Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

But good God, Buys! Get down from there! You look like you’re sitting on a chicken! You’re going to break the bird’s back!

I jump down and chase her around a bit, then I launch an attack on the child. I fall down in the dust. She comes to stand over me and laughs with a little hand over her little mouth. I pick her up and she wriggles free. Then I’m after her again with a roar. She makes for her mother, cackling. I throw Maria over my shoulder and drop her on our bed of hides. After a while we become aware of Elizabeth peering at the two tussling, groaning bodies. Then she sees a gecko by the door.

By dusk I’m coming to my senses on the bench in front of the door. Against the waves of golden fire on the horizon the silhouette appears of an ox wagon without a canvas hood. Five withered mangy oxen trudge on, the front one without a yoke, hitched up with leather thongs like a draught horse. Two Hottentots, one in front of the oxen, the other on the wagon chest. A raggle-taggle preacher in what remains of a top hat and tails is standing on the back of the wagon loudly lamenting his depraved soul. He plucks off the last of his buttons to show me his breast, roasted red. The vagabond missionary clings to the flaps of the dilapidated wagon and shouts imprecations in German and High Dutch about rivers that will run with blood and dark men in dark nights with long knives and the spattering spit seems to dry instantly to the raw blisters on the God-crazed fool’s mouth. The Hottentots gesture feebly in my direction with flaccid arms while lashing the oxen listlessly and driving them along the road. The man scratches at his breast and becomes quite spirited when Maria appears from the reed door. The wagon is still halfway down the road when the stinker starts performing elaborate curtseys. He wishes me a prosperous harvest. He introduces himself under some or other Germanic surname. He enquires after the way to Swellendam, while the oxen plod on to Couga, further and further away from Swellendam. I smile at the man and proclaim that they are following the strait and narrow road, that it’s long and hard and overgrown with thistles, but that it is indeed the right way. The man, already bereft of his senses and now also of his destination, gesticulates grandly in my direction. He bows again before starting to curse the Hottentots for their laxity and warning them that the laggard will never attain the Joyous Jerusalem. The wagon creaks to a halt. The emaciated emissary of God jumps downs; his knees buckle under him. The flies feast undisturbed on the blisters of the babbling salvager of souls, nor are they swatted away from the cheeks of the Hottentots. He gathers a fistful of sand, kisses it and proclaims his love of this prospect and the quality of the soil and asks in a highly convoluted manner if he can help me with the harvest in exchange for a blanket and a sweet potato twice a day.

Does it look as if I plant anything?

He looks around him and sees the arid bushes and the aloes and low kopjes and the cattle way over there and the few Hottentot huts hardly distinguishable from the veldt or from my hovel. I splutter at his confusion.

You can harvest just what you like, my dear fellow.

The preacher starts orating about how the Lord nourishes each one of his creatures and how for weeks he’s been preparing meals from the Garden of God. I have an elephant rifle in my hand and I march towards the man. He grabs the whip from a Hottentot and lashes out clumsily at the oxen.

I am going, good Sir! I am on my way, the narrow way, as indicated by you! he shouts at me.

I take aim and riddle the back of the wagon with the gravel with which I’ve loaded the gun. The oxen trudge on. While reloading, I bethink myself, put the gun down, run after the wagon, jump on. In a great voice I start preaching at the dumbfounded missionary and his Hottentots. I proclaim long stretches of fever dreams from Revelations that Geertruy taught me to recite. I shout:

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast! And it said, Come and see! And I looked! and behold! A pale horse! And his name that sat on him was Death! And Hell followed with him! And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth! To kill with sword! And with hunger! And with death! And with the beasts of the earth!

I carry on harrowing the little congregation hearkening to me gobsmacked. I caution them against the forest paths leading off the strait and narrow, the black women lurking in pools in this country ready to leap upon you and the cannibals and the extirpation of the Christian by the Heathen and monsters and the beasts straight from the clefts of Hell. I castigate them in advance about the dagga and the liquor that will rot their souls and the buttocks of the women and the breasts upon which they will perish. The leader of the bedraggled little team forgets about the oxen and the ramshackle outfit limps to a halt in the middle of the road where my voice starts resounding among the kopjes. I spread my arms and square my chest and once again resort to High Dutch:

And the kings of the earth! And the great men! And the rich men! And the chief captains! And the mighty men! And every bondsman and every free man! Hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains! And said to the mountains and rocks: Fall on us! And hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb!

I fall silent. Only the cicadas and the last sentence respond in the kopjes. Then the last blast of the trump:

For the great day of his wrath is come! And who shall be able to stand?

The four men look at one another. The wagon groans into motion. I sit down flat on my arse in the wagon and laugh. The Hottentots look at me. The top hat and tails realises the peroration is over and starts mumbling to himself about blasphemy and the dissolution of the soul. I remain sitting, snorting, drunk all over again, on my way along with them in the wrong direction deeper into the wilderness, until they’ve rounded the bend at the drift. Then I jump down and go and pick up the gun and fire a last shot low over their heads and trot home. Geertruy was right: The right words and a loud voice are stronger than a whole team of oxen and pack more of a punch than an elephant gun. Maria comes walking towards me. I can barely hear what she’s shouting, but I can guess that she’s not happy with my way of receiving the men of God. I rush at her, push my head between her legs, lift her backwards over my shoulders and run straight to the conjugal bed.

If your name appears on the official list for commando service, you have to attend the annual military manoeuvres at the nearest landdrost’s offices. The business drags on for a whole week. For someone from De Lange Cloof like myself that means being away from home for more than a fortnight; to Swellendam and back is more than a week on horseback. If you have a decent horse. You have to ride your own horse half to death on the way there and take your own gun and go and blast away your own lead at a bunch of targets and consort companionably with the burghers of the district and try not to beat anybody up. Only illness or incapacity serves as an excuse – sad souls like Jacob Senekal whose poor old eyes could never see all the way to the targets.

I’m very happy sitting on De Brakkerivier. Nobody bothers me, I bother nobody and around me everything perishes and flourishes. Days dawdle like seasons. I don’t wander far from the house. Every thorn tree looks like the next one. I do, though, find it impossible to pass an anthill without churning it up with a stick.

I have no desire to ride to Swellendam to establish who’s got the prize pizzle or who can shoot straightest. Brandy is scarce and I prefer to have mine on my own. I have no desire to horsewhip old Horse, unshod and cantankerous, all the way to Swellendam. Maria’s hardly washed the blood from the new baby and I have to be on my way again. The gun I leave with Maria; if they want me to shoot, they can lend me a Company musket and melt the candlesticks on their groaning drostdy tables to provide me with bullets. I slip a dagger into my belt in case somebody decides to stalk me at night. Horse is old and crotchety but he can outrun any creature, Bushman or lion. The Buys men turn up regularly for these manoeuvres, perhaps I’ll bump into one or more of my brothers there. But I’m not going to go looking for them.