The Covenant (49 page)

The Hottentot flicked his hippopotamus-hide whip. The oxen moved forward, and the broken couple retreated from their sad adventure.

In the fifteen years since that informal marriage, Johanna had borne nine children, each delivered in the corner of the harsh hut with the assistance of little Hottentot women, whose wails of apprehension and joy equaled the howls of the newborn. Two children had died, one struck down by a yellow Cape cobra in the dust outside the dwelling, another taken by pneumonia; but the seven survivors swarmed about the huts and hillsides. Johanna kept track of her brood, fed and swept and sewed clothes for them all, and kept her ramshackle home in reasonable order.

But she herself deteriorated, and one traveler described her as a
slattern, a word she merited, since she had no time for her appearance. At thirty-three she was used up and practically dead, except that she refused to die. She had entered that seemingly endless period in which a scrawny woman, inured to work, moved almost mechanically from one bitter task to the next, perfecting herself in a ritual of survival.

“The only attention she allows herself,” the traveler wrote, “comes at dusk when, with her brood about her, she holds court as her two Hottentot women servants bathe her feet. Whence this custom came, I know not, nor would Mevrouw van Doorn explain.”

No matter how bleak her life, no matter how unattractive she became, she retained one assurance: Hendrik loved her. She was the only woman he had known, and that first night in the fields she had shown him that she needed him; without books to read or the ability to read them, without other Dutch people to consort with, she had been content to hold Hendrik as the core and source of her life, while he, able to read the great brassbound Bible, could envision no life other than the one he led with her. Sometimes, after reading a chapter of Genesis or Exodus to his family and relating the wanderings of the Israelites to the tribulations of a trekboer, he would speculate on the future of the children: “Where will the girls find husbands?”

And then in 1724 came the worst drought Hendrik had known, and even when the Hottentots galloped to the edge of the northern pan, thinking to herd the cattle there, they found that it, too, had retreated to a mere pond. Hendrik now had four hundred cattle, three times as many sheep, and he realized that his depleted lands could no longer support them. Even the modest garden that Johanna tended had withered, and one evening Hendrik directed all his clan to go down on their knees and pray. With thirty-five supplicants around him—his own eight, the twenty-two Hottentots, plus the slaves—he begged for rain. Night after night they repeated their prayers, and no rain came. He watched his cattle, his only wealth, grow scrawny, and one dark night as he crept into bed Johanna said, “I’m ready,” and he replied, “I do believe God wants us to move east.”

“Should’ve moved five years ago,” she said without rancor.

“I figure to move east. Maybe sixty, seventy miles.”

“I been east, you know.”

“Was it as bad as you said?”

“It was worse. We was seventy miles east of here, just where you’re heading, and it was even worse than Pappie said.”

“But you’re willing to try again?”

“This place is used up. We better go somewheres before the drought ruins us.”

“You’d be willing to try again?”

“You’re a lot smarter than Pappie. And I know a lot more now than I did then. I’m ready.”

The older children were not. Conservative, like all young people, they complained that they wanted to stay where they were, especially since families were beginning to move into the area, but there were two boys at the farm who looked forward to the proposed move with considerable excitement. Adriaan was a mercurial stripling, lean and quick like his mother. He was twelve that year, illiterate where books were concerned but well versed in what happened on the veld. He understood cattle, the growing of mealies, the tracking of lost sheep and the languages of his family’s slaves and Hottentots. He was not a strong boy, nor was he tall; his principal characteristic was an impish delight in the world about him. To Adriaan a mountain had a personality as distinct as that of a master bull or his sisters. He certainly did not talk to trees, but he understood them, and sometimes when he ran across the veld and came upon a cluster of protea, their flowers as big as his head, he would jump with joy to see them whispering among themselves. But his chief delight lay in walking alone, east or north, to the vast empty lands that beckoned.

The other boy who was cheered by news of an eastward trek was the half-Hottentot Dikkop, fathered nineteen years earlier by a Coloured hunter who had lain with one of Hendrik’s servants. It was unfair to call him a boy, for he was seven years older than Adriaan, but he was so unusually small, even for a Hottentot, that he looked more like a lad than Adriaan did. He had a large bottom, a handsome light-brown skin and a shy nature that expressed itself principally in his love for the Van Doorn children, especially Adriaan, with whom he had long planned to set forth on a grand exploration. If the family now moved a far distance eastward, after the new hut was built and the cattle acclimated, he and Adriaan would be free to go, and they would be heading into land that few had seen before. Nothing could have pleased Dikkop more than this possibility, and when the wagons were loaded he went to Hendrik: “Baas, come new farm, Adriaan, me, we head out?”

“It’s time,” the baas agreed, and that was all the promise Dikkop required. On the journey he would work as never before, proving to his master that the proposed exploration was justified.

Two wagons heavily loaded, a tent to be pitched at dusk, a white family of nine, two slaves, two large families of Hottentots, two thousand sheep, four hundred cattle and two span of oxen—sixteen in each—formed the complement of the Van Doorns as they headed into totally unfamiliar land. Johanna had a meager collection of kitchen utensils, five spoons, two knives but no forks. Hendrik had a Bible published in Amsterdam in 1630, a few tools and a brown-gold crock in which on festive occasions he made bread pudding for his family. He also had a small assortment of seeds, which he was confident he could expand into a garden, and sixteen rooted cuttings of various fruit trees, which, with luck, would form the basis of an orchard. In the entourage he was the only one who could read, and he took delight in assembling all people connected with him for evening prayer, when he would spread the Bible on his knees and read from it in rich Dutch accents.

The trekboers traveled only modest distances on any day. The oxen were not eager to move and the herds had to be allowed time to graze. Hottentots had to scout ahead to locate watercourses, so that five miles became a satisfactory journey. Also, when a congenial spot was found, the caravan lingered three or four days, enjoying the fresh water and the good pasturage.

At the end of three weeks, when some sixty-five miles had been covered, Hendrik and Johanna stood together on a small rise to survey a broad expanse of pasture, where the grass was not excessive or the water plentiful, but where the configuration of land and protective hills and veld looked promising.

“Was your father’s farm like this?”

“Almost the same,” Johanna said.

“And he failed?”

“We almost died.”

“This time it’s different,” Hendrik said, but he was reluctant to make the crucial determination without his wife’s approval. At a score of intervals in their life together she had been so prescient in warning him of pitfalls that he relied on her to spot weaknesses that he missed.

“Would you worry, Johanna, if we chose this spot?”

“Of course not! You have sons to help you. Trusted servants. I see no trouble.”

“God be praised!” he shouted with an exuberance which startled her. “This is it!” And he started running toward the center of the
plain he had selected, but Johanna cried, “You won’t have time before sunset! Wait till tomorrow!”

“No!” he shouted with an excitement that activated his children and the servants. “This is ours! We mark it out tonight.” And he kept running to a central position, where he directed his Hottentots to collect rocks for a conspicuous pile. As soon as it was started, he cried to everyone, “Where’s north?” He knew, of course, but wished their confirmation for the sacred rite he was about to perform.

“That’s north,” Dikkop said.

“Right.” And he handed Johanna a pistol. “At half an hour, fire it. I want everyone here to witness that I walked only half an hour.” And with that he strode off to the north, not taking exaggerated steps, and not running, but walking with grave intent. When he had covered about a mile and three-quarters, Johanna fired the pistol, whereupon he stopped, gathered many rocks and built a pile somewhat smaller than the one at the center. Then, shouting with joy, he sped back to the center, leaping and kicking like a boy.

“Where’s south?” he yelled.

“Down there!” several voices cried, whereupon he said again to his wife, “Give me half an hour,” and off he went, never running or cheating, for the testimony must be unanimous that he had defined his land honestly. When the pistol fired, he built a cairn and hastened back to the central pile.

“Where’s west?” he shouted with wild animal spirits, and off he went again, taking normal strides but with abnormal vigor. Another shot, another cairn, another dash.

“Where’s east?” he cried, and the men bellowed, “There’s east!” But this time, as he headed for the vast unknown that had so lured his crippled grandfather, and had seduced him away from the pleasing security of Trianon, it seemed to him that he was participating in a kind of holy mission, and his eyes misted. His steps slowed and diminished much in scope, so that his farm was going to be lopsided, but he could not help himself. He had walked and run nearly eleven miles at the close of a demanding day, and he was tired, but more than that, he was captivated by the mountains that ran parallel to his course, there to the north, hemming in the beautiful plains on which the great farms of the future would stand. And to the south he could feel the unseen ocean, reaching away to the icebound pole, and he had a sense of identification with this untrammeled land that none before him had ever felt.

“He’s not walking,” Adriaan said at the center.

“He’s slowing down,” Johanna said.

“Give him more time,” the boy pleaded.

“No. We must do it right.” But Adriaan grabbed his mother’s hand, preventing her from firing, and of a sudden his father leaped in the air, throwing his arms wide and dashing ahead to recover the lost time.

“Now!” Adriaan said, dropping his hand. The pistol fired, the eastern cairn was established, and Hendrik van Doorn tramped slowly back to his family. The new loan-farm, six thousand acres of promising pasture, had been defined.

The next three months, April through June, were a time of extraordinary effort, since the farm had to be in stable operating condition before the onset of winter. A spacious kraal was built of mud bricks and stone to contain the precious animals, trees were planted, a small garden was dug and a larger field for mealies was plowed and allowed to lie fallow till spring planting. Only when this was done were the servants put to the task of building the family hut.

Hendrik paced out a rectangle, forty feet by twenty, then leveled it with a mixture of clay and manure. At the four corners long supple poles were driven into the ground, those at the ends bent toward each other and lashed together. A sturdy forty-foot beam joined them, forming the ridge pole of the roof. The sides of the hut, curving from base-line upward, were fashioned of wattles and heavy reeds interwoven with thatch. A crude door entered from the middle of one side, but the two ends were closed off and the whole affair was windowless.

The house contained no furniture except a long table, built by the slaves, with low benchlike seats formed of latticework and leather thongs. Wagon chests held clothing and the few other possessions, and atop them were stacked the plates, pots and the brown-gold crock. The fireplace was a mud-bricked enclosure to one side, with no chimney. Children slept on piles of softened hides, their parents on a bed in the far corner: four two-foot posts jutting above ground, laced with a lattice of reed and thong.

The name for the rude domicile in which the nine Van Doorns would live for the next decade, and the other trekboers for the next century, would occasion endless controversy. It was a hartbees-huisie,
and the contradictory origins proposed for the word demonstrated the earthy processes at work shaping a new language for the colony. The hartebeest, of course, was the narrow-faced, ringed-horn antelope so common to the veld, but there was no logical reason why this lovely animal who roamed the open spaces should lend his name to this cramped residence. A better explanation is that the word was a corruption of the Hottentot
/harub
, a mat of rushes, plus the Dutch
huisje
, little house. Others claimed that it must be
harde
plus
bies
plus
huisie
, hard-reed house. Whatever, the hartbees-huisie stood as the symbol of the great distance these Dutchmen were traveling physically and spiritually from both the settlement at the Cape and their progenitors in Holland.

The first winter was a difficult time, with little food in store and none growing, but the men scoured the hills and brought in great quantities of springbok and gemsbok and handsome blesbok. Occasionally the Van Doorns, in their smoky hartebeest hut would dine on hartebeest itself; then Johanna would cut the meat into small strips, using a few onions, a little flour and a pinch of curry. Hendrik would roam the lower hills, looking for wild fruits which he could mangle into a chutney mixed with nuts, and the family would eat well.

The children begged their father to make one of his bread puddings, but without lemon rind or cherries or apples to grace it, he felt it would be a disappointment, and he refrained, but toward September, when the long winter was ending, an old smous driving a rickety wagon came through from the Cape with a miraculous supply of flour, coffee, condiments, dried fruits, and things like sewing needles and pins.