You tried to explain the idea of the soil blanket to him, but he just stood there gaping at you.
You’ll get your rations same as always, end of the month, you said. He just nodded, put his hat back on.
Jak was the next one who had to be instructed in how things were going to be run.
I want to go and show you something, you said.
It had better be something big, he said from behind his motoring magazine.
It is, you said. It’s the beginning and the end of everything.
You loaded a spade and a pickaxe and a sieve into the bakkie. You wanted to teach him about soil, but he just stood there next to you on the land kicking at clods. You thought: How must I move you? Must I first till you here amongst the stubble? Will that make you listen to me?
That was what you thought, but what you said was: You really must help me to think here, my husband. Without you I can’t tackle this thing.
Don’t think you can bribe me with sweet talk, Jak muttered.
You kissed him on the mouth. He drew away slightly. He didn’t like kissing.
Look, you said, this is now the one type of dryland that you find here, shallow soil on shale. Tends towards acidic. Poor in phosphorus.
Jak shrugged. And?
And so lime supplements and superphosphate. And salt lick for the animals.
You’d brought along the ground-plan with illustrations. You’d made a thorough study, you thought he had to get on top of things. He wouldn’t touch the new publications on the agricultural development of the district, never mind listening to the extension officer. There on the land under the bright March sun you tried again. You stood close to him. You made sure that your hip was pressing against the small of his back. You showed him the photographs of the vertical sections.
Nine inches deep on the hills and then rock, you explained, it’s a pretty slender resource.
You’d noticed how meagre his knowledge was. His so-called diploma, he’d just seen to it that he enrolled, attended one or two classes, never even did the practicals. You had to teach him to sit on a tractor. A cow’s udder gave him the creeps.
You get yellowish and reddish shallow soil along the hills, you tried. Mispah and Glenrosa. Sometimes it stretches down a bit deeper. Down below on the slopes in the untilled veld it’s different, Hutton and Clovelly soils, medium-depth red and yellow solids that drain well. But up here where you can plough, it erodes easily, here we have to make good contours and run-offs.
You rocked lightly against his body, adjusted the rhythm to the pace of your instruction.
Jak stood behind you. He pressed his body against you.
He pointed over your shoulder at the grazing below in the direction of the river.
So here it’s dry and down there it’s wet, he said with a snigger.
Just so, Jakop, you said. You laughed at his innuendo while in truth you were irritated, you pressed back against him with your buttocks.
Along the river the water table is high in winter and there you find that the soil puddles and becomes waterlogged, there we have to dig drainage troughs.
Really? Now tell me Mrs Soil Expert, what do you call the resource down below? Crumpet catch, hmmm? Banana bower? He placed his hands on your hips and drew you tightly against him.
Estcourt, Westleigh, Oakleaf, you rattled off the names, Longlands, Dundee, Avalon. You showed him the pictures in the book.
Some are shallow wet duplex soils and others are wet saline alluvial sand-loam or clay-loam. Also on the poor side.
So how are we going to get rich on poor soil, tell me that? His mouth was in your neck, you had goose pimples all over. He knew the sign.
Slowly, you said, very slowly and gradually.
He misunderstood you, had only one thing on his mind, took off his belt, said he was a hasty hound, wanted you to service him right there on the open land. But you thought the lesson would take more readily in a cool room at home.
That’s the way it is with most things when you’re dealing with men, your mother had taught you, you have to dip your demands in a dab of sugar. Remember, the truth is nothing in itself. Package it prettily.
You unbuttoned the top of your blouse and said that to get rich on Grootmoedersdrift would take years, a decade or more. You took his hand and held it against your breast and told him stories about farmers who grew too rapidly and went bankrupt just as rapidly. You took off your dress while you instructed him in the principles of crop rotation, you opened his fly slowly. Button by button you tried to get his mind round the subsurface method of cultivation. You slid your hands under his shirt and rubbed his nipples and explained to him why soil had to lie undisturbed for long periods and that rest was the best way of getting the soil structure rich and crumbly. You bowed your head over his abdomen and pleasured him and swallowed it all, because spitting out you knew he took as an insult.
Well, said Jak that morning in bed, his criterion for good healthy soil is a good healthy yield.
Regular activity, my wife, that’s all that’s necessary, on the home front as on the farming front. What goes around, comes around, or as the farmers say, eating is easy, threshing is labour.
And you lay back and for a second time let him have his way. Strike, you thought, strike your sword on the water, you think you possess me, but you don’t know me. Penetrate, you thought, invade me. What are you without my surfaces for you to break? My surfaces are merely my surfaces. Underneath I am unfathomable and you are a splinter in the void. When he rolled off you, he sighed and took your hand, squeezed it.
Just think, my little Milla, in a few years’ time there’ll be a whole string of little de Wets who can help sow and harvest one day. So we’d better make enough profit to buy some more land for them.
That was the beginning of the differences. Jakop and little Milla’s differences. He wanted to plough under the large stretches of natural veld on Grootmoedersdrift immediately for small-grain. You said it was of incalculable value, you should divide it up in camps and use it just like that, unspoilt, for rotation pasture. He wanted to plough the fallow lands five discs deep and clear them and level them with a section of rail track as he’d seen other farmers do. You said no, we break up the soil just enough to sow, with a ripper so that it doesn’t get too much air and we anchor the stubble only lightly in the topsoil. He said it looked like hotnot farming. You said it was a blanket, it preserved the moisture, it preserved the nitrogen. He wanted to sow all the fields at the same time every year with wheat. You maintained a four-stage cycle was best: Wheat, fallow, old land, wheat, with a green compost like lupins ploughed in every other cycle and dryland lucerne sown under the wheat for grazing when the harvest was in. All he wanted to concede was two-stage. Wheat, fallow, wheat, fallow. He wanted to plough straight down with the fall of the land on the steep slopes as the Okkenels had done all the years. Over your dead body, you said, there had to be contours because the soil had already eroded badly in places.
The outcome could probably have been foreseen.
He said, well, then you farm on your own.
You said, but you’re my husband, the land belongs to both of us, you promised to farm it with me.
Next thing you knew, he’d taken a loan from the Land Bank with Grootmoedersdrift entered as security and bought a large tract of adjacent hilly land to the south.
Let’s see, he said, you do as you see fit on your precious little farm and I farm the new land.
Fortune favoured him. After he had applied new fertilisers on a massive scale, he sowed double-density, new varieties of short-stem wheat on the ploughed land. He must beware of rust on the delicately bred strain of wheat, you warned. Oh my dear little prophetess of doom, he laughed. And indeed. Only goodness and mercy followed him. No summer rain to speak of, the air dry and clean, no sign of fungus. That October you saw farmers pulling off the road and clambering through the fences to walk in Jak’s lands and to feel the long fat ears and the short thick pipe of the wheat. Never again Klipkous, they said to one another. It was the last mature land in which you saw your father standing, hand on the hip, with a faraway look in his eyes.