The orchard has ears.
That’s what Agaat said. You knew it was meant for you. You wormed away backwards and came to your feet carefully and walked back. You picked up a few oranges at random to have something in the pocket, a proof.
Pathetic, you thought, my child thinks I’m pathetic.
You went and changed into another dress. Nobody need know that you’d crawled on your stomach. On your back where the August sun had beaten down, it felt hot for a long time after, itchy all over the shoulders.
All the time that afternoon while Jak was taking Jakkie around on the farm to see his latest activities, you felt as if another tape was spooling in your head with commentary.
The bokbaai vygies a feverish rash, the Namaqualand daisies a knee-high blaze. The whole garden an indictment, wide and sorrowful.
Jakkie stood gazing at it.
Gaat’s work, you said.
Gaat’s and mine, Jak said. Your mother, don’t you know, had fainting fits for months on end. She went and fell into the ditch that evening after your medal parade. Agaat must have told you. On top of a rotten cow. Got such a fright she was all aquiver.
Jak held open the door of the new abattoir for Jakkie. He’d always been squeamish, he said, about the slaughtering on the block, the old axes and the knives at the draining-gutter under the bluegums, where the dogs lick, where the gauze cage sways in the wind.
An abattoir was an asset on Grootmoedersdrift, he said, solidly built, complete with shiny steel surfaces, neon lights, completely automated bearing-surfaces, industrial refrigeration plants. Jak tapped against the wall, stroked the shiny surfaces with the back of his hand.
Pale in the light of the cooler, in deep marinading dishes, lay the sheep and the suckling pigs with their legs tied together. Agaat had already threaded them along the spine on the central braai rods for the spit-braai the following day.
You stood back out of the cool-room. The dull light over the rumps, the ribs and legs, the headlessness, the disgrace.
You’d stood next to Agaat the day when the installers came to demonstrate the machinery. You couldn’t watch, the fear of the animals between the railings of the isolation pen, the swinging up onto the moving hook of the living animal, the blood in the drainage chutes, the screaming saw-blade.
See, now somebody with one hand can slaughter all on her own, Jak had shouted at her above the noise.
Jak took a sheep’s head out of the cooler, held it up by the ears before Jakkie. The head from the slaughter, belonging to Dawid and company, that they’d not collected yet. He slotted the blade into the grooves with a click and took hold of the head on either side by the ears. Slowly he guided it over the steel surface to the blade.
Now watch closely, he shouted above the din to Jakkie, no mess, no splinters, no force, as quick as breaking your neck.
It was a little year-old merino ewe, earmarked for the knife, a well-filled round fringe of wool on the forehead, the ears velvety, pinkish, the wrinkled nose of her race, the mouth already slightly crooked and shrunken under the nipple-coloured snout.
Jak pressed the head down on the neck, pushed it against the blade with his hands on either side on the cheeks. There was a jolt as the teeth of the saw seized the wool and then it was bone, a scream rising higher and higher as the fleece got thicker along the forehead.
Jak came away from the blade with the two open halves to show you. It looked like a cross-section model in a biology laboratory, the soft grey hemispheres of the brain, the white sinus chambers, the brown furrows of the nasal passages, the mouth cavity with the long halves of purplish tongue, thinner than you’d expect, from which a trickle of blood was welling, the jaw with the two front teeth sawn apart.
Easy, see, said Jak and clapped the two halves closed like a book. He turned the head at a right angle and starting from the snout he cut it up into cubes with rapid strokes, so that the outsides fell open onto the sawing surface like the pieces of a jigsaw. He switched off the machine, removed the blade and put it in the sink, and swept the blocks into the off-cuts pail with the back of his hand.
Child’s play, he said, and with his foot he pushed the pail in by the door of the cool-room.
What could have been going through Jak’s head? The logic of his sightseeing tour escaped you.
Next was Jak’s new merino stud rams. Under the direction of the stock-breeding expert of the Tygerhoek experimental farm he’d done experiments to determine the influence of the various feeds and feed supplements on the fertility of the sheep. You listened to him explaining all this to Jakkie. You could have sworn he was a stud farmer.
There were four rams, a dozen or so ewes, each in a separate pen with a number and a steel post-box in which the records of their feeding schedule were kept.
What you see here is worth tens of thousands of rand, said Jak, all the champions of Katbosch and Zoetendals Valley and Van Rheenen’s Heights.
They’re all very close already to the Super Utility Merino. That’s the objective.
Jakkie wasn’t listening. As if he were on the look-out, his eyes kept wandering in the direction of the road which one could see from the pens.
What he was looking for, said Jak, was one hundred per cent pre-potency, a lambing rate of a hundred and fifty per cent, early weaning time and the greatest possible uniformity and regularity of build, plus then super-wool qualities.
You all had to examine the one ram with him.
Hannibal, it said on the tin name-tag.
If you consider, Jak said, that there were only fat-tailed Hottentot sheep with knock-knees and Cape sheep covered in tatters in this country when the white man arrived here, then we’ve come a long way.
The ram retreated slightly on its delicate little feet as you approached.
Down on your haunches, said Jak, otherwise he’ll get a fright.
He clicked his tongue and murmured reassuringly.
Finer of fleece than the Rambouillet and even than the Vermont, hardier than the Saxony, more compact than the Australian, such a South African merino. Perfectly adapted to our conditions.
Jak folded open the fleece on the back so that you could see the wool.
Four inches, very soft, not a cross-thread in sight, just see how wide is the staple, he said. Feel. Top spinning quality. Look at the deep crimp.
Jak isolated one tuft.
He took Jakkie’s hand and put his fingers on the tuft. See how it stands up, nice cauliflower tip as well. Just feel the character. Deep character.