Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

But they all knew Jacobus ate meat at least once a week. The farmer brought a brown paper parcel for him that was put in the refrigerator in the locked house. Many of them had not had any since a calf had broken a leg and been slaughtered two months before. — Well if you want, we can have meat and beer instead of working on Monday or Tuesday? —

Jacobus ignored the joke. — You never know when he comes these days. —

People started arriving on Saturday night. The old women from the location who came to the farm for weeding in summer must have heard about it, and they walked over on Sunday morning. There were Solomon’s brother’s people, from across the vlei. That crazy woman seemed to have asked some people of her own; they behaved almost as if it were her goat that was going to be killed. Anyway, they brought a lot of beer. The goat was led into the yard where everyone was already gathered except her followers, who were still at their singing and clapping in Phineas’s room. It was happy to be out of the dark of the barn and pulled determinedly towards the cabbage leaves some woman had left from her cooking, breaking a chain of droppings like a broken string of shiny black beads. In the instant of straining for the leaves it was thrown on its right side by many hands. Solomon’s brother stabbed it over the aorta. It took quite a few minutes to die; the noise it made seemed to be muffled out gradually, as if some invisible weight were descending on the creature. At last — quite soon — it made no sound.

Solomon heard what there was to hear but did not see. He stood as he had been instructed by people there who knew about these things, facing away, with a friend who worked with his brother for the bus company. The friend spoke conversationally to the air — Here is your beast, Bengu, father of Solomon, Nomsa, mother of Solomon. It is to say we give thanks that you have cared for him. May God protect his child —

No one among the crowd was paying any attention; already the men were gathered over the dying goat, everyone was animated by the thought of meat and wanted to get on with the skinning and cutting up so that cooking could begin. The butchering was done expertly under advice and argument from onlookers. Some parts were given to the women, others reserved for the men; the gall was poured over the entrails to make them tasty. Somebody remembered to collect the blood in a tin and put it at the back of the room where Solomon slept, where it was to be left overnight. Among the older people, a clay pot of beer circulated from mouth to mouth as they squatted; the others filled jam-tins and mugs of their own from the milk-buckets and plastic petrol-containers of beer. Even Phineas’s wife drank again, darting eagerly as the goat towards good things after her days of incarceration in a room. Dancing and clapping and singing were fired by meat and drink and the two oil-drums covered with hide sometimes beat so strongly they vied with the shouting and laughter, sometimes lazily dropped to a panting mark-time, but never ceased, never broke the tempo of pleasure, of excess, that regulated everyone’s blood. The sound of a party drew comers across the vlei. It went on all through the afternoon and almost through the night; people came and people went, long after the meat was finished, people slept and people woke. Jacobus was there like everybody else, as drunk as everybody else. There was nothing to worry about; the farmer and the young one had been and gone early in the day. Once or twice Jacobus remembered the irrigation but could not remember whether it was turned off or not; then he no longer remembered what it was that bothered him. The evening was nearly as warm as a summer night; later, when the cold rose from the river, beer had given them all a skin thick to it. They sweated and sang. There was no one to come up complaining to their rooms built of reject breeze-blocks, their lean-tos of tin and sacking, their fowl-runs made of scrap and filched fencing, that jigged up and down, appeared and disappeared in the light of their braziers blotted out and released by the movement of their bodies. The farmhouse was locked; Jacobus kept the key on a nail hidden from everyone: Jacobus kept them safe, he was hostage among them, hidden among them like the key, there was no one to come and find him. All the farm was dark except for where they gathered the life of the place together for themselves. He and his son with woman’s hair came and went away, leaving nothing, taking nothing; the farmhouse was empty. Stamping slowly, swaying from one foot to another, dancing conferred a balance of its own that drunkenness could not fell, and those who felt blows gathering in their fists mostly could not find their target. The night stood back from them; their voices, their treading feet and thumping drums spouted from it in plenty. The sleeping cattle, the barn, the sheds, the fanged and clawed machines the colour of football jerseys and smelling of oil, the pick-up and the caterpillar tractor, the water obediently flowing forever down there in the reeds — all — all might have been theirs.

On Monday Jacobus was relieved to see that he must have remembered to turn off the irrigation. The compound stank of fermented maize in various avatars — spilt beer, vomit, urine. And the few bones feasting dogs and flies were testimony to the inadequacy of a goat. Someone — who else but that woman? — had hung the horns above the sack that covered the doorway of Solomon’s room. He threw them on the ash-heap.

You should just see it. A pity you can’t see it. It was getting on for autumn that first time I came to look over the place — wasn’ t that the year the drought had already begun, anyway? You couldn’t imagine, looking at it then, it could be like this.

It is true any woman would go crazy over the multiple-headed lilies that are suddenly blooming out of these untidy streamers of leaf. Some were burned, in the fire; he remembers kicking at the exposed apexes of the bulbs, thinking they were done for. But no, with the early rain, they are out all over the veld: they don’t look like wild flowers, at all, they are something you’d pay through the nose for, from a florist’s, stems rising two-foot tall with a great bunch of five or six blooms at the top, white striped with red. He has counted seventeen over on the island that the fire made visible; the new reeds aren’t thick enough to hide it completely, yet. And where the river is narrower and the banks are clear of the reeds, red-hot pokers are flowering right out of the water. Down here at the third pasture the place looks like a water-garden on some millionaire’s estate.

You wouldn’t believe it was natural. If you could show it to Kurt and his old cronies! Genus: Amaryllidaceae ; species: Crinum bulbispermum. One of the secretaries at the office has been sent out to buy the best book available on veld flowers and from it he’s identified the lilies as the Orange River Lily, Crinum bulbispermum , spring-blooming, favouring swampy ground. It belongs to the amaryllis family, most of whose members are distinguished by the arrangement of the flowers in an umbel subtended by two or more bracts.

— Look — a perfect mandala- Showing off, or flirting by pretending to assume he would know what she was talking about, she gestured with her foot at some bedraggled plant. But in that courtship dance that led over pasture and donga, he had seen the foot rather than the plant: chipped red shield of a big toenail that protruded from the sandal like an imperious finger.

— A what? —

— The shape of these leaves — you know — it’s that whorl you see inside a marble. A symbol of the universe. —

— What sort of word is that? —

— Now you have me. Sanskrit, I think. — Crawling through a fence while he held the barbed wires apart for her, a strand of her hair caught and remained there. A pause; part of the fine old chase. She laughed while he jerked the hairs loose and wound them round his finger to present to her. He often saw tufts of coarse blond hair from the cows’ tails left like that, on the fences.