1972 - A Story Like the Wind (42 page)

François, however, insisted. He explained that his mother was in the south and that Hunter’s Drift was a large establishment, not only accustomed to giving hospitality to strangers but welcoming it as a break in a singularly lonely routine. He would only beg his host, he elaborated, to follow him as soon as possible, so that they could get to his home before dark.

The girl, who had been listening attentively, if not anxiously, skipped with excitement when she saw that François had overcome the last of her father’s reservations. François, who had a special eye for natural movement took instant delight in the ease and grace with which she did her little dance of pleasure. At the same time he marvelled at her quicksilver spirit because already she appeared impatient of the journey ahead, as if anxious to be transported by magic carpet to Hunter’s Drift. Eagerly she asked, ‘Have we still far to go? I do hope not!’

François did not answer at once, confirming the girl’s impression that she was going to find him irritatingly slow in conversation. Then he replied, ‘It’s another three and a half hours on horseback.’

‘On horseback?’ the girl exclaimed. ‘But how far is that for us?’

‘Oh, you’ll have some sixteen to eighteen miles to go.’

She looked disappointed and then turned her back on him to call out in Portuguese to Amelia to hurry.

The moment François had answered her questions, he set out to saddle up his horse, leaving the Moncktons to start breaking camp behind him. He hastened because he had promised that he would go ahead to show the wagons where best to camp for the night. That done, he would wait for the rest of the party to join them and then show them a short cut to his home.

He had hardly reached his horse, however, when the girl appeared suddenly at his side to kneel down and fondle Hintza. Hintza, who until this noonday interlude, had never taken kindly to strangers, now was clearly making an exception.

Indeed, he was responding ardently to her advances. All the pet expressions of endearment that the girl used on Hintza caused him to wag and tremble with pleasure at her touch. Even she must have been somewhat surprised at herself because there came a moment when she looked up to say, ‘You know, I’ve never had a dog of my own…I’d so love to have a dog exactly like him.’

François, standing rather tall above her, finished tightening his horse’s saddle before he answered. He looked straight down into a pair of eyes open and unreserved and thought he had never seen eyes with such a range of expression. For instance, he had already seen them full of mischief, and all the mischievous eyes he had known up to then had usually been quick, smallish eyes, not nearly as large as those dark, almost weighty ones now looking up at him. Then he had seen eyes full of wonderment, and in his experience eyes that tended to wonder had always been rather vague, unfocused, always inclined to stare as if they did not see a person so much as something invisible beyond him. Yet he knew that these same large eyes, full of their own inner light, were also unusually quick, observant and lively. In fact he had never in his life met a pair of eyes so charged with paradox as those into which he looked, now with yet another expression in them to confuse him, one for which he could for the life of him think of no name at that moment.

‘If you could wait long enough, I’m certain I could get you a puppy almost like him,’ he told her, touched by the note of longing in her voice and remembering how many years he had had to dream of a dog like Hintza before Ouwa finally realized it for him.

The prospect seemed to overwhelm her into silence before she said in a hushed, almost humbled little voice, ‘That would be just too, too wonderful.’

As if afraid that such a prospect might immediately be snatched away, she turned her attention to Hintza, remarking, ‘You call him Hin. What a strange name for a dog. What sort of language is that?’

‘Oh, it’s not his full name. I only call him that for short,’ François replied, busying himself with the bridle.

‘What’s his proper name then? I’d love to know it. It isn’t another sort of Chisai, I hope?’

François knew that he couldn’t possibly tell her Hintza’s proper name then without embarrassing consequences for them all. He could only reply, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t tell you now.’

At that, the girl’s wide eyes grew even wider in amazement.

‘Will you tell me soon, please?’ she pleaded.

‘Of course, one day,’ François answered. ‘But not just now. I’ll explain why tonight.’

That aroused an extraordinary sense of delighted anticipation in Luciana. ‘Oh, how lovely. I love secrets, don’t you? And I’m good at keeping them too. I’ll swap you one of mine if you promise to keep it too.’

The girl’s concept of secrets was so foreign to François that he was speechless. The growing pattern of reticence and evasion that life seemed to have imposed upon him, had awoken a sense of guilt in his imagination. Until then the idea that secrecy could ever be justified had never entered his mind; let alone the fact that it could be a source of enjoyment. For the first time his pagan-puritan conscience felt relief. If one as lovely and innocent as this young girl could find the possession of secrets natural, he suspected his own sense of guilt, perhaps, need not press so heavily.

Xhabbo and his cave, and François’s visit to uLangalibalela were real secrets. But he had an inkling of relief at the thought that in confiding Hintza’s full name to her, and his reason for contracting it into Hin, he might make her in a sense a partner, who, by sharing things he had never shared with anybody else, could in time help to lighten the real weight of secrecy within himself.

This inkling became almost concrete belief as he rode away because, when he looked back just before finally vanishing into the bush, he saw Luciana still standing where he and Hintza had left her. She had removed her sun bonnet and the moment she saw that François was looking back, she waved it vigorously above her head.

As a result of thoughts and incidents like these, François was beginning to feel a different person from the one he had been at dawn. In fact he became so preoccupied that it seemed he had barely left the Monckton camp when he was disturbed once again by the crack of ox-whips and the cries of wagoners on the road ahead of him.

At once he pulled his horse into a fast gallop, and soon caught up the rear wagon of the train ahead. The wagon carried such a heavy load that it was stacked high above the canvas top of the front half. The great load was securely tied down under the traditional ‘buck-tarpaulin’ of the professional purveyors of this kind of transport in the interior. As a result, he did not see the women and children riding on the driver’s bench just underneath the opening in front until he was abreast of them.

They were all Cape-coloured people, dressed in clothes of the brightest colours that gave the remote world of the bush, robbed of its own natural colour just then by the fierce corrosive light of the afternoon sun, an oddly festive if not gypsy appearance. They were all members of one of François’s favourite peoples in Africa. Both Ouwa and Lammie, who came from the far south, had grown up with people exactly like these. They had always spoken of them with such affection and lively appreciation that François’s whole being was conditioned to feel cheerful at this first passing glimpse of them. He knew them to be the gayest, wittiest, most skilful and least bitter and undismayed people in the whole of the land. And all this in spite of the fact that, considering their origins, their uncared-for upbringing, and their utter rejection by the very Europeans who had created them, they had little cause to be gay.

Yet, even knowing all this, he was still amazed by the cries of surprise, delight and welcome with which the women and children all greeted him as he rode by. Even waving back as vigorously and as cheerfully as he could, his response felt abrupt and inadequate. But he pressed on, so anxious was he to talk to the leader of the team who was walking beside his span of eighteen coal-black oxen, exhorting them to greater effort by constant cries of encouragement, and cracking the lash of his long whip expertly over their long horns, without touching a hair of their gleaming coats in the process.

Leading the team, by a long leather thong tied around the horns of two enormous oxen at the head of the span, was a bare-headed, little coloured boy in ragged clothing, thin and obviously with a long history of malnutrition behind him, yet indefatigable and full of energy, pulling the two immense oxen behind him, either one of which, had they so wished, could have trampled him down at any moment. But instead they seemed to be so dominated by his will and spirit that they responded with the greatest willingness, setting such an example to the rest of the span that the overloaded wagon moved over the road at a pace which François could scarcely have believed possible. The moment he was beside the leader of the team, who had doffed his crumpled hat when he noticed that François was a European, François swung easily out of his saddle to walk beside him.

Then, in the way which Ouwa and Lammie had taught him, he held out his hand in greeting to the man, saying in his own tongue as good manners demanded, ‘Good day. I’m François Joubert!’

The man was surprised. But when he saw that François’s outstretched hand remained he took it in his own very shyly, with what François thought was a most attractive smile slowly forming on his gaunt and tired face until it became a wide grin of real pleasure.

‘Allah, God!’ the man exclaimed instinctively, using that combination of both Christian and Muslim gods which the Cape-coloured people draw on in moments of surprise. ‘I thought you were a ghost, because who would have thought that a son of a
Blanda
[the Cape Malay word for a European] would pop out like a blerrie Jack-in-the-box in this forsaken place?’

He said all this with such a lack of inhibition and such a pressure of natural cheerfulness that François could not help smiling. Then he told the man why he was there and how he had just come from their employer to show them where they could best camp for the night.

At the same time, noticing the casual way in which the wagon was being conducted through the bush at what was about to become the most dangerous hour of the day, since lion, leopard and all beasts of prey would soon be setting out to hunt for food for the night, he felt compelled to warn the man, saying: ‘You know, you’re being rather careless. This is very dangerous country you’re travelling in. Why haven’t you got your gun on your shoulder as I have mine? You can never tell in this part of the world when you might not need it. I promise you, I’ve lived here all my life and I’m never allowed to walk even a hundred yards from my own home without a gun.’

For a moment the man’s gay manner abandoned him. He looked at François. Then shrugging his shoulders he answered, François thought, rather tragically. ‘Where do you live then, little master, that you do not know that mere creatures like ourselves are not allowed to possess any guns, even in such a dangerous place? If I had as much as a water pistol on me I would find myself in front of a magistrate before this day is out or my name is not Arrie’—the Cape-coloured abbreviation and endearment for Abraham. Here his natural sense of irony restored his good spirits and he smiled.

Both the ‘little master’ (a term that François loathed and which had been abolished at his birth from the vocabulary of their servants by Ouwa and Lammie) and the man’s explanation, made François feel thoughtless and ashamed. He apologized at once before asking who the leader of the train was so that he could tell him about a camping site for the night.

François’s apology and manner restored the man to his natural friendliness. He told François that, of course, the leader of the team was in the front of the wagons. The
of course
was not at all as obvious to François because he had always been told by Ouwa and Mopani that the leader of any wagon train should always travel at the rear, for that was the place where all the trouble tended to collect.

But he did not pause to argue. It all seemed to him typical of the reckless, courageous, everlastingly optimistic abandon with which these people had always hurled themselves at the unknown in Africa and which had enabled them to play such a vital role in pioneering the immense land, though that role was never hinted at in the history books prescribed by the European governments.

Quickly saying goodbye, which elicited a chorus of bright responses from the man’s family parked high, bright and full of chatter as Paraguayan parrots, on the driving bench of the wagon, François went on ahead. He passed five more wagons in build and load exactly like the first and each drawn by spans of eighteen oxen. Only the spans were different and expressed the individuality and pride of personal possession, independence and self-respect of the owners. The oxen looked as if they were better fed and cared for than the people. The yokes and leather straps, though worn supple as silk with use, were sound and properly maintained. The wagons, though blistered by sun and weather, rolled on well-greased wheels bound tightly in broad, thick iron bands flashing like silver.

Unlike the first wagon, the span of the second wagon consisted entirely of pillar-box red oxen, the third of tawny-coloured, the fourth was of creamy-white, the fifth was of beautiful strawberry roans, the sixth black-and-white brindled oxen and the seventh span, the leader, was drawn by huge, hump-backed creatures of subtly flashing magenta coats and crescents of gleaming ivory horns. They were to François a brave and exceedingly beautiful sight and he was moved by the look of unreserved acceptance of their arduous lot in their glowing, gentle purple eyes. Even when the muscles on their broad shoulders gathered in huge knots as they lowered their heads to take the extra strain of a steep incline in the rough road, their broad hooves kept up a steady rhythmic beat, as of muffled drums, on the scarlet dust underneath them.

But what excited him most was that on the top of the loads of each wagon ahead were sitting the men who obviously needed rest after their shift of conducting the spans. They had just begun making music as only the Cape-coloured people and the gypsies of Imperial Hungary can do. Strumming the guitars, playing the concertinas and mouth-organs that they carry with them wherever they go and value even more than bread and butter, they were singing the songs of the road which they had evolved for themselves throughout their long, traumatic history.