The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  The others groaned. “No, Greasy. Tell it right.”

  After a pause, Griesbach spoke again.

  “I guess you’re asking me to say that Ovide’s approach may have got him killed, but you can’t fault his arithmetic.”

  There was a burst of false laughter. Laughing at something that had been funny once. In the midst of it, no one paid attention as Frank stood, as he poured the last dribble of rum from the mess tin, then let it fall onto the crushed grass.

  “Who?” asked Frank. It took them a while to settle down and pay attention.

  “Who what, Adams?”

  “Who told Ovide five and two?”

  There was silence. Everyone looked somewhere other than at Adams. His presence was spoiling things. They wished he’d go.

  “Who?”

  Griesbach answered. “It was Eddy Belton.”

  “Eddy’s not here.”

  “Eddy most assuredly is here, and he was at Pan Station too, where Smith poisoned himself. This is what happened, Adams, so you don’t get it balled up. General Roberts sent Botha a train-load of women and children. Botha sent back a bunch of our prisoners of war. The Beltons were among them. But, before anyone noticed them, Eddy …”

  Frank jumped through the fire. In a shower of sparks, he threw himself on Griesbach, toppled him backwards. Griesbach was strong, had long arms, and he clubbed Adams with his fists on both sides of the head. Frank drew back his own fist, but the others swarmed him. He managed to rise, dragging them. He threw off a pair and was trying to get back to Griesbach when they brained him with a rifle barrel. His weight was too great for his legs then. Not even his fingers would move. The fingers were right in front of his eyes but would not answer.

  Bankfontein

  Frank awakened in the cold daylight when a freight of pain crossed his head. He cringed in anticipation of more such trains but that was the only one. He was in a box-shaped tent with two men sitting cross-legged, one big, one small. They hunched forward with blankets over their shoulders.

  Frank had thrown up and his cheek wore a crust of it. He rubbed it off with the dirty blanket but the stink remained. He sat up straight but his body would not stay that way. He put his hand into his hair and felt a tacky surface: a carapace of drying blood. The Beltons blurred when he looked at them.

  “Where’s my horse?”

  “The Boers took Dunny when they caught us,” Eddy said.

  “Why’d you tell Ovide five and two?”

  With a slurping sound, Eddy Belton started to cry.

  “Shut up, you stupid idiot! You fucking baby!”

  Pete windmilled at Eddy with his fists. Eddy raised his heavy arms to shield himself, but continued to cry.

  Frank crawled to Pete and grabbed the shoulder of his filthy uniform. Where he pulled Pete’s collar back, a big louse unhooked itself and ran.

  “Leave your brother alone.”

  The guard knocked on the wall of the tent and yelled for them to be quiet. Frank was still swaying, felt as if he might fall senseless again. Pete wrenched his uniform out of Frank’s weak fingers.

  “I want to tell him,” Eddy said.

  “You shut up, you goddamn fool!”

  “I’m going to tell him.”

  “You will tell him fucking nothing!”

  “I will.”

  Pete slugged Eddy again, as hard as he could. Eddy accepted the blow. Then he turned and grabbed his brother’s arms. Pete looked amazed, had perhaps never felt his brother’s strength before. Eddy bent Pete backwards to the ground and spoke down into his face.

  “I saw Ovide at the medicine box. We’d got off the train and nobody’d seen Pete and me. We weren’t arrested yet. Ovide looked terrible sick. He was holding his head. He said the medicine he needed wasn’t in the box.”

  “Stop it, Eddy,” said Pete, but without force.

  “One time, Pete told me to get five and a two out of the medicine box. He said five and two was secret medicine for officers. That was when we were at Norvals Pont and Pete wanted to kill Jeff Davis. We gave five and two to the baboon to make it sleep, but the medicine killed it. Pete said it was too strong for monkeys but was still the best medicine in the box for sick people. I didn’t want to kill Ovide, Frank. I wanted to make him better.”

  This time the guard untied the tent flap and entered rifle first.

  “What the hell’s going on in here? Let him off the ground, Eddy. All you sit apart and be quiet. This is the last time or I’m coming with the gags and irons.”

  After the guard left, Frank asked Eddy again where Dunny went. Eddy said that when they took the horses and were riding them in the night, Pete wanted to find a Boer camp and rob it. He thought they could steal some horses and come back and be heroes.

  “We rode up to their outpost and didn’t even know it. They took us prisoner.”

  The last Eddy had seen of Dunny, she was tied in the Boer camp. The officer’s charger was there too. Then Eddy and Pete were put on a train and sent east to where they were locked inside a big wire cage with British Tommys.

  Frank could not hold himself up anymore. He fell over and closed his eyes against the swimming light.

  Next day, Frank was less sick. Greasy Griesbach came and let him out of the jail tent while the Beltons stayed behind. The Beltons’ court martial was to be soon, possibly today. Greasy led Frank to his own tent where he had hot tea and cooked mutton waiting.

  While Frank was eating, Greasy apologized. He said he and the others had behaved badly last night. They were celebrating Redpath’s return and had drank more liquor than they’d had in months.

  “I’m genuinely sorry, Adams. I was drunk, and it didn’t register that Ovide was your friend.”

  “Why make fun of him at all?”

  “Yes. You’re right, of course. It was a poor showing. I regret it. But I want you to know that, no matter how it must seem, Smith was buried with proper respect. The grave is north of camp. All the men turned out. Everybody sang.”

  “Am I free now?”

  “I’ve explained this situation to Davidson. Yes, of course you’re free. I can show you Smith’s grave. Come. I would like to. I’ll show you now.”

  Frank let himself be led. The hill sloped north, and the pile of stones was below camp on that slope. Frank asked Greasy to excuse him, and Greasy left.

  Frank moved the rocks around the pile, trying to make everything fit better. Every time he set a rock, he pictured Ovide underneath, feeling the changed weight. He’d be wrapped in threadbare blankets, his floppy uniform too large because he never cared enough to trade for clothes that fit. His balding head, naked, sunburned, peeling.

  Frank thought about Ovide’s age. Ovide told the enlistment officer in Calgary he was thirty-nine and a half. That was in December 1899. It meant that sometime, here in Africa, Ovide had turned forty. Frank took a deep breath and choked on it. The idea of this birthday, uncelebrated, made him cry.

  Frank said aloud to Ovide inside those rocks that he was sorry about the birthday, and sorry he’d gone Boer-chasing with Jeff Davis. Sorry that before he’d left they’d had an argument about Ovide’s headache and not wearing his hat. He was sorry that, when he rode away, he had not looked back.

  But it did no good to be sorry. Sorry came after and was too late. Ovide was dead and betrayed. That was all.

  Bergendal Farm

  Lord Roberts’ army prepared to resume its eastern push. The effort to trap Christiaan De Wet in the Brandwater Basin had failed, and the commander-in-chief had refocused on driving Botha’s Boers down the Delagoa Railway into the fever lands. General Pole-Carew would attack north of the railway while General Buller pressed up from the south.

  After fighting his way north from Natal, Buller selected a three-acre crown of rocks at Bergendal Farm for his debut battle in the combined army. He began shelling the hill on August 27, eventually hurling so much lyddite at the knoll it looked like Vesuvius. The stubborn Johannesburg Zarps holding it would not quit�
�a hundred men holding back fifteen hundred. But, finally, when a quarter of them were dead, the rest retreated.

  From there, Buller rolled east into Machadodorp. This had been Kruger’s capital, but his railcar, his mobile legislature, had by now rolled east to Nelspruit. With the town to themselves, Buller’s hungry soldiers went after Boer pigs and chooks, and the Boer women went after them with brooms and pitchforks.

  “Verdammt Rooineks!” the women cried. Damn rednecks.

  Lord Strathcona’s Horse, among the first of Buller’s army in the town, were accused of this looting, and their commander, Sam Steele, responded with outrage. His men would do no such thing, he roared. He had called them together and had personally observed there was no loot among them. In this way Sam transferred the indignity to himself. Were they calling him a liar?

  As Pole-Carew and Buller continued east in combination, the phrase often used was that they were “sweeping Botha’s army before them.” Another metaphor was that they were punching a hole into Boer territory. But everything north and south of the broom’s path, the punched hole, remained Boer and hostile.

  The Beltons were court-martialled at Middelburg. Eddy looked like a child when they put him on a train to Pretoria; a big, sad, innocent child headed for a long stretch in jail for the crime of being Pete Belton’s brother. Convicted, sentenced, manacled, Pete continued to insist that he had been attacking the Boers when captured and so should be recognized not as a traitor, but as a hero.

  Frank’s ridgling was returned to him. Without Ovide, Frank rode the ridgling among the various camps and slept outside at night, shivering in his greatcoat. Since Ovide’s death, he could not sleep in their tent, though he hauled it along.

  Abraham, Dakomi, and the rest in the horse yard continued to welcome Frank at their fire. In the daytime, they called him bossy, though it was stone clear he was no one’s boss. He went about his horse work carefully, trying to mimic Ovide. Sometimes when his fingers were pressing among the fine bones of a horse’s ankle, he would imagine they were Ovide’s fingers, powered by Ovide’s deft knowledge. When he listened for liquid in a horse’s wheeze or deciphered the troubled flexion of a horse’s joint, he was again acting out what Ovide would have heard and done.

  But if Frank succeeded by this means with the horses, he never shifted his sorrow and guilt an inch. Simply, Ovide had died of a mistake Frank would never have let him make. Five and two. Frank had not been there, and Ovide was dead.

  The only source of relief was rum, and rum came only on ration day. He soon understood that one ration would not do the job and so used what money he had to buy more. With three rations inside him, Frank could drift off and surround himself with people who would forgive him. Doc Windham had told Frank that he himself was responsible for at least three deaths and two disappearances, and had given up on guilt. Frank’s mother would give him hell and then forgive him because he was her son.

  The oddity of the Mounted Rifles was that none of them held Frank responsible for Ovide’s death but most of them blamed him for his attack on Greasy Griesbach. Greasy was a great favourite, whose father had been regimental number one in the North West Mounted Police. A prairie aristocrat who everyone sucked up to. Now, they were pleading with Greasy to bring a charge against Adams for jumping him when Greasy had only offered the crazy bastard a drink.

  Practically the only person in the Rifles’ camp who did not hold this view was Greasy himself A couple of times, Griesbach had come to see Frank, and though he acted bluff, there was a hint of contrition buzzing inside it. Both times, Greasy had made Frank an offer. He had promised to get him a better horse. He suggested he could arrange things so Frank was out of the horse yard and back on patrol. Frank’s refusal frustrated and angered Greasy, though he tried not to let it show.

  All this stemmed from Greasy Griesbach’s being a good man who now felt guilty for ridiculing Ovide’s death and insulting Ovide’s friend. He wanted to make amends and be forgiven, and Frank was not ready to do that.

  Next time Greasy came looking for absolution, Frank decided he would ask him for rum. Maybe Frank would even beg for it the way Indians did on the street in Ft. Macleod. That would be the perfect revenge because rum was a kind of poison, and Greasy would not be able to claim, even to himself, that he was doing Adams any good. The moral debt would remain unpaid.

  Night Attack, September 1900

  In early September, Major Sanders took a hundred Mounted Rifles and headed for the old sore spot of Nooitgedacht. The Boers were still pestering Night Attack, and the major had decided to take enough men there to sweep them off. It was a big expedition that required a full of set of camp orderlies and labourers. Frank was included and so were his black friends.

  Night Attack was well developed by now, with an outer circle of Cossack posts to defend it. When the expedition arrived, Sanders packed his newcomers into the square of trees so the Boers would not know how many or how well armed they were. All along the outer perimeter, he wanted the trenches deepened and new ones added. Even the black labourers had shelter along the edge of the trees, and the only thing left in the open were the horses.

  At dawn on September 5, the enemy cut loose with a pompom, two bigger guns, and a great many rifles. They were closer than seemed possible: within the camp’s ring of outposts.

  Frank was in the trench closest to the horses. Behind him, the unarmed bullwhackers and horse campies cowered in their holes with rounds of shrapnel burning down through the tree canopy above them.

  The first few shells burst over the horse lines. Shrapnel balls rained down and some landed along the spine of a big toffee gelding. The horse dove for the ground, then fought with himself when he could not escape the pain. Beside him, an Argentine whipped against its rope and threw itself in a madness of fear. More shrapnel came, bouncing among the horses like hot, frisky hail.

  Frank could see the white of bone shining through the wounded geldings back. He laid his rifle atop a flat rock, drew a bead on its fine head, and shot twice.

  As the battle continued, Frank kept watching the terrified horses. He paid little attention to other trenches or to the copse behind him. When a ball welded into a horse’s muscle, the skin would shudder, as if it were trying to shake off a massive horsefly. Even then, the pain came as a surprise; the squeal, delayed.

  Frank watched and was their god, deciding who had suffered enough and who should live to suffer more. A few times, he ran over and hauled down a rearing animal. He walked along the row of heads, retying them shorter, speaking calmly into their twitching ears.

  His own bald-faced ridgling, normally so full of fight and lust, stood within the barrage with ears flat and a thick rind of white around the blue rims and dark cores of his eyes. He did not kick or rear but stood stock-still and trembled as the shells crashed.

  Despite being outnumbered, the Canadians did some good shooting and forced the Boer gunners to move several times. They drove their riflemen out of cover and back. When the battle had gone on three hours, the Boer commandant must have noticed that he was farther away than when he’d started. He gave the order to withdraw.

  In the relative silence that followed, the Canadians took stock of their losses. No Mounted Rifles had been killed but some were wounded. Lieutenant Moodie through the leg. Private Johnston through the shoulder. Johnston had been in the outpost that the Boers attacked before dawn. All six men there had been taken prisoner, but Johnston and Fotheringham had escaped and made it back to camp.

  The third man wounded was Major Sanders, who had slivers of steel in his side.

  In all, eight horses had been killed by the Boers or wounded and finished off by Frank. Frank wanted help picking steel out of the still-living ones and went to where his fellow campies had waited out the fight. They were in a tight group that split open as he came, revealing a man kneeling. It was Dakomi, and his bloody hands were knitted tight across his weeping belly.

  Through the dappled and smoking tree shadow, Frank ran f
or the medic and found him with Major Sanders. The major was on a chair, leaning forward. Sanders’ orderly held his shirt up, while the medic probed with long tweezers.

  Frank said there was a man by the horse lines hit in the guts and bleeding to death.

  The medic looked over his glasses. “Nobody’s that bad, private.”

  Frank pointed to where Dakomi knelt.

  “Oh,” the medic said as he adjusted his glasses and took aim again with the tweezers. “When I’m done here.”

  By the time Frank returned, they had Dakomi on a blanket with a rolled coat under his head. The wound was uncovered, and Frank could see pieces of Dakomi’s shirt driven into his flesh. His purple eyelids were fluttering and his teeth chattered.

  “Him dying, bossy,” said Abraham.

  When the medic came, he shrugged before he knelt down, to proclaim the hopelessness.

  Well after dark that evening, Corporal Griesbach came striding into the horse camp. He swung his head side to side, took in the fresh grave, then found Frank in a group sitting near the horse lines. There was a strong moon but no fires allowed, in case the Boers were lingering.

  “A moment?” Greasy asked Frank. Frank followed him to one of the trenches that was now empty. Greasy sat on its edge with his long legs in the hole. He opened his tunic and produced a bottle.

  “Let’s try some good stuff for a change.”

  Frank took the brandy and drank. It caught in his throat and made him cough.

  Greasy was staring back at the grave. “I didn’t think we had anyone killed.”

  “Dakomi.”

  “What?”

  “His name was Dakomi.”

  “Oh.”

  “We played cribbage.”

  “Too bad.”

  “How’s Major Sanders?”

  “Splinter in his side. He’s put Evans in charge for a couple of days—which is bad luck for some. Evans wants to know how six men can lose an outpost, get taken prisoner, and never fire a shot. He grilled Johnston and Fotheringham for a half-hour each. Damn obvious they were asleep. If he can prove it, there’ll be court martials.”