The sun beat down on Hektor-Jan’s scalp and drew up memories of all his dogs. He smiled at the silly bow that still fluttered around the puppy’s neck, wrapped up with the leather thong that served as a leash. Hektor-Jan’s smile broadened. You could not gift-wrap a morning like this.
And then Pa was motioning them to be quiet. The farm buildings were far behind. Their route had taken them through the koppies and towards the vlei. They sank into the long grass, pressed down by Pa’s hand. Now they would wait. Despite the mid-morning hour, something was bound to come to the vlei to drink. When the sun was hot, creatures had to drink.
Hektor-Jan snapped a grass stalk and began to chew. Pieter snapped a grass stalk too. Shelley stared at the gun in her hands. The sun gleamed off the polished wood and dark metal of the rifle. François shook his head and murmured something. He tapped Pa on the shoulder, handed him his rifle, crept backwards very quietly and slunk off. Not even Shelley watched him go. The puppy fell asleep in the hot grass.
The inside of the house was dark and cool. Sylvia had quickly run off to be with Dorcas. They were doing something in the kitchen. It sounded complicated. Sylvia was full of English questions. Dorcas matched her in Afrikaans. They seemed to be trading laughter – hilarious misunderstanding.
Janet sat in the chair. Without seeming to move, she gradually slumped till she was half-lying in the seat. The house pressed down on her. She tried not to think of Hektor-Jan living in the house that her own father had had built. She tried not to think what it must have been like growing up in this squat building that Hektor-Jan’s father had constructed with his own bare hands. She tried not to think of the dead creatures fixed to the wall above and around her. She tried not to think at all.
What were they doing now. What had they shot. What had they killed. What creature did not know that even now it had but bare seconds to live. What must it be like to know that you had just moments left in this life. Janet thought about her children hunting and she could not think of Pieter and Shelley raising rifles to their small shoulders and taking aim and –
Janet pulled herself upright in the chair. She looked wildly around the room.
She glanced across at the photos of Hektor-Jan’s mother. The one with her leaning back with her feet up, something in either hand. Janet looked closer. Was it biltong and a knife. Yes, a strip of biltong – a long stick of dried meat – and, in her other hand, the glinting blade of a stout penknife. Surely the same nostalgic penknife, which Hektor-Jan still used to slice biltong. With its strawberry-red handle and the brave cross of the Swiss Army. Probably the only heirloom, if you could call it that, which came to him when his mother died. A knife for her youngest child. Janet shook her head and Hektor-Jan’s mother looked fiercely out of the picture. She seemed to be mid-chew, certainly not making an effort to smile. Her broad face had the oddest expression. Janet dismissed Mrs Snyman as she herself felt dismissed by a sepia mother-in-law wielding bloody stick and blade. Janet found herself peering more at the wooden frames, the polished wood with the grain exposed and glowing. The life that pulsed in the frame and bordered the old brown figures from dead times. The frames seemed alive; the people stuck in the past. The glowing wood throbbed with life and light, thanks no doubt to Dorcas’s polishing hands, which so busily burnished things in this odd room.
Presumably, she dusted Meneer Yuckulls and his friends. Against her will, Janet’s eyes were drawn upwards and she stared at the sad heads around her. Each animal strained forwards. Each creature yearned, it seemed. Tried to leap from the wall which had become its shoulders and midriff and limbs. Each head tried to burst from the blank wall of its tomb.
Janet held her breath. She could hear them panting. Most of their mouths were open. If she sat very still, Janet would hear their breathing, strained by effort and throttled by the wall. She pulled herself upright again. What was wrong with the chair. She breathed out.
What is wrong with the chair.
Janet did not move. It was Meneer Yuckulls. Of that Janet was sure.
What is wrong with the chair.
The voice was the jackal’s voice and yet it spoke inside her head. What is wrong, it said again, this time noting a more general malaise.
Janet tried not to look up at the jackal. She tried to breathe in, and then she had to look up. She narrowed her eyes. She stood up, freeing herself from the chair, and her breath came and she shook her head. Her hand moved to her belly. The glass eyes of the jackal gleamed. They pressed down on her and its panting mouth spoke again.
Ek is ’n twee-gat jakkals. I am a two-burrow jackal, it announced.
And even though its head was fixed to a rough, wooden plaque, it nodded and the whole wall shifted too. A two-burrow jackal. One burrow for wifey, and another burrow. But was that a surreptitious or a blatant other burrow. The way the jackal grinned at her, there could be no doubt that it rejoiced in its second burrow. It seemed to make no bones about another burrow. That is what jackals do, appeared to be the leering implication. One burrow for Janet and a burrow, a disused rabbit hole, maybe, that led to Alice and her wonderland. There, it was thought and it was said and Janet could not breathe. A twee-gat jakkals, with gleaming teeth and a filthy mouth. And the walls of dead animal heads crowded closer. Trapped in Springs – all these creepy crawlies. Their desperation compressed the air, seemed to gasp all the oxygen from the room, leaving Janet reeling, her lungs tight and heaving. Spots danced in front of her eyes and her chest burned. She thought she might pass out, clamped as she was between the bright jaws of Meneer Yuckulls. He could crush her skull in an instant. The pressure was unbearable and her chest burned and burned. Her head was going to split – so was her heart. Then there was a bang.
She fell back into the chair and there was a bang, a gunshot in the house, and François, the youngest brother, burst into the room.
Janet sensed rather than saw him. There was a double flicker in the jackal’s glass eyes and there he was, standing in the doorway, the smash of the screen door now healed by silence. In the sad house, the bang simply became a brief scar in the memory of air. Janet seemed to fall back even further in her seat, suddenly released and her chest heaved – she breathed.
François started to come over to her, then stopped. He stood in the no-man’s land of the middle of the lounge. Gasping, Janet watched him in duplicate in the jackal’s eyes.
I do that also, François said.
You hear the jackal speak. Janet tried to breathe the words, tried to untie her tongue which was glued to the roof of her mouth, tried to turn to her brother-in-law who had given up on the hunt.
François laughed. There is times, when I can’t sleep, jy weet. When I come and I lie back in the chair, where you now lie back. And I look at these animals. In the dark, I do that when I can’t sleep. Most of these animals would be alive in the dark. Eating, hunting – alive, jy weet.
Janet stood up again – shakily – and took a step back. Such sadness welled up in the old room.
I come and I look at them.
François moved closer and stood beside the trembling Janet, looking up at the jackal and all the other heads on that wall. Janet did not know what to say. The jackal had said it all. Had it spoken. Was she – like her own mother – was she –
Janet turned to François so that she could see his tanned skin, his shy smile and not her mother’s pale, taut face. Talking jackals then eating tissues. One surely led straight to the other. She raised her hands before her and looked at them.
That one, I shot. That blesbok, there. François picked out a timid deer. And that meerkat, there. But that’s alles, niks meer nie. Not any more.
Janet lowered her hands, knotted them behind her back and turned to his sad face. How the muscles moved in his throat and his confession came to her ears. The jackal had not moved, yet –
Who shot the jackal, she managed to ask.
François’s throat and jaw moved, and his hands gestured as he told her. Janet’s hands squirmed above h
er coccyx. They would not remain still.
Meneer Yuckulls, he finished saying.
Meneer Yuckulls, she repeated.
They were still standing there when the screen door smashed open again and Hektor-Jan burst into the room.
He shouted at François. Telefoon. Ambulans. Ongeluk. There has been an accident. Gun. Barrel. Bullet. Bliksem.
Then he was gone and François was on the phone, his thick fingers slipping off the dial with whirring curses and Meneer Yuckulls did not say a word although there was the sudden wink of a smug glass eye and a general air of I told you so. An accident. With a gun, barrel, bullet. Of course. Play with fire. Let your children play with fire. What on earth do you expect.
Janet fell from the house into the light. Pieter. Shelley. She knew something like this would happen. She had seen it in the entrails of the pool all year. An augury of concrete fact. A crack that leapt to instant life and which no amount of cement or wise Solomons could cancel. 1976 was not going to be a good year, no matter how much it was toasted. Why, in the fizzy flight-patterns of 5th Avenue Cold Duck had she not sensed –
There, on the other side of the koppie that swelled at the back of the house, they came carrying a body. Janet ran and could not see. She stopped and put a hand to her brow, to shield her eyes from the beating sun.
The chickens skrawked in their hok and it sounded like the picannins had come home to roost. The mangy chickens chattered and muttered and laughed.
Still, she could not make out who was hurt and, far away, Hektor-Jan’s form now joined them on the low hillside and there was a tangle of helping and dogs milling, their barks coming faintly on the air. One jumped up and Hektor-Jan sent it flying with a sudden kick and then a little girl’s figure and a little boy’s figure appeared at the side of the huddle.
Shelley was fine and Pieter was fine! Her children were alive and sound of limb!
But wait. Pieter had disappeared from sight, somehow swallowed by the dry veld grass and Hektor-Jan was bending down now, and Shelley was beside him, holding something, also looking down. Janet felt her knees buckle in sympathy, felt her motherly tenderness run, pulling out of her, looping from her belly in an anxious arc across the space. Her hands found her face although her voice seemed somehow hooked on the screen door. Janet’s mouth hinged open and shut without a sound as Hektor-Jan picked up Pieter, clasped his inert son to his chest and stumbled forward, face raised to the hot sky. Shelley followed – dragging the new puppy and something dangling from her other hand. Koos and Willem carried Oupa between them and François burst from the house.
Nee, he screamed. His voice shrieked high and effeminate. Dorcas steamed through the screen door behind him, but did not catch him as he fell. Janet turned just as Dorcas rumbled past and she saw Sylvia’s face pressing against the wire mesh of the outer door. Should she run to Hektor-Jan; should she stay with little Sylvia. Janet twisted where she stood, unable to distinguish between the lesser of two evils, between the devil and the deep blue sky.
1.024m
Who understands a human hand:
Fingertips and tenderness hidden in a fist.
– Olivia Pretorius, ‘Daddy’s Hands’
During one of these roadblocks at the northern entrance to Tembisa, I learned an important lesson. Initially everything went peacefully, until a taxi full of passengers approached and the door slid open. A man jumped out and came running towards us, screaming. He had a knife clutched in either hand. I was armed with a shotgun, but when I noticed him, he was almost on top of me. I could not shoot him at such short range without blowing him away.
I was standing slightly to one side, so one of my colleagues pulled out his service pistol and fired two shots into the man’s legs. It had no effect. He raised his weapon again and shot him in the chest. At a distance of a metre, the eighth bullet finally struck him in the head. The man fell down dead almost on my colleague’s shoes. No one knew why he had attacked us.
The lesson I learned from this was to be on the alert at all times. I also learned that a person who is hit by a 9 mm-bullet does not stagger back ten metres, as the movies would have you believe.
– Johan Marais, Time Bomb: A Policeman’s True Story
That was Pieter’s birthday. An infamous Saturday.
He got more than he could have bargained for. A new DOG, a ride with Oupa in the ambulance, a bristling caterpillar of six stitches that stretched above his right eye – as though about to crawl across his temple – and a whole fistful of memories to punch his dreams into the middle of next week’s nightmares … for years to come.
Janet tried to stroke his brow, but he shrank from her touch.
Too sore, he moaned, his sheet screwed up whitely beneath his chin.
Kiss New-Jock good night, said Janet but Pieter seemed not have heard her, and it was Shelley who took the puppy to the kitchen and rolled up the newspaper in readiness for the night – and who, indeed, rearranged the letters on the fridge to THANK YOU GOD. They remained there for some time, their colourful gratitude squealed to the kitchen, while Oupa had his eye that was pierced by the metal of the exploding rifle taken out, as well as his sinuses and the best part of his left cheekbone. His tattered left ear, what remained of it, was stitched until he looked, by his own assessment, like one of the plaas braks that had been in the wars.
Pieter and the puppy moaned and cried the whole night.
Hektor-Jan cursed the fact that it was Saturday night, and that he had not slept for over thirty hours, and he got up to smack New-Jock with the newspaper every time Janet went to Pieter.
Her small son clung to her, neither awake nor asleep.
It just went bang, he sobbed and tried to punch his pillow away from his face. He kept coughing up Bang, and again Bang, from the depths of his little chest.
An hour later, he writhed through Oupa’s blood. Bloody, bloody blood, Pieter wailed and Janet could not tell whether he was cursing or crying. And Oupa’s eye, yeye, eye, Pieter almost yodelled the sight of the burst yolk, the gooey egg of Oupa’s eye that cracked and ran down the side of his face, what had been the side of his face but was now a dented, shredded messy, messy mess, all hanging muscle and grinning teeth that gaped through the hole in his face and chattered as the eye, yeye, eye-slime ran into his mouth.
That’s when he fainted, Shelley said, when she joined her mother at the two o’clock session; when New-Jock’s cries had got worse and the sound of the thrashing Benoni City Times had woken her up again. Pieter was fine, she said, But then he just sommer fainted, just like that.
Janet stared amazed at Shelley’s slender fingers that snapped coolly in front of her, the sudden snap denoting the abrupt felling of little Pieter who had cracked his head on a rock and had begun to bleed like his oupa.
But he was a good deal noisier, said Shelley, and again her mother watched with something approaching fascination. Janet held Pieter tightly, whilst his sister perched on the end of his bed and described how he had kept crying and asking if he was going to go blind with all that blood that was gushing into his eyes. He could not see, and he just kept shouting about going blind, Mommy, Shelley said.
Keep your voice down, Janet managed to whisper as Pieter and his ears shuddered beneath her arm, and she surely smothered Shelley’s words.
Fine, said Shelley and went back to her bedroom to watch over the snoring Sylvia, who had remained like a little white picannin dancing behind the wire mesh of the screen door and had been spared most of the anguish. The frantic staunching of Oupa’s face with Dorcas’s apron that she whipped off, after shoving her doek into the hole in Oupa’s cheek. She tied the apron strings around and around his head leaving just his mouth to swear foamy bits of blood and bone. And Dorcas would not let Koos near his father with the brandy bottle because Die dokter sou seker onmiddellik begin opereer – there would be an immediate general anaesthetic and an operation. Surely. Seker. Dorcas knew that. How, no one had any idea.
H
ektor-Jan dragged the dazed François off to the bathroom inside, whilst Koos tried to pass around a two-litre Coke bottle of the neighbour’s best mampoer and Dorcas cradled Oupa’s elevated head in her lap, his body prone in the dust. That would help to reduce the bleeding, if not the blaspheming. Janet clasped Pieter’s head in her lap, like Dorcas, and tried to mutter reassurances as stoutly as the meaty maid. Janet’s soft right hand pressed down over Pieter’s forehead and eye, her left hand supported his neck. Shelley went looking for Sylvia who had disappeared. Then the ambulance arrived.
The paramedics were swift and certain. It was all over in a flash of gurney clips, quick hands and gleaming needles. Oupa in the back of the ambulance, on one side, snuggled into his morphine blanket, and Pieter on the other. With Janet and Dorcas caught in-between the bed-ledges with the one paramedic. An optimist who whistled Boney M tunes through a gap in his teeth whilst asking Pieter if he supported a rugby team.
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