back again. Maybe some creature bit him in the veldt. Perhaps he chewed the wrong leaf. A few days ago he came home and complained and nobody took any notice. My mother scolded him for a laggard and lazybones. He went and lay down and never again spoke a straight sentence and never again got up. In the kloofs jackals and hungry dogs are calling. Shreds of candlelight bob up and down in the washbasin. My sister sits down next to me, her fingers form shadow figures against the wall. My father’s hands scrabble at his stomach. A bellowing, then the drawing up of the legs.
Oh God! My Lord God.
My mother Christina rebukes her husband; he falls silent, mutters something inaudible. Mother instructs us to carry him out of the bedroom cot and all and place him by the hearth. She oversees our doing, walks out. I go and stand by her side; she pays me no heed. My eldest brother comes into the house with a headless chicken, slits open the belly and presses the spread-eagled fowl onto his stepfather’s chest to draw out the fever. Father once again calls to our God born in deserts and wars and thrusts the fowl from him. Mother commands another flayed-open hen. This time the bleeding warmth is tolerated for longer. I sit in the corner and peep from under a heap of hides how through the night chicken after chicken is pressed to the cropped-up chest. With the first glimmering of dawn I help Mother to plaster his chest with cow dung. I spread the steaming dung, feel the tremors under the skin.
Don’t touch me! Father bellows.
I step back.
Stop your nonsense, says Mother.
Father is silent.
They slaughter a goat and drape the guts over the body. My sister brings water. Mother goes to stand in the yard. My brothers and I rinse the blood from the dung floor, massacre chickens and stoke the fire in the hearth. Father’s convulsions drive our little lot like a troop of sleepwalkers until with a sudden starting up and last spasm as if the limbs wanted to tear themselves free of his innards, he sighs and dies. I hunker by the fire and regard my father: Jan de Buys, Jean du Buis the Third, grandson of a Huguenot, son of a rich Boland farmer. His death, like his life, small and meek.
Come, let us dig up my parents’ remains from the archives: At age twenty-two father marries Christina Scheepers, twice-widowed, eight years older than he. Grandfather de Buys, the old scoundrel, sends Father packing with a wagon and a few over-the-hill oxen. The couple – and Mother’s five children by her previous husbands – hit the road. They drive their little cluster of cattle until they pitch their tent on a deserted piece of land next to a random stream. Husband and wife and children and Hottentots build a house of reeds and grass and clay, and live there while Christina bears two daughters who hardly show their little wet heads between her legs before dying and are buried without names in holes that are covered up and not marked and leave absolutely no scar on the face of the earth. Father and Mother do not know the territory and the cattle die of the poisonous grass and bulbs and a drought claims the rest of the herd. They wander through De Lange Cloof and by Mother’s account I am born in the year 1761 on Wagenboomsrivier, the farm of one Scheepers. We roam further afield. Thorn trees and ferns grow in the kloofs and leopards dwell on the slopes and we squat with family and acquaintances. A year later Father signs for the quitrent farm Ezeljacht in the Upper Lange Cloof, where the pasturage is more abundant. Father and the older sons and the Hottentots build a house. A reed partition divides the interior into two rooms. The bulrush roof trails on the ground. Christina bears more children of whom two sons and two daughters survive.
When the rest of the house is stunned to sleep by shock, I stay sitting and looking at my father while the fire in the hearth slowly fades. That morning I am eight and overwhelmed; every now and again I get up and feel him getting colder. Today, in my all-seeing, I look back. I see my beloved father lying there in his house like the houses of other migrant farmers. Habitations of which purse-lipped English travellers will one day write that they look more like the lairs of animals than the homes of human beings. At the time of his death he’s long since been totally routed by the woman and her ten children. A poor man, his estate barely seven hundred rix-dollars. A lifelong, very gradual and inexorable surrender. A fatal politeness and compliancy that would have rendered even the feeblest resistance to the poison from the veldt too self-assertive for him.
By late morning Mother is assigning tasks like every blessed day. The bustling runs its course around the body, displayed on the cot. On the floor lies a little posy of heather that somebody placed on the body and that fell down and that nobody picked up again.
I try playing with my brothers and sisters. My brother with the long arms carries me around on his shoulders. My sisters want to hold me and cry. The younger brothers and sisters seek comfort from me. I don’t know how to comfort. I slap my youngest brother when he starts crying and then he bawls more loudly. I go and hide against the house, underneath the window. Mother is standing by the body with her arms folded. She sees me, walks to the window and looks straight through me and pushes the wooden shutter back into the window opening. I walk around the house and enter by the door. Mother is standing next to the body again. I press my head into the dark and soft pleats of her dress. She places a hand on my shoulder. The hand moves over my back and rubs up and down and presses me close and then drops to her side. I look up at her and she says something that I forget instantly and I walk to the river and strip shreds of bark from the trees and watch them floating away on the water and throw stones in their wake. By afternoon two of my sisters come looking for me and press me to them and start wailing again. The sun shifts; I wander around the yard. My brothers are all busy and grumpy and nobody has a job for me and nobody wants to play. I inspan my knucklebone oxen on the dung floor.
Get out from under my feet, she says.
I’ll be good, Mother.
Go and play outside. You can’t be a nuisance in the veldt.
I’ll sit still, Mother.
Outside! There’s nothing there for you to break.
The sun sets. The moon rises. I lie between my brothers and sisters in the front room and listen to our mother snoring in the bedroom. I hold the sister closest to me as tight as I can. Until she wakes up and knees me away and turns over.
At the funeral I watch them weeping. Something barks me awake in the night. I get up from the heap of over-familiar bodies slumped on top of one another like a litter of backyard kittens. I walk away, I stand still. The house is a dull smudge against the stars. I turn away, walk on, turn around and look at the house again to see if anybody is coming to look for me. If anybody should rush out of the house now, I’ll run away, but not as fast as I can. One of my older brothers will catch up with me and plough me into the dust and drag me home and flay me.
I walk to the house of my half-sister Geertruy, my godmother Geertruy and her new husband, David Senekal, at the far end of the farm, and I don’t look back again. The moon is hanging too heavily; the treetops can barely hold it up. The farm is big, more than three thousand morgen, and on this night much bigger. It is cold.
I stand still, look around me. Geertruy is not far away. If I go and knock there in the middle of the night, she’ll carry on about it. Mother is not far. If I go back there, my sisters will wake up and comfort me.
I sit down against a red rock that looms up from the scrub like a gravid hippopotamus. I dig next to the rock. The soil soon becomes friable; I dig further. I curl up in my hole against the rock lying hard behind me and of which I cannot imagine the nether end. I scrabble soil all over me. I press it hard against me like the back of my sister. Everywhere herds and flocks and swarms are calling to one another; they warn and threaten and lure. Once I see steam rising out of a pair of nostrils against the pale moon and then the eyes glittering in the bush and then nothing except
