Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  She’s barely four feet tall. I lie on top of her, it’s as if she disappears into the ground under me. When she bends over me, I’m a child between her breasts. She is soft as no other body is soft and she smells of animal fat and buchu and the stuff she uses to starch Geertruy’s bonnets. The following few months we search each other out in the veldt and behind the homestead and there are toothmarks on our bodies and our crotches are raw and sore.

  Regard us well, spy on us if you can, because after two centuries I can still not capture our lovemaking in words. Words like passion and all-consuming create no pictures of her nipples. Geertruy taught me to read and write properly; I know what it’s worth. Rather unbutton the front of your pants or slip a hand in under your dress and see her back straining.

  See, I look much older than twenty that day when I walk far into the veldt. The thunderclouds are massing low and full. The black clouds make the plain seem brighter, the greens and yellows sharper. I pick tracks at random. I home in on an oribi spoor, then foot by foot I follow the tracks of a mountain tortoise. I follow a footfall as long as the pace pleases me, until an alluring track crosses the previous one. I follow a klipspringer in the direction of the river; I trot and run along the bank with the speed of a rhebok. The stream winds its shallow course through the poort. Then the spoor that piques my notice is above me in the air: the whistlings of swifts flashing over and past one another, as if knotting and unknotting invisible loops. On their way northwards. I wonder how far Ezeljacht is from France and my ancestors. Dancing and chirking they stretch their sable wings, the wings wapping like hands clapping all around me. They break their circles and fly high into the sky. One of the swallows skims down low over my head and disappears into the ridge across the river. For a moment it seems as if the bird flies into the rocks without breaking its speed. Then another one sweeps down, a wide curve, and it, too, flies into the rocky ridge. Two crows hover in the sky, cawing, high above the swallows. The birds funnel down, one after the other they fly themselves to smithereens against the rocks and then shoot out again reborn.

  When I get closer, I see the cave on the other side of the stream. An overhanging rock in the ridge into which the swallows disappear. The place into which the swallows evanesce is more than an overhang but not yet quite a cave. In sunlight you’ll carry on past it without glancing up; in a thunderstorm it will be like a mountain stronghold to you, a palace hewn out of the earth. It’s not much of a hiding place, but it is a womb or fort for somebody searching for one or the other and not finding anything else in the vicinity.

  In the middle of the stream I step into a hole, am suddenly up to my waist under water. Then I reach the reeds and a few paces up take me to the cave. I struggle through the umbrella thorn. I walk in under the overhang where the birds flew straight into the earth or should be lying smashed in front of the rock. I find them chattering in the cracks, hidden in mud nests under the overhang. The rocky roof is soot-blackened. The walls are covered in paintings.

  Great vague figures in charcoal extend across the rock walls, to the left many pictures in ochre. The soil is tramped solid; generations of feet have danced here. A long, narrow gash extends a foot or so above the surface. It is dark in there and smells of dassie shit and nobody will ever know how far back it goes. Among the painted beasts are figures that are human and no longer human: dancers with the forked tails of fishes or water maidens or swifts.

  I turn around to the chattering behind me. The swallows fly to and fro past the overhang. They are scarcely a few arms’ lengths away, but however close they are, they still look like far-off falcons. Believe me, the sun reflects in their right eye, the moon in their left.

  The sky is emptied of their noise, my eyes on the rock face again. Neither-fish-nor-fowl people in a ring. Rust-brown figures with swallowtails bent forward, leaning on walking sticks. This drawing is small, all the figures fit easily under my hand. I jerk away my hand, wipe my damp palm on my trousers. A few figures in the centre of the scene, more prominent, with delicate fingers clenched around dancing sticks, convulsed with the power boiling inside them, and under it, next to a line tracing an upside-down arch and disappearing into the rock to the left, a school of winged creatures that, arms stretched back, swim-fly along the line, until they melt into the rock.

  It seems as if the figures enter and leave the outcrops and cracks in the rock. At times the figures seem to start up from smears of paint. I can see that the drawings have been spread out against the wall since whenever, but it’s not the sheer age of it that keeps me here. Age is nothing to be proud of. I can’t get my mind round the pictures, but I keep gazing. All that I’m sure of is that the guy who painted this stuff was not confused. I walk home. The lighter clouds have been burnt away before the sun. The overhang and its swallows and picture put behind me. The moon like a faded stain of last night’s shining, still in the sky.

  Months later Geertruy is making soap. She asks the children in the yard to fetch her some ganna bush for the lye. The children tell tales of a leopard lurking in the kloofs of late. She asks me to go with them to keep an eye. I drag Saterdag along for company. We find a leopard track and walk up the kloof with the children’s voices echoing behind us. At the far end of the kloof we come upon more pictures. Nothing as delicate and clear as the swallow people: faded eland and elephants against a rock without overhang where the sun and rain efface the traces of human beings.

  Saterdag goes quiet and runs his hand over the drawings. I tell him about the swallow people in the poort. Saterdag remembers what he was told as a child. Stories about his mother and the old folk who once hunted in the mountains before they were brought down to sit and fatten the Senekal cattle. He tells me about the rock that is the veil between this world and another. He tells how worlds melt into one another in the caves where magicians ape nature and where people turn into birds to fly to the other side and how the drawings keep these voyages in motion. He tells it all to me as he remembers the old folk told it to him and in this way he mimics and parrots them without ever having danced like that.

  I don’t pay him much attention. Saterdag drones on. Now and again the children come and listen to a fragment of story before scrambling into the ganna bush again.

  Those swallows, Coenraad, they know when to move on, they know when the bad weather with its lightning comes. Nobody can catch those swallows. They fly so fast because they’re little more than wind. Those wind birds. Windvogelen.

  We make ourselves small, Windvogel, I say. Like a light breeze. Then, one day, from out of the blue sky we let loose a goddam storm on them.

  Windvogel, says Windvogel, deep in thought. Windbird. Yes, he says, Windvogel gets me together more than Saterdag.

  I come of age and I sue Scrotum Senekal because he’s not paying me my share of the butter profits. He promised to pay me for my labour on the farm. Every blessed time we walk past the four butter-churners, it’s the same story. Swears high and low that half the proceeds of the butter will be mine as soon as I turn twenty-one. But for the last few years the wet blood-fart has been too much of a spineless slacker for the month-long journey to the Cape markets. One evening I ask him again about the butter. He grumbles in his greyer-by-the-day beard about the low prices. How the butter has started stinking by the time they get to the Cape. He whinges about the Bushmen and the foot-and-mouth and the ravening creatures lying in wait next to the road for an ox wagon. I sit back and listen with my smile. Geertruy jumps up and starts mewling and snarls something at me. She says my heart has gone cold. I say it’s because I no longer lie by their hearth like their damn dog. The case is turned down and I appeal and the magistrate rules that Snail-trail Senekal must inspan his oxen and get his hindquarters to the Cape and give me the money. So there, thank God for the powers that be. Hardly two years later the magistrate gets to hear about us again when I batter Snake-slime Senekal half to death.

  With the money that I at last get out of David Doddle-dick, I sign a leasehold on a piece of
fallow land near the Kammanassie Mountains, to the north and inland through the poort. It’s not quite far enough from my family, but I don’t expect very many visits. My brother Johannes abandoned the land recently when he packed up for the eastern frontier. I called there from time to time and liked the black soil, the grey underbrush, the sudden spaces opening out from the ever-stifling Cloof. I don’t tell anybody; why should I? Of my being a father I don’t say much either. What can one say? It makes Maria happy. The baby’s hair is red like my beard.

  I wake Maria one morning and tell her to start packing. I fetch Windvogel and we go and herd my cattle and sheep.

  Go fetch your bundle, I say. Tie it up good and fast.

  The rain is on its way. I saw it the previous evening by the meagre light of the crescent moon and by morning the mist from the sea is pouring over the southern mountains, all along the Cloof like milk boiling over. Surging cold churns over the mountain until the grey mountainside disappears. The shimmering mist settles behind the trees at the foot of the mountain like a second mountain, a solid spectre. The buttermilk clouds join heaven and earth and undo both.

  I fetch my saddle in the house and cart the thing on my back over the fields to David Deathwatch. I tell him that Windvogel is coming along. Bumcrack-boil Senekal is not impressed. The Bushman who grew up among his Hotnots and guzzled his food and nowadays calls himself Windvogel Whatever can’t just bugger off at will, he says. The sooner I clear out from under his feet, the better, is his decision. But if I trek, I trek alone. I smile. I have my own land. Scurvy Senekal is no longer my boss. He prattles on about how he raised me and how he fed me and that he deserves better than being dragged in front of the magistrate for a few barrels of butter. I look down at my godfather, then up and into the distance.

  Windvogel wants to come along.

  He can want what he wants, he’s my Hotnot or Bushman or Godknowswhat and I decide where he puts his flat feet, I don’t care what the creature calls himself nowadays.

  I smile.

  So what’s so bloody funny now?

  I’m just thinking what you’re going to look like soon.

  I was like a father to you.

  I was your tame Hotnot, I was never your child.

  David Damnation loses his temper and then two of his teeth when my fist meets his face. He staggers, stoops to pick up his hat, then comes upright again. On his head here below my chin I see the sunburnt bald patch.

  I’m done with you. Take your stuff. Hotnot-humper.

  I’m not done with you, I say.

  The smile again. Then the fists again until he’s lying flat and doesn’t get up again. I chuck his saddle off Horse’s back and cinch my own. Li’l Senekal mumbles something on the ground.

  I ride to the homestead and take my leave of Geertruy.

  Did you say good bye to David?

  After our fashion.

  Go well, Little Brother.

  Go well, Sis.

  She doesn’t press me to her and doesn’t cry and watches me riding away on her husband’s horse in my makeshift wagon with my common-law wife and my bastard child and my Bushman friend till she can no longer see me and then, I know, she stays watching the wagon trail. I ride on and look back.

  What was to follow in my wake on that yard is all too predictable: The maid who screams as Shit-shanks Senekal walks into the kitchen. Geertruy whose eyes narrow when she hears the screams. My sister who turns around in the gravel, back to her husband’s house, to face the wrath awaiting her there.

  A red dog with one ear and the hair bristling on its back comes walking out of the brush into the wagon trail, sniffs the air and watches us moving past. It puts out its tongue to taste the first few drops. It trots behind the wagon. Something rustles in the bushes on the road ahead. Maria points at two more dogs trotting along in the grass. The rain sets in. Further along in the bushes another ten or so of them, spread out in front of and next to and behind the wagon in the veldt; a whole pack.

  The farm has a name already, and I don’t mess with it. De Brakkerivier, The Brackish River, lies over the first ridge behind Ezeljacht, but here the soil is already of a different kind, harder, barer. It’s a part of the world that changes its nature like day and night every half-hour’s ride on horseback. The coastal forests are not far behind me; beyond the Kammanassie Mountains in front of me a semi-desert lies far and wide. Look: slangbos, thorn trees low to the ground, slate and a few ostriches pecking at the stones. We outspan and instantly form part of the background.

  The wattle-and-daub hut that we devise with frames of lathing covered with clay merges with the ridge. It’s a stronger and bigger construction than the nest in which Maria and I have been living for the past few years. Windvogel and Maria help and scold and eventually take over the building when I start nesting again instead of building. I stand watching them, how nimbly their hands work, how they can plait reeds and plaster clay. I rub my hands, scratch at the calluses, but the fingers remain blunt and stupid.

  A month or so later a few runaway Hottentots arrive who beg for work and they also build huts for themselves and herd my cattle and slaughter a sheep as needed. I sit and smoke and contemplate the limits of my world and do absolutely nothing.

  In summer I’m thirsty all the time. I wander into the veldt and return with a skin pouch full of honeycomb, some larvae still in the comb, and a body swollen and red from bee stings. I chuck the lot into a dish and go and sweet-talk Maria to make karrie. She puts water on the fire, pours lukewarm water on the honey. She comes to sit outside with me against our reed house like an upside-down basket. She takes the clay pipe from my hand and smokes. I try to smile with my swollen face. She takes a strong puff before returning the pipe.

  You must build us some walls, she says.

  What for, come winter we’ll be gone again.

  For what do we have to trek along with the sheep? Can’t we just send the shepherds? Settle down here good and proper?

  You come and sit here. I can’t stare at those accursed kopjes year after year.

  I press her to me and we kiss and I let her go and I scratch at the bee stings on my cheek. Her skin is tight over her belly again. I stroke the oiled stomach. Look how those forearms squeeze out the honey into the bowl. Look how the point of her tongue sticks out while she’s straining the karrie must through a gauze cloth into a flask.

  Do you want to go for a walk? My feet need to get out.

  I scratch at the blisters.

  I’m waiting for the karrie.

  The stuff has to ferment for days, Buys.

  I’ll wait.

  She walks into the veldt and disappears over the ridge, buttocks tight with umbrage. The naked child comes out of the hut. My daughter is two years old and has her mother’s mouth and her mother’s rare slave name: Elizabeth. She never cries, hasn’t really started talking yet. I try to pick her up, but she struggles free. She sits down in the dust and looks at me. Later she moves closer into the shadow of the house. Now and again she looks round and smiles; as soon as I get up and come closer, she runs into the house.

  When the karrie is ready at the end of the week, Windvogel and I start drinking in the morning and by the afternoon we are racing around on two wild ostriches until Maria comes to harangue us.

  But good God, Buys! Get down from there! You look like you’re sitting on a chicken! You’re going to break the bird’s back!

  I jump down and chase her around a bit, then I launch an attack on the child. I fall down in the dust. She comes to stand over me and laughs with a little hand over her little mouth. I pick her up and she wriggles free. Then I’m after her again with a roar. She makes for her mother, cackling. I throw Maria over my shoulder and drop her on our bed of hides. After a while we become aware of Elizabeth peering at the two tussling, groaning bodies. Then she sees a gecko by the door.

  By dusk I’m coming to my senses on the bench in front of the door. Against the waves of golden fire on the horizon the silhouette appears of an
ox wagon without a canvas hood. Five withered mangy oxen trudge on, the front one without a yoke, hitched up with leather thongs like a draught horse. Two Hottentots, one in front of the oxen, the other on the wagon chest. A raggle-taggle preacher in what remains of a top hat and tails is standing on the back of the wagon loudly lamenting his depraved soul. He plucks off the last of his buttons to show me his breast, roasted red. The vagabond missionary clings to the flaps of the dilapidated wagon and shouts imprecations in German and High Dutch about rivers that will run with blood and dark men in dark nights with long knives and the spattering spit seems to dry instantly to the raw blisters on the God-crazed fool’s mouth. The Hottentots gesture feebly in my direction with flaccid arms while lashing the oxen listlessly and driving them along the road. The man scratches at his breast and becomes quite spirited when Maria appears from the reed door. The wagon is still halfway down the road when the stinker starts performing elaborate curtseys. He wishes me a prosperous harvest. He introduces himself under some or other Germanic surname. He enquires after the way to Swellendam, while the oxen plod on to Couga, further and further away from Swellendam. I smile at the man and proclaim that they are following the strait and narrow road, that it’s long and hard and overgrown with thistles, but that it is indeed the right way. The man, already bereft of his senses and now also of his destination, gesticulates grandly in my direction. He bows again before starting to curse the Hottentots for their laxity and warning them that the laggard will never attain the Joyous Jerusalem. The wagon creaks to a halt. The emaciated emissary of God jumps downs; his knees buckle under him. The flies feast undisturbed on the blisters of the babbling salvager of souls, nor are they swatted away from the cheeks of the Hottentots. He gathers a fistful of sand, kisses it and proclaims his love of this prospect and the quality of the soil and asks in a highly convoluted manner if he can help me with the harvest in exchange for a blanket and a sweet potato twice a day.