I didn’t count. I start peeling again. She throws a few unpeeled potatoes into the pot. When the tails are done, the mill appears on the table and I have to mince tails. The half-cooked ribs go onto the coals along with the hare and the mealies.
Before the meal is dished up, there’s yet another story. Every offshoot gets his own plate of food. To serve a meal is apparently quite a complicated business. This one is short of more meat than that one, that one more beans than the other. Dirk is cutting teeth and gets only soft meat. Jan is too thin and must get an extra bit of hare. I’m too stout and don’t get any ribs. Aletta’s stomach is playing up, she gets bread and black tea. The unpeeled potatoes are for the daughters: peels are said to make your hair shine. I start mumbling something about the suckling pig’s coat that isn’t exactly blinding.
Shut up, Buys! Go and call your children, the food is getting cold.
No man can conquer the wilderness and the kitchen.
Uncle Jacob and I are not the only ones to get ourselves into trouble. Our whole family has problems with bosses. My big brother Johannes, too, had to go and see the Batavian landdrost because of the curses and slaps he levelled at Veldt Commandant van Rooijen. So it’s probably understandable that the neighbours weren’t too pleased when yet another Buys – a Caffre lover and Caffre copulator at that – moved into the district. Buyses should be sown as sparsely as possible. As soon as there’s a whole clump of them in one place, the strife and court cases start up.
Under my neighbours, whom, the Lord knows, I never loved as myself, I was known, in those first years in the Couga, as Outlaw Buys. They won’t let me buy on credit and don’t want me in their homes. The Ferreiras of Elandsfontein especially slander me every chance they get. Long Piet makes no secret of the fact that he thinks I’m something sticking to the sole of his shoe. His cousin and wife Martha is one of the local bitches who refer to me behind my back as King of the Bastards. Behind her back everybody calls her Mad Martha; that lady is impossible to get on with. When I have to call in at Elandsfontein, she receives me cordially, serves her universally celebrated milk tart, asks interested questions. Piet and I settle our business as soon as possible in order to be spared the sight of each other, but Martha insists on offering another cup of coffee. I feel like a child in her sitting room, as if between slurps of coffee she’s waiting for me to break something. As if she’s deliberately placed her most precious saucer in my hands, because she knows my hands are too rough for porcelain. The saucer cracks in my hand. She smiles at me.
If that rabble want to tattle on about my colourful clan, then that’s all right by me. I’m not ashamed of my family. But all the talk about the price on my head is starting to irritate me. I’m a free man, dammit. Not free as a bird, but free like these accursed burghers around me who are born free and in all freedom expire on the same plot of borrowed ground. May the very stones cry out my citizenship and if not the stones then at the very least the goddam landdrost. I ride to Swellendam, only to be informed that I have to ride to Uitenhage if I wish to speak to my landdrost. Swellendam has washed its hands of the red Couga clay. I collar a scrivener and make the man sit down so that he can write. I dictate a charming letter to the authorities to make sure that I can bestride my farm as a free man. The fellow has to rewrite the thing three times before I am satisfied with my petition:
I shall not elaborate upon the causes of my general decline, the ruinous tendency of my many households. I shall also not bore you with the adversities with which I have had to contend in the last decade. I am furthermore not vengefully inclined towards those who were the cause and engine of my adversity. I am only thankful that Providence has granted me the strength to endure it all, as well as the blessing, after so many years under the Heathen nations, to be allowed to return to the land of my birth under the rule of those who have been appointed over me by the Batavian government.
Were I, however, to remain peaceably among my countrymen, I beg to inform the Commissioner-General that during the dominion of the English I was declared an outlaw, and a hundred rix-dollars offered for my body dead or alive. I have long since forgiven this murderous onslaught on my life, but it would greatly please me if my pardon were to be announced in as public a manner as my being declared an outlaw. Let it be proclaimed that I returned to the Colony with the full knowledge and permission of the highest authority at the Cape, here to end my days as a peaceful and obedient Burgher under the aegis of the laws of the land.
Find enclosed herein a copy of the Notice of 14 February 1789 declaring me an outlaw.
The Burgher Coenraad Buys.
The bureaucratic machine reports back that my pardon was included in the general amnesty declared on 1 March 1803, to everybody arraigned by the English for political misdemeanours. My return to the Colony occurred not only with the knowledge of but in express instruction from the governor, and I would be permitted to lead a free and unhindered life among other inhabitants as long as I behaved in a respectable manner. The decree of outlawry is hereby officially rescinded. A copy of this resolution will be sent to me so that I can have it registered at any drostdy as may prove necessary.
Do you also smirk when you read how the terrorists of one authority are accorded amnesty and declared freedom fighters by the next succession of wigheads? Do you also want to cry out: The past is not dead, it’s not even past?
For the rest of the Batavian rule I keep my trap shut and make myself small and grant my fellow human being his terrestrial happiness. I have a few children baptised and do my best not to commit adultery, nor to kill anybody, nor to steal, nor to bear false witness against my neighbour and also not to covet my neighbour’s house, his wife, his manservant, his ox, his ass and not even his ever so comely maidservant.
In 1806 the focking English overrun the Batavians. We had all remained hopeful that the Cape would become Dutch again, as soon as peace was declared in Europe. But believe me, Couga-Coenraad’s world was small. The Bushmen who now and again filched a sheep were more of a nuisance than the Bushmen-of-the-Sea.
When in that year I once again had a yowling child in my lap and had to be told how the Ferreira snot-noses execrated my brood for outlaw half-breeds, I’d had enough of Mad Martha’s cinnamon-sugar reign of terror. I got to hear stories of how Martha assaulted her housemaids. Stories that she’d thrashed a few of them to death. Some of them had previously been Kemp’s catechumens. I write my old friend a long account, in the hope that he can engage his power as colonial spokesman of the Lord to harrow the Ferreiras. I hear nothing from him, till five years later I am summonsed to testify against my neighbour’s wife.
I sit apart at my daughter’s wedding. 5 August 1809, Swellendam. Mists swirl about the town. Bettie is marrying Johan Sowietsky. A bland and blond fellow; wouldn’t harm even a mosquito. Not very many of the groom’s people have turned up. The few who have made it into the pews gape at us open-mouthed when we walk into the church. The Sowietskys are a pallid bunch, the older generation’s Slavic accents still weigh down their words. The father and mother know what their son is letting himself in for. They came to exchange pleasantries soon after Jan came to beg me for the hand of my daughter. It’s the rest of the family that’s sitting there muttering and mumbling under their breath and smirking at my colourful little tribe filling up the pew behind me. The minister drones his drone and the church choir wauls worse than the yard cats in August. Bettie and Jan mutter a few little nothings at each other. She’s looking lovely. Elizabeth and Nombini helped Maria to stitch the dress together. My wives are a band apart. Then the ring is on my daughter’s finger. Not one of my wives wears a ring. There is a ceremonial shaking of hands such as I last witnessed at Avontuur and then a drinking of tea such as I have never witnessed. The tea is weak and lukewarm, but this crowd fling it down their gullets as if it were the abundant streams of nectar or virgin piss or whatever of the New Jerusalem. The tarts are not inedible. I have to dissuade a few of the younger offspring from the cake tables with the flat of my hand. You’d swear I never fed the rascals. After the cake and tarts have disappeared, my children play in the dust. The older sons stand with me and smoke. The eldest and Elizabeth’s little ones I know well, but the lot in the middle, I don’t really know about them. Piet and Aletta and little Maria and Windvogel the younger. I wasn’t at home much when they arrived. They didn’t pick up my scent while they were still lying shut-eyed squealing and shitting. I am the husband of their mothers; I am not their father. Nombini stayed for as long as she had to; there she is now, walking down the street on her own, on her way out of town. We’ll pick her up when we head home. She doesn’t last long among people. She has the two children by Langa but they steer clear of me. Then there’s Windvogel’s lad, who is now my lad. But nothing of our own.