Red Dog
Page 42
I say something. When it’s emerged from my lips, it’s incomprehensible to both of us.
We sit for a long time, now and again she starts saying something, then has second thoughts. Eventually:
But if you … Oh, Lord, when you decide you want to go and muck in somewhere again, for sweetheavensake just take this along.
A leather pouch has found its way into my lap. It looks vaguely familiar. I fiddle with the thong with my right hand, don’t manage to open it. She takes it from me and unlaces it. I peek into the pouch with my good eye. Kemp’s lead letters that I stole when he pushed off. Never had the heart to melt the stuff for munitions as I’d intended. Left it somewhere and forgot about it. For all these years she’s been keeping it.
And you’re going to need this as well, you old bandit.
From a fold of her dress she conjures up a powder horn, places it in my hand. It’s chock-full of gunpowder.
Thought I’d hide the last bit of powder until it became really necessary.
She is silent, then smiles:
Thought that way I’d at least be saving the lives of a few poor Caffres and elephants.
She starts laughing at herself, stops instantly and puts her hand on the horn that is still clutched in my hand. We sit peering ahead of us.
My speech is spoken, she says.
I don’t know what to say. We sit staring across the plains for a while. Then she gets up, dusts her backside.
Well, then, up you get. That crowd of Buyses must be dying of hunger by now.
The next day I indicate to the boys to stoke me a fire. I hold out the pouch of Kemp’s letters to Baba and make him understand that he has to start melting so long. I drag my good-for-nothing foot to the wagon.
Rummage in the chests looking for my bullet moulds. Back at the fire Baba is nowhere to be seen. He’s chucked the letters into a pot, stood the pot in the flames and cleared out. Goddammit, I should have thrashed the little shit more often when my hands still could. I make sure my lame leg is firmly planted, bend over the fire and get the pot out of there. The letters are starting to run. I put the pot down in the sand. Want to sit down, then my leg gives way. I knock over the pot into the fire. I strike the ground and kick and shout. The children turn up instantly, they spoon the bits of lead they can rescue out of the coals. The rest of Kemp’s letters will, like his sermons, become part of the ash and gravel and strike nobody. The lead pebbles will lie here till one day an ostrich pecks them up and shits them out again undigested somewhere else.
I sit down and start pouring the drops of lead into the mould. I think of Geertruy under the tree, of me practising letters with a quill. Zijn en hebben. Being and having. I am nothing. I have nothing. My heart is empty. I scratch under the loincloth, count my two balls. From them my uncountable seed that fell in places not all of which I know. Who comes after me will bear my mark and signs, a red beard somewhere, perhaps a voice that can incite people, one day a man who can shoot well. And that is all.
After an eternity I manage to cast four bullets. That will suffice. How far can the damned Portuguese be? I get all three my guns lifted, want to go and inspect them in peace somewhere, away from prying eyes. I don’t manage a good grip, drop them just as Johannes spots me.
Father must get in out of the sun. Come, let’s go and sit by the wagon.
He inspects the guns. He takes aim with one, nods. Takes out the flint from another and places it in the chosen gun. Then he replaces the breech with that of another gun. He cleans the barrel. He polishes the butt while looking at me all the time. He sits with the gun in his hands, examines it, then hands it to me.
This one will last, Father.
He gets up and walks to the tent where his wife is trying to soothe their baby.
Toktokkie comes to feed me water. One of the little ones waves at me. Right in front of me is a blurred blot, only at the edges does the world still contract into focus. I turn my head slightly to place the child from the corner of my eye, and then the little creature is gone. I feel the threads of spit spinning webs in the sagging corner of my mouth.
In the afternoon I hone my stolen herneuter with one hand, the whetstone clenched between my knees. I go and lie in the wagon. Lie on my back gazing at the crooked frame that I was supposed to fix. Aletta scrambles into the wagon, complains of mice in the food chest. I doze off, don’t dream, wake up from the heat. Outside Midge and Gawie are shouting at each other. Sleep overwhelms me again. Wake up with Toktokkie and little Maria tickling my feet. I yell at them. Maria comes in, rummages around, arranges things around me and doesn’t look at me and speaks no word and is off the wagon again and gone. I get up. Sit down again. Peer at where the wagon tent is chafed through, the sun that sidles in there; the dust that drifts into the column of light and only then becomes visible, in drifting creates patterns and constellations and breaks up and vanishes as soon as it floats out of the column. A fly walks on my chin, over my lip and into the sagging mouth. I swallow. I go and sit outside and listen to the hurly-burly around me. I prune my toenails.
As the sun starts gathering water for the night’s drought, I call my people together.
Tonight we’re all eating together, I keep on saying until they understand me.
Maria snorts in the background. I ask her if I can have a bit of sugar on the sweet potatoes. Just tonight, I know there isn’t much left.
What are you saying, Buys? Talk so I can hear you, she says without looking up from the cauldron.
I repeat. She doesn’t reply, stirs the pot with conviction. I go and sit at the makeshift table in front of the wagon. The undergrowth snaps just over there, not far from the camp. Animals on their way to the watering hole. I watch the children scurrying around me to carry food to the table and sit down one by one. The half-grown ones at the table, the little ones on the ground. They tease and mock among themselves; here two boys on the verge of fisticuffs, there a granddaughter in tears. In between a continuous buzz of laughter. I can’t feel my face; I don’t know if I’m smiling. Maria feeds me if I get too excited and spear my flabby mouth with my fork. Oh, the roasted fat, the pink flesh. My every earthly possession for a last dram of spirits. Oh, Maria’s sweet potatoes.
What exactly and how much I said to them, I can no longer recall; with my sagging mouth they would in any case not have understood very much of it. I remember that I told them about Inhambane that can’t be too far away, while scrutinising each one of them with care to burn each little mug into the back of my eyes. Some say I had more than three hundred children, more than three thousand grandchildren. That fertile I couldn’t have been. I hope not. The troop here with me is in any case nowhere near all my offspring. Bettie is gone, the baby dead; Philip dead. What do I know of what happened to the others. But this little lot in front of me, they are here. Even Windvogel the younger. See, the young men who are big and strong already, as I once was, each with his own wife and wives and children. My grandchildren. The daughters who look like their mothers. The little ones with the busy eyes and stick legs who still have to grow into being human. Aletta and Eliza, my Toktokkie, fiddling with a pressed flower under the table. Piet, Dirk with the black eye, little Maria, the big men Johannes and Coenraad Wilhelm. Johannes’ wife, another goddam Christina, is breastfeeding the baby. Coenraad Wilhelm’s wife, Katrien, is lending a hand with clearing the table. Doors, ever frowning like his namesake Kemp. My beloved Elizabeth’s offspring, each one with that expression of hers around the eyes: Gabriël and Michiel, my Gawie and Midge, the two rapscallions. Little Doris, more taciturn and more dangerous by the day. Little Jan. Baba, the little man for whom there were no names left over.
You must not believe everything that Midge was to tell later; he was always a handful. But something scratches the Omni-Eye of this Omni-Buys when I read Michiel’s recorded words:
He was sorely aggrieved over the loss of our mother, and in his grief said unto us, that he would leave us there, we should not proceed further into the land, and
also not go back. He said also that the white people would eventually arrive. The Lord would provide for us.
When is Father going away, why can’t we go along, asks Gawie.
We’re going along, the little ones chirp.
Coenraad Wilhelm gets up and walks away, Maria is washing dishes, Dirk gazes at me with a look I don’t understand. Then everybody starts chattering and asking questions at the same time. They must have understood enough through my drooling and slurring. I claw the battered Bible closer.
Let us read, I say.
Everyone is silent at once. They look at each other, examine the table top. I stroke the leather, feel the pages, quite possibly the last paper these dead fingers will ever touch. I open the book, search for my place, and begin:
And the first came out red all over like a hairy garment; and they called his name Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore years old when she bore him. And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field, and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.
I look up. They don’t understand a single word dropping from my gibbering jaw, but each and every one nods piously and with eyes wandering elsewhere pretends to be listening.
And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob.
I lie behind Maria. Here, at long last, it is not necessary to forgive her her lack of mystery. Tonight it is the familiarity of every wart and mole that I seek out with my mouth. I drink from them as from a colony of breasts. Tonight her gurglings and snorings drone beautifully. I don’t close an eye. I want to make sure my fingers remember every part of her. The sweat at the back of her knees, the smell of her grey frizz, the shapes of her ears. I touch her, but my fingers are dead. To feel her skin I have to sniff her body with my snout, my hands mere front paws, hard and calcified like hooves. In the early hours I get up. She pretends to be sleeping.
I struggle to fasten the buckskin around my hips. Throw a kaross over my shoulders. I scrabble in the pot, wrap the leftovers in a cloth. Slip the herneuter into the loincloth. I sit by the cold embers, smoke a pipe. I wrap hides around my feet, try to tie the thongs with one hand and give up. Johannes comes out of his tent with a baby on his arm, looks me in the eye, soothes the child at his breast, stoops into the tent again. I keep looking at the tent. Nobody appears. I tie a bundle of karosses to my back. It’s too heavy; I drop it. Against the wagon lean the bows and quivers. For that you need two damned arms. I take up my gun, the very last powder horn, the pouch with four bullets. My right leg drags me to the brushwood. One of the dogs charges at me, licks my calf, won’t leave me. I chase him away quietly, but the cur lingers on behind me. I throw stones at him until he stops and then trots back to the camp.
In the Tswapong hills I wanted to die. Here at the edge of the camp, where the bushes close in, my second death then, the demise of my name, of Coenraad de Buys. Adieu, Mijnheer de Buys. Till we meet again, Khula, Kadisha, Moro, Diphafa. Het ga je goed, Kgowe. Farewell, Coen. All that still lives is my raddled body; all that can still die is my woundedness.
7
See, here we stand. I, the Omni-Buys who has bewhispered you to here, and you, my reader. Further we cannot go. Here we have to take our leave of the man-beast Buys. He is no longer I; he is apocryphal. See, he gazes at the slumbering wagon and tents. The stars are on fire, the moon is meagre, the sun already inexorable on the horizon. He limps on, turns around again. Maria has not emerged from the wagon yet. She is still lying with her face to the side of the tent, her eyes open. You try to catch up with him. My hand to your chest stays you for ever. We see him walk away against the half-light of early morning.
The dogs smelled the weakened creature from far away. The soil has been baked hard, he leaves no tracks. They follow his familiar stench until they see him, this thing with the dragging gait. They see him stumble along the grain of the earth, his left arm swinging to its own measure, the left leg sinew to sinew alongside. His paws are bleeding. Before they trot off to where they can smell the quaggas, the pack greet him as they have done for generations. After a moon’s milky filling and draining they come across him again. He shuffles along bent almost at right angles, the gun in his claw all that keeps him upright. He mutters to himself, does not hear his knife falling behind him and staying there. He stops only when he sees the red dog. He does not move while the dog comes to sniff at him. When the pack see him again half a moon later, he’s prowling on all four paws, the gun and powder horn dangling under his belly. His fur is hanging loose, his knuckles bleed. He scans the world of brushwood and distant cawings. The dogs fell a waterbuck and devour it and forget about the crawling loner. At daybreak they sniff out the bush pigs and guinea fowl. They find him prodding and devouring the insides of a frog. He peels pieces of bark from dead trees, stuffs the teeming crawling creatures into his mouth. His claws find roots in the sand. He digs and pulls and gnaws. He hunkers with a root in the cheek, peers lazy eyed at the bushes and does not see the dogs. His nostrils dilate. The red dog breaks through the branches; the creature’s head turns at an angle. For a moment they regard each other, then they both growl. The pack recalls the red dog. The man-beast has not moved yet; he keeps on gazing. The moon is full again and still in the sky with the morning sun when he comes upon the dogs at the watering hole. Their heads are buried in an eland. The red dog looks up, its hyena-like snout red and dripping. His head drops back into the carcase. With a last shot fired into the air, the monster scatters the dogs. They peer out of the undergrowth at how he descends upon the eland, how he tugs furiously at a hind leg trying to tear it off. He falls forward, head first into the guts. A gnawing and growling sounds from the belly of the eland. When he catches his breath his head is wet, a strip of flesh dangles from his jaws. A dog snaps a branch. He turns his head, he sniffs, his jaws let go of the chewed flesh. He looks up; they are everywhere. They tear away his hides, tear out his hair, tear off his skin; drive their claws into him. Their canines hook onto joints; the bones break. They tear open the body. The red dog grabs a chunk of meat, devours it to one side with his cubs. The dogs devour him; then they devour the rest of the eland. Later they lie in the damp sand next to the watering hole, their tongues smacking. A bitch kecks, vomits out a morsel of bone, gobbles it up again immediately. The cubs snap at each other. When the sand is baked hot, the pack trot into the veldt in search of the slender strips of shade of a thorn tree. At dusk they will trek on.
See, there he vanishes into the bush now. Did you see? Because that was the last sighting of Coenraad de Buys. But to be dead is not enough. Like molten letters I linger in the gravel without eroding. I am the thistle. The piss in the stone of the Union Buildings. Like a pack of dogs I renew myself constantly. You’ll never be shot of me.
Addendum
LICHTENSTEIN’S DESCRIPTION OF COENRAAD DE BUYS
The way you imagined this exceptional man on the basis of often exaggerated accounts turns out, upon meeting him, to be entirely justified. His uncommon height (nearly seven feet), his shapely limbs, his excellent carriage and the confident look of his eye, his high forehead, his whole mien, and a certain dignity in his movements, made a most pleasing impression. So one might want to imagine the heroes of antiquity, a living image of Hercules, a terror to his enemies and a pillar of strength to his friends. What the descriptions had not led us to expect was a certain modesty and reticence in his conversation, a mildness and kindness in his looks and mien, which could not in the least have led you to suspect that the man had for so many years lived among untutored savages, and which, still more than his words, contributed to remove the prejudice we had conceived against him. He willingly gave information concerning the subjects upon which he was questioned, but carefully avoided elaborating upon himself and his relations with the Caffres. This sly reticence was often accompanied with a sort of wry smile, that spoke of the inward consciousness of his own powers, and i
n which was plainly to be read that his forbearance was not the result of fear; it was rather as if he scorned to satisfy the vapid curiosity of his questioners at the expense of truth, or of his own personal reputation. This rendered him all the more interesting to us, and probably excited our sympathy much more than the relation of his story would have done.
Original German quoted from: Lichtenstein, Hinrich. 1967 (1811). Reisen im südlichen Afrika in den Jahren 1803, 1804, 1805 und 1806. Volume 1. Stuttgart: Brockhaus/Antiquarium. 344–345.
Acknowledgements
On the tracks of the historical Buys I consulted, among others, works by the following authors: John Campbell, Max du Preez, Richard Elphick, IH Enklaar, OJO Ferreira, Herman Giliomee, Peter Kallaway, Martin Legassick, MH Lichtenstein, Andrew Manson, Roelf Marx, Noël Mostert, Neil Parsons, Nigel Penn, Gustav Preller, AE Schoeman, JT van der Kemp, PJ van der Merwe and HG Wagner.
As far as other quotations, references and rewritings are concerned: Omni-Buys saw it all, read every word. He eats as he reads. As he plunders mission stations and cattle kraals, so he plunders the texts of others far and wide in order to tell his own tale. Should you then in his retelling stumble across the remains of other authors, notably Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy, regard it as the homage of a scoundrel.
Summary
The only revolution here is that between dust and fire, the only equality the levelling of the land by the elements, the only fraternity a function of a common enemy or a shared disgrace. The only liberty the one that comes from surrendering to your fate.