The Covenant

by James A. Michener

  By accident, and surely not by design, the Saltwoods came at last into that bleak northern country which had provided refuge to the slaves Jango and Deborah, who had fled here with their children. The land was now occupied by a few Bushmen, a few Hottentots who led a vagrant life after their last herds had been bartered away, quite a few runaway slaves from various parts of the world, and a scattering of ill-defined ne’er-do-wells and outcasts. In the veins of these fugitives there was Dutch blood aplenty, German, too, from settlers and sailors off ships, and not a little contributed by English officers on their way home from India and freed during their Cape Town leaves from the confines of British respectability. There was every color, from the purest black to the fairest white, the last being provided by the new missionary, Hilary Saltwood of Oxford.

  He had settled on land in the northern part of the Great Karroo, that rolling semi-desert which occupied so much of the country. It was a thirst-land whose treeless expanse frightened most people but enchanted those who found refuge here. The Saltwoods built their meager hartebeest hut close to a meandering stream, which went dry much of the year. When it was finished, they surrounded it with a thicket of protective thorn, exactly as Australopithecus had done five million years earlier.

  The site would have seemed quite miserable, except for the cluster of five hills, each separated from all the others, perfectly round at the base, handsomely leveled off at the top. Their beauty lay in their symmetry, their classic purity of form; from a distance they resembled five judges huddling for an opinion, but from within their circles—say at the entrance to the missionaries’ hut—they became protective sentinels guarding the Karroo from the vast herds of animals that wandered by and from the titanic storms that swept across it. When a man elected to serve God at this forsaken spot, he had the presence of God with him at all times.

  One traveler, standing at the door to Saltwood’s hut, avowed that he could ‘see north to portals of heaven and west to the gates of hell without spotting a human being.’ He was, of course, wrong. In various nooks and secret places families had their huts. Behind the flat-topped hills there were whole villages whose residents hunted small animals for their hides, great ones for their ivory tusks. Others traded to the north, crossing the Karroo to where substantial numbers of people congregated. And others, with remarkable diligence, actually farmed the area—one hundred and fifty acres to feed one sheep—and found it profitable. One man mended wagons for customers as far distant as a hundred miles.

  But everyone in the Karroo shared in one miracle, and joyously. When spring rains came to this arid land, usually in early November, the rolling plains exploded with flowers, millions of them in a sweeping carpet of many hues. It seemed as if nature had hidden here her leftover colors, waiting for the proper moment to splash them upon the world. In one of his sermons Hilary Saltwood said, ‘The stars in heaven, the flowers on the Karroo, they’re God’s reminder that He stays with us.’

  His duties were many. It was he who marked with ritual the passages of life: to christen, to marry, to bury. He served as arbitrator in family brawling. He taught school. His wife was general nurse to the scattered community. Messages were left at his rectory, the hut by the water pan, and he counseled with all who sought advice on anything. He helped at brandings, attended slaughterings in the hope that he might come home with a leg of something. And he participated in extended hunts when food was needed. He was a vicar of the veld.

  But most of all he conducted services, in the open, beside the stream, with the five hills looking down. He read from the New Testament, lingering on its revolutionary messages of social justice, equality and brotherhood. In simple terms, devoid of cant, he talked with his people about new fashions of living in which all men would share responsibility, and he bore constant testimony to the fact that black and white could live together in harmony:

  ‘That the white man is temporarily in a position of command because of his gun, his horse and his wagon is as nothing in the eyes of the Lord, or in the passage of history. How brief is the life of man. A hundred years from now it may be the black man who will be in a position of authority, and how little that too will matter in the eyes of the Lord. White man up, black man up, the perpetual problems remain. Where do I get my food to eat? How do I pay my taxes? Am I safe at night when I go to sleep? Can my children learn the lessons they need? It is answers to those questions that we seek, and it matters not who is powerful and who weak, because in the great rolling away of history, all things change but the fundamentals.’

  Whenever he spoke like this on Sunday morning, he spent Sunday afternoon wondering about the education of his own children. He and Emma now had three dark-skinned rascals, with their father’s height and their mother’s flashing white teeth. They were bright children, masters of the alphabet at five and their numbers at six. With others in the area, they studied with Emma and took their catechism from Hilary; some of these children were instrumental in bringing their parents to the mission, encouraging them to go through the motions of worship, and all participated when Reverend Saltwood organized a picnic with games and songs and food.

  Then the young ones, twenty or thirty of them, of every shade, would venture outside the five hills and play on land that reached forever. A dozen kinds of antelope would watch from a distance, and sometimes lions would move close to listen and then to roar with chilling thunder.

  Adults always sought permission to join these safaris, and sometimes it seemed as if they enjoyed the outings more than their children, especially when great flocks of ostrich loped past or when boys found a settlement of meerkats. Then there was joy indeed as everyone gathered to watch the furry little animals scamper to their burrows, stand upright to see who was watching, and duck swiftly below ground. ‘Meerkats are like people,’ Emma told the children, ‘they must run around, but they’re happiest when they go back into their homes.’

  Hilary could find in the Bible no precedent for a picnic, and he sometimes wondered if he was sponsoring a pagan ritual. There was no instance in which Jesus had participated in such a gathering, but the missionary felt sure that the Master would have approved this glowing combination of fellowship in watching the meerkats and reverence in singing the hymns that followed. And one night he asked Emma, ‘Isn’t it possible that the miracle of the loaves and fishes should be considered a picnic? Or when He asked that the children be allowed to come to Him. Maybe the Cana wedding guests assembled on the side of some hill in Galilee.’

  Such days imparted a happiness that Hilary had never known before. His wife was a woman of infinite richness; her children were a joy; the tattered people who comprised his congregation loved his curious manners and forgave his intrusions into their spiritual lives; and the great, barren land, once one became accustomed to it, provided a congenial home. Best of all, there were no Boers and Englishmen contesting for power, no social stigma because this man was white, that woman black.

  And then the relative peace was broken by Dr. Simon Keer, thundering back to South Africa to collect incidents to be used in another book. He was in his fifties now, at the apex of his political power and a furious fighter for causes worthy of his support. He had recently assumed leadership of the philanthropic movement, as it was now called, and had learned how to excite huge crowds in London and Paris with his fiery oratory and dramatic examples of Boer misconduct. His first book, The Truth About South Africa, had run its course, and he felt he could best inflame opinion by producing a sequel showing that the horrors of Dutch occupancy at the Cape still persisted, even though Englishmen of higher moral standards held the reins of government. A supporter had given him a generous loan to fund this trip, counting upon Dr. Keer’s sensationalism to cover the investment.

  In short, the volcanic little man had found in the philanthropic movement his golden Ophir, and he was coming back to South Africa to increase his treasure.

  Wherever he went he caused turmoil, lecturing the locals about morality, threatening them wit
h the laws his friends in Parliament were about to pass, and accusing the Boer farmers of crimes that would have been rejected even by the Black Circuit of 1812. Always he made the confrontation one between the honest Englishmen of the empire and the dishonest Boers of the backveld, and when one man who had seen the real horrors of slavery in the English islands of the Caribbean said in public meeting, ‘Don’t come preaching to us. Clean up your own islands,’ he silenced the man with the thundering response: ‘Your observation is irrelevant.’

  When rumors circulated that two Boers had tried to assassinate him at Swellendam, his audiences increased in size, as did his fury; he was certainly not without courage, for he took his message to all parts of the colony, and in due course he convoked at Grahamstown a meeting of all LMS personnel, and when messengers had ridden to the outposts, a strange, ungainly group of men and women began to straggle in. They were the forward agents of God, an impassioned, dedicated, unlikely lot made old before their time by the bleak conditions under which they lived, but intensified in their beliefs by the problems they had succeeded in solving.

  Strangest of all the couples were the Saltwoods of Great Karroo, he walking in long strides, staff in hand, his black wife riding a small horse. They had come three hundred miles, their eyes ablaze at the prospect of meeting the leaders of their calling. When they entered the thriving mercantile center the first sign they saw was THOMAS CARLETON, WAGON BUILDER. It was a real building now, with stone walls, tiled roof; in fact, it was two buildings, one the foundry and carpenter’s shop, the other a sturdy house.

  ‘We must halt here,’ Hilary said, anxious to try to heal any wounds that might still exist between him and the man who had stolen his bride. ‘Hello, Thomas!’ he called, and when the builder appeared at the door of his forge, Hilary was astonished to see how the years that had handled him so roughly had scarcely touched this bright-faced young man.

  ‘I’m Saltwood,’ Hilary said hesitantly.

  ‘Why, so it is! Vera, come here!’ And from the house beside the shop came the former Miss Lambton of Salisbury, now a matron with two blond children. No longer the timid spinster studying watercolors, she was now in her mid-thirties, mistress of a house and keeper of accounts for her husband’s thriving business.

  ‘Good morning, Hilary,’ she said graciously. Then, with a mischievousness she could never have disclosed back in Wiltshire, she teased: ‘You’re the reason I sailed so far.’

  ‘Are these your children?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘I have three now,’ he said quietly.

  ‘We haven’t stopped, you know,’ Carleton said, putting his arm about his wife.

  ‘Has my brother any little ones?’

  ‘Like all of us. He has one.’

  During this colloquy Emma had remained on her horse, quietly to the rear, and now Vera cried warmly, ‘Here is your wife!’

  ‘It is. Emma, as you know.’

  The wagon builder helped her alight, took her by both hands, and asked, ‘Didn’t you tell us you’re a Madagascan?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘How in the world did you get down here?’

  ‘I was born here,’ she said in the slow, beautiful English she had acquired from her Oxford-educated husband. ‘But my parents were … How do you say it, Hilary?’

  ‘Kidnapped.’

  ‘They were kidnapped by Portuguese slavers. It was quite common. Still is, I think.’

  ‘Little woman like you, three children!’ Carleton shook his head and returned to his work.

  In the days prior to Dr. Keer’s arrival, the Karroo couple participated in many friendly meetings like this, for the indignation caused by their marriage had abated. Grahamstown was now a typical rural English settlement with a thriving marketplace to which many Boer wagons came. They were heartily welcomed, not only for their trade but also because of the commandos they provided whenever untamed Kaffirs from across the Fish River attacked.

  Hilary overheard one tough English farmer joking with a Boer: ‘After we were here eighteen months, and the Kaffirs had attacked us once and you Boers five times, our minister said on Sunday, “See how the heathen restrain themselves in the face of God! They always prefer to raid the Boers.” And a man in the back of the church cried, “It isn’t God, Dominee. It’s cattle. We don’t have any and the Boers do!” ’

  Hilary was particularly pleased to renew acquaintance with his brother Richard, whose exuberant wife Julie had undergone a transformation somewhat similar to Vera Lambton’s, except that whereas the latter had descended from the role of Salisbury elite, Julie had climbed the ladder from Dorset illiterate to solid gentlewoman, wife of a former major in the Fifty-ninth. She found no difficulty in accepting Emma Saltwood as her sister-in-law, partly because everyone knew that Emma would be returning to the Karroo as soon as the convening ended, and could thus pose no problem with her miscegenation, but partly also because of Christian charity. Julie saw that Emma was a remarkable woman and no doubt a fine mother, and as such she merited acceptance.

  The trouble came with Dr. Keer, for when he dismounted, tired and hungry after the long ride from Golan, he gasped when he saw Hilary, and thought: Dear God, this man’s ten years younger than me, and look at him! To reach Keer’s hand, Hilary had to stoop, which made him appear even older and more haggard than he was; in missionary work a man on the frontier aged much more rapidly than an official back in London. And when Keer realized that the little black woman trailing behind must be the Kaffir his informants had spoken of, he almost gagged: It’s another case of a man’s taking his missionary work too personally.

  In private discussions with the people of Grahamstown he spoke with some force against the awful error of a missionary’s marrying a woman of any tribe with which he worked: ‘It’s a fatal mistake, really. Look at poor Saltwood. How can he ever return to England? I need an assistant. Work does pile up. Parliament and all that, you know. But could I ask him to help me? With a wife like that, how could he solicit funds from important families?’

  One night, at a small gathering, he asked Richard Saltwood directly, ‘My dear boy, how did you ever allow this to happen to your brother?’ and Richard replied with amusement, ‘I think you’d better ask Mrs. Carleton over there. You and she were responsible, you know.’

  ‘Me? Carleton? Never met the man. What’s he do?’

  ‘He builds wagons. It’s his wife you know.’

  ‘Can’t believe it,’ Keer said, but when he was led across the room to where Vera stood, she reminded him that they had met in Salisbury when she was still Miss Lambton. ‘Of course, of course! When I was giving my lecture on slavery.’ He coughed modestly. ‘I visit the entire country, you know. Becomes very tiring.’ He was rambling on so that he might have time to collect his thoughts, and suddenly he remembered: ‘But you were to marry Hilary Saltwood!’ He stopped, then added in a pejorative way, ‘But I hear you’ve married the carpenter.’

  It fell to Vera Carleton to puncture this little man’s balloon, and with the quiet assurance she had gained from doing hard manual work to aid her husband, she said, ‘Yes, I did marry the carpenter. Because after your lecture that night I took you aside and asked for your personal opinion, and you confided that Hilary Saltwood was rather a silly ass. Which I confirmed later, so I thank you for your good advice.’

  Dr. Keer was nonplused at the direction this conversation was going, but Vera forged ahead, her voice rising: ‘So on the ship coming out I decided not to marry Hilary. I sought out Thomas Carleton, the wagon builder, I asked him to sleep with me, and then to marry me. So I am doubly indebted to you, Doctor.’

  When Keer retreated several steps, she followed him. ‘And I am indebted in a third way. For when I see what a great fool you are, and what a man of nobility Hilary Saltwood is by comparison, I realize that you aren’t fit to tie his boots, or my husband’s, or, for that matter, mine. Now you scamper back to London before the Boers hang you.’

  She was still fuming
when she reached home: ‘It was awful, Thomas, that little prig. I suppose you’ll have to apologize tomorrow, but Hilary really is Christ-like, and Keer’s so stupid he wouldn’t recognize Jesus if that carpenter walked in here tonight.’ Then she laughed. ‘Didn’t you see the way Keer patronized you? And me? He seems to forget that a carpenter was once important in this world, and may be so again.’

  Angered by Keer’s open abuse of one of his missionaries, Vera was inspired to move closer to Emma Saltwood, and when the two had tea together, or when they walked with Julie Saltwood, there developed a kind of frontier solidarity which was possible among these pioneer women who had come long distances to a strange land and who had conquered it in limited ways. No one of the three had escaped battles—ten-year-old Emma running away from De Kraal, Vera battling the physical and emotional storms south of the Cape, wild Julie riding a horse to Plymouth to escape stupid parents and more stupid brothers—and each had won through to the reassuring plateau of strong husband and lively children.

  Common experience allowed them to be friends, but this could happen only in their generation. Already forces were at work which would drive them forever apart, and in the second generation companionship like this would be unthinkable. Then a woman of good heritage from a cathedral town would not care to associate with a runaway illiterate from Dorset, and neither would dare invite into her home a Kaffir, whether married to a white missionary or not.

  The cruel wedge that would separate people was driven deeper by everything that Dr. Keer did or said during his convention. In public meetings he excoriated the Boers, making any future relationship between Boer and missionary impossible. In private he continued to ridicule Saltwood for having taken a Kaffir wife; on this subject he did make one important observation: ‘What Hilary’s done, the silly fool, is place a weapon in the hands of our adversaries. Critics accuse us of being nigger-lovers—kaffir-boeties, the Boers call us—and when one of our own people makes such a disastrous marriage, it proves that everything they said against us is true. It sets missionary work back fifty years.’ In general, he spoke and acted as if the welfare of the world depended upon his conciliating the better families of England so that they would bring pressure on Parliament to pass the laws he wanted.