In the grey light of morning the rainbow looks different. Darker than last night by lamplight. Then it looked like an empty bright stage-set where actors were due to appear, singers, to bring life to it. Now it looks like a hole in the plastering, a dark plane against the white wall. Dark rainbow.
Agaat is tired this morning. Her face is withdrawn. She appears by my bedside less frequently than usual. She avoids my eyes. Her embroidery lies folded on the chair. On top of it lies the little blue book open at where she was last reading before I fainted. The building of the fireplace.
Sometimes I think it’s no longer I who am the target of the reading. She does it for herself, to generate energy. To squeeze anew from history a last pressing of indignation, but not so as to destroy me with it the more easily, but as a shot in the arm, as fuel for herself to carry on nursing me every day.
Because her arms are tired. I can feel how she struggles when she has to turn me, lift my legs, my hands.
Her feet are sore, I can hear she walks with difficulty. She’s burnt out.
How valiant was she not at the start, in those early days when we had just heard what was wrong with me. Fired with enthusiasm even. She thought she would handle it, as she had handled all illness and death in her life.
She was upset that I wouldn’t take her with me to Cape Town, alarmed when I came back after a week.
Leroux came to fetch me and brought me back again. I pretended to be sleeping in the car. I didn’t want to listen to his chatter. I thought of Agaat, how I was to convey it to her. A few times I felt the wind buffet the car, heard him swear, felt the car swerve as he corrected. It was a wild wind typical of the change of season and it raged all the way from Groote Schuur to The Spout. When we got out in the yard I could see the willows by the dam being blown to one side. I could smell the fennel, sharp as always when the wind blew just before the rains.
12 May 1993 it was. A Wednesday afternoon. Agaat served tea and rusks in the sitting room.
In her eyes the full orchestra was playing.
So here you are again! Alive and kicking! Pure affectation! Didn’t I tell you! Or what am I saying? Let’s have it! If there’s more to know, I want to know it! Now! This minute! Winter pains? Frozen shoulder?
I shuttered my regard, answered cautiously, later-later-clear-out-now.
It was what he’d suspected all along, said Leroux and added milk to his tea.
Not hypochondria. Not this time.
Small smile, quickly wiped away. In front of him lay the papers with the results of the tests.
I must plan, he said.
One and a bit of sugar.
I must make provision.
Doctor Stir-well.
I must start formulating a living will.
Doctor Dunk-a-rusk.
You’re never done with such a testament. You can always change it again. In the end it really only has to state in black and white what must happen one day when you can no longer change anything yourself.
Tchirr-tchirr, the creeper against the pane.
Who must do it then . . .
Picks a crumb out of the tea.
Who may change something then . . .
I heard a dog’s bark downwind blow away right out of its mouth.
Who may change something on your behalf . . . take decisions on your behalf . . . now do I understand what he means?
Ticks, with the teaspoon in the saucer.
I must consider it well, I have enough time, he said. Three years, maybe five in my case. I must realise he himself does after all think very progressively about these matters, he always wants only to alleviate all and any suffering as much as possible and he is at my service I need only speak the word, do I understand?
As far as possible. Alleviate he wants to.
Up-and-down with his eyebrows. Read-me-I’m-an-open-book-my-name-is-Euthanasia-Leroux-MB Ch.B.
Well, in my book there’s little scope for speculation, Doc. I was born Redelinghuys, house of reason.
I beg your pardon?
I said, time will tell.
I wanted him to leave. Agaat was listening from behind the kitchen door. I could hear the floorboards creak. She had taken a dislike to the man from early on, could imitate his would-be fatherly blanditudes to a nicety.
At the front door he pressed a transparent blue plastic case full of blue and red pamphlets and brochures into my hands, also a book on all kinds of atrophies and publicity magazines on appliances, and folded my thumbs around the handle for me.
Do take well-informed decisions now, Mrs de Wet, he said, fortunately I know you are of a practical bent, somebody who wants to be in control at all times. And you are a farmer. Illnesses and suffering are a farmer’s daily bread. And fortunately you have no dependants at this stage who could hamper you . . . er . . . whom you have to concern yourself about.
The self-correction was half lost in the thunderous bang of the back door.
Grootmoedersdrift is situated in a draught. That was what we always said to one another at that time of year.
And wait, he said, it almost slipped my mind.
Three paces and he was next to his car. A big white plastic bag appeared.
On appro, he said, the newest appliances on the market, I thought I would do some shopping for you in the meantime while I was in town. Try them out, see what works, we can settle later.
He pressed the bag into my arms on top of the case.
A sheet of paper fluttered to the ground, he snatched it up and stuck it on my chest on top of everything else.
Oh, and then there’s this table, the whole profile at a glance, he said, symptoms, medicine, therapy.
Bedside manner in the Overberg, I thought, physician heal thyself.
And as he drove out at the gate, I thought: Milla has all of it.
Only now do I realise what I was trying to think that day. Because now I almost have it all behind me.
To make of nothing an all.
That was what Agaat made of me. The lamer, the more nothing I became, the more she put into me. I never had any defence. It was her initiative. To make me a lucky packet of myself. The person who has to wither so that the book of her life can be filled. As in like manner the great God had to shrink to make room for his creation. Or something to that effect. Even now I still can’t quite get a clean grip on the idea. It’s a sort of sum with varying balances but with retention of all the contents, only distributed in very specific packagings.
I went to lie down on my bed until Agaat rang the bell for supper. She had cooked specially to celebrate my return: Lamb pie, green beans with onion and bacon, stewed peaches, potatoes, boiled, floury as I like them, a ripe red tomato salad with onions. Damask. Candles. Flowers.
Welcome home.
Even a bottle of wine from the cellar.
Eat, she said, it will give you strength.
She served me, poured wine for me. The meat in the pie was finer than usual, so that I didn’t have to cut it. I was hungry. I was melancholy with feeling what hunger felt like. I wiped my eyes with my napkin. She pretended not to see it. While I was eating, she talked softly, gave me an edited-for-the-sickbed version of what had been happening on the farm in the meantime. She made me at home in my room afterwards. Hot-water bottle, new bedsocks, softest wool, look, I knitted them for you while you were away. Waited for me to speak, pleaded with the eyes, please, I’m Agaat, I’m here, with you, speak to me, tell me what is happening.
Another time, I indicated with my hand.
She switched off the light.
Sleep, she said in the dark in my direction, then you’ll feel better.
Later I became aware of a murmuring and got up to go and see. I listened in the passage. It was her voice.
Dys-pha-gia, can’t swallow, dys-ar-thria, can’t talk, sia-lor-rhoea, incessant drooling.
She was sounding the words. I peeped through the chink of the kitchen door. The plastic case and the white bag had been unpacked. Papers and brochures were spread out on the kitchen table. Agaat was studying my illness over her supper. On her hands were two grey palm socks to which a clumsy knife and a fork with three prongs had been fixed.
Spas-ti-ci-ty, she read on the table next to her plate, wrist pains, cramps, spasms, as-piration, depression.
Slowly she spelled out the big words: Movement spec-trum exercise. Mo-di-fied food con-sis-ten-cy.
And in the same breath she said, I’ve finished eating, you can come out now from behind the door, we might as well get to work on this, you and I.
You and I. Indeed. We’re still getting to work, if work is what one can call what has been happening in this room the past few months.
One could have decided not even to get started on it.
Because it would be too much.
I would have had to settle it on my own while I could still move, that’s what. Short and sweet. But I procrastinated every time. Just this first, just that first, must first clear up, first get my life in order before I put an end to it one day neatly tied up with a string. But I couldn’t.
I left the decision to her.
Euthanasia isn’t something that she can even consult me on any more.
Such a possibility doesn’t appear on her list.
How would she in any case have to formulate it?
Must I put an end to you?
Are you ready?
How do you want me to prepare you?
Or must I overpower you unexpectedly?
Do you want to know how I’m going to do it?
Do you want to choose the method yourself?
A pillow over your head? A drink? A pill? A crowbar? A knife?
She’ll never be able to say it. She chose the strait and narrow. Simply doing from hour to hour what was given to her hand to do. First things first, one thing at a time, according to a plan. As if it made sense, as if it held promise.
Why does she ignite the little bit of hope in me every day? Hope of a turn, a way out, a satisfactory conclusion, of which you could say with certainty that it was good?
I find that on some days I long for it more than on other days.
I heard the phone ringing early this morning. It was Leroux.
She was short with him.
Perhaps he had been hopeful. Because, no, she said, she’s still with us, and well. Well, well, well. I understand. I’ll do that. Right. Goodbye doctor. Yes, doctor. No, doctor. Goodbye.
And now she thinks I’m sleeping again after drinking my thick sweet tea with the bit of chilli powder that she believes is good for me. I heard her send the servants home. She wiped my face quickly this morning and beyond that did not touch me, as if she were suddenly scared that I might fall apart. I tried to reassure her.
Thank you, I feel better after the phlegm is out, lighter, I breathe more easily.
But she avoided my eyes, didn’t want to help me speak, knew it was just to comfort her.
I can’t help her.
Twice already I’ve heard her pick up the receiver and put it down again. She wants to phone. I wait. What does Agaat want to say? Whom does she want to phone?
She phones often, the chemist, the co-op, the shop. Orders things, organises things. And people phone here and she speaks to them and tells them, according to who is phoning, more or less. Rather less, more less, less and less. Platitudes. Truisms. The chickens are laying well, the harvest is almost in, her feet are cold sometimes. When she says that, they ring off quickly. People don’t want to hear about my ever more chilly feet.
If it’s Jakkie, she speaks loudly on purpose, repeats everything he says. About his research amongst primitive tribes, his travels. He gets to all of Africa, it seems, just not South Africa. Here he apparently only wants fieldworkers. Agents it sounds like, who listen to songs and send them on to him. To then be preserved in the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology. It seems to her Americans have money to waste, says Agaat.
Jakkie.
Sometimes I think she makes it up, that he rings, that he asks after me, that he says he will come.
But how would I know?
My child the great absence.
What he inherited from me and Jak is definitely recognisable. Slightly melancholy, sometimes quite sharp with his tongue. Agaat one hears most clearly in him. The sayings, the songs, the rhymes, in which he has an obsessive interest. Sometimes she sings something on the phone for him if he can’t remember the words any more.
The bottom of the bottle.
The Sunday morning.
Ai, the ordinary little old songs, and then he did have such a beautiful voice, the child. Would it be him that she wants to ring? A last chance to come?
When he wrote to say he was starting to study all over again, I wrote back saying but surely there’s a department of Afrikaans cultural history at Stellenbosch, isn’t there? And then in his next letter he delivered himself of a whole lot of stuff about how he wasn’t a Patriomanic Oxwagonologist, but an anthropologist, and that meant that it was the rubbish bins of the worthy professorial Brethren of Stellenbosch, not their ideas, that he had to scrutinise under a magnifying glass. The ideas, he wrote, spoke for themselves, they flared to high heaven like pillars of fire in the desert, they couldn’t be missed by a deaf-and-dumb dog with a blocked nose.
It upset me, that the child could now turn so sharply against his own people. Being radical surely didn’t oblige you to become disrespectful. It wouldn’t have been wise of me to react at that stage. Those were his refractory years. Not that he ever fitted in altogether. Even as a child always half-apart, never really interested in his peers, tied to Agaat’s apron strings here on the farm. Later, too, not much time or taste for the antics of his fellow-students or for the other officers in the Defence Force. Herd animals, he said, always had to have a bell-wether and a scapegoat, without those they couldn’t function.
Nowadays he sounds more concerned. Not about the headline news, he writes, but about ‘the little grey bushes,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. Surely one can’t live with so little faith in the world?
He writes but rarely. When he writes to Agaat, she no longer shows it to me. Not that she ever really showed his letters, she just read out from them, quoted what she wanted to.
There was just the one letter, the one that she had to show us, Jak and me, the first one after he vanished. Of that I saw only the first line. And when I saw it again, it was so besmeared with blood that the pages were stuck together.
She would supposedly still read it to me. Nothing came of that. More than a year later only did Jakkie report on everything. Rather synoptically. No reference to that first confession and plea.
Did we bring him up wrongly?
Can’t have been too wrongly, for he has a job and a house and a will of his own.
It’s Agaat who’s been most badly hurt. She pines for him, I can see it, when she gazes out of the door in a certain way and closes her eyes for a moment, or, sometimes at night, when the doors here are thrown open and she lowers her embroidery and turns her head askance to listen, her cap tilted at an angle like a radar dish.
Does she want to phone him this morning? Perhaps she’s struggling with the dialling codes for overseas. Perhaps she wants to pretend to be phoning him, for my sake. Perhaps she’s trying to think what she’d better say then, how she should say it, for the benefit of my listening ears.
But I know what her face looks like when she thinks she’s going to be talking to Jakkie.
Perhaps it’s the undertaker, rather, that she wants to phone. For a preview. Perhaps she hopes that it will encourage me, such a quantity surveyor’s assessment. Just as well that I’ve been deprived of speech.
Of the friends it’s only Beatrice that Agaat still allows to see me, if she should want to, that is. After that conversation in Jak’s office she’s rather withdrawn herself from me. Scared of her own emotions. Only now do I realise how widespread it must be. Blunted men, suck-weary women. Only death can still whet their appetites.
Agaat keeps their visits brief since she’s realised it. Gives them tea in the sitting room, lets them greet in the doorway, not a step closer, takes them out again. Closes the front door on their backs. Sometimes they slip through, down the passage. The inquisitive mainly, the spiteful attracted to the bed of affliction.
Such vanity, it all seems from here. The endless stream of visitors that I had here at one stage. Until Agaat decided that was enough now. Now it’s her turn and her turn alone.
Now that I have only my thoughts that I may think, without ever having to express them, the last scrapings of my senses. Light, dark, heat, voices, open doors, wind. The ruin that Agaat helps me to inhabit. A squatter in my own body. Wind-blown settlement. A perilous freedom.
So she would be able to spend the rest of her earthly days writing down what she went through with me. If I provisionally have the advantage, that’s only because I won’t live for long enough to read her writings one day.
She’d be capable of putting my head in a clamp to force me. Specially intended for my eyes. Niche market.
There she is dialling the number in the passage now, she sits down for the conversation. She’ll dissemble more if she thinks I’m sleeping.
This is Agaat, she says. Her voice comes out low.
She clears her throat. Lower the girl.
This is Grootmoedersdrift, Nooi Beatrice, Agaat speaking.
That’s better. In her place. Sharp and clear. The soul of innocence. The brownest servant in the land.
Morning, Nooi, how are you, Nooi?
No, so-so, Nooi. Nooi, I want to ask if you can help me, Nooi. I must get to town tomorrow, Nooi, with Dawid. I want to ask if you could come and watch over Ounooi here for a few hours, please Nooi.
Watch over. Masterly choice of words, Agaat.
What was that, Nooi? No, I must buy all sorts of things, at the chemist and from the shop. And I must arrange things with the printer, for the cards and the programme as the ounooi wants them all for the funeral.
Yes, there’ll be many people, Nooi. If everybody comes it will be close to a hundred people, we’ll have to stir our stumps, Nooi.
Stir our stumps. Lord. Is she making it up, perhaps? Perhaps she wants the farm exchange to hear. Perhaps she’s talking straight into the monotone of the dialling tone.
No, Saar and Lietja wouldn’t know, Nooi, they’re farm people, they’re unwashed.
You’re right in there, my old body-servant, all the way to my neighbour’s wife’s tonsils you’re in.
Yes, everything in order here, Nooi, just last night we almost had a mishap. No, the slimes, the slimes, you know, go and settle under in the lungs, as you know she can’t cough for herself any more.
No, I knock it to the top as doctor taught me, then I remove it with a little suction pump, I know how to by now. Doctor was here, yes, he gave oxygen. We have oxygen here now.
Yes, he showed me how.
Not much, about two hours at a time, but then I get up, then I look.
How do you mean now, Nooi?
No, Nooi, the ounooi plays along very well, she knows I must do it all, she understands.
Yes, Agaat, she lies here and she understands. And she listens to the price you have to pay there on the telephone for a simple neighbourly favour. Old vulture’s beak smacks as she devours the line. Feed her, Agaat. Feed her till she’s gorged.
Agaat lowers her voice. She coughs.
No, quite clear. Completely conscious still.
No, doctor says you can’t do more at home than I’m doing. He says otherwise she must go off to hospital.
That really wouldn’t work, Nooi.
No, I just know, she doesn’t want to. She signed the papers.
She doesn’t want the machines on her. She thinks doctor wants to prescribe to her how. How she must, you know Nooi, how she must . . . go before . . .
Agaat shifts her weight on the stool. The boards creak in the passage. She is quiet for a long time. Would she be patting her cap to make sure that it’s seated properly? Would she be concentrating on the floorboards?
No, says Agaat, she would never, she’s too obstinate, she wants to do it herself.
I’ll watch well, Nooi Beatrice, you know don’t you, we know each other, the ounooi and me, we’ve come a long way together. She only wants me here.
No, I understand her, Nooi, she still wants to see everything, she wants to hear, I know, she still wants to taste and everything.
No, I just know. No, she can’t, not a word, but I look at her then I know.
Yes, Nooi, please, Nooi. As early as you can, yes, Nooi. Eight o’clock, half past eight. There’ll be breakfast here for you, Nooi.
Yes, by twelve we’ll be back.
First to the co-op, yes, Dawid must get things, parts for the combine harvester that he has to keep in order, yes, and sacks.
Baling wire, yes, there’s enough, the railway bus delivered.
A bit of a squeeze everything, yes, and the harvest is late this year, but I knew it would be around Christmas sometime, so my side is ready.
Yes, so now we can only wait . . .
Agaat’s voice sounds tired.
Yes, yes, only to town, as I say, Nooi. We have to deliver things. No, the eggs and the milk. Pumpkins. Onions too. And I must exchange the videos. But the story films upset her, now I keep to nature films. National Geographic, yes.
That’s right, Agaat, butterflies, bats, killer whales. Juicy bribes for the neighbour’s wife.
Agaat rubs out an insect on the passage floor with the point of her shoe.
Yes, Human and Pitt, she says.
Quickly she speaks now.
Yes, that’s here already, it’s standing in the shed. They want to come and do it here. Yes, they say it’s better at home when somebody has been lying for such a long time already.
Dominee, yes, he phones regularly and asks, yes, Mrs Dominee as well, but Ounooi doesn’t want them here, nor the elder.
I do the service.
I do it, yes. I pray and I read when she feels the need, and I sing.
Yes. It will be here on the farm. In the graveyard here.
Yes, it’s been dug for a long time. Next to her mother’s. Wire netting over it so that things can’t nest in it.
Weeded, yes. Whitewashed, too, the wall. Everything tidy. I sowed a few painted ladies seeds there, they’re nicely in flower now.
Who? Jakkie? Last time he still said he was coming. It’s snowing there, he says it’s lying thick. Tomorrow I’m sending him a telegram so that he has it, black on white.
He’s working, yes till just before Christmas, they don’t have a holiday now.
No, it’s arranged. Everything’s arranged. So will you please come tomorrow, Nooi? Thank you very much, Nooi. Till tomorrow then, Nooi. Thank you, Nooi. The same to you, Nooi.
I beg your pardon, Nooi?
No, doctor says he thinks less than a month, Nooi, perhaps a month.
No, Nooi, yes, Nooi, we can only hope for the best, Nooi. Well, that’s fine then, Nooi. Till tomorrow, Nooi. Goodbye, Nooi.
Tsk, Agaat sucks her teeth.
I don’t hear her replace the receiver.
The board next to the telephone stool creaks as she comes upright and then it creaks again as she sits down again. Then it creaks again. Then she replaces the receiver with a soft click. Then it clicks again as she lifts it.
Is everything in order, Agaat?
She slams the phone down hard on the cradle. The receiver falls off, I can hear it banging against the wall as it swings from its cord.
Tring, goes the telephone. Again the receiver is slammed down.
She walks down the passage with loud confused steps. She walks past the kitchen door, she walks blindly into the sitting room. She kicks over something there. She sets it upright. It falls over again, metal on wood. Other things fall. Thud, it goes, thud, thud, thud. She’s back in the passage. She wants to come to me, but she can’t. She’s dragging something, wires across the floor.
What do I hear? A groan, a curse, a sob?
Two doors slam. The kitchen door, the screen door. And then another one, the outside room’s.
A dog barks.
What else do I hear? Windows are slammed shut, stiff copper catches violently pulled over the lip of the window frame, and then opened again.
Curtains are yanked shut, too far so that half of the window is exposed again. Plucked to and fro, two rings come undone.
I understand, Agaat. It was too much. Your voice, your words, your news, your request, it was too much for you to hear.
I see you. You’re standing in your room, you’re standing and you can’t stand any longer. You bend at the middle and you bend at the backs of your legs, your back hunches, you crawl forward over the linoleum. You take the poker, you pull out the grate. You crawl into your hearth, white cap first. You go and lie with your knees pulled up in the old black soot. You make yourself heavy and you make yourself dense and you sink away under the concrete with your fist in your mouth.
How can I blame you for wanting to vanish, Agaat? That you want to get away from me, away from the tyranny of me? More inescapable than ever, now that I can say or do nothing, now that I myself am floundered, and am immoveable as the stones. I would want to open myself to you and take you up into myself and comfort you. But I cannot, because I am your adversary exactly because I am as I am, mute and dense, and you are looking for a safe refuge from me. Under your own stones.
How can I accompany you to where you are now? At the heart of the hearth, under the soot, where you want to conceal yourself, under the foundations, under the stone strata, where they are blue, where you find a crevice into which to disappear, and haul in the block of stone on top of you, so that you can be occluded, with your arm over your head, with your fist in your mouth? Until nobody searches for you any more, to draw you out, to split you into parts and stretch you over spars and to infuse you and to chafe you and to rap you till you scream, till you sing, till you dance to their tune? Till you feel time click shut behind you and everything else falls silent, in your mouth no taste any more save the clean chalky tang of lime and scale?
So that I can come to be there with you, with my hand on your hip bone, with my hand on your shoulder tip to wait with you in the dark. For them to be rendered white and tidy, your bones, one by one, your clavicle, like a rudder, like an ensign, your shoulder blades like fans, your ribs shiny spokes, inside them a cleared hold, with every mast and beam caulked and planished in the dense rock face, the rock that retreats before your entry, a small fanfare. So that you can come to rest with all that is yours fixed and impermeable like pitch, your sails furled.
How can I be with you while you become a fern, a jaw of something inchoate, a keel, a beckoning nodule that flows in the grain of stone?
I shall go and lie with my head in that corner, with my ear on the place where the last trace of you lingered. I shall draw the suppurate stain of you into my nose, careful that you should not mark me, so that you shall be free of me, and free of yourself, a fume, a dark blemish that mists over the stone on which I am lying with my cheek.
…
Open at page 221, Agaat said. Her voice was clear. She put the old Farmer’s Handbook on your lap. End of October it was, 1960, the year of the botulism.
Ask me from the beginning, she said, ask me all the symptoms, and all the cures, ask me trick questions, I’ve learnt it all, I know everything now, I’ll never make a mistake again.
Never mind Agaat, you wanted to say, but your voice wouldn’t come. You sat there crying but she struck up and launched into her lesson. She wanted to force you upright. In spite of the battle between you, or for its sake, because how was she to fight you if you were weak? How was she to hate you?
You couldn’t come to terms with the loss of your Jersey cows, and her voice trying to create order and call things by their name, made you cry more. It was the third day that you had stayed in your room after the catastrophe with the botulism. Jakkie was with you most of the time in his cradle. Even his rosebud mouth, his little hand around your finger, couldn’t console you.
First bone-hunger, then general dirt-craving, she started. First os-teo-pha-gia, then allo-tri-opha-gia.
She sounded out the big Latin words.
Degenerated appetite it was. That’s how the vet had explained it to her, she said. Then she went and read up all the rest in her book.
Agaat looked at Jak who had come to listen in the doorway. He nodded at her to carry on. You felt how the accident had brought you closer to each other, closer, but in complex self-conscious ways. Jakkie woke up later in his cradle, he was the only one who reminded you all of your capacity for innocence.
When you could no longer contemplate the deaths and the putting-down, you took the child and left Agaat there with the autopsy. You saw how she came forward to lend a hand, her white apron like a standard in the midst of the carnage. And there she stood, three days later, grey with exhaustion, but with all the pieces of wire and cartridge cases and tin and horn and bone that had come out of the stomachs, scrubbed clean in a bucket to come and show you.
An unnatural craving, she said, her recitation-voice wilted with exhaustion, that’s what causes cows to eat carrion. Sheep can also get it. Then they eat the wrong things, then they get sick. Of germs in carcases. Bo-tu-li-nus germs. But it’s the soil that lacks something first. Phosphorus. And then the grazing. The problem is in the soil. It works through the grass into the blood. That’s what causes the wrong hunger in the first place, the lack in the soil.
It’s the first time the vet has seen it in The Spout, Agaat explained. Mostly it occurs in the north-west, it’s a poverty disease.
She indicated with the little hand an approximate direction supposed to represent the north-west.
We are rich, she said, but you have to know well on what soil you’re farming. It’s not just botulism they can get, but stiffsickness as well, cro-ta-lism, then the back hunches and the limbs thicken and the mouse swells up.
On her strong arm, on the knob of the joint she showed where the mouse was situated, behind the front foot of the cow, just above the hoof.
Jak was standing in the doorway listening. You smiled at each other at Agaat’s book-learning, a small smile. He was flabbergasted. It was the first time that you’d seen him of his own volition deliver a pocket of onions and a pocket of potatoes and a leg of lamb to the vet to thank him, over and above his fee, for his support. And it was also the first time that you saw him give Agaat a present—a little bag of liquorice and a See magazine when he came back from town.
Even picked Jakkie up in his lap. As long as you just stay good and healthy, Pappa’s little bull, he said and stroked the child’s head.
That was not the only disaster with cows during Jakkie’s infancy.
Was it August of the following year? No, September ’61 it was, a month after Jakkie’s first birthday that Jak decided to add some more new Simmentals from South West Africa to his herd. New stud material needed to be added, he said, to the first herd of the German cattle that he’d started to build up in ’55 when he tired of his wheat experiment. You were reluctant. Jerseys were what you knew, delicate of hip and legs, finely-moulded of head. A Simmental, a dual-purpose animal with a blunt head and full shoulders and heavy legs, was to you an alien concept. To milk cows, help them calve and then after a few years to sell them for slaughter, felt to you like treason.
The calving was another story. That you knew well enough from the first group of Simmentals. They were small-hipped and calved with difficulty. Nights long you and Dawid had to struggle in those first years to turn breached calves. Jak assisted clumsily, walked off after a while in impatience and from squeamishness at the blood. And then you remained behind alone, with over your shoulder the pair of eyes there on the stable’s partition wall, under the lanterns, murmuring after you the little words which you prattled at the cows. Six or seven she must have been then.
If you put new animals from a different environment with old herds that had multiplied for generations on a farm, it always caused problems. You didn’t fancy more problems. The problems in the backyard were already simmering again. And now, a year after the botulism disaster, another seventy of the Simmentals arrived. You insisted that they should be kept in a separate herd and that most of them be utilised singly for slaughtering while you would continue the dairy farming with which you were familiar, with the Jerseys.
How exactly did it come about on that spring day that the new herd of Simmentals were grazing with the Jerseys next to the river amongst the blue and yellow flowers? A gate left gaping? The new stable boy, Dawid’s town cousin Kadys, who didn’t know any better?
The guilty one would never be found. It was a Saturday afternoon, not a good afternoon for searching for culpable parties. And Jak wouldn’t listen to you about the glass flagon that he gave each worker on weekends with their rations. Otherwise I have to take them to town and then they drink in any case and I don’t drive with drunken hotnots on my lorry. And I don’t milk with drunken people over weekends, you said, but it fell on deaf ears. And now here was the trouble.
And if it hadn’t been for Agaat. She’d gone for a walk with Jakkie in his pram.
We’re going to the river, she said as she packed the bottle and his hat.
You knew why there specifically. It was sorrel time. It was the time for stringing garlands of pink sorrel and yellow sorrel on the long thin leaves of the wild tulips, an old game of Agaat’s, you had originally shown her how. You pull the sorrel flower off the germen so that the flower has a little hole at its point underneath and then you string them one by one tightly packed against one another on the tulip string until it’s full and then you tie the two ends together in a knot. Then you hang it around your neck. The garland of flowers, once in spring around her neck, around your neck. Such a garland took two hours to string and served as a necklace for a quarter of an hour. Then it was wilted. You knew that on that afternoon she would sit Jakkie down on his little blanket in the grass and plait him a garland and sing to him. In veld and vlei the spring’s at play. There was a hare, a fox and a bear, and birds in the willow tree. All the old spring songs.
Agaat came into your room, ten minutes after she’d left, without knocking and gave the child back to you in your arms.
And now? Are you back already? you asked.
And then you noticed her cap that was crooked.
They’ve been to the water already, they’re shitting slime, Agaat said.
She gulped to recover her breath. She push-pushed at her cap with the one hand.
You knew at once that it was the Simmentals she was talking about. They’d been to the poison plants. Cows that have grown up on a farm with wild tulips, don’t eat them. They learn from an early age that they’re more bitter than grass. So the old herd of Jerseys were safe even though the tulip bulbs were juicily in flower. It would be the new cattle, South West African cattle with a mindless hunger for greenery. After their arrival they’d been herded into a bare south-facing camp with hay and dry powerfeed and radishes to get them back into condition after their long journey in trains and lorries. Let loose in a green camp they would eat as if they were being paid for it, the young tulips first. And that would make them thirsty. And then they would drink. And water on tulips, that everyone knew, was as good as arsenic.
Agaat couldn’t talk fast enough.
Chased them out of the grazing shut the gate so that they can’t get to the river but there’s a small drinking trough in that dosing-camp where they are now it’s probably also been drunk dry they’re thirsty they’re shitting green strings their eyes are watering they’re going to die off Hamburg’s in the holding pen in front of the crush pen but he won’t take one pace farther will have to get him in the headclamp quickly!
She was right. A bull like that, even when he’s ill, couldn’t just be doctored in the open. One swing of his head and you’d all be sent sprawling in the mud.
You wanted to know where Dawid was, where Kadys and Julies were.
I had them called down there by the cottages, they don’t come out.
How did she get the bull into the holding pen single-handedly?
Agaat was trotting down the passage to the pantry. Jakkie put up a bawl. Jak was gone, would only be back from tennis by milking-time. Saar and Lietja arrived heavy with sleep at the kitchen door with a cluster of littl’uns. Big and small stretched their necks to see into the kitchen if under the licence of irregularity there was something to loot.
Hey you, back! Agaat scolded them.
You had your hands in your hair. That sort of time on Grootmoedersdrift. Agaat gave you a look of pull-yourself-together-on-the-spot.
So listen well now, she said to Saar and Lietja, the new cattle have eaten tulips. Do just what I say and do it quickly! Coffee first, four cans full, double-strength, with sugar!
She looked at you. It could mean only one thing. Hamburg was critical. Sweet strong coffee was all that could save the most valuable animals.
Agaat issued orders non-stop while she worked. The little canister of raw linseed oil she’d already had rolled out of the pantry and the bag of linseed had also been dragged out. In the big white basin with the red roses on the bottom she measured out three measuring jugs of linseed oil and added hot water and stirred with a spatula as she talked. In another gallon-drum she ordered ten measuring jugs of barley and water.
You just stood there, your legs paralysed.
Brandy! she shouted at you! Quicklime! Five double handfuls!
You managed to secure the child in his pram. He would just have to scream now.
Four dozen eggs, whites and yolks separated! she ordered Saar.
Four cups of brandy with the whites! Stir! In the hanslammers’ bottles! Screw shut! When the coffee’s brewed, get it cooled down! Pour it into cooldrink bottles! Be quick quick quick! Bring the roll of rubber piping with the elastic ring around the end behind the pantry door! And a knife! Have it ready! Get a move on!
Now you felt the adrenaline, quickened your pace, grabbed Jak’s ten-year-old brandy out of the cabinet, went and dragged the bag of lime out of the storeroom. You understood everything that Agaat commanded. You just couldn’t have remembered it all yourself so exactly. You knew what was at stake. The new bull was a champion and had cost tens of thousands of rand. You threw a few handfuls of lime into a canister. How much water? you called.
Fifteen jugs! Mix well!
Agaat was already measuring off the raw linseed oil in the big glass rusk canister.
Together you added the lime-water to the oil and shook it up in the bottle, you with your hands above and below, Agaat with her unbalanced grip round the sides.
First to and fro! Agaat directed. Up and down!
Now it’s right, leave it, put down! she called when it had formed a thick cream.
The vet! she called after you. Ring him, give him a list of our medicines, ask him if it’s right, tell him to come, quickly!
In the topsy-turvy you hadn’t even thought of that. But she was right. There had to be a control. So that nobody could say that you’d made mistakes.
Doctor is playing golf, said Mrs Vet.
Take a pen, sweetheart, you heard yourself say, and write! Raw linseed, lime, barley, tannic acid, coffee, brandy, Hamburg tulip poisoning, crisis Gdrift, 13 September, 5 p.m., have you got it? You rang off before she could reply.
You went and fetched the bakkie and parked it in the backyard. Agaat had the bakkie loaded with bottles of sugared coffee and the bottles of egg-whites with brandy, the big rusk bottle full of lime-and-oil cream, the drum of barley water and the drum of slimy raw linseed on water, all sorted into boxes. And the thin rubber tubes, the Coopers dosing-syringes from the shed, a bottle with tannic acid, a measuring spoon, the thicker rubber tubes and cans for the enemas, plastic funnels, tins full of boiled water and bottles with screw-tops and extra bottles and containers.
The whole rescue mission was ready to roll within an hour.
Everybody wanted to bundle into the back of the bakkie. Agaat looked at you, now you had to speak. She tried to calm Jakkie. He was bawling his head off with the hubbub.
That they had to be very calm not to frighten the animals, you said, that they had to work slowly and with a plan to your and Agaat’s orders nothing more and nothing less, that they must not talk loudly, and make no restless movements, that everybody first had to go and scrub their hands and rinse them every time between every animal. And that Saar and two big boys and one littl’un were in your team. And Lietja and two striplings and the other three littl’uns in Agaat’s team. And that they should remain behind you when you arrived in the camp because you first had to get to the bull in the holding pen to doctor him.
O-alla-got, Saar said and tied her headscarf tighter.
Don’t come and o-alla here now, where are your menfolk? you scolded. Why can’t you keep them on track?
Saar looked away. But was there also something else in her attitude? Because she’d seen Agaat ordering you about and you doing everything exactly as she said, a little servant-girl of hardly thirteen? Her face was cunning. There wasn’t time to say arrange your face. In any case you thought twice before saying that to the kitchen-maids.
You sent one of the boys to go and commandeer OuKarel. You knew Agaat had everything right about the medicine and you had learnt from your mother about the procedures with tulip poisoning, but experience was what was lacking. You needed OuKarel’s eye there, you felt. You remembered your mother’s belief that a bull, not to mention a new one, wouldn’t co-operate if there wasn’t a man in the company.
In the camp the animals were huddled around the drinking trough as Agaat had predicted.
And there was Hamburg, his hump seven hands high above the rails of the holding pen. He’d be able to flatten it like nothing. His head was hanging, strings of drool from his mouth, and the piss and the thin slimy dung ran out of him. He pressed himself against the back of the partition.
How had Agaat got him in there? How would you move him to the threshold of the crush pen? Would the headclamp be in working order?
Wide-eyed the maids stood staring. Agaat trotted off to test the lever of the clamp. Up and down she pressed it so that the flat shaft first bent at the hinge in the middle and then lifted up. Open and shut she operated it, the steel arms of the clamp flashing in the sunlight over there at the far end of the crush pen.
How are we going to get him in there? you asked her.
He’s already half dead, Agaat said, look how deep his eyes are, he’s wonky in the front legs, he won’t give us grief.
How? you asked with the eyes.
Agaat hooked the index finger of her strong hand in front of her nose.
With the bare hand on his nose-ring?
That’s how I got him there in the pen, Agaat said.
You didn’t believe her. The holding pen’s gate was wide open. You were sure she’d prodded him in there from behind.
The holding pen was one thing, one would still be able to roll free under the lowest bar of the pen. But the crush pen was a narrow gully with high cement walls. There was one escape route, that was to the back. But how would you worm past the bull if you were in front of him and he gored you? He would fill the gully from wall to wall.
At the front end, in front of the headclamp, there was a shutter of steel that could be lifted if he should decide to rush forward.
But what if everything happened very quickly? You’d be paralysed with shock, you’d slip, the one who had to lift the shutter could lose his nerve, you’d be trampled.
Who should take the bull in there?
You hesitated.
I’ll take him, said Agaat, her mouth set in a straight line. He knows me. He’s soft in the nose. He won’t bugger around for no reason.
Ho my mother, said Saar.
You go and sit in the bakkie with Jakkie, Agaat said, and wash your hands before you touch him.
Push the other cattle away from the drinking trough, she ordered Lietja, count them, there should be seventy.
And for you she tallied on the fingers of her strong hand. One bottle of egg and brandy, one bottle of coffee, two pints of the rusk bottle’s lime-and-linseed water mixed with two tablespoons of tannic acid to the pint, decanted into two Coopers canisters.
She would lead the bull as far as the clamp, you had to secure his head. Then somebody had to open the shutter so that she could get out in front.
Agaat ordered two boys to go and fetch planks and to build a scaffolding on little drums outside the crush pen on both sides so that you could reach across to dose the bull.
What if he gores you? one whispered to her. What if he tramples you?
They retreated stepping on one another’s feet. Mush! they giggled. Arsgaat!
Dry up, said Agaat, a bag of acid drops for everybody, if you help nicely here. Stand ready, hand us what we tell you and keep your big traps shut or I’ll make dog-mince of you.
You’d never forget it, the sudden subservience of everybody, big and small. Something changed gear that afternoon on Grootmoedersdrift.
Agaat put the medicine containers precisely in sequence on the wall on either side of the headclamp. She blew into the rubber tubes to check that they were clear. She squeezed the triggers of the dosing-canisters and squirted medicine on the ground until she was satisfied that they were working correctly and without air bubbles. Her mouth was set in a line, her chin jutting far forward.
Bring a rope, you called to the boys, bring a stick.
For what? Agaat asked.
So that I can have something with which to pull you out if he runs amuck, you said, then you grab the rope or the stick.
She looked at you. Agaat Lourier can’t pull herself out of the gully with one arm, her face said.
Or I push the stick under your apron’s shoulder-straps and lever you out, you said. You couldn’t look her straight in the eye.
The gully is too deep. The stick is too short. You’re too weak. It wasn’t even necessary for her to say it.
Perhaps we should rather wait for the vet, you got out. Your voice was low.
Wait till I’m in, she said to you, climb on the wall and walk behind me. Don’t put things in his head. Think one thing and think it straight.
First try to prod him from behind, you said.
You try, Agaat said, he doesn’t want to, he’s too buggered.
You went around the back of the holding pen. You prodded the shitting bull in the flanks with a stick. He didn’t budge.
Agaat straightened her cap with both hands. There at the gate of the holding pen you saw it. The one shoulder pulled up, the pace forward, the pace back, the genuflection. Then she opened the gate and went in and closed the gate behind her. Plumb towards the dead strip between the bull’s eyes Agaat advanced, bold and high her mien.
Water came into your mouth, of iron it tasted, of blood.
She hooked her finger into the nose-ring, turned her back, took a pace forward. Through the bars of the holding pen you saw the bull bend its knee, dragging his hind leg, starting to move forward. Six, seven, eight paces and Agaat was in the crush pen with him.
You climbed onto the wall, the stick and rope in your hand. The bull lowered its head. On both sides of his muzzle gobbets of drool were hurled against the cement walls. His small sunken eyes were on the cross of Agaat’s shoulder-straps. Soon she was invisible. You could only deduce, from the steady pace at which the bull moved forward, that she was there walking ahead of him, and that she was exerting a constant force of traction on him.
The blood in your temples! The whole twenty, twenty-five, thirty yards of the crush pen! Triumph when the bull pushed his huge muzzle over the crossbar, when you pressed down the lever, and wedged in his head, and Agaat escaped through the shutter. A yelling from the littl’uns, cries of admiration as she emerged there.
She was opposite you on her scaffolding on the other side of the gully. She wiped her hands on the bib of her apron. She pushed at her cap. On her shoulders something glistened in the sun. It was wet where the big bull had drooled on her.
Agaat held out her little hand, the back, so that the bull could feel the warmth on his nose. He tried take a step back, felt his head was fast. It would be a business if he lay down in the gully. You had to work quickly. Agaat looked at you across the hump.
You wanted to praise her because she was so brave, but the expression on her face prevented you.
First the coffee, then brandy, he needs a kick-start, she said.
The main thing was that the liquid should not end up in the lungs. Agaat passed you the bottle with coffee.
Press on his cheeks, she said, you have two hands.
You pressed on the release knobs, the sensitive salivary glands. The jaws parted slightly, you pressed down the lever a notch to pick up the head another few degrees and lifted the lip and inserted the thin tube along the gum behind the back molar on the tongue.
Swallow! Gaat said.
The coffee went down without any problems. But then the egg mixture wouldn’t pour smoothly down the tube. Agaat took it mouthful by mouthful out of the bottle and blew it into him through the tube.
After that it was the raw linseed-and-lime cream. The full two prescribed pints.
Then the two of you unlocked the clamp. Enlivened by the stimulants, the bull allowed himself to be prodded out of the crush pen. You drove him slowly to the clean straw that you’d had brought in and covered him in sacks where he stood, because then he had the shivers.
When did OuKarel appear on the scene? Next thing you noticed, there he was crushing his hat, a vaaljapie breath issuing from his mouth. You had to flash a warning look otherwise Agaat would have scolded the old man. He was just sober enough to help. You rounded up the cows three at a time and dosed them with the boys holding their heads up. The cows shat and pissed and tried to step back and coughed. Then everybody had to let go to let them finish coughing. Raw linseed oil down the wrong gullet was the greatest risk. Terrible pneumonia could be the result.
Twice you and Agaat rushed back to the house to mix more medicine.
By six o’clock you trained the bakkie’s headlights on the scene and sent home for lanterns. Agaat and yourself you fitted out with headlamps from Jak’s mountaineering equipment. Like a cyclopic eye Gaat’s headlamp shone in the dark.
One cow looked as if she was going to succumb and had to be given a stomach-pump.
Jakkie was cold and hungry and cried.
Take him, Agaat, you said, go and bathe him and give him food, he’s upset, I’ll take charge here now. Wait until he’s asleep then you come and call me.
At half past six Jak returned from tennis. Flabbergasted. In white clothes and all he plunged into the ooze of manure and mud to help. Anew you doctored the bull with coffee and brandy to stimulate his heart. At seven o’clock the vet turned up from the clubhouse, even more sozzled than Karel. Jak went and dragged Dawid and his cousin out of the huts to come and help. Agaat returned with Jakkie tied to her back in a blanket. She went and stood in front of Dawid and Kadys. Without a word she made them both drink half a bottle of sweet coffee and three gulps of laced egg-white to fix the hangover. The bakkie lights were on them. Everybody was watching. They did as they were told. The women and the boys whispered. Dawid’s face was squint. The vet stood back as if he was scared he would also be accosted.
Now you two go and milk the Jerseys, they must be sore by this time, she said. You sent Saar along to keep an eye because they were stepping very high indeed.
Men! you and Agaat signalled to each other with the eyes. But your part of the message was vitiated by her look. Some women! it said.
By four o’clock that morning the tulip poison had been counteracted. You administered barley-water and linseed-lime because the animals couldn’t drink ordinary water. But the new herd had been saved. Hamburg was starting to see better out of his eyes. He stopped peeing and started shitting less and less. Just the one cow that had been given the enema was looking weakish.
Everybody who had helped was ready to drop from hunger and fatigue. Agaat went home and for the second time that day washed and dressed in clean clothes.
The kitchen was a chaos, lime and oil on the floor and all the separated yolks standing around everywhere in dishes and bowls. All the egg, Agaat said, overwhelmed for the first time that day, you could see.
Never mind, we can use it, you said, let’s make food for the people, they must be starving. You mixed the batter and Agaat started baking vetkoek and bacon and fried onion and pans full of scrambled eggs. Along with big jugs of sweet rooibos tea with milk you helped her to serve it in the backyard.
Aitsa, such a whitecap cattle-quack, the servants teased Agaat, how she blows a bull full of brandy!
There was new respect in the teasing and in the attitude, even of the big men when they brought back their plates and came to hand back the mugs into her hands.
You served Jak and the vet indoors. They were quiet.
That little coloured girl of yours deserves a medal, Thom Smuts said after a while to Jak with his mouth full of egg.
That’s Milla’s department, Jak replied, and gestured with his head in your direction where you were pouring coffee. It’s she who should get the compliment.
…
my nurse takes me under my own law she counts my blessings for me minces my meals flushes my guts wipes my arse twists my buttons into their holes coat-buttons blouse-buttons jersey-buttons knots my shoelaces girds my buckles zips up my side-zips back-zips breast-zips my hooks my eyes shrouds my body closes off my openings she cleanses me combs me powders me paints me I am a well-rounded woman an effigy of a woman a scarecrow on a broomstick
doll and gaat go to town they pretend nothing is wrong gaat starched mrs de wet packaged they step with tiny tiny steps four legs and a walking stick they nod tiny tiny nods good morning good morning good day they invite the world to tea and cake mrs de wet is sixty-seven her hands they lie in her lap she drinks through a straw her vitamins for who would ever drink tea through a straw?
next to her waits her walking stick the finches twitter in the rushes who’s afraid of a broomstick who’s afraid of a walking stick?
o who’s afraid of a walking stick
the first one was a knob-stick but soon the knob was too knobbly the second had a crook-neck but soon the neck was too crooked the third had a finger-grip but soon the grip started to slip the fourth was of light metal with rubber on the tip and rubber on the grip and a silver hoop to support the wrist
and then there were two of the same
one for each elbow
hopalong down the passage a clumsy camel on the stoep calump calump here comes kamilla a bat on crutches a gothic letter who said we do not hear the coming of death?
the fifth had four legs and a name in chrome on the shaft
viking strider
the strider itself had a calf-foot rest she walks like a sentinel in athens her head on her neck a pitch-black tassel her heart waggles like a gyroscope
…
3 October 1961
What more must I think up to get hr down? Braying hides ploughing waterproofing tarpaulins seeder-sums! All in vain! It’s a year later & again it’s exactly the same damn nonsense as last year. Seems seasonal. Don’t want to end up in those maelstroms with her again.
So tonight the macaroni comes to the table again burnt to a cinder & Jak takes one look & gets up & drives away at speed. Waited till Jakkie was away & took a mouthful of J.’s brandy to calm myself & then went & knocked at A’s door. Said she had to come to the kitchen immediately. At first she won’t utter yea or nay & stares at the ground.
Now you’re going to look at me my girl I say look me in the eyes & tell me what in heaven’s name is wrong this time? A small flickering on her face but I keep my cool—would it do now to give hr the idea that she’s won here & I ask: What on God’s earth must I do with you to get you good again? & then of course I said the wrong thing: I can’t live any longer with such a person in my house. But wouldn’t she give me a quick look. I’m not in your house she says I’m in the outside room right there I almost explode with anger but I restrain myself & ask again: What must I do to get you good?
I want a fireplace, she says. I ask you!
Full of specifications on top of that: a grid & fire-irons & a mantelpiece. In my room. It’s damp. Its walls are mouldering. I’m cold.
Just like that full in my face.
It’s October I say. It’ll be winter again she says. It’s winter when I have my birthday.
Oh Lord is that what’s been going on all the time! With Jakkie’s birthday being in August A.’s in July of course went by disregarded again. How can she expect of me to remember that as well? But then for the sake of sweet peace I said I’m sorry & I said: A fireplace—what do you think of yourself! She gave me that look of hers & showed with her fingers & she said: I took your bull for you by the nose so that he could be dosed.
What could I raise against that? Her list could have been much longer.
9 October 1961 half past seven
From early this morning there’s been a breaking & hammering in the backyard & A.’s stuff has been carried out in a pile. Decided after all to have a fireplace installed in her room. It gets cold back there in the winter & Jakkie is now spending all his time with hr. Will have to teach hr to drive as well. Don’t want another crisis when Jak or Dawid isn’t here.
Where have you ever in your life heard of slave quarters with a built-in fireplace says J., does she think she’s a royal skivvy with a pedigree in Scotland? If I were him I say I’d keep my mouth shut she led his holy Hamburg by the nose for him & blew wine spirits into him while he the so-called master was prancing about volleying on the tennis court.
Had the dish & grid welded last week & had the lime mixed for the whitewashing on the outside & the black chimney pot is standing ready & the iron cross-beam to go above the grate so that the whole operation can be completed in a few days. See to it that it draws properly I said to D. there’s no point in going to all the trouble & then we’re stuck with smother & smoke inside the room. It must be got ready & right before we start the harvest there’s no time for toiling & moiling.
Quarter past nine
Have just been to have a peep in the backyard. Hearth-hole has been broken through. It’s going to be a half-outside roundbelly fireplace otherwise it will take up too much space inside. A. is standing in the middle of the floor with hr hands in front of hr & looks at the foundation of the hearth being laid. The labourers yell so can we come & fry our scratchings by your fire? our sheep’s tails our sheep’s heads? can we stew our porcupine over your coals or are you going to be otherwise with your fire? She doesn’t twitch a muscle but I know her she’s very taken with it. More than that. She looks inspired. Lord in heaven help us the girl.
Second day of hearth-building 12 o’clock
D. had me called to the kitchen they’ve finished plastering & whitewashing on the outside he says but inside’s a problem. Apparently A. is particular about the plastering around the hearth-hole. They must do what she says I command. He feels queasy says D. the builders are teasing A. between the legs. Send them home I say he’ll just have to help her on his own with the finishing-off inside just as long as it gets finished.
She doesn’t want to be helped says D. she wants to do it herself on her own it’s her altar. Heaven help. Altar. For what sacrifice?
After lunch
Strangely quiet in the backyard all afternoon. Went & looked out of the nursery window & lo & behold there are Saar & Lietja peering into A.’s window they’re pushing & shoving each other. Had better go & investigate.
5 o’clock
A. had gone to dig potatoes in the field for supper so then I went & peeped through the window. A cloth draped in front of the fireplace a bucket of plastering-cement & a pointed trowel & a bucket of water & a snow-white block-brush & a few shoe boxes all with lids on. Typical. Grabbed my opportunity & went to have a peek. Quartz pebbles & skulls & shells & baby’s toes & sea urchins from Witsand. Couldn’t look any further.
13 October
Instructed D. to teach A. to drive the bakkie. She refuses point-blank. Will just have to teach her the ropes myself. In a week we’re mowing.
15 October
Waited till J. was out this afternoon before taking the old Chevvy down to the fields with A. & Jakkie. Coaxed & wheedled there you have your fireplace now I said exactly as you wanted it now it’s my turn. She looks at me askance won’t give me the child to hold won’t get in behind the wheel. Perhaps I should just let it be. The fireplace seems in any case to have the desired effect. Everything is running smoothly again. Bread is rising chickens are laying flower garden spick & span big fires every evening. Hear her singing & telling stories to Jakkie there in the back. Every morning the white cloth is draped over the opening. Can’t see anything of what she’s been getting up to there only the heaps of ash & the half-burnt logs on the ash heap next to the compost heap. She cleans it up every morning early. Tends her fireplace like a verger.
20 October after eight
Went to peep what they’re doing there in the back. Sparks from the chimney fireworks on the outside room’s roof it hisses & sputters as the hot ash is blown into the rain (October rain! Two fields harvested already. Does though seem as if it will clear tomorrow. Can’t abide a hassle with wet wheat).
Peered through the chink in the curtains could only make out the silhouette A. on an apple box in front of the fireplace with Jakkie on her lap. No other light a tremendous fire. Pressed my ear against the pane couldn’t hear anything. Jakkie in his crawler his hair a halo around his head A.’s cap illuminated with the glow of the fire looks as if it could burst into flame at any moment. All the strange things plastered into the fireplace not exactly what one would call a work of art. Mouldings half Romish & creepy where does she get it from?
Jakkie pushes his little fingers into the black nostrils of the lynx skull A. strokes over the imprint of hare’s-foot fern he points at the horseshoe in the middle above she counts the abalone shells set around the edge one two three four five she holds him so that he can touch the marbles quick with the fire the taws with the green & yellow banderoles inside the small milky marbles bluish & reddish she shows the hollows of the dassie-foot he stirs the spoor of the steenbok she shows the tears of the snow he laughs at the shiny puddles of water she tickles the pistil of the arum the vaulting of the lily’s lip the ravel on the tip with which the lily’s body was bound before it opened in the vlei. From her mouth I can see she’s singing to him. Her foot is marking time her knee is hopping. Wide-eyed he listens. Points at the black mole on her cheek she opens her eyes wide he presses on it with his tiny pink finger she pretends it’s a switch a magic spot she moves her scalp to wiggle her ears & the point of her cap he laughs he roars.