The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

After he had rejected a number of ideas, one after the other, as impracticable, Lodewyk got hold of a plan that he decided to carry out. From this you can get some sort of conception as to how crackbrained those plans must have been that he didn’t act on. Anyway, he got Flippie Geel to write to Doors to tell him that his brother Lodewyk had been killed in an accident on the diggings, and that his body was being sent home in a coffin by transport wagon. And a few days later a coffin, which Lodewyk had had made to his size, was on its way to the Lategan farm. Inside the coffin, instead of a corpse, was a mealie-sack that Lodewyk and Flippie Geel had filled with gravel. I suppose that was the only time, too, that they had a spade in their hands during their stay on the diggings.

  Now, I have often tried to puzzle out – and so have many other people: for although it all happened long ago this story is still well known hereabouts – what idea Lodewyk Lategan had with that coffin. For one thing, he was drunk very often during that period. And he no doubt also inherited a good deal of his mother’s weakness of mind. But he must surely have expected Doors to unscrew the lid of the coffin, if for no other reason than just to make certain that Lodewyk really was dead.

  He could surely not have foreseen Doors acting the way he did when the coffin was delivered on the front stoep of the Lategan homestead. Without getting up from the riempies chair on which he was sitting – well forward because of his hump – Doors shouted for the farm natives to come and fetch away the coffin.

  “The key of the vault is hanging on the wall of the voorkamer,” Doors said. “Unlock the vault and put this box on one of the trestles. Close the doors but don’t put the lock on the chain again.”

  Doors silenced his mother roughly when she tried to speak. Tant Alie had wanted to be allowed to gaze for the last time on the face of her dead son.

  The transport driver, who had helped to carry the coffin on to the stoep and had stood bare-headed beside it in reverence for the dead, walked back to his team a very amazed man.

  There were some, however, who say that Doors Lategan had second sight. Or if it wasn’t second sight it was a depth of cunning that was even better than second sight. And that he had guessed that his brother Lodewyk’s body was not in the coffin.

  The farmers of the neighbourhood had naturally no suspicions of this nature, however. Many of them sent wreaths.

  A few weeks later it was known that Lodewyk’s ghost was haunting the Lategan farm. Several natives testified to having seen the ghost of Baas Lodewyk on a couple of moonlight nights. They had seen Baas Lodewyk’s ghost by the vault, they said. Baas Lodewyk’s ghost was sitting on the low wall and there was what looked like a black bottle in his hand. One man also said that he thought Baas Lodewyk’s ghost was singing. But he couldn’t be certain on that point. He didn’t want to make sure, the native said.

  But what were even better authenticated were the times when Lodewyk’s ghost was seen driving along the high road in the back of Flippie Geel’s mule-cart that had a half-hood over the back seat. Even white people had seen Lodewyk’s ghost riding in the back seat of Flippie Geel’s mule-cart. It was known that Flippie Geel had recently returned to the Marico to improve his Government land some more. He had already sold the mealie-planter that he had got on loan from the Government. He was now trying to sell the disc-plough with green handles.

  Because in life Lodewyk Lategan had been Flippie Geel’s bosom friend, it was not surprising, people said, that Lodewyk’s ghost should have been seen in the back of Flippie Geel’s mule-cart. But they were glad for Flippie’s sake that Flippie hadn’t turned round. Lodewyk’s ghost looked too awful, the people said who saw it. It was almost as though it was trying to hide itself away against the half-hood of the cart.

  It was when an inquisitive farmer crept up on the window of Flippie Geel’s rondavel, one evening, and saw Lodewyk’s ghost sitting with its feet on the table, eating biltong, that the truth came out. Next day everybody in the Marico knew that Lodewyk Lategan was not dead.

  Shortly afterwards came the night when Doors’s natives re­ported to him that they had seen Baas Lodewyk climbing through the barbed wire with a gun in his hands. Doors took down his Mauser from the wall and strode out into the veld.

  Except for the few shots during the night, everything on the farm the next day seemed as it had been before. The only diffe­rence was that in the Lategan family vault a sack of gravel in a coffin had been replaced by a body, and the lid of the coffin had been screwed on again. During the night one brother had been murdered. And the other had fled. He was never caught.

  Several days passed before the veldkornet came to the Lategan farm. And then Tant Alie would not give him permission to open the coffin.

  “One of my sons is in the vault and the other is a fugitive over the face of the earth,” Tant Alie said. “I don’t want to know which is which.”

  Nevertheless, the veldkornet had his way. He came back with an official paper and unscrewed the lid. In the coffin that was much too long for him – although it was cramped for breadth – lay Doors, the hunchback brother, with a bullet in his heart.

  But even before the veldkornet opened the coffin it was known in the Marico that it was Doors that had been murdered. For when Lodewyk Lategan fled from the Marico he drove off in Flippie Geel’s mule-cart. Several people had seen Lodewyk driving along the highway in the night. And those people said that for Lodewyk’s own sake they were glad that Lodewyk did not look round.

  It was as well for Lodewyk Lategan, they said, that he should drive off and not know that there was a passenger in the back seat. The passenger had broad shoulders and the starlight shone through his ungainly hump.

  Oom Piet’s Party

  All the young people of the Dwarsberge were at Piet van Zyl’s party, that night. Also some people that weren’t perhaps so very young. And they had come, some of them, from even further than the Dwarsberge. They explained, a couple of what you can call the more elderly guests, that it was not the thought of Piet van Zyl’s moepel brandy that had brought them all that way. For that matter, as Willem Pretorius said, he for his part had not been invited, even. And then Bart Lemmer said that for his part, he had not been invited either, but he had come along there, to Piet van Zyl’s farmhouse, in the evening, because Piet van Zyl’s farmhouse stood so high up, against Tsalala’s Kop, and it would be good for his asthma, to be so high up, for a change. Then Willem Pretorius said that it was something in some part of his spine that was being done good. But he didn’t say what with.

  Piet van Zyl had taken a lot of trouble over that party. He had cleared all the furniture out of the voorhuis except two chairs for the Bester brothers to sit on with their concertina and guitar, and a tall tamboetie kist that a guest who wasn’t dancing could stand and rest his elbows on. In the kitchen there were bottles and jars on a long table.

  Wynand Smit was explaining what the exact kind of illness was that had brought him along to the dance, when Willem Pre­torius interrupted him.

  “Look, kêrels,” Willem Pretorius said. “This is, after all, a dance. Let us not be so unsociable as to remain standing here talking on the stoep on our own about our sicknesses.”

  Bart Lemmer and Wynand Smit agreed with him. He had also been thinking of going into the kitchen, Bart Lemmer said.

  On the way to the kitchen they had to pass through the voor­kamer where there were young men in shirt-sleeves and young girls in pretty coloured dresses dancing in lively fashion.

  “I think I will come back a little later here, and dance,” Willem Pretorius said, on the way to the kitchen.

  Bart Lemmer said he thought he would, too, when it was a bit cooler, and he didn’t need to take his jacket off. It would appear that he had dressed somewhat hurriedly for the dance and had neglected to change the shirt in which he had climbed through a barbed-wire fence a week before, a few yards ahead of a bull.

  These smart young men of today, with their striped shirts and their ties with big yellow flowers on, were much too fussy, W
ynand Smit acknowledged.

  They reached the kitchen just at the moment when the outside door was being opened and Lettie van Zyl, the wife of the host, came in, followed by two Mtosas, who carried between them a dish that was almost the size of a small bath. From the remarks the one Mtosa was making about the way the other Mtosa was not looking where he was going, one gathered that the dish was hot.

  “I always say that’s the best way to cook, Nig Lettie,” Willem Pretorius said to Piet van Zyl’s wife in a friendly fashion. “You can’t beat the old bakoond of sun-dried brick. That’s what I say. And I can see, from what’s inside the dish, that you have still got ribbokke under those rante.”

  By that time both Mtosas were making remarks. They wanted to get the dish on to the kitchen table, and Bart Lemmer was stan­ding in the way. Wynand Smit saw what the difficulty was and stepped forward to help the Mtosas. The dish nearly fell on the floor, then, from the sudden way Wynand Smit jumped when he let go.

  “If I had known it was so hot I would have got a rag,” he said in sombre tones, looking at his hands.

  “All the same, I am surprised,” Lettie van Zyl said to Willem Pretorius.

  “Ag, think nothing of it, Niggie,” Willem Pretorius replied. “We are all Bushveld farmers. And for some special time, like this dance, ah, well, even if ribbok is royal game, nobody will think anything –”

  “That wasn’t what I was talking about,” Lettie said quickly, coming to the point. “I am surprised to see you here at the dance. Not that you aren’t very welcome, of course, Neef Willem. Don’t think that. You and Neef Bart and Neef Wynand – Piet and I are naturally glad to have you. But I mean, after what happened last time –”

  “Oh, that?” Willem Pretorius asked, affecting surprise. “But how was I to know that that man with the black beard was an ouderling? He wasn’t wearing a manel. All I saw was a man wearing a black beard. And even if he wore a manel, I don’t think it was the right sort of a place for an ouderling to be. With dancing – and – and singing – and – and drinking –”

  “But the ouderling did not dance,” Lettie van Zyl replied. “And all he drank was coffee.”

  Willem Pretorius looked sceptical.

  “Well, all can say,” he said, “is that if he wasn’t drunk, how did he come to fall into the dam?”

  Lettie van Zyl started going out of the kitchen to find out whether her guests would like to eat now or a little later. When she got to the door she turned round and faced Willem Pretorius with a look conveying a sort of finality.

  “It wasn’t the ouderling that fell into the dam, Neef Willem,” she said. “It was you that fell in.”

  Willem Pretorius kept on insisting, but not very loudly, that a Bushveld party was still no place for an ouderling to come dancing and singing and – and swearing in.

  “Royal game,” Piet van Zyl, the host, said. Piet van Zyl was leaning against the tall tamboetie kist in the corner, talking to a small group standing around him with plates. “Royal game is about all we got left to shoot for the bakoond, these days. That’s all since the time the game got protected by law. I am not allowed to shoot a ribbok here on my own farm, anymore, because of the law. So that’s about all we’ve got to eat here, today, in the way of wildevleis. And not too much of that, either. And yet I can remember the time when game swarmed around Tsalala’s Kop almost like in the Kruger Park. That was before a lot of Volksraad members who just sit and talk and call each other names got hold of the idea that they had to protect the game in the Bushveld by law. Protect them against what? That’s what I want to know.”

  Several members of the little group said he was quite right. Yes, they said, also against what?

  “And what’s the result today?” Piet van Zyl demanded. “Why, today, about all the game that’s left are a few ribbokke in the rante. And all that’s just since these game laws. They say they’ve got the game laws for protecting the animals in the Kruger Park, also. Well, if that’s so, I won’t give much for the chances of the Kruger Park, that’s all.”

  Piet van Zyl’s logic made a strong appeal to most of the members of his small audience. Young Dawie Gouws started telling a story that his grandfather told him out of his own mouth about the time Dawie Gouws’s grandfather shot a whole herd of elephants that had got knee-deep into the swampy ground by the Molopo.

  “And where are those herds of elephants today?” Dawie Gouws asked. “It’s all these politicians with their game laws. Why, there is hardly a single elephant left by the Molopo, today.”

  Piet van Zyl said that, everything considered, it wasn’t surprising.

  “I got this ribbok at about four hundred yards,” Piet van Zyl went on, “just as he was disappearing into a clump of kameeldorings. About a mile from there, on my way home, when I put the ribbok down to rest again, I got an aardvark just as he was disappearing into his hole. I got him at about two hundred yards.”

  Meneer Strydom, the new schoolmaster, asked Piet van Zyl what he wanted to do that sort of thing for. We called him Meneer Strydom because he called everyone else Meneer, instead of Neef or Oom or Swaer. The schoolmaster was from the city.

  “I have read all about the aardvark in a book on natural his­tory,” Meneer Strydom went on. “Did you know that the aardvark is the friend of man? I can’t understand this senseless lust for destruction – just so that you can say afterwards that you got an animal at so many hundred yards. I mean, nobody has got a greater admiration for a big game hunter than I have – at a suitable distance, and with the wind blowing in the wrong direction, so that he can’t smell me. And I would like to be among trees, the trunks of which at a distance you would confuse my flannel trousers with.”

  Piet van Zyl said he had thought of that before today. The schoolmaster must not think he had not thought of that before today. But if it was an early winter morning and there was a slight breeze blowing, and there was mist on the rante, then he wouldn’t mind if he shot a rhinoceros, on such a morning. And if he couldn’t get a rhinoceros, then a baboon would do, perhaps. He didn’t say that he would feel like that later in the day, now. He had hardly ever gone out hunting later in the day – just mornings and evenings. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought of such things, but that was how it was. It must be some sort of instinct.

  “Well, I am glad I haven’t got that sort of instinct,” Meneer Strydom said. And when Lettie van Zyl came to offer him another thick slice of roast ribbok he declined quite pointedly. He might have a little afterwards, though, he said, with bread and butter.

  It was queer how, for a spell, Piet van Zyl’s talk of hunting got everybody interested in the subject to the exclusion of the dancing and even of the mampoer. A young man would forget the girl dancing in his arms to the vastrap tune of “Die Wilde Weduwee van Windhoek” and would start demonstrating to another young man how he shot that tree-full of sleeping tarentale.

  At one stage the elder Bester brother put down his concertina and started kneeling on the floor, bending forward. It looked as though a piece of his concertina had got lost and he was looking for it on the floor.

  But it was only when the younger Bester brother also stopped playing for a bit, and the elder Bester took up the guitar that his younger brother had put down and, still kneeling, pointed with it, that you knew what he was saying.

  You didn’t have to hear the words.

  Meneer Strydom slipped through into the kitchen. In the kitchen Willem Pretorius was kneeling half under the table. Having al­ready heard the elder Bester brother, Meneer Strydom knew what was coming.

  “And there was the lion crouching,” Willem Pretorius was saying, “ready to –”

  While helping himself to a drink, Meneer Strydom took the opportunity of explaining to Bart Lemmer that the despised earthworm was in reality the friend of man. Because Meneer Stry­dom was a school-teacher, Bart Lemmer took it in good part.

  “What I say,” Bart Lemmer said to Wynand Smit, however, after Meneer Strydom had gone back into the voor
kamer, “is that that schoolmaster must have pretty queer friends. Next thing he’ll be saying that the boomslang and the Klipkop Mshangaan are also the friend of man.”

  “On with the dance,” the younger Bester brother called out, taking his guitar away from his elder brother, who was getting ready to reload, to the impairment of the G-string. Soon afterwards the interlude of the huntsman was forgotten. Dust from the swift feet of the dancers rose up once more to the ceiling. Outside there shone the moon that in the past had seen great herds making their way to the water. Old vanished herds.

  There was a shot. The music and the dancing ceased. Two more shots in quick succession.

  “Poachers from the city,” Piet van Zyl declared, his face pale with fury in the candlelight. “Coming here with motor cars. And we can’t do anything about it. By the time we get there they will be gone. Bloodthirsty savages from the city coming here to exterminate our wildlife.”

  We agreed with Piet van Zyl that it was no good going after those poachers. They were sure to be gone. There was also the possibility – although we did not say that to each other openly – that those savages with their senseless bloodlust, and so quick on the trigger in the dark, and all, just might not be gone.

  Only Willem Pretorius went out to see. Bart Lemmer and Wy­nand Smit followed him, staggering slightly. A little later we heard evil sounds. But it was not an encounter with poachers. When Bart and Wynand came back they said it was enough they had done in pulling Willem Pretorius out. His hat they would go and look for in the dam in the morning.

  Funeral Earth

  We had a difficult task, that time (Oom Schalk Lourens said), teaching Sijefu’s tribe of Mtosas to become civilised. But they did not show any appreciation. Even after we had set fire to their huts in a long row round the slopes of Abjaterskop, so that you could see the smoke almost as far as Nietverdiend, the Mto­sas remained just about as unenlightened as ever. They would retreat into the mountains, where it was almost impossible for our commando to follow them on horseback. They remained hidden in the thick bush.