The Covenant (54 page)

The hartebeest hut had been lived in so thoroughly that it could scarcely be distinguished from the one on the previous farm, and on the perimeter of the holding, Hendrik had placed four more cairns, midway between the compass points. In less than a year the Van Doorns had themselves a stable farm, six thousand acres well marked and so far removed from any neighbor that intrusion of any kind was unlikely for years to come.

The family was deeply interested in Adriaan’s report of the two black youths and this proof that a tribe of some magnitude occupied
the lands farther east. Again and again the older Van Doorns asked their son to repeat exactly what he had learned during his four-day meeting with the blacks.

“They speak with clicks,” Adriaan said, “so they must be of the same family as the Hottentots, but Dikkop understood none of their words. They were a strong, really handsome people, but their only weapons were clubs and assegais.”

Hendrik was so interested that he summoned Dikkop, who conveyed the important information that so far as he could discern, they called themselves the Xhosa:
Hkausa
, he pronounced the word, giving it a pronounced click in the back of his throat. “They said they were the Xhosa, who lived beyond a big river.”

“What river?” Hendrik asked.

“There were so many,” Adriaan and Dikkop said together, and for the first time they spelled out the geography of the vast lands to the east, and it was this report, laboriously written down in archaic language by Hendrik van Doorn, that ultimately reached the Cape, adding to the Compagnie’s comprehension of the lands they were about to govern, whether they wanted to or not:

When Hendrik finished this writing he was proud to have remembered so much of his education, and ashamed that he had neglected it. At Trianon his parents had taught him his letters and to speak correct Dutch, but long years in the company of Hottentot and slave, and then with an illiterate wife, had caused him to speak in rough, unlettered sentences. Worse, he had taught none of his children to read.

But he engaged in no recriminations, for life was bountiful. With June came harvest time, and the family was busy gathering not only enough vegetables for the long winter, but also more than enough to dry for seeds: big yellow pumpkins, gnarled green squash, mealies, radishes, onions, cauliflower and cabbage for pickling. The fruit trees, of course, were too young to bear, but in his explorations of the surrounding terrain Hendrik had found wild lemons whose thick and oily skin proved so useful, and bitter almonds like the ones from the hedge his grandfather had cut down during his escape from Compagnie domination.

One heard little of the Compagnie out here. The farm was so distant from headquarters—one hundred and sixty-two miles in a straight line, half again more according to the wandering path over the mountains—that no official could easily reach it. No predikant ever arrived for marriages and baptisms, and certainly no assessor or tax collector. Still, a kind of supervision prevailed, distant and unenforced, but ready for implementation when roads should penetrate the area. A petulant Compagnie official who crossed the mountains in vast discomfort had come as far east as four farms short of Van Doorn’s, and he had written upon his return to the Cape:

The loan-farm law was passed, but as the perceptive emissary had predicted, it could rarely be enforced. Distant farmers were instructed to carry their taxes to either the Cape or Stellenbosch, and they simply ignored the law. On farms close in, the officials did make a brave show of riding out in midwinter to demand overdue tithes, but with obstinate and dangerous renegades like Rooi van Valck, no collector dared approach his outlaw domain lest he be shot through the neck.

In these years Adriaan had little concern with tax collectors; he was so occupied with extending his knowledge of the wilderness that weeks would pass without his being seen at the farm. It was then that the soubriquet Mal Adriaan was fastened most securely to him; he would come home from an exploration and say, “While I was sleeping in the tree …” or “As I climbed out of the hippo’s wallow …” or “In the days when I lived with the gemsbok …” He caused outrage among his family and the slaves by insisting that lions could climb trees, for it was commonly accepted that they could not and that a man was secure if only he could find refuge in a tree.

“No,” said Adriaan, “I’ve seen a tree with seven lions sleeping on the higher branches.” This was so crazy that even the slaves called him Mal Adriaan, and once when he was twenty he experienced for the first time the loneliness that comes upon a young man when he is ridiculed by his peers. The family was eating in the hut, scraping away at bones of mutton and cabbage, when his father asked, “Have the animals moved closer to our valley?” and he replied automatically, “When I was staying with the rhinoceros …” and his brothers and sisters said simultaneously, “Oh, Adriaan!” and he had blushed furiously and started to leave the table where they huddled, except that his mother placed her hand upon his arm to restrain him.

That night, as they sat outside the hut, she told him, “It’s not good for a man to wait too long. You must find yourself a wife.”

“Where?”

“That’s always the question. Look at our Florrie. Where’s she to catch a husband? I’ll tell you where. One of these days a young man will come by here on his horse, looking for a bride. And he’ll see Florrie, and off she’ll go.”

And sure enough, within four weeks of that conversation Dikkop, always frightened of new movement, came rushing to the hut, shouting, “Man coming on horse!” And in came a dusty, lusty young farmer who had ridden a hundred and twenty miles on hearing the rumor that Hendrik van Doorn out beyond the river had several daughters. He made no secret of his mission, stayed five weeks, during which he ate enormous quantities of food, and on the night Hendrik offered him a bread pudding crammed with lemon rind and cherries and dried apples, he belched, pushed back the soup plate from which he had gorged himself, and said, “Florrie and me, we’re heading home tomorrow.”

The Van Doorns were delighted. It might be years or never before
they saw this daughter again, but at her age it was proper that she ride away. Illiterate, barely able to sew a straight line, a horrible cook, a worse housekeeper, off she went with her illiterate husband to found a new farm, to raise a new brood of tough-minded trekboers to occupy the land.

Two nights after they departed, Johanna sat with Adriaan again and said, “Take the brown horse and be going.”

“Where?”

“Three people now have told us that Rooi van Valck has a mess of daughters. Ride up and get one.”

“They also say Rooi’s a bad one. Defames the Bible.”

“Well.” She hardly knew how to say what was required, but she had thought about this matter for some time, keeping her mouth shut lest she irritate her husband. But now she said in a low voice, “Adriaan, it’s possible to take the Bible too seriously. I can’t read it myself—never had my letters—but sometimes I think your father makes a fool of himself, scouring that book for instructions. If Rooi van Valck has a daughter, and she looks as if she’d be good in bed, grab her.” When Adriaan said nothing, for these ideas were shocking to him, raised as he was with absolute faith in the Bible, even though he could not read it for himself, his mother added, “Living in a hut is no pleasure. It’s not much better than what the Hottentots have. But to love your father and go to bed with him when you children are asleep. That can be enough to keep a life going.” With a sudden jerk of her hand she pulled him around to face her in the darkness. With her eyes close to his she whispered, “And never forget it. You leave for Van Valck’s at sunup.”

Adriaan took the brown horse and rode far to the north, across the empty plains, across the muddy Touws River, and well to the west of the Witteberge Mountains, until he saw ahead the columns of dust that signified a settlement. It was the farm, the little empire, of Rooi van Valck, and to get to the hartebeest huts in which Rooi and his wild collection of attendants lived, he had to pass through valleys containing twenty thousand sheep, seven thousand head of cattle.

“I’m looking for Rooi,” Adriaan said, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his wealth.

“Not here,” a Madagascan slave growled.

“Where is he?”

“Who knows?”

“Can I speak to his wife?”

“Which one?”

“His wife. I want to speak with his wife.”

“He’s got four. The white one, the yellow one, the brown one, the black one.”

“Which one has the daughters?”

“They all got daughters, sons too.”

“I’ll see the white one.”

“Over there.” And the slave pointed to a hut not one bit better than the one the Van Doorns occupied.

All these cattle, Adriaan said to himself as he crossed the clearing to the hut. And he lives in a hut like us. He was pleased rather than disturbed, and when the white Mevrouw van Valck invited him to sit with her, he was relieved to see that she was much like his mother: old beyond her years, well adapted to the dirt, independent in nature.

“What do you want?” she asked, squatting on a log that served as a bench.

“To see your husband.”

“He’s around somewheres.”

“When will he be back?”

Like the slave, she answered, “Who knows?”

“Today? Three days?”

“Who knows?” Looking at him carefully, she asked, “What farm?”

“Hendrik van Doorn’s.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Trianon. Those Van Doorns.”

The name had a startling effect on her. “Trianon!” she roared, following the name with a string of Dutch and Hottentot curses. Then, going to the open end of the hut, she bellowed, “Guess who’s here? A Van Doorn of Trianon!”

“I’m not from Trianon,” Adriaan tried to explain, but before he could establish this fact, numerous people had erupted from the many huts, women of varied colors bringing with them children of the most mixed appearance.

“This one is from Trianon!” Mevrouw van Valck shouted, hitting him in the shoulder playfully and ringing out a new string of obscenities. “And I’ll wager he’s come to find him a wife. Isn’t that right, Van Doorn? Isn’t that right?”

And before he could control his blushing and explain in an orderly
manner the purpose of his mission, the tough woman had yelled for different people, and a procession of bewildering types came to her hut. “You can have this one,” she shrilled, pointing to a nubile girl of seventeen with dark skin and black hair. “But you can’t have that one because he’s a boy.” This occasioned great laughter among the women, and the parade continued.

“This one you can have,” she said more seriously, “and I’d advise you to take her.” With these words she brought forth one of her own daughters, a girl with bright red hair that fell almost to her waist. She seemed to be about fifteen or sixteen, not shy, not embarrassed by her rowdy mother. Going directly to Adriaan, she extended her hands and said, “Hello, I’m Seena.” When her mother started to say something obscene, the girl turned in a flash and shouted, “You, damn fool, shut up.”

“She’s the good one,” Mevrouw van Valck shouted, cackling with the other wives, who formed a circle of approbation.

“She has lovely hair,” a Malay woman said, reaching out to fluff the girl’s red tresses.

Adriaan, overcome with embarrassment, asked Seena, “Is there somewhere …”

“Get away, you …” The girl uttered an oath equal to her mother’s and chased the women back. “We can sit here,” and she indicated an old wagon chest at the entrance to the hut in which she lived with a ramshackle collection of other children.

“Where’s your father?” Adriaan asked.

“Out killing Bushmen,” she said.

“When will he be back?”

“Who knows? Last time it took him four weeks to clean out the valleys.”

“Can I stay here?”

“Was my mother right? Are you looking for a wife?”

“I’m … I’m … looking for your father.”

“You don’t have to wait for him. He doesn’t care what happens. Have you a farm?”

“I live a long way off.”

“Good.” That was all she said, but the single word conveyed her longing to get away from this tempestuous place.

It was worse when Rooi himself roared in from the manhunt. He was a huge man with a flaming head of red hair that gave him his name. He was really Rupertus van Valck, from a family which had
settled early at the Cape. Rooi van Valck, Rooi the Falcon, the red-haired terror who submitted to no control, whether from the Cape governor, the Lords XVII, or God Himself.

The Van Valcks first had trouble with authority in the time of Van Riebeeck, when Leopold, the stubborn soldier who had founded the family, sought permission to marry a Malaccan girl. The Compagnie dillydallied so long that when permission was finally granted, Rooi’s grandfather was a sire twice over. The next serious clash came when Mevrouw van Valck, a lively, independent-minded woman, wanted to dress in a way becoming her prettiness. From Amsterdam the Lords XVII specifically ordered that “Mevrouw van Valck must not wear bombazine, and certainly not a bright yellow bombazine, and especially since she is not the wife of a senior Compagnie official.” When she persisted, with her husband’s encouragement, soldiers were sent to rip the dress apart, whereupon Van Valck thumped the soldiers—and spent a long day on the wooden horse.