The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  But karee mampoer is white and soft to look at, and the smoke that comes from it when you pull the cork out of the bottle is pale and rises up in slow curves. And in time of drought, when you have been standing at the borehole all day, pumping water for the cattle, so that by the evening water has got a bitter taste for you, then it is very soothing to sit on the front stoep, like now, and to get somebody to pull the cork out of a bottle of this kind of mampoer. Your hands will be sore and stiff from the pump-handle, so that if you try and pull it out yourself the cork will seem as deep down in the bottle as the water is in the borehole.

  Many years ago, when I was a young man, and I sat here, on the front stoep, and I saw that white smoke floating away slowly and gracefully from the mouth of the bottle, and with a far-off fragrance, I used to think that the smoke looked like a young girl walking veiled under the stars. And now that I have grown old, and I look at that white smoke, I imagine that it is a young girl walking under the stars, and still veiled. I have never found out who she is.

  Hans Kriel and I were in the same party that had gone from this section of the Groot Marico to Zeerust for the Nagmaal. And it was a few evenings after our arrival, when we were on a visit to Kris Wilman’s house on the outskirts of the town, that I learnt something of the first half of Hans Kriel’s love story – that half at which I laughed. The knowledge of the second half came a little later, and I didn’t laugh then.

  We were sitting on Krisjan Wilman’s stoep and looking out in the direction of Sephton’s Nek. In the setting sun the koppies were red on one side; on the other side their shadows were lengthening rapidly over the vlakte. Krisjan Wilman had already poured out the mampoer, and the glasses were going round.

  “That big shadow there is rushing through the thorn-trees just like a black elephant,” Adriaan Bekker said. “In a few minutes’ time it will be at Groot Marico station.”

  “The shorter the days are, the longer the shadows get,” Frikkie Marais said. “I learnt that at school. There are also lucky and un­lucky shadows.”

  “You are talking about ghosts, now, and not shadows,” Ad­ri­aan Bekker interrupted him, learnedly. “Ghosts are all the same length, I think, more or less.”

  “No, it is the ghost stories that are all the same length,” Krisjan Wilman said. “The kind you tell.”

  It was good mampoer, made from karee-berries that were pluck­ed when they were still green and full of thick sap, just before they had begun to whiten, and we said things that contained much wisdom.

  “It was like the shadow of a flower on her left cheek,” I heard Hans Kriel say, and immediately I sat up to listen, for I could guess of what it was that he was talking.

  “Is it on the lower part of her cheek?” I asked. “Two small purple marks?”

  Because in that case I would know for sure that he was talking about the new waitress in the Zeerust café. I had seen her only once, through the plate-glass window, and because I had liked her looks I had gone up to the counter and asked her for a roll of Boer tobacco, which she said they did not stock. When she said they didn’t stock koedoe biltong, either, I had felt too embarrassed to ask for anything else. Only afterwards I remembered that I could have gone in and sat down and ordered a cup of coffee and some harde beskuit. But it was too late then. By that time I felt that she could see that I came from this part of the Marico, even though I was wearing my hat well back on my head.

  “Did you – did you speak to her?” I asked Hans Kriel after a while.

  “Yes,” he said, “I went in and asked her for a roll of Boer tobacco. But she said they didn’t sell tobacco by the roll, or koedoe biltong, either. She said this last with a sort of a sneer. I thought it was funny, seeing that I hadn’t asked her for koedoe biltong. So I sat down in front of a little table and ordered some harde beskuit and a cup of coffee. She brought me a number of little dry, flat cakes with letters on them that I couldn’t read very well. Her name is Marie Rossouw.”

  “You must have said quite a lot to her to have found out her name,” I said, with something in my voice that must have made Hans Kriel suspicious.

  “How do you know who I am talking about?” he demanded suddenly.

  “Oh, never mind,” I answered. “Let us ask Krisjan Wilman to refill our glasses.”

  I winked at the others and we all laughed, because by that time Hans Kriel was sitting half-sideways on the riempies bench, with his shoulders drawn up very high and his whole body seeming to be kept up by one elbow. It wasn’t long after that he moved his elbow, so that we had to pick him up from the floor and carry him into the voorkamer, where we laid him in a corner on some leopard skins.

  But before that he had spoken more about Marie Rossouw, the new waitress in the café. He said he had passed by and had seen her through the plate-glass window and there had been a vase of purple flowers on the counter, and he had noticed those two marks on her cheek, and those marks had looked very pretty to him, like two small shadows from those purple flowers.

  “She is very beautiful,” Hans Kriel said. “Her eyes have got deep things in them, like those dark pools behind Abjaterskop. And when she smiled at me once – by mistake, I think – I felt as though my heart was rushing over the vlaktes like that shadow we saw in the sunset.”

  “You must be careful of those dark pools behind Abjaterskop,” I warned him. “We know those pools have got witches in them.”

  I felt it was a pity that we had to carry him inside, shortly afterwards. For the mampoer had begun to make Hans Kriel talk rather well.

  As it happened, Hans Kriel was not the only one, that night, who encountered difficulties with the riempies bench. Several more of us were carried inside. And when I look back on that Nagmaal my most vivid memories are not of what the predikant said at the church service, or of Krisjan Wilman’s mampoer, even, but of how very round the black spots were on the pale yellow of the leopard skin. They were so round that every time I looked at them they were turning.

  In the morning Krisjan Wilman’s wife woke us up and brought us coffee. Hans Kriel and I sat up side by side on the leopard skins, and in between drinking his coffee Hans Kriel said strange things. He was still talking about Marie Rossouw.

  “Just after dark I got up from the front stoep and went to see her in the café,” Hans Kriel said.

  “You may have got up from the front stoep,” I answered, “but you never got up from these leopard skins. Not from the moment we carried you here. That’s the truth.”

  “I went to the café,” Hans Kriel said, ignoring my interruption, “and it was very dark. She was there alone. I wanted to find out how she got those marks on her cheek. I think she is very pretty even without them. But with those marks Marie Rossouw is the most wild and beautiful thing in the whole world.”

  “I suppose her cheek got cut there when she was a child,” I sug­gested. “Perhaps when a bottle of her father’s mampoer exploded.”

  “No,” Hans Kriel replied, very earnestly. “No. It was something else. I asked her where the marks came from. I asked her there, in the café, where we were alone together, and it suddenly seemed as though the whole place was washed with moonlight, and there was no counter between us anymore, and there was a strange laughter in her eyes when she brought her face very close to mine. And she said, ‘I know you won’t believe me. But that is where the devil kissed me. Satan kissed me there when we were behind Abjaterskop. Shall I show you?’

  “That was what she said to me,” Hans Kriel continued, “and I knew, then, that she was a witch. And that it was a very sinful thing to be in love with a witch. And so I caught her up in my arms, and I whispered, trembling all the time, ‘Show me,’ and our heads rose up very tall through the shadows. And everything moved very fast, faster than the shadows move from Abjaterskop in the setting of the sun. And I knew that we were behind Abjaterskop, and that her eyes were indeed the dark pools there, with the tall reeds growing on the edges. And then I saw Satan come in between us. And he had hooves and a f
orked tail. And there were flames coming out of him. And he stooped down and kissed Marie Rossouw, on her cheek, where those marks were. And she laughed. And her eyes danced with merriment. And I found that it was all the time I who was kissing her. Now, what do you make of this, Schalk?”

  I said, of course, that it was the mampoer. And that I knew, now, why I had been sleeping in such discomfort. It wasn’t because the spots on the leopard skin were turning like round wheels; but because I had Satan sleeping next to me all night. And I said that this discovery wasn’t new, either. I had always suspected something like that about him.

  But I got an idea. And while the others were at breakfast I went out, on the pretext that I had to go and help Manie Burgers with his oxen at the church square outspan. But, instead, I went into the café, and because I knew her name was Marie Rossouw, when the waitress came for my order I could ask her whether she was related to the Rossouws of Rysmierbult, and I could tell her that I was distantly related to that family, also. In the daylight there was about that café none of the queerness that Hans Kriel had spoken about. It was all very ordinary. Even those purple flowers were still on the counter. They looked slightly faded.

  And then, suddenly, while we were talking, I asked her the thing that I was burning to know.

  “That mark on your cheek, juffrou,” I said, “will you tell me where you got it from?”

  Marie Rossouw brought her face very close to mine, and her eyes were like dark pools with dancing lights in them.

  “I know you won’t believe me,” she said, “but that is where Satan kissed me. When we were at the back of Abjaterskop to­gether. Shall I show you?”

  It was broad daylight. The morning lay yellow on the world and the sun shone in brightly through the plate-glass window, and there were quite a number of people in the street. And yet as I walked out of the café quickly, and along the pavement, I was shivering.

  With one thing and another, I did not come across Hans Kriel again until three or four days later, when the Nagmaal was over and we were trekking to the other side of the Dwarsberge once more.

  We spoke of a number of things, and then, trying to make my voice sound natural, I made mention of Marie Rossouw.

  “That was a queer sort of dream you had,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered, “it was queer.”

  “And did you find out,” I asked, again trying to sound casual, “about those marks on her cheek?”

  “Yes,” Hans Kriel answered, “I asked Marie and she told me. She said that when she was a child a bottle of mampoer burst in the voorkamer. Her cheek got cut by a splinter of glass. She is an unusual kind of girl, Marie Rossouw.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, moving away. “Oh, yes.”

  But I also thought that there are things about mampoer that you can’t understand very easily.

  Seed-time and Harvest

  At the time of the big drought (Oom Schalk Lourens said) Jurie Steyn trekked with what was left of his cattle to the Schweizer-­Reneke District. His wife, Martha, remained behind on the farm. After a while an ouderling from near Vleisfontein started visiting Jurie Steyn’s farm to comfort Martha. And as time went on everybody in the Marico began talking about the ouderling’s visits, and they said that the ouderling must be neglecting his own affairs quite a lot, coming to Jurie Steyn’s farm so often, especially since Vleisfontein was so far away. Other people, again, said that Vleisfontein couldn’t be far enough away for the ouderling: not when Jurie Steyn got back, they said.

  The ouderling was a peculiar sort of man, too. When some neighbour called at Jurie Steyn’s farm, and Martha was there alone with the ouderling, and the neighbour would drop a hint about the drought breaking some time, meaning that Jurie Steyn would then be coming back to the Marico from the Schweizer-Reneke District with his cattle, then the ouderling would just look very solemn, and he would say that it must be the Lord’s will that this drought had descended on the Marico, and that he himself had been as badly stricken by the hand of the Lord as anybody and that the windmill pumped hardly enough water even for his prize Large Whites, and that in spite of what people might think he would be as pleased as anybody else when the rains came again.

  That was a long drought. It was a very bitter period. But a good while before the drought broke the ouderling’s visits to Martha Steyn had ceased. And the grass was already turning green in the heavy rains that followed on the great drought when Jurie Steyn got back to his farmhouse with his wagon and his red Afrikaner cattle. And by that time the ouderling’s visits to Martha were hardly even a memory any longer.

  But a while later, when Martha Steyn had a child, again, there was once more a lot of talk, especially among the women. But there was no way of telling how much Jurie Steyn knew or guess­ed about what was being said about himself and Martha and the ouderling, and about his youngest child, whom they had christened Kobus.

  It only seemed that for a good while thereafter Jurie Steyn seem­ed to be like a man lost in thought. And it would appear that he had grown absent-minded in a way that we hadn’t noticed about him before. And it would seem, also, that his absent-mindedness was of a sort that did not make him very reliable in his dealings with his neighbours. It was almost as though what had been happening between the ouderling and Martha Steyn – whatever had been happening – had served to undermine not Martha’s moral character but Jurie Steyn’s.

  This change that had taken place in Jurie Steyn was brought home to me most forcibly some years later in connection with some fence-poles that he had gone to fetch for me from Ramoutsa station. There was a time when I had regarded Jurie Steyn as somebody strong and upright, like a withaak tree, but it seemed that his character had gradually grown flat and twisted along the ground, like the tendrils of a pumpkin that has been planted in the cool side of a manure-pile at the back of the house. And that is a queer thing, too, that I have noticed about pumpkins. They thrive better if you plant them at the back of the house than in the front. Something like that seemed to be the case with Jurie Steyn, too, somehow.

  Anyway, it was when the child Kobus was about nine years old, and Jurie Steyn’s mind seemed to have grown all curved like a green mamba asleep in the sun, that the incident of the fence-poles occurred.

  But I must first tell you about the school-teacher that we had at Drogevlei then. This school-teacher started doing a lot of farming in his spare time. Then he began taking his pupils round to his farm, some afternoons, and he showed them how to plant mealies as part of their school subjects. We all said that that was nonsense, because there was nothing that we couldn’t teach the children our­selves, when it came to matters like growing mealies. But the teacher said, no, the children had to learn the theory of what nature did to the seeds, and it was part of natural science studies, and he said our methods of farming were all out of date, anyway.

  We didn’t know whether our methods of farming were out of date, but we certainly thought that there were things about the teacher’s methods of education that were altogether different from anything we had come across so far. Because the school hours got shorter and shorter as the months went by, and the children spent more and more time on the teacher’s farm, on their hands and knees, learning how to put things into the ground to make them grow. And when the mealies were about a foot high the teacher made the whole school learn how to pull up the weeds that grew between the mealies. This lesson took about a week: the teacher had planted so large an area. The children would get home from school very tired and stained from their lessons on the red, clayey sort of soil that was on that part of the teacher’s farm.

  And near the end of the school term, when the dams were drying up, the children were given an examination in pumping water out of the borehole for the teacher’s cattle.

  But afterwards, when the teacher showed the children how to make a door for his pigsty out of the school blackboard, and how to wrap up his eggs for the Zeerust market in the pages torn from their exercise books, we began wondering whether th
e more old-fashioned kind of school-teacher was not perhaps better – the kind of schoolmaster who only taught the children to read and write and to do sums, and left the nature-science job of cooking the mangolds for the pigs’ supper to the kaffirs.

  And then there came that afternoon when I went to see Jurie Steyn about some fence-poles that he had gone to fetch for me from Ramoutsa station, and I found that Jurie was too concerned about something that the teacher had said to be able to pay much attention to my questions. I have mentioned how the deterioration in his moral character took the form of making him absent-minded, at times, in a funny sort of way.

  “You can have the next lot I fetch,” Jurie said. “I have been so worried about what the school-teacher said that I have already planted all your fence-poles – look, along there – by mistake. I planted them without thinking. I was so concerned about the schoolmaster’s impudence that I had got the kaffirs to dig the holes and plant in the poles before I realised what I was doing. But I’ll pay you for them, some time – when I get my cheque from the creamery, maybe. And while we are about it, I may as well use up the roll of barbed wire that is also lying at Ramoutsa station, consigned to you. You won’t need that barbed wire, now.”

  “No,” I said, looking at my fence-poles planted in a long line. “No, Jurie, I won’t need that barbed wire now. And another thing, if you stand here, just to the left of this ant-hill, and you look all along the tops of the poles, you will see that they are not planted in a straight line. You can see the line bends in two places.”

  But Jurie said, no, he was satisfied with the way he had planted in my fence-poles. The line was straight enough for him, he said. And I felt that this was quite true, and that anything would be straight enough for him – even if it was something as twisted as a raw ox-hide thong that you brei with a stick and a heavy stone slung from a tree.