It must be just before afternoon, time to unload the morning’s harvest and to make repairs and to draw breath, to rinse the itchy chaff and the straw from the eyes. The combine harvester that went out this morning comes droning back up the yard. The driver calls: Open up! The door slides open scuffing on its rollers, on its track of steel set into the threshold, the engine echoes darker with the rolling-in under the roof. Here comes the first tractor now, I can hear it’s pulling a wagon full of bales. The second tractor is hauling a wagon full of sacks, it’s labouring harder. To judge by listening, it sounds like a year of hefty weights.
They’re shouting in the yard. They calclass="underline" Carry in, carry in! Grab hold! It’s Dawid and Kadys and the new man, Kitaartjie. I hear a bakkie. That must be Thys coming to cast an eye. Towards the back in the caverns of the shed there’s a ting-tinging of ball-peen hammers. I know the sound. They’re clinking new blades onto the red harvester’s cutting-rod. The hay must be strong because the blades hop, the blades wear out.
Perhaps they can carry me out into the yard one more time, on a stretcher. They can fit my neckbrace and strap me in and stand me up under the wild fig-tree. So that I can see. So that I can smell the dust, so that I can see the black plume of diesel fume spurting from the tractor, so that I can assess the swing of the wagon on the drawbar, and count the bales as they are carried into the shed, and count the stalks on the back of the bearer, praise the one who will break open a bale before my feet so that I can see the density, the power, and the glory, the one who shall know to gather me a handful from the centre and press it against my cheek.
Somebody must bring the small scale before me and hold it up in the air until the hand stops quivering.
A bushel of Daeraad I want to see weighed, a bushel of Kleintrou, a bushel of Sterling.
And somebody must stand in front of me and take a mouthful of Vondeling and chew it for me and look into my eyes and I want to see the pupils contract as the grains crack open, and hear soft singing while the molars grind, hey ho, hey ho, yoke the oxen now. And as the cud starts to bind, I want to see the eye start to shine.
And somebody must bring a coop of chicks and enfold my hands in their hands and put chicks in my hands and feed them with the wild pulp in which spit and bran are stippled. I want to feel once more in my palms the chirp and throb of the body of a chick.
And somebody must wipe my tears and somebody must see to it that I don’t choke.
Because the map I must still see.
They must unroll it in the dust and place stones on its corners so that it doesn’t roll shut. Four red-blue shards of shale.
They must remove the brace so that my neck can bend.
They must take my head in their hands so that it doesn’t become too heavy, and lift it up and lower it as the rod points on the map and the hand points over my world, so that I can see the map of Grootmoedersdrift and its boundlessness. The blue waverings on paper of the Korenland River to the west, from the Duivenhoks and the Buffelsjag on the east, the dense contours, fingerprint-like, of the Langeberg in the north and the Potberg in the south. The square dots of the encircling places: Suurbraak, Heidelberg, Witsand, Infanta, Struisbaai, Port Beaufort, Skipskop, Malgas, Swellendam, Stormsvlei, Riviersonderend, Caledon, Bredasdorp, and Barrydale just over the Tradouw and Montagu and Robertson and Worcester.
And amongst the mountains and towns and rivers, with the straight red line of the bypass traversing its body, the extent of my farm. The dotted lines of the boundaries, the white dots of the beacons, the green of bushes and orchards and the gardens in its domain, the silver dams, the number of watering-places and stored waters on the dryland, the stables and the sheds and the kraals. The grass pasture next to the Klip River and the lands, the camps for the lambing and the summering, the plots of fallow land, the shallow basins where the sheep sleep, and the black shadow of bluegums.
Between the land and the map I must look, up and down, far and near until I’ve had enough, until I’m satiated with what I have occupied here.
And then they must roll it up in a tube and put on my neckbrace again like the mouth of a quiver. And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae.
So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage.
Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.
I pile up three breaths. With my chest I create an incline. The hand-bell that Agaat put under my hand rolls from under my palm with a tinkling. First it falls against the iron railing and then further, onto the floor.
The farmers in the vicinity liked inviting you and Jak to their parties, the glamorous, chic, childless couple of Grootmoedersdrift. And if you invited them back they were all too eager to accept. There were harvest festivals, wool festivals, water festivals on Grootmoedersdrift, a festival of triplets in the lambing time, a festival for the new tower silo with automated mowing-trunk and conveyor belt. And your parties were always the swankiest in the region.
Jak was urbane and talkative at these gatherings, as always appreciative of you in front of guests. The festival fairy he called you. Not that he ever lifted a finger to help you. As a matter of fact, nobody knew how much the success of those dinner parties in the late ’50s on Grootmoedersdrift owed to somebody that you could count on at all times. Everybody assumed that it was Jak who was supporting you. Nobody could have guessed that the farming didn’t interest him much. And nobody knew that it was to the back room that you went for comfort when he left you on your own.
You saw how they fell for him, the flocks of twittering wives and the freshly scrubbed young farmers. He was the pièce de résistance at every occasion. You recognised yourself in them, in the way they couldn’t get enough of him. You could see what they were thinking. How did she contrive it? How can a woman be so lucky?
Their eyelids fluttered at the sight of Jak’s new cars and lorries and implements and innovations, his imported stud bulls and rams. They ogled his fine Italian shoes and the cut of his trousers, and blushed at the casual way in which he turned back his shirtsleeves once over his tanned wrists. All this while you were lightly conversing about books and music, just enough to bind the company around the dinner table while yet leaving everybody free to indulge their flights of fantasy around Pretty Jak de Wet.
That suited you fine. You didn’t want to draw attention to Jak’s weaknesses. You wanted to show to advantage yourself. Your job was to camouflage him. Because apart from his toastmaster’s jokes he didn’t have much in the way of conversation. Boast, that he could do, and wittily comment on what he’d read in the papers, the plans of the Party he could explicate, and the mechanisms of his implements, but he was too light-weight for you. Often in that sitting room resounding with laughter, you bit your lip. You wanted him stronger, more independent, less transparent, you wanted him to possess more of himself, of his own substance.
What did you want him to be? An anchor post? A trailblazer? A source of insight? How could you expect him to understand that?
You didn’t understand it yourself. You could only hint and squirm. You were in the shade. That was what angered him without his knowing what was bothering him, this: That you replaced his guts with your own projects.
But when did you start to see it in this light? Not with so much clarity in those first twelve years.
You wanted a child.
And for that he was good enough.
Because that was something you didn’t have. It was in him. His seed.