Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

The calving was another story. That you knew well enough from the first group of Simmentals. They were small-hipped and calved with difficulty. Nights long you and Dawid had to struggle in those first years to turn breached calves. Jak assisted clumsily, walked off after a while in impatience and from squeamishness at the blood. And then you remained behind alone, with over your shoulder the pair of eyes there on the stable’s partition wall, under the lanterns, murmuring after you the little words which you prattled at the cows. Six or seven she must have been then.

If you put new animals from a different environment with old herds that had multiplied for generations on a farm, it always caused problems. You didn’t fancy more problems. The problems in the backyard were already simmering again. And now, a year after the botulism disaster, another seventy of the Simmentals arrived. You insisted that they should be kept in a separate herd and that most of them be utilised singly for slaughtering while you would continue the dairy farming with which you were familiar, with the Jerseys.

How exactly did it come about on that spring day that the new herd of Simmentals were grazing with the Jerseys next to the river amongst the blue and yellow flowers? A gate left gaping? The new stable boy, Dawid’s town cousin Kadys, who didn’t know any better?

The guilty one would never be found. It was a Saturday afternoon, not a good afternoon for searching for culpable parties. And Jak wouldn’t listen to you about the glass flagon that he gave each worker on weekends with their rations. Otherwise I have to take them to town and then they drink in any case and I don’t drive with drunken hotnots on my lorry. And I don’t milk with drunken people over weekends, you said, but it fell on deaf ears. And now here was the trouble.

And if it hadn’t been for Agaat. She’d gone for a walk with Jakkie in his pram.

We’re going to the river, she said as she packed the bottle and his hat.

You knew why there specifically. It was sorrel time. It was the time for stringing garlands of pink sorrel and yellow sorrel on the long thin leaves of the wild tulips, an old game of Agaat’s, you had originally shown her how. You pull the sorrel flower off the germen so that the flower has a little hole at its point underneath and then you string them one by one tightly packed against one another on the tulip string until it’s full and then you tie the two ends together in a knot. Then you hang it around your neck. The garland of flowers, once in spring around her neck, around your neck. Such a garland took two hours to string and served as a necklace for a quarter of an hour. Then it was wilted. You knew that on that afternoon she would sit Jakkie down on his little blanket in the grass and plait him a garland and sing to him. In veld and vlei the spring’s at play. There was a hare, a fox and a bear, and birds in the willow tree. All the old spring songs.

Agaat came into your room, ten minutes after she’d left, without knocking and gave the child back to you in your arms.

And now? Are you back already? you asked.

And then you noticed her cap that was crooked.

They’ve been to the water already, they’re shitting slime, Agaat said.

She gulped to recover her breath. She push-pushed at her cap with the one hand.

You knew at once that it was the Simmentals she was talking about. They’d been to the poison plants. Cows that have grown up on a farm with wild tulips, don’t eat them. They learn from an early age that they’re more bitter than grass. So the old herd of Jerseys were safe even though the tulip bulbs were juicily in flower. It would be the new cattle, South West African cattle with a mindless hunger for greenery. After their arrival they’d been herded into a bare south-facing camp with hay and dry powerfeed and radishes to get them back into condition after their long journey in trains and lorries. Let loose in a green camp they would eat as if they were being paid for it, the young tulips first. And that would make them thirsty. And then they would drink. And water on tulips, that everyone knew, was as good as arsenic.

Agaat couldn’t talk fast enough.

Chased them out of the grazing shut the gate so that they can’t get to the river but there’s a small drinking trough in that dosing-camp where they are now it’s probably also been drunk dry they’re thirsty they’re shitting green strings their eyes are watering they’re going to die off Hamburg’s in the holding pen in front of the crush pen but he won’t take one pace farther will have to get him in the headclamp quickly!

She was right. A bull like that, even when he’s ill, couldn’t just be doctored in the open. One swing of his head and you’d all be sent sprawling in the mud.

You wanted to know where Dawid was, where Kadys and Julies were.

I had them called down there by the cottages, they don’t come out.

How did she get the bull into the holding pen single-handedly?

Agaat was trotting down the passage to the pantry. Jakkie put up a bawl. Jak was gone, would only be back from tennis by milking-time. Saar and Lietja arrived heavy with sleep at the kitchen door with a cluster of littl’uns. Big and small stretched their necks to see into the kitchen if under the licence of irregularity there was something to loot.

Hey you, back! Agaat scolded them.

You had your hands in your hair. That sort of time on Grootmoedersdrift. Agaat gave you a look of pull-yourself-together-on-the-spot.

So listen well now, she said to Saar and Lietja, the new cattle have eaten tulips. Do just what I say and do it quickly! Coffee first, four cans full, double-strength, with sugar!

She looked at you. It could mean only one thing. Hamburg was critical. Sweet strong coffee was all that could save the most valuable animals.

Agaat issued orders non-stop while she worked. The little canister of raw linseed oil she’d already had rolled out of the pantry and the bag of linseed had also been dragged out. In the big white basin with the red roses on the bottom she measured out three measuring jugs of linseed oil and added hot water and stirred with a spatula as she talked. In another gallon-drum she ordered ten measuring jugs of barley and water.

You just stood there, your legs paralysed.

Brandy! she shouted at you! Quicklime! Five double handfuls!

You managed to secure the child in his pram. He would just have to scream now.

Four dozen eggs, whites and yolks separated! she ordered Saar.

Four cups of brandy with the whites! Stir! In the hanslammers’ bottles! Screw shut! When the coffee’s brewed, get it cooled down! Pour it into cooldrink bottles! Be quick quick quick! Bring the roll of rubber piping with the elastic ring around the end behind the pantry door! And a knife! Have it ready! Get a move on!

Now you felt the adrenaline, quickened your pace, grabbed Jak’s ten-year-old brandy out of the cabinet, went and dragged the bag of lime out of the storeroom. You understood everything that Agaat commanded. You just couldn’t have remembered it all yourself so exactly. You knew what was at stake. The new bull was a champion and had cost tens of thousands of rand. You threw a few handfuls of lime into a canister. How much water? you called.

Fifteen jugs! Mix well!

Agaat was already measuring off the raw linseed oil in the big glass rusk canister.

Together you added the lime-water to the oil and shook it up in the bottle, you with your hands above and below, Agaat with her unbalanced grip round the sides.

First to and fro! Agaat directed. Up and down!

Now it’s right, leave it, put down! she called when it had formed a thick cream.

The vet! she called after you. Ring him, give him a list of our medicines, ask him if it’s right, tell him to come, quickly!