colored new leaves before the rains, the land flat and gray-green and enormous. Kabelo sat in the second row by the window with a blanket over his knees and named things as they passed. "That is where we had the puncture in eighty-eight. That is the turnoff for Tonota, where Small Dube's wife was from. That tree. That tree was there in seventy-nine."

"All the trees were there in seventy-nine, Rra," said Ayanda from across the aisle.

"Not like that one," Kabelo said, and was right: it was a baobab, the first they had passed, enormous and gray and bare, with a trunk like a wrinkled elephant standing on its own head.

Ayanda had his speaker on his knee at low volume. Amapiano, the long rolling log-drum bass and the piano chords floating over it, the music that had come up out of the townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria in his own lifetime and now seemed to be playing in every taxi between Cape Town and Lusaka. By the time they reached the border at the river, half the bus was nodding to it, and Coach Nko, who claimed to like only the old Zimbabwean guitar music, was tapping his pen on his clipboard in time.

---

The border was the Limpopo. It was nearly dry in August, a broad bed of pale sand with a channel of brown water in the middle and reeds along the edges, and the bridge over it was low and long. Lesedi had done this crossing perhaps a hundred times in her life. She had the passports in a plastic folder in the order the officials liked, the club's letter from the league, the vehicle papers, the list of players with their nationalities: eleven Batswana, two Zimbabweans, two South Africans, one Mosotho, one Namibian, one Swazi, one Zambian student on loan from a college in Gaborone.

On the far side, the officer on duty flipped through the passports and stopped at Kabelo's.

"Mothibi. Tati River Rovers." He looked up. "My father used to talk about your team. He played for Messina Copper in the eighties. He said you had a bus that sang."

"The horn," said Lesedi. "It used to have three notes."

"He said the whole bus sang," the officer said, and stamped the passport, and waved them through.

---

Musina was a copper town, low and hot, with jacaranda trees along the main road that would bloom purple in another month, and beyond the town, out on the road toward the national park, baobabs everywhere, hundreds of them, standing in the scrub like a herd of patient gray animals. The Baobabs' ground was on the edge of town, with a concrete stand along one side and, behind the far goal, a real baobab so old and wide that the local children climbed into a hollow in its trunk to watch the match.

Coach Nko named the team in the changing room. Ayanda was on the bench again.

Lesedi waited until the players had gone out for the warm-up. Then she said, "He was the best player on the pitch for twenty minutes last week."

"For twenty minutes," Nko said. He was forty-six, a welder by trade, a broad, quiet man from Bulawayo who had played nine seasons at center-back for the Rovers, married a Motswana nurse, stayed. He had a rough patch on his right forearm where a spark had burned him in 2014 and he rubbed it when he was thinking. "For ninety he would be tired by sixty and they would run at the space behind him and we would lose by three. I am bringing him on with twenty-five to go. Like last week."

"We lost last week."

"Not because of the boy." He rubbed the burn. "Lesedi. You choose the bus. You choose the hotel. You choose the food, and the food is very good. I choose the team. That was the agreement with your father, and it was the agreement with you."

She knew it was. She also knew that she had stood at the kitchen door on Wednesday and watched Ayanda eat four plates of bogobe and seswaa without speaking, the way a boy eats when he has been hungry somewhere for a while, and that she had thought: we need him to play, because if he does not play he will go home.

She did not say it. She nodded and went out to sit with her father under the umbrella.

---

The Baobabs scored after eleven minutes, a long shot that dipped and hit the underside of the crossbar and came down a foot over the line. Sibusiso stood looking at the spot where it had landed with his hands on his hips, as if the ball had been rude to him personally.

After that the Rovers held. Onkarabile and the new left back from Gaborone kept the Baobabs' fast winger quiet. Jonas Shikongo, the Namibian, who played in the middle of midfield and kept the game in his head like a sum, began to find Thabiso with long passes, and Thabiso began to win them in the air, though he did nothing much with them after. At half-time the Rovers were losing one-nil and nobody was very worried.

With twenty-five minutes left, Ayanda came on.

The Musina crowd knew who he was. Somebody shouted something about the Highveld academy that made the stand laugh, and Ayanda's shoulders went up and stayed up. For ten minutes he tried to beat every man on the pitch by himself and lost the ball each time. Then, in the seventy-eighth minute, he got it on the right with space, looked up, and, instead of running, curled it to the far post, where Onkarabile had wandered up for a set piece that had come to nothing and never gone back. The captain headed it down into the dirt and up into the net.

He ran to the bench and pointed at Ayanda, both arms, the way a man points at a bus he wants to stop. On the bench Nko wrote something on his clipboard. In the stand Kabelo said, "The boy passed."

---

Afterward the Baobabs gave them a braai behind the stand. This, too, was older than anybody: the home club fed the away club, and the away club ate everything. A drum-shaped iron grill on legs, the coals white, a man in an apron turning coils of boerewors with a long fork, the fat spitting. Lamb chops. Pap, stiff white maize porridge in a pot the size of a car tire, and beside it a bucket of chakalaka, the spicy relish of carrots, beans, onions, peppers and chili that every South African grandmother made differently and every South African grandson believed his grandmother made best.

"This is wrong," said Ayanda, tasting it, but he went back for more.

The Baobabs' chairman, a retired schoolmaster with a white beard, came and sat with Kabelo on a plastic chair in the dusk. They had played against each other in 1982. They did not remember the score but they remembered the referee, a famously short man who had blown his whistle so hard on a penalty that the pea had flown out.

"You are going to every ground this year, I hear," the chairman said.

"Every one."

"And your knees?"

"My knees are eighty," said Kabelo. "The rest of me is nineteen." He nodded toward Ayanda, who was teaching the Baobabs' kit man's daughters a dance. "Like him."

---

On the way home, after the border, in the dark, Sibusiso put the headlamps on full and the mopane leaves flared copper in them on both sides of the road. Most of the players slept. Rra Oteng counted the gate share twice by flashlight. Lesedi opened the Book on the folding tray and Kabelo, beside her, spoke the entry.

*Matchday Two. Musina Baobabs 1, Tati River Rovers 1. A dry river and a great many baobabs. A child watched the whole match from inside a tree. The captain scored with his head. The boy from Soweto passed the ball, and a man from the border post remembered our bus. One point. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Three, Home to Bulawayo Ironworks

Coach Nko did not sleep the night before Bulawayo Ironworks came to Francistown, and at six in the morning he was already at the Railway Ground with a wheelbarrow of sand, filling in the hollow in front of the south goal where every rainy season since 1990 had worn a small lake.

Lesedi found him there when she came at eight with the flasks. He had his welding overalls on and his sleeves rolled up and the sand had gone into his hair.

"You know their coach," she said. It was not a question. Everybody in the club knew.

"Mthulisi Ncube," said Nko, and tipped the barrow. "We were at school together in Makokoba. Same class from Grade One. He sat behind me and put his ruler down my collar every morning for six years." He leaned on the handle. "He played for Ironworks. I came here. He has coached them for eight seasons and they have never finished below fourth."

"And you have never beaten him."

"Not as a coach." He smiled, a small rueful smile. "As a player I beat him four times. He does not like to talk about it."

---

The Bulawayo supporters came over the border at Ramokgwebana in two minibuses and a truck, and some of them had relatives in Francistown, so that by two o'clock the north side of the ground under the thorn trees was full of people calling to each other across car bonnets in Ndebele and Setswana and English and the half-and-half mixture that the whole of this border spoke, where a sentence might begin in one language and end in another and nobody would notice. A Zimbabwean aunt had brought maputi, popped maize in a plastic bag, salty and a little burned, and was selling it in twists of newspaper. Somebody had a radio playing the old Bulawayo township jazz, saxophones and a walking bass.

Coach Nko's sister Sithandazile came with her three children and sat in the stand with Lesedi and Kabelo. She was a nurse at the hospital in Bulawayo, a tall, quick woman with her brother's broad face, and she had brought a container of her mother's beef stew and a stack of cold sadza wrapped in a cloth, the thick maize porridge that was to Zimbabwe what bogobe was to Botswana, which is to say, everything.

"From Mama," she told Lesedi. "For your father. She says he once gave Nkosana a lift from Plumtree when he had no money for the bus, in nineteen ninety-nine, and she has not forgotten."

Kabelo took the container and looked at it. Then he looked at Sithandazile with an expression of polite, warm uncertainty that Lesedi had come to know in the last year: the look of a man who knows he is supposed to remember something.

"Your mother is very kind," he said. "Please thank her for me. Was it her son who played in goal for us in nineteen ninety-four?"

"No, Rra," said Sithandazile gently. "My brother played center-back. From ninety-nine. He is the coach now."

"Of course," said Kabelo. "Of course he is." He looked down at the pitch, where Nko was standing at the touchline in his good jacket, and Lesedi saw him try to fit the man to the name, and saw it not quite go in.

---

The match was the best they had played in two years.

Mthulisi Ncube's Ironworks played the way Bulawayo teams had always played, fast and close and short, the ball moving on the ground like a stone skipping on water. For half an hour the Rovers chased. Then Jonas Shikongo began to stand where the passes were going to go before they went there. He was twenty-seven, a bookkeeper for a transport company on the industrial side of Francistown, from Ondangwa in the north of Namibia, slim and serious, with his shirt always tucked in. He did not run much. He did not need to. He intercepted one pass, then another, then a third, and on the fourth he took the ball, turned and hit a low shot from twenty-five meters that went in off the inside of the post.

It was the first goal Jonas had scored in two seasons. He did not celebrate. He walked back to the center circle, tucking his shirt in, and the stand laughed and roared at the same time.

Ironworks equalized before half-time with a header Sibusiso should have had and knew he should have had. In the second half Thabiso missed twice, once from four yards, and the second time he stood with both hands on his head and the north side under the thorn trees gave him a long, sympathetic groan, the kind people give a man whose cow has wandered into a neighbor's garden.

Then with ten minutes to go Ayanda came on, and three minutes later he ran at the Ironworks right back, stopped, ran again, stopped again, until the right back fell over without being touched, and from the byline he cut the ball back to the penalty spot. Thabiso was there, and missed it entirely, and behind Thabiso was Tapiwa, the quiet Zimbabwean, who had never scored for anybody, and who side-footed it in.

Two-one. The Ironworks supporters, who were fair people, applauded Tapiwa because he was from Gwanda and they knew his uncle.

---

At the end Mthulisi Ncube walked the length of the touchline to shake Nko's hand. They stood there for a long time. Then the Ironworks coach reached up and put his ruler, a real wooden ruler from his jacket pocket, down the back of Nko's collar, and Nko roared with laughter and chased him to the corner flag.

Lesedi watched them from the stand. She was smiling, and she was also watching her father, who had his eyes closed under the umbrella. When she touched his arm he opened them.

"Did we win?"

"Two-one, Rra."

"Good. Good." He looked at the scoreboard, where Tebogo had hung the numbers. "Who is our coach?"

"Nkosana Sibanda," she said. "From Makokoba. He played for you from ninety-nine. Center-back. You gave him a lift from Plumtree once."

"Nkosana," her father said. "Yes. The welder." He nodded several times. "I know him. I know him very well."

---

That evening she drove Sithandazile and the children to the bus station for the last minibus to Plumtree. On the way back she sat in the car outside her own gate for ten minutes with the engine off, watching the lights in her kitchen, where Ayanda was showing her husband Tshepo a dance and Tshepo, who was fifty-five and had once been described by his own mother as built like a water tank, was trying.

She had known for a year. The doctor at the clinic had said the words in March: a slow condition, years, not months; good days and bad days; keep him walking, keep him talking, keep the old routines. The old routines were the Book and the bus. She had thought, when he raised his hand at the meeting, that the season would be too much for him. She thought now, in the dark car, that it might be the only thing holding him together. She did not know which was true. She suspected both.

Inside, her father had already gone to bed. The Book was on the kitchen table, open at the right page, with the pen laid across it, waiting.

She wrote the entry herself, from what he had said at the ground.

*Matchday Three. Tati River Rovers 2, Bulawayo Ironworks 1. The Namibian scored and tucked his shirt in. Tapiwa from Gwanda scored his first. The two coaches were at school together and one of them still carries a ruler. A container of beef stew from Makokoba for the founder. Four points. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Four, Away to Maseru Blue Cranes

The longest trip of the first half of the season began on a Thursday evening, because Maseru was a thousand kilometers away by the road Nkuku could manage, and Sibusiso refused to drive her more than eight hundred in one day. "She is a grandmother," he said. "Would you make your grandmother walk eight hundred kilometers?"

"My grandmother walked further than that," said Thabiso. "Every year, behind the sheep."

"Then your grandmother was not thirty-six years old and made of steel."

They slept Thursday night in the dormitory of a church school outside Mahikeng that took visiting teams for a small fee, and left again at four on Friday, south and east across the Highveld, the land opening out into enormous pale grassland under an enormous pale sky, maize stubble in the fields, windmills turning over the cattle troughs, and then, after Bloemfontein, the first line of blue on the eastern horizon that Thabiso saw before anybody else and stood up in his seat to point at.

"Maloti," he said. He said it the way some men say the name of a girl.

---

Thabiso had not been home in eleven months. He came from Ha Mohale, a village of stone houses with thatched roofs on a slope above a river in the mountains, five hours from Maseru by minibus taxi and then two on foot, and he had come down to Francistown on a two-year apprenticeship with an electrical contractor because his uncle knew the contractor's foreman. He had played football on a field above the village where the goals were piles of stones and the slope was so steep that one team always played uphill. "The best players in Lesotho," he told Ayanda, "come from the villages where you have to play uphill. Your legs remember."

"My legs remember tar," said Ayanda.

"That is why you are fast and I am strong," said Thabiso, satisfied, and Ayanda had no answer.

They crossed into Lesotho at Maseru Bridge late on Friday afternoon. The Caledon River was low and brown. On the Lesotho side the city climbed the hills in ranks of small houses, and over it, behind it, were the mountains, close now, brown and gold in the evening, so big that Lesedi, who had seen them many times, still felt for a moment that the bus had grown smaller.

And it was cold. That was the thing the Batswana players never believed until it happened. It was September, spring, and in Francistown it had been thirty-one degrees on Thursday. In Maseru at six in the evening it was nine, and falling, and the wind off the mountains came down the streets with an edge to it. The players got off Nkuku with their arms wrapped round themselves and their teeth going, and Thabiso got off behind them, unrolled his grandfather's blanket from his kit bag and put it round his shoulders, pinned at the throat with a big safety pin, and looked, Ayanda said, like a king.

It was a heavy wool blanket in dark red and gold, with a pattern of maize ears woven into it and a pinstripe at each edge, the kind that every Mosotho man and woman wore in the cold and that Thabiso's grandfather had bought in 1979 with his first wages from the mines and worn every winter of his life. "When he died," Thabiso said, "my grandmother gave it to me. She said: now you carry the cold for him."

---

His grandmother came on Saturday morning. She had left Ha Mohale at three in the morning, walked to the road with a neighbor and a lantern, ridden five hours in the back of a minibus, and arrived at the Blue Cranes' ground at ten, two hours before anybody expected her, with a basket on her arm and a blanket of her own, gray and blue, over a long dress. 'Mè Mamello Letsie was seventy-six, small and straight, with a face as lined as the hills she came from and very bright eyes.

Thabiso saw her from the bus and ran.

Lesedi watched them from the steps of Nkuku: the tall young man in the red blanket bending almost double to hold the small woman in the gray one, both of them rocking a little, side to side, the basket squashed between them. When they came apart, 'Mè Mamello held his face in both her hands and said something in Sesotho that made him laugh and then wipe his eyes with the corner of the blanket.

"What did she say?" Lesedi asked him later.

"She said I am too thin and my hair is a disgrace and she has brought me papa."

She had. In the basket, wrapped in cloths, was a pot of stiff white papa, still faintly warm, and a container of moroho, wild greens cooked with onion and a little tomato, and six hard-boiled eggs, and a jar of the sour fermented porridge that Thabiso had been missing, he said, more than he had missed any person. She fed him on the steps of the bus. Then she fed Sibusiso, who was nearest. Then she fed Ayanda, who had come to watch, and who ate three handfuls of papa and moroho and said, "Gogo, this is better than my gogo's," and then looked guilty and added, "Don't tell her."

'Mè Mamello did not speak much English. But she understood that, and laughed, and patted his cheek.

Then she saw Kabelo, sitting in the second row of the bus with the window open, and something passed between them that Lesedi could not follow: two old people from two countries, with the same blanket over their knees, looking at each other through a bus window. 'Mè Mamello climbed the steps and sat beside him without being asked, and the two of them sat there for half an hour in silence, watching the mountains.

---

The Blue Cranes beat them three-one.

The ground was on a slope, not as steep as the field above Ha Mohale but enough to notice, and the Blue Cranes played the first half downhill with the wind behind them and were two goals up by the twentieth minute. Their supporters had a famo band, two accordions and a drum, playing in the stand behind the goal, the bright, wheezing, galloping music of the Basotho migrant workers, with a singer who seemed to be making up the words as he went. Lesedi did not understand them but she understood the tone, which was mockery, and the crowd, which roared at every line.

Thabiso had the worst match of his life. He was trying too hard and everybody could see it: snatching at chances, shooting from impossible places, turning when he should have passed. At half-time Coach Nko put his arm round his shoulders and spoke to him for a long time, quietly. In the second half, uphill, Thabiso missed a header from six yards that he would have scored in his sleep in Francistown. His grandmother, in the stand beside Lesedi, pulled her blanket over her face.

Onkarabile pulled one back from a corner. The Blue Cranes scored a third on the break. At the end Thabiso stood in the center circle with his hands on his knees and did not move until Jonas came and walked him off.

---

That night, in the dormitory of a teachers' college in Maseru where the league had arranged beds, Lesedi found him on the back step in his blanket, looking at the lights climbing the hill.

"She came all that way," he said. "Five hours. And I was terrible."

"She did not come to see you score."

"Then what did she come for?"

Lesedi sat down beside him on the cold concrete. "She came to see if you were too thin," she said. "You are. She came to see if your hair was a disgrace. It is. She came to feed you papa and sit with my father on a bus. She has done all three. She will go home tomorrow very happy."

He was quiet. Then he said, "My grandfather used to sing on the bus. When he went to the mines. The men sang all the way, the whole night, songs they made up about the road and the mountains and the women at home. Lifela. The songs of the travelers." He pulled the blanket tighter. "He taught me one. It goes, in English, something like: The road takes me down from the mountain, and the mountain waits, and my mother waits, and the mountain does not grow tired of waiting."

"That is a good song."

"It sounds better in Sesotho."

"Everything sounds better in the language it was made in," said Lesedi. "That is why my father makes them write their grandmothers' villages and not just the name of the country."

---

In the morning 'Mè Mamello took the first minibus back toward the mountains. Before she left she climbed onto Nkuku once more and asked, through Thabiso, to see the Book. Lesedi opened it to the page where he had signed in August. The old woman ran her finger along the line: Ha Mohale, above the river, where 'Mè Mamello keeps the ponies. She read it twice, moving her lips. Then she nodded, satisfied, as if a gate had been properly shut.

*Matchday Four. Maseru Blue Cranes 3, Tati River Rovers 1. Cold. A famo band laughed at us and was right to. The captain scored. The Mosotho had a bad day and his grandmother came five hours to see it and was proud of him anyway. She sat with the founder and they did not need to talk. Four points. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Five, Home to Manzini Hornets

October came to Francistown the way it always came, like an oven door opening. The ground was baked hard and pale and cracked in a pattern like the back of a tortoise. The thorn trees along the north side were dusty and gray. In the afternoons the sky went white with heat and the air above the Gaborone road shook, and everybody waited, without saying so, for the rains that were still a month away.

Sibusiso Dlamini spent the week before the Manzini Hornets match under Nkuku.

She had made the trip to Maseru and back without complaint, which was suspicious, and on the Monday after, she had refused to start at all. Sibusiso found the trouble on Tuesday, a fuel line cracked where it ran past the exhaust, and spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings with his lamp and a borrowed length of pipe while his wife Nomsa sat on a plastic chair beside the bus, six months pregnant, reading him the league table off her phone and passing him tools by name.

"Spanner," he said, from under the bus.

"Which one?"

"The one I always want."

She handed him the right one. They had been married nine years. She was a dental assistant at a clinic on Selous Avenue and had come to Francistown from Manzini with him in 2017, when the mechanic's job came up, and she said she had learned the names of every tool in his box the way some women learn the names of their husband's cousins: so she could argue about them.

---

Sibusiso was thirty-six and in his ninth season with the club, which made him, after Onkarabile, the longest-serving player in the squad. He came from a homestead near Big Bend in the low, hot east of Eswatini, sugarcane country, where the cane stood higher than a man on both sides of the road for twenty kilometers and in the burning season the sky went orange at night and black ash came down like snow. His father had driven a cane tractor for thirty years. Sibusiso had learned engines by lying in the dirt under that tractor at the age of nine, and goalkeeping by standing between two cane stalks while his cousins kicked a ball of plastic bags at him.

"That is why I am not afraid of the ball," he told Kitso, the eighteen-year-old reserve keeper, at training on Thursday. "A ball made of plastic bags and string, when it hits you in the face, you learn very quickly to catch it. A real ball is a gift."

Kitso, who was a head taller than Sibusiso and still growing, nodded seriously and wrote it down in a notebook.

"You do not need to write it down."

"I want to remember."

Sibusiso looked at him for a moment, then at Lesedi, who was at the touchline with the water bottles. "This one," he said, "is going to be good. Write that down."

---

The Hornets came on Friday night in a minibus and a car, and their supporters on Saturday in a coach that had left Manzini at midnight. A group of Swazi women who lived in Francistown and had heard about the match came in a body, wearing emahiya, the bright printed cloths knotted at the shoulder and wrapped at the waist, red and black and white, with pictures of shields and birds and spears in the patterns. They brought food in covered dishes and set it out on a cloth under the thorn trees: sishwala, a thick porridge of maize meal cooked with beans, and a beef stew to go with it, and sweet potatoes roasted in the ashes of a fire that one of them had lit in a half-drum.

Nomsa sat with them, and so Lesedi sat with them, and so did Kabelo, who had never in his life refused a plate of anything. He sat in a folding chair with a bowl of sishwala on his knee and talked to an old Swazi woman about cattle. Neither of them had more than a dozen words of the other's language. It did not seem to matter. Lesedi heard her father say "Brahman" and "Tswana" and "Nguni," which were breeds, and the old woman say "Nguni" back to him with great approval, and the two of them nod over the bowls as if they had agreed on something important.

---

It was a hard, scrappy, airless match, and it was Sibusiso's.

The Hornets were bigger and stronger and in the first half they came at the Rovers' goal in waves. Sibusiso saved with his feet, his knees, his chest. He came off his line and took a cross out of the air above three Hornets as if he were picking fruit. He shouted at his defenders constantly, in English and siSwati and the five words of Setswana he trusted, and once, after a save, at the ball. At half-time it was nil-nil and the Swazi women under the thorn trees had begun to cheer for him even though he was saving shots from their own team, because, as one of them told Nomsa, he was a Swazi boy and was doing it very well.

In the sixty-seventh minute Onkarabile brought down a Hornets striker on the edge of the box, and the referee, after a long look, pointed to the spot.

Sibusiso walked to his line. He took his gloves off, smacked them together twice, put them on again. He bounced on his toes. Lesedi had seen him do this before every penalty for nine years and had never asked what it meant.

The Hornets striker ran up, stopped, ran again.

Sibusiso went left, early, much too early, the whole ground saw him go. Then, somehow, in the air, he stopped going left and put out his right hand, behind him, and the ball hit his palm and spun up off the crossbar and out.

The noise came a moment later, as if everybody had needed to check what they had seen. Tebogo at the scoreboard threw his hat into the air. Kabelo stood up out of his folding chair so fast that he spilled the sishwala.

It ended nil-nil. In the dressing room afterward Lesedi asked Sibusiso how he had done it.

"I went too early on purpose," he said, pulling off his boots. "He was watching my knees. When a striker is watching your knees, you give him your knees. Then you keep your hands for yourself."

"Who taught you that?"

"A cane tractor driver from Big Bend," said Sibusiso, and grinned at the floor.

---

That evening Nomsa came to Lesedi's kitchen with a dish of leftover sishwala and a problem.

"The baby is due in the second week of March," she said. "My mother wants me to come home to have it. In Manzini. It is the custom in our family: the first child is born in the mother's mother's house." She put her hand on the curve of her belly. "I have looked at the fixtures. We play away to the Hornets in March. In Manzini. The second week."

Lesedi got out the fixture list from the drawer and looked. It was true. Matchday Sixteen. Manzini.

"He will want to be in two places at once," Nomsa said.

"Most men want to be in two places at once," said Lesedi. "Very few of them get to be in two places in the same city."

Nomsa laughed. Then she said, more quietly, "And if we finish seventh, there is no bus, and no league, and no Manzini in March next year either. He knows that. He thinks about it under the bus."

"We all think about it," said Lesedi, and wrote the match in the Book.

*Matchday Five. Tati River Rovers 0, Manzini Hornets 0. Very hot. The Swazi women of Francistown brought sishwala and cheered for our goalkeeper against their own team. He saved a penalty with his hand behind his back. The founder spilled his porridge. A child expected in Manzini in March. Five points. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Six, Away to Katutura Dynamos

The road to Windhoek ran west across the whole of the Kalahari, and Jonas Shikongo had it in his head the way other men have a song.

"Francistown to Nata, one hundred and ninety. Nata to Maun, three hundred. Maun to Ghanzi, two hundred and eighty. Ghanzi to the border at Mamuno, two hundred and ten. The border to Windhoek, three hundred and twenty." He said it on the bus on Thursday morning, to nobody in particular, as Nkuku pulled out of the Railway Ground into the dark. "One thousand three hundred kilometers. Fifteen hours if nothing goes wrong."

"Something always goes wrong," said Sibusiso from the driver's seat.

"Then sixteen."

It was eighteen.

---

Jonas kept the league table on squared paper in a school exercise book with a green cover. He had kept one every season since he joined the club in 2021, ruling the columns himself in pencil, with the points in ink. After every matchday he updated it from the results the league sent out, and on long trips he took the book out on his knee and worked through possibilities, what would happen if they won the next three, if they drew, if Okavango lost to Siteki and Musina drew with the Blue Cranes, in a small neat hand that ran down the margins and into the corners.

"You are doing sums about October," said Ayanda, reading over his shoulder somewhere past Nata, where the salt pans began and the land went white and flat and shining to the edge of the sky. "It is only October. The season ends in May."

"The season ends in May," Jonas agreed. "But the points from October count the same as the points from May. Most teams forget that." He tapped the page. "Five points from five matches. Last year, after five matches, the team that finished sixth had seven. We are two behind already. Not a disaster. A warning."

"You should be the coach."

"I am a bookkeeper," Jonas said, as if that settled it. "Coaches are for hoping. Bookkeepers are for knowing." He closed the book. "But do not tell Coach Nko I said that."

---

What went wrong was the water pump, two hours past Ghanzi, at noon, in a country of red sand and gray camelthorn trees and silence, so far from anything that when Sibusiso turned off the engine the only sound was the ticking of the metal cooling and, very far off, a bird.

The players got off and sat in the shade of the bus. Sibusiso and Coach Nko took the cover off the engine and looked into it the way two doctors look into a patient who has done something foolish. Kabelo, who had slept since Maun, woke up and asked where they were, and when Lesedi told him, said, "The pump. It was the pump in eighty-nine, too, in the old bus before this one. Outside Ghanzi. We waited six hours and a Herero farmer came in a truck with a bag of oranges and a length of wire."

Nobody came with oranges. But a cattle truck came after two hours, westbound, driven by a young Namibian who heard Jonas's Oshiwambo greeting and stopped at once, and who had, by a coincidence that Kabelo regarded as entirely ordinary, a cousin in Gobabis who sold reconditioned pumps. The young man drove Sibusiso to the border and back with the part. By half past seven they were moving again, and they crossed into Namibia at Mamuno in the dark, under more stars than Ayanda had seen in his life, and he stood at the back of the bus with his face against the window the whole way to Windhoek and did not play his music once.

---

Katutura was the big township on the northwest side of Windhoek, rows of small bright-painted houses climbing the low hills, blue and pink and yellow and green, and on Saturday morning Jonas took Lesedi, Ayanda and Thabiso to the open market at Single Quarters to eat kapana.

It was the most famous street food in Namibia and Jonas had been talking about it since Maun. Under a long tin roof, a row of open fires on half-drums, men in aprons slicing beef into thin strips on wooden boards and laying them on the grills, the smoke going up in a cloud you could see from the road, and the sound of fat on coals, and the noise of a hundred conversations, and over everything a radio playing kwaito. You pointed at the meat you wanted, the man grilled it in front of you, cut it on his board into bite-sized pieces with a knife like a short sword, and then you dipped each piece into a little heap of salt mixed with dried chili and spices that sat on a piece of paper at the end of the board. You ate standing up, with your fingers.

"This," said Ayanda, with his mouth full, "is the best food in Africa."

"In Musina you said the chakalaka was wrong and then ate three plates," said Thabiso.

"I was confused in Musina."

Jonas's cousin Ndapewa worked at one of the fires, and she would not let them pay. She was a cheerful, heavy woman in an apron printed with oranges, and she grilled them a second round and a third, and told Lesedi stories about Jonas as a boy in Ondangwa: how he had counted the cattle every evening and known exactly which one was missing, how he had kept the score of every street match in a notebook, how their grandmother called him "the little accountant" from the age of six.

"And she is coming," Ndapewa said. "Meekulu. Today. From the north. She will be at the ground."

Jonas, who had been calm across thirteen hundred kilometers and one broken water pump, put down his piece of kapana and looked suddenly very young.

---

Meekulu Ndeshipanda Shikongo was seventy-nine. She had come down from Ondangwa on the overnight bus, seven hundred kilometers, and she was sitting in the front row of the concrete stand at the Dynamos' ground when Nkuku arrived, in a long dress of the Owambo style, pink and white stripes with three bands of black at the hem, and a matching head cloth folded into a tall, neat shape. Beside her was a plastic basin covered with a cloth. Under the cloth, Lesedi learned later, was oshifima, the stiff porridge of mahangu, pearl millet, that the north of Namibia was raised on, and a pot of dried fish stew, and a bag of dried mopane worms, roasted with salt.

Jonas went up into the stand before the warm-up. He knelt in front of her. She put her hand on his head.

He played, that afternoon, the match of his life.

He was everywhere and nowhere, the way he always was, never running when he could walk, never walking when he could stand still in the right place. In the twentieth minute he won the ball in his own half and, instead of passing, carried it forty meters and laid it into Thabiso's path, and Thabiso, who had not scored in six matches, took one touch and hit it so hard that the Dynamos' keeper did not move. In the second half, with the Dynamos pressing, Jonas took a free kick from thirty yards and put it over the wall and under the bar, and turned, and did not tuck in his shirt, but ran, for the first time anybody could remember, to the stand, to the front row, to the old woman in pink and white.

Two-nil. The Dynamos' supporters, who knew the Shikongo family, gave him a round of applause.

---

Afterward, in the low sun, the old woman fed the whole team oshifima and fish stew out of the basin, rolling a ball of porridge in the fingers of one hand, pressing a hollow in it with her thumb to hold the stew, and handing it to each player in turn as if he were her own grandson. When she came to Kabelo she stopped, looked at him, and said something in Oshiwambo to Jonas.

"She says she remembers your bus," Jonas told him. "She says it came to Ondangwa once, a long time ago, for a friendly. Nineteen ninety-one. She sold oranges outside the ground. She says you bought all of them."

Kabelo looked at the old woman. Then he smiled, slowly, the whole of his face.

"Twelve oranges," he said. "And she gave me one more for nothing. For luck. We lost five-two."

Meekulu laughed and clapped her hands. Jonas looked from one of them to the other as if he had found a mistake in a column of figures that added up anyway.

*Matchday Six. Katutura Dynamos 0, Tati River Rovers 2. Eighteen hours on the road and the water pump again, outside Ghanzi, as in eighty-nine. Kapana at Single Quarters, three rounds, no payment allowed. The Mosotho scored. The bookkeeper scored, and ran. His grandmother sold me oranges in nineteen ninety-one. Eight points. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Seven, Home to Highveld Stars

Highveld Stars arrived in Francistown on a proper coach, with air conditioning, tinted windows and their badge, a gold star over a black mountain, painted along the side in letters a meter high. They parked it under the thorn trees beside Nkuku, and for an hour before the match the children of Francistown walked back and forth between the two buses comparing them, and Tebogo the scoreboard boy reported to Lesedi that the Stars' bus had a toilet.

"Nkuku has a toilet," said Sibusiso. "It is called the side of the road."

The Stars were the richest club in the league and had won it four times in six years. They had an academy in Soweto with three pitches and a gymnasium. Ayanda had been in that academy from the age of eleven until May. He had told Lesedi, on his second night in her house, in a flat voice, that they had called him into an office with a window that looked out on the main pitch and told him he was not strong enough, not tall enough and not good enough at defending, and that they wished him well.

He had not said anything else about it. But on the Thursday before the match he stopped eating. On Friday he did not play his music. On Saturday morning Lesedi found him sitting on the back step at six, fully dressed in his kit, staring at the wall of the yard.

"You are four hours early," she said.

"I know."

She sat down beside him with her tea. After a while she said, "Who is coming?"

"Coach Mabaso. The academy director. The one with the window." He did not look at her. "And three of the boys I came up with. They are in the first team now. One of them is Lindani. We were in the same class at school. We used to walk to training together." He picked at the edge of the step. "He texted me on Wednesday. He said, see you Saturday, small boy."

---

There was a big crowd, the biggest of the season, nearly a thousand, because the Stars brought their own supporters by the coach-load from Johannesburg, and because the Francistown people loved to watch a rich team and hope it would lose. The Stars' supporters wore gold and black and brought plastic horns that made a noise like a herd of very large angry bees, and they sang from the moment they arrived. The Francistown people answered with the long rising "Eeeee" and a drum somebody had brought from the cattle post, and for an hour before kickoff the ground shook.

Coach Nko started Ayanda. It was the first time all season.

Lesedi did not know whether that was kindness or a test. She suspected Nko did not know either.

---

It was a disaster from the second minute, when Lindani, the boy Ayanda had walked to training with, took the ball off him on the halfway line with an ease that was almost polite, and the Stars scored from the move. The Stars' supporters sang a song about a small boy who went to Botswana to look for cattle, which made no sense and which they sang for twenty minutes.

Ayanda tried. Everybody could see him trying. But he tried the way a man runs downhill in the dark, too fast and with no idea where his feet would land. He lost the ball, chased it, fouled the man who had taken it, got up and lost it again. In the thirtieth minute, chasing Lindani back into his own box, he slid in from behind and took his old classmate's legs, and the referee pointed to the spot without hesitating. Two-nil. Sibusiso got a hand to the penalty and could not keep it out.

Thabiso pulled one back just before half-time, a header from a corner, the ball flying in off the bar, and for ten minutes the ground believed. But at half-time Nko took Ayanda off. He did it quietly, a hand on the boy's neck in the dressing room, a few words nobody else heard. Ayanda sat on the bench for the second half with a towel over his head, and the Stars scored twice more, cleanly, like men shutting a series of doors.

One-four. At the final whistle Lindani walked across to the bench and held out his hand. Ayanda shook it without taking off the towel.

---

He was gone from the house when Lesedi got back.

Not gone. His suitcase was on his bed in the back room, open, half packed, his kit folded on top. But he was not there, and his phone went to voicemail, and Tshepo, who had been home all afternoon with Kabelo because Kabelo had been too tired to sit through the heat, said the boy had come in at seven, packed for ten minutes without a word, and walked out again.

"He will be at the bus station," said Tshepo. "The night bus to Johannesburg leaves at ten."

Lesedi looked at the clock. It was nine fifteen. She picked up the car keys.

But Kabelo was standing in the passage in his pajamas. He had heard. He had a look on his face that she had not seen for a long time, sharp and present, the look of a man who had run a club for forty years and knew exactly what to do on a Saturday night when a nineteen-year-old wanted to go home.

"Bring me volume two," he said.

---

Ayanda was not at the bus station. He was at the Railway Ground, sitting on the bottom row of the tin stand in the dark, with his sports bag at his feet and the floodlight on the clubhouse roof throwing his shadow out across the red dirt toward the goal where he had given away the penalty.

Lesedi parked the car by the gate. Her father got out before she could help him, took his stick and the green ledger, and walked along the touchline in his pajamas and his brown meeting jacket. She stayed by the car. She thought this was not hers to do.

Kabelo sat down on the bench beside the boy with a small grunt. For a while neither of them said anything. Then the old man opened the Book on his knees and turned the pages under the floodlight, slowly, until he found what he wanted.

"Read," he said, and put his finger on a line.

Ayanda, after a moment, read it aloud. Lesedi heard it across the ground in the quiet. "Lucky Moloi. Meadowlands, Soweto, behind the shop with the green door, where MaMoloi keeps chickens."

"Nineteen eighty-four," said Kabelo. "He was eighteen. He came from your city. He was very fast and not very strong and he was the worst defender I have ever seen in my life. In his fourth match we lost six-nil to a team from Bulawayo and he went to the bus station that night with his bag." He turned the page, then another, and another, and stopped. "Read."

"Lucky Moloi," Ayanda read, slowly. "Meadowlands, Soweto, behind the shop with the green door, where MaMoloi keeps chickens." He looked up. "It's the same."

"It is the same name in the same hand, two years later," said Kabelo. "He came back. He signed again, the way we do when a man comes back, so that the Book will know. He played for us for eleven seasons. He was captain for four. He married a girl from Tonota. He is fifty-nine now. He lives in Selebi-Phikwe and every year at Christmas he sends me a card with a picture of a chicken."

The boy said nothing. The old man closed the Book.

"You are not strong enough," Kabelo said. "That is true. You are not tall enough. Also true. You defend like a goat. You will learn. What you are is fast, and brave, and you passed the ball in Musina when you wanted to shoot, which tells me you can be taught. And you wrote your grandmother's street in my Book." He put his hand flat on the cover. "Do you know what that means? It means that if you go home tonight you will be in this Book forever as a boy who went home. And if you stay, one day you will be in it as something else."

Ayanda put his face in his hands. Kabelo waited. Above them, a little owl called from the thorn trees, two notes, the sound a horn makes when its third note has died.

"Rra," Ayanda said at last, through his fingers. "Can I ask you something?"

"Ask."

"Did they win? Rovers. That match Lucky came back for."

"No," said Kabelo. "We lost three-one to the railway police. He scored our goal. He was very pleased with himself. It was the only goal he scored that year." He stood up, with the stick, and the boy stood up too and caught his elbow. "Come. My daughter will want to feed you, and she is a difficult woman when she is not allowed to feed somebody."

---

At midnight, after the boy had eaten two plates of seswaa and gone to bed, his suitcase unpacked, Lesedi found her father at the kitchen table with the Book open and the pen in his hand.

"I will write this one myself," he said.

It took him twenty minutes. His hand shook, and twice he had to stop, and the letters climbed up the page and fell down it again like a road in the hills. But he wrote it.

*Matchday Seven. Tati River Rovers 1, Highveld Stars 4. A great noise from Johannesburg. The Mosotho scored off the bar. The boy from Soweto had the worst day a boy can have and found his way to the stand afterward and not to the bus station. Lucky Moloi of Meadowlands was the same in eighty-four. Eight points. K.M., by his own hand.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Eight, Away to Plumtree Border Wanderers

Plumtree was a hundred kilometers away, and the Rovers went in the morning of the match and came back the same night, and it was the shortest away trip of the season and the oldest.

"The first away match this club ever played," said Kabelo on the bus, "was at Plumtree. September nineteen seventy-six. We went in the back of a railway lorry because there was no bus. Twenty-two of us, standing up, holding on to each other. We lost four-three and we sang all the way home."

"What did you sing?" asked Ayanda. He had been sitting next to Kabelo since the Highveld match. Nobody had arranged it. He simply got on the bus and sat there, and the old man moved his stick to make room.

"I do not remember. Something rude about the referee."

It was the second week of November, and the rains had not yet come, but they were coming. You could see them building in the afternoons, great towers of cloud on the eastern horizon, white at the top and blue-black underneath, and in the mornings the air had a heaviness in it and the doves called and called. On the road to the border the mopane leaves had turned their full summer green, and in the dry grass beside the road the first red flowers of the impala lilies had come up out of nowhere.

---

They crossed into Zimbabwe at Ramokgwebana, where the border post was two low buildings and a boom gate and a man selling roasted maize cobs, black-flecked and smoking, from a grill made from a car wheel. Coach Nko bought one for every player on the bus and said it was the custom. Nobody had ever heard of the custom. Everybody ate the maize.

Plumtree was a small town of wide streets and old trees and a railway line, where the Bulawayo road and the Francistown road met, and where most people seemed to have relatives on both sides of the border. The Wanderers' ground was on the edge of town, a plain dirt field with goals made from welded water pipe, painted white, and a single concrete terrace along one side. Behind the north goal stood a wild fig tree so enormous that its branches reached halfway across the penalty area, so that a high ball on that side sometimes went into the leaves and came out somewhere else.

Kabelo got off the bus and walked straight to the tree.

He stood under it for a long time. Then he put his hand flat on the trunk, the gray, ridged bark, and Lesedi, coming up behind him, saw that he was crying a little, without fuss, the way old men do.

"This was here," he said. "In nineteen seventy-six. We sat in the shade of it before the match, all twenty-two of us, and ate bread and jam. Gabriel Nare climbed it to get a ball out of the branches and could not get down and we had to fetch a ladder from the station."

"It is the same tree, Rra?"

"There is no other tree like it," said her father. "There is no other tree like it anywhere."

---

The man who came across from the terrace to greet them was very old and very tall and walked with two sticks. He wore a gray suit, a white shirt buttoned to the throat and a felt hat, and he stopped three paces from Kabelo and looked at him and said, in English, "You are still alive."

"So are you," said Kabelo. "I am surprised."

"I am more surprised. I am older." The tall man came the last three paces and the two of them shook hands, and kept shaking, and then held on to each other's forearms.

His name was Mandla Ndlovu. He was eighty-two. He had played center-forward for the Wanderers from 1964 until 1981 and been their chairman for twenty years after that, and he and Kabelo had played against each other in that first match in 1976, and in every Plumtree match for five years after.

"He scored three that day," Kabelo told Lesedi. "Three. Against an old man in the back of a railway lorry."

"You were thirty-one," said Mandla Ndlovu. "I was thirty-two. We were both old men." He looked at Lesedi. "Is this the little girl who sat on the bus with the bag of oranges?"

Lesedi stared at him. "I was seven," she said. "That was nineteen eighty. I do not remember you."

"I remember you," said Baba Ndlovu, with great satisfaction. "You were the first girl I ever saw on a football bus. You told me my team was very bad. You were right."

---

They sat together on the terrace, the two old men, Mandla's grandson on one side and Lesedi on the other, and watched the match, and it was the best afternoon her father had had in a year.

He remembered everything. He remembered the score of every Plumtree match from 1976 to 1990. He remembered the name of the Wanderers' goalkeeper in 1977, who had been a butcher and had once stopped a penalty with his stomach. He remembered that in 1979 the ball had gone into the fig tree in the second half and not come out at all, and they had played the last twenty minutes with a ball borrowed from a primary school. Baba Ndlovu remembered the same things, slightly differently, and the two of them argued about the details with tremendous pleasure. Lesedi sat between them and did not say a word.

On the pitch, the match was fierce and friendly, a derby between towns that shared cousins. The Wanderers scored first, from a header that went in off the fig tree, which caused a long argument that the referee ended by pointing to the center circle. Jonas equalized from the edge of the box. The Wanderers went ahead again. Then, with fifteen minutes left, Ayanda came on, and on the left wing, with his first touch, instead of running at his man, he turned and laid the ball back to Onkarabile, then ran into the space where it would go next. The captain found him. He crossed first time, low and hard, and Thabiso slid it in.

Two-two. Baba Ndlovu said, "That boy has been taught."

"By a goat," said Kabelo, and the two old men laughed until they coughed.

---

And then the rain came.

It came in the eighty-fifth minute, the first of the season. The clouds that had been building all afternoon over the eastern hills came in across the town in a long blue-black wall, and the wind went cold, and the first fat beads of rain hit the red dirt so hard they raised little puffs of dust, and the smell came up off the ground, the smell that every person in southern Africa knows and waits for all year, the hot wet sweet smell of rain on dry earth. Then the sky opened.

The referee abandoned nothing. He simply blew the final whistle five minutes early, because nobody could see the ball. The players ran for the fig tree. The spectators ran for the fig tree. The two old men did not run, because they could not, and Lesedi and the grandson held a sheet of plastic over them, and the four of them sat there on the concrete terrace in the roaring rain, soaked to the skin, Kabelo and Baba Ndlovu with their faces turned up to the sky like boys.

"The rains came early," said Baba Ndlovu.

"The rains came when they came," said Kabelo. "Like the fig tree. Like you and me."

---

On the way home, in the dark, with the windscreen wipers going and the wet road shining and every player on the bus damp and happy, Kabelo asked for the Book and wrote the entry himself again. It took a long time. Nobody minded.

*Matchday Eight. Plumtree Border Wanderers 2, Tati River Rovers 2. The fig tree is the same tree. Mandla Ndlovu is the same man, and still cannot accept that a goal off a tree is not a goal. The boy from Soweto gave the ball and went for it again and the Mosotho scored. The first rain, in the eighty-fifth minute. Nine points. K.M., by his own hand.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Nine, Home to Mafeteng Eagles

Masego came home from Gaborone for the weekend of the Mafeteng match, which was the last Saturday of November, and found her grandfather in the yard at seven in the morning teaching a nineteen-year-old from Soweto how to pound seswaa.

"No, no, no," Kabelo was saying. "Not like that. You are hitting it like it owes you money. You are not angry with the meat. You are persuading it."

Ayanda had a heavy wooden pestle in both hands and a three-legged iron pot of boiled beef in front of him, and he was sweating. The beef had been boiling since five with nothing but water and salt, the way seswaa had always been made for weddings and funerals and the arrival of important people, until it fell off the bone, and now it had to be pounded with the pestle, slowly, for a long time, until it came apart into soft salty threads. It was the national dish of Botswana and Tshepo said the secret was patience and Kabelo said the secret was the cow and Lesedi said the secret was that the men in her family only ever made it when somebody was watching.

"Mma Masego," said Ayanda, seeing her. "Help me. He says I am persuading wrong."

"You are," said Masego. She was twenty-four, in her final year of a law degree at the university, tall like her father and quick like her mother. She put down her bag, took the pestle from him, and showed him. "Slow. Lift. Let it fall. Do not push."

"That is what I said," said Kabelo.

"That is what you said in Setswana," said Masego. "He does not speak Setswana, Rra-mogolo."

"He is learning," said Kabelo. "Yesterday he said dumela to the dog."

---

Masego had not been to a match since she was sixteen. She had grown up on Nkuku, the way her mother had, falling asleep on the back seat on the way home from Bulawayo with the Book on her lap, and then she had grown out of it, the way children do, into school and friends and a university four hundred and thirty kilometers south. She came this weekend because her mother had telephoned on Wednesday and said, carefully, that her grandfather was having good days and bad days, and that if she wanted to see him on a good day at a football match, this season was the season.

She sat in the stand under the umbrella with him and the Book. She had brought a notebook.

"Tell me about my mother," she said. "When she was small. On the bus."

Kabelo looked out across the pitch, where the Eagles from Mafeteng were warming up, and Lesedi, at the touchline with the water bottles, saw him do it and wondered what her daughter had asked.

"Your mother," said Kabelo, "was seven years old when she first came on the bus. Nineteen eighty. Plumtree. Her mother sent her with a bag of oranges and told her to sit at the front and not speak. She spoke for one hundred kilometers. She told the referee he was blind. She told Mandla Ndlovu his team was very bad. She knew the name of every player in the club and what he liked to eat and which ones snored." He smiled. "She wanted to play. There was no team for girls then. She used to play in the yard with the boys from the railway houses, in bare feet, in goal, and she was better than half of them. When she was twelve she asked me why she could not play for the Rovers. I said, because you are a girl. She said, then I will run it."

Masego looked at him. "She said that? At twelve?"

"She said it. She kept saying it. Forty years she has been saying it." The old man tapped the Book. "Now she runs it. She thinks I do not know."

"Know what, Rra-mogolo?"

"That it was always hers," said Kabelo. "Since the oranges."

---

Thabiso scored twice in the first half.

The first was a header from a corner, the kind he had been missing all season, and he rose above two Mafeteng defenders and hit it so hard into the ground that it bounced up into the roof of the net. He stood for a moment as if he did not believe it. Then he ran to the corner of the ground where a small group of Basotho had gathered: three electrical apprentices from his company, a woman who sold blankets at the bus rank, two students. One of them had brought an accordion. They played four bars of famo and he danced, for about a second and a half, an odd, high-stepping, stamping dance with his arms out wide.

"What was that?" Ayanda asked him at half-time.

"The way we dance when the rain comes after a dry year," said Thabiso, embarrassed.

The second came ten minutes later. Jonas found him with a long pass over the Eagles' defense and he controlled it with his chest, let it bounce once, and volleyed it past the keeper from the edge of the box. This time he did not dance. He walked back to the halfway line with his face turned up to the sky, both hands open, and Lesedi, who had watched him suffer for three months, sat down suddenly on the bench beside the water bottles.

The Eagles pulled one back. Then, near the end, with the Eagles pressing, Ayanda won the ball deep in his own half, carried it fifty meters with three men chasing him, and instead of shooting, waited, waited, until Tapiwa arrived beside him, and slid it across. Three-one.

In the stand Kabelo said to his granddaughter, "Write that down. The boy waited."

---

After the match Thabiso borrowed Lesedi's phone, because his had no airtime, and called a neighbor in Ha Mohale who had a radio and a cousin with a phone. It took twenty minutes and four calls to reach his grandmother, who had been fetched from the cattle kraal and was out of breath. Lesedi stood a little way off. She heard him say the score in Sesotho, and then nothing for a long while, and then laugh, and then say something that made him turn away and press the heel of his hand into one eye.

When he gave the phone back he said, "She knew. A man in the village has a son in Maseru who follows our league on his phone. The son called his father and the father went running to the kraal before I called. She knew before I did."

"How?"

"She says she knew at halftime. She says she felt it in her knees." He shook his head. "My grandmother says her knees can tell her when it will snow, when a cow is going to calve and when her grandson has scored."

"Mine could tell when somebody was lying," said Lesedi.

---

That night the house was full. Masego and her father had finished the seswaa, and there was bogobe and morogo, the wild spinach cooked with onion, and a pot of beans, and magwinya from the morning. Ayanda had invited Thabiso and Thabiso had invited Jonas and Jonas had brought Tapiwa. Sibusiso and Nomsa came with a cake. Coach Nko came late, with his wife, and stood in the kitchen doorway eating seswaa out of his hand and arguing with Kabelo about a match in 2003.

At ten, when everybody had gone, Masego sat at the kitchen table with her mother and the Book.

"He told me about the oranges," she said.

Lesedi was washing the big pot. She did not turn round. "He tells everybody about the oranges."

"He told me something else." Masego turned the pages back, a long way back, to 1980, where in the margin beside the Plumtree match, in her grandfather's young, strong, upright hand, there was a small note she had never noticed before. She read it aloud. "My daughter Lesedi came on the bus today. She told the referee he was blind. One day she will run this club."

Lesedi put down the pot. She came and stood behind her daughter and read it over her shoulder, twice.

"I never saw that," she said.

"It's been there forty-five years, Mma."

"I never looked in the margins," said Lesedi. "I only ever looked at the scores."

*Matchday Nine. Tati River Rovers 3, Mafeteng Eagles 1. The Mosotho scored two and danced for the rain. His grandmother felt it in her knees in Ha Mohale. Tapiwa scored from the boy's pass; the boy waited. My granddaughter home from Gaborone. Seswaa pounded slowly. Twelve points. K.M., by the hand of M.N.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Ten, Away to Siteki Lions

Sibusiso drove the road to Eswatini as if it were a road in his own body.

They crossed the Limpopo again on the Thursday, the river running now after the rains, wide and brown and fast under the bridge, and went south through the hot green Lowveld, past mango orchards and banana plantations and roadside stalls stacked with pawpaws and litchis, and slept in the hall of a school outside Mbombela. On Friday morning they climbed into the hills toward the border at Oshoek, the road winding up through plantations of pine and eucalyptus, the air cooler, the mist lying in the valleys like milk in a saucer. And as soon as the border was behind them, Sibusiso began to talk.

He talked all the way down the Ezulwini valley, past the craft markets with their grass baskets and soapstone carvings and candles, past the hotels and the golf course and the hot springs, past Mbabane on its hills. He talked through Manzini, where the market in the middle of town was the biggest in the country, three floors of it under one roof, women selling vegetables and dried fish and traditional medicines and cloth and carvings, and where, he said, his wife's mother had a stall selling emahiya and would sell you one whether you wanted it or not. He talked all the way east out of Manzini into the Lowveld, where the land went flat and hot again, and the sugarcane began.

"Twenty kilometers," he said, pointing out of his window. "Twenty kilometers of cane, on both sides, all the way to Big Bend. When I was a boy I thought the whole world was cane."

It was the end of the harvest season, and some of the fields had been burned before cutting, the old way, and stood black and stubbled, and some were still green and taller than the bus, and the air through the windows smelled of smoke and sugar, a heavy brown sweetness that got into everybody's clothes and stayed.

---

Siteki was not in the cane. It was on top of the Lubombo mountains, on a long flat ridge along the eastern edge of the country, and the road climbed to it in a series of switchbacks with the whole of the Lowveld spread out below, the cane fields in squares of green and black, the river shining, and on the far side, the hills of the middle of the country blue in the haze.

The Lions' ground was at the edge of the town, on the flat top of the ridge, with a view so wide that Thabiso said it was nearly as good as a view in Lesotho, which from him was the highest compliment there was.

Sibusiso's mother was waiting at the gate.

MaDlamini was sixty-eight, round and strong, in a red and black emahiya knotted over one shoulder and a black head wrap, and she had come up from the homestead near Big Bend in the back of a neighbor's pickup with two of Sibusiso's aunts, four of his nephews and a plastic drum of food. She took her son's face in both her hands, exactly as 'Mè Mamello had taken Thabiso's in Maseru, and then she stood back and looked at him and said something in siSwati that made his nephews laugh.

"She says I am too fat," said Sibusiso.

"Every grandmother in this league," said Lesedi, "has an opinion about the size of her grandson."

"She is my mother," said Sibusiso. "That is worse."

---

MaDlamini had brought, in the plastic drum, a stew of beef and pumpkin leaves, and a pot of sishwala, and a great many boiled mealies, the long white cobs, and a bag of sugarcane cut into short lengths for the players to chew, "for energy." Ayanda had never chewed sugarcane in his life. Sibusiso's nephews showed him how, peeling the hard outer skin with their teeth and biting into the white fiber and sucking out the sweet juice and spitting the pulp. He did it badly and got juice down his shirt and laughed so much that MaDlamini, who did not understand a word he said, laughed too.

She also had something for Nomsa: a length of emahiya cloth, folded and tied with string, white and blue, with a pattern of small birds. "For the baby," Sibusiso translated. "When it comes. For the carrying." He put it carefully into his kit bag, at the very bottom, under his gloves.

Then MaDlamini saw Kabelo, and went and sat beside him on the bench in front of the stand, and gave him a length of sugarcane, and Kabelo, who had all his own teeth at eighty and was very proud of it, chewed it with enormous seriousness, and the two of them sat there spitting pulp into a paper bag and nodding at each other, and Lesedi thought: this is the fourth grandmother. Maseru, Windhoek, Francistown and now Siteki. Her father had sat beside every one of them as if they had all known each other for years.

---

The match was lost in the thirty-fourth minute, and it was lost by Ayanda.

The Lions were tough and disciplined and very hard to play against on their own ridge, in the thin bright air. They had a center-back named Bongani, big and slow and clever, who had clearly been told about Ayanda, and from the first minute he talked to him. Lesedi could not hear what he said from the stand. She did not need to. She could see Ayanda's shoulders go up, the way they had gone up in Musina, and stay up.

"He is talking about Highveld," said Coach Nko at the touchline, and called Ayanda over, and spoke to him, and sent him back.

In the thirty-fourth minute Bongani fouled Ayanda on the edge of the box, a hard tackle but a fair one, and as Ayanda lay on the grass he bent down and said something into his ear, and Ayanda got up and shoved him in the chest with both hands. Bongani fell down as if he had been hit by a cane lorry.

The referee showed the red card at once. Ayanda stood looking at it with an expression of total disbelief. Then he walked off, past the bench, past Nko, past Lesedi, without looking at any of them, and sat on the steps of Nkuku with his head down.

The Lions scored before half-time and again after it. Ten men could not get back into it, though Jonas tried, and Thabiso tried, and Sibusiso, in front of his mother, made two saves that she applauded standing on the bench. Nil-two.

---

Kabelo found the boy on the bus steps after the final whistle. Lesedi went with him this time, because the steps were steep and her father was tired, and she stood behind him while he lowered himself onto the step beside Ayanda.

"What did he say to you?" the old man asked.

"He said I was so bad Highveld paid Botswana to take me," said Ayanda. His voice was hoarse. "He said it every time. Every time I got the ball. And then the last time he said it about my gogo."

"What did he say about your gogo?"

Ayanda told him. Lesedi winced.

Kabelo was quiet for a while. Below them, beyond the edge of the ridge, the sun was going down over the Lowveld and the whole of the plain had turned gold, and the smoke from a burning cane field far below was going straight up in a thin gray column.

"In nineteen eighty-one," said Kabelo at last, "at Mbabane, a defender from the Mbabane railway team said something about my mother. I pushed him over. I was the captain. I was thirty-six years old. I was sent off and we lost and I had to drive the railway lorry home for eleven hours with twenty-one men not speaking to me." He looked at the boy. "Do you know what I learned?"

"What, Rra?"

"That the defender wanted me to punch him. That was his whole plan. He was not good enough to stop me with his feet, so he stopped me with his mouth. Bongani is the same. He is not fast enough to catch you. So he talked until you gave him what he wanted." He put his hand on the boy's knee. "Next time he talks, you score. That is the answer to a man like that. The only one."

Ayanda wiped his face with his sleeve. "We play them again. In May."

"I know," said Kabelo. "I will be there. So will you."

---

The league gave Ayanda a two-match ban, which meant he would miss Okavango at home and Notwane away in January. On the long road back, through the cane and up over the border and down into the Lowveld again in the dark, Lesedi wrote the entry from her father's words while Ayanda sat beside him and listened to every one.

*Matchday Ten. Siteki Lions 2, Tati River Rovers 0. A town on top of a mountain. Sugarcane for energy; the founder still has his teeth. The goalkeeper's mother brought blue cloth for a child not yet born. The boy from Soweto was sent off for listening to a man he should not have listened to. So was I, in nineteen eighty-one. Twelve points. K.M., by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Eleven, Home to Okavango Royals

The last match before the December break was played in a heat so heavy and wet that the players' shirts were dark with sweat before the warm-up was over. It had rained every afternoon for two weeks. The Tati River was full, a brown fast sheet of water under the old railway bridge, and the red dirt of the Railway Ground had turned to a rich dark mud at the goalmouths, and the strip of grass down the middle had grown so fast that Tebogo's uncle had to mow it on the Friday with a push mower, and the whole ground smelled of cut grass and wet earth and the frangipani trees by the clubhouse, which were in flower.

Ayanda could not play. He sat in the stand with Kabelo under the umbrella with the Book on his knees, wearing his club tracksuit, and he did not complain once.

"You keep it today," Kabelo told him, before the kickoff, and gave him the pen.

The boy looked at the pen. "Rra, I can't. That's for Mma Lesedi."

"Mma Lesedi is busy. She has to be at the bench with the water bottles and shout at the coach." Kabelo opened the Book to the right page. "I will tell you what to write. You will write it. You have a good hand. I saw it in August."

So Ayanda kept the Book.

---

The Okavango Royals had come all the way from Rundu, in the far north of Namibia, on the bank of the Okavango River where it formed the border, eleven hundred kilometers away by the road through Kasane and across the Zambezi region. They had left on Wednesday. Their coach, a slow-spoken former schoolteacher named Kandjimi, said they had seen elephants on the road outside Kasane, a whole herd crossing in the evening, and had sat in their bus for forty minutes waiting for the last of them to cross, and that one of the young bulls had stood in front of the bus and flapped his ears at them for five minutes, "like a referee."

Jonas went to greet them, because they were Namibian, and came back with news. "They are sixth," he said, to Lesedi, at the touchline. "Sixteen points. We are seventh on twelve. If we win today, we are fifteen and they are sixteen, one point between us. If they win, they are nineteen and we are seven behind at Christmas." He tucked in his shirt, though it was already tucked. "This match is worth more than three points."

"Every match is worth three points," said Lesedi.

"This one is worth six," said Jonas. "Three for us. Three we take from them."

---

It was a long, tight, sweating match, and both teams were too tired by the second half to do much but run and hope. The Royals were well organized and had a striker named Haufiku who was the league's top scorer, a tall, loose-limbed young man who seemed to arrive in the box from nowhere. Twice in the first half he arrived from nowhere and twice Sibusiso was there before him. The third time, Onkarabile was.

The captain had been quiet all season. Not bad. Quiet. He did his job and organized his line and taught Standard Four on weekdays and went home to his wife and two small children in Monarch on Saturday nights. But Lesedi had noticed that since the Siteki match he had started staying behind after training to talk to Kitso about positioning and to Ayanda about patience, and on the bus back from Eswatini he had sat for an hour with Tapiwa, who was homesick for Gwanda, talking about nothing.

In the seventy-ninth minute, from a corner, he rose above Haufiku at the near post and flicked the ball across the goal and in at the far side.

He did not run anywhere. He stood in the six-yard box with his arms out, and then, slowly, he turned and pointed up at the stand, at the umbrella, at the old man and the boy with the Book.

"Write that," said Kabelo to Ayanda.

"What?"

"Write: the captain pointed."

---

One-nil. When the results came in that evening, Jonas sat at Lesedi's kitchen table with his green exercise book and updated the table in ink.

"Halfway," he said. "Eleven matches. Fifteen points. We are seventh. The Royals are sixth on sixteen. Musina are eighth on fourteen, Plumtree ninth on thirteen. Sixth place at the end, in the last five seasons, needed between thirty and thirty-four." He looked up. "So. We need to take more in the second half than in the first. Eighteen points from eleven matches would give us thirty-three. Possible. Not easy."

"How many wins is that?" said Ayanda.

"Six wins, no draws, five losses. Or five wins and three draws. Or four wins and six draws, which is a very boring way to finish sixth." Jonas closed the book. "I would prefer six wins."

"Then we will win six," said Kabelo, from the armchair by the window, where everybody had thought he was asleep.

---

Ayanda did not go home for Christmas. He did not have the bus fare, and he would not take it from Lesedi, though she offered three times, and on the twenty-fourth he telephoned his grandmother in Orlando East on Lesedi's phone and talked to her for an hour, walking up and down the yard in the evening heat, laughing, sometimes quiet, and at the end handed the phone to Lesedi without warning.

"She wants to talk to you, Mma."

MaMkhize's voice was strong and deep and full of the noise of a house with a great many people in it. She spoke English with great care, the way people speak a language they use for important business. "You are the lady who is feeding him."

"I am, Mma."

"He says you make him eat vegetables. Nobody has ever made him eat vegetables." There was a pause. "Thank you."

"He is a good boy, Mma. He keeps the Book now."

"What book?"

Lesedi told her. The old woman listened to the whole story without interrupting, the ledgers and the rule about grandmothers and the line her grandson had written in August. Then she said, slowly, "He wrote my name? In a book in Botswana?"

"Your name and your street, Mma. And the fat cake table."

There was a long silence on the line. Then MaMkhize said, in a different voice, "Tell him to come home at Easter. I will make him fat cakes. Tell him, when he plays at Highveld, I will be there. I will bring the whole street."

---

On Christmas Day they drove out to the cattle post near Tonota where Kabelo still kept nineteen head of cattle under the care of a herdsman named Rra Pule, who was seventy-three and had worked for the family for fifty years. They ate seswaa that Ayanda had pounded himself, persuading it, and bogobe and morogo and a great deal of watermelon, under a big mopane tree, with the cattle standing in the shade of another one, their tails going. Thabiso and Jonas came. Tapiwa came. Kitso came with his mother. Sibusiso and Nomsa came, Nomsa very round now, sitting in the best chair.

And when they got home there was a card in the post box, from Selebi-Phikwe. It had a picture of a chicken on the front. Inside, in a big looping hand, it said: Happy Christmas, Rra Kabelo. I hear there is another boy from Soweto. Tell him not to go to the bus station. Lucky.

Ayanda read it three times. Then he took it to his room and pinned it on the wall above his bed.

*Matchday Eleven. Tati River Rovers 1, Okavango Royals 0. Very hot and very wet. Elephants on the Kasane road held up the visitors. The captain scored and pointed. Halfway. Fifteen points, seventh, one behind sixth. Written by Ayanda Mkhize, Orlando East, for K.M., who told him what to say, except this line, which is his own: thank you, Rra.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Twelve, Away to Notwane Pioneers

In the second week of January, five days before the Notwane match, Kabelo fell in the passage at three in the morning on his way to the bathroom, and lay there for twenty minutes before Ayanda, coming in late from a cousin's party, found him.

Nothing was broken. The doctor at the hospital said so twice, and then a third time when Lesedi asked again. A bruised hip. A cut above the eye that needed four stitches. "But he is eighty," the doctor said. "Rest. A week at least. No long journeys. No football buses."

Kabelo heard this from his bed with an expression of polite attention, the way he listened to referees.

"Gaborone is not a long journey," he said, when the doctor had gone. "It is four hundred and thirty kilometers. That is a short journey."

"It is six hours, Rra," said Lesedi.

"Six hours is a short journey. Windhoek was eighteen."

"Rra." She sat on the edge of his bed. She had not slept. "You heard him."

"I heard him." Her father looked at the ceiling. "I said every ground. At the meeting. In front of the committee."

"Nobody will hold you to it."

"I will hold me to it," said Kabelo, and closed his eyes, and she could not tell if he was tired or simply ending the argument.

---

Nkuku left for Gaborone at five on Saturday morning without him. Tshepo stayed home. Lesedi sat in the second row by the window in her father's seat, and the bus felt wrong all the way down the A1, through Palapye and Mahalapye, the long straight tar road through the thornveld green from the rains, the cattle standing in the shade of the trees, the donkey carts on the verge. Nobody named anything as it passed. Nobody remembered a puncture in 1988. Ayanda, who was still suspended for this one match and had come anyway to carry the water, sat across the aisle in the seat beside the empty one and did not play his music.

Somewhere past Mahalapye, Onkarabile came and sat in the empty seat.

"Mma," he said. "Can I tell you something?"

"Tell me."

"When I was ten, my father brought me to the Railway Ground for a match against Bulawayo Ironworks. Two thousand and four. Rra Kabelo was at the gate with the cash tin. My father had no money that week. Rra Kabelo looked at him and looked at me and said, the boy is free, the boy is always free, and gave me a sweet from his pocket." The captain looked at his hands. "I never paid at that gate again. Not once. Every match until I signed. He never asked." He was quiet. "I wanted you to know that. Before today."

Lesedi looked out of the window at the thornveld for a long time.

"Thank you," she said.

---

Notwane Pioneers played at the national stadium's training ground on the edge of Gaborone, a proper ground with grass all over and a covered stand and a scoreboard that lit up. Masego was there with four friends from the university, in Rovers shirts she had bought from the club's box of old kit, and they had made a banner on a bedsheet that said FOR RRA-MOGOLO in red paint.

Lesedi phoned home before the kickoff. Tshepo answered.

"He is not here," said Tshepo.

"What do you mean he is not here?"

"I mean he made me drive him to the bus rank at six o'clock," said Tshepo, sounding very tired, "and when I would not put him on a minibus, he made me drive him myself. We are at Mahalapye. We will be there at half-time. He says if I drive faster we will be there for the second half kickoff and I have told him I will not drive faster."

Lesedi stood in the car park of the national stadium with the phone in her hand and laughed so hard that Coach Nko came out of the dressing room to see what was wrong.

---

The first half was hard. Notwane were as neat and patient as they had been in August and the grass made them better. They scored after twenty minutes, a lovely flowing move down the left that ended with a tap-in, and the Rovers chased for the rest of the half and found nothing. At half-time Nko said very little in the dressing room. He walked up and down. He rubbed the burn on his forearm. Then he said, "Thabiso. You are standing in the same place as the center-back. Stand behind him. Jonas, find Thabiso behind him." And he sat down.

When the players came out for the second half there was a noise from the far end of the covered stand, and Lesedi turned and saw her husband coming up the steps, very slowly, with her father on his arm. Kabelo had a white plaster over his eye and his stick in his free hand and his brown meeting jacket on, and he was walking with his head up like a man arriving at a wedding.

The Rovers supporters, all forty of them, stood up. Masego's friends held up the banner. On the pitch, the players saw him, and Onkarabile raised his hand, and then all of them did, eleven men in blue with their hands up, the way they did for the old men at the start of the season, and the Notwane players, not sure why, raised theirs too.

Kabelo sat down in the front row of the stand beside Lesedi with a small grunt. "Did I miss anything?"

"We are losing one-nil."

"Then I did not miss anything," said her father. "Where is the Book?"

---

Thabiso stood behind the center-back. Jonas found him, twice in ten minutes, with long passes over the top. Lesedi, years later, telling it, always said the ball came down out of the sky like something the sky had been keeping.

The first time, Thabiso took it on his thigh and turned and shot, and the Notwane keeper saved with his legs. The second time, he let it run across him, and stroked it into the far corner with his left foot.

One-one.

And then, with ten minutes left, Tapiwa, the quiet boy from Gwanda, took a corner that curled in toward the near post, and Onkarabile met it with his forehead, and the ball went in so fast that the Notwane goalkeeper turned to look at the net as if somebody had told him a joke he had not understood.

Two-one. In the stand, Kabelo said, "The captain," and Ayanda, who had come up from the bench with the water bottles to sit at the old man's feet, wrote it down.

---

They drove home in the dark, Kabelo on Nkuku in his old seat with a cushion behind his hip and Tshepo following in the car. At Palapye they stopped for fuel and fat cakes and the old man slept, his head against the window, the plaster white in the light from the pumps. Lesedi sat beside him with the Book on her knees and let Ayanda write.

*Matchday Twelve. Notwane Pioneers 1, Tati River Rovers 2. Grass everywhere. A banner from my granddaughter and her friends. The Mosotho scored from behind the defender. The captain scored from the boy from Gwanda's corner. The founder fell down on Tuesday, came by car on Saturday and arrived for the second half, which is the better half. Eighteen points. K.M., by the hand of A.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Thirteen, Home to Musina Baobabs

The Musina match was lost by a goal that should not have counted, in the fifty-third minute, on a gray, low, drizzling afternoon at the end of January, and afterward nobody remembered the goal at all, because by six o'clock Kabelo Mothibi was missing.

He had been in the stand under the umbrella for the whole match. Lesedi had seen him there at the final whistle, sitting with the Book closed on his knees, with Ayanda beside him. Then she had gone down to the dressing room, because Sibusiso had a cut on his eyebrow from a collision and Kitso had to be found to hold the towel while she taped it, and Coach Nko wanted to talk about the referee, and Rra Oteng wanted to talk about the gate, which was the smallest of the season because of the rain. She had been gone twenty minutes. Perhaps twenty-five.

When she came back up to the stand, the umbrella was still tied to the rail and the Book was on the bench under it, and her father was not there.

Ayanda was not there either. Nor was the boy's phone answering.

---

For the first ten minutes she did not let herself be frightened. He was at the toilets. He was in the clubhouse. He was in Nkuku, in his seat, asleep. She looked in all of them. Tshepo looked again. Sibusiso, with the tape still on his eyebrow, went round the outside of the ground under the thorn trees calling, and Thabiso went the other way, and Jonas took the car park, and Onkarabile ran, actually ran, in his boots, the half kilometer to Lesedi's house and back.

He was not at the house. He was nowhere.

At a quarter past six Lesedi stood at the gate of the Railway Ground in the drizzle with her phone in her hand and the Book under her arm and could not think of a single thing to do. She thought: he is eighty, he has a bruised hip and four stitches healing over one eye, he does not know what year it is half the time, it will be dark at seven. She thought: I took my eyes off him to tape a cut. She thought: I said every ground. No. He said it. I let him.

Coach Nko came and stood beside her. He did not touch her. He said, "Where did he go before?"

"Before what?"

"Before you were born. Before the club. When he was young. Where did he go when he was not at home?"

And she knew.

---

The old Francistown station was a kilometer and a half away, on the far side of the railway line, a long low building of red brick with a tin roof and a deep veranda, built in the days of the steam trains. Most of the passenger traffic had moved years ago. The station was half empty now, used for offices and a goods depot, but the old goods shed was still there at the end of the platform, a tall brick barn with a pair of big wooden doors, where in 1976 a railway fitter named Kabelo Mothibi and ten of his friends had met on a Thursday evening after their shift, sat on crates under a hanging lamp, and decided to start a football club.

The doors of the goods shed were shut. But on the platform outside, on a wooden bench under the veranda, with the drizzle blowing in past the edge of the roof, sat her father, in his brown jacket, with his stick across his knees.

And beside him, with his arm round the old man's shoulders and his tracksuit top over both of them, sat Ayanda.

Lesedi got out of Tshepo's car before it had stopped. She ran down the platform. She did not know afterward what she meant to say. What she did was stand in front of her father, soaked, out of breath, and say, "Rra," and then nothing.

Kabelo looked up at her. His face was calm, and puzzled, and very tired.

"The others are late," he said. "We said seven. Gabriel is always late. Ishmael has to wash first, he works in the boiler shop." He looked at the shut doors. "They have locked it. They never lock it."

---

Ayanda told her, afterward, in the car, in a low voice, while her father slept against Tshepo's shoulder in the back.

"He got up at the whistle, Mma. He said he had to go to a meeting. I said what meeting, and he said the meeting, and started walking. Fast. Faster than I have ever seen him. Out of the side gate by the clubhouse, not the main gate. I couldn't stop him, Mma. I tried. He shook me off." The boy swallowed. "So I went with him. I thought, if I can't stop him I can go with him. My phone was dead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Mma. I should have run back. But I thought if I left him for one minute he would cross the line in front of a train."

"You did right," said Lesedi.

"He talked the whole way. About a ball he bought on Blue Jacket Street. About a heifer. About eleven men on crates." Ayanda shook his head. "He was telling me how the club started, Mma. Like it was tonight. Like we were going to start it."

"In a way," said Lesedi, "you were."

---

That night she did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table with the Book open and did not write anything in it. At two in the morning Tshepo came and sat across from her in his dressing gown and made her a cup of rooibos and did not tell her to go to bed.

"I cannot do it," she said at last. "The bus. Every ground. Namibia. Lesotho. Soweto. He could have walked in front of a train. He could have walked into the river."

"He did not."

"Because a boy of nineteen followed him."

"Yes," said Tshepo. He was a slow, large, gentle man, a surveyor for the roads department, who had married her in 1999 knowing that he was also marrying a football club and had never once complained about it. "Because a boy of nineteen followed him. Who would not have been in Francistown at all, if your father had not given him a reason to stay. Who would not have known how, if your father had not shown him." He put his hand over hers on the table. "Lesedi. You think you are carrying him. Look around. You are not the only one carrying."

---

In the morning there was a knock on the door at seven. It was Onkarabile, in his teaching clothes, with a sheet of paper.

"I talked to the boys," he said. "Last night. After." He held out the paper. It was a list, in his neat schoolteacher's hand, with the eleven remaining matches down one side and names beside each one. "One player sits with Rra Kabelo at every match, home and away. Not the same one. We take turns. That player does not leave him, not for the dressing room, not for the toilet, not for anything. If he wants to walk, the player walks with him. On the bus, the same. If the player is in the eleven, one of the boys on the bench keeps the seat warm while the match is on, and the moment the whistle goes the player comes straight up to the stand." He pointed. "Ayanda has done his. Jonas wants Katutura in March. Sibusiso asked for Manzini, but that's when the baby comes, so I said no. Thabiso has Mafeteng. Tapiwa has Bulawayo. I have the last one. Rundu."

Lesedi took the paper and looked at it for a long time. Every match had a name. Some of the names she had not expected: the left back from Gaborone. Kitso. The Zambian student. Two of the young Batswana who had barely played. Coach Nko had put himself down for Siteki.

"You do not have to do this," she said.

"Mma," said Onkarabile, in the patient voice he used for forty ten-year-olds. "We know we don't have to. That's why we're doing it."

*Matchday Thirteen. Tati River Rovers 0, Musina Baobabs 1. Rain. A goal from a man who was offside by a meter. The founder went to the goods shed at the old station for a meeting that happened in nineteen seventy-six, and the boy from Soweto went with him so that he would not be alone at it. Eighteen points. Written by L.M., who has been shown that the club is bigger than the people who run it.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Fourteen, Away to Bulawayo Ironworks

Tapiwa sat with Kabelo all the way to Bulawayo, and talked to him about Gwanda.

He was twenty-two and had said perhaps a hundred words all season, and Lesedi had assumed he was shy, which he was, and slow, which he was not. He was a builder's laborer in Francistown, sending most of what he earned home to his mother and three younger sisters in Gwanda, a small dusty town in the gold-mining country south of Bulawayo, and on the bus he discovered that Kabelo had played there twice, in 1978 and 1986, and remembered the name of a bottle store where the team had bought cold drinks, and the color of the goalposts, which were red.

"They are still red," said Tapiwa, astonished.

"Of course they are still red," said Kabelo. "Nobody in Gwanda would paint them any other color. It would be a scandal."

It was the most anybody had heard Tapiwa laugh.

---

Bulawayo was a city of wide streets. They had been laid out, Coach Nko said, standing at the front of the bus with the microphone that had not worked since 2015 and therefore shouting, wide enough for a span of sixteen oxen and a wagon to turn round in, and they still were: long, straight avenues lined with jacaranda trees and flame trees and old low buildings with deep verandas and iron pillars, and in the middle of town, the City Hall in its gardens. Coach Nko pointed everything out. He had become, in the hour since the border, a different man, louder and quicker and younger, and when they drove out to the west of the city, past the stadium, into the old township of Makokoba, he stopped shouting and simply looked out of the window.

Makokoba was the oldest township in the city, rows of small houses close together with tin roofs and yards swept clean, washing on the lines, children everywhere, and at every corner a woman sitting on an upturned crate with a table in front of her, selling tomatoes in pyramids of four, or bananas, or frozen sweet drinks in plastic tubes that every child in Zimbabwe lived on in summer. The bus could not get down the narrow street to Nko's mother's house. They stopped at the corner and walked, the whole team, with the children of Makokoba running alongside, and by the time they reached the gate there were forty people following.

MaNcube was eighty-four, small, with white hair under a blue head scarf, and she stood at her gate with her hands on her hips and looked at her son, who was forty-six and a head and a half taller than her, and said, "You are late."

"Mama, we came from Botswana."

"Botswana is not so far. Your sister came from the hospital and she was not late." She looked past him at the team, and at Lesedi, and then at Kabelo, on Tapiwa's arm, and her whole face changed. She came out of the gate. She took the old man's hands.

"Thank you for the lift," she said. "From Plumtree. In nineteen ninety-nine."

Kabelo looked at her. Lesedi saw him look: the polite, warm, searching look, the one he gave when something had gone missing. And then, slowly, she saw him find it.

"The boy with no bus fare," he said. "Who stood at the side of the road outside Plumtree with a bag and a pair of boots and no money. And I said, where are you going, and he said, to the trial at the Rovers, and I said, I am the Rovers, get in."

"That boy," said MaNcube, "is now the coach."

"I know," said Kabelo, and squeezed her hands. "I know. The welder."

---

She fed them all. Of course she did. In the small yard, under a mango tree heavy with fruit, on plates borrowed from four neighbors, she served sadza, thick and white and steaming, shaped into smooth mounds with a wooden spoon, and beef stew in a dark rich gravy, and covo, the dark green leaves of the Zimbabwean kale, cooked with tomato and onion until they were soft, and a dish of matemba, small dried fish, fried crisp. Everybody ate with their right hands, pinching off a piece of sadza, rolling it, pressing a hollow with the thumb for the relish. Ayanda burned his fingers on the sadza and MaNcube laughed at him and showed him how to let it cool on the edge of the plate.

In the evening, from a community hall across the road, came the sound of a choir rehearsing: men's voices, a dozen of them, singing without instruments, deep and close, the old Ndebele way of singing that the whole country knew and that Coach Nko said his father had sung in, the bass going down so low that Lesedi felt it through the bench she sat on. They sang one song over and over, stopping and starting as the leader corrected them. It was about a river, Nko said. In English, roughly: The river does not ask the stone to move. The river goes around, and the stone grows smooth.

He sat beside her on the bench under the mango tree while the choir sang. After a while he said, without looking at her, "I nearly gave up the team. In May. After we finished tenth."

She turned. "You never said."

"I said it to your father. I went to the house. You were at work. I sat with him in the yard and told him I was not a good coach, I was a welder who had once been a good center-back, and the club needed a real coach, a man with badges and certificates, and I would step aside." He rubbed the burn on his forearm. "He listened. He did not argue. Then he said, Nkosana, I bought this club a ball with the money from a heifer. I did not know anything about football. I knew where every man's grandmother lived. That was enough. Then he went inside and made me tea."

"And you stayed."

"I stayed. And then in August you came to me and told me to play the boy." Nko smiled a little. "And I thought, she is her father's daughter. She knows where the grandmothers live. But she has never been told the coach's job is to keep the boy alive to the end of the season, not just the end of the match."

Lesedi was quiet. The choir across the road stopped, started again.

"I am sorry," she said. "For Musina."

"Do not be sorry," said Nko. "You were right about the boy. I was right about the minutes. That is what a team is."

---

The Ironworks ground was in an old industrial area to the south of the city, a hard dirt pitch surrounded by a concrete wall painted in the club's colors, orange and black. Mthulisi Ncube was at the gate with his ruler in his pocket. Gwanda had sent a minibus: Tapiwa's mother, his three sisters, his uncle who had once been a fullback.

It was a draw, and a good one. The Ironworks scored first, from a free kick that Sibusiso said he saw only after it had gone past him. The Rovers held on, and pressed, and missed, and in the sixty-eighth minute, from a cross by Ayanda that Thabiso missed with his head and the Ironworks keeper missed with his hands, the ball fell at the far post to Tapiwa, who did not miss with anything.

He ran, for the first time in his life, to the minibus from Gwanda, where his mother and his three sisters were standing on the roof.

One-one.

In the stand, Kabelo said, "Red goalposts," as if it explained everything, and Tapiwa's uncle, beside him, nodded and said, "Red goalposts," and the two old men shook hands.

*Matchday Fourteen. Bulawayo Ironworks 1, Tati River Rovers 1. Wide streets. MaNcube of Makokoba remembered a lift from Plumtree and so did I. The boy from Gwanda scored and his whole family stood on a roof. A choir across the road sang about a river and a stone. The coach and the manager have agreed that they were both right. Nineteen points. K.M., by the hand of L.M., with Tapiwa Moyo of Gwanda beside him.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Fifteen, Home to Maseru Blue Cranes

On the Wednesday before the Blue Cranes came, Rra Oteng Masilo called at Lesedi's house at seven in the evening with the gate figures for the season so far, a calculator and a face like a closed door.

"I am sorry to call at home," he said, sitting very straight on the edge of the sofa. "But the committee meets on Monday and I must be accurate. The diesel this season is already eleven percent above the budget. Maseru. Windhoek. Siteki. Bulawayo. The fuel pump at Ghanzi. The fuel line in October." He cleared his throat, as he always did before a number. "If we finish seventh, we will end the season eighteen thousand pula in deficit. Even if we finish sixth, the league pool will only bring us back to the line. Not above it."

"I know, Rra."

"I want to be clear that I am not against the football." He took off his glasses. "Some people at the club think I am against the football. I am not. I am the treasurer. My job is to say the numbers out loud so that nobody can say later that they did not hear them."

From the armchair by the window, where he had been dozing over the radio, Kabelo said, "Oteng."

Rra Oteng turned. "Rra Kabelo. Good evening. I did not want to disturb you."

"You are Oteng Masilo," said Kabelo. He was sitting up now, and his eyes were clear, and his voice had the dry precision it had had when Lesedi was a girl. "From the railway houses on the Tati side. Your mother was Mma Masilo who kept the goats. In nineteen seventy-seven you were sixteen years old and we were short of players for the Plumtree match, three men down with fever, and I put you in at left back. You scored an own goal in the sixth minute. You cried all the way home in the lorry and I gave you my handkerchief." He held out his hand toward Lesedi without looking at her. "Volume one."

---

It was there. Lesedi found it on the fourth page of the first ledger, in the cramped, careful hand of a sixteen-year-old: Oteng Masilo. Railway houses, Tati side, where Mma Masilo keeps the goats.

And in the margin beside it, in Kabelo's young upright script: Own goal sixth minute. Cried. Will be all right.

Rra Oteng read it in silence, holding the ledger in both hands, with his glasses back on. He read it a second time. Then he took the glasses off again and did not put them back.

"I had forgotten," he said. "I had completely forgotten. One match. I only played one match." He looked at Kabelo. "You remembered."

"I remember everything that happened before nineteen ninety," said the old man, and sat back in his chair, satisfied. "After that it is a little crowded."

Rra Oteng sat for a long time with the Book on his knees. Then he gave it back to Lesedi, carefully, and gathered his calculator and his papers and put them in his briefcase and stood up.

"The numbers are the numbers," he said at the door. "I will read them on Monday. I must." He stopped, with his hand on the frame. "But I will say also, to the committee, that there are seven hundred and seventeen names in those ledgers, and one of them is mine, and that I would like it very much if there were a few more."

---

The Blue Cranes had come on Friday in a hired coach, with their famo band. They played in the stand behind the north goal from noon, the two accordions and the drum and the singer who made it up as he went, and this time Thabiso's apprentice friends had brought an accordion of their own, and stood in the corner of the ground under the thorn trees and played back. Nobody in Francistown understood the words of either side. Everybody understood it was a contest, and by kickoff the whole ground was cheering every line, and Thabiso, warming up, kept stopping to listen and shake his head and laugh.

"What are they singing?" Ayanda asked him.

"Theirs is singing that I play football like a donkey that has been told about football but never seen it. Ours is singing that their keeper is so slow he has a calendar instead of a watch." Thabiso grinned. "Ours is better."

It was a match the Rovers had been waiting for since September, and they played it as if they knew it.

Thabiso scored after twenty minutes, from a long ball of Jonas's that he chased into the corner, cut back from, and hit inside the near post with his right foot. He did not dance. He walked straight to the north stand, where the Blue Cranes' band was, and bowed to them, very deeply, in his blanket of a celebration, arms out. The Blue Cranes' singer, to his great credit, put down his microphone and bowed back.

The second came just after half-time, and it was Ayanda's work: a run from the halfway line past two men, a stop, a look, and then, instead of shooting, a pass square to Jonas, who had walked twenty meters to be there and who passed it into the net as if he were posting a letter.

Two-nil. Sibusiso did not have a save to make in the second half. Kitso, warming up on the touchline, said it was the most boring forty-five minutes of goalkeeping he had ever seen.

---

After the match, while the two bands played on into the evening in a kind of truce, Rra Oteng came up to the stand where Kabelo was sitting with Kagiso Sebina, the left back from Gaborone, whose turn it was, and sat down on the other side of him.

"Rra Kabelo," he said. "Which other matches did I miss? After nineteen seventy-seven?"

Kabelo considered this question with great seriousness.

"All of them," he said. "Every one. You went to the university in Lesotho and then you came back and did accounts. You never came on the bus again." He patted Oteng's knee. "But there are seven left. It is not too late."

Rra Oteng sat with his briefcase on his lap and looked at the pitch, where Thabiso was doing his stamping dance for the Blue Cranes' band.

"Mafeteng is in April," he said. "I have never been to Mafeteng."

"Then you will come to Mafeteng," said Kabelo. "And you will sit next to me. And if you score an own goal, I still have the handkerchief."

*Matchday Fifteen. Tati River Rovers 2, Maseru Blue Cranes 0. Two famo bands; ours won. The Mosotho scored and bowed. The bookkeeper scored from the boy's pass, which was the right pass. The treasurer was shown his own name, his own grandmother's goats and his own own goal from nineteen seventy-seven. Twenty-two points. K.M., by the hand of K.S.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Sixteen, Away to Manzini Hornets

Nomsa went home to Manzini at the end of February, on the overnight bus, with a suitcase, a carrier bag of baby clothes and the length of blue-and-white emahiya cloth from her mother-in-law at the bottom of her handbag. Sibusiso stood at the bus rank in Francistown at nine in the evening and watched the bus pull out and then went straight to the Railway Ground, opened Nkuku's engine cover under the floodlight and changed the oil, though it did not need changing, because he could not think of anything else to do with his hands.

The baby was due in the second week of March. The match was in the second week of March. "She will come on the Saturday," Sibusiso said, all through the first week of the month, to anybody who would listen. "I know it. At three o'clock. During the match. She will come at kickoff."

"Babies do not read the fixtures," said Lesedi.

"This one is a Dlamini," said Sibusiso. "She will read everything."

---

She came on the Friday night.

Nkuku had arrived in Manzini at four in the afternoon, after a day and a half on the road and a long wait at the border while an official counted the players three times, and Sibusiso had gone straight from the bus to the hospital on the hill, where Nomsa's mother met him in the corridor and told him to sit down, and he sat down, on a plastic chair, in his club tracksuit, and stayed there. At eleven forty that night, in a room at the end of the corridor, Nomsa gave birth to a girl of three kilograms and two hundred grams, with a great deal of black hair and a voice, Sibusiso said when he telephoned Lesedi at midnight, like a referee who had just seen a dive.

"She is beautiful," he said. His own voice was strange. "She is so beautiful, Mma. I cannot talk properly."

"You are talking properly."

"I am crying properly. That is different." A pause. "Mma. Tomorrow. I cannot leave them. I am sorry. I cannot."

"You are not leaving them," said Lesedi. "You are not leaving them for any football match in the world. Kitso is in goal."

There was a long silence on the line. Then Sibusiso said, "Tell him to watch the striker's knees."

---

In the morning, because the match was not until three, and because Nomsa's mother had insisted, Lesedi took the team to the Manzini market.

It was the biggest and noisiest market in the country, a great hall with a tin roof and three floors of stalls, and around it in the streets more stalls under umbrellas, so that the whole center of the town seemed to be buying and selling at once. On the ground floor were the vegetables, in heaps: tomatoes and onions and potatoes and great green pumpkins and bunches of leaves, and avocados and bananas and the first mangoes, and at the back, the dried fish and the dried beans and the sacks of maize meal. Upstairs were the crafts: grass baskets woven in tight coils of red and black and natural straw, wooden bowls, carved animals, beadwork, mats. And on the top floor, along a whole wall, the cloth.

Nomsa's mother, Make Simelane, had a stall on the top floor. She was sixty-one, brisk, with her reading glasses pushed up into her head wrap, and she had sold emahiya in that market for thirty years, and she did not wait to be introduced. She took one look at Lesedi and pulled a length of cloth off the stack behind her, red and black and white, with a pattern of shields, and held it against her to judge the length.

"For you," she said, in English. "For the lady who keeps my son-in-law's team."

"Make, I cannot."

"You can. You will. It is a gift from my granddaughter." Make Simelane knotted it at Lesedi's shoulder with three fast movements of her hands and stood back. "There. Now you look like a manager."

The players went through the stalls like boys on a school trip. Thabiso bought a grass basket for his grandmother. Jonas bought a wooden bowl and argued about the price for ten minutes for the pleasure of it. Ayanda bought a small carved hippopotamus for MaMkhize and asked Make Simelane, very politely, if she had a cloth with a picture of a fat cake on it, and she laughed so loudly that the women at the next three stalls came to see what was funny.

Kitso did not buy anything. He stood at the window on the top floor, looking out over the roofs of Manzini, with his hands in his pockets, eighteen years old and about to play in goal in another country for the first time.

"You will be all right," Lesedi told him.

"I know, Mma." He did not look at her. "I wrote it down. Watch the knees."

---

He was very nearly all right.

The Hornets knew that their opponents had an eighteen-year-old schoolboy in goal, and they came at him from the first whistle. Kitso was tall and brave and a little slow, and for twenty minutes he caught everything and punched everything else, and the small group of Rovers supporters who had come by minibus from Francistown, and the Swazi relatives of the Dlamini family, and Make Simelane, who had shut her stall for the afternoon, began to believe. Then, in the twenty-fourth minute, from a corner, a Hornets defender headed the ball down into the ground and it bounced over Kitso's hands and in.

He stood looking at the net. Then he turned, picked the ball out himself, and threw it to the center circle, and Lesedi, on the bench, saw him take a breath and square his shoulders exactly the way Sibusiso did.

In the thirty-eighth minute, Thabiso equalized from a cross by Ayanda. In the fifty-ninth, the Hornets were given a penalty, a hard call, a handball against Onkarabile that was more shoulder than hand. Kitso walked to his line. He took off his gloves, smacked them together twice, put them on again. He bounced on his toes.

The Hornets striker watched his knees.

Kitso went left, early, much too early. Then, in the air, he stopped going left, and put out his right hand.

The ball hit his wrist, and spun up, and over the bar.

The Rovers bench came off the bench. Coach Nko threw his clipboard. Kabelo, on the bench beside the Zambian student, Mwila, whose turn it was, stood up so fast that Mwila had to catch him by the belt.

But with five minutes left, tired, a long way from home, the Rovers lost a man at the back post, and the Hornets scored from a header that Kitso could not have reached if he had been three meters tall. One-two. At the whistle the eighteen-year-old sat down on the goal line with his back against the post and his knees up and put his face in his gloves.

The Hornets' goalkeeper, a veteran of thirty-four who had played against Sibusiso for nine years, walked the length of the pitch, sat down beside him, and put his arm round his shoulders. Lesedi never knew what he said. When Kitso stood up, he was smiling.

---

They went to the hospital on the hill before they left, all of them, the whole team, in the evening. They could not all go in. They stood in the car park below the ward window, twenty men in blue tracksuits, and Sibusiso came to the window with the baby in his arms, wrapped in the blue-and-white emahiya cloth with the pattern of small birds, and held her up, and the team cheered so loudly that a nurse came out and told them to be quiet, and then stayed to watch.

"Her name is Lindiwe," Sibusiso called down. "Lindiwe Nkuku Dlamini."

The car park went quiet. Then Coach Nko said, "Nkuku?"

"For the bus," said Sibusiso from the window, and the team cheered again, and this time the nurse did not stop them.

---

Kabelo turned eighty-one on the Sunday, on the road home, somewhere between the border at Oshoek and Mbombela, with the mist lying in the valleys and the pine plantations dark on the hills. Lesedi had baked a cake on Wednesday and hidden it in the cooler box under the drinks. At ten in the morning Onkarabile stood up at the front of the bus and the whole team sang to the old man, in Setswana and siSwati and Sesotho and isiZulu and Oshiwambo and Ndebele and English, all at once, so that it was not one song but six or seven songs about the same thing, and none of them in the same key.

Kabelo sat in his seat by the window with the cake on his knees and listened to the whole thing, and when it was over he said, in English, so everybody would understand, "That was very bad singing. It was the best I have ever heard."

Then he asked for the Book.

*Matchday Sixteen. Manzini Hornets 2, Tati River Rovers 1. A child born on the Friday night, Lindiwe Nkuku Dlamini, three kilograms and two hundred grams, named for the bus. The schoolboy kept goal and saved a penalty with his hand behind his back, as he was taught. The Mosotho scored. I am eighty-one today and was sung to badly in seven languages. Twenty-two points. K.M., by the hand of K.R., goalkeeper.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Seventeen, Home to Katutura Dynamos

It was Jonas's turn at the Dynamos match, and he took it more seriously than anybody had taken anything all season.

He arrived at Lesedi's house at ten in the morning, five hours before kickoff, with his green exercise book, a folding chair, a flask of rooibos, a hat for Kabelo, a hat for himself, two bananas, a packet of biscuits and a cardboard box from Ondangwa that had come by courier on Thursday. He sat down in the yard with the old man under the jacaranda, opened the box, and took out a plastic bag of dried mopane worms.

"From Meekulu," he said. "For you. She says she remembers the oranges."

Kabelo took the bag and opened it and smelled it and his face lit up. Mopane worms, the fat caterpillars of the emperor moth that fed on the mopane trees all across the dry country from Namibia to Zimbabwe, picked in the season by women and children, squeezed out, boiled in salt water and dried in the sun, so that they kept for a year. In Botswana they were called phane and in Namibia they had another name and in Zimbabwe another, and in every country people swore their own were the best.

"These are good," said Kabelo, chewing. "Not as good as ours."

"Rra," said Jonas, very gravely, "with respect. These are better."

"Ours are fatter."

"Ours are crisper. You fry them with onion and tomato and chili. Meekulu fries them in a pan from nineteen sixty-eight. They have a flavor of the pan."

"Ours have a flavor of the tree."

They argued for an hour. Lesedi, hanging washing on the line at the other end of the yard, listened and did not intervene, because it was the happiest she had heard her father since Christmas.

---

It was a bad day for Lesedi.

She did not tell anybody. She had not slept well since January, and the last three weeks at the wholesaler had been the end of the financial year, and there had been the Manzini trip, two nights on a school floor, and on Thursday night her father had woken at two and called for her mother, who had been dead for ten years, and would not be told, and in the end Lesedi had sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand and let him call her Dineo until he fell asleep. She had not wanted to correct him. She had not been able to bear it, either.

On Saturday morning, at the kitchen table, when she brought him his tea, three sugars, milk in first, he looked up at her with his polite, warm, searching look.

"Thank you, Mma," he said. "Are you from the club?"

She stood there with the cup. She heard herself say, "Yes, Rra. I am from the club."

"Good," he said. "Good. My daughter runs it, you know. She is very clever. She was the first girl ever to ride the bus."

Lesedi put the cup down very carefully on the table. Then she went out into the yard, past Jonas in his folding chair with his exercise book, to the far end, behind the washing line, where nobody could see her, and stood with her hand over her mouth.

Jonas found her there. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, in his careful bookkeeper's voice, "My grandfather was the same. At the end. He knew who I was on Monday and on Wednesday he called me by my father's name. My grandmother said: the ledger is still there. It is just that some pages are stuck together."

Lesedi laughed, a wet, broken laugh. "Did she say that?"

"She said it in Oshiwambo. That is the bookkeeper's translation." He held out a clean folded handkerchief. "Mma. Go to the ground. I will bring him. He will be all right with me. I have the box from Meekulu. We have not finished arguing about the worms."

---

The match was a draw that felt like a loss.

The Dynamos had been rebuilt since October. They had two new midfielders from a club in Swakopmund and a center-back who seemed to have been assembled from spare parts of other center-backs, and they took the lead after half an hour. Thabiso equalized with a header just before half-time. Jonas had begun on the bench, resting a sore hamstring, and had spent the first half in the stand beside Kabelo. At half-time Tapiwa turned an ankle, and Coach Nko sent for him. In the second half, after Ayanda was brought down in the box, it was Jonas who took the penalty, and placed it so gently in the corner that the Dynamos keeper, diving the other way, actually turned his head to watch it roll in.

Two-one. With nine minutes left.

Then the Dynamos' new center-back came up for a corner in the ninety-first minute and headed it in off the inside of Sibusiso's post, and Sibusiso, in his first match back since Manzini, lay on his back in the goalmouth with the ball and the net and stared at the sky for a long time.

Two-two.

---

That evening Jonas came to the house with his exercise book and sat at the kitchen table with Lesedi and Coach Nko and Onkarabile and went through the table in pencil.

"Seventeen played. Twenty-three points. We are eighth." He ran his finger down the column. "Okavango sixth on twenty-six. Musina seventh on twenty-five. Plumtree ninth on twenty-two. Five matches left. Fifteen points available."

"What do we need?" said Nko.

"Last five seasons, sixth place needed between thirty and thirty-four. This season it is a little high, because Highveld and Siteki and the Blue Cranes are taking points from everybody. I think thirty-three." He looked up. "Ten points from fifteen. Three wins and a draw. Or more."

"Who do we play?"

"Highveld away. Plumtree home. Mafeteng away. Siteki home. Okavango away, last day, in Rundu." Jonas closed the book. "If we are still alive on the last day, it will probably be against the team we are trying to catch."

Onkarabile looked at the list. "Highveld away," he said. "In Soweto. They have lost twice all season."

"Yes," said Jonas.

"So we need to beat the best team in the league in their own ground."

"Or," said Jonas, "we need to win all four of the others. Which is harder." He tucked his pencil behind his ear. "Personally, I would beat Highveld. It is only one match."

From the armchair by the window, Kabelo, who everybody had thought was asleep, said, "The boy from Soweto will beat Highveld."

They all turned to look at him. He had his eyes closed. A piece of Meekulu's mopane worm was still in his hand.

"How do you know, Rra?" said Onkarabile.

"I do not know," said Kabelo, without opening his eyes. "I remember. It is a different thing. Sometimes I remember things that have not happened yet. It is one of the advantages of being old."

*Matchday Seventeen. Tati River Rovers 2, Katutura Dynamos 2. A box of mopane worms from Meekulu in Ondangwa, which are not as good as ours, though the bookkeeper disagrees and has the right to. He scored a penalty so slowly the keeper watched it. A header in the ninety-first minute. Some pages are stuck together. Twenty-three points. K.M., by the hand of J.S., who will not say his worms are worse.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Eighteen, Away to Highveld Stars

Ayanda went home for Easter. He had saved the bus fare himself since January, a little from every wage, in an envelope in the drawer beside his bed, and on the Thursday before Good Friday he took the night bus from Francistown to Johannesburg with his speaker, his sports bag, a carved hippopotamus from Manzini and a plastic container of seswaa that Lesedi had pounded for MaMkhize, and he was gone for five days. The house was very quiet without him. Kabelo asked for him four times.

He was back on the Wednesday. On the Thursday, Nkuku took the team south to Soweto, and Ayanda sat beside Kabelo all the way, though it was Kitso's turn, and Kitso let him.

"She is ready," Ayanda said, somewhere south of Polokwane, with the Highveld grasslands going past, the maize fields brown now with autumn. "My gogo. She has been getting ready since Christmas. She has told the whole street."

"How long is the street?"

"Long," said Ayanda. "Very long."

---

They stayed on Friday night in a church hall in Orlando East, two streets from MaMkhize's house, because she had arranged it. Ayanda had been right about her. She was seventy-four, short and broad and tremendous, with a voice that carried across three yards, and she was waiting at the hall door when the bus arrived at six with fourteen neighbors behind her, and when she saw her grandson come down the steps of Nkuku she did not run to him. She stood with her arms folded and looked at him, up and down, for a long time, in front of the whole team.

"You are fatter," she announced.

"Gogo—"

"Good. That is good." She turned to Lesedi, who had come down the steps behind him. "This is the lady."

"This is Mma Lesedi, Gogo."

MaMkhize came forward and took both of Lesedi's hands in hers. Her palms were hard and warm and smelled faintly of cooking oil. She looked into Lesedi's face for a long moment and then said, simply, in English, "Thank you for my boy," and Lesedi found that she could not answer at all.

---

That night the street had a braai.

It was not a small braai. It ran the length of MaMkhize's yard and spilled out through the gate into the street, three grills made from oil drums cut in half, the coals glowing, men in aprons turning boerewors and chops and chicken, and on trestle tables, pap and chakalaka and a potato salad and a beetroot salad and a great many bread rolls, and at the end of the table, under a striped umbrella, MaMkhize's own fat cake table, the one Ayanda had written in the Book in August, with a pot of oil bubbling on a gas ring and a bowl of dough, and MaMkhize herself standing behind it frying fat cakes, golden and puffed, and handing them out hot. Somebody had brought a sound system and the amapiano went down the street in long rolling waves and the children of Orlando East danced in the road.

The neighbors came to look at the team from Botswana. Some of them remembered Ayanda kicking a ball against their walls. One old man remembered Lucky Moloi of Meadowlands, and when Kabelo, sitting in the best chair in the yard with a fat cake in each hand, told him about the cards with the chickens on them, the old man laughed so hard he had to sit down.

Late in the evening, a young man in a gold and black tracksuit came through the gate and stood at the edge of the yard. Ayanda saw him and went very still.

"Lindani," he said.

They looked at each other. Then Lindani came across the yard and held out his hand, and Ayanda took it, and they stood there, two boys who had walked to training together for seven years, not saying much.

"My mother sent chakalaka," said Lindani at last, and held up a container. "She says your gogo's is too sweet."

"Your mother is wrong," said Ayanda.

"She knows," said Lindani, and grinned, and the two of them went and stood by the fat cake table and argued about it for an hour.

---

The Stars' ground was a proper stadium, with a stand on all four sides and grass like a carpet and floodlights on tall steel masts. There were four thousand people, the biggest crowd any of the Rovers had ever played in front of. And in the corner of the south stand, behind a bedsheet banner that said ORLANDO EAST FOR AYANDA in red and gold letters, there were a hundred and twelve people from one street, MaMkhize at the front in her best church hat, with plastic horns and a drum and a cooler box of fat cakes.

Coach Nko started Ayanda.

The first half was the hardest forty-five minutes of the season. The Stars had the ball almost all the time, passing it round in long patient triangles on the perfect grass, and the Rovers chased and blocked and threw themselves in front of shots. Sibusiso made four saves. Onkarabile cleared one off the line. Jonas, everywhere, did not let Lindani have a moment's peace. At half-time it was nil-nil and Coach Nko said only, in the dressing room, "They have not scored. Remember that. Every minute they do not score, they get more worried."

In the sixty-eighth minute, the Stars, worried, pushed their fullbacks forward, and the ball broke loose in the Rovers half, and Thabiso won it in the air and headed it, without looking, toward the right touchline, where Ayanda was.

He had forty meters of grass in front of him and one man to beat. He did not run at the man. He ran at the space beside him, then stopped, and the man stopped, and then he went, past him, toward the box, with Lindani coming across from the left to cover. Ayanda saw him come. He did not shoot. He waited, one touch, two, while the keeper came out, and the keeper went down, and Lindani slid in—

And Ayanda, at the last moment, lifted the ball over both of them with the outside of his right foot, the way he must have done ten thousand times against the walls of Orlando East, and it went up, and over, and down, into the net.

---

The noise from the south stand was like nothing Lesedi had ever heard. A hundred and twelve people from one street, standing on their seats, blowing their horns, banging their drum, and MaMkhize at the front with both arms raised and her church hat gone and her face streaming. Ayanda ran the whole length of the pitch to them. He did not do a dance. He climbed the advertising boards and the barrier and went into the crowd and found his grandmother and held on to her while the street closed around them both.

It took the referee three minutes to get him back onto the pitch.

The Stars threw everything at them for twenty minutes, and the Rovers did not let it in. When the whistle went, Lindani was the first to reach Ayanda. He hugged him. Then Coach Mabaso, the academy director, the one with the window, came down from the Stars' bench and shook Ayanda's hand and said something to him, and Ayanda nodded and said "Thank you, Coach," very politely, and walked away.

"What did he say?" asked Lesedi on the bus.

"He said he had been wrong about me." Ayanda was looking out of the window at the lights of Soweto going past. "I said thank you. But I wanted to say, you weren't wrong. I wasn't strong enough. I wasn't good enough at defending. You were right in May." He turned. "I just wasn't finished."

---

In the bus, in the dark, on the road north, Kabelo asked for the Book. He gave it to Ayanda.

"This one," he said, "you write in your own words. All of it."

*Matchday Eighteen. Highveld Stars 0, Tati River Rovers 1. Four thousand people. One hundred and twelve from one street in Orlando East, by the fat cake table. Sibusiso saved four. The captain cleared one off the line. Thabiso headed it to me without looking. I waited. Coach Mabaso was right in May and I was not finished. MaMkhize lost her best church hat and says she does not want it back. Twenty-six points. A.M., Orlando East, for K.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Nineteen, Home to Plumtree Border Wanderers

Baba Mandla Ndlovu came across the border for the return match in the front seat of his grandson's pickup, in his gray suit and his felt hat, with his two sticks across his knees and, on the seat between them, a cardboard box tied with string.

He would not say what was in the box. He carried it himself from the pickup to the stand, one stick in one hand and the box under the other arm, refusing all help, and set it down on the bench beside Kabelo, and sat down beside it, and rested.

"You are still alive," said Kabelo.

"So are you. I am surprised every time."

"So am I."

It was the third week of April. The heat had gone out of the year. The mornings were cool now and the evenings came early, and the grass down the middle of the Railway Ground had stopped growing and begun to go pale at the tips, and the mopane trees along the river were turning, here and there, from green to the first yellow. In the thorn trees along the north side the weaver birds had finished their nests and gone quiet. It was the time of year Kabelo had always said was the best for football: not too hot to run, not yet cold enough to ache, the light low and gold by four o'clock, the dust not yet back.

It was Thabiso's apprentice friend Rethabile's turn to sit, a Mosotho electrician who had never played a minute for the club but had been registered as a squad player in January so that the rota would have one more name. He sat on the other side of the two old men and listened to them all afternoon and said afterward that it had been the best education of his life.

---

Kabelo had a good day. It was the clearest he had been since the Blue Cranes match in February, perhaps since Plumtree in November, and Lesedi, watching him from the bench, felt the old cautious hope come back up in her, the hope she had stopped allowing herself because it hurt too much when the next day was bad.

He knew everybody. He greeted every Wanderers player by name as they came off the bus, because he had asked Baba Ndlovu's grandson for the team list on the phone on Thursday and learned it. He knew the score of the November match, and who had scored, and that the goal off the fig tree should not have counted. He knew that it was the nineteenth matchday, and that there were three left after this, and that Jonas said they needed seven points from the four, and that Okavango were in sixth on twenty-nine. He told Baba Ndlovu all of this in great detail, and Baba Ndlovu listened with his hat tipped forward and his hands folded on his sticks, nodding.

"You are worried," said Baba Ndlovu at last.

"I am eighty-one. I am always worried."

"You are worried about the bus."

Kabelo was quiet. Then he said, "I am worried about the Book. If there is no bus, there is no league. If there is no league, the Book is only Francistown. Francistown is a good town. But the Book was never only Francistown." He put his hand on the green ledger on his knees, the sixth one, which had seven pages left. "There are names in here from Gwanda and Ha Mohale and Ondangwa and Big Bend and Orlando East and Plumtree. Seven hundred and seventeen. If the bus goes, nobody new from those places writes in it. It stops. It becomes a thing in a trunk." He looked at his old friend. "I do not want to be a thing in a trunk, Mandla."

Baba Ndlovu said nothing for a long time.

"Then you had better win today," he said finally, "against my team. I give you permission."

---

They won two-nil.

It was not a beautiful match. The Wanderers had nothing to play for except pride and the pleasure of beating their cousins, and they played hard and close and sometimes a little late, and the referee, an elderly man from Selebi-Phikwe who had refereed in the league since 1999 and liked to explain his decisions to the players at length, spent much of the first half explaining them. But in the thirty-first minute Kagiso Sebina, the left back from Gaborone, who had never scored in his life, ran forty meters up the touchline to support Ayanda, got the ball back from him, and, with nobody else to give it to, shut his eyes and struck it, and it went in off the crossbar and the post and the back of the Wanderers' keeper's head.

"I meant it," said Kagiso afterward, to everybody, all evening.

"You did not mean it," said Ayanda.

"I meant to hit it. Everything after that was the ball's idea."

The second came in the second half, and it was Thabiso's, a header, the kind he had missed in September and now scored without thinking. He ran to the corner where his apprentice friends were with the accordion and did his stamping rain dance, and then, because Rethabile was in the stand, ran back along the touchline and did it again in front of the two old men, and Baba Ndlovu lifted one of his sticks in salute.

Two-nil. Twenty-nine points. When the results came in that evening, Okavango had lost at the Blue Cranes and Musina had won at home, and Jonas, at Lesedi's kitchen table, rubbed out a line in pencil and wrote in ink: Rovers 29, sixth. Okavango 29, seventh, on goal difference. Musina 28, eighth.

"Sixth," said Ayanda, staring at the exercise book. "We're sixth."

"For one week," said Jonas. "On goal difference. By one goal." He tapped the page. "Kagiso's goal. The one off the keeper's head."

"I meant it," said Kagiso from the doorway, where he was eating seswaa out of a bowl.

---

Before he left, Baba Ndlovu opened the box.

Inside, wrapped in newspaper, was a football. It was an old one, very old, the leather gone dark brown and cracked into a fine web of lines, the laces at the seam still there, a thick leather lace, though they had made balls without laces for fifty years. It was heavier than a modern ball. When Kabelo held it in his hands his face did something Lesedi had never seen it do.

"Blue Jacket Street," he said.

"The heifer ball," said Baba Ndlovu. "From nineteen seventy-six. You left it in the fig tree. The ball that went up in the second half of nineteen seventy-nine and did not come down. It came down in nineteen eighty-two, in a storm. A boy found it and gave it to me, because I was the chairman, and I put it in a box, and I meant to give it back to you the next time we played." He smiled, a little ashamed. "I forgot. For forty-three years, I forgot. And then in November you stood under the tree with your hand on it and I remembered."

Kabelo turned the ball in his hands. He put his thumb on the lace, on the cracks, on a spot near the valve where the leather had been patched, long ago, with a square of tire rubber.

"I patched that myself," he said. "In the goods shed. With rubber from a railway lorry."

"I know," said Baba Ndlovu. "That is how I knew it was yours."

*Matchday Nineteen. Tati River Rovers 2, Plumtree Border Wanderers 0. Autumn light. The left back from Gaborone scored with his eyes shut and says he meant it. The Mosotho danced twice. Mandla Ndlovu of Plumtree brought back the ball from Blue Jacket Street, the heifer ball, which has been in a box for forty-three years. Sixth, by one goal. Twenty-nine points. K.M., by his own hand, which was steady today.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Twenty, Away to Mafeteng Eagles

Rra Oteng Masilo got on the bus at three in the morning on the last Thursday in April, carrying a small suitcase, a cushion and his briefcase, and sat down in the second row beside Kabelo, in the seat that was Thabiso's by the rota, and asked Thabiso if he would mind.

"Rra," said Thabiso, "it is your first trip in forty-nine years. You sit."

So the treasurer sat. He sat for nine hundred kilometers, through the Thursday and the dawn of Friday, south across the Highveld with the maize fields cut now and the stubble pale gold and the cattle grazing in them, the windmills turning, the farm dams low and brown, and for most of it he talked with Kabelo about 1977: the railway houses on the Tati side, the goats, the lorry, the handkerchief. Neither of them had remembered so much about 1977 in years. Each of them kept the other going, the way two men carrying a heavy table keep each other going, and once, somewhere past Bloemfontein, they both laughed so hard that Coach Nko turned round at the front of the bus to see what had happened.

"Rra Oteng is human," said Ayanda quietly to Lesedi. "Who knew?"

"He has always been human," said Lesedi. "He just does it in a column."

---

Mafeteng was in the lowlands of western Lesotho, an hour south of Maseru, not as high as the mountains but high enough. In late April the autumn had already come. The mornings were very cold. There was frost on the grass at six, and the breath of the ponies tethered by the road went up in white plumes, and the men riding them along the verges sat straight in their saddles in their blankets and straw hats, the conical woven hats with the knob on top that Thabiso said were shaped like a mountain near Maseru, and looked at Nkuku with mild interest as she wheezed past.

They stayed in a school hostel on the edge of town, and on Friday evening Thabiso's uncle came to fetch him. Ntate Tlali Letsie drove a minibus taxi between Mafeteng and Maseru, a white sixteen-seater with a cracked dashboard and a set of plastic flowers stuck to the windscreen, and he invited the whole team to the taxi rank to eat.

The taxi rank in the evening was a world. Sixty minibuses parked in rows with their engines running and their doors open, the drivers calling their destinations, the conductors hanging out of the windows, and between the rows, women at braziers selling grilled chicken feet and boiled mealies and pots of papa with stews, and men in blankets drinking tea from tin mugs, and from every second minibus, famo, played very loud, accordions and drums and voices, each taxi a different song, so that walking down the rows was like walking through a radio being tuned. Ntate Tlali bought them papa and chicken stew and moroho and they ate standing up in the cold with their hands round the hot plates.

"The famo singers," said Ntate Tlali, who spoke English well because he had worked in the mines in his twenties, "they sing about the taxi rank. About the drivers. About who owes money and who has a new girlfriend and who has a bad engine. It is the newspaper."

"What are they singing tonight?" said Lesedi.

Ntate Tlali listened to the nearest minibus for a moment and grinned. "That one is singing about a bus from Botswana that is older than the singer's grandmother. And that the team inside it is sixth in the league and coming to steal points from the Eagles. And that they will not get any."

---

They did not get any.

It was a hard, cold, bright afternoon, with a wind coming down off the mountains to the east, and the Eagles, who had nothing to play for, played as if they had everything. They scored after eight minutes, a long shot that the wind took and carried over Sibusiso's hands. Thabiso equalized before half-time, a header from a free kick that he celebrated by running to the corner where his uncle and twenty taxi drivers were standing in their blankets, and doing his stamping dance, and the taxi drivers did it with him, which nobody in Francistown would ever believe afterward.

Then, in the seventy-eighth minute, with the score at one-one and the Rovers pushing for the winner, an Eagles midfielder took the ball off Jonas, of all people, Jonas who never lost the ball, and ran half the length of the pitch with it and scored.

One-two. Jonas stood in the center circle and looked at the ground for a long time.

---

The bus that night was very quiet. In the hostel, after the players had eaten, Jonas sat on his bed with the exercise book and did not open it. Lesedi sat beside him.

"Tell me," she said.

"Okavango won at home. Thirty-two." He did not look up. "Musina lost at Highveld. Twenty-eight. We are twenty-nine. Seventh. Musina eighth." He let the book fall shut. "Two matches left. Siteki at home. Okavango away. If we win both we have thirty-five and we are sixth, whatever anybody else does. If we draw one and win one, thirty-three, and it depends on Musina." He rubbed his face. "I lost the ball, Mma. I never lose the ball."

"You lost it once."

"Once is all it takes. In a column, once is a whole row."

Rra Oteng was standing in the doorway. Neither of them had heard him come. He was in a dressing gown over a sweater and he had his reading glasses on.

"Young man," he said to Jonas, "may I tell you something about columns?"

Jonas looked up.

"In nineteen seventy-seven," said Rra Oteng, "I scored an own goal in the sixth minute of my only match for this club, and I cried all the way home, and I never went on a trip with this club again for forty-nine years, because I thought one row in a column was the whole account. I was wrong. The founder wrote beside my name: will be all right. He was right. I have been all right." He took off his glasses. "You lost a ball. Tomorrow you will not lose it. That is the whole of bookkeeping. The next line."

Jonas was quiet for a moment. Then he opened the exercise book again, took out his pencil, and wrote something in the margin.

"What did you write?" said Lesedi.

He showed her. In his small neat hand, under the table: Will be all right.

---

Later, very late, when everybody was asleep, Lesedi found her father awake in the hostel kitchen, sitting at the table in his blanket with the heifer ball in his lap. He had brought it from Francistown in his bag. He was turning it slowly in his hands.

"Rra. It is two o'clock."

"I know what time it is." He looked at her. It was a good look, clear and sharp. "I know where we are, too. Mafeteng. Seventh. Two to play." He set the ball on the table between them. "I will tell you something now, Lesedi, while I can, because tomorrow I may not be able to tell you anything."

She sat down across from him.

"When we get to Rundu," her father said, "whatever happens, you will write the last line in the sixth Book. Not me. You. And then there is a seventh. If there is a bus, there is a seventh. If there is no bus, there is a seventh anyway. You will buy a new ledger and the boys will sign it at the Railway Ground in the district league, and the boys from Gwanda and Ha Mohale and Orlando East will come on the minibus to play for us anyway, because they will hear that we write down their grandmothers." He put his hand on hers. "The bus was never the thing. The Book was the thing. The bus only carried it."

"Rra—"

"I know. I know you know. I am telling you so that you will know that I know." He smiled. "Now go to bed. You have to beat Siteki."

*Matchday Twenty. Mafeteng Eagles 2, Tati River Rovers 1. Frost on the grass. Men on ponies in blankets. Twenty taxi drivers did the Mosotho's dance with him at the corner flag. The bookkeeper lost a ball and wrote in his margin what I once wrote beside the treasurer's name. The treasurer came on the bus for the first time in forty-nine years. Twenty-nine points, seventh. K.M., by the hand of O.M., who did not cry.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Twenty-One, Home to Siteki Lions

The last home match of the fiftieth season was played on the second Saturday of May, and by noon there was no room under the thorn trees for one more car.

They came from all six countries. Nobody had organized it, or rather everybody had: the word had gone out down the roads and over the borders the way word went in that part of the world, by minibus driver and cousin and telephone and the market, that the old man of Tati River Rovers was riding the bus to every ground in the fiftieth year, and that there was a home match in May, and that it might be the last time the club played in the league, and that the old man wanted to see everybody who had ever written in the Book.

Lucky Moloi came from Selebi-Phikwe, fifty-nine years old and very fat and very pleased with himself, in a shirt printed with chickens. Baba Mandla Ndlovu came from Plumtree with his grandson and his two sticks. Small Dube's widow came from Tonota. Gabriel Nare's son came, and Ishmael Tau's two daughters, and a grandson of Bakang Sello, the first goalkeeper, and three of the brothers Kgosi's grandchildren. From Bulawayo came MaNcube, in a minibus with Sithandazile and a container of beef stew. From Gwanda, Tapiwa's mother and his three sisters. From Ondangwa, on a bus that had taken two days, Meekulu Ndeshipanda Shikongo in her pink and white dress with a basin of oshifima on her knee. From Ha Mohale, by a journey of minibus and bus and minibus that took her a day and a half, 'Mè Mamello Letsie in her gray and blue blanket. From Manzini came Make Simelane, who had shut her stall for four days, and Nomsa with Lindiwe Nkuku Dlamini, eight weeks old, wrapped in the emahiya with the small birds. And from Orlando East, in a hired minibus with nine neighbors, MaMkhize, in a new church hat.

Lesedi stood at the gate and watched them come. She had a table set up inside the gate under the frangipani, with the cloth her mother had embroidered with a ball and a bus, and on the table, open, all six green ledgers, and beside them the heifer ball from Blue Jacket Street. People stopped at the table to find their names, or their fathers' names, or their grandmothers' villages, and stood turning the pages, and some of them laughed and some of them cried and most of them did both.

---

Rra Oteng made a speech before the kickoff, standing on a crate in front of the stand with a microphone that worked for about half of it.

He cleared his throat before the first number.

"In nineteen seventy-six," he said, "eleven railwaymen bought a ball with the money from a heifer." He held up the ball. "This ball. Since then, seven hundred and seventeen players have written their names in these Books, from Botswana and Zimbabwe and South Africa and Namibia and Lesotho and Eswatini, and from Zambia and Malawi too. Beside every name is the place where that man's grandmother waits for him. I know, because I am one of them. I played one match, in nineteen seventy-seven, and scored an own goal." The crowd laughed. "The founder wrote beside my name: will be all right." He lowered the microphone, then raised it again. "I am the treasurer. My job is to say the numbers. Here is the number. Two matches. That is all. Two matches, and this club decides if it carries the Book across six borders next year, or only across the Railway Ground." He looked up at the stand, where Kabelo sat under the umbrella with Coach Nko beside him, whose turn it was. "Rra Kabelo. Whatever happens. The Book will be all right."

The crowd stood up. It was the loudest the Railway Ground had been in fifty years.

---

The Siteki Lions had come to win. They were fourth, and they wanted third, and they had Bongani in the middle of their defense, big and slow and clever, and from the first whistle he talked to Ayanda.

Lesedi watched from the bench. She saw Ayanda's shoulders begin to rise, and then she saw him look up, at the stand, at the umbrella, at the old man and the coach under it, and she saw the shoulders come down again.

In the twenty-sixth minute, Bongani said something to Ayanda as they waited for a throw-in, and Ayanda nodded, politely, as if he had been asked the time. Then he took the throw from Kagiso, turned Bongani one way and went the other, ran past him into the box, waited while the keeper came out, and passed it into the far corner.

He ran back past Bongani on his way to the halfway line. He did not say a word. He simply held up one finger, then pointed at the scoreboard, where Tebogo was hanging the number, and kept running.

In the stand, Kabelo said to Coach Nko, "That is the answer to a man like that."

---

They held the lead for an hour.

It was the longest hour of Lesedi's life. The Lions came at them in waves, the way the Hornets had in October, and Sibusiso, with his daughter in the stand for the first time, stopped everything: shots, headers, crosses, a free kick that he tipped onto the bar. Onkarabile threw himself in front of two shots in a minute. Jonas did not lose the ball once. Thabiso, up front alone, held it and held it and held it with his back to the goal while the clock ran. The crowd under the thorn trees made a noise like a long wind.

In the ninetieth minute, from a corner, the ball came off three bodies in the box and fell at the feet of a Lions substitute who had been on the pitch for two minutes, and he hit it, and it went in.

One-one.

The whistle went before the Rovers could kick off again. The players lay down on the red dirt where they stood. Bongani, to Lesedi's surprise, walked across to Ayanda and pulled him up by the hand and said something to him, and Ayanda nodded, and they shook hands.

"What did he say?" she asked afterward.

"He said: you didn't hit me this time." Ayanda shrugged. "I said: you didn't deserve it this time. He laughed."

---

The results came in at six. Okavango had drawn away at Notwane: thirty-three. Musina had won: thirty-one.

Jonas did the table at the trestle table under the frangipani with half a dozen grandmothers watching him over his shoulder.

"Thirty points," he said. "Seventh. Musina thirty-one, sixth. Okavango thirty-three, fifth." He wrote it in ink. "Last day. We play Okavango in Rundu. Musina play Mafeteng at home." He looked up at the circle of faces. "If we win and Musina do not win, we are sixth. If we win and Musina win, Musina are sixth. If we draw, we are almost certainly seventh."

"So we must win," said MaMkhize.

"Yes, Gogo."

"And Musina must not win."

"Yes, Gogo."

"Then why are you looking so worried?" said MaMkhize. "That is only two things."

---

That night, after the grandmothers had been fed and settled in spare rooms and on sofas all over Francistown, after Lindiwe Nkuku Dlamini had been passed from lap to lap until she fell asleep on Kabelo's, after 'Mè Mamello and Meekulu Ndeshipanda and MaNcube and Make Simelane and MaMkhize and MaDlamini, who had come from Big Bend at the last minute on the back of a cane lorry and a bus, had sat together at Lesedi's kitchen table until midnight with no language in common, talking, Lesedi wrote the entry for her father, who was asleep in his chair with the baby on his chest.

*Matchday Twenty-One. Tati River Rovers 1, Siteki Lions 1. Everybody came. Six grandmothers at one table, one of them off the back of a cane lorry. The treasurer made a speech and held up the heifer ball. The boy from Soweto was talked to, and scored, and said nothing. The goalkeeper's daughter watched her father for the first time. A goal in the ninetieth minute. Thirty points, seventh. One match. Rundu. K.M., asleep, by the hand of L.M.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.

Matchday Twenty-Two, Away to Okavango Royals

The road to Rundu was the longest road of the season, and the last, and Kabelo Mothibi rode every kilometer of it in the second row of Nkuku by the window, with the sixth green ledger on his knees, the heifer ball at his feet and Onkarabile Dikgang, whose turn it was, beside him.

They left on the Wednesday. North from Francistown to Nata, where the salt pans shone white to the edge of the sky. North again through the mopane forest, yellow now with autumn, to Kasane on the Chobe River, where they slept a night in a school hall and in the morning, on the road along the river, sat for an hour in the bus while a herd of elephants crossed in front of them, forty or fifty of them, the big cows and the half-grown calves and the small ones running to keep up, and one young bull standing in the road with his ears out, staring at Nkuku.

"Like a referee," said Kabelo.

"The Royals' coach said the same thing in December," said Lesedi.

"Then it is true," said her father.

Then over the border into Namibia at the Chobe, and west across the long flat strip of the Zambezi region, the road straight and empty through woodland and villages of round thatched houses with reed fences, and women walking at the roadside with water containers on their heads, and children waving, and then, on the second evening, Rundu, on its bluff above the Okavango River, with the river spread out below wide and slow and shining in the sunset, and on the far bank, the other country, low and green.

---

All along the road into Rundu were the woodcarvers. Under shelters of poles and thatch at the roadside, men sat on low stools with adzes and knives, carving, and in front of them on the sand, laid out in rows, were their works: bowls and spoons and drums, giraffes and elephants and hippos, masks and walking sticks and stools, in pale wood and dark wood, the shavings heaped around the carvers' feet like snow. The Kavango carvers were famous across the whole country, Jonas said. Their families had carved for generations.

On Friday morning, Kabelo asked to stop.

He got off the bus with his stick and Onkarabile at his elbow and walked along the row of carvings, slowly, looking at each one. At the end of the row he stopped in front of an old carver who was working on a walking stick, a long straight shaft of dark wood with a handle shaped like the head of a bird.

"Can you carve a ball?" Kabelo asked.

The old carver looked up at him. Jonas translated. The carver said something, and Jonas said, "He says he can carve anything."

Kabelo bent down, slowly, and picked up from the sand a small block of pale wood the size of a fist. "On this," he said, "carve a bus. A small one. And on the side of the bus, carve: Tati River Rovers, Fifty Seasons." He looked at the carver. "I will pay you now. Whatever happens tomorrow, I will collect it on Sunday."

---

The Royals' ground was on the edge of town, near the river, a sand-and-grass pitch with a long concrete stand down one side and, behind it, a row of tall old trees, and beyond them the Okavango, so close that the players could see the water between the trunks during the warm-up, and a fisherman poling a dugout canoe along the reeds.

The Royals were fifth, safe, with nothing to lose and a striker named Haufiku who had scored twenty-one goals and wanted twenty-two. Their whole town came. There were three thousand people, and they had drums, and a group of women in long dresses of the Kavango style who sang in the stand from the warm-up to the end.

Coach Nko gave the team talk in the changing room in four sentences.

"We have played twenty-one matches," he said. "We have been to six countries. Every man in this room has written his grandmother's village in the Book. Go and write one more line."

---

Haufiku scored his twenty-second in the thirty-ninth minute. It was a beautiful goal, a run and a turn and a shot that Sibusiso touched but could not stop, and the Royals' supporters made a noise that sent the birds up out of the trees by the river.

At half-time the news came from Musina, on Rra Oteng's phone: Musina one, Mafeteng nil.

In the dressing room nobody said anything. Then Jonas stood up. He was not a man who stood up in dressing rooms. He took his green exercise book out of his bag and held it up.

"I have done the sums," he said. "All of them. Every possibility. If Musina win and we win, they are sixth. If Musina draw and we win, we are sixth. If Musina lose and we win, we are sixth." He put the book down on the bench. "Every line ends the same. We have to win. Whatever happens in Musina, we have to win. So we stop thinking about Musina." He looked round the room. "That is all the sums there are."

Coach Nko looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "What he said," and sent them out.

---

The equalizer came in the sixty-first minute, and it was Jonas's. He won the ball from a Royals midfielder in the center circle, the kind of tackle he never made, a slide on the sand that took the ball clean, and he got up and ran with it, and kept running, forty meters, the longest run anybody had ever seen him make, and from the edge of the box, with two men closing, he passed it into the corner. Then he stood in the box with his shirt half out and did not tuck it in.

One-one. Twenty-nine minutes left.

In the stand, with Onkarabile on the pitch, Kitso was keeping the seat beside Kabelo. The old man had the Book open on his knees and the pen in his hand, and he did not write anything. He watched. Lesedi, at the bench, kept looking up at him, and every time she looked he was watching, very still, with his whole face.

In the seventy-fifth minute, Rra Oteng's phone buzzed. He looked at it and turned to Lesedi with an expression she had never seen on him.

"Mafeteng have equalized," he said. "In Musina. One-one."

---

The last fifteen minutes were played with the sun going down behind the trees and the river going gold beyond them, and the light coming through the trunks in long bars across the sand.

The Royals had nothing to play for and they played as if they had everything, because that was what you did in that league, in that part of the world, against a team that had come eleven hundred kilometers. Haufiku hit the post. Sibusiso saved with his legs. Onkarabile cleared off the line, the third time that season. The Rovers attacked, and missed, and attacked again. The minutes went. Lesedi did not look at the clock. She looked at her father.

In the ninetieth minute, the fourth official held up a board. Three minutes.

In the ninety-second minute, Kagiso won a throw-in on the right, deep in the Royals' half, and threw it to Ayanda.

He had a Royals defender in front of him and another coming. He did not run. He looked up. He saw Thabiso at the far post, standing behind his center-back, the way Coach Nko had told him to stand in January, in Gaborone. He waited, one touch, two, while the two defenders came and the space behind them opened. And then he crossed it, high and slow and curling, out over the box, the ball turning in the gold light, hanging there over the sand for what Lesedi, telling it for the rest of her life, always said was the length of one long breath.

Thabiso rose.

He rose the way the men of the mountain villages rise, the ones who played uphill as boys, with their legs remembering. He rose above his center-back and met the ball with his forehead at the top of its fall and sent it down, hard, into the sand, and up, past the Royals' keeper's hand, and into the roof of the net.

---

The Rovers bench came off the bench. Coach Nko ran the length of the touchline. Sibusiso ran from his own goal, ninety meters, and arrived at the pile of blue shirts in the corner and jumped on top. Rra Oteng, at the bench, sat down very suddenly and took off his glasses and put his face in his hands. And Thabiso, at the bottom of the pile, got out somehow, and ran, not to the corner, but along the front of the stand, to the umbrella, and stopped in front of it, and did his stamping rain dance on the sand, alone, arms wide, for the old man.

Kabelo was standing. Kitso was holding him by the belt. He had the Book in one hand and the other hand up, open, raised, the way he raised it to ask a referee for a word.

The whistle went eleven seconds after the kickoff. The Royals' players came and shook every hand. Haufiku found Thabiso and held his face in both hands, the way the grandmothers did.

Two-one.

And at ten past six, on Rra Oteng's phone, from Musina: final score, one-one.

Thirty-three points. Sixth.

---

On the Sunday morning, on the road out of Rundu, Nkuku stopped at the woodcarvers. Kabelo got off and walked along the row to the old carver, who had his parcel ready, wrapped in a page of newspaper. Inside was a small bus, carved in pale wood, the size of a fist, with windows and wheels and a crack in the windscreen, and along the side, in careful letters: Tati River Rovers, Fifty Seasons.

"He asks," said Jonas, "what happened."

"Tell him," said Kabelo, "that we are going to Rundu again next year."

---

The bus went east into the sunrise, along the river, back across the long flat country toward the border and the elephants and home. Most of the players slept, piled on each other in the seats, still in their tracksuits. Ayanda had his speaker on his knee at low volume, and the long rolling bass went down the aisle under the sleepers like the river had gone under the trees.

In the second row, Kabelo opened the sixth green ledger at the last page. There was room on it for one entry, and one line.

He gave Lesedi the pen.

"You write it," he said. "I will tell you the words. And then the line at the bottom is yours."

So she wrote.

*Matchday Twenty-Two. Okavango Royals 1, Tati River Rovers 2. The longest road. Elephants at Kasane, one of them a referee. The woodcarvers of Rundu. The bookkeeper ran forty meters and did not tuck in his shirt. The boy from Soweto waited. The Mosotho rose like a man from a village where you play uphill. Mafeteng drew in Musina. Thirty-three points. Sixth. Fifty seasons. K.M., by the hand of L.M., who has always run this club.*

Then she looked at the last line, the empty one at the very bottom of the very last page, where in fifty years nobody had ever written anything because it was too close to the edge.

"You never signed," her father said. "In fifty years. You never played, so you never signed."

"No, Rra."

"Sign."

She held the pen over the line for a long moment. Outside the window the sun was coming up over the river and the reeds and the far green bank, and the old bus rattled east toward six countries' worth of roads, and in the seats behind her, a Mosotho and a Namibian and a Swazi and a boy from Soweto and a boy from Gwanda and a schoolteacher from Monarch were asleep against each other's shoulders.

Then she wrote, in her own hand, in the place her father had kept for her since a bag of oranges in 1980:

*Lesedi Mothibi. Second row of Nkuku, by the window, where my father keeps the Book.*

© 2026 CRUNOD LLC. All rights reserved.