Coming Home: Act 2, Scene 2 Summary & Analysis

A year later, Veronica’s illness has progressed. Now, she lies bedridden while Mannetjie tries unsuccessfully to get her to eat soup. She tells him to wake her if “Uncle Alfred” comes by later, then she asks if Mannetjie and Alfred’s relationship has been improving. Mannetjie says it has. This pleases Veronica, who reiterates that Alfred is part of the family now and that he will be there to look after Mannetjie if anything happens to her. Mannetjie says nothing will happen, and she agrees that “[e]verything is going to be fine.”

Mannetjie’s favorite teacher, Miss Viljoen, has recently left the school, but Veronica tells him not to be sad and to keep working hard so that he can go to a good secondary school. Then she asks Mannetjie to read from one of his books. He resumes a passage about someone named Klonkie finding a cave decorated with bushman paintings and telling himself stories about them. Mannetjie asks his mother how to make a story, and she tells him that he already makes up stories and just needs to write them down. Mannetjie takes down Oupa’s old pumpkin seed tin and reviews the list of vocabulary words he keeps in it.

As Mannetjie recites his word list to himself, Veronica falls asleep, and Alfred enters. Alfred smiles at Mannetjie, but Mannetjie doesn’t smile back, and he becomes angry when Alfred starts to talk pessimistically about Veronica’s condition. Alfred responds that he’s praying for the best just like him, and that Mannetjie doesn’t appreciate Alfred’s own feelings about Veronica. He recalls the day she left the village for Cape Town and the total emptiness he felt afterward.

The conversation shifts to Mannetjie’s schoolwork, and Alfred recalls how Veronica used to help him cheat in school. He enthusiastically touts Mannetjie’s future at a prestigious secondary school, but the boy chastises him for not realizing that their poverty will make that impossible. He attacks Alfred for being too dumb and inarticulate to help him.

Alfred reveals that he does have a way to help Mannetjie, then he takes two sacks full of money out of his canvas bag. He nervously starts to reveal how he came by the money, saying that he’s already confessed to God. Finally, he explains: Oupa had entrusted him to maintain his house after his death for when Veronica returns. After receiving a letter from Veronica, announcing her return, Alfred rapidly started cleaning the house, and it was then that he discovered the money in a hiding hole. Oupa had been saving his pension money for Veronica. Alfred says that he knew stealing it was wrong, but the vision of finally buying the bicycle he had dreamed of his whole life was too powerful. He took the bags back to his home and hid them.

Mannetjie, enraged, attacks Alfred until he exhausts himself and collapses. Alfred bears the beating stoically and acknowledges that he deserves the punishment. He explains that he’s returning the money now because he thought he saw Oupa’s ghost out on the farm, and it filled him with guilt. He tells Mannetjie that even though it can’t cover Veronica’s medicine, it will now help pay for Mannetjie’s schooling.

Alfred stands to go, but Mannetjie stops him. He’s scared about his mother’s state. Alfred is too—unlike during even his own mother’s death, which he just wished to be speedy. He tells Mannetjie that they must stick together to support each other, as Veronica wished. Mannetjie agrees. Mannetjie asks if he must call Alfred “pa” now, but Alfred asks that Mannetjie just use his real name. He says wants to be Mannetjie’s friend.

As Alfred returns to tending Veronica’s bedside, Mannetjie takes up the pumpkin seed tin and tries to conjure Oupa’s ghost. An upbeat Oupa soon arrives and gives a long speech to Mannetjie in which he instructs Mannetjie to get the seed tin out and get to work; the weather is right. He then recalls the last harvest he sowed, which he did with Alfred. He describes the feeling of planting out in fine weather and anticipating the taste of crops to come as “real happiness”—the sort of happiness that makes one want to sing the loudest of anyone in church.

Oupa then recalls how the late frost came and destroyed their whole crop. Alfred was devastated, but Oupa stoically accepted their misfortune and told Alfred that they must simply plant again. Oupa relates the late frost to another one he experienced in youth while working alongside his father: when young Oupa was similarly baffled and dismayed, his father explained that it is useless to ask “why” about the ways of God: one must simply accept God’s will. 

Nevertheless, Oupa, recalls, he was deeply wearied by the frost that killed that final harvest. As he sat down under a walnut tree, he explains, everything started to fade, but in his dying moments he could hear Alfred’s voice joyfully telling him that one pumpkin plant had survived the frost. Oupa now asks Mannetjie what kind of seeds he’s keeping in the tin, and Mannetjie reveals his vocabulary words. Oupa is amused and disbelieving, but Mannetjie insists that the words are his seeds. They are “also miracles,” and they will grow. Oupa remains skeptical, so Mannetjie demonstrates what he means by sounding out some of his words and then beginning to tell a tale that employs them, modeled on his Klonkie book, relating the story of Oupa and his pumpkin seeds. Oupa looks on in approval.