Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

The chestnut trees are buried up to the bole in a mixture of bone-meal, well-dried manure and the soil the digging displaced. All the colours of the layers are mixed up, now, there will be a fault — negligible, on the natural scale — where the two small trees now stand like branches children have stuck in sand to make a ‘garden’ that will wither in an hour.

There are a number of other positions he could have chosen. He sees that, walking over the farm with his trees in mind, superimposing two large chestnuts in flower (pink or white? — he forgot to ask the nurseryman, but perhaps one doesn’t know until the first blooming) at various points in his landscape. The irrigation ditches are full of water. Heavy grasses sag into it in wet swags. Frogs flip themselves like thrown stones from an (absent) schoolboy. For the first of seven summers the river is at its full summer height, and he can hear its accelerated pace, its raised voice above the sounds of birds and reeds and grasses, behind the yells of one of the herdsmen chasing an obstinate cow. He can hear it all over the farm. It’s not easy to get near. The third pasture is deceptive. A glossy, rough, matted acid green with here and there patches of grass flowering bronze straw stars looks luxuriant and solid enough to take an army over it without being so much as trampled. But there’s no foothold. As you put the weight of a boot on the grass it lets you into water; it’s all marshy, down there. And even in the middle of the day mosquitoes are active and find your neck. He has to retreat from the reeds, where he can hear waterbirds quarrelling somewhere in there, safe from everything — there must be hundreds of them this year. The mealies are going to be magnificent, at this rate. Up on higher ground he hears himself crashing through them as if he were coming towards himself, about to come face to face with… He stops dead, they creak and rustle, their sap rising to right themselves after his shouldering. It could only be one of them — a farm worker, that is, a familiar black face among black faces, up here. Maybe one of their children on guilty childish business, searching for birds’ eggs. He doesn’t move and the other doesn’t move; it’s as if each presence (himself and the sound of his own breathing) waits for the other, as concealment. Again he’s almost tempted to speak, the sense is strong; to make an ass of himself, saying aloud: — You’re there. It seems to you that it is to you that observations are being addressed: The mealies look as if they’re going to be magnificent, at this rate. —

The hairs on their leaves rasp at his clothes. The cobs are clubs pressed against the central canes, with a tassel of silky green fringe tagged at the top. To demonstrate, to test a cob he has to slice with his thumbnail through the tight bandage of ribbed leaves that encases it like a mummy. Through the slit the nail suddenly reaches and penetrates the white nubs so young they are not yet quite solid, and their white milky substance flows under the nail and round the cuticle. Even here, there is a great deal of water: coming out of the mealie-field, he has jumped a ditch and landed on a bank that gives way. His left leg plunges before him down into a hole, he is one-legged, lop-sided, windmilling his arms for balance, and he regains it only by landing with one palm hard on the wet, tussocky ground. He doesn’t quite know what to do next, for a moment; he stays there, in this grotesque variation of the position of a runner poised for the starting shot. He could have broken a leg. But he is unhurt. He must get his leg out of the mud, that’s all. It has already seeped in over the top of the boot and through the sole and holds him in a cold thick hand round the ankle. A soft cold black hand. Ugh. It’s simply a matter of getting enough leverage, with the other leg and the rest of his body, to pull himself free. As he heaves, the mud holds him, holds on, hangs on, has him by the leg and won’t let him go, down there. Now it’s just as if someone has both arms tightly round the leg. It’s suction, of course, that’s all; the more he pulls the greater the vacuum. He would get out of his boot if he could, but the leg’s caught nearly to the knee. He pulls and pulls; down there, he’s pulled and pulled. It’s absurd; he’s begun to giggle with queer panicky exasperation.

And then, he’s been let go. That’s exactly how it feels: something lets go — the suction breaks. He has to stump up to the house with an elephantiasis of mud on one foot. It’s heavy as lead. It feels as if part of him is still buried.

Jacobus is full of concern, of course. The good old devil half-carries him to the tap, tries to scrape the mud away with a spade and, making a hell of a mess, twice the mess necessary if he’d been left to deal with it himself, washes the clotted earth clear of the shoe. Alina, on Jacobus’s excitable and confused instructions, finds a pair of veldskoen in the house and brings them. They are a little too short, the old shoes of a half-grown boy. But they will do. That’s what comes of having two places; you never have what you need, in either.

The sun has turned to a thickening blur of radiance and the heat is intense. It’ll come down again, this afternoon.

— Too much rain, Jacobus. —

— Too much rain, master. —

… the heaven was hard and it did not rain. The people persecuted him exceedingly. When he was persecuted I saw him and pitied him, for I saw men come even by night and smite his doorway with clubs, and take him out of his house… And on another year, when they saw that the heaven wished to destroy the corn, they hated him exceedingly… I heard it said that it rained excessively that it might cover the dead body of Umkqaekana with earth. I heard it said they poisoned him and did not stab him. I heard it said that those people were troubled, for their gardens were carried away by a flood.

The weather came from the Moçambique Channel.

Space is conceived as trackless but there are beats about the world frequented by cyclones given female names. One of these beats crosses the Indian Ocean by way of the islands of the Seychelles, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes. The great island of Madagascar forms one side of the Channel and shields a long stretch of the east coast of Africa, which forms the other, from the open Indian Ocean. A cyclone paused somewhere miles out to sea, miles up in the atmosphere, its vast hesitation raising a draught of tidal waves, wavering first towards one side of the island then over the mountains to the other, darkening the thousand up-turned mirrors of the rice paddies and finally taking off again with a sweep that shed, monstrous cosmic peacock, gross paillettes of hail, a dross of battering rain, and all the smashed flying detritus of uprooted trees, tin roofs and dead beasts caught up in it.

From the Moçambique Channel a mass of damp air was pushed out over Southern Africa, and as the other factors — atmospheric pressure, prevailing winds — did not head it off, turned to rain. It began one afternoon but unlike other cloudbursts common on the highveld after a hot morning, did not stop at sunset. The rain went on all night — a really good rain, people remarked, steady and soaking — and continued most of the next day. A set-in rain; one of the three-day rains that, in a good year, mark the beginning of the end of summer and ensure that the grazing will last out well into winter. After three days it did slacken, but the tarpaulin of cloud bulged low with more, and by afternoon it had begun again, a rain steady as ticker-tape. A dark rain, a tropical rain, not the summer storms of a high altitude often lit by the sun still shining in another part of the vast sky.

The English-language evening paper published a picture of a pet dog being rescued from a flooded storm-drain by the fire brigade. In the city, black men put specially-shaped waterproof covers on their hats. On the farm the children huddled along to school in plastic bags that had held superphosphates. The streets of the location returned to the vlei of which it had once been part, and the white policemen at the local station had time to send off entries for several commercial radio competitions: there was a drop in crime.