Devil's Valley (39 page)

Far in the background Brother Holy could be seen rolling about in strange contortions, blasting the valley with thundering curses from Jeremiah and Ezekiel. He aimed a hoarse shout in our direction as we passed below, but Hans Magic didn’t even look up.

‘
Etch ‘Ou

Along the way a few women joined our little procession: Hanna-of-Jurg, Annie-of-Alwyn, Dalena-of-Lukas, three or four others, and Emma. Hans Magic clearly resented their presence, but he said nothing openly, contenting himself with unsavoury remarks muttered under his stinking breath.

Some distance beyond the rock pool, high up along the course of the dried-up river, he stopped. “He’ll be somewhere here,” he announced.

That was just where Emma and I had earlier left the little bag of food on the flat rock. I was rather relieved, even touched, to see that the bag had disappeared. But of course, it could have blown away: the wind had torn a trench along the full length of the kloof as it came funnelling down from above. And how could we be sure that the child would have found a safe spot to shelter?

The women started calling, followed by the rest of us, first in single voices, then all in chorus.

“Piet! Piet, come out! We’ve come to fetch you!” we trumpeted among the cliffs, hearing our own voices echoing back from the distance: ‘
etch ‘ou!…‘ou!…‘ou!

“The little shit is hiding from us,” grumbled Hans Magic. “He’s a stroppy one.”

We didn’t bother to answer. Farther and farther we spread out, hollering his name.

Only the echoes replied.

“He could have fallen to his death,” said Hanna-of-Jurg, in a surprisingly high whining tone for such a voluminous person. She turned her vulnerable cow’s eyes to Hans Magic: “If anything happened to him, you’ll be to blame.”

“I’m telling you he’s just hiding away.”

“Then how come you can’t find him? You always know everything.”

“He’ll come out.”

Half an hour later we were back in the settlement, with empty hands. A small knot of people were awaiting us at the church. Children were dispatched with the tidings. Within minutes a large search party set out again along the dry riverbed. But when night fell they were forced to turn back.

“The dark will bring him home all right,” said Hans Magic, but his eyes were avoiding ours. “He’ll be back before morning.”

“And all for nothing,” Hanna-of-Jurg reminded him.

“I told you the clouds had to be right. They came from the wrong side again.”

“It’s my child’s life you’re playing with.”

“You can always have another,” he said, and walked away.

Swollen Thick

It was Henta who brought the news in the morning. I was at home alone, Tant Poppie having been called out to help when a few people were injured by a wall that had collapsed in one of the stricken houses during the night. The moment I saw the girl I knew. I stood up very quickly from the breakfast table.

“Has something happened?”

“Yes, Oom.” She didn’t cry, but her eyes were swollen thick. The normally blooming face looked very pale. There was a bloody weal across one cheek, and on the dusty legs under her dress. The dress itself was in shreds, the hem of it undone, one sleeve torn off, exposing the shoulder. Through the fresh smell of peaches she usually exuded wafted darker, more worrisome odours of the night, alluding to a kind of space she should not yet have knowledge of.

“Who did this to you?” I demanded.

She just shook her head, her knotted dark-red hair falling over her face.

“Henta, what happened?”

The she began to cry. “It’s Piet, Oom. Pa killed him.”

Shocking State

There are professions in which personal involvement in what happens around you is a sure recipe for a fuck-up. Objectivity is the golden rule. Any lawyer will tell you that. Any psychologist too, I’m sure. Be that as it may. But what I do know is that no crime reporter can afford to get emotionally involved in a case he’s required to cover.

Ever since that day when little Piet Snot mistook me for God, he’d somehow become my damn responsibility, whether I’d wanted to or not; and even more so after he’d brought me the wretched chameleon. To bring me luck! To compound it all, there was Henta. From the first time in Jurg’s shed (
What do you think I’ve come for?
), she’d been stirring up totally unbloodymanageable feelings in me. Her perverse innocence. And now, this morning, she turned up in that shocking state.

All of which spelled out quite clearly that I’d better stay out of it. But how could I? If
she
asked me? And if little Piet Snot was dead?

I couldn’t believe it. In a way perhaps it was the worst that could have happened. Up to that moment, even when I’d become drawn into events like Ouma Liesbet’s death or Hans Magic’s rainmaking rituals or Ben Owl’s suicide, it had been possible to keep to the sideline. But this time there was no fucking way I could stay out of it.

Any Cop

“Aren’t you coming?” asked Henta. She looked like one of those cheap paintings of Spanish gypsy children who stare at you with their huge eyes and tear-stained cheeks, pure schmaltz. I didn’t want to see it. Why couldn’t she have gone to Lukas Death for help? He was the fucking judge. It had nothing to do with me.

Is Oom not going to help me?

“What can I do?” I asked helplessly, more to myself than to her.

“You want me to go back to that place alone?” she asked.

I took her by the shoulders. She winced, and I quickly let go again. “What’s wrong?”

She half-turned her back and pulled the dress down from her shoulder to show me the bloody weals. Jesus Christ.

“Do you want to see more?”

“I’ve seen enough,” I said quickly. “Why did he do that to you?”

“I tried to stop him.”

Filled with bloody guilt and self-loathing I said, “All right, I’m coming.”

Distraught, I looked round. I didn’t like the idea of taking on Jurg Water with my bare hands, especially in the mood he would undoubtedly be in right now. But there was nothing in the voorhuis I could use as a weapon. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a long fire-iron from the hearth.

“Come.”

She cast a scared look at the fire-iron, but offered no protest. Shrugging her bare shoulder back into the torn dress she followed me. A few people on the road stopped when they saw us pass. They must have drawn their own conclusions, for they soon fell in behind us. By the time we reached Jurg Water’s house there were a dozen or more on my heels.

The front door was closed. Like any cop in a film I kicked it open.

Foul Play

Confusion continues to surround events in the Devil’s Valley where a young boy known as Piet Snot (9) was found dead on Monday morning after apparently getting lost in the mountains over the weekend. It is suspected that he lost his way in a violent windstorm. Although a search party was sent out on Sunday afternoon, its members were forced to suspend the search when night fell without any sign of the boy. However, it was reported that his father, Mr Jurg (Water) Lermiet continued on his own to scour the mountains for his son until he found the child’s body in a deep ravine in the early hours of Monday morning. Judging by the injuries to the body it would seem as if he had been attacked by a wild animal. According to a spokesman, Mr Lukas (Death) Lermiet, foul play is not suspected and rumours about dissension in the family are devoid of all foundation. The sister of the dead boy, Miss Henta Lermiet, was unwell and had been advised by her father not to speak to the press. Final funeral arrangements have not yet been made
.

Wounded Buffalo

Everything suddenly got out of hand the moment I stepped into Jurg Water’s house. The fire-iron had been meant only as a precaution, for self-defence. But when I saw the small broken body on the narrow bed in the corner, with a still-shocked Hanna beside it like a bundle of unwashed laundry and Jurg walking up and down in the background brandishing a sjambok, something in me gave way.

The moment he recognised me he came charging round the dining table, kicking a chair out of the way so violently that I heard the wood splinter.

“Get out of my house!” he shouted, his face looking more like a malignant tumour than ever.

“Pa,” said Henta behind me.

Jurg Water stared past me in disbelief. “What are you doing with that bastard?” he demanded.

I glanced round at her. “Henta, go and call Lukas Death. And Hans Magic.”

Like a frightened rabbit Henta just stood there. But some of the other people on the stoep scurried off. A handful of men came bundling through the doorway to stop us. But Jurg Water was like a fucking wounded buffalo. He shoved two or three of them out of the way and aimed a blow with the sjambok at me. I sidestepped and it only struck my shoulder, but I could feel it cutting through the skin under my shirt. Then I let rip with the fire-iron. Your Worship, it was he or I.

Jurg dropped to the floor on all fours, shaking his head as if he didn’t know what had hit him. There was blood everywhere. The blow had struck him over the nose and forehead. It seemed as if the nose was broken. I hoped it was.

But that was that. Because the next moment a whole bunch of people burst past me to separate the two of us. In the struggle my watch was torn from my wrist, and as I stopped to pick it up someone crunched it underfoot. This made me even madder. But as I bundled up to hurl myself at them, I realised that Emma was there too.

If it hadn’t been for her, I swear by the brass buckle on my father’s belt, I’d have broken free from the hands pinning my arms to my back. I was man enough to kill Jurg, or anybody who tried to stop me. But not in front of her. Jurg was still carrying on like a bull brought down to be castrated. There were chairs and benches breaking all over the place as he wrestled with his tamers. The only unmoving objects in that voorhuis were the messy remains of Piet Snot on the bed, and Henta in the doorway, her hands pressed to her face.

By the time Lukas Death arrived everybody was talking at the same time. Those who’d come in last had the most to say. I couldn’t make head or tail out of all their versions, but later in the day I was able to speak to Hanna and from Emma I learned what she’d been told by Henta; and from all those bits and pieces I managed to patch together a fuller picture.

Insult to Incest

It turned out that little Piet had never gone into the mountains after all. Just after Hans Magic had sent him up the dry riverbed, he’d made a detour back to the settlement. That must have happened during the Sunday dinner. Even in the heart of the drought there was the customary excess of goat’s meat and samp and pumpkin and sweet potatoes and the rest. Piet must have avoided the loiterers and the stricken in body or mind, hiding behind his father’s house where there was rubble enough lying about after all the storms. And during the heavy sleep that descended on the valley in the wake of the meal he’d slipped inside to ask help from Henta. For better or for worse she wiped the sticky mess from his body, fed him the remains of the Sunday meal, and hid him under her bed where she’d spread a few buckskins. The ample dassie-skin kaross on the bed hung down far enough to keep him out of sight. That, as it turned out later, was where he’d stowed the dead chameleon the night before, after scooping it up from its premature grave.

So far everything had gone well for him. But not for long. The main problem was Jurg Water’s temper which had been building up towards an explosion for some time: the family, recognising the signs, had gone into a kind of catatonic state in anticipation. He was already fucked when the storm in the afternoon brought no rain. “It’s because that Piet is so bloody useless,” he ranted. And when Hanna tried to defend the boy he slapped her. Wanting to stay out of it, Henta had withdrawn to her bed in the voorhuis, but somehow that made him even angrier. And then the futile search in the mountains stirred up yet more bloody thunder inside him, which wasn’t helped at all by Hanna’s increasingly vocal reproaches. He hardly slept all night. My own guess is that he was already hatching schemes of revenge for the shame little Piet had brought on them.

What followed is still not clear. It would seem that Jurg’s prostate sent him outside during the night. But it is also possible that darker designs drove him to Henta’s bed in the voorhuis, because that was where the trouble came to a head. In the dark he either stumbled over little Piet’s feet sticking out from under the bed, or the boy made a sound when his father’s heavy body began to weigh down the that of the bed on top of him. The particulars are not that important. All that matters is that Jurg plucked Piet from under the bed and, to add insult to incest, discovered the dead chameleon in the boy’s hand. That was all he needed, and Henta’s attempts to interfere just about turned his arse-hairs grey.

Many Generations

It was in the church that the next chapter was played out. Which came as no surprise. There is no other public building in the settlement, and in the course of time the church has come to stand in for all kinds of functions, not all of them solemn or proper. I should have remembered what had happened to Alwyn Knees.

All that lived and moved in the Devil’s Valley was there. Including Brother Holy, but he was scratching away so furiously that he couldn’t have absorbed much of what was happening around him. Behind the communion table a few chairs had been set out for the members of the Council of Justice: Lukas Death in the centre, more pissed-upon than pissing; to his left, Isak Smous; to his right, Jos Joseph. Jurg Water and I were both in the front row, but with several other men in between. Just as at church services, the men and women were seated apart in two blocks, left and right.

Let me say immediately that it was the weirdest trial I have attended in my career as a crime reporter. Actually it wasn’t a trial at all, and perhaps I’d been fucking naive to expect anything of the kind. I should have taken to heart the way in which after the deaths of Ouma Liesbet and Ben Owl everything had simply petered out, but at least there was the excuse that his suicide had prematurely brought an end to both matters. But this time it was murder, loud and clear, and the perpetrator was at hand.