Agaat (35 page)

You gestured to Agaat that she could leave. At her leisure she walked out, her ears flapping backward under her cap.

She must keep her nose out of my business, I'm telling you here and now, she's carrying on as if the farm belonged to her. And . . . and . . .

Jak was red in the face. With an oil cloth he polished furiously at the barrel of his rifle.

Yes, Jak, and what else?

You were used to it. Always in such situations he brought it up. Agaat was the cause of everything that went wrong, and you were the cause of Agaat. With your finger to your lips you signalled he should lower his voice.

And, he said, if I ever have to hear again that my child, my little Jakkie . . . I'll cut off her two tits for her one by one and throw them to the pigs! What must the people think? Jak de Wet's child is being . . . suckled by a . . . by a cast-off kitchen-goffel!

You were startled. Who had read, who had seen, who had told whom?

You kept your cool. Where do you find such rubbish? you asked.

Jak was on his feet, he knocked his chair over backwards.

I hear it from the labourers! I hear them talk! They know everything that happens in this house, you say so yourself! Dawid's cousin says Saar saw it. They piss themselves laughing, the hotnots. Where do you think this must end? What must they think of me? So-called lord of the manor?

You don't know how much Agaat is worth to me, you said. You would probably never even have had a son if it hadn't been for her. And perhaps not even a wife.

Bluff back. But your heart was beating in your throat. Could Agaat have planted the story herself?

Dammit, Milla, once again that pretty-pious little story of yours, how long do you think you're still going to entertain me with it, your stupid serial? Go and write it up for Springbok Radio, go on, you've hardly put that skivvy of yours in her place than you start praising her to the skies all over again. Agaat of Grootmoedersdrift, Littletit of the Overberg! Then they can listen to it on the wireless every day from Caledon to Swellendam.

Jak slammed doors in his storming out.

A mite vehement about cows eating tins, you thought. A mite fierce over a mere rumour amongst the labourers. But it was only the following day that you realised why Jak had been on the defensive.

You were numbering the diaries that were full. From '53 onwards. In the correct sequence, with the periods that they covered written clearly on the cover. So that you could keep exact tally of how many there were. High up in the bedroom wardrobe you were putting them away. Under the eiderdowns.

Then Agaat came to call you.

Come and have a look, she said, the boys say it's not just tins that the cows are eating.

You followed her to the grazing next to the river. There against the wilderness of brambles the pregnant cows were standing and eating white ribs, the carcase of a cow that had been lying there for a long time. The white shards were sticking out of their mouths as they were chewing. You gazed at the drooling and the crunching, too shocked to put one foot in front of the other. To one side the cows' off-colour calves were standing neglected, watching.

Dawid says he shot Blommetjie and Gesina yesterday, Agaat said, they must also have eaten funny stuff.

She went to show you, two cows on the other side of the river.

Blommetjie had already burst open. You could see the dead foetus of her calf. Blommetjie, a great-granddaughter of Grootblom, another one of the Grootblom clan from your mother's old herd.

All that you could get out of Jak was that the cows wouldn't get up and that they were lying in the grass drooling with their heads in their flanks and that he'd wanted to put them out of their misery.

You phoned the vet in town. He would come and see what he could do but he didn't have serums, he would order them immediately from Onderstepoort. If the sickness was what he thought it was. It could take a week to arrive.

You grabbed Agaat by the apron and shook her.

Why didn't I hear the shots more often? Why don't we ever hear anything? Why do I only learn about this now? Why did nobody come and tell me that the cows didn't seem right? Why don't you notice things, I know you know what a healthy cow looks like!

She looked you straight in the eye, her body ramrod-stiff. You could see the hurt settling in her gaze. On top of the poker face, a film of aggrievedness. More than that.

He screws a pipe into the front of the rifle's barrel, she said, her voice neutral.

You let her go, she retreated. When she spoke it was soft, but clear and controlled.

I saw it yesterday for the first time. All you hear is thud like a bag of salt falling off a wagon. But I know what it sounds like now. From now on I'll know to listen for it.

Don't let him see you, Agaat.

You are my eyes and my ears, you wanted to say, he knows in the long run I find out everything, but just don't let him discover that you're spying on him.

You were silent, blew your nose. Her gaze forbade you to say anything further.

You should have said you were sorry you scolded so viciously. You should have said you would be more alert yourself. Never mind, it's not your fault, Agaat, you should have said, you're with Jakkie all day, how could you know what was happening in the fields? But you didn't. You stepped past her, your hands to your face. Shattered because of the cows. Over those injured eyes of Agaat's you stepped. Right over the insinuation flickering in that eye.

Must I see the germs even before they hatch? Must I keep death itself from your body? There was reproach on her face.

Sobering it was.

You gathered yourself. Saw to it that the old bones and tins and cartridge-shells and rusted wires and everything on the old grazings next to the river were cleared up. Jak trembled with dismay when he heard the name of the sickness. He buckled down and helped. You controlled yourself, said if it was really necessary, then he should go and lay out a proper shooting-range with real targets at the back of the fallow land in a special camp where he would be out of the way of man and beast. There would never again be a single thing shot and left lying in the veld, you said.

You immediately started administering bonemeal with the salt, for the sheep as well, and gave instructions for the making of new little troughs that would ensure that each head of cattle would get its eight ounces.

You got in a team of convicts and had the whole farm, next to the rivers and on the side of the drift, scoured for bones. More than a hundred bags full were collected.

You wouldn't forget that, the shaven heads of the men as they moved stooped down in a slow phalanx before Agaat's white apron over the lands. The old hymns there on the fallow, carried by the wind, you could hear them as far as the yard, Agaat's descant high and bright above the deep voices of the men.

Everybody was flabbergasted. Cows that eat skeletons. As if death itself had nutritional value. Even Saar and Lietja who could produce a ribald laugh on any occasion, stood there in the kitchen singing, dragging it out with that lugubrious bending of the notes that the brown people could give to a song. A weeping and wailing it was in those days on Grootmoedersdrift, as the wagons full of white bones arrived in the yard. And as the digging of the trenches began and the skeletons of skunks and meerkat and guineafowl, and the carcasses of cattle, were cast into them, Agaat led the workers in the singing of another verse.

It set you crying all over again. For more than the cows. For Agaat's eye that was dry and sharp with supervising. In her mouth it was a battle hymn, that you could hear, and it was directed at you and you felt how she was piling up her case against you. It was a case for which she could locate her injustice in the very hymns of your own church, in the very mouths of the prophets of the Old Testament.

Did she have everybody on her side even then?

Jak could in any case not endure it too long under Agaat and her convicts. He left his bag of bones and tried to assist the vet. You yourself tried to hurry along the bone-collecting. If the singing were to carry on any longer, you felt, the walls of the homestead would tumble down like those of Jericho.

The bonemeal feeds that you administered helped to get the oxen, the bulls and the cows that had not given birth that year back into condition. But the best dairy cows, all of those that would have calved that season and that had been put to graze in the little back camp next to the river, were lost.

Three days long the deaths continued. Over and over the process repeated itself, the staggering gait with which it started, the glassy stare, the puzzled gaze, the drooping ears, the tangled coat, and the dried-up nostrils. One after the other they lay down. One by one the heads became too heavy there where they were lying in the grass. They turned their noses into their flanks trying to support their heads. The flanks collapsed. The jaws were paralysed, the tips of the tongues lolled on the teeth in front, drool and foam glistened around the mouths, heavily the great brown gullets moved up and down. One after the other soft, pining death you accompanied, your hand on the flank, your hand on the little crown between the ears. You wept by your cows. The best of them were descendants of the animals you had known as a child. Aandster's great-great-grandchild, Pieternella's distant cousins, all the meek caramel-coloured mothers.

When the convicts had gone and all the cows were buried, Agaat came to you. She came to sit by you in your room with Jakkie drinking his bottle in her arms. She put the old green Handbook on your lap.
Her voice was neutral. Her eyes shone.

Open on page 221, she said, open, and ask me anything, I am fully learned now, about anything that can possibly happen to a cow.

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.