Читать книгу Heartfruit - Ingrid Wolfaardt - Страница 6

The scar has healed on his buttocks and the rain has come and the rain has gone, just as Oupa predicted.

Isak waits for his parents’ door to open and the radio to be switched on.

He feels the raised ridge of the strawberry mark on his skin. His father walks down the passage and his heart quickens but the steps don’t stop. Sounds of coffee beans being mashed in the grinder come from the kitchen. Then measured steps down the passage. He waits but they pass by.

Danie sleeps through the seduction of the pungent smell but he follows it to where his mother lies in her single bed, tight as a ball, exhausted by the long days in the pack shed. She faces the wall and the skin under her eyes is like the pith of lemons.

Isak climbs into his father’s bed. It is warm and the pillow stinks of cigarettes. His father lights up, one for him and one for her. Without looking, she reaches out for the cigarette balanced on the saucer. Her lips tremble as she draws, lipstick trapped in the creases of her mouth.

His father pulls back the curtains, letting in the light. She shies back onto the bed and Isak can see the mountain behind the leafless deltoidia. The organ ends and it is the news. They speak of gold and oil in the beginning and troublemakers in the end, especially the one in the Eastern Cape, then it is the weather report and his father stubs the cigarette in the saucer. Even his mother listens with interest.

* * *

Transvaal, Free State, Natal, then the Boland and the predictions remain the same as yesterday and last Sunday and the Sunday before. No rain now or next week, or the week after. It is as though the rain of a month ago never existed.

“Switch off.” His father locks the bathroom door.

They can hear him spit phlegm in the basin. Isak rolls onto his side, watching his mother’s face, the colour of chalk on cement. The DollyVarden is hers. On it stand wigs, blonde and red-haired, made from human hair, fitted on foamalite heads. He gets out of bed and sits on the stool with gilt legs. The mirror shows her tiny figure and the blue triangles in the corner of her eyes. Gingerly, he touches the wigs, wondering whether the women who gave the hair walked around with shaven heads, then he pulls one over his short hair, a wig with blonde tresses like Magdaleen’s.

“Isak.” His mother is frowning and the mirror skews her face and he pulls it off, arranging the wig on the faceless head.

Perhaps the hair comes from dead people, he thinks.

“Coming?” His father is dressed in his farm clothes with his moustache in a perfect line above his lip. Distracted he looks past them to the open window.

His mother’s nightie has slipped off her shoulders, revealing her breasts and she doesn’t seem to care him seeing.

The dog with the smiling face is waiting on the back stoep. Shed leaves lie still under the deltoidia. He sits in front of the bakkie with his father, the dog on the back and they drive up to the borehole on the ridge. No clouds in the sky, just bright blue that is wide and far, meeting the top of the mountains. Irritably, his father fiddles with the radio while old voices sing. The radio is turned off before they can complete the hymn.

So dikwels al voorheen

Het U vergewend hulp verleen

En van die skuld bevry

Hoe gou het ek nie weer u goedheid Heer vergeet nie

Die val en opstaan bring ’n diep verydeling.

In front of them is the borehole. The Lister machine runs dryly while the screeching rod only pumps up air. They walk to the edge of the hole. His father cuts the engine. There is silence. They both listen to the dog’s panting and the ringing of stone on stone as Isak tosses pebbles down the shaft.

For a long time his father stands at the hole. Eventually, he moves away to look over the farm. The flash rains of summer are already forgotten, just as his oupa had said.

Without a word the man with silver hair walks back to the Lister, disconnecting the delivery pipe from the turbine, the metal key in his hand. Isak lines the stones in a row, watching his father lift his arm behind his head. He throws the key into the veld.

Below the ridge a man and woman scuffle at the barracks. She falls, her head, top heavy with curlers and the man snatches something from her hand, disappearing into the low-roofed house. His father ignores the ruction, tossing the dog onto the back of the bakkie. The woman does not move, her filthy feet stick out from under the bell-bottom trousers.

They drive down to the orchards, past the barracks, where children are pressed against fencing, waving with frightened eyes. Isak waves back.

The bark of the trees is shrivelling. They walk along one row of trees, his father in front with the dog. Turning down a side row, they head for the heart of the orchard. Here the ground is like talc. Isak bends down, printing his palm in the dust.

“Gone,” the man says to himself, “gone.”

The trees have begun to wean of the green fruit. Small pears lie in the grass.

The trees are dying. Thousands of them, for the dams are empty and the river has run itself dry and the boreholes that tap into underground lakes are waterless holes of stone.

A bundle of feathers lies ahead in the path. Isak picks it up. The bird is light and limp enough to spin up high above his head. Then it flops into the dust. A useless thing for him. His father reverses the bakkie out by the gate. He takes a chain and a heavy padlock, locking the gate that leads to the trees, then they drive back, past the barracks to the house, to get ready for church.

The woman is murmuring on her back. Isak unwinds the window as they pass her by. She is singing a hallelujah liedjie and her head looks like an oversize lollipop.

“Jou ma se meid,” is all his father says as he closes the window.

* * *

Church comes and church goes. The dominee with the dark lenses and grey Hush Puppies thanks the Lord for their white skins. Isak sits on the front stoep with Kalbas, running his fingers over the dog’s back as he waits. From the village side, the red-winged Chevrolet of Oupa can be seen as it hovers above the road, kicking up a storm past the orchards. It is as though Oupa does not want to see what they see.

They climb out of the broad-bodied car with difficulty and they are shaped the same because they are cousins and share the same surname, even before their marriage. Their faces remind Isak of upside-down houses and their strongly boned hands and feet of oxen.

Ouma opens her arms for him and he is glad for her but Oupa stiffly climbs the steps grumbling so loudly that David can hear in the garage where he polishes the hubcaps of the Ford. His own bruised expression is one of dissatisfaction.

His mother and father come out of the house. She wears gloves and a coat to go with the sky blue of the car, while his father’s cufflinks sparkle. He and Oupa look alike, as they shake hands with their backs bent towards the farm.

Isak embraces his Ouma around her hips. Her arms that take his shoulders are powerful, arms that can carry a bag of chicken manure in each hand. Oupa’s feet are turning green and blue because his blood can’t get there anymore and he is angry with Ouma, as though it is her fault.

“Sakkie, Ouma’s skatlam.”

She is soft and he stays in her arms until she lets go and turns to his mother.

“Sara.”

“Ma.” She turns her cheek to the older woman but their cheeks do not touch.

Danie hides behind his mother. Ouma takes a peppermint out of her bag, holding it out to him. Shyly, he steps forward to take it. His mother clicks her tongue for the sweet offered, the pillar-box hat, with the blue net over her eyes, hiding her disapproval.

They watch their parents climb into the shiny Ford. Their father wipes the dash with a folded hanky. Danie searches for Isak’s hand because they are going away for a long time but Isak shakes it off, his brother’s peppermint breath in his face.

The Ford reverses out of the garage and they wave, then the car turns with its engine facing the road and the boys run behind the car. Isak keeps an eye on the turning hubcaps.

The Ford sprays stones in their faces as it picks up speed. They stop running. Both of them don’t move from under the camphor trees until the car has disappeared on the big road that runs north.

Things change when his ouma is around. Nothing you can see, just a feeling really. He picks a bunch of leaves, crushing them in his hand, smelling-smelling as he runs up the hill with Danie following. In the kitchen, his oupa dribbles over the table, coughing, his face flushed, while his ouma sits as calm as a windless day, reaching up to Raatjie. She ties a piece of raw meat over Raatjie’s bruised eye.

“David, David,” Ouma says quietly as she fastens the string behind Raatjie’s head.

“It’s all that woman’s fault,” Oupa accuses. “You must tell that woman the floor polish she uses is bad for my chest.”

Ouma says nothing, so Oupa lifts his head, turning his attention to Raatjie. “Tell that nooi of yours she must stop using the floor polish with the sunbeam on the lid, it makes my chest close.”

“Ja, Baas,” Raatjie answers with a deadpan face, her one eye looking at the floor.

Ouma holds out her arm and the boys pull. They walk with her to the room, the spare bedroom, the one of Tannie Lettie when she nursed Oupa. Obediently both sit on the bed and watch her undress. Her back is speckled with large freckles. When she untwists her bun, lifting her arms above her head, her skin is like kneaded dough. Isak loves the way her flesh folds.

“Will Ouma sing the song about the tea?” Danie asks politely.

A trail of coughing leads out onto the stoep and they hear how Oupa swears at the dogs.

“Ouma can’t remember a word of it.” She slips on a housedress and her back is so broad she could have been a man if it weren’t for the bun.

“Tea for two, Ouma.” Isak prompts her.

“Oupa doesn’t want Ouma to sing any more, he says it sounds like a dying organ.” She vigorously combs her grey hair, the pins and nets next to Oupa’s vials and asthma pump.

“Please, Ouma, just one time, please.” Isak closes the door. “Oupa won’t hear.”

“Ag, why not?” She smiles, reaching out to the two of them to join her on either side, then she takes a deep breath, pushing back her shoulders and stretching out her neck. Isak looks at her in the mirror, while Danie turns to her. At first her voice is tremulous, especially on the high notes and Isak closes his eyes imagining her on stage, young and beautiful, like in the photos, singing in the city hall.

The screen door bangs closed. Ouma stops.

“Enough, let’s go for a little walk.” She laughs gaily, “I want to see how my garden is doing.” But her eyes stay on the closed door.

Either side of her they stroll out onto the front stoep. Isak enjoys burying his whole hand in the palm of hers. The sun sets over the cypresses and the garden planted by Ouma when she came back from the sand dunes of the north. Out of the veld a wild hare appears, loping over the lawn, unafraid of the dogs. It stops at a dripping tap, pawing at the muddiness. They wait quietly for it to hop further towards the orchards.

She picks a single blossom from a dark green bush. “Gardenia thunbergia,” she says, holding it out for the two of them to smell. “Katjiepiering.”

“I like it, Ouma.” Isak sniffs at the flower. “It smells like bath soap.”

Ouma picks another for Danie as they walk to the rose garden. Here and there a rosebush carries a head. Ouma clicks her tongue with disapproval as she walks between the neglected bushes.

“Skatlam, come and look here.” She points to a minute creature on a rose leaf. “It’s a predator, we call it a krokkedilletjie because it eats the eggs of the red spider mite.”

She scratches at the tiny creature with her nail, placing it on Isak’s palm. “When the volk spray poison in the orchards for the mite they kill the krokkedilletjies as well.” She looks up over the orchards. “This year they are lucky though.”

“Are the krokkedilletjies glad there’s a drought, Ouma?” Danie asks.

“Perhaps, the more of them, the less your pappa has to spray.” Ouma finds another and Danie opens his palm expectantly but she places it with the other and the two goggas navigate their way along Isak’s arm. “But don’t we know that all men are masters and who would listen to an old woman anyway?”

Isak is fascinated with the way they struggle over his arm hairs. “Raatjie listens to Ouma.”

His ouma laughs, and her laugh belongs in a younger body. “Only the kitchen volk, child.” She picks thorns off a blown rose.

The boys do the same.

“Ouma, we found a box in Ouma’s bedroom.” Isak stops talking and blows the goggas off his arm. “There, where Ouma and Oupa sleep.”

Danie drops on his knees looking for the krokkedilletjies.

The thorns fall onto the paving as she listens intently. “What sort of box?”

“ ‘A shoe box, Ouma, with Tannie Lettie’s name on it.” Danie jumps up excitedly with the predators.

“Tannie Lettie left a long time ago. Are you sure it’s not your mamma’s box?”

Isak shakes his head firmly. “It’s under the loose plank under Oupa’s bed, Danie found it when we were playing wegkruipertjie from Raatjie, Ouma.”

She puts the blown rose to her nose. “Did Ouma’s children look inside?”

“Mmm … just stupid stuff of girls, Ouma, cards and letters with hearts on.” Isak’s attention is on the goggas on the tip of Danie’s finger. “Nothing nice, Ouma, just a lot of dried flowers the colour of … a scab.”

His ouma pinches off the petals of the dark red rose until the orange heart is exposed.

“Ouma, why did Tannie Lettie go away?” Danie places the goggas onto his rose. “I like Tannie Lettie, she always gave me pink sweeties.”

“Ouma didn’t need her help any more.” She kisses them each on the forehead. “Come, let’s go back, I’m sure your oupa is looking for us.”

The old man stands on the stoep coughing in the shadows, resting on his cane, brooding. He is unaware of them, looking over their heads towards the mountain.

* * *

All month long men cut down pear trees with chainsaws that complain like dogs do when his father played the piano. The trees are dying but no one speaks of it, for his father has gone north to get away from it all.

Scattered along the riverbank are heaps of trees and fruit in the dead grass.

Isak and Petrus smoke in the eucalyptus grove near the farm gate, sprawled out on a bed of bark and the trees are tall and straight-limbed, like long-legged giants. Both hear the tractor at the farm barracks, off-loading sawn wood. The women’s voices rise up with delight. It saves them searching the ridge daily, for there is enough wood to see them through the coming winter. Above, summer swallows dash in between the eucalyptus trees, gathering to leave. Ahead in the road, Oupa’s Chevrolet growls and moans as it brakes at the gate and goes over the cattle grid.

Isak clicks his tongue. “Oupa, does just what he likes.”

“It’s still the farm of the oubaas,” Petrus reminds him.

“Isn’t!” Isak sits up.

“Is! The oubaas’s name still hangs at the gate.”

“Pa hasn’t had a chance to change it, that’s all.”

“Your pa is like the volk, he works for the oubaas.”

“Nonsense man, my pa is the baas.”

Petrus smiles gloatingly. “You’re just like volk.”

“I’m going to inherit it all.” Isak drops the rolled cigarette and picks up the gun lying next to him, checking the trigger. “Pa has shown me the will and my name is on it. One day this is all mine.” He gets up and stalks the swallows, asking impatiently, “Where’s Danie?”

“Helping my ma rub the vrot feet of the oubaas,” Petrus shrugs.

Isak takes out the folded diagram in his pocket, studying the drawing. The dominee says it is blasphemous, man playing God, but his oupa says farmers play God all the time, so it’s nothing new. The newspaper cutting shows lines and arrows that mark the insertions made into the man’s chest. The heart is a pump, he rereads the doctor’s words.

Danie comes running down the hill with the shopping bag. “Here’s everything,” he shouts excitedly, tipping the contents onto the ground. There is a bottle of chloroform, cotton wool, gauze, their mother’s nail set and needle and thread.

Isak aims and shoots randomly into the trees. The first two birds fall to the ground unusable, the pellet penetrating their chests and killing them.

Petrus kicks at them with disgust. “Ga, man, this isn’t going to work.” He hunches down and lights another cigarette.

Danie fishes out the birds, stroking their lifeless wings, then buries them in a shallow grave under the bark. Once again Isak swings his gun wildly, shooting into the khaki-coloured foliage. A bird drops at his feet still fluttering, its eyes shining.

“We’ve got him, we’ve got him!” Petrus dances jubilantly around the small bird, his smoking cigarette trampled underfoot while Isak feels the bird’s heartbeat.

“Chloroform,” Isak commands, passing the gun to Petrus as Danie comes running with the bottle. “And the other one.”

Danie hesitates, looking uncertainly at Petrus. “Can’t we shoot another one instead?”

“We don’t have time for that.” Isak screws the lid off the bottle.

“I don’t want to.” Danie passes on the cotton wool.

“Give here.” Isak dips the cotton wool in the liquid, pressing it against the bird’s beak.

“Leave him alone.” Petrus steps forward, the gun slung over his shoulder.

“Shurrup, I’m the baas.” Isak feels how the bird relaxes in his hand, seeing how the eyes turn to glass. “And hurry up.”

Danie turns away tearfully.

“It is his.” Petrus kneels next to Isak, taking out a blunt pocket knife.

There is no answer.

“I said … the stupid thing … is his.”

Isak lays the bird on its back, taking the knife. “Do you or don’t you?”

Petrus nods in agreement, scratching out the cigarette and lighting it again, the smoke a screen before his face.

“Hold tight then.”

At a distance Danie stands with the cage. Inside it the canary swings back and forth.

Delicately, Isak draws a line over the bird’s chest that peels open, to reveal a beating heart. “Bring,” he gestures impatiently.

Danie opens the cage door. His hand closes around the swinging bird and it trills agitatedly, pecking viciously. “Can’t.” The small boy clutches the bird against his shirt.

“Take it,” Isak instructs Petrus.

Petrus sighs, gets up and walks over to Danie. “You did say it’s OK.”

“I didn’t know it would be like this …” He points to the bird. “It’s different.”

“Your word is your word,” Petrus reminds him, reaching out for the bird.

“Moffie.” Isak taunts them both.

Danie clutches even tighter and the bird squawks louder. Petrus squeezes the small boy’s wrist until his fingers release the bird into his own.

“Dannaman, it’s not so bad, man, it’s only a bird.”

The canary’s beak is pressed into the cotton wool. The birds lie together, the swallow and the canary. Isak slices open the second chest with greater speed and confidence and with the blunted point he cuts around the heart of the first bird, loosening it from the connective tissue.

“Take it.”

Petrus cups his hands for the beating heart. The second heart is placed in his hands, leaving both chest cavities empty.

“Pass.”

Petrus tips the palpitating heart of the swallow into the canary’s chest and the canary’s into the swallow’s chest. With tweezers, Isak shifts the heart into position then begins to sew. Pinching the chest between forefinger and thumb, he sews neat stitches like the girls do in class.

The boys wait. Danie embracing the cage and Petrus holding the gun. The birds lie motionless, side by side, one dull, the other brilliant.

Eventually, Petrus picks up the swallow and presses his ear against its chest, listening, then he does the same with the canary but neither responds. They hang limply in his hand. “Dead is dead,” he says to the others.

Isak stares at the dead birds, while Danie rocks back and forth on his heels.

* * *

Despondently, they sit and reconsider the operation. Petrus sprinkles tobacco along the length of the paper then rolls it up, one for him and one for Isak, while Isak checks the gun.

“Why doesn’t Koos come home any more?” Isak sucks in his cheeks, drawing heavily, thinking of the 1960 Chrysler parked in front of David and Raatjie’s house. Koos was his mother’s favourite, the only brown boy to get matric.

“Dunno.”

“He can do what the other volk do from the city, work in his holiday time to earn more or is he so rich that he doesn’t have to?”

“What rubbish about rich?” Petrus spits out pieces of tobacco. “Koos is at the barracks, just doesn’t want to see people that’s all, and he’s vrek tired from driving the lorry every day.”

“Doesn’t want to see the baas,” Isak corrects him.

“The baas is no baas of Koos, Koos is his own baas.”

Danie’s back is towards them. The small boy carves a stick figure from a branch with Petrus’s knife. Isak drops his voice. “What’s he so tired from anyway? He doesn’t drive the lorry himself, he is just the helper for the baas of the lorry, Raatjie told me.”

Petrus ignores him, snapping twigs while Danie chips away at the wood.

“Is he scared of something?”

“Shurrup!” Petrus jumps up. “If you going to mess with me like this, I’m leaving.”

“He doesn’t even greet my mother.”

“Your ma’s moer, man. He owes your ma sweet nothing.” Petrus stomps off angrily, mumbling.

“Ma paid his school fees and his matric suit and … and … your house is anyway our house, ‘cos it’s our farm, so everything is ours, poeskop!” Isak shouts after him.

“He forgot his knife.” Danie holds up the knife.

“It’s ours, the knife is Pa’s.” Isak stomps on the dead birds.

“But it’s his knife now,” Danie insists. “Pappa gave it to him.”

“What do you know?” Isak snidely remarks. “I’m off.” Without waiting for Danie he makes for the dam wall behind the barracks.

Raatjie’s house is closest to the dam wall. The wall is double thick clay because of the houses below. Isak slides down into the grey bushes, the gun slung over his shoulder. From here he can see the back of her house, the orchards, office and the road to town.

Her garden has roses rescued from the rubbish bin, wrapped in newspaper and trenched in. Roses just the same as in his ouma’s garden. Raatjie’s roses are still blooming. There are sunflowers too, rising above the weeds with oversized heads and Koos is there, darker skinned and sharp like his mother.

Koos is making a bonfire. With quick dashes back and forth he feeds the fire. In and out he runs with boxes, dumping them into the flames and there is a grimness on his face as his head spins around looking to the road that leads to the farm.

The team is sawing the pear orchard to the ground. Behind them a white van with meshed windows drives slowly towards the office. His oupa comes shuffling out onto the stoep, slowly raising his cane, pointing towards the barracks.

All of a sudden a figure runs from the river towards the bonfire. From the lightness of running he knows it can only be Petrus, gesturing and shouting. Koos hears him and the sight of Petrus running seems to make Koos wild as he stamps the papers and books with his gumboots.

Petrus flings the gate off its hinges and tackles Koos. They fall onto the ground, rolling over each other, while the white van comes closer.

Isak lifts his head to see better. “Oupa won’t like it one little bit that Koos is buggering up David’s gumboots like that.”

The van stops. Koos loosens himself, running to the fire, fanning it with a cardboard box. Then the van is moving again, this time to Raatjie’s house, the van of Sergeant Kloppers who loads troublemakers in the back on weekends.

The heat from the fire is so great that Koos must shield his face. He runs towards the dam, vaulting over the barbed-wire fencing, dropping down into the bushes while Petrus slinks around the back of the house on all fours, Raatjie’s cat rubbing herself against his legs, meowing.

The van pulls up behind Koos’s Chrysler. The sergeant gets out, languidly lighting a cigarette as he walks around the car, peering through the windows, then he walks over to the fire. With his boot he scrapes some of the burning paper closer, picking it up, before throwing it back.

Petrus disappears around the furthest side of the house and the cat sits disappointedly in the sun, staring at him in the bushes. Instinctively, Isak falls forward as the sergeant looks up towards the dam wall. He holds his breath, keeping flat on the rock, hearing the crackling of the fire and the melancholy chain saws.

Cautiously, he lifts his head, looking straight into Koos’ face. They are so close he smells the fear from the flared nostrils and the smoke caught in his perspiration. Koos’ eyes are dark black. Silently he mouths a word, drawing an invisible line with his finger across his throat. Isak understands.

* * *

They study each other. There is nothing else to do. The van door clicks open and they wait for the van to move away.

Koos stands up. He shows Isak that he must not move. All along the dam wall he runs with a bent back and thin legs in gumboots. Isak does not look around. When Koos stood up, he looked like the stick figure that Danie was carving.

He wanders down to the pear orchard that Oupa planted before the big war and it is a graveyard of stumps, rooted to the sky.

* * *

At last the saws are still. Then the barking of the dogs begin while his parents are away north, dogs all over the farm. First the long-tailed mongrels of the barracks, then those at the prefab house of the white foreman. Finally the three on the hill. All through the night they bark until it becomes part of the night sounds, as trains come and go, a sound that you forget about over time.

The blue Ford appears one day in the driveway around noon, covered in dust. His father gets out, banging the door like teachers do at school when they haven’t had a holiday for a long time, and his mother is nervous, the white gloves on her hands soiled with nicotine.

Isak and Danie run to the car and stop. Isak holds out his hand but his father just nods briefly, his eyes running over the changed landscape. His mother rubs his head and that of Danie. Her mouth is smiling, but that is all that is happy on her face and Isak wonders if they are angry because of them.

Their mother goes to lie down in the room. Ouma and Oupa are packed to leave, back to the old age home with village water and municipal electricity. Isak wants to cry as the red Chevrolet pulls out of the garage where the Ford should stand. This time he leaves Danie’s hand in his.

The room of Tannie Lettie smells of mothballs and Oupa’s medicine. Isak finds one of Ouma’s pins on the floor with a strand of grey hair twisted around it. He drops to his knees, lifting the bedspread. The plank is still loose and the shoebox of Tannie Lettie is still there. He opens the box. It is empty, except for a handful of torn petals.

From her room, his mother shouts in a shrill voice. Down the passage, the radio is switched off.

He puts back the box and plank, pocketing Ouma’s pin.

In the kitchen Raatjie lays the table, rudely dropping the place mats.

The boys wait for their father to sit before pulling out their chairs, slyly staring at Raatjie’s glass eye, the weekend work of David. Their father sits down, still wearing his city clothes and crocodile leather shoes.

The ribbed hare hops across the lawn in the midday sun, straight to the dog’s water bowl on the back stoep. They watch it drink weakly before the grace is said.

The curried silt is from pig trotters, made by Ouma, for their father. The yellow jelly slips off the knife, staining the white tablecloth as Raatjie cuts it into blocks and slides it onto their plates. Their father doesn’t notice the blobs of gelatine. He gets up and places the radio next to him, reading a newspaper from the north while they eat. There’s a photo of the troublemaker from the Eastern Cape on the front page and his name is easy to remember for a black man.

The Minister of Agriculture is talking on the radio, when suddenly his father sweeps the radio off the table, breaking the antenna. The battery falls out and the radio stops playing. They do not speak. With lowered heads the boys eat the silt, while the man toys with the salt and pepper cellars in the shape of windmills. Even the evergreen cypresses are yellowing.

“Go and call David and the rest of the volk,” he commands Isak. “Tell them to bring the tripod.”

Outside the dog with the smiling face barks and the hare hops into the undergrowth as the dog makes a chase for it. The sky is cleanly swept, a band of blue so pure. Raatjie sits on the stone wall at the wash line, skirt hitched up for the breeze to blow under, waiting for them to finish so that she can go back to the barracks and the brew.

He runs down the hill to where the men are drinking and playing dominoes. He watches a while and they ignore him for they have no fear of him.

“The grootbaas is calling for you. He says you must bring the tripod.”

The men curse his father loudly but it is the brew that makes them difficult and the long week past. They pack up the board game and each one takes a last slug at the communal bottle before obeying the baas. The baas is baas and that is that.

On the ridge his father paces up and down. The men come stumbling up the hill towards the disused borehole, while he lights one cigarette after the other. They carry winches and chains and the spider-legged tripod is pulled by a tractor.

“Get ready to dismantle.” His father doesn’t speak to anyone in particular. He turns his back on them and the borehole.

The men quieten. Even those with liquorice breaths listen, for the shadow of the man with the silver hair falls upon each one of them. To the right, Petrus and the other boys slide down the dam wall on a butter bush, their naked bodies smeared with clay. Isak stays with the men and his father at the pump. The men are ham-fisted and struggle to mount the tripod that straddles over the borehole’s opening. Eventually the winch releases the heavy chain and hook that descends into the hole. Everything is too slow for his father. He snaps at David while grinding the stubs under his crocodile leather shoes. Alongside, the boys squeal with delight as they slide faster and faster down the lubricated embankment.

As the first pipe appears at the mouth of the hole, his father steps forward.

“Stop.” His eyebrows draw together. “Drop a little.”

The pipe reveals a wheel of greased bearings, enclosing the rod. David steadies the hook and himself with the winch as the other men rush forward to clamp it securely. With great care the eight-foot pipe is dismounted and rolled to one side, then the process is repeated as the next section of pipe is lifted to the surface. Isak keeps count. The butter bush gripped between the boys’ thighs looks inviting. He feigns disinterest but he notices that none of them have taken the slide from the very top, not even Petrus, yet he remains at the hole. The seventh pipe is lifted and the men warm up to the job. His father secures the pipe himself as the men take a smoke break. David back-peddles on the winch and the pipe drops without warning, trapping his father’s finger in the collar. Piet Plesier grabs the collar, wrestling with the enormous weight while David winches up to no avail. His father’s ring finger is in the collar and his brow folds over his eyes. He pulls at his hand so that the sinews and veins of his neck bulge, while all the men shout themselves into soberness and run about. But his father is silent, lifting the collar with the other hand, until his finger comes out, shorter and bloody and David swoons on top of the tripod.

He strides over the ridge, the corners of his tweed jacket flapping in the wind and from behind his father’s back is straight, his chin on his chest and the hand with the damaged finger is pressed into his shirt.

Up on the ridge the men have found their voices as they lift the pipes furiously.

In the kitchen scullery is a pig’s head. His father slices off the pig’s cheek with his left hand and wraps the raw meat around the bleeding stump of a finger. They walk back the way they have come, there where the blood lies on the rocks.

The borehole is disconnected completely and the hole boarded up, until one day when it rains and the earth is filled with water.