Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  I plonk the book down on my throne. Food for the flames. Janssens notices me and stops the digging. He comes to fetch me to inspect his excavation. I stroke my immense dog while he’s digging. A dizzy spell makes me sit down. Janssens licks my face. The ploughing paws suddenly deafening, as if they’re harrowing at the back of my head, there where things should have remained buried.

  If it hadn’t been for Kemp and his new pal Read’s damned philanthropy, I might have ended my days in the Couga. If only I hadn’t written him that letter. No, not even you will believe that. I’d have trekked my trek sooner or later anyway. In any case. The two missionaries squat in that shithole Bethelsdorp and invite all that is Hottentot or Caffre to come and moan about the hidings the farmers administer them. They believe every word and write it all down and post it to England. Cradock is instructed by the focking British Minister of Colonies to investigate all fifty charges by the missionaries against the farmers. De Swarte Ommegang – The Black Circuit, our name for that circuitous court – gets going in 1812 and meanders about between Graaffe Rijnet, George and Uitenhage. Preachers have always thought that if you confess hard enough, it will set you free. Farmers slap and thrash their workers. It’s always been like that. It will damnwell always be like that. The strong ones trample the small ones, the small ones get stronger with being trampled, until they can trample themselves.

  Initially I’m aggrieved when I hear about the Ommegang, until I’m told that there’s also a whole list of charges against Long Piet and Mad Martha. I am summonsed to go and testify in George about the stories that I peddled to Kemp. Many thanks, Kemp, for this last gift. Oh, Martha, I thought, now it’s my turn to trample.

  The summons was still lying right there on the table where I read and left it, when I got news of Kemp’s death. In December 1811, so the people say, the old man gave up the ghost in the Cape.

  Lord knows, Kemp, I bade you farewell ten years ago at Schapenkraal. What mourning was to be done, I mourned then and had done with mourning. We had our own lives to live. I came to squat here. Now I am told that in your sixtieth year you acquired a lovely little slave girl, fourteen years old, and set her free, her mother and brothers as well. Married the overjoyed maiden. They say she was rounding out with your fourth child when she bent over your deathbed to make sure that the blanket was covering your long body properly. Dear old Kemp, I was witness to how the crafty woman-flesh of these parts, dark and tender, led you into temptation until seventy times seven every day. Yea, verily, for once and for always and damn me, at last, you permitted yourself to yield. And what a yielding it was! I don’t mourn you, Jank’hanna, I rejoice with you. My friend who is dead for ever.

  The evening before I’m due to set off for court, Maria and Elizabeth and I are sitting at the kitchen table. They want to know where I’m heading. Coenraad Buys setting foot off his farm is a great event these days. I tell them about Mad Martha and the tales doing the rounds. How she bullies and beats her labourers to death. Maria snorts:

  But, Buys, you’re a fine one to talk.

  Nombini is standing in the doorway. I notice her only when she turns on her heel and walks out.

  Maria, that mad piece of shamelessness must not get away with such cruelty.

  You yourself have been to court because you maltreat your workers.

  I was not found guilty.

  Only because you and your pals chased off the landdrost.

  I want to start protesting, then Elizabeth gets up.

  I’m going to bed, Coenraad. You must travel well tomorrow.

  Sit for a while longer, wife, I say.

  The Coenraad I married wasn’t scared of his neighbour’s wife.

  Maria gets to her feet, spluttering.

  Sleep well, you two turtle doves, she says as she leaves.

  A pheasant calls from the other end of the yard. The dog’s snout perks up out of the hole, its ears erect. He wants to take off, then I grab him by the scruff of the neck, drag him back to the hole. I push his head into the loose soil.

  There, I say, you wanted to dig. Now dig.

  He digs up a bone and trots off across the yard, flaunting the chewed-to-a-pulp treasure in his mouth.

  On 4 January 1813 the Ferreira trial has been running for two days. I walk into the little hall. George’s new drostdy, the ancient posthouse, smells of wood oil. There they sit, the whole accursed ruck of them. Every soul in the district crammed in here. The air is saturated with sweat and spite and silence. And in the dock Mad Martha Ferreira, fortyish, stocky and strong, broad shoulders, rhinoceros hide. No tits to speak off, two dried-up dugs under the dark frock. Eight children have emerged from under that frock to date. The muscles in the forearms. The knobbly hands. She is tidy. Even here in the courtroom the audience whispers of her milk tart. The lashless white eyes don’t blink and don’t let go of me. Long Piet is younger than I, but looks older, bowed down prematurely under those eyes of Martha’s. There was a charge against him as well, that he had trampled a Hottentot youth, Kleinveld, with his horse, but the corpse was without any blemish and Piet was not summonsed. He is here as support for his beloved wife.

  On the bench with its hopeless carpentry the worthies L.C.H. Strubberg and P.L. Cloete shuffle in their seats in boredom. Landdrost A.G. van Kervel is the plaintiff. G. Beelaerts van Blokland is the prosecutor. The atmosphere is strained, first names too intimate, only initials are tolerated.

  Eleven charges. Seven dead by her hand, four mutilated. I slide into the back row. My fingers cramp into claws when I see the grimace around her mouth. She smiles at me, at the whole court, while checking to see who all turned up for the performance. I know that grimace. As the lips curl up for the laugh, the cheeks compress the eyes into smug slits. It’s a laugh that as a child I saw often. It says I am pleased you did that, Coenraad; I am pleased you went too far. Now I have licence to flatten you. Because you are not respectable. Martha is not pretty like my mother, she doesn’t know how to swing her hips. But they are of the same stock. The quiet violence of respectability. This white woman with the bearing of a lady, educated as few women of her class are, schooled and trained and addled, every hair pinned up and covered up; the compression of the corset curdling and compacting everything inside it. Good morning, my dear mother. I smile back.

  For four days I sit and listen to the plaints, waiting for my turn to be called. For four days I look at her before I get to say my say. The Hottentots stream into court and confess and cry and malign the Christians. Martha sits and listens. When the proceedings are adjourned, she talks softly to her husband and at times laughs behind her hand at whispered jokes. The Hottentots in the witness stand look bewildered, each one more so than the next, as if they cannot comprehend that a court could listen to them without hanging them afterwards. Some talk at length, others just cry. The witness stand warms up with the bums of the wounded and the chancers. One or two speak their testimony like rhymes learnt by rote; I recognise phrases from Kemp’s catechising. Kemp knew how to train a Hottentot.

  Watch her closely when the mad madam defends herself. She hides her big hands under the witness stand. She feigns gently, contemplatively, demurely and serenely. Civilised. She is aware of herself and of everybody around her. She answers two hundred and forty-eight questions. The only thing in this courtroom that is not under her control is her left foot that almost inaudibly knocks on the wooden floor.

  I discipline my workers, she says, because I am a precise woman, very set on my work.

  And the title Mad Martha, how do you feel about the name?

  I know very well that they call me Mad Martha, but that is without foundation. I am no madder than others who are obliged to deal with Hottentots and Blacks. Still, I know I am standing before just judges and in that I trust.

  And in that vein the she-wolf talks herself out of a corner.

  The Ferreira clan were banished from Algoa Bay in 1803 already, precisely because of all the stories that their farm labourers spread about even then.
Piet and Martha move to De Lange Cloof, to Dieprivier, the farm of Piet’s younger brother Naas. Three years later they settle on Elandsfontein, where they are still squatting behind their fortified turf ramparts, breeding like mildew.

  Here in George the scandals of Algoa Bay caught up with the miscreant of a woman. At Fort Frederick, so the people aver, the slave woman Manissa was lashed every day with a sjambok, once an eye was taken out. Manissa goes to gather wood and does not return. Martha follows in her footsteps and returns without the slave. Half an hour’s walk from the homestead they find a spoor of blood, a bloodspot, a piece of taaibos wood, drag marks, the small footprints of Martha and a bundle of wood tied with Cape tulip.

  Martha Ferreira:

  I did not chastise dear Manissa. Perhaps once gave her a few well-deserved lashes across the back. The woman had the Mozambique disease. She died of red diarrhoea, Your Honour, the blood stool. Night before her death I nursed her. Old Esau buried her.

  Roosje and her child Hendrik left Kemp’s mission station to go and work for Martha. At Dieprivier Roosje developed a dry cough and the consumptive disease. She couldn’t work any more; she was beaten every day with a stick or sjambok. One fine day she runs away from the cookhouse. Martha is hot on her heels and beats her and hits her in the back with a rock so that she falls down in a ditch and dies next to the kraal. She was buried and three weeks later Martha and Long Piet left Dieprivier.

  Mad Martha:

  Roosje was a poor, sickly creature, all skin and bones. I doctored her with goosegrass and sowthistle, but nothing could staunch the consumption. We buried her as is the Hottentot custom in a kaross and a rug.

  At Dieprivier Martha sends little Hendrik, Roosje’s pride and joy, to go and fetch calves. It starts raining and snowing and he can’t get back over the flooded river. The Hottentot Geduld finds him after three days in the veldt behind a rhinoceros bush, rigid with cold. Back at home Martha puts the child’s feet in a pot of boiling water. He can’t feel that the water is boiling. He just sees steam. Martha treats the sores, wraps the boiled feet in cloth and one by one the toes start dropping off.

  Mad Adder:

  When Geduld turned up with the boy, I dosed him with warm wine. Added crushed tendrils of sour fig to warm water and warmed Hendrik’s little feet in it. I put a poultice of barley on his feet to draw out the burn. I did my best. I did though once take a paddle to the child’s head because he swore. That I am sorry about, Your Honour.

  What is it to me that the woman Bitja went to collect wood at Dieprivier and that Martha caught up with her and gashed open her eyebrow and lips? What business is it of mine that when the lunch meat was spoiled one day, Martha cut the housemaid Lys’ arm with a knife? What does it matter to me, I’m waiting to face the mad bubonic bitch myself.

  I settle myself in the witness stand, push the table forward to create space for my legs and my wrath. That woman puts me off my stroke so much, I’m not my normal eloquent self. I stare at my scruffy shoes, the chafed ankles, my trousers that don’t reach where they should. Not that the other Christians in the hall look any better. But the cloak of respectability is not upon my shoulders; the panoply of white conformity I do not wear. Everybody examines me as if I’ve crawled out of a hole. My voice is hoarse, my oration brusque.

  Coenraad de Buys:

  Your honour, about five years ago a raggle-taggle Caffre and two women turned up on my farm and complained about the Ferreiras. I can tell you today only what I wrote at the time to my honoured friend, the late Jank- … Doctor van der Kemp. The Hottentot woman Griet left Doctor van der Kemp’s mission station to go and work for … er … Mrs Ferreira. Martha, Mrs Ferreira, apparently beat her and stoned her. Griet’s body was full of running sores and after a while her hands were no longer worth anything. She died in front of her straw hut and two women dug her in. That is what I know, what I heard.

  Goddam Martha:

  In her last days Griet complained of a hard band over her navel. She said she was drinking snake venom for it and at full moon I saw her wandering about muttering. Then she fell down in the door of the hut. Her belly was swollen. Even Mijnheer Buys would not have looked at her twice.

  The rabble laugh.

  And Rachel? Van Blokland asks.

  To the devil with Rachel, I want to shout. I want to see Martha hang until her eyeballs pop and her tongue swells up like a rotten fish.

  Coenraad de Buys:

  The woman Rachel was one of Kemp’s Bethelsdorp Hottentots, a reborn child of our Lord, who went to work for that … for Mrs Ferreira. The phthisis made the woman spit blood. So I am told. Mrs Ferreira is alleged to have beaten her to death, and, so I am told, dragged her a hundred paces to her straw hut and, I swear that that is what I was told, that night set the hut on fire. Apparently Rachel was buried the next morning in the vineyard.

  A Hottentot succeeds me and says Martha burnt down the hut only two weeks after the thrashing. Another one nods conspiratorially in my direction and to hell with him too. He alleges that Rachel was burnt alive. Yet another says that it was a high wind that brought the fire.

  Crazy Clap-cunt:

  Little Rachel suffered from the fever for a month and complained of a stitch under her right teat. I nursed that daughter of Ham. Gave her candles to burn at night when the sleep was elsewhere. The wind was strong that night: I pray that little Rachel was asleep when the flames overwhelmed her and she returned to the bosom of our Father.

  I am excused, but Martha’s meagre smile does not let me go. The room around us vanishes. It is just she and I in the courtroom, on earth. I stare at Martha, how she tugs at her dress, irons out the wrinkles on her lap with the back of her hand. With one ear I hear how Long Piet’s labourer Esau buys himself the slave woman Steyn as wife. How Martha beats her with sjamboks, broomsticks, jukskeis, and heavy objects. The flesh that rots with all the bruising and starts to fall off the woman’s body. How with swollen and rotten arms and head she lies senseless. Esau was not allowed to visit her but he went to say good bye to his wife in secret. She died and her body was just gone.

  When the young Hottentot Hans comes to speak in person, he does not look up once. He knows as well as I that once you look into those eyes, you’ve had it. When he was eleven or twelve he did housework at Elandsfontein and minded the children. He says when the children were naughty or cried, Martha beat him with river bush canes, brooms and jukskeis. And then nursed him.

  One Hottentot after the other comes to testify that Martha beat one Abigaël so badly that the pus oozed from her wounds until she died. The story has many endings. The story has one ending. Abigaël died in Algoa Bay. She died in Dieprivier. She died at Elandsfontein. Abigaël is dead. Mother Martha, ungodly goodness personified, says the woman died in childbirth of red diarrhoea.

  The Hottentots in borrowed Sunday best say that when old Mina one day botched a piece of embroidery, she was beaten till she was blind and her eyes pulp. They say her wounds stank to high heaven. The end of this story also takes many forms: Martha hit the woman behind the head with a plank while she was sitting in front of her hut. She is dead. Martha beat her with a yoke. She died in a ditch. Black-hearted Martha who could have been my mother:

  Mina was old and small and poxy. Her whole body and face covered with the red scabs of the shame. The woman couldn’t work in the house any longer. No person could be expected to face such a sight. Mina henceforward worked in the garden. I didn’t touch the woman; the pox was the end of her.

  On one point only everybody is agreed: Mina’s grave at Elandsfontein was shallow. The dogs dug her up.

  The only charge on which Mad Martha was found guilty, was that of the blow to Hendrik’s head. She had to pay a fine. Outside the courtroom the Couga Christians surrounded her and shook her hand and hugged her. I walked past them and somebody snarled things at me. From the centre of the circle she waved at me.

  I gather the Buys clan so we can set fire to the farmyard together. A father, after all, should w
orship with his family. The lot finish off or abandon whatever they were doing and walk across to where I’m starting to light the firebrands, but I myself stumble around, I fidget and fumble. My head is sputtering – stories about Martha, about the Couga, stories in the traveller’s book.

  Oh, the stories doing the rounds in the Couga. Old Jan Prinsloo who haunts his farm, Wolwekraal, over there. They say he wanders about at night among his horses looking for souls to devour. Skinned and roasted by his labourers, he walks, red and liplessly grinning, around his old yard in the kloofs. Apparently tied a few pregnant women to a wheel and beat them to ribbons and killed their husbands when they wanted to resist and then all hell broke loose on the old horse breeder’s farm. Some say his labourers consumed old Jan after roasting him, others say that he ran all aflame to the stables and arrived there ablaze.

  Are Martha’s victims already wandering about around her house? Are her maids awaiting their chance to skin her alive one night? I wish her such an eternal wandering, without skin or lips, for ever surrounded by her ghosts. Shall I write Prinsloo and Martha’s stories in the back of the book? My own nightmares? Shall I supplement the wanderings of the vagabond scientist with monsters of my own so that they too can be consumed by fire? Is there room for more ghost stories in a book that aspires to science and constantly bogs down in horrors?

  It’s truly dangerous to get embroiled in stories. Take, for instance, this Vocis affair of the traveller sitting rotting under that tree, so many wagon trails ago. He boarded a ship and landed here with a fresh quill and a large flagon of ink and wanted to write down the world. One fellow came to commit Africa to writing and went mad. At least he found peace under the tree. His book survived him; did his book murder him? Something tells me the book is dangerous, contagious. As soon as you pen that first sentence, you’re up to your neck. Well, Flatus, may you find peace in the flames.