He inspects the guns. He takes aim with one, nods. Takes out the flint from another and places it in the chosen gun. Then he replaces the breech with that of another gun. He cleans the barrel. He polishes the butt while looking at me all the time. He sits with the gun in his hands, examines it, then hands it to me.
This one will last, Father.
He gets up and walks to the tent where his wife is trying to soothe their baby.
Toktokkie comes to feed me water. One of the little ones waves at me. Right in front of me is a blurred blot, only at the edges does the world still contract into focus. I turn my head slightly to place the child from the corner of my eye, and then the little creature is gone. I feel the threads of spit spinning webs in the sagging corner of my mouth.
In the afternoon I hone my stolen herneuter with one hand, the whetstone clenched between my knees. I go and lie in the wagon. Lie on my back gazing at the crooked frame that I was supposed to fix. Aletta scrambles into the wagon, complains of mice in the food chest. I doze off, don’t dream, wake up from the heat. Outside Midge and Gawie are shouting at each other. Sleep overwhelms me again. Wake up with Toktokkie and little Maria tickling my feet. I yell at them. Maria comes in, rummages around, arranges things around me and doesn’t look at me and speaks no word and is off the wagon again and gone. I get up. Sit down again. Peer at where the wagon tent is chafed through, the sun that sidles in there; the dust that drifts into the column of light and only then becomes visible, in drifting creates patterns and constellations and breaks up and vanishes as soon as it floats out of the column. A fly walks on my chin, over my lip and into the sagging mouth. I swallow. I go and sit outside and listen to the hurly-burly around me. I prune my toenails.
As the sun starts gathering water for the night’s drought, I call my people together.
Tonight we’re all eating together, I keep on saying until they understand me.
Maria snorts in the background. I ask her if I can have a bit of sugar on the sweet potatoes. Just tonight, I know there isn’t much left.
What are you saying, Buys? Talk so I can hear you, she says without looking up from the cauldron.
I repeat. She doesn’t reply, stirs the pot with conviction. I go and sit at the makeshift table in front of the wagon. The undergrowth snaps just over there, not far from the camp. Animals on their way to the watering hole. I watch the children scurrying around me to carry food to the table and sit down one by one. The half-grown ones at the table, the little ones on the ground. They tease and mock among themselves; here two boys on the verge of fisticuffs, there a granddaughter in tears. In between a continuous buzz of laughter. I can’t feel my face; I don’t know if I’m smiling. Maria feeds me if I get too excited and spear my flabby mouth with my fork. Oh, the roasted fat, the pink flesh. My every earthly possession for a last dram of spirits. Oh, Maria’s sweet potatoes.
What exactly and how much I said to them, I can no longer recall; with my sagging mouth they would in any case not have understood very much of it. I remember that I told them about Inhambane that can’t be too far away, while scrutinising each one of them with care to burn each little mug into the back of my eyes. Some say I had more than three hundred children, more than three thousand grandchildren. That fertile I couldn’t have been. I hope not. The troop here with me is in any case nowhere near all my offspring. Bettie is gone, the baby dead; Philip dead. What do I know of what happened to the others. But this little lot in front of me, they are here. Even Windvogel the younger. See, the young men who are big and strong already, as I once was, each with his own wife and wives and children. My grandchildren. The daughters who look like their mothers. The little ones with the busy eyes and stick legs who still have to grow into being human. Aletta and Eliza, my Toktokkie, fiddling with a pressed flower under the table. Piet, Dirk with the black eye, little Maria, the big men Johannes and Coenraad Wilhelm. Johannes’ wife, another goddam Christina, is breastfeeding the baby. Coenraad Wilhelm’s wife, Katrien, is lending a hand with clearing the table. Doors, ever frowning like his namesake Kemp. My beloved Elizabeth’s offspring, each one with that expression of hers around the eyes: Gabriël and Michiel, my Gawie and Midge, the two rapscallions. Little Doris, more taciturn and more dangerous by the day. Little Jan. Baba, the little man for whom there were no names left over.
You must not believe everything that Midge was to tell later; he was always a handful. But something scratches the Omni-Eye of this Omni-Buys when I read Michiel’s recorded words:
He was sorely aggrieved over the loss of our mother, and in his grief said unto us, that he would leave us there, we should not proceed further into the land, and also not go back. He said also that the white people would eventually arrive. The Lord would provide for us.
When is Father going away, why can’t we go along, asks Gawie.
We’re going along, the little ones chirp.
Coenraad Wilhelm gets up and walks away, Maria is washing dishes, Dirk gazes at me with a look I don’t understand. Then everybody starts chattering and asking questions at the same time. They must have understood enough through my drooling and slurring. I claw the battered Bible closer.
Let us read, I say.
Everyone is silent at once. They look at each other, examine the table top. I stroke the leather, feel the pages, quite possibly the last paper these dead fingers will ever touch. I open the book, search for my place, and begin:
And the first came out red all over like a hairy garment; and they called his name Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore years old when she bore him. And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field, and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.
I look up. They don’t understand a single word dropping from my gibbering jaw, but each and every one nods piously and with eyes wandering elsewhere pretends to be listening.
And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob.
I lie behind Maria. Here, at long last, it is not necessary to forgive her her lack of mystery. Tonight it is the familiarity of every wart and mole that I seek out with my mouth. I drink from them as from a colony of breasts. Tonight her gurglings and snorings drone beautifully. I don’t close an eye. I want to make sure my fingers remember every part of her. The sweat at the back of her knees, the smell of her grey frizz, the shapes of her ears. I touch her, but my fingers are dead. To feel her skin I have to sniff her body with my snout, my hands mere front paws, hard and calcified like hooves. In the early hours I get up. She pretends to be sleeping.
I struggle to fasten the buckskin around my hips. Throw a kaross over my shoulders. I scrabble in the pot, wrap the leftovers in a cloth. Slip the herneuter into the loincloth. I sit by the cold embers, smoke a pipe. I wrap hides around my feet, try to tie the thongs with one hand and give up. Johannes comes out of his tent with a baby on his arm, looks me in the eye, soothes the child at his breast, stoops into the tent again. I keep looking at the tent. Nobody appears. I tie a bundle of karosses to my back. It’s too heavy; I drop it. Against the wagon lean the bows and quivers. For that you need two damned arms. I take up my gun, the very last powder horn, the pouch with four bullets. My right leg drags me to the brushwood. One of the dogs charges at me, licks my calf, won’t leave me. I chase him away quietly, but the cur lingers on behind me. I throw stones at him until he stops and then trots back to the camp.