The Conservationist (4 page)

— So close by! You must be pretty vulnerable to stock-theft? —

- Oh yes. There’s a high fence all round to keep them from getting in and out except through the location gates, but there’re great big gaps where they cut the wire and come out at night. I haven’t lost anything yet but an old chap, De Beer, reckons to lose a couple of head a year. In spite of his dogs. And his reputation for shooting on sight. —

- Ughhh - fancy digging someone up again. -

- It’s too beautiful - haven’t you ever been out there? - She was a good-looking woman whom he had known for fifteen years. She always seated him on her right at her dinner-table. Now she asserted long friendship through making clear to others her family’s familiarity with his possessions and way of life.

- Ah well — there are possible advantages, whatever happens. There’s a rumour they’re going to establish a township for Coloureds, adjacent to the location, out towards the Katbosrand side. —

- Oh no! How ghastly - She put her palm down a moment on his wrist, just as he was breaking off a piece of the roll on his side-plate.

— Not at all, I’ll be expropriated, sell to the government, make a fortune. And that’ll be the one and only success in my farming operations! - While they laughed, he popped the bit of bread into his mouth, and as he did so, caught on the back of his hand the perfume of the woman beside him. She dutifully divided her attention between the men on her left and right, but when it was his turn she talked in a low voice, with many questioning murmurs, as if words were not always necessary, and a special shy but open gaze in her blue-green eyes. He knew that look; was surprised he had not noticed it before, because it was obvious that it must have been there, for him, on other occasions, come to think of it. We’ve been aware of each other a long time, it said. We’ll soon be old, or dead. But he, who was not accustomed to passing over such opportunities whenever or however they presented themselves, felt nothing of his usual swift reaction to pounce in discreet response. A little later, when her daughter, whom he used to fetch to play with his son a few years ago, and who was now sixteen or seventeen, came to give him the good-night kiss on the cheek that was the relic of childhood politeness, he made a discovery. It was she, among the females present, whom he wanted to meet and undress in a hotel room.

The breeze-block quarters that had been put up on this farm kept the rain out better than the mud-houses the people were used to making for themselves, but they were colder in winter. They had begun to be cold already, as soon as the sun went down; the coughing of the children went on incessantly and ignored inside, while the men squatted or stood with hunched shoulders round the brazier. Jacobus had made his own arrangements: did not live down at the compound at all, actually - he and his wife and youngest child occupied Alina’s room in what was supposed to be the domestic servant’s quarters near the house, while Alina and her man had fixed up the shed as their room - but Jacobus came to the compound often for the company, in the evenings, as well as going back and forth for one reason or another, during the day. He was speaking of a dog, the need of a fierce dog to keep intruders off the farm at night. — Like the India’s dogs at the shop. Something everybody will be afraid of. I’ll keep it chained up all day, then it will get mad at night. That’s the way to have a good dog. —

— Ask him. —

— I told you - many times, I’ve said it to-him. —

— What can you do then. —

- Many times. You know how it is. You say one thing, and they just use it to say another. He looks past my face: how many dogs already on this farm? They are killing everything, the compound dogs. So I tell him it’s not true about the dogs. Then he says, then people must be putting traps for the birds, where have the birds gone? —

— Even the eggs - someone said.

Jacobus made a soft, long ah-sound of exasperation and defeated contest, and the others made similar sounds, a kind of laughter. He clicked his tongue against his palate in a glottal snap-of-the-fingers.

— Even the eggs... —

But Jacobus did not respond and so the laughter died; he could not encourage this talk too much - he was himself half on the side of the authority it mocked, he earned his privileges by that authority and also protected
them
against its source. He had told the women to warn the children not to collect eggs where they could be seen; he had remarked to
him
that there were plenty of guinea fowl about if you had to be up at work early enough to see them.

— He won’t bring - (a gesture of the head to indicate the police) - from town? —

Jacobus grinned out of inside knowledge. - He doesn’t like those Dutchmen! —

The man called Witbooi who had come from Rhodesia illegally seventeen years before rocked slightly, reassured, on his haunches. If he had no pass, it was not that he, whose real name was Simon Somazhegwana, had no papers; in the plastic fertilizer bag that held his clothes and possessions there was an old wallet full of paper - expired work permits from areas where he had been endorsed out, pages torn from school exercise books inscribed Bearer,
Witbooi, is a good boy
... TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN ...
This is to say that Bearer, native Witbooi
... with the barely-literate signatures of white housewives and farmers as reference. He produced them to employer after employer, over the years, preserving them carefully against a day when they would meet the pair of eyes in which surely they would find validity, like that of any other document given out by white people; like that of the bits of paper issued officially at the pass office.

The farm people bought their paraffin, matches, tobacco, soap, tea and sugar from the Indian store at the turn-off of the farm road; the weekly mealie-meal ration was part of their wages, doled out from sacks by Jacobus. The children made expeditions to the store when they had cents from the gate to buy sweets with, or found bottles on which they could claim the deposit. Jacobus, his own master most of the week, used the tractor to drive down when he pleased.

- What’s going on at your place there ? -

— Why? Why ‘what is going on’? — Jacobus did not talk to the Indian as he did to a white man, nor as he would to one of his own people.

The Indians behind the counter were three: the old one - the father’s father — the father himself, who had spoken, and a slim young son. The old one had a beard, bluish lips on which two worn brown teeth rested, wore a round white cap, and sat all day on a kitchen chair. The full contours of the middle one’s face shone with stubble and he was always in shirtsleeves; this son (there were several) wore tight bell-bottom pants and jackets with a back vent or lurex thread - sometimes farm workers would touch and marvel, half joking: - Where you buy this? In town? - On Saturdays and Sundays Indians still younger served - schoolboys of the family, who began to help in the shop as soon as they were old enough to distinguish the different denominations of coins.

— You know. You’ve been fighting there. — The challenging, aggressive way of speaking was something that meant nothing to farm people; a convention of the barriers between them and the Indian proprietor; they were used to him.

Jacobus fell in with the rules of the game. — Me! I didn’t do nothing. Me, fight! What for? —

— Come on, man! The police was there on your farm. Someone killed there. —

— The police was here? To you? — Jacobus screwed up one eye, leant forward just a little across the counter.

— They came here, they came here. They talked to my boys - my boys don’t know anything, what do they know about your place. -

The Indians had blacks of their own working for them.

— No, they don’t know our place. That’s right. —

The Indian threw the money into the till expertly, banged it shut with a shrill ring. — You make trouble down there, you bring the police to make trouble for everybody. —

— We don’t make. — Jacobus shook an open hand in the direction of the location. — The people
there
—

— Trouble for everybody! —

But the old man did not open his half-closed eyes or move his folded hands whose right index finger twitched all the time like a winged insect come to rest, and the young one leant S-shaped against the counter and seemed not to have been listening.

— No, everything it’s all right. That man he was dead, the police come and take it away. Finish. Is not our trouble. - The ‘our’ took in the shopkeeper, his
ménage
, Jacobus himself, and the farm people.

The shopkeeper cut off his attention abruptly; already his hand with the little red-eyed ring had put on his glasses and taken up the suppliers’ invoices he was checking. His lips moved sternly over words: 12 only gents’ plastic watch straps. The shop was empty after Jacobus’s clumsy shape sauntered out of the light of the door and the old man and the young watched their son and father keeping vigil, as it was necessary to do over everything and everyone with whom they had dealings.

The Indians had a house snugly contiguous with the store, with beans trained up the walls and marigolds behind the barbed-wire fence. Except for the façade of the store the ten-foot fence enclosed their whole property, right around the partly-bricked-in yard, taking in the tin hovels supported by the yard wall down where their blacks lived. The fence was shored up here and there with sheets of corrugated iron and even an old bedstead - the blacks had built it for their employers, to keep blacks out. The two great dogs - cross-breeds of the white men’s favourite watch-dogs, Alsatian and Dobermann Pinscher - who were chained to runners along the fence had worn a shallow ditch inside the length of it, bounding, racing and snarling at everything that passed within their hearing and vision. They barked now at an approach, but when Jacobus came up to the high gate, stopped, claws splayed tensely in the dust, sniffed. He stood a moment or two, his fingers hooked through the diamond mesh, exchanging greetings with a woman who was pumping water from the well. The dogs stood by with swinging tails while the woman let him in and she and he strolled over to the tin houses. He and the people there greeted each other with ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘mother’, ‘uncle’, a grammar of intimacy that went with their language; one of the women was doing the Indians’ washing, a visitor was eating half a loaf and drinking a bottle of Coke, an old man as well as several other women were home. The doors of the houses were open and gave directly onto the dirt, the broken chairs, empty bottles and cooking pots proclaiming the outside as much a living area as the inside. Perhaps in response to a message run by a child, one of the men who worked in the store appeared, too. He and Jacobus had not seen each other when Jacobus was in the store. His hands were dusty with some whitish grit: he had been at the back, weighing mealie-meal into paper bags.

— They were here? —

— The same day. —

Jacobus was comfortable on an up-ended box. He was offered, but did not take, a pinch of snuff from the old man’s tin. — What’s he so worried about? Do you ever hear that an India kills people. —

— Frightened about the shop. You know they’re not supposed to stay here, this place is for white people. The Indians can’t have a shop here. They pay. - He put out his black hand, pollened with white, and rubbed the thumb along the close-held fingers. He smiled at the thought that this was something Jacobus didn’t know.

The old man said — Yes, plenty of money, these people. They pay and then everyone is quiet Nice and quiet. They leave them alone. No trouble. No trouble and they won’t come, they won’t ask anything if it’s Indians or a white man in the shop. -

Jacobus smoked the half cigarette he had taken from his pocket; exclaimed amusedly, a comment to himself on the exchange he had had in the shop, and then was distracted by the visitor’s new bicycle that was lying beside him: how much did a bicycle like that cost, nowadays? It was a third as much again as Jacobus had paid for the same make some years ago, before he had begun to use the tractor for transport. They talked of money; it led, inevitably, to talk of work. Someone’s relative working on a farm round about had been told to go - that was how dismissal happened and no one questioned the bluntness any more than the purpose of mentioning the matter to Jacobus.

- We don’t need anybody. —

But they knew Jacobus was the boss of the show, he ran that farm while the white man lived in town. - All right, tell him to come. But not Sunday. Before Sunday or after Sunday. I don’t know - perhaps I can ... It’s nearly winter, there’s not so much work, you know. Perhaps I can say ... I can tell him I need another boy for the cows —

A woman who had not spoken turned out to be the man’s wife: Hallo, sister, hallo, brother. — She’s staying here, but she can’t stay - someone said. One of her children carried the baby of the family like a hump on its back. The baby’s hair was reddish, the usual symptom of nutritional deficiency when infants become too old to be satisfied by the breast and are given mealie porridge instead. It was crying and the child joggled it until its yelling head rolled. Children followed Jacobus through the gate and climbed on to the tractor but he chased them off and they watched him drive away at the majestic pace of the iron caterpillar, laughing, pummelling each other, falling about in the dust.

I pray for corn, that many people may come to this village of yours and make a noise, and glorify you.

Mehring read in the paper how hippos were aborting their foetuses in dried-up pools. It was the fourth (fifth?) year of drought. Of course, it didn’t affect him; the river, if reduced in volume, was perpetual, fed by an underground source. The farm didn’t depend on surface water. He didn’t depend on the farm. He would have to buy a considerable amount of supplementary feed for the cattle, but that could all go down as a tax loss.

He has just flown to Japan for a week; his frequent travels are of the kind where luggage consists of a couple of new shirts and whole files of papers to be studied on the plane. There seldom is time - chance - for any pleasure. A dinner with the Japanese or Germans or Canadians and their wives is part of the business schedule. They all have boats or summer places about which, as a change from base metals, it is protocol to talk over food and drink. — I’m not in the yacht-owning class, I’m afraid (it was charming of him to say). I have my bit of veld and my few cows. And that’s all I want. —