Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

But he has in his mind just exactly how to put it: — The children are taking guinea fowl eggs to play with. They must’ve found a nest somewhere in the grass or the reeds and they’ve taken the eggs. -

— There by the river. You were there? — The chief herdsman’s lips are drawn back from his decayed horse-teeth. He looks distressed, reluctant: yes, he is responsible for the children, some of them are probably his, and anyway, he is responsible for good order among the dependants of the farm workers and already the farmer has had occasion to complain about the number of dogs they are harbouring (a danger to the game birds).

— It’s not as if they needed them for food. To eat. No, eh? You’ve got plenty of fowls. They’re just piccanins and they don’t know, but you must tell them, those eggs are not to play games with. If they find eggs in the veld they are not to touch them, you understand? Mustn’t touch or move them, ever. — Of course he understands perfectly well but wears that uncomprehending and pained look to establish he’s not to blame, he’s burdened by the behaviour of all those other people down at the compound. Jacobus is not without sycophancy. - Master — he pleads — Master, it’s very bad down there by the river. I’m try, try phone you yesterday night. What is happen there. The man is dead there. You see him. — And his hand, with an imperious forefinger shaking it, stabs the air, through chest-level of the farmer’s body to the line of willows away down behind him.

— A man? —

— There — there — The herdsman draws back from his own hand as if to hold something at bay. His forehead is raised in three deep wrinkles.

— Somebody’s died? —

The herdsman has the authority of dreadful knowledge. - Dead man. Solomon find it yesterday three o’clock. —

— Has something happened to one of the boys? What man? —

— No. Yes, we don’t know who is it. Or what. Where he come to be dead here on this farm. -

— A strange man. Not one of our people? —

The herdsman’s hands go out wide in exasperation. — No one can say who is that man. - And he begins to tell the story again: Solomon ran, it was three o’clock, he was bringing the cows back. — Yesterday night, myself I try sometime five time — he holds up his spread fingers and thumb — to phone you in town. —

— So what have you done? —

— Now when I’m see the car come just now I run from that side where the mealies are —

— But with the body? —

This time the jutting bearded chin as well as the forefinger indicate: — The man is there . You can see, still there, master, come I show you where is it. -

The herdsman stumps past. There is nothing for the farmer to do but follow. Why should he go to look at a dead man near the river? He could just as well telephone the police at once and leave it to the proper channels that exist to deal with such matters. It is not one of the farm workers. It is not anyone one knows. It is a sight that has no claim on him.

But the dead man is on his property. Now that the farmer has arrived the herdsman Jacobus has found the firmness and support of an interpretation of the event: his determined back in the blue overalls, collar standing away from slightly bent neck, is leading to the intruder. He is doing his duty and his employer has a duty to follow him.

They go back over the lucerne field and down the road. A beautiful morning, already coming into that calm fullness of peace and warmth that will last until the sun goes, without the summer’s climax of rising heat. Ten o’clock as warm as midday will be, and midday will be no hotter than three in the afternoon. The pause between two seasons; days as complete and perfectly contained as an egg.

The children are gone; the place where they were might just as well have been made by a cow lying down in the grass. A coyly persuasive voice blaring a commercial jingle is coming out of the sky from the direction of the compound… YOUR GIANT FREE… SEND YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS TODAY.

The two men have passed the stationary car and almost reached the gate. The tiny boy in the jersey bursts from nowhere but is disconcerted at the sight of the herdsman. Hanging from his plump pubis his little dusty penis is the trunk of a toy elephant. He stands watching while Jacobus unhooks the loop of rusty wire that encloses the pole of the barbed fence and the pole of the gate, and the gate, which is just a freed section of the fence, falls flat.

The road has ruts and incised patterns from the rains of seasons long past, petrified, more like striations made over millennia in rock than marks of wheels, boots and hooves in live earth. There was no rain this summer but even in a drought year the vlei provides some moisture on this farm and the third pasture has patches where a skin of greenish wet has glazed, dried, lifted, cracked, each irregular segment curling at the edges. The farmer’s steps bite down on them with the crispness of biscuits between teeth. The river’s too low to be seen or heard; as the slope quickens his pace through momentum, there is a whiff in the dry air (the way the breath of clover came). A whiff — the laundry smell of soap scum. The river’s there, somewhere, all right.

And the dead man. They are jogging down to the willows and the stretch of reeds, broken, criss-crossed, tangled, collapsed against themselves, stockaded all the way to the other side — which is the rise of the ground again and someone else’s land. When it is not a drought year it is impossible to get across and the cows stand in midstream and gaze stupidly towards islands of hidden grass in there that they scent but cannot reach. The half-naked willows trail the tips of whips an inch or two above the threadbare picnic spot, faintly green, with its shallow cairn of stone filled with ashes among which the torn label off a beer carton may still be read by the eye that supplies the familiar missing letters. With the toe of his rubber sole the farmer turns, as he goes, a glint where the bed of the river has dropped back; someone lost a ring here, last summer. The blue overalls are leading through dead thistle, past occasional swirls of those swamp lilies with long ragged leaves arranged in a mandala, among the amphibian tails of a patch of tough reeds that keep their black-green flexibility all winter. The two men plunge clumsy as cattle into the dry reeds, exploding a little swarm of minute birds, taking against their faces the spider-web sensation of floss broken loose, by their passage, from seeding bulrush heads. There lying on his face is the man.

The farmer almost ran on to him without seeing: he was close behind his herdsman and plunging along doggedly.

The dead man.

Jacobus is walking around the sight. There is a well-trampled clearing about it — the whole compound must have been down to have a look. — How is happen. What is happen here. Why he come down here on this farm. What is happen. — He talks on, making a kind of lament of indignation. The farmer is circling the sight, too, with his eyes.

One of them. The face is in the tacky mud; the tiny brown ears, the fine, felted hair, a fold or roll where it meets the back of the neck, because whoever he was, he wasn’t thin. A brown pinstripe jacket, only the stubs of button-shanks left on the secondhand sleeves, that must once have been part of some white businessman’s suit. Smart tight pants and a wide belt of fake snakeskin with fancy stitching. He might be drunk, lying there, this city slicker. But his out-dated ‘stylish’ shoes are on dead, twisted feet, turned in stiff and brokenly as he was flung down. Except for the face, which struck a small break or pocket between clumps, his body isn’t actually on the earth at all, but held slightly above it on a nest of reeds it has flattened, made for itself. From here, the only injury he shows is a long red scratch, obviously made by a sharp broken reed catching his neck.