The Covenant (62 page)

Rebecca he saw with unflinching clarity: he sensed that she had declared war upon Seena and him and was probably agitating for their expulsion; but he also saw that she was an exceptional woman whom he might have wanted to marry had he been younger. She was passionate and clean and shining, like a white stone at the bottom of a moving river. Her courage merited enormous respect, for in her zeal to discipline the trekboer world, which he had to admit was lawless, she was like some great mother elephant crashing through the underbush, headed for a destination which she alone perceived, and nothing would stop her. That she felt herself to be driven by God only made her more formidable. She was not cruel, nor did she try to overwhelm her opposition; like a cascade running to the sea, she simply kept moving in her predestined direction.

She would be the inner strength of the new religion developing in South Africa, the silent woman who sat serene in church while the men roared and ranted and announced the Psalms to be sung; but in the privacy of the home it would be she who determined what the day-to-day applications of that public religion were to be, and if ever the men carelessly fumbled their way toward some wrongdoing, she would summon them back to the stern path of duty. She would be against change, against relaxation, against new ideas from abroad, against any bizarre interpretation at home. She would form the granite core of the church, and her quiet teaching would prevail.

In short, Adriaan had grown to respect his daughter-in-law not
only as the inexorable force of the future but also as the hard-grained, just human being who was needed at this moment in history. She was a stalwart wife, a compassionate mother; he liked her caustic wit and her capacity to hew to a single line. She was, all told, a good woman, and if she opposed him, the fault must be his.

It was always this way when generations clashed: the best of the old found it easy to appreciate the merits of those among the new who displayed integrity. It was the second echelons, deficient in understanding and empathy, who caused the trouble, and now Lodevicus was prepared to do just that.

It was the second expedition against the Bushmen which demonstrated how stonelike he had become and how justly he merited the title Hammer. This time there had been no massive theft of cattle, only the constant spiriting away of a cow here, an ox there, but all farmers in the region were enraged with the little brown men, and when Lodevicus said, “They’re like vermin. Periodically they have to be exterminated,” they agreed, and once more a commando was sent north to cleanse the area.

On this expedition no rhinoceros was used as bait, and for good reason: there were now no herds of large animals in the region; most had been killed off or driven away. Rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, zebra, those glorious beasts who had roamed these hills had vanished before the horse and gun, and now these dreadful weapons were to be turned against the Bushmen.

What Lodevicus did was separate his commando into three groups operating like a vast pinwheel, riding in circles that tightened toward the center, and as the men rode they watched for little brown men who might be trapped within their circle. As the bewildered Bushmen ran this way and that in sad confusion, the horsemen picked them off, one by one. There was no mass slaughter of ninety, as before, but only the deadly attrition of knocking down running targets—until two hundred were slain.

Adriaan, remembering his friendship with the Bushmen, had spoken against the hunt, but he had been ignored. He was appalled at its inhumanity, and when one old man, hampered by a kind of belt he wore, stumbled about in confusion, Adriaan rode to rescue him, but Lodevicus swept in, lowered his rifle, and killed the man.

“What have you done?” Adriaan cried.

“We’re clearing the land,” Vicus shouted from his horse.

“Damn you! Look at him!” And Adriaan dismounted to inspect the dead man’s belt, and found it to be of rhinoceros hide imbedded with eight tips of eland horn. Holding the belt aloft, he cried, “What is it, Vicus? Tell me, what is it?”

His son reined in his horse, rode back, and looked contemptuously at the leather. “Seems like a belt.”

“Dip your finger into one of the horns,” and when he did, the finger came out a deep-stained blue.

“What is it, Vicus?” And when his son said he didn’t know, Adriaan cried in pain, “They’re the pots of an artist. Who paints the living veld on the roof of the cave. And you murdered him.” Looking up at his mounted son, he said with bitter scorn, “Lodevicus the Hammer. I won’t share my house with you one day longer.”

“It’s my house,” Lodevicus said. “I built it.”

Whereupon the old man cried in terrible rage, “Read the Bible you prate about! It was Abraham’s house as long as he lived. But you’ve tainted it … with red blood … and blue paint. And I’ll have no more of it.”

Turning his back on his son, he mounted his horse, hurried over the hills, and shouted as he rode into De Kraal, “Seena! Come on, old Redhead. Get yourself ready to leave this pitiful place.”

“Good!” she shouted back. “Where do we go?”

“I’ll find a place,” he assured her, and at sixty-five the old wanderers began scouting far lands to determine where they would build their own hut.

In 1778 the Hollanders who came to Cape Town to govern the colony, spending temporary terms in a land that confused them, gave honest proof of their desire to administer the area justly, for they devised a solution to frontier problems that was more humane and considerate than any being offered at this time by either the British or the French in their colonies. The governor himself trekked all the way from Cape Town, on horseback and by slow oxcart, to talk with trekboers like the Van Doorns and native chieftains like Guzaka, and after painful consideration of what was best for all, sent an emissary back to De Kraal with a written order that was concise and unmistakable:

When the emissary rejoined the governor’s party he was able to state with assurance: “The frontier problem is settled. There can never again be conflict, because each side will keep to its own bank of the river.”

The day after he said this, Adriaan van Doorn loaded his wagon, handed his wife a walking stick, and bade farewell to his son’s family. To Rebecca he said with sorrow, “You and Lodevicus have set a course so harsh I cannot follow. May your God give you strength to finish it.”

“He’s your God, too.”

“Mine is a gentler God,” he said, but when this rebuke caused blood to leave her face, he kissed her and said, “The world throws up mountains, and sometimes we must live in separated valleys.”

And he forded the river and built his hut right in the center of the area which the governor had promised would never again be touched by white men.

When Xhosa spies informed Guzaka that a trekboer had violated the order before it was seven days old, he concluded that the only reasonable response was warfare, so he assembled a party and led his men in a swift charge that engulfed the trespass hut.

Before Adriaan could reach for his gun, assegais flashed and Seena was dead. Swinging the butt of his rifle, he tried to beat off the attackers, but they overwhelmed him, and when his arms were pinioned, Guzaka lunged at him with a spear.

• • •

Now Lodevicus became indeed the Hammer, exacting a terrible revenge. Inflamed by the knowledge that it had been he who forced his parents’ exodus, he confessed his guilt to no one, but led his commandos far across the Great Fish, rampaging deep into Xhosa lands, destroying forever the hopeful truce the governor had arranged. He burned and slaughtered, and for every cow the Xhosa had stolen, he took back a hundred. With flashing guns he rode against unmounted men armed only with spears, shouting, “Kill! Kill!”

When he returned to De Kraal he claimed, in his apologetic report to the governor, that he had been lured across the Great Fish by Xhosa infamy, but that the border was now secured for all time. Although he convinced the governor, he was not persuasive with Guzaka, who heard of this report, and now it was he who planned revenge.

“Every kraal must be destroyed,” he thundered at night meetings, and if Vicus van Doorn had sought retribution after the death of his parents, Guzaka wanted nothing less than extermination.

It was, in most respects, as uneven a war as would ever be pursued in Africa, with each side having outrageous advantages. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of one hundred to one and could extirpate any single white farm; but the whites possessed guns and horses, and when the latter galloped through a kraal, they spread such terror that one white gunman could methodically reload and shoot a dozen fleeing natives.

It was a confusion, a clash of interests that could not even be defined. Guzaka was committed to moving his cattle slowly onward, as his people had been doing for eight hundred years, while Lodevicus felt that God Himself had ordered him to establish on the far bank of the Fish River a Christian community obedient to the rules of John Calvin. Land ownership was a constant problem, Guzaka’s tribe having always held their land in generality and believing that they were entitled to every lush pasturage reaching to the Cape, while the trekboers cherished a tradition which their Dutch forebears had defended with their lives: that a man’s farm merited the same respect as a man’s soul.

It was impossible to detect at any moment in this vast struggle who was winning. At the beginning of 1778 Guzaka gained a signal victory by razing the hut of Adriaan van Doorn, but in the spring of
that year Vicus retaliated with his famous “tobacco commando.” Recalling his tactics with the Bushmen, when he used a rhinoceros to wipe them out, he scattered tobacco on the ground a Xhosa war party would traverse; when they bent to grab at this prize, they perished in a hail of lead. In 1779 recognized warfare erupted, black regiments pitted against white field forces, and this was repeated in 1789 and 1799, bloody preludes to the more terrible wars that would continue through the next century.

During the battles Lodevicus never equated the Xhosa with the Bushmen, those troublesome little animals that had to be exterminated. Since the Xhosa were large men like himself, they commanded respect. As he told Rebecca, after one arduous expedition, “When we pacify them, they’ll be good Kaffirs.”

Guzaka had no intention of becoming a good Kaffir. Six separate times he threw his warriors against De Kraal, still convinced that if he could humble it, he could break the spirit of the trekboers, and six times the protecting hills enabled the embattled farmers to repel the invaders, and in the chase that always followed, to massacre them. But on the seventh try, in 1788, Guzaka and his warriors broke into the valley unexpectedly and came upon Rebecca van Doorn as she was going from the cattle byre to her house. With flashing assegais they cut her down, and she died before Lodevicus could reach her.

In contrast to the rage he felt at the similar death of his mother and father, this time he fell silent, brooding upon the harsh fact that God was not giving him the easy victories Dominee Specx had spoken of in those exciting days of revelation at Swellendam. He was also plagued by memories of that morning when his wife and mother resorted to the Bible to answer the question of what would happen when the Xhosa struck, and the mocking words reverberated: “An hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight.” One of that ten thousand, the damned Guzaka, had killed his father, his mother and his wife. The New Jerusalem had not been established on the far side of the Great Fish; the Canaanites had not been expelled from the house of the Lord; indeed, they seemed to be chopping that house to bits.

And then, in the depth of his despair, when it seemed that his mission and that of the trekboers had been completely frustrated, God visited him again, in the person of a girl of nineteen who came riding alone into De Kraal on the back of a white horse. She was Wilhelmina Heimstra, from one of the irreverent families down by the
sea, and her mission was forthright: “I cannot live in idolatry. I cannot exist without the presence of God.”

“You can’t stay here,” Lodevicus said. “I have no wife.”

“That’s why I came,” the girl said. “When the messenger told us that the Xhosa had killed Rebecca, whom I knew …”

Lodevicus, then forty-nine, the Hammer of the frontier, stood silent. In all the territory he commanded there was no predikant to give direction, not even a sick-comforter other than himself, and he did not know what to do. But then he recalled the patristic figures of the Old Testament and how often they had been faced by such problems on their lonely frontiers: older men without wives, heads of families with no one to assist them, and his mind fell especially on Abraham, that first great trekboer:

It became apparent that God had sent this girl to comfort him in his old age, but the problem of how a Christian marriage could be performed without a cleric was perplexing. “You cannot stay here, when I have been so demanding of others that they follow in righteous paths.”

“You demanded, Lodevicus, that’s true, but no one obeyed. Everyone to the south lives as they always lived. I’m the one who listened and obeyed.”