The Ghost at the Drift

Ghost stories that I have heard people tell (Oom Schalk Lou­rens said), are always about the same sort of thing. You must have heard this kind of story often. A traveller is on his way somewhere, and he has to cross a drift after nightfall. People in the neighbourhood warn him that no man has ever been able to ride his horse past the drift in the dark. But the stranger proceeds on his way until he reaches a spot where his horse suddenly rears up in terror. Thereupon the traveller returns to the people who warned him about the drift; and he spends the night with them, and they enlighten him at considerable length about the circumstances of the murder that was committed there long ago, and about the ghost that haunts the place near the drift where the grass does not grow.

This is quite a good story, of course, if it is properly told, without too much detail. You spoil the story if you describe too fully how the ghost looks, and if you try to imitate the noises it makes – as I have heard some storytellers do.

Anyway, I have heard this story so often that I have almost come to the conclusion that there is only one ghost in the Transvaal. And that there has been only one murder.

All this reminds me of the time when Gert Bekker and I were driving by mule-cart to the Kalahari. We went through Rooikrans. Because this was my first visit to the Molopo area, and because Gert Bekker had been on that road before, a singular thing happened to Gert Bekker. He felt that he had to take the lead in everything, and he gave me a lot of instructions and good counsel. Although I had grown up in the Bushveld, Gert Bekker treated me as though I was some newcomer from an overseas city, just because I had not been in that small part of the Groot Marico before – whereas I knew the rest of the district as well as I knew my own farm.

“There are many ways in which a stranger to these parts can deceive himself, Schalk,” Gert Bekker was saying. “That kwê-bird that you heard calling now. You thought that sound came from in front, didn’t you?”

“I saw the kwê-bird when we passed him a few moments ago,” I answered. “He was perched on a bough of one of those withaaks to the left there.”

“It’s a good thing you saw him, then,” Gert Bekker continued. “Otherwise you might have got startled. I’ve seen strangers to these parts –”

“Kwê – ê – ê!” we heard the bird call again.

And so Gert Bekker went on talking, with the mule-cart bumping over the dusty road in the heat of the afternoon. Gert Bekker’s voice sounded as empty as the mule-cart’s rattling: his conver­sation was as dusty as the road: I only thought that his words couldn’t take a turn as neatly as the cart-wheels did in the sand.

Afterwards, in treating me as a foreigner in the Marico, Gert Bekker even went so far as to begin thinking out lies to tell me. The kind of lies that Marico farmers make up for a stranger from the city, so that they can laugh about it afterwards when they think of how the stranger’s jaw fell.

Among other things, Gert Bekker told me of a farmer near the Molopo who had trained a team of green mambas to form themselves into a long chain to draw water from the well in a bucket. “A mamba-chain is no stronger than its weakest link,” Gert Bek­ker said, making up more lies as we went along. And he looked at me sideways, at intervals, to see if my mouth was also beginning to open in astonishment.

Later in the afternoon we outspanned at the farmhouse of Jurie Snyman, whom I had met once or twice in Zeerust at the Nag­maal. I was glad that I could shake hands with Jurie Snyman and say, “Middag, Neef Jurie,” quickly, before Gert Bekker could introduce me as “Schalk Lourens, a stranger to these parts” – as he had done at other farmhouses where we had called along the road.

Jurie Snyman’s wife brought us coffee into the voorkamer, and we sat and spoke about the new kind of bot-fly pest that was invading the Marico from the Kalahari side.

“Do you know what a bot-fly is, Schalk?” Gert Bekker had the impudence to ask me, still keeping on with his role of being a mentor to a new arrival in that region.

“Yes,” I answered, shortly, “and I also know what a pest is.”

Jurie Snyman laughed, thinking that I was referring to our Volksraad member who was sitting in Pretoria and had done nothing to get government assistance for the farmers in our struggle against the bot-fly plague. The result was that we spent several hours in discussing our Volksraad member, whom we ended up by talking about as our bot-fly member, so that it was quite late in the afternoon when we again stood beside the mule-cart, which Jurie Snyman’s kaffirs were busy inspanning. Jurie Snyman came out with us. His farmhouse faced on to the road. Opposite the farmhouse was a rondavel that was used as a post office. Further down the road, partly hidden by the thorn-trees, was the thatched roof of a schoolroom.

“Your farm is growing into a fair-sized town,” Gert Bekker said to Jurie Snyman.

“Yes, indeed,” Jurie Snyman answered, proudly. “About half a mile beyond the school building there is also Ouma Theron’s house: she’s the local midwife. And just behind the bult is the new Indian store. That means five buildings by the road – two on the other side of the road, and three on this side – in a distance of a little more than a mile. There are seventeen pupils in the school. The teacher boards with Haasbroek near the Molopo drift and comes in every day by the donkey-wagon that the Education Department provides for the schoolchildren. My farm is actually the biggest town in the Marico, north of the Dwarsberge, when the school is in session.”

Gert Bekker looked at me significantly. He meant that here was something else of which I, a stranger to these parts, had until that moment been ignorant.

We were already seated on the mule-cart when it seemed as though Jurie Snyman had suddenly remembered something. He looked at the sun, which was within an hour of setting.

“You may as well spend the night with me,” he said to Gert Bekker. “No man can drive his trek-animals past a certain spot near the Molopo drift after dark. The Molopo is nearly eight miles from here. You won’t make it before nightfall.”

Gert Bekker, unlike myself, did not guess what was coming. So he said, no, while he was grateful for Jurie Snyman’s offer of hospitality, we had arranged to stay over with Faan Cronje, who lived just across the drift. Faan was his wife’s sister-in-law’s second cousin on the Liebenberg side, Gert Bekker explained, and he dared not be neglectful of the social obligations when it came to the more intimate kind of family ties.

“But after your mules get a fright there, just before the drift, and they won’t go any further,” Jurie Snyman said, “then don’t sleep out on the veld, but come back here. I’ll be expecting you in any case.”

Gert Bekker, not guessing what it was all about, looked at Jurie Snyman in some surprise. So I was glad that I was at last presented with an opportunity for enlightening Gert Bekker, instead of having had, until now, to receive all kinds of unwanted information and advice from him. For although I might be a stranger to that small part of the Marico around the Molopo, I was not a foreigner when it came to recognising a story, and in the few remarks that Jurie Snyman had made I detected all the signs of the Trans­vaal’s oldest and most worn kind of ghost story.

“The ghost of a tall woman dressed all in white haunts a spot near the drift,” I announced, “and no horse will go past that spot at night.”

“And she carries a baby at her breast, and the baby cries,” Jurie Snyman added.

“And no grass grows there,” I said.

“And around the woman’s waist is a long black girdle whose ends reach almost to the ground,” Jurie Snyman said again.

At last Gert Bekker was able to find words.

“But how do you know all these things?” he called out to me in astonishment. “I thought you were a strange –”

“It’s all to do with a murder of long ago,” I replied airily. “Shake the reins.”

Before he realised that he was taking instructions from me, Gert Bekker had cracked his whip and the mule-cart began to move off along the road. He waved goodbye to Jurie Snyman.

“You’ll be back here this same night,” was the last thing we heard Jurie Snyman shout.

There was something in Jurie Snyman’s tones that made the afternoon seem later than it already was.

We had driven past the school building and the thatched roof, and past the house of Ouma Theron, the midwife, and past the new Indian store that was about half a mile around the bend, before Gert Bekker again spoke to me. And then I thought that I noticed in his voice a certain measure of respect that had not been there before.

“I suppose it is – it’s all just nonsense, Schalk, about – about that woman in the white dress?” Gert Bekker asked me. “And do you think it really is a white dress, or is it just that all ghosts look white?”

“I am sure I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know these parts around the Molopo at all. You know what it is when one is a stranger to a place. I thought you were familiar with –”

“I didn’t know all that,” Gert Bekker answered. “And do you think that a murder really was committed there?”

I told him that I didn’t know about that, either. I had merely guessed.

“We should have asked Jurie Snyman more about it,” Gert Bekker said, “before we drove off in such a hurry. We can’t just go by guesswork in a thing like this. When it comes to ghosts you’ve got to have hard facts. Like how the ghost looks, and everything.”

Afterwards, when the shadows began to lengthen, I also started feeling that it would perhaps have been as well if we had asked Jurie Snyman a few more questions …

A little further on Gert Bekker again broke the silence.

“Perhaps we don’t need to go all that way, across the drift, to spend the night with my wife’s relatives,” he said. “We can call on them in the morning. I sometimes think that we Afrikaners lay too much stress on family attachments. It is something that becomes unhealthy if it gets overdone. We can perhaps just camp out next to the road, this side of the drift.”

“Even a good distance this side of the drift will do,” I an­­s­wered.

“I’ve got some mealie-meal and coffee and boerewors in the back of the cart,” Gert Bekker said again.

“And we can scoop up water out of the next jackal-hole we come to,” I said.

We also said that it would be a good idea to pitch camp while there was still plenty of daylight. We would be able to get to­gether a large quantity of dry branches for the fire.

“And a couple of dead tree-trunks,” Gert Bekker supple­mented. “A dead tree-trunk, if it’s a good one, keeps burning all night.”

I did not care for the thoughtless way in which Gert Bekker kept on repeating the word ‘dead.’

After we had eaten the boerewors and drunk our coffee, and had tethered the mules, we crept in under our blankets beside the fire. I wanted to talk about the thing that was uppermost in my mind, but I could sense that Gert Bekker was afraid to talk about it, and that made me also afraid to broach the subject. It is a peculiar thing that when you are alone at night in the company of a person with an ignorant mind, your own sensible outlook becomes clouded by the other person’s superstitions. That was what I felt was happening to me, lying there in the night with Gert Bekker only a few yards away from me.

And, of course – as I learnt afterwards – when Gert Bekker spoke about that night, he always said that if it hadn’t been for my absurd kaffir beliefs, which gradually undermined his own sound understanding and education, he would not have been afraid to sleep right next to the drift, on that very spot, even, where the grass did not grow. He didn’t mind sleeping on the hard ground, he said.

I mention all this so that you can see from it what an impossible sort of person Gert Bekker always was.

Anyway, we couldn’t sleep. We talked about things in which neither of us was at all interested. And we did not speak much above a whisper.

I can’t remember when it was that I first sensed something. I turned my head to one side and what I saw then made me dart one swift glance at Gert Bekker, to find out if he had also seen it. I concluded that he had. Because in a single wild movement he pulled the blankets right over his head. I didn’t see what he did after that, because at almost the same time I pulled the blankets over my head as well. After all – as Gert Bekker had taken so much care to point out to me – I was a stranger, comparatively speaking, to the Molopo area, and I could therefore do no better, in an emergency of this nature, than to follow his example. He had been on the road to the Molopo before, and he would naturally know that the right thing to do, when you get a sudden glimpse of a spectral shape a few feet away from you – a woman all in white and with the fire-light flickering on her ghostly features, and on the child held in her arms – is to pull the blankets over your head very quickly.

I lay a long time in the dark, too frightened to move. The blankets pressed close around my face, but I knew that I wouldn’t suffocate: I was afraid to breathe much, in any case. And I knew only one thing, and that was that nothing on earth would induce me to gaze voluntarily upon that ghostly shape again.

I hadn’t looked, either, to see if she was wearing a black sash reaching to her feet …

I only felt that we had pitched our camp much too near to the drift, after all.

For a long time I heard nothing but the beating of my own heart. I lay like that for hours, it seemed. Then, through the padding of the blankets, I thought I heard – laughter. I listened. No, I couldn’t be mistaken. It was, indeed, laughter of a sort. I would know the sound of Gert Bekker’s empty guffaws anywhere.

The explanation was simple enough. The wife of Piet Haasbroek was in labour. Piet Haasbroek had left for Rustenburg a few days before by donkey-cart, the family’s only form of conveyance. And since there was no one else to send, Rena van Dam, the young school-teacher who boarded with the Haasbroeks, had set out in the dark to call on Ouma Theron, the midwife, whose house we had passed in the afternoon. Rena van Dam had seen the camp-fire and had walked up to get our help.

The mules were quickly inspanned and the three of us drove off to fetch Ouma Theron. An hour or so later the midwife alighted from the mule-cart in front of the Haasbroek home. Gert Bek­ker and I helped in the kitchen, keeping the fire going for hot water. We also sat around in the voorkamer and smoked.

About all of this, however, there still remained one thing that puzzled me – and it was something that I was shy to ask about. I was on the point of mentioning the matter to Gert Bekker on a few occasions, when we were alone together in the voorkamer and the three women were in the bedroom. And for the reasons I have already given you – to do with Gert Bekker’s gross superstitions – I each time restrained myself. And I had the peculiar feeling that Gert Bekker wanted to ask the same question of me, but that something that was almost like fear was holding him back, also.

Round about midnight Mevrou Haasbroek’s child was born. Of course, Gert Bekker and I asked to be allowed to see the baby. And, somehow, it seemed to me that the birth of a child in that house, a little while before, and the murder at the drift, long ago, were in that moment equally lonely and solemn things.

We heard voices in the bedroom, and few minutes later Rena van Dam came out, carrying the child wrapped in swaddling-clothes.

And this shows you what a strange thing the imagination is.

For when Gert Bekker spoke then, he uttered the very words that I wanted to say. And he brought up just that thing that I had been worrying about all night.

“That’s like the child you had in your arms when I first saw you by the camp-fire,” Gert Bekker exclaimed, “before I pulled the blankets over my head.”

From her answer, it appeared to me that Rena van Dam had been a school-teacher in the Molopo area somewhat too long. It must be the influence of the neighbourhood that affected her, I decided. And I felt sad to think that an educated girl should suffer like that from self-delusions.

“When I got to the camp-fire,” Rena van Dam said, “you were both of you already lying with your heads under the blankets. I saw the two of you by the light of the fire when I was still a long way off.”