The wood and tin of the door, held together by nails now brittle with rust, creaked and rattled independently. Skitterboud stepped out in time to see the crest of a blood-red sun buckle the horizon.
‘Ooh,’ he crowed, ‘in a hurry this morning, there’s time enough old girl, time enough to do the blue climb today.’
He liked to rise just before the sun. His hands fumbled with the buttonholes of his shirt. The button must have come off in the night and he remembered dimly a hard disc probing his dreams. Or was it the spear of her elbow as her wiry body turned away from him.
‘Meid,’ he called, ‘Meid, the sun’s up.’
She clasped her hands behind her head and from the bedclothes followed the slow swell of sun. Now young and fiery, it stuck out its chest to battle against the timid morning. She did not move. Later, when the sun grew pale and quivered with rage, she would not be able to look it in the eye. She knew of a girl in the Kamiesberg who had summoned her eyes to meet the midday sun and something so terrible did she see that no words ever crossed her lips again and the day grew black with thunder. That’s how things happen: not blinded but struck dumb. The next day the sun rose as if nothing had gone wrong.
Meid drew the blanket over her head so that the infant on her right murmured and rolled closer to the smell of milk. It tugged lazily at the nipple, its eyelids sealed with sleep. She could hear him outside, still chattering to the sun, to the chickens that tumbled noisily out of the pen, coaxing the fire in the cooking shelter with sweet talk. That was Skitterboud all right with his sweet talk, his chatter to keep the world smiling.
The child rolled the nipple like a boiled sweet in his mouth and complained loudly.
‘Shsht, shsht,’ she said, ‘you’ll wake the others.’ The trickle of milk had dried up and the child opened an eye to question the source. She smiled, rubbing the thick matting of his head.
‘I told you it would dry up in the summer. You’re a big boy now, nearly two, you can’t go on for ever.’ The uncomprehending eye dropped its shutter and the child rolled back, bleating. She thought of the lambs in the veld wagging their tails in vain for milk as their dams stormed off in irritation. Soon they would find a use for that wagging after all, use it to fan away the summer flies until their tails grow heavy with the storage of fat. By then they would have forgotten the udder.
‘Meid, Meid,’ he called, ‘what can the matter be with this woman?’ as if he could not address her directly through the reeds of the house. Where the mud had flaked off the reeds with heat, the smoke crept through the crevices making her stomach heave. But she sprang out of bed lightly, slipped on the dress which hung from a nail and fumbled for her doekie amongst the bedclothes. In the summer she slept bareheaded but during the day the doekie kept the sun from burrowing into the thick black hair, from worrying at her scalp like lice.
He was mending a wooden stool by the fire. The steel triangle stood stoically over the flames and the flat black pot on it sang. By its side the sound of hissing coffee water issued from the round belly of the three-legged pot brooding over the coals.
‘Where’s the mealiemeal?’ he asked. Her hands hung limp and her eyes scanned the veld as she replied, ‘Yes I’ll get it.’ But he jumped up impatiently, ‘I’ll go and I’ll get the children up as well.’ He moved like lightning and for a moment her body was kindled by a smile turned inward. Still Skitterboud, and she thought of how she had walked all those days from the Kamiesberg and arrived on this farm on the night of a dance. How rare such days with a reward at the end of the road, when he laid down his guitar and danced. Under the yellow moon the earth breathed gold dust and she the stranger whispered, ‘Who is he?’ His eyes were on her, Skitterboud, the man of shimmering thighs who spun like a top, his thin legs studded with stars.
She sprinkled a film of yellow mealiemeal on to the steaming circle and watched the boiling centre draw in the flour in greedy spirals, down, down, until the circles grew outward once again.
‘You must stir it in,’ he said. ‘You’re in a dream today. There’s nothing worse than lumpy mealiepap.’
Pimples of maize lazing in the slush, she could almost feel them captured between tongue and teeth, and her hand flew to her stomach to stem the nausea. He took the spoon from her. Stirring all the while, ‘I’ll bring you some kambroo from Dipkraal. I saw some in the valley last week; some tubers should be ready by now.’
So he knew. After three children he could not fail to detect that she was with child. The kambroo would steady her stomach.
‘Tata, Tata,’ the little girl called, ‘I want to come to Dipkraal.’ He swung her on to his hip and the leather of his face cracked into so wide and relieved a smile that she turned to her brother and from the lofty position chanted, ‘Eehee, Eehee, I’m going to Di-ipkraal.’ For a moment he thought of taking her. She would cool the hours in the stony hills stretching before him, but the sun was already paling with heat and the day would be very long. So like her mother little Blom, his favoured second born, and he put her down to explain to the coalblack eyes how Baas Karel wanted the sheep rounded up for a count. He, Skitterboud, had not seen the merinos for a few days; they may well have been impounded by Baas Coetzee. Stony hills then miles of red sand to cover, through the knee-high bushes dripping their sticky milk. And nowhere to hide from the sun.
‘Boohoo,’ she cried, ‘boohoo, you took Dapperman to Dipkraal.’ He packed the bread and filled the canvas bag with water from the bucket.
‘But that was in spring and Dapperman is older and stronger.’ He patted her head.
‘Yes,’ said the steam engine that was Dapperman, puffing energetically, his cheeks blown taut with concentration as he snaked spitefully around her, puffing, puffing through her amplified boohoos. He narrowly missed his mother’s clout and leapt deftly over the pressed thornbush wall that formed the circle of the cooking shelter. The little one inside had woken up and his cries fiddled to Blom’s boohoos, thickening the morning air, spreading into the vast expanse of open veld around her so that she dug recklessly into the jute sack hanging above their reach for the new enamel plates that she had meant to save for later that day. Pretty plates to catch the tears. What did it matter which set of tears, there would be plenty that day; there would always be snot and tears until the bodies grow strong enough to stifle the sobs and the sun dries up those wells.
‘Blom, Blom,’ she reprimanded, dishing with her back to them the mealie porridge into the new dish and, turning, saw the scrunched face first slacken then light up with pleasure. Blom’s finger circled the white enamel edge around the steaming porridge. ‘And white sugar,’ she crowed. They waited for Meid to explain these luxuries but her face was locked as she reached for the baby on Skitterboud’s knee.
‘You should be going.’ But he held on to the child; he did not want to go. He would give the little one his porridge today. The child flailed its arms wildly and kicked at the proffered plate. ‘No,’ it shrieked, ‘my dish,’ so that the porridge had to be transferred to the old dented tin plate. Now he was happy; he murmured in accompaniment to the beat of the spoon on tin.
‘Ooh,’ cried Dapperman and Blom together and, laughing, they shoved down the porridge to complete the picture that peeped in brilliant flashes of red and green from the brief paths made by the spoons. And there it was. A full-blown rose and a train painted on the white enamel. Dapperman, the steam engine, puffed and snaked once again around her, she crosslegged with face of bursting rosebud. ‘And now my turn,’ so that he collapsed, rose head lolling as Blom beat out a train-dust around him. Neither had ever seen a rose or a train. Dapperman said that roses were printed on, no, grew between the carriages.
The dishes had newly arrived in the shop. Last week on the monthly outing to the village she watched the boy stacking them on the counter and she strained to see the colour shifting under the tissue paper in which they were wrapped. The picture leapt out at her from the last plate. In his haste to unpack, the boy had pulled the paper right off.
With her provisions packed carefully in a bag for balancing on her head she held on to the concrete pillar on the stoep of Baas Piet’s store. She could not leave. Round and round she swung so that her body stretched like toffee in the heat, wrapped itself around the pillar, wanting what she could not have. It was then that she felt the new life twitch in her belly so that she swung the bag defiantly over her shoulder and went back into the shop. Baas Piet, who had long since despaired of discouraging the farm workers from colonising his stoep, looked eager and read aloud from the back of the plate: Made in China. A rose and a train made so far away in China for her children. She wished that she could take them far, far away. Someone had once told her that Chinese people did not look so unlike them, the Namaquas, except of course for the hair, long straight black hair, smooth as a horse’s tail. And Baas Piet? People say that once there were no white people in these parts, that they too came from far, far away, but then she knew that people say all sorts of things as they wait for the purpling hills to swallow up the last of the light. She looked at the Boer as if his face would tell the truth but his eyes were fixed with such intent on the knot she was undoing in her handkerchief that she fumbled with the coin and remembered that he had of course not addressed the Made in China to her.
On that long walk home with the month’s mealiemeal swaying on her head she squirmed at her extravagance. Skitterboud would be angry. She tried to be a good wife but there were so many people a woman had to please that she no longer knew what to do. As for the children – and she smiled as she thought of the enamel plates – they had seen neither train nor rose.
Ounooi Annie had a rose bush, right there in the middle of the veld, so that when she arrived at the big white house she had not minded so much after all. That was what a woman had to do. Baas Karel said shortly after she had come to stay that the place for his shepherd’s new woman was in Ounooi Annie’s kitchen. She knew that that was right, but oh, how she had hoped that Skitterboud’s smile and sweet talk would keep her out of that farmhouse so far away from their own pondok.
But as she approached, there was the rose blazing red in the sun so that she smiled as she pored over it, its breath on her cheek until she looked up to see Ounooi Annie smiling at her and yes, she thought, it would not be so bad after all, not so bad surrounded by these pretty things. For the curtains flapping in the window sent their printed pink posies spilling out on to the veld. Ounooi smiled, ‘Pretty roses hey! You can look after them if you like.’ And she, Magriet, plunged both hands into the rosebush to cup for a second the scented redness so that the Ounooi shrieked, ‘Meid, Meid, pasop!’ and she watched red blood trickle through her fingers thinking, That is my new name, baptised in blood.
Once her mother had told her of the name Magriet, a flower in the garden of Ounooi Visser whom she worked for until her death. White with a yellow-sun centre. How fervently she had whispered those words to the wind. Seeds, she had been taught at mission school, could travel for miles in the wind and she waited for the stray marguerite to root in the veld. But the wind whistled by in a flurry of dust; the name did not sound real. It was bound to be reclaimed some day. And so she became Meid.
Ounooi was sorry but she had plenty grounds for complaint. Cleanliness was next to godliness and Meid did not clean with the thoroughness expected in a Boer house. She was too often caught dreaming and she neglected even to water the rose. This was true. On the gleaming sideboard in the parlour she lavished all her care on a brass bowl of artificial carnations. She wrapped the cloth tightly around her little finger and, wetting it with spittle, carefully crept into the crevices of the waxy pink petals with their impossibly frilled edges. They made her smile. Whatever will these Boers have next? She could stare for hours into the glass front of the sideboard but best of all were the carnations. She wondered what would happen if she watered them.
Ounooi said to Skitterboud as he waited in the kitchen for his wages and the weekly bottle of wine, ‘She’s lazy, you’ll have to take her away and train her and then perhaps we could try her again some time.’ Lowering her voice she added, ‘She’ll be better, more willing to learn, if you married her. It’s not right, you know, even if you Bushmen will not think of God, He doesn’t forget you. He looks upon your sins and weeps.’
Meid could swear that Skitterboud wiped away a tear as Ounooi gave details of the document that would console God. She watched him crumple his hat in both hands and dimly did she hear the sound of his tin guitar twang out of tune. She could not remember the excuse she made for going back to the parlour where under their very noses she plucked a plastic carnation from its brass bowl. A ridiculously long stem but she would weave it through her doekie, for a marriage surely meant dressing up as for a dance.
Was it the marriage that brought all the children? God’s blessing? Her girl was to be named after a flower, but a flower she would know, something she could shout to the wind: the Namaqua daisy that breaks out of the stones washed white by winter rain, so that the hills hum with colour in the sun. Just Blom, plain flower, a name that no one could take away from her. She would never take her to the big white house.
She went back from time to time when Ounooi needed her. But as soon as the children filled out with food she lapsed and shamefully disappointed Ounooi whose self-respect could not allow Meid to stay. Not that Meid did not keep her eyes lowered or keep her voice from rising into a question mark, but the tell-tale dust pressed against a white finger trailed along the sideboard; her quiet yes to all Ounooi’s questions curdled in the blandness of the mutton bredie she served up – always a few minutes late.
Back home there were the children, hers again, and the patch of mealies she kept alive with buckets of brack water they carried from the river. The cobs were stunted, but in autumn she listened to the tall stalks rustling like paper in the wind. Then the marriage brought another child and she found herself once again standing at Ounooi’s back door, her head bowed.
Skitterboud’s figure was a black dot in the distance but little Blom still waved. Meid had gathered clothes in bundles and was now ruining a see-through doekie by weaving through the delicate stuff the thick stem of a faded plastic flower. She had not been allowed to wear it on the day of her marriage. Skitterboud said that it was wrong, that the magistrate would know by just looking that it was stolen. She snorted at the memory. The red-nosed man did not even look at them. His pale eyes were fixed at some point above their heads, taking instruction from God. Oh, she had not expected him to smile at them, but how could the sin be put right by Him if he, the intermediary, did not know what they looked like? She knew right from the start that the certificate had no power over her; that it was a useless piece of paper and certainly no match for the tokolos. She knew the tokolos would win in the end. She was the first to see him. On a summer’s night when they escaped from the heat of the house and the restless children to lie under a white moon, the stunted figure scuttled by, stared boldly and disappeared into thin air as she screamed. Skitterboud, who fortunately had a full bladder, pissed a wide circle around the house to protect them for the night. It was the very next day that Giel arrived.
The children shrieked with delight and she had to bend down for them to touch the frilled edges of the carnation now faded with age.
‘It’s horrible like you, like you, like you,’ chanted Dapperman at Blom.
‘No it’s not, it’s beautiful,’ said Blom, whose voice quivered uncertainly at the dirty pink of years of dust.
And they were off again, wringing each other dry with taunts. She would leave them to fight it out, wait until Blom, ashen with spent rage, should collapse on her for comfort. Meid waited, propped in the shade against the house. Around her the strange damp circles of just-darkened earth crimped at the edges. The tears of the earth, she thought, the stifled tears that rise mistily by night leaving the grey stain of salt. She watched the shafts of heat sucking up the moisture as the shadow of the house was shoved along by the sun. She burrowed a hand into the delicious cool sand. It crumbled through her fingers and fell into an untidy heap. She should not have disturbed this shadow of moisture. But things will happen without your consent just as Giel arrived and things could no longer be the same.
She had heard of him, the smart nephew who worked at a garage in the town. He arrived with wonderful tales which he told after much clearing of the throat as everyone gathered around Oompie Piet’s fire in the evenings. Of how he had driven cars, of trains with green leather seats and of three months spent in gaol for a crime which he could not tell about or had not yet ascertained. But when he described the red shirts and khaki shorts of the convicts lined up with their sickles to harvest wheat for Baas van Graan, his eyes blazed with anger. He tugged at the spotted neckerchief and looked into the distance and his eyes scaled the hills and seemed to land in the town from where his words came oven fresh.
He had come to shear, then stayed to plough for Baas Karel – there were not many who had learnt to drive a tractor. One day he returned with a sheep from Baas Karel’s flock. It was simple, he said, the sheep had collapsed in the heat and they were hungry.
‘Hungry, are we not?’ he challenged, but they all remained silent and Skitterboud narrowed his eyes and shook his head and shifted on his haunches saying, ‘It isn’t right. Baas Karel will shoot every one of us. The sheep are sacred to him.’
Giel looked at him musingly then waved a reckless hand, ‘Fuck Baas Karel.’ He sharpened a knife on a slab of blue stone and she, Meid, was the first to rise. She held a bucket under the animal’s throat and watched the hot blood foam into it. She built a fire; the offal had to be scraped that night. Fat from the roasting ribs spluttered on the coals and with the woodsmoke sent a maddening smell into the night air. No one could resist, and the children asked quietly for more. Later, as she helped him to hang out the meat for drying, their eyes met and clung to the moment. He rubbed his head shyly as if to check that the convict’s skull had not reappeared.
Meid rose.
The sand had dried out prematurely with all that raking, leaving the grey stain of salt.
Shit shit shit, she cried into her empty hands. For once the children were quiet, watching her with awe.
Skitterboud’s story is yellow with age. It curls without question at the edges. Many years have passed since the events settled into a picture which then was torn in sadness and rage so that now reassembled the cracks remain all too clear. They soften a facial line here and pinch into meanness a gesture elsewhere. A few fragments are irretrievably lost. Or are they? If I pressed even further . . .
Such, however, is my excuse for having constructed this portrait: the original has long since ceased to exist for him; only here is the story given its coherence. I am after all responsible for reassembling the bits released over the days that I sought him out as he moved with the winter sun around the pondok. We shouted above the sound of Boeremusiek crackling from a radio with tired batteries.
I am uneasy. He knows that I am after the rest of the story and there is of course my original reason for seeking him out. I can see no other way of getting through this visit after years away from the place of my birth. The silence of the veld oppresses me. I need dagga. In spite of his crumpled Sunday tie and talk of going to church, I suspect him of rolling a regular dagga pil. On a Saturday afternoon he would strum his tin guitar and beat out a dust outside his pondok with a truly remarkable shudder of the legs and he would sink down, pooped, saying, ‘Skitterboud, that’s what they call me,’ his pupils dilated in narcotic bliss. These legs will go on shimmering for years. But you have to dance on your own these days, no one has time to dance anymore, or makes a decent guitar. I don’t know what these Namaquas are coming to.
I do not have the courage to ask about the dagga. I am content with the story.
Today he looks tired. His face is a nicotine brown and pillow-down waves helplessly in his hair. I ought to leave him alone; besides, he is wary and will be on the lookout for leading questions.
We measure the efficiency of our eyes. I am amazed at how well he sees from those slits, banked up with wrinkles and sunken behind the high cheekbones that threaten to pierce through the skin. Yes, he can see the blue megalithic outcrop in the distance and the lone thorn tree on the horizon and the clump on the right which he tells me is a flock of sheep. And then I realise that he knows the veld as he does the lines of his hand; no degree of myopia or astigmatism can blur the topography. He had driven the sheep towards Bloukrans himself; he knows from the position of the sun that they will now be resting in the sparse shade of the dabikwa trees. He does not know how much he actually sees. I hand him my spectacles and his face cracks with surprise. Clearly his vision is improved and he mutters with wonderment as he steps around the house to gaze about the veld. He will not tell me of the things he discovers, of how the veld has aged. Have I ruined it for him? This, he says, tapping at the frames, is just precisely what I want. Then he whips them off and balances on his heels as he tells.
‘Those merinos were the death of me. The short-tailed Dorper, that’s the sheep for this veld, or even the fat-tailed Afrikaner, but the merino is as wayward as a young woman. No doubt sweating under that hot coat she is always restless, disobedient, leading the others astray. You should see them on shearing day trying to scale the walls like monkeys, even though they like nothing better than losing those heavy expensive coats. Ooh, I may be rickety now, but yes, I was the prize shearer in my day. All of us Septembers of Rooiberg, all the brothers and uncles and cousins, were good shearers, but I was the best, the chief shearer. The Boers would travel miles in their shiny motor cars in search of me.’
He puts on the spectacles and with the right hand shading his eyes he scans the horizon in a pantomime search.
‘Did you find the merinos?’ I ask.
‘Which?’ He bores a stick into the ground.
‘You know,’ I insist, ‘the Boer’s.’
‘Which Boer’s?’ he repeats stubbornly.
I swallow. I will have to use his term. There is no getting round it.
‘Baas Karel’s.’ And the word Baas drowns in my mouth, flooded with gall. I will not be foxed by him. He is amused by my repugnance at the word Baas. I retaliate with a direct question.
‘I mean the day you were asked to round up the sheep for a count. Did you find the merinos?’
He drags the stick to and fro in the dust before he looks up to say, ‘Yes, it was a long day. I didn’t get home till late, and in my bag the puniest piece of kambroo you have ever seen. It was too dry that spring.’
‘Gone. They had all gone. Filled the buckets with water and left. That night they all slept under Giel’s new roof.’
‘And she had really said nothing?’
‘No, there was no need. But I had hoped. She was a smart one that Meid, nothing could stop her. I think you had better leave these glasses with me. They’ll be of greater use here in the veld. If you put your mind to it you could see right over a hill with these, and if that’s no good, through the clouds into heaven.’
‘No, they’ve been made specially for my eyes. You should go and see the doctor and get him to make up a pair to suit you. Pensioners get concessions on such things so it shouldn’t cost much.’
‘I saw Dr van Zyl last year. You know Dr van Zyl, always a joke and a slap on the back. Well, he said to me, “Skittie you need a nose to wear glasses. Next time you’ll be asking me to replace your baboon’s nose.” And that was it. Anyway, I don’t have any papers and you need certificates before you’re given pension. They say I’m too young, see I move too fast for pension, and the young baas poked about in my mouth and said I had too many teeth left. Now my mamma and tata knew we were there without any papers from a magistrate. They told us to keep away from magistrates, said magistrates bring nothing but trouble. As a young man I thought I knew better, but you should pay heed, my child, to the elders. They know what’s right,’ and as I snorted he came to the point. ‘I see you’ll have to leave these with me.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want you to have them, they’re just no good to you. It will damage your eyes wearing glasses not specially prescribed for you.’
‘But I can see better with them.’
‘But it is precisely the point.’ He looks at me sympathetically. ‘You’ve been to school for so many years and you still believe everything they tell you. It’s those magistrates again, they’ll be behind this nonsense for sure. Who can know better than myself whether these glasses are good for me or not?’
‘Well, I can’t pretend to know better than you do but there are experts who know,’ I insist, placing the glasses firmly on my nose.
‘Yes,’ he says pensively, ‘the longer they sit on school benches with chalk and slate, the less they know. Look, I believed all that because they’re supposed to be so clever – until I heard what the cleverest man of all had to say. The magistrate. He’s supposed to know right from wrong and it was he who said it . . . filth.’
Skitterboud spits vigorously.
‘He knows nothing of right and wrong. All those people he locks up, you can be sure they know more than he does. Oh, they think they know so much but they know nothing, nothing. When I take off my hat and say, “Yes Baas, yes my grootbaas,” and hold my hat to my chest, I have to squint and chew my cheeks to keep from laughing out loud.’
He mimics in a grave voice: “‘Spend your pay carefully, Skitterboud. Here’s your bottle of wine, now you won’t need any more, and I know you people dance all night but get to church on Sunday, the sheep won’t need you then.”
‘I say, “Yes Baas,” and I don’t say that no one dances any more, that the young people have left. Ag man, they don’t know anything, even with all those important bits of paper. They remember nothing,’ and his Afrikaans slows down according to his idea of posh, ‘need to peer over their glasses to check their papers all the time. I was afraid of him all right, of the magistrate who married us. And it was Ounooi’s idea when Meid went with the children. She said, “Skittie, you’re a legally married man, a respectable Bushman. This is a case for the court. The Baas-magistrate will get the children back, he’ll settle this business for you.”’
‘So it was the children you wanted,’ I interrupt.
His tone is defensive. ‘You miss the laughing and the crying and the fighting of the children. You don’t always notice them when they’re there but when they’re gone the silence lurks in the corners like a sulking tokolos.’
The stick in his right hand sweeps careful arcs, clearing away the larger pebbles that fly off beyond its range. It is a young Jan Twakkie shoot, pliant, so that he is able to flatten some of its length on the ground and widen the clearing.
‘I shouted for them across the veld and Meid leaned over the latched lower door (Giel was flash; he had built a lower and upper door out of old planks) and she said, “Skittie, they won’t come. They live here now with me. They’ll see you tomorrow, they’ll see you every day, but first they must get used to sleeping here.” And all the while she was flicking with a nail at one of the panels of the door where old green paint had been flaking off for years, and only at the end of her speech did she look up.’
He grinds his heels into the ground and shifts his haunches as he orders away the face, the burrowing nails.
‘Eeh,’ he sighs, ‘I didn’t need glasses in those days,’ and he holds out his hand to have another look. I oblige. ‘Mine were the best eyes in Namaqualand.’ I look dubiously into the faded pupils, dull like old marbles scratched over the years by boys who play rough and cheating games.
‘I had,’ he insists. ‘Never a missing sheep.’ But even this route betrays him into the story. ‘Except that once when Baas Karel knew, but I didn’t say a word, not a word about Giel.’
Skitterboud wrinkles his nose to adjust the glasses. He is resigned to telling the story. His Namaqua vowels dip sharply, angrily.
‘I said to the magistrate – his nose you know had disappeared by then. Funny that was, he ended up with quite a small nose for a white man, but his ears had grown, limp soutslaai leaves that fell from the close-clipped back and sides of his head like those of a freshly shorn merino. I could swear that he wasn’t the magistrate but of course he was and anyway I had seen him only the once before, and I said to him, “It’s Dapperman and Blom, the baby doesn’t count, he’s still drinking at his mamma.” And as before the magistrate looked up to the back of the courtroom and said in a voice of thunder to the wooden beam, “Magriet September is the lawfully wedded wife of Johannes” (that’s my real name) “and has no right to take away with her anything from his house. Everything, from the children to the last scrap of underclothing she is wearing, belongs to him and is his right to retrieve.”
‘Now yes, at that point I shut my ears and listened no more and when I came out I spat out those words into the hot red sand and watched it sizzle. And there was nothing to do about my shame. I just had to wear it like the tie and jacket I bought from Baas Karel for the court. Everyone knew where I had been that day, the whole of Rooiberg knew of the filthy words of the magistrate. That he should want me to make her undress and keep all her clothes and send her running across to Giel naked under the roasting sun. Well, I shut my door when I got home and didn’t go down to Oompie Piet’s where a huge fire burned in the shelter and lit the faces of those listening to Oompie Piet’s stories. No, I went to sleep on those shameful words.’
‘Skittie,’ I say, breaking the silence, ‘perhaps you had better keep the glasses. I expect they will be more useful to you.’
His face cracks with a cock-a-doodle-doo of laughter so that I jump at the opportunity.
‘So you and Meid became good neighbours?’
‘Yes,’ he replies tersely. ‘I stayed in town till the evening and brought back a flagon of wine which I finished behind that closed door. So I found my way over to Giel’s house and dragged her out and slapped her once, twice, before Giel stopped me. It was a bitter day of shame for me, but you see when I woke up the next morning in the ditch where Giel had dropped me I knew that under the red eye of the sun we could drink a cup of coffee together. Meid always knew things. She wouldn’t have allowed me to hit her if it wasn’t for the baby in her belly. She said straight away that it was the fault of the magistrate; that the tokolos lurking about Rooiberg had an uncommonly large nose.’
Skitterboud walks off without further explanation. His chin is raised in recognition of the glasses he wears so that his last words whirl off in a gust of wind. I watch the slight figure lean hare-like as he makes his way across the veld.