Seed-time and Harvest

At the time of the big drought (Oom Schalk Lourens said) Jurie Steyn trekked with what was left of his cattle to the Schweizer-­Reneke District. His wife, Martha, remained behind on the farm. After a while an ouderling from near Vleisfontein started visiting Jurie Steyn’s farm to comfort Martha. And as time went on everybody in the Marico began talking about the ouderling’s visits, and they said that the ouderling must be neglecting his own affairs quite a lot, coming to Jurie Steyn’s farm so often, especially since Vleisfontein was so far away. Other people, again, said that Vleisfontein couldn’t be far enough away for the ouderling: not when Jurie Steyn got back, they said.

The ouderling was a peculiar sort of man, too. When some neighbour called at Jurie Steyn’s farm, and Martha was there alone with the ouderling, and the neighbour would drop a hint about the drought breaking some time, meaning that Jurie Steyn would then be coming back to the Marico from the Schweizer-Reneke District with his cattle, then the ouderling would just look very solemn, and he would say that it must be the Lord’s will that this drought had descended on the Marico, and that he himself had been as badly stricken by the hand of the Lord as anybody and that the windmill pumped hardly enough water even for his prize Large Whites, and that in spite of what people might think he would be as pleased as anybody else when the rains came again.

That was a long drought. It was a very bitter period. But a good while before the drought broke the ouderling’s visits to Martha Steyn had ceased. And the grass was already turning green in the heavy rains that followed on the great drought when Jurie Steyn got back to his farmhouse with his wagon and his red Afrikaner cattle. And by that time the ouderling’s visits to Martha were hardly even a memory any longer.

But a while later, when Martha Steyn had a child, again, there was once more a lot of talk, especially among the women. But there was no way of telling how much Jurie Steyn knew or guess­ed about what was being said about himself and Martha and the ouderling, and about his youngest child, whom they had christened Kobus.

It only seemed that for a good while thereafter Jurie Steyn seem­ed to be like a man lost in thought. And it would appear that he had grown absent-minded in a way that we hadn’t noticed about him before. And it would seem, also, that his absent-mindedness was of a sort that did not make him very reliable in his dealings with his neighbours. It was almost as though what had been happening between the ouderling and Martha Steyn – whatever had been happening – had served to undermine not Martha’s moral character but Jurie Steyn’s.

This change that had taken place in Jurie Steyn was brought home to me most forcibly some years later in connection with some fence-poles that he had gone to fetch for me from Ramoutsa station. There was a time when I had regarded Jurie Steyn as somebody strong and upright, like a withaak tree, but it seemed that his character had gradually grown flat and twisted along the ground, like the tendrils of a pumpkin that has been planted in the cool side of a manure-pile at the back of the house. And that is a queer thing, too, that I have noticed about pumpkins. They thrive better if you plant them at the back of the house than in the front. Something like that seemed to be the case with Jurie Steyn, too, somehow.

Anyway, it was when the child Kobus was about nine years old, and Jurie Steyn’s mind seemed to have grown all curved like a green mamba asleep in the sun, that the incident of the fence-poles occurred.

But I must first tell you about the school-teacher that we had at Drogevlei then. This school-teacher started doing a lot of farming in his spare time. Then he began taking his pupils round to his farm, some afternoons, and he showed them how to plant mealies as part of their school subjects. We all said that that was nonsense, because there was nothing that we couldn’t teach the children our­selves, when it came to matters like growing mealies. But the teacher said, no, the children had to learn the theory of what nature did to the seeds, and it was part of natural science studies, and he said our methods of farming were all out of date, anyway.

We didn’t know whether our methods of farming were out of date, but we certainly thought that there were things about the teacher’s methods of education that were altogether different from anything we had come across so far. Because the school hours got shorter and shorter as the months went by, and the children spent more and more time on the teacher’s farm, on their hands and knees, learning how to put things into the ground to make them grow. And when the mealies were about a foot high the teacher made the whole school learn how to pull up the weeds that grew between the mealies. This lesson took about a week: the teacher had planted so large an area. The children would get home from school very tired and stained from their lessons on the red, clayey sort of soil that was on that part of the teacher’s farm.

And near the end of the school term, when the dams were drying up, the children were given an examination in pumping water out of the borehole for the teacher’s cattle.

But afterwards, when the teacher showed the children how to make a door for his pigsty out of the school blackboard, and how to wrap up his eggs for the Zeerust market in the pages torn from their exercise books, we began wondering whether the more old-fashioned kind of school-teacher was not perhaps better – the kind of schoolmaster who only taught the children to read and write and to do sums, and left the nature-science job of cooking the mangolds for the pigs’ supper to the kaffirs.

And then there came that afternoon when I went to see Jurie Steyn about some fence-poles that he had gone to fetch for me from Ramoutsa station, and I found that Jurie was too concerned about something that the teacher had said to be able to pay much attention to my questions. I have mentioned how the deterioration in his moral character took the form of making him absent-minded, at times, in a funny sort of way.

“You can have the next lot I fetch,” Jurie said. “I have been so worried about what the school-teacher said that I have already planted all your fence-poles – look, along there – by mistake. I planted them without thinking. I was so concerned about the schoolmaster’s impudence that I had got the kaffirs to dig the holes and plant in the poles before I realised what I was doing. But I’ll pay you for them, some time – when I get my cheque from the creamery, maybe. And while we are about it, I may as well use up the roll of barbed wire that is also lying at Ramoutsa station, consigned to you. You won’t need that barbed wire, now.”

“No,” I said, looking at my fence-poles planted in a long line. “No, Jurie, I won’t need that barbed wire now. And another thing, if you stand here, just to the left of this ant-hill, and you look all along the tops of the poles, you will see that they are not planted in a straight line. You can see the line bends in two places.”

But Jurie said, no, he was satisfied with the way he had planted in my fence-poles. The line was straight enough for him, he said. And I felt that this was quite true, and that anything would be straight enough for him – even if it was something as twisted as a raw ox-hide thong that you brei with a stick and a heavy stone slung from a tree.

“What did the school-teacher say about you?” I asked Jurie eventually, doing my best not to let him see how eager I was to hear if what had been said about him was really low enough.

“He said I was dishonest,” Jurie answered. “He said …”

“How does he know?” I interrupted him quickly. “He’s so busy on his farm there, with the harvesting, I didn’t think he would have time to hear what is going on among us farmers. Did he make any mention of my fence-poles at all?”

“He didn’t mean it that way,” Jurie answered, standing to the side of the ant-hill and gazing into the distance with one eye shut. “No, I think those poles are planted in all right. When the schoolmaster told me I was dishonest he meant it in a different sense. But what he said was bad enough. He said that my youngest son, Kobus, was dishonest, and that he feared that in that respect Kobus took after me.”

I thought this was very singular. Did not the school-teacher know the story of the ouderling’s visits to Jurie Steyn’s wife, Martha, in the time of the big drought? Had Jurie Steyn no suspicions, either, about the boy, Kobus, not being his own child? But I did not let on to Jurie Steyn, of course, what my real thoughts were.

“So he said Kobus is dishonest?” I continued, trying to make my voice sound disarming. “Why, did Kobus go along to Ra­m­out­sa station with you, for my poles?”

“No,” Jurie Steyn answered. “The schoolmaster won’t allow Kobus to stay away from school for a day – not until the harvesting is over. But I am sending Kobus and a kaffir to Ramoutsa on Saturday, by donkey-cart. I am sending him for that roll of barbed wire. And, oh, by the way, Schalk, while Kobus is in Ramoutsa, is there anything you would like him to get for you?”

I thanked Jurie and said, no, there was nothing for me at Ra­moutsa that had not already been fetched. Then I asked him another question.

“Did the schoolmaster perhaps say that you and Kobus were a couple of aardvarks?” I asked. “I daresay he used pretty rough language. Snakes, too, he must have said. I mean to say …”

“You are quite right,” Jurie interrupted me. “That fourth pole from the end must come out. It’s not in line.”

“The whole lot must come out,” I said, “and be planted on my farm. That’s what I ordered those poles for.”

“That fourth pole of yours, Oom Schalk,” Jurie repeated, “must be taken out and planted further to the left – I planted it in crooked because I was so upset by the schoolmaster. It was only when I got home that I realised the cheek of the whole thing. I have got a good mind to report the schoolmaster to the Education Department for writing private letters with school ink. I’d like to see him get out of that one.”

If the Education Department did not take any action after the schoolmaster had used the front part of the school building to store his sweet-potatoes in, I did not think they would worry much about this complaint of Jurie Steyn’s. By way of explanation the school-teacher told the parents that why he had to store the sweet-potatoes in that part of the school building for a while was because the prices on the Johannesburg market were so low, it was sheer robbery. He also complained that the Johannesburg produce agents had no sense of responsibility in regard to the interests of the farmers.

“If I had so little sense of responsibility about my duties as a school-teacher,” he said, “the Education Department would have sacked me long ago.”

When the schoolmaster made this remark several of the parents looked at him with a good deal of amazement.

These were the things that were passing through my mind while Jurie Steyn was telling me about the way the school-teacher had insulted him. I was anxious to learn more about it. I tried another way of getting Jurie to talk. I wanted to find out how much the schoolmaster knew, and how much Jurie himself suspected, of the facts of Kobus’s paternity. I felt almost as inquisitive as a woman, then.

“I once heard the schoolmaster using very strong expressions, Jurie,” I said, “and that was when he spoke to a Pondo kaffir whom he had caught stealing one of the back wheels of his ox-wagon. I have never been able to understand how that kaffir got the wheel off so quickly, because he didn’t have a jack, as far as I know, and they say that the wagon had not been outspanned for more than two hours. But that was only a Pondo kaffir without much understanding of the white man’s language of abuse. No doubt what the school-teacher said about you and your son Kobus was …”

“It’s possible to get a back wheel off an ox-wagon even if you haven’t got a jack, so long as the wagon isn’t too heavily loaded,” Jurie said, without giving me a chance to finish, “and as long as you have got two other men to help you. Still, it would be interesting to know how the Pondo did it. Was it dark at the time, do you know?”

I couldn’t tell him. But it was getting dark on Jurie Steyn’s farm. The deep shadows of the evening lay heavy across the thorn-bushes, and the furthest of my fence-poles had grown blurred against the sky. It seemed a strange thought to me that my fence-poles were that night for the first time standing upright and in silence, like the trees, awaiting the arrival of the first stars.

Jurie Steyn and I started walking towards the farmhouse, in front of which I had left my mule-cart. The boy Kobus came out to meet us, and I could see from the reddish clay on his knees that he had studied hard at school that day.

“You look tired, Kobus,” Jurie Steyn said. And his voice suddenly sounded very soft when he spoke.

And in the dusk I saw the way that Kobus’s eyes lit up when he took Jurie Steyn’s hand. A singular variety of ideas passed through my mind, then, and I found that I no longer bore Jurie Steyn that same measure of resentment on account of his thoughtless way of acting with my fence-poles. I somehow felt that there were more important things in life than the question of what happened to my roll of barbed wire at Ramoutsa. And more important things than what had happened about the ouderling from near Vleisfontein.