He rings his brother that evening. They talk in a general way for a while, and then Adam brings the conversation around to their schooldays. It’s not a topic they often dwell on; under Adam’s casual tone, there is a guarded, defensive note.
‘Tell me something,’ he says. ‘Do you remember somebody called Canning?’
‘Hmmm. I think I do. He was in your year, not mine.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Jeez, Ad, I couldn’t tell you. Kind of average and boring. Why?’
‘I ran into him up here recently. But I can’t really place him. Was he a friend of mine? Did I hang out with him?’
‘I don’t know. If you don’t remember him, why should I? He was sort of a nobody, I think, a bit of a background character.’ Gavin yawns. ‘So how’s it going up there otherwise? Have you tackled the weeds yet?’
The weeds. They seem, somehow, more numerous than before, rustling and hissing, mocking him in a foreign tongue. When he’s finished talking to Gavin he goes out onto the back stoep and stares at them. What better way to mark a new beginning than by clearing out the weeds?
*
He’s up at sunrise the next day. He wants to start early, before the heat builds. With the solid heft of the pick in his hand, he is full of power and purpose. But in five minutes he’s gasping and reeling, slippery with sweat. The earth is hard and resilient as iron. The pick bounces off it, making hardly a dent, throwing his own force back at him. The sun is well clear of the horizon by now.
He works a while, rests a while, works again. After an hour he has cleared a tiny space, not much bigger than himself. And he hasn’t even managed to dig the weeds out of the ground: all he’s done is break off the stems at the base, leaving the roots buried. Despite the gloves, his hands are raw from the thorns and blistered from using the pick. The sun pours down its molten malevolence on him. When he wipes the sweat from his eyes, he sees the yard stretching away.
A voice says, ‘No, man, that’s not going to work.’
The blue man is leaning on the fence.
‘Why not?’ Adam says.
‘You need to make the ground soft first. You got to run the water over it, let it loosen up. Then you can pull those things out.’
The blue man has a hoarse, soft voice, with a heavy Afrikaans accent; Adam has to lean forward to hear him. From close up, he can see the lines on his face, the teary quality of his blue eyes behind their glasses, the way he has combed a few long hairs sideways over his head to hide the baldness. There are nicotine stains on his fingers and on the fringe of his moustache. He is about sixty years old and – now that Adam and he are squaring up to each other like this – just an ordinary man. He looks avuncular and friendly; a neighbour, like any other.
He says, ‘I see your windmill is broken. It’s a small problem. I can fix it for you, if you like. Then you can fill up the dam and run water over the ground.’
‘Would you? I’d really appreciate that. Thank you.’
They have slipped into conversation so obliquely that it’s no big deal. Weeks and weeks of silence; then they are suddenly chatting over the fence. Why didn’t they just talk to each other in the first place? Adam decides to introduce himself. By now names are almost incidental, almost unnecessary, but they go through the ritual. The blue man says, ‘Blom,’ and they shake hands.
Blom. It could be a first name or a surname. Somehow it doesn’t matter: one word is enough of a designation, as with Canning. But no; it’s not like Canning. The surname has stuck on Canning because it’s an echo from schoolboy days. ‘Blom’ is something else: an extraneous oddity, like a hat.
The blue man lets himself through the strands of wire and comes plodding over to the windmill. He measures and mutters to himself. ‘I think I might have a pipe that fits,’ he says. He goes off and comes back again with the pipe and a box of tools.
He is there for a few hours, banging and hammering and welding. He’d said it wasn’t a big job, but he exudes an intense flurry of toil and concentration. Adam makes tea and carries it out to him, feeling all spare and wifely. While they are standing there, sipping from their mugs, looking out over the brown weeds moving in the wind, Blom says, ‘I’ve seen you over the fence. Many times.’
‘Yes. Me too. I saw you see.’
‘I also moved here recently. I came here only one or two months before you. So we are like the new boys on the block!’ He laughs immoderately.
‘Yes,’ Adam says. ‘It’s all a bit strange to me still. I’ve never lived out in the countryside before.’
‘Ja, I can see that, ou maat. I can see you’re a city boy. Don’t know up from down. But moenie worry nie, you’ll start to like it. Soon it’ll be like you lived here your whole life.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Adam says, looking uneasily at the metal innards of the windmill, the weeds vibrating in the breeze. ‘You can’t really change who you are.’
‘That isn’t true,’ Blom says with sudden seriousness. ‘Didn’t you ever imagine moving to a new place, where nobody knows you, leaving the past behind... Didn’t you ever think about that? Starting again from nothing?’
‘Well, maybe. Lots of people have done that, to escape from something. But that’s just a con, isn’t it? You’d just be pretending. You wouldn’t really be a different person.’
‘Do you believe in God, Adam?’
‘No. That is, I don’t know.’
‘You should believe. If you accept the Lord into your heart, it’s like life starting again. Not pretending – for real. The whole past washed away! But I don’t judge you. We are all sinners in the eyes of God. Me above all. But I came through that test. My faith is stronger than before.’
‘That’s good,’ Adam says, and sips at his tea.
‘I have been reborn. And that’s when I decided to start again. A whole new life! I gave up my old ways. All my sins. I became a new man.’
‘I can understand that,’ Adam says. ‘I’m also changing my life.’
‘Ja? How is that?’
‘Oh, just... getting away from things. Taking time out to think.’ He leaves it at that. Poetry versus religion: he doubts they’d have a language in common.
Later, at the end of the afternoon, Blom is done. He steps back, hands on hips, to see. From the pipes that lead into the dam there is a clunking and throbbing, and then a rush of brown water. It fades, then comes again. With every rotation of the heavy old blades above, there is a sudden gush down below. The colour of the water changes, becoming clearer.
A headiness goes through Adam, out of proportion to the scene. It feels good, this successful labour with the elements. To have this pure transparency, driven up from under the ground by wind – it is a kind of magic. Although he hasn’t done any work himself, he has drawn closer to the world.
Blom comes inside to clean up. In the bathroom, he strips off his shirt before washing at the sink. While getting him a clean towel, Adam notices a bad scar on his back. It doesn’t look surgical; more like an accident. He would like to ask about it, but they don’t know each other well enough. Scars are a kind of history; they may have been made by stories too personal to be discussed.
Afterwards, in the kitchen, they drink another cup of tea. ‘Thank you very much for all your trouble,’ Adam says, but Blom only nods. It occurs to Adam that gratitude may not be enough. ‘Can I pay you for your time?’ he says.
Blom holds up a hand, palm outward, in refusal. ‘People must help each other,’ he says. ‘But if you want to give me something, you can let me have that.’
He is pointing at the peacock feather Adam had picked up at Gondwana. It’s been lying on the sideboard since he brought it home; he hasn’t looked at it once. ‘That? Sure. Take it.’
He can’t imagine what Blom might want it for, but he’s happy to part with it. There’s no real use, in the end, for Beauty. He feels touched all over again to watch the solitary figure of his neighbour plodding away afterwards through the brown weeds, his tool-box in one hand, the long glossy feather in the other.
When he thinks about Canning and his wife, he knows they would never help anybody like this. No, they are city people, with their corruption and complexities – they are, in fact, too much like him. Blom is a rough diamond, a real salt-of-the-earth type. The charity they’ve exchanged today is as simple and pure as the water still running into his dam. He is learning country ways at last!
That night, when Adam sits out on the steps and sees the blue man smoking a cigarette outside his back door, each wears a name and a face for the other. Adam raises a hand in greeting, and Blom waves back.
*
All night he can hear water running into the dam. He imagines that it might be the same water he swam in a few days before. It’s possible that it has travelled across the countryside, then percolated through the ground at the bottom of the river into some subterranean pool, from which the windmill has drawn it up.
In the morning he goes out to stare at the dark disc of the surface. There are strange things floating there, released perhaps from the mud at the bottom. Leaves and feathers. The dead shell of a dragonfly. He turns the tap on the outlet pipe and lets the water run. It pours across the parched ground like an explosion in slow motion. At first the soil is too hard to take it in, but after a few minutes the ground swallows in shock. The earth changes colour, from brown to black. Then the dam is dry. He closes off the pipe, to let it start filling again. He waits for the standing puddles to sink in, to loosen the ground, before he fetches the pick.
This time there is no resistance: the weeds lift out cleanly, roots and all. They are passive and brittle. He starts piling them up, to be burned later. He works quickly; he has a vision of the whole yard being cleared. But after he’s gone a short way, the ground is hard and dry again. The water has soaked only a small area at the very top of the yard. He realizes that he will have to do this in stages: dig a channel for the water, flood a new section, then clear it. It will take a long time, maybe months, to get all the weeds out.
But that’s all right. Man against the earth: it’s an old story, perhaps the oldest one of all. Already – even though the cleared space is small – he feels good. It’s the satisfaction of physical work: of honest sweat and broken skin. And the satisfaction of seeing the weeds in retreat, the turned soil taking their place.