times he had looked out into the gathering dusk, shaking his head at it. But after Jurie Steyn had lit the oil-lamp, Oupa Bekker cheered up a good deal. Then he started telling us about the time when he encountered a ghost near Spelonksdrift, in the old days.
“I had lost my way in the dark,” Oupa Bekker declared, “and so I thought that that stretch of water was just an ordinary crossing over the Molopo River. I had no idea that it was Spelonksdrift. So I pulled up at the edge of the stream to let my horse drink. Mind you, I should have known that it was Spelonksdrift just through my horse not having been at all thirsty. Indeed, afterwards it struck me that I had never before seen a horse with so little taste for water. All he did was to look slowly about him and shiver.”
At Naudé asked Jurie Steyn’s wife to turn the paraffin lamp up a bit higher, just about then. He said he was thinking of the lorry-driver. The lorry-driver would be able to see the light in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer from a long way off, if the lamp was turned up properly, At Naudé explained. It was queer how several of us, at that moment, started feeling concern for the lorry-driver. We all seemed to remember, at once, that he was a married man with five children. Jurie Steyn’s wife did not have to turn much on the screw to make the lamp burn brighter. We men did it all for her. But then, of course, we Marico men are chivalrous that way.
In the meantime, Oupa Bekker had been drooling on in his old-man way of talking, with the result that when we were back in our seats again we found that we had missed the in-between part of his story. All we heard was the end part. We heard about his dispute with the ghost, which had ended in the ghost letting him have it across the chops with the back of his hand.
“So I went next day to see Dr Angus Stuart,” Oupa Bekker continued. “In those days he was the only doctor between here and Rysmierbult. I didn’t tell him anything about what had happened at Spelonksdrift. I just showed him my face, with those red marks on it … And do you know what? After he had had a good look at those marks through a magnifying glass, the doctor said that they could have been caused only by a ghost hitting me over the jaw with the back of a blue-flame hand.”
That story started Johnny Coen off telling us about the time he was walking through the poort one night, with Dawie Ferreira who had once been a policeman at Newclare. And while he and Dawie Ferreira were walking through the poort, a Bechuana through whom they could see the Milky Way shining came up to them. In addition to having the Milky Way visible through his spine, the Bechuana was also carrying his head under his arm. But Dawie Ferreira, because he was a former policeman, knew how to deal with that Bechuana, Johnny Coen said. He promptly asked him where his pass was for being on a public road at that time of night. You couldn’t see the Bechuana for dust after that, Johnny Coen said. In fact, the dust that the Bechuana with his head under his arm raised on the Government Road of the Marico seemed to become part of, and to reach beyond, the Milky Way that shone through his milt and was also a road.
The lorry from Bekkersdal arrived very late. The driver looked perturbed.
“We had big-end trouble at Spelonksdrift,” the lorry-driver said, “and an old farmer riding a mule came up and gave me a lot of sauce. He acted as though he was a ghost, or something. As though I’d take notice of that sort of nonsense. I saw through him, all right. Then he sloshed me one across the jaw. When I tried to land him one back he was gone.”
The lorry-driver had marks on his cheek that could have been caused by a back-hander from an elderly farmer riding a mule.
Oom Tobie’s Sickness
From the way he was muffled to the chin in a khaki overcoat and his wife’s scarf in the heat of the day, we knew why Tobias Schutte was sitting on the riempies bench in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. We knew that Tobias Schutte was going by lorry to Bekkersdal to get some more medical treatment. There was nobody in the Groot Marico who suffered as regularly and acutely from maladies – imaginary or otherwise – as did Tobias Schutte. For that reason he was known as “Iepekonders Oom Tobie” from this side of the Pilanesberg right to the Kalahari: a good way into the Kalahari, sometimes – the exact distance depending on how far the Klipkop Bushmen had to go into the desert to find msumas.
“You look to be in a pretty bad way again, Oom Tobie,” Chris Welman said in a tone that Oom Tobie accepted as implying sympathy. Nobody else in the voorkamer took it up that way, however. To the rest of us, Chris Welman’s remark was just a plain sneer. “What’s it this time, Oom Tobie,” he went on, “the miltsiek or St. Vitus’s dance? But you got it while you were working, I’ll bet.”
“Just before I started working, to be exact,” Oom Tobie replied. “I was just getting ready to plant in the first pole for the new cattle camp when the sickness overtook me. Of a sudden I came all over queer. So I just had to leave the whole job to the Cape Coloured man, Pieterse, and the Bechuanas. The planting of the poles, the wiring, chasing away meerkats – I had to leave it all to them. They are at it now. I don’t know what I’d do without Pieterse. I must give him an old pair of trousers again, one of these days. I’ve got a pair that are quite good still, except that they are worn out in the seat. It’s queer how all my trousers get worn out like that, in the seat. The clothes you get today aren’t what they used to be. I buy a new pair of trousers to wear when I go out on the lands, and before I know where I am they’re frayed all thin, at the seat …”
“Was Pieterse – I mean, did Pieterse not look very surprised, sort of, at your being taken ill so suddenly, Oom Tobie?” Jurie Steyn asked, doing his best to keep a straight face.
“Well, no,” Oom Tobie replied in all honesty. “When he helped me back onto the stoep from the place where we were going to put up the fence, Pieterse said he had felt for quite some days that I had this illness coming on. It wasn’t so much anything he could see about me as what he felt, he said. And he could remember the exact time, too, when he first had that feeling. It was the afternoon when the poles and the rolls of barbed wire came from Ramoutsa. He didn’t himself feel too good, either, that afternoon, he said. It was as though there was something unhealthy in the air. He’s an extraordinary fellow, Pieterse. But that’s because he’s Cape Coloured, I suppose. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s some part of him Slams, too. You know these Malays …”
Chris Welman asked Oom Tobie what he thought his illness was, this time. “Well, I know it can’t be the horse-sickness,” Oom Tobie said, “because I had the horse-sickness last year. And when you’ve had the horse-sickness once you don’t get it again. You’re salted.”
The new schoolteacher, Vermaak, who wasn’t long out of college, and whom Jurie Steyn’s wife seemed to think a lot of, on account of his education, then said that it was the first time he had ever heard of a human being getting horse-sickness.
Several of us, speaking at the same time, told the schoolteacher that there were lots of things he had never heard of, and that a white man getting horse-sickness was what he now had an opportunity of getting instructed about. We told him that if he remained in the Groot Marico longer, and observed a little, he would no doubt learn things that would surprise him, yet.
The schoolmaster said that that had already happened to him. Just from looking around, he said.
“What I have got this time, now, is, I think, the blue-tongue,” Oom Tobie continued. “Mind you, I used to think that only sheep get the bluetongue. When there is rain after a long drought – that is the worst time for the blue-tongue. And you know the dry spell was pretty long, here in the district, before these rains started. So I think it must be blue-tongue.”
Gysbert van Tonder asked Oom Tobie to put his tongue out, so we could see. We all pretended to take a lot of interest in Oom Tobie’s tongue, then. It was, of course, quite an ordinary-looking sort of tongue, perhaps somewhat on the thick side
