So then I drank the sweet tea & read the chapter on hides in the old Handbook for farmers the removal of hair in bran & in manure & braying of the thongs till dressed & the cawr snow-white (‘core’? old book = full of funny words & spelling mistakes must point them out to A.) & tanning of small & large hides with vitriol & barkbush. Methods that few people know about nowadays.
Pa taught me the importance of this old knowledge he said the wheel always turns my child there will be a time again of poverty & need & the farmer who doesn’t know about the old ways then will be gone to glory & then there I sat crying over Pa’s underlinings in the parts about the deterioration of the veld in our country & the exhaustion & ill-treatment of the soil. That is what A. must also learn the old ways & the care of the defenceless earth, the little pans & the vleis & the ‘tortisses’ & how we must protect it all against the onslaughts of so-called civilisation because how many centuries does it not take for mother-rock to crumble & disintegrate to soil & then humans come along & destroy it through avarice & carelessness.
J. is actually the one who should be reading it all but it’s not as if he takes any notice of me also laughed that time when I said I wasn’t selling the donkeys that mother kept what is a farm without a donkey. If the plough broke or the tractor wouldn’t go in those first years & the parts couldn’t arrive immediately from town then one could carry on with the animals & hand-plough so that one didn’t fall behindhand too much with the work. Then one regained some respect for the blood-sweat with which Gdrift was carved out of the earth.
Underlined in pencil for A. the sentence in the Foreword that says that the Handbook will help the farmer in his material growth just as the Bible helps him in his spiritual growth & then I lay down on her bed because I was suddenly very tired & closed my eyes & prayed for my child who has to be born into this world. Must have dropped off for a while because next thing I saw a broad strip of sunlight was slanting over the linoleum. Inside the lunch was already being brought to the table J. was at the table & he frowned when he saw me & pointed at my forehead with his fork if it wasn’t one of A.’s caps that I’d tried on there in her room in front of her mirror so light it is you don’t even know you’re wearing it. What is that? asked J. is that your mothering-bonnet? Fortunately I could take it off before Somebody Else saw it.
4
Agaat stirs on her bed in the passage. I see the first glimmering through a chink in the curtain. It’s five o’clock on the phosphorescent hands of the alarm clock on the night-table.
Agaat doesn’t need an alarm. Every morning just before the grandfather clock chimes the hour, she awakens. By then I have been lying awake for a long time. Sometimes I pretend to be sleeping so that she can sing. Gaat sings me awake.
There’s only one creak as she sits up on the camp stretcher. While the chimes echo in the front room, she doesn’t budge. What could she be thinking of in between the five strokes? Would she be steeling herself there on her bed, looking down the dark passage with the first light falling from the rooms, from door frame to door frame? Would she be swiftly running through her schedule for the day? Praying perhaps? No, Agaat doesn’t pray, she only prays on my behalf, she says, that will have to suffice.
At the beginning of winter she carried in the stretcher for the first time from the storeroom. Too flimsy for her to my mind, she’s filled out these last few years. Since she’s been looking after me she no longer works so much around the house and in the garden. Dig here, scrub there, I hear her handing out orders.
At night I don’t hear her stir. She sleeps like a ramrod on that bier. I can see it before me. On her back with the hands on the chest. The sleep of the vigilant. Twice a night, once before midnight and once after, she comes and stands by my bed in the dark on bare feet. She is not officially awake. Nor am I, I pretend to be asleep. Sometimes of late she then goes out at the back and stays away for an hour or longer.
I don’t hear her go into the back room. Where on earth would she roam?
There’s the first stirring now. The stretcher creaks as she stretches to reach the switch of the passage light. She takes one gulp of water from her mug. The enamel krrts on the floor as she sets it down. Another creak as she swings her legs off the little bed. A swish as she puts on her housecoat over her nightdress. A squeak and a bang as she folds the stretcher, a shuffling as she slides it into the second broom-cupboard next to the bathroom.
She walks down the passage. Thud, thud, thud, go her bare feet on the boards. She unlocks the kitchen door, talks to the dogs, closes the lower door behind her again. The screen door squeaks, the screen door slams, seven paces, the outside room’s door is opened, the lock, the bolt, the lower door that scuffs on the linoleum. Washing and dressing is what she’s going to do. Use the bathroom in the house, I try to get through to her, but she pretends not to understand me.
Koffie and Boela make whimpering sounds. I hear them paw the lower door of the kitchen. She no longer allows them in my room. On Leroux’s advice, she says.
I don’t believe her. From the day that she started to read from the booklets, she forbade them here. As if she wanted to be the dog herself.
She cannot abide to see other life in my room.
Just as little as she can abide the idea of moving into the guest bedroom and to stay in the house decently with me. Why not? There’s more than enough space here, I gesture, but there’s no getting her to understand.
I miss the dogs. Always when they came galloping in here, I felt as if I was still somebody’s owner. First with the front paws on the bed’s edge, wet muzzles pressed in under my hands, smell of dog bodies in my nose, laughing mouths and panting breaths, a whole warm brown fur-covered life here over my white covers. With their wag-tails they whisked the air into life here in the room in the mornings. After a while they would calm down and settle on the little mat by the glass door next to Agaat’s chair, and I would look at how their eyebrows twitched as they watched me for a while and how they at length would sigh and go to sleep. I could watch them like that until they started dreaming, till the hind legs started kick-kicking, and the little muscle started twitching in the forepaw and the lip started quivering with a muted growl. Chasing rabbits.
Now it’s only Agaat’s chair there in front of the glass door. There she sits and embroiders during the day if she has time, if she feels well-disposed towards me, and in the evenings until I fall asleep.
It’s a big cloth. She’s been working at it ever since I’ve not been able to move, all of eleven months. Started it a long time ago, it seems, because one side had already been thoroughly worked when she brought it in here the first time. I often signal with my eyes, let’s have a look, but she pretends not to see. Now the first light darts through the chink in the curtain onto the embroidered cloth where she put it down on her chair. The decoration is dense and thick in white satin thread, an intricate combination of drawn stitch and shadow stitch. If I focus in a certain way, the strip on which the light falls looks like a band of white marble with convoluted detail sculpted in low relief.
She’s made great strides with the embroidery, Agaat, she’d by now be able to add a few chapters to the embroidery book.
Quarter past five, it chimes. She’s back in the kitchen where she put the kettle on on her way out, so that now she only has to add boiling water to the bag and the thickening agent. Here she is coming down the passage. First tray, set out last night, second quarter-hour of the day. Tea. Morning medicine.