Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

How long have we been sitting here on our arses? Days? Weeks? The veldt is flat, the soil is red, the grass yellow, the bushes green, the trees bear thorns, the horizon is white, the sky blue and deep and so godfor-etcetera. Strange nests like plaited yellow whirlwinds hang from the branches. Thump the tree and you hear the Babel of twittering from the dark tunnels, but the residents never appear. Anthills clamber up the trunks. Nombini. Cracked clay of a watering hole. Maria. Children, all the children. Baobabs quiet as palaces. Eland. Buffalo. Snores. Herds. Stampedes. At dusk the distance flames up. I imagine mountains in the mist.

My people are asleep. I’m sitting on my own, stoke all the fires in the camp with new wood. I sit. The six fires surrounding me flare up high, the camp as bright as day. Above me the black velvet night, the white holes in the canvas flicker like stars. The undergrowth creaks. Then: a herd of eland charge through the camp, in between the fires, the sweat on their flanks, every fold and muscle illuminated. The sacred antelopes in the daylight here with me with above us the pitch-black night, as if they sheer outside time and season and reason and between worlds and through all reality and dream. Behind me the undergrowth creaks again to admit the eland.

On a morning like all the others Maria shakes me awake in the wagon. She wants to know what’s the story with Nombini and me.

How should I know, I say. Is she haranguing me again where I can’t hear?

Maria says Nombini disappeared in the night. Maria says she woke up to the sound of crying when Nombini said good bye to her children. Then she was off with a little bundle of food under her arm. I ask why Maria did not stop her. She says I know very well there’s no arguing with that Caffre woman:

You try to stop her once she’s got an idea into that head of stone.

Maria says Nombini mumbled something about a godalmighty nest she wanted to go and build, that she wanted to climb trees before her toes are blunt with walking. I fall back onto my bed. At the back of my head something rattles like a bead somebody is spinning at the bottom of a porcelain dish. I lie and wait till Maria takes umbrage and stalks out.

The ants march in a line to the grubs, pick them up and haul them to the shoulder-high anthill here next to me. I carefully pick up an ant, put it down some distance from its comrades. It scurries back at once to the file and falls in. I bend over to pick up another ant: my breeches tear. The arse-end of my mole-rat breeches in tatters. My beloved breeches, you stinking scoundrel! Oh godless traitor! I tear off the breeches and leave them to the ants to drag into their subterranean kingdom. To the devil also with breeches. I walk back to the camp to devise a loincloth for the ridiculous and crumpled bell clappering between my legs.

When the next morning I wander into the veldt with my bow and arrows and a kaross around my shoulders, hat on the head and a buckskin around my hips, Maria and the children grin at Buys the Bushman.

You must hope and pray you don’t bump into your pals today! Maria shouts after me. They’ll sell you to the nearest farmer!

I walk on, too angry to shout back. The sun scorches my lily-white legs. It’s only later that afternoon when I’m doing battle with a thorn in my ankle that I realise how long it’s been since I’ve thought of shoes. Then I think of Kemp, of spotted breeches and mad maps. And I wonder how the nest is progressing of the woman who never was mine.

A day, a week later. I walk to the wagon. Whence the headache? For months now not a drop of liquor over my lips. Something smells of burnt feathers. My heart thumps my chest to pieces. The world reels. I stand still, hands on knees. Puke. My legs give way under me. I try to get up. I fall and have a fit. An outcry:

What in godsname, Buys?

Somebody slaps me. An eye flutters, opens. Maria offers me water. The water tastes wrong; it spills on me. I bite my tongue and it bleeds.

They stand around me. Mealtime before the wagon. Baba touches my face.

Why did Father’s face droop like that? Is his face going to drop off, Aunt Maria?

Let be, child, says Maria. Come on, stop it.

Baba wipes the snot off his lip, sits down to one side.

Can you feel if I touch here? Maria asks. Lift up your arms, Buys.

I lift them above my head. I keep them there. The left arm floats down, even though it feels as if I’m keeping it up. Maria makes me sit up. A big plate of food in front of me.

Come, eat, you’re sick with sadness.

I’m hungry; the food drops into my lap. The left hand doesn’t want to function.

What are you saying? Speak properly.

She feeds me. Swallow, dammit, swallow. Around me the chattering of children. My understanding slips in and out.

Shh, now. Chew. There you go. Swallow.

She wipes my mouth. She pulls the bespattered kaross over my head. The left arm gets stuck in the hide. She jerks. It tears. She cries. She’s gone. The children prattle. She’s back, plonks down a mirror in front of me.

There, see. See what you look like now.

A face lies before me on the table. Dirty beard. Red and grey. The skin red and peeling. The left side sags down, the mouth gapes open to the left. The left eye half shut, the eye looks the other way. I smile. The mirror smiles on the right side, on the left everything droops undisturbed, a string of drool hovers in the beard.

They don’t leave me in peace. If I get up, there’s a child or a thing under my slack-side armpit to support me. Windvogel the younger gives me a baobab crutch. Beautifully carved and oiled, but goddammit! Are you wishing me dead now, bugger, I berate him. He understands not a word I say and hugs me and says it’s a pleasure. God damned in every blessed heaven! At mealtimes it’s a great entertainment for everybody to feed me. At night Maria lies curled up under my armpit – such a thing hasn’t happened in years and years. She snores. I sit more than I lie. The swallowing doesn’t work when I’m lying flat.

They wash me, even though I’m not dirty; they cart me around, even though I’m perfectly at home where I am. If I object, they pretend not to understand. If I hit out at them, they think I’m having a fit. Then the bunch of them really pity me.

Wake up one morning with the wagon shaking under me. I struggle upright and peer out of the tent flap. Maria is sitting on the wagon chest cursing the oxen on their way. She stops the wagon when she sees I’m trying to shift in beside her. When she’s satisfied that I’m securely settled, she cracks the whip again. A fly settles on my cheek. The wagon stops on a rise. You can see far in every direction. With the help of Jan, the wagon leader, she gets me off the wagon and sits me down on a flat rock.

I’ve been mucking along behind you for a lifetime, Buys. And you just can’t sit still and stay there. I get old and grey and all that I could hope for all these years was to sit with you. To sit and look at the world.