Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

He did not speak to this woman about her dreams. That was her husband’s trouble, not his. But he was told she said if she had dreamed of cattle instead of a wild animal, she would have known what she must do. She would kill a beast and then she would be well again.

It was too warm for the woollen scarf but he wore a knitted cap. He pushed it up from the pursed lips that were like the raised imprint of some strange kiss on his forehead. He had not let the sun get at it yet. It did not hurt but felt tender to hands that touched it. He smiled at the thought of the poor creature, Phineas’s wife. — I’m not ill. —

The woman who lived with him said — But you were nearly dead. You were dead there in the veld. -

Jacobus was always talking. He waited and waited for the right time to ask him. But the only thing to do if you wanted to ask something was just to say it, even if it had nothing to do with what Jacobus was busy telling you. — Was I dead when you found me? —

They were washing the old bull after he had been out to stud.

— Well how could you be dead, you are here now. - Jacobus grinning; or grimacing with his enthusiastic scrubbing among the curly suds of the bull’s flank: the old rake had shat himself, he stood wearily on his stumpy legs, a drooping mustachio at the end of his retracted penis, while Solomon played the hose on to him under Jacobus’s direction.

— But did you think I was dead. —

Jacobus looked up dramatically. He was ready to tell the story again. Spray from the hose sprinkled his woolly beard with tinsel.

— Would you have said, he is dead. —

— Of course you were like a dead man! Didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t snore the way people do when they’re dead-drunk —

A sensation of terrible cold and darkness — that must have been when he was left lying there naked — and the cold, cold edges, the freezing-edged pain over which another, warm darkness flowed — his wound and the blood flooding it. And then he died, alone in the third pasture with the one who was already dead there. As if he died — because he knew nothing, remembered nothing, he did not know he was being carried, he did not know Jacobus and the others were weeping over him, trying to get him to open his eyes, leave the other one and come back to them.

The dark, the freezing ragged edges — they did exist, as the other one did, outside himself and the moment before he died: he knew where. In the sky when a great storm was coming and a thick darkness was suspended from the hills over their heads on the farm, at the edge of a precipice of dark, terribly high up where the frozen rain, the hail, came from, out of the heat of summer, the black ledge of the storm was torn and ragged. That was where it seemed to him he was, that was what he had had knowledge of when he wasn’t there in the veld to answer Jacobus, or to know himself travelling in the pick-up and lying in bed in the hospital.

Phineas’s wife was a nuisance to everyone. The business of wanting to dance and confess was not something done once, over and done with. She wanted people to come and clap for her again. But they all had better things to do when work was finished. It was not as if she ever had any beer to put people in the mood for singing and clapping. Izak laughed and laughed, softly, and would not come near, even the first time. — Why? — But he wouldn’t answer anyone. — It’s not his religion. — When did he say that? — I’m telling you, I know why. — Izak let them go on talking about him; he smiled in their attention. Dorcas came once but was forbidden by her husband, now known behind his back as ‘Christmas Club’, to do so again.

— He’s right. There was enough trouble already. -

— What trouble? —

All very well for Alina to take that tone; but between Jacobus and Alina there was the special circumstance of their accountability to the farmer, which the others did not share.

— She’s bringing people from over the hill there. And also from the location. —

— Tsa! man! He doesn’t know who is living here and who isn’t. —

— He’ll tell me, why do I let everybody walk around on his farm, they will steal cattle, there will be fights, look how Solomon was attacked… that other business down there… this, that — I don’t like her sickness, myself. —

Alina was authoritative with the speculations and evidence of her long talks with the other women who lived up at the compound with Phineas’s wife. It was even said that the woman would not sleep with her husband any more. — You know what’s supposed to be wrong with her, don’t you? —

— I don’t like that woman. I never liked her. First always drunk, so that he complains there’s too much beer on this farm. Now this. If Phineas was not such a good man with the cattle, I would say let them go. But poor Phineas —

— You know, don’t you? She feels the amatongo in her shoulders. It’s the disease that means you’re going to get the power. —

Jacobus drew snot through the back of his nose into his throat, tasting something unpleasant. He circled his forefinger, pointing it stiffly at his right temple. Alina’s face wanted to laugh, but she was afraid to. — She says she’s not surprised — they tell me. It’s true she always knew about plants for medicines. —

— I will buy my Epsom from the India. —

And now she could laugh.

Solomon told his brother he had dreamt of the bull with the white face, that young one whose nose-ring was still new. They had never found out who the men were who had lured Solomon out at night and left him for dead in the veld. They could only roughly calculate how long he must have lain in the third pasture. Solomon would have liked to have known how long he lay there. It was a miracle that he was alive now. Although he was the younger, his brother had treated him with a special respect, ever since he had recovered. He listened carefully to everything he said; he listened while Solomon told him that the woman who was making a nuisance of herself had said if she had dreamt of a beast instead of wild animals she would have known what to do. He said — There is no pain? —

The cap was being worn, the stitched lips were not to be seen.

— Sometimes a headache. —

Solomon did not tell his brother the thought that he had lain in the veld (how long?) with that other one down there who had never been taken away, never been buried by his own people. For — how many hours? — there had been two of them dead there instead of one.

Jacobus said: — That’s his bull, the young one, you dream about, you know. —

They owned no cattle: not a single beast between the lot of them. That woman who thought she was going to be a diviner, she was dreaming back somewhere in the old days, somewhere in the Reserves, where you killed a beast from your herd for a wedding, a funeral, a thanksgiving, or to put things right — cleanse the kraal, they used to call it.

If a beast died of some illness that did not make it dangerous to eat, Jacobus was always given permission by the farmer to cut it up and distribute it to the farm workers. Sometimes it was possible to buy from some other farm meat from an ox that had died in this way. Solomon’s dream had been of a young Hereford bull like the farmer’s, but even a live slaughter ox would have cost the money he earned in six months. He paid five rands for the goat. Goats were unobtainable from the farms round about because the farmers didn’t allow them to be kept; it came from a man in the location who grazed it on waste land near his house. It turned out to be a goat with a white face, although Solomon had not asked for anything special.

Everybody seemed to have a hand in the arrangements. The goat arrived led by a child the day before and was tethered in the barn on Jacobus’s insistence — If he sees anything eating his grass or anyone even picking up a bird’s egg on his farm, you know there is big trouble. — Jacobus was not pleased about the whole thing; the farmer always came out at weekends.