44 MUIS
All day we walk towards the mountains. Kapok says this is a short cut so that we don’t have to go back through Meiringspoort. I wouldn’t mind going back the same way but he is afraid he will see Pantoffel and Rinnik and that will mean too much pain. The road to the Swartberg Pass from Oudtshoorn is long but quiet with good places to rest. There is so much water. Much more than on the other side of the mountains, where there is nothing. When night comes we settle under high blue gums next to the river. The river is clean and there are plenty of stokkies for a fire. We eat a tin of pilchards and a packet of lemon creams from the hamper with sweet coffee. Without Miskiet looking for us I am at peace and, for the first time in many, many years, sleep comes easily with the night. The cold wakes me in the early hours and I lie for a long time watching the stars through the still branches of the trees and listening to the crickets. We will need all our blankets soon – they are in Rietbron with Diksop. We can fetch them when we are over the mountains.
The moon is big and I can see the river so I stand up and walk along the bank, picking up sticks. The bright eyes of a muishond freeze as it watches me come.
“Dis okay muishond, ek is ook ’n muishond.”
Miskiet is dead, I live.
“Ek is ’n muishond,” I say aloud, the only sound in the dead night. The animal runs into the bushes and is gone.
I will not hide anymore.
When we fetch our blankets we will go back to Prince Albert. I will get a domestic job and the children will go to school. We will rent a space in a yard and make a proper hok. Kapok must find sinkplaat so we can build a hok. In the morning, when we walk over the Swartberg, I will tell him my plans.
At the camp I make a small fire for coffee and then lie next to the red coals with my cup.
Witpop is awake and in a thin, sleepy voice she asks me, “Mamma, why are you laughing?”
I stretch out and touch her head. It is good to hear her talking again.
“I didn’t laugh.”
“I heard you laugh, Mamma.”
“A big rock that I have carried on my shoulders is gone.”
“Was the rock the oom?”
“Ja. It was the oom. He wanted to kill me because I wouldn’t do what he wanted.”
“’n Man kannie so maak’ie, Mamma.”
For a while we lie quietly listening to the water in the river.
“I shot him, Mamma.”
Kapok is sitting up now too, rubbing his eyes and looking at the fire. I add more sticks and push the coffee-pot into the coals again.
“Is there any of Miskiet’s money left?” I ask him.
“R200.”
“Give me R150. I want to keep it safe so that when we are over these high mountains I can take Witpop to Pep and buy her school shoes and roll-on.”
Witpop is staring into the fire but when I say that she lifts her face to me and I see her tired, dead eyes become alive again.
“Dankie,” I say to her. “Dankie, my kind,” and, for the first time since she fired that gun, she smiles.
The next morning we reach the mountains and our climb starts. The Swartberg Pass is a road that twists and turns into the clouds.
As we walk I look back to see if Fansie is coming but there is no one.
Kapok walks in front and every time he stops for a rest he climbs on a rock to look back over the way we have come.
At last, at Die Top, we can see the plains of the Great Karoo on the other side. Kapok says Fraserburg is out there but I can’t see it. It isn’t true, a person can’t see all that way. I don’t know why I believed Kapok when he said that. He was talking rubbish.
“Climb up to the peak, you will see it from there,” he says.
“I have just climbed a mountain and now you want me to climb more so I can see a town? Is jy mal?”
He just laughs and I smile at him. “I want to sit now,” I say.
We make camp off the road, in a small hollow out of the wind. Tonight, on top of this mountain, it is going to be cold. We sit close together, laughing at Sponsie’s chattering. Kapok kills the fire as soon as our coffee boils and the tin of beans is hot.
“This is not a place for fires, people will chase us,” he says.
Then, when the dark comes, I see the lights, far-away stars at the end of the sky. “That’s the Ultra City at Leeu Gamka,” Kapok says.
“That is very far away,” I say, thinking how long it took us to get to the mountains.
“Do you want to go there again?” he asks.
“If there is no work this side, we can go there and send word for Baas Kobus and Klein Mies that we have come.”
Miskiet is gone. Leeu Gamka is our place too, and we can go back.
The lights are all that shows there is a town. From Die Top I can’t see there is a road with trucks going to Cape Town or houses with people. There is a tunnel there, a place where one thing changed everything.
“We haven’t got money for more donkeys,” Kapok says. He is thinking aloud. “It’s too hard now with donkeys and only the langkampe for grazing and then nothing in drought times. I am glad we don’t have donkeys anymore. I couldn’t stand their hungry eyes for another day,” he says.
I understand. It is hard with a karretjie now.
The packet with my children’s papers is close to my heart and I reach into my shirt and touch it. The government knows their names and their faces. Miskiet said Fansie was his child but this is not so.
Miskiet wanted a woman and a child and I feel sorry for him, even though, all this time, I was afraid of him.
Kapok is watching me and he says, “A person can’t own another person. Everyone is free and karretjiemense are more free than anyone. God made it like that.”
It’s true. Miskiet would have been a hard man to live with. I would have been like Aunty Loos, hit on the head so many times they would have had to put me in the ground. There would have been no one for my children then. It is better this way.
Jan, who died in the tunnel so long ago, never knew he would have been a father. He never touched a dop and I think, if he had been alive, maybe I would have been a dorpsvrou.
Ja, Kapok makes me walk up and down, this way and that way, but it is okay. There are many happy times.
Under the sky, on the quiet mountain, I think about where Fansie is sleeping. Many times he sleeps alone in the veld but towns are not good places for him.
“Mamma, Fansie will find us,” Witpop says. “He knows the road we are taking. He will come.”
“Yes, Witpop,” I say, “he will find us.” I smile at her. My Witpop.
He will come.
He always does.
Published in 2013 by Umuzi
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1966/003153/07
First Floor, Wembley Square, Solan Road, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
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© 2013 Carol Campbell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
First edition, first printing 2013
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 978-1-4152-0183-1 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0498-6 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0499-3 (PDF)
Cover design by Monique Oberholzer
Cover photography by Eric Miller
Text design by Fahiema Hallam
Set in Impressum
Ook beskikbaar in Afrikaans as Karretjiemense
For my mom and dad,
Winnie and Ron Graham
The Great Karoo
When Cold Winds Blow
Present Day
; Carol Campbell, My Children Have Faces
My Children Have Faces Page 14