The Conservationist (21 page)

- and women said among themselves it was in fact the last, she must be somewhere around the end of the childbearing age - she had gone to the hospital in the location. Since she had begun to dream she had stopped drinking; she went about with a cloth tied low on her forehead like a mourner. She would shake hands with no one except very old people. At times she held her shoulders like someone whose back has been burned by hot water and winced if anything touched it. She wore a strand of large-holed white beads from the Indian shop threaded on string round each ankle. She wouldn’t eat what she saw in a dream she must not eat.

She dreamt she was going to turn into a snake. Everyone heard about it. Then she said it was a lizard she was afraid she would become, and she used the name
isalukazana
, the lizard that is a little old woman.

- She is certainly becoming an old woman. -

Solomon could think of nothing to say in answer to Phineas. Ever since he had known the woman nearly all her front teeth had been missing and now that she was so thin the cheeks sucked the empty space and her skin was grainy and dark round the eyes. He had heard she was not really Zulu at all, but came from Pondoland.

He remarked to Jacobus - I don’t know those people. -

He was crowded into the room against the wall along with others when she had the desire to dance and confess her dreams to them. There was no getting out of it. With her cloth hanging in her eyes she stood in what little space there was and gave the time that was to be clapped and the phrase they were to chant. Somebody had to beat a folded ox-hide. It was awkward to move elbows and clap in such a pressure of people. Izak’s radio was playing outside. When the chant and the beat of clapping was steady in counter-rhythm to it, she began to lift those ankles with the white beads, lift her feet, first one then the other, coming down lightly on the toes. She began to stamp her heels and quiver the muscles of her body like a young girl, right up to her cheeks, flapping the loose skin. The claps fell faster, the chant was drawn from deeper and deeper places in the men’s chests and higher and higher behind the women’s noses. The ox-hide gave off dust and hairs. The radio was pressed out under a far greater volume. Then she stopped; hands were in mid-air, some spattered claps completed themselves. Panting like a skinny dog chasing a rat in the vlei, she was after those dreams of hers, rambling, pursuing, speaking of leopards and chameleons - creatures the children in the doorway had never seen - speaking of snakes she had dreamt she was going to turn into, Umthlwazi, Ubu-lube, Inwakwa, Umzingandhlu; of imamba and inyandezulu, the snakes that are men and if killed will come to life again; speaking of the spirits, amatongo; describing how she had seen the ugly and rough-skinned lizard that is the itongo of an old woman, and how in her sleep there were also elephants and hyenas and lions and full rivers, all coming near to kill her, how they followed her, how there was not a single place in the whole country that she did not know because she went over it all, farther than Johannesburg and Durban, all by night, in her sleep. She started to pray then as people do in church and broke off, saying that when she tried to pray this desire carried all kinds of death to come and kill her at once. Now and then her words became songs she said she heard in her head without ever having learnt; and the songs became words again, telling dreams. She was so exhausted that sometimes her voice was lost; Izak’s radio took up with an advertising jingle about washing powder that the children knew by heart. But the sweat that had filled the room with the smell of her (as if she were leaving her body like smoke) while she danced, continued to pour and trickle while she talked, started and oozed continually, as if her whole body were weeping, as if every pore were a puncture from which life were running out. There was no point at which this gathering of hers broke up. Released from the binding rhythm of clapping, people got restless and began to shift and talk. They simply found their way out to go about other things. Afterwards Solomon suddenly saw her, washing her hands in a tin basin in the yard like a woman who has just finished plucking a fowl or some other ordinary work.

He did not speak to this woman about her dreams. That was her husband’s trouble, not his. But he was told she said if she had dreamed of cattle instead of a wild animal, she would have known what she must do. She would kill a beast and then she would be well again.

It was too warm for the woollen scarf but he wore a knitted cap. He pushed it up from the pursed lips that were like the raised imprint of some strange kiss on his forehead. He had not let the sun get at it yet. It did not hurt but felt tender to hands that touched it. He smiled at the thought of the poor creature, Phineas’s wife. — I’m not ill. —

The woman who lived with him said — But you were nearly dead. You were dead there in the veld. -

Jacobus was always talking. He waited and waited for the right time to ask him. But the only thing to do if you wanted to ask something was just to say it, even if it had nothing to do with what Jacobus was busy telling you. — Was I dead when you found me? —

They were washing the old bull after he had been out to stud.

— Well how could you be dead, you are here now. - Jacobus grinning; or grimacing with his enthusiastic scrubbing among the curly suds of the bull’s flank: the old rake had shat himself, he stood wearily on his stumpy legs, a drooping mustachio at the end of his retracted penis, while Solomon played the hose on to him under Jacobus’s direction.

- But did you think I was dead. —

Jacobus looked up dramatically. He was ready to tell the story again. Spray from the hose sprinkled his woolly beard with tinsel.

— Would you have said, he is dead. —

— Of course you were like a dead man! Didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t snore the way people do when they’re dead-drunk —

A sensation of terrible cold and darkness - that must have been when he was left lying there naked - and the cold, cold edges, the freezing-edged pain over which another, warm darkness flowed - his wound and the blood flooding it. And then he died, alone in the third pasture with the one who was already dead there. As if he died - because he knew nothing, remembered nothing, he did not know he was being carried, he did not know Jacobus and the others were weeping over him, trying to get him to open his eyes, leave the other one and come back to them.

The dark, the freezing ragged edges - they did exist, as the other one did, outside himself and the moment before he died: he knew where. In the sky when a great storm was coming and a thick darkness was suspended from the hills over their heads on the farm, at the edge of a precipice of dark, terribly high up where the frozen rain, the hail, came from, out of the heat of summer, the black ledge of the storm was torn and ragged. That was where it seemed to him he was, that was what he had had knowledge of when he wasn’t there in the veld to answer Jacobus, or to know himself travelling in the pick-up and lying in bed in the hospital.

Phineas’s wife was a nuisance to everyone. The business of wanting to dance and confess was not something done once, over and done with. She wanted people to come and clap for her again. But they all had better things to do when work was finished. It was not as if she ever had any beer to put people in the mood for singing and clapping. Izak laughed and laughed, softly, and would not come near, even the first time. — Why? — But he wouldn’t answer anyone. — It’s not his religion. — — When did he say that? — — I’m telling you, I know why. — Izak let them go on talking about him; he smiled in their attention. Dorcas came once but was forbidden by her husband, now known behind his back as ‘Christmas Club’, to do so again.

- He’s right. There was enough trouble already. -

- What trouble? —

All very well for Alina to take that tone; but between Jacobus and Alina there was the special circumstance of their accountability to the farmer, which the others did not share.

— She’s bringing people from over the hill there. And also from the location. —

— Tsa! man! He doesn’t know who is living here and who isn’t. —

— He’ll tell me, why do I let everybody walk around on his farm, they will steal cattle, there will be fights, look how Solomon was attacked ... that other business down there ... this, that — I don’t like her sickness, myself. —

Alina was authoritative with the speculations and evidence of her long talks with the other women who lived up at the compound with Phineas’s wife. It was even said that the woman would not sleep with her husband any more. — You know what’s supposed to be wrong with her, don’t you? —

— I don’t like that woman. I never liked her. First always drunk, so that he complains there’s too much beer on this farm. Now this. If Phineas was not such a good man with the cattle, I would say let them go. But poor Phineas —

— You know, don’t you? She feels the amatongo in her shoulders. It’s the disease that means you’re going to get the power. —

Jacobus drew snot through the back of his nose into his throat, tasting something unpleasant. He circled his forefinger, pointing it stiffly at his right temple. Alina’s face wanted to laugh, but she was afraid to. — She says she’s not surprised - they tell me. It’s true she always knew about plants for medicines. —

— I will buy my Epsom from the India. —

And now she could laugh.

Solomon told his brother he had dreamt of the bull with the white face, that young one whose nose-ring was still new. They had never found out who the men were who had lured Solomon out at night and left him for dead in the veld. They could only roughly calculate how long he must have lain in the third pasture. Solomon would have liked to have known how long he lay there. It was a miracle that he was alive now. Although he was the younger, his brother had treated him with a special respect, ever since he had recovered. He listened carefully to everything he said; he listened while Solomon told him that the woman who was making a nuisance of herself had said if she had dreamt of a beast instead of wild animals she would have known what to do. He said -There is no pain? —

The cap was being worn, the stitched lips were not to be seen.

— Sometimes a headache. —

Solomon did not tell his brother the thought that he had lain in the veld (how long?) with that other one down there who had never been taken away, never been buried by his own people. For - how many hours? - there had been two of them dead there instead of one.

Jacobus said: — That’s his bull, the young one, you dream about, you know. —

They owned no cattle: not a single beast between the lot of them. That woman who thought she was going to be a diviner, she was dreaming back somewhere in the old days, somewhere in the Reserves, where you killed a beast from your herd for a wedding, a funeral, a thanksgiving, or to put things right - cleanse the kraal, they used to call it.

If a beast died of some illness that did not make it dangerous to eat, Jacobus was always given permission by the farmer to cut it up and distribute it to the farm workers. Sometimes it was possible to buy from some other farm meat from an ox that had died in this way. Solomon’s dream had been of a young Hereford bull like the farmer’s, but even a live slaughter ox would have cost the money he earned in six months. He paid five rands for the goat. Goats were unobtainable from the farms round about because the farmers didn’t allow them to be kept; it came from a man in the location who grazed it on waste land near his house. It turned out to be a goat with a white face, although Solomon had not asked for anything special.

Everybody seemed to have a hand in the arrangements. The goat arrived led by a child the day before and was tethered in the barn on Jacobus’s insistence — If he sees anything eating his grass or anyone even picking up a bird’s egg on his farm, you know there is big trouble. — Jacobus was not pleased about the whole thing; the farmer always came out at weekends.

But they all knew Jacobus ate meat at least once a week. The farmer brought a brown paper parcel for him that was put in the refrigerator in the locked house. Many of them had not had any since a calf had broken a leg and been slaughtered two months before. — Well if you want, we can have meat and beer instead of working on Monday or Tuesday? —

Jacobus ignored the joke. — You never know when he comes these days. —

People started arriving on Saturday night. The old women from the location who came to the farm for weeding in summer must have heard about it, and they walked over on Sunday morning. There were Solomon’s brother’s people, from across the vlei. That crazy woman seemed to have asked some people of her own; they behaved almost as if it were her goat that was going to be killed. Anyway, they brought a lot of beer. The goat was led into the yard where everyone was already gathered except her followers, who were still at their singing and clapping in Phineas’s room. It was happy to be out of the dark of the barn and pulled determinedly towards the cabbage leaves some woman had left from her cooking, breaking a chain of droppings like a broken string of shiny black beads. In the instant of straining for the leaves it was thrown on its right side by many hands. Solomon’s brother stabbed it over the aorta. It took quite a few minutes to die; the noise it made seemed to be muffled out gradually, as if some invisible weight were descending on the creature. At last - quite soon - it made no sound.

Solomon heard what there was to hear but did not see. He stood as he had been instructed by people there who knew about these things, facing away, with a friend who worked with his brother for the bus company. The friend spoke conversationally to the air — Here is your beast, Bengu, father of Solomon, Nomsa, mother of Solomon. It is to say we give thanks that you have cared for him. May God protect his child —

No one among the crowd was paying any attention; already the men were gathered over the dying goat, everyone was animated by the thought of meat and wanted to get on with the skinning and cutting up so that cooking could begin. The butchering was done expertly under advice and argument from onlookers. Some parts were given to the women, others reserved for the men; the gall was poured over the entrails to make them tasty. Somebody remembered to collect the blood in a tin and put it at the back of the room where Solomon slept, where it was to be left overnight. Among the older people, a clay pot of beer circulated from mouth to mouth as they squatted; the others filled jam-tins and mugs of their own from the milk-buckets and plastic petrol-containers of beer. Even Phineas’s wife drank again, darting eagerly as the goat towards good things after her days of incarceration in a room. Dancing and clapping and singing were fired by meat and drink and the two oil-drums covered with hide sometimes beat so strongly they vied with the shouting and laughter, sometimes lazily dropped to a panting mark-time, but never ceased, never broke the tempo of pleasure, of excess, that regulated everyone’s blood. The sound of a party drew comers across the vlei. It went on all through the afternoon and almost through the night; people came and people went, long after the meat was finished, people slept and people woke. Jacobus was there like everybody else, as drunk as everybody else. There was nothing to worry about; the farmer and the young one had been and gone early in the day. Once or twice Jacobus remembered the irrigation but could not remember whether it was turned off or not; then he no longer remembered what it was that bothered him. The evening was nearly as warm as a summer night; later, when the cold rose from the river, beer had given them all a skin thick to it. They sweated and sang. There was no one to come up complaining to their rooms built of reject breeze-blocks, their lean-tos of tin and sacking, their fowl-runs made of scrap and filched fencing, that jigged up and down, appeared and disappeared in the light of their braziers blotted out and released by the movement of their bodies. The farmhouse was locked; Jacobus kept the key on a nail hidden from everyone: Jacobus kept them safe, he was hostage among them, hidden among them like the key, there was no one to come and find him. All the farm was dark except for where they gathered the life of the place together for themselves. He and his son with woman’s hair came and went away, leaving nothing, taking nothing; the farmhouse was empty. Stamping slowly, swaying from one foot to another, dancing conferred a balance of its own that drunkenness could not fell, and those who felt blows gathering in their fists mostly could not find their target. The night stood back from them; their voices, their treading feet and thumping drums spouted from it in plenty. The sleeping cattle, the barn, the sheds, the fanged and clawed machines the colour of football jerseys and smelling of oil, the pick-up and the caterpillar tractor, the water obediently flowing forever down there in the reeds — all — all might have been theirs.