The Conservationist (28 page)

— It’s flourishing - the rains are almost too good this year. You should have come out more than once. —

— I know. You didn’t ever take me again - oh you would have - but we never seemed to get the right chance, did we... ? - —

Through the sirens calling and the deep seas drowning the cable that sways between us, you know how to put a hand on me.

No ordinary pig-iron dealer so far as you’re concerned. The flesh is present at either end of the line; in fact, that’s a live wire clutched to the ear in the right hand, a sparking wire at whose touch each nipple breaks out of its little worn brown parcel of slack skin. Lovely goose-flesh.

— I’m planting European chestnuts for the blacks to use as firewood after they’ve taken over —

Oh that makes you laugh — I know! That’s what you really like about me, about us; we wrestle with each other on each other’s ground, neither gives an inch and when we fall it’s locked together, like lovers.

Whatever you think of me as an employer of black labour you are confident you can entrust yourself to me. Always have been.

— Trouble. I don’t want to say too much over the phone —

- Ask away. Ask me for something. That’s what I’m here for. How else will you explain to them you know me? Out with it. -

— I wouldn’t do it, but there are people who matter more to me than anything in the world —

- Stop beating about the bush. —

— I wouldn’t suddenly phone you again out of the blue if it were not -

Of course you would not. Of course you would not phone.

Jacobus admires the trees although they are nothing to see, this small, because he is told they are special trees. He asks a great many questions about them; he thinks this is the way to please, he knows how to handle the farmer. It is also a way of showing that he is in charge of the digging of holes that is being done by Solomon, Phineas and himself.

— Ah, is coming fruits, that’s nice. And now is plenty, plenty rain, is going grow quick. —

— Not fruit, nuts. You know what that is? —

It is difficult to find an accurate comparison for chestnuts. None of them is likely ever to have seen an almond or walnut tree, although these grow in people’s gardens in town. Groundnuts — those they know, a common crop not here but in the middle- and low-veld; but groundnuts grow attached to the plant’s roots.

— Yes I know nuts. — Sweat clouds Jacobus’s matt-black neck (blacker than the rest of him, as a white man’s neck turns redder from long exposure to the sun) like condensation on a bottle of dark ale, and he is talking abruptly, all the time, each utterance chopped short by the blows of the pick he’s wielding.

- Peanuts, you know peanuts. Well, something like that only these are very big, they’re big as small new potatoes, and they grow in bunches on the tree. -

— Big like potatoes! —

— New potatoes, little ones. -

— And I’m sure is taste very nice. -

— Oh yes. You can cook them and eat them like mashed potatoes, too. —

Jacobus translates this bit of information and repeats it to Solomon and Phineas as they swing and rise, swing and rise with their picks, but they do not respond.

— I think I can taste that nuts next year. —

That wily character knows he is exaggerating, he may not speak the language but he understands the conventions of polite conversation all right.

— Oh it will be many years before these have any nuts. You and I will be old men, Jacobus. —

— No! How can we be old? You are still young. —

— No, no. These will be big trees, very big, when you are very old and walk with a stick. —

— Well, is all right. Is all right, when Terry can get them. when he can get marry and bring them nice for his wife, his little children? —

The farmer stands over them while they dig. It’s necessary because there must be no skimping: the holes must be deep, the earth must be properly trenched to a good depth. He cuts the thick twine round the neck of the packing on each tree and carefully folds back the plastic skin and the sacking beneath it. The clump of roots and earth (this earth has come all the way from Europe) has dried out a bit despite all precautions. Some frail capillary roots look like wisps of fibre from an old mattress. He tests them between finger and thumb; both limp and brittle. But he will not allow himself to investigate the bigger roots, visible though embedded in the European earth; the trees must take their chance. Handling them will only make things worse. Two hundred rands down the drain.

Jacobus is quick; no hesitation escapes him. His spade (they are beginning to shape the holes now) pauses. — But is coming all right when we plant. Plenty rain this month. —

The first hole is ready and they move on to make the next. It was difficult to decide where to place the trees. They ought to be near the farmhouse, really - a farmhouse as one thinks of one. Two great round chestnuts dark over the stoep on a Transvaal farm. It would be something extraordinary. But on the other hand indigenous trees would be better in such a definitive position, Yellowwood, Eugenia or something - as a general rule one should plant indigenous trees wherever possible, not even ordinary exotics like eucalyptus and poplar; he has the companion volume to the wild-flower book, a book of indigenous tree species. Anyway there really isn’t a farmhouse yet; that place could perhaps be fixed up one day but it hasn’t the right character, doesn’t look as if it were ever intended to be a real farmhouse. The curve where the road from the entrance to the property turns up towards the complex of farm buildings seems right; a sort of dignified approach to where, one day, a farmhouse and its garden would be differentiated from the farm proper, preside over it. ‘Turn right when you come to the big chestnut trees.’

He stands with his hands on his hips, for balance, looking down into the hole. Whatever else they may or may not be able to do, they know how to dig. There is laterite on some parts of the farm, but not here, and the spades have cut down clean and deep. The cross-section of close-packed soil laid bare has its layers of colours and textures stored away. Broken in upon, the earth gives up the strong musty dampness of a deserted house or a violated tomb. At one layer roots frayed by the spades stick out like broken wires. He leans down to tug at one - the young trees must not have to compete for nourishment with the root system of some other growth. But the roots don’t yield, and he can’t see where they can come from. There’s a vertigo that goes with pits; not that this one could take him in and conceal him entirely; it’s not more than four feet deep, even crouching, his head would stick out like an unwary rabbit’s. But there are some for whom it would be large enough; those tribes who bury in the foetal position.

They have dug one good hole and it remains to make sure they don’t think they’ve done enough hard work for the day and slack off on the next. The rhythmical grunts with which their picks are flying up, over there, and hooking into the ground with a thud, doesn’t mean they won’t try to get away with going down only three feet.

They’ve stopped. Jacobus is making a show of heaving at something; it’s a rock they’ve struck. On the desk at the office in town there is a grey-brown stone that bears marks of having been shaped, a kind of petrified whittling, that he once picked up when they were ploughing. The secretaries all ask about it. Like Jacobus, they feel obliged to show interest in what interests him. He is able to explain exactly. — You know what that is? That’s a hand-axe. It was used like this — here, open your palm. You know how old that is? That’s a stone age implement, from my farm. — But this is nothing but a boulder that has come to light.

The chestnut trees are buried up to the bole in a mixture of bone-meal, well-dried manure and the soil the digging displaced. All the colours of the layers are mixed up, now, there will be a fault - negligible, on the natural scale — where the two small trees now stand like branches children have stuck in sand to make a ‘garden’ that will wither in an hour.

There are a number of other positions he could have chosen. He sees that, walking over the farm with his trees in mind, superimposing two large chestnuts in flower (pink or white? — he forgot to ask the nurseryman, but perhaps one doesn’t know until the first blooming) at various points in his landscape. The irrigation ditches are full of water. Heavy grasses sag into it in wet swags. Frogs flip themselves like thrown stones from an (absent) schoolboy. For the first of seven summers the river is at its full summer height, and he can hear its accelerated pace, its raised voice above the sounds of birds and reeds and grasses, behind the yells of one of the herdsmen chasing an obstinate cow. He can hear it all over the farm. It’s not easy to get near. The third pasture is deceptive. A glossy, rough, matted acid green with here and there patches of grass flowering bronze straw stars looks luxuriant and solid enough to take an army over it without being so much as trampled. But there’s no foothold. As you put the weight of a boot on the grass it lets you into water; it’s all marshy, down there. And even in the middle of the day mosquitoes are active and find your neck. He has to retreat from the reeds, where he can hear waterbirds quarrelling somewhere in there, safe from everything - there must be hundreds of them this year. The mealies are going to be magnificent, at this rate. Up on higher ground he hears himself crashing through them as if he were coming towards himself, about to come face to face with... He stops dead, they creak and rustle, their sap rising to right themselves after his shouldering. It could only be one of them - a farm worker, that is, a familiar black face among black faces, up here. Maybe one of their children on guilty childish business, searching for birds’ eggs. He doesn’t move and the other doesn’t move; it’s as if each presence (himself and the sound of his own breathing) waits for the other, as concealment. Again he’s almost tempted to speak, the sense is strong; to make an ass of himself, saying aloud : — You’re there. It seems to you that it is to you that observations are being addressed: The mealies look as if they’re going to be magnificent, at this rate. —

The hairs on their leaves rasp at his clothes. The cobs are clubs pressed against the central canes, with a tassel of silky green fringe tagged at the top. To demonstrate, to test a cob he has to slice with his thumbnail through the tight bandage of ribbed leaves that encases it like a mummy. Through the slit the nail suddenly reaches and penetrates the white nubs so young they are not yet quite solid, and their white milky substance flows under the nail and round the cuticle. Even here, there is a great deal of water: coming out of the mealie-field, he has jumped a ditch and landed on a bank that gives way. His left leg plunges before him down into a hole, he is one-legged, lop-sided, windmilling his arms for balance, and he regains it only by landing with one palm hard on the wet, tussocky ground. He doesn’t quite know what to do next, for a moment; he stays there, in this grotesque variation of the position of a runner poised for the starting shot. He could have broken a leg. But he is unhurt. He must get his leg out of the mud, that’s all. It has already seeped in over the top of the boot and through the sole and holds him in a cold thick hand round the ankle. A soft cold black hand. Ugh. It’s simply a matter of getting enough leverage, with the other leg and the rest of his body, to pull himself free. As he heaves, the mud holds him, holds on, hangs on, has him by the leg and won’t let him go, down there. Now it’s just as if someone has both arms tightly round the leg. It’s suction, of course, that’s all; the more he pulls the greater the vacuum. He would get out of his boot if he could, but the leg’s caught nearly to the knee. He pulls and pulls; down there, he’s pulled and pulled. It’s absurd; he’s begun to giggle with queer panicky exasperation.

And then, he’s been let go. That’s exactly how it feels: something lets go - the suction breaks. He has to stump up to the house with an elephantiasis of mud on one foot. It’s heavy as lead. It feels as if part of him is still buried.

Jacobus is full of concern, of course. The good old devil half-carries him to the tap, tries to scrape the mud away with a spade and, making a hell of a mess, twice the mess necessary if he’d been left to deal with it himself, washes the clotted earth clear of the shoe. Alina, on Jacobus’s excitable and confused instructions, finds a pair of veldskoen in the house and brings them. They are a little too short, the old shoes of a half-grown boy. But they will do. That’s what comes of having two places; you never have what you need, in either.

The sun has turned to a thickening blur of radiance and the heat is intense. It’ll come down again, this afternoon.

— Too much rain, Jacobus. —

— Too much rain, master. —

... the heaven was hard and it did not rain. The people persecuted him exceedingly. When he was persecuted I saw him and pitied him, for I saw men come even by night and smite his doorway with clubs, and take him out of his house ... And on another year, when they saw that the heaven wished to destroy the corn, they hated him exceedingly... I heard it said that it rained excessively that it might cover the dead body of Umkqaekana with earth. I heard it said they poisoned him and did not stab him. I heard it said that those people were troubled, for their gardens were carried away by a flood.

The weather came from the Moçambique Channel.

Space is conceived as trackless but there are beats about the world frequented by cyclones given female names. One of these beats crosses the Indian Ocean by way of the islands of the Seychelles, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes. The great island of Madagascar forms one side of the Channel and shields a long stretch of the east coast of Africa, which forms the other, from the open Indian Ocean. A cyclone paused somewhere miles out to sea, miles up in the atmosphere, its vast hesitation raising a draught of tidal waves, wavering first towards one side of the island then over the mountains to the other, darkening the thousand up-turned mirrors of the rice paddies and finally taking off again with a sweep that shed, monstrous cosmic peacock, gross paillettes of hail, a dross of battering rain, and all the smashed flying detritus of uprooted trees, tin roofs and dead beasts caught up in it.