At home I bustle to and fro around the place and at night I lie awake. Maria manages after a few days to drag the story out of me.
And so they let you go just like that?
They wouldn’t shoot a man for a hyena and a few apes.
You know they shoot for far less.
How must I know why they didn’t shoot me.
You were angling for it.
I went back for the animals on that wagon. I knew I was going to blast the daylights out of whatever was let loose in that kraal.
Oh come on, Buys, I know you. You also wanted to see what they would do to you. The Graaffe Rijnet boys.
I’m silent.
You didn’t shoot the dogs?
What for? They’d been tamed already.
In winter when the river can hardly flush away your piss, my comrades and I and our Hottentots trek through the bushes and kloofs and river to Caffreland and return with cattle from the Mbalu kraals. A few nights later Langa’s people trek through the bushes and kloofs and river and get away with cattle from my kraal. A few days later I trek through the bush-grown kloofs and the dry river and return with Langa’s cattle, and a few days later Langa treks through the overgrown kloofs and the Great Fish River and returns with my cattle. Langa is eighty and he’s always fought and he’ll always carry on fighting.
When I come home on a strange horse with a herd of strange cattle and a wagonload of ivory, buck hanging from the wagon tilt, and guns – chests full of smuggled guns – Maria comes running out of the house and she takes up position a few paces in front of me and I walk up to her and she steps back and stops when I stop and looks down and closes her hands tightly over her thumbs and presses her hands to her sides and looks up quickly:
Your child is dead, she says.
The baby was buried behind the house against a hill, a heap of stones piled on top of her little carcase. Maria takes me to the heap of stones. I have still not said a word.
You couldn’t have waited? I say.
How was I to know when you’d be coming home? You’re forever drifting about.
I am silent. I sit down and pick up one of the stones. I stroke it, knock it against another stone.
I should have waited with the burial, she says. But I didn’t think you’d mind. You were gone. It was starting to stink.
That’s all right, I say. It wouldn’t have been of any use.
I wait for the afternoon to heat up properly. I go and chop wood and ride a distance on my new horse that does not yet recognise my body’s signals. The following morning I’m awake before sunrise. I walk up to the hill with a pickaxe. I hew rocks from the incline that one day when we’ve all copped it will become a mountain. I take out the rocks and split them further until I can pick them up. When my people come and ask whether they can help me I chase them away. I carry the rocks to the heap and pile them on my daughter’s body.
After a week the pile is higher than the house and wider. Maria comes to stand before me with her arms akimbo.
You never even gave her a name. You never touched her. She was nothing to you.
Now she’s become something.
She wasn’t a heap of stones.
I can touch the stones.
In the course of the next few days I spend less and less time with the stones. The new horse is clever. The person from whom the Caffres took him, whoever he was, had taught the animal things that other horses don’t know. The horse is big and dappled, and when he runs, the speckles blend into a snowy nightmare bearing down on you. My flame-haired Elizabeth can’t keep her eyes off the massive animal that runs so fast. It looks as if his hoofs don’t touch the ground, as if he’s going to slide into the air and rend it apart. She draws a picture of the horse in the sand and shows it to me. The horse has eight legs. She names him Glider and I call him, for her sake and despite my aversion to animal names, Glider. I teach my daughter to ride the horse. I teach the horse subtle signals that others won’t notice. I teach the horse to pick up its hooves all the way under its chin and put them down thunderously as the Frenchman’s horse did, but with more fury.
In these days it comes to pass that a couple of cattle disappear every now and then. When the herdsmen come to complain, I tell them to shoot when they see Caffres wandering around where they have no business to be. I hand out guns. When the number of missing cattle on my farm increases to about twenty, Coenraad Bezuidenhout turns up on my turf. I’ve heard stories about this farmer, one of the most notorious in the district. I offer him a bowl of coffee. He says, Pleased to meet you, we must join forces against the Caffres. He’s heard I can shoot like no Christian in these parts and that my horse can outrun an assegai. He says talents like that should not be hidden under a bushel. Bezuidenhout and I and a few armed Hottentots set out for the Caffre kraals and return a week or so later with more cattle than were missing.
Elizabeth talks to me about the horse. I’m allowed to lift her onto the horse. In the evenings I go to add more rocks to the pile until one evening I start chucking them down. I climb onto the pile and look around me and then I start breaking down the pile. When all the rocks are lying about around me, I call two Hottentots and order them to cart off the rocks so that nobody will ever see that there used to be a pile here. I leave only the few stones of Maria’s little heap. I walk into the house that evening. Maria is a few weeks pregnant and is salting biltong.
May I ask? she asks.
What for?
That night the little woman holds me tight and strokes my head and slowly rubs me hard. I mount her and she touches me gently and tenderly and that infuriates me. She becomes aware that I’m trying to hurt her; she goes quiet. Later we lie together, careful not to touch each other, like two wounded animals.
It’s in that year or the next that Gert-who-remembers-the-pigeon absconds. Just check in the Colony’s documentation how the baptised bastard-Hotnot Gerrit Coetzee starts tattling. Read there how the scoundrel in 1793 declares on oath that I, on pretence of hunting elephants, cross the Fish River to the Caffres and rob them of their cattle, as many as I see fit. According to the declaration, I drive the cattle to my farm and if the Caffres object I make them lie on the ground and then I flog them with whips or sticks or whatever. The bastard of a convert declares further that in the course of one such incident I allegedly instructed the Hottentots Platje and Piqeur to fire on the Caffres. The first-named killed five and the last-named four. To this the reborn Hotnot then adds a declaration from Platje that testifies to my so-called mistreatment of my goddam farm labourers.
Look me in the eye and ask me straight out and I won’t deny any of this. Why should I? I listen to these accusations and I nod. I don’t know and don’t care a damn where he digs up these stories, but don’t tell me that that god-cursed lump of typhoid-turd called Gert ever went along on these raids. That Hotnot couldn’t have hit his own misbegotten foot at close range. I would never have taken him along. He was there about as much as he ever played with Noah’s pigeon.
On 21 March 1788 I receive a letter from my uncle:
My heartily commended nephew Coenraad de Buys
I have to inform you that Langa has let you know he demands payment from your good self for beating his Caffre, otherwise he will immediately attack afresh. He considers it a challenge to himself and the Christians must not think that he is scared of waging war.