How did you eventually reach the car, reach home?
There are shreds that you remember. Jak charging, swearing, past the slow line of cars on the left shoulder of the service road, Agaat tumbling around on the back seat rigid as a totem pole. You clinging with both hands to the door handle on your side. The abuse that you had to listen to as far as you travelled, the terrifying speed.
You and this golliwog of yours, I’m never taking you anywhere again! Never, do you hear? I’m not going to have my name dragged through the mud in front of the whole goddamned world. That was how Jak began. Spit showered the car as he spoke.
It’s a great day in my son’s life and from beginning to end you cause nothing but embarrassment! There I had to drop everybody just like that to tag along looking for you and your pet woolly-lamb, I was still thinking after the heat of the day let’s take a few people and Jakkie out for a drink somewhere in a nice restaurant overlooking the sea, but no, Milla gets lost so that I have to get the whole of Ysterplaat on red alert! Where were you in any case that you didn’t hear it on the loudspeakers? Mrs Milla de Wet, would Mrs Milla de Wet please go to Gate B, her husband Mr Jak de Wet is waiting for her there. Mrs de Wet! Mrs de Wet! Everybody’s laughing at me, the man who can’t look after his wife, there I am for hours standing at Gate B and then on top of it all I have to explain what a wog’s doing in the whites-only toilet. How do you think one explains something like that? And that after I warned you. From the start! But you won’t listen! It’s Agaat here and Agaat there and Agaat everywhere! Jesusgodjerusalemalmighty, I have so had enough! Do you hear me? Of you and the scum you brought into my house! Enough! Enough! Enough!
Jak didn’t speak again. He switched on the radio and turned the knob of the shortwave band, to and fro through the crackling whistling stations until he found what he was looking for. The news and weather forecast. He turned up the volume all the way. There’d been more riots on the Rand and reports of subversive activities. And the forecast for the winter-rainfall area from the Hottentots Holland mountains to Cape Agulhas was a strong south-easter, temperatures of more than thirty degrees and a warning of a fire hazard.
It was deep dusk by the time you got home. That hour of the Overberg summer that always filled you with apprehension. The deceptive light, the smell of sunbaked dust, the wind fraying out the bluegums.
Agaat opened the gate and didn’t get back into the car. Not that Jak waited, he pulled off in a cloud of dust and charged in violently over the gravel. You caught a glimpse of Agaat in the side mirror. The dogs were jumping up against her. She bumped them aside with her hips.
Later, after you’d had your bath, after Jak had withdrawn himself, you switched on the table lamps and drew the curtains in the house, fed the dogs and fetched the cream in the little room where the separator stood. In the backyard everything was dark and still. The bolt on the door of the outside room was still drawn. The bottles for the house milk had not been sterilised and set out on the table in the kitchen as usual. The tray that Agaat always put out on the work surface with cups for supper, was standing up straight behind the kettle on the shelf. You looked in the food tins that you’d brought out of the car. The sausage sweaty, the sandwiches soggy, untouched.
You got the torch and put on a pair of tackies to go and look for Agaat. At first you were angry. Why should I have to fret myself? you thought. Everybody flaunts their feelings, but does anybody ever ask me what I’m feeling?
But you were hungry and you felt alone. Agaat would be hungry. You wanted to sit at the kitchen table having tea while she made tomato eggs.
At the dam you ordered the dogs, look for Agaat, look!
Itchy goose-down blew up against you. The quacking and gabbling of ducks and geese and smaller waterfowl clamoured as far as the dogs ran and there was a barking and a splashing and a fluttering of wings and a rustling in the reeds before everything became still again. After a while they were back, came and sat by you with gaping mouths.
You switched off the torch. The dogs’ racing breaths made it impossible to listen properly.
Go home, you showed them, get home you two.
What did you want to listen for? A sighing over the water? A weeping in the grass?
Those weren’t Agaat’s sounds.
The brisk untying of apron bands, yes. The intake of breath when she picked up something with the weak hand, the squelching of her rubber soles. But those were all indoor sounds, caught and reflected by floors and walls and ceilings, the sounds of the bright domestic hours. Now the house against the rise with its table lamps behind the curtains looked to you like a glowing coal in the night.
You’d have to listen for a low humming, you thought, or a crackling. Conditions were favourable.
There were still two places where you could go and look, in the poplar grove by the little vlei on the other side of the dam, and on the koppie in front of the house where she often walked.
You didn’t switch on the torch again and on the level ground under the dam wall you found your way to the vlei. There was almost no water in it. You sniffed the air for the smell of fire, but there was only the stench of duckweed and something else, dead cat.
Further along next to the poplar grove the smell got stronger. When you entered the grove, you switched on the torch again and flashed up against the white trunks of the poplars. You tried to imagine, Agaat, swinging from her apron bands, the head with the white cap tilted forward. But it wasn’t an honest image, you thought. You could more realistically expect a blunt object to the head.
What were you thinking? That she’d allow herself to be found by you? To be comforted? What were you really looking for there in the dark? Your whole body was in turmoil. There was a metallic taste in your mouth.
You didn’t see the ditch in time. The torch shot from your hand as you tumbled down the side. You screamed as you tried to find a handhold against the side, but the soil was mushy and muddy and broke up into lumps under your hands. Then you were at the bottom, there was something under your feet, it gave way with a smacking sound, you sank into it up to your ankles. Something crawled against your legs. You screamed again, with long steps tried to get out of the muck. The stench was unbearable. Then you saw the torch lying faintly gleaming.
And it was shining on something that crawled. It took a while for you to make out what it was. The head of a cow, half rotten, with white maggots writhing in the eye sockets and the ears and in the bloated-open mouth and muzzle in which nothing was visible of the gentle expression of the Jersey.
How did you get home? You wanted to escape from your own skin. You ran, a flare of stench.
You got your shoes off, rinsed yourself as well as you could under the jet of the garden hose. There was light in the backyard. You remained standing in the door of the kitchen. You didn’t want to go into the house in your dirty dress.
Agaat didn’t want to see you. She was pouring the milk from the cans neatly into the bottles. She was wearing a clean apron and a new uniform, a fresh stiffly starched cap on her head. The tea cups were set out, you could hear the kettle boiling. She extracted a bottle from the steaming bowl of water by the mouth with forceps and inverted it to drip dry. One, two, three drops in the bowl. Shake, shake, shake.
She looked up. Wooden eye.
Sis, what’s that stink, she said, I’m working with milk here. She looked down and tsk-ed at the bail of the can that kept on falling over her hand as she poured out the milk.
Bring a towel, you said, and my slippers and an old dressing-gown.