Bekker pulled himself together, then.
Before that, I had noticed a strained look on Chris Welman’s face. He did not seem to be himself, somehow. Chris Welman seemed to be taking it much too seriously, this nonsense that was being talked about Jurie Steyn’s bull-calf.
“You say your wife has spoilt Duusman, Jurie?” Oupa Bekker asked.
“Completely,” Jurie Steyn admitted.
Oupa Bekker looked thoughtful.
“But you don’t think,” he asked, “that you might also perhaps have had a hand in spoiling him? Think carefully, now.”
“Well,” Jurie said, somewhat reluctantly, “a little, maybe.”
That seemed to be the sum of what Oupa Bekker wanted to know. In any case, he said nothing more. That made us all feel uncomfortable. It was a good deal worse than when he giggled in that annoying old-man sort of way, that was not much different from an old woman’s giggle. But now he remained silent. And you couldn’t go and thump an old man on his back just for keeping quiet. At least, in public you couldn’t. Not when people were looking.
“Duusman chew?” Oupa Bekker asked.
“Chew – how do you mean, chew?” Jurie Steyn repeated. We could see he was hedging.
“Tobacco,” Oupa Bekker insisted, firmly.
“Well,” Jurie Steyn said, “he does come in every morning for a plug of Piet Retief rolled tobacco. It started as a joke, of course. But, all right, if you put it that way, Duusman does chew. But he spits most of it out again. I started him off on the habit. It seemed funny to me, the idea of a bull-calf chewing. But he’s got into the habit, now. It seemed funny at the time, if you understand what I mean. But now, well, I think Duusman will burst the doorframe down if he doesn’t get his chew every morning –”
“And you blame it on your wife,” Oupa Bekker said. And he started laughing again. And even when his laughter went up into very high notes he did not bother to look round to see how Chris Welman was taking it.
It was almost as though Oupa Bekker knew that Chris Welman would not slam him on the back again, even if Oupa Bekker’s laughter ended in his coughing his head off.
“You yourself can’t stop chewing tobacco, no matter how hard you try – can you, now?” Oupa Bekker remarked to Jurie. “I know I can’t. And all I’ve got left are a few top teeth that aren’t near as good as yours or Duusman’s.”
When Jurie Steyn did not answer, Oupa Bekker said that he should send Duusman to the butcher’s shop. But he did not think that Duusman would make even good butcher’s meat, Oupa Bekker added.
Well, we all knew, of course, that if you had once reared a bull-calf by hand, you could never send him to the butcher’s shop, even if the land company were foreclosing on you.
It was a relief to us all when the lorry arrived in dust and noise and with milk-cans and circulars from shopkeepers.
But we should have felt more surprised, somehow, when, along with the driver and his assistant, there also alighted from the lorry young Tobie, Chris Welman’s son, who had gone to Johannesburg and whom we had not seen for several years.
Tobie Welman was slim and good-looking, and he walked with a light step, and his black hair was slicked back from his forehead, and a cigarette dangled from his lip.
And when Chris Welman walked out to meet Tobie, as though he had been expecting him, we wondered why he had not told us that his son was coming back. We would, after all, not have said anything about Tobie Welman having been in reform school.
Duusman forced his way into the voorkamer, about then, lowing. “Moo,” Duusman said.
Local Colour
We were talking about the book-writing man, Gabriel Penzhorn, who was in the Marico on a visit, wearing a white helmet above his spectacles and with a notebook and a fountain pen below his spectacles. He had come to the Marico to get local colour and atmosphere, he said, for his new South African novel. What was wrong with his last novel, it would seem, was that it did not have enough local colour and atmosphere in it.
So we told Penzhorn that the best place for him to get atmosphere in these parts was in that kloof other side Lobatse, where that gas came out from. Only last term the schoolteacher had taken the children there, and he had explained to them about the wonders of Nature. We said to Gabriel Penzhorn that there was atmosphere for him, all right. In fact, the schoolmaster had told the children that there was a whole gaseous envelope of it. Penzhorn could even collect some of it in a glass jar, with a piece of rubber tubing on it, like the schoolmaster had done.
And as for local colour, well, we said, there was that stretch of blue bush on this side of Abjaterskop, which we called the bloubos. It wasn’t really blue, we said, but it only looked blue. All the same, it was the best piece of blue bush we had seen anywhere in the Northern Transvaal. The schoolmaster had brought a piece of that home with him also, we explained.
Gabriel Penzhorn made it clear, however, that that stretch of blue bush was not the sort of local colour he wanted at all. Nor was he much interested in the kind of atmosphere that he could go and collect in a bottle with a piece of rubber tubing, just from other side Lobatse.
From that we could see that Gabriel Penzhorn was particular. We did not blame him for it, of course. We realised that if it was things that a writer had to put into a book, then only the best could be good enough. Nevertheless, since most of us had been born in the Marico, and we took pride in our district, we could not help feeling just a little hurt.
“As far as I can see,” Johnny Coen said to us one day in Jurie Steyn’s post office, “what this book-writing man wants is not atmosphere, but stinks. Perhaps that’s the sort of books he writes. I wonder. Have they got pictures in, does anybody know?”
But nobody knew.
“Well, if it’s stinks that Penzhorn wants,” Johnny Coen proceeded, “just let him go and stand on the siding at Ottoshoop when they open a truck of Bird Island guano. Phew! He won’t even need a glass jar to collect that sort of atmosphere in. He can just hold his white helmet in his hand and let a few whiffs of guano atmosphere float into it. But if he puts a white helmetful of that kind of atmosphere into his next book, I think the police will have something to say.”
Oupa Bekker looked reflective. At first we thought that he hadn’t been following much of our conversation, since it was intellectual, having to do with books. We knew that Oupa Bekker had led more of an open-air sort of life, having lived in the Transvaal in the old days, when the Transvaal did not set much store on book learning. But to our surprise we found that Oupa Bekker could take part in a talk about culture as well as any of us. What was more, he did not give himself any airs on account of his having this accomplishment, either.
“Stinks?” Oupa Bekker enquired. “Stinks? Well, let me tell you. There never have been any stinks like the kind we had when we were running that tannery on the Molopo River in the rainy season, in the old days. We thought that the water of the Molopo that the flour-mill on the erf next to us didn’t use for their water-wheel would be all right for us with our tannery. We didn’t need running water. Just ordinary standing water was good enough for us. And when I say standing water, I mean standing. You have got no idea how it stood. And we didn’t tan just plain ox-hides and sheepskins,
