Jan comes to light his pipe with us outside the church hall. He’s been calling me Father since we came out of church. I tell the men what I read years ago in the Flatus Vocis. How the Portuguese explorers plant crosses all along the coast. How our explorer arrives at a kraal where the people think the cross on the rocks is an altar of fertility. How the men sneak off to the stone cross at night and, believe me, stand there and rub themselves up against the cross and return home full of hope to service their wives. Nobody laughs.
Bettie can’t get away from the clucking women around her. She waves at me. I take my son-in-law aside. I tell him Now listen well. I list a series of atrocities that I shall perpetrate upon him and his extended family if he should mess with my Bettie. I tell him I like him. He has manners, especially with the womenfolk. He knows what an exceptional creature Bettie is; he worships the ground her feet tread upon. I tell him Keep it like that. He nods and gulps and says Yes Father. As you say, Father. When he walks away to his friends, I call him back.
Jan, I say, always remember: Do as I say and not as I do.
Yes, Father, of course, Father.
Well, then, that’s all right. Those pals of yours want to ply you with strong liquor. Let’s go and see whether they have enough for an old man’s thirst.
The young crowd don’t keep up for very long, then they hive off to go and drink elsewhere at their own pace. The Sowietskys also get going by late afternoon. Jan remains shiny-eyed and upright. We walk across to Bettie where she’s sitting red-eyed in the corner of the little hall with Maria. I hang on to Jan, his puny shoulders only just support me. I let go of him, lose my balance and grab at Maria and Bettie. With a hand on the shoulder of each and a tongue that slurs in their ears, I say Jan is a man after my own heart. I say Bettie deserves such a man. And Maria says:
Yes, my dear child. You deserve better than me. Your Jan will stay with you. He’s not a rover, I can see that. You can’t make a rover stay at home. With him you do as with a baby. Ever since we’ve been farming at Opkoms, your father has had to have his teat or his bottle, otherwise he bawls or tries to run away.
I settle next to Maria. I put an arm around her. She doesn’t resist. We look at our daughter. I watch how Jan treats her. He touches her slowly and gently. When she was small, nobody was permitted to touch Bettie. As she grew older, that didn’t change. The boys couldn’t get near her – even Maria and I had to keep our hands to ourselves. Nobody, till this pale and blond Jan. He is tall and strong, but carries himself as if he’s smaller than she. I look out of the window at how he presses her to him where they think we can’t see them. How they kiss. He touches her as I touch Elizabeth’s special cups, as you touch a lamb that has to be gentled out of a ewe. You hardly touch, but you make sure that you have a grip. I watch what Jan does and I try the same with my hands on Maria. She looks at me as she hasn’t looked at me for a long time, just for a moment. She gets up and pours the last of the tea.
As long as my brandy casks don’t run dry, the peace at Couga endures up to and including 1811, a shambles of a year in my life.
The year kicks off with the wedding of Coenraad Wilhelm, but this joyful occasion is soon forgotten in a nitpicking about river water. I’ve been renting a pasturage farm for two years, De Doorn River, from Marthinus Menderon, but the Heynses complain that I use up all the river’s water before it reaches their outspan. They go and moan to the heemraad and really abuse me in the plaint and I have to get away from there. They must take their water and squirt it up their clenched arseholes.
De Doorn River was one thing, but then came the bother with the Hottentots. Commandant Linde decides that each Hottentot who does not have a contract with the farmer he’s working for must be called up for military service. The bunch with their shiny muskets and showy hats come prance with their equally shiny horses in my yard. When I can’t show them a single contract, they take my Hottentots from me. My children and I and their appendages try to feed and harvest and care for the cattle and the crops, but goddammit what’s the use and why.
On top of that, the Second Caffre War was raging at the time. Graaffe Rijnet’s landdrost, Anders Stockenström, was in action at Bruyntjeshoogte. The story goes that Stockenström left there just before the New Year with twenty-four men to talk tactics with Colonel Graham. At Doringnek on the Zuurberg they ran up against a crowd of Caffres. Stockenström regards himself as friend to Caffre and Christian in equal measure. He dismounts with no gun in his hand and goes to negotiate with the Caffres to let them through. When he gets back to his horse, they are surrounded and the Caffres murder Anders and seven other burghers, also a bastard interpreter, one Philip de Buys, my dear, dear son Philip.
In 1812 burghers not resident in the districts of Graaffe Rijnet or Uitenhage could choose to donate money for the safeguarding of the border against the Caffres rather than to perform military service. I paid for my younger sons; Coenraad Wilhelm paid for himself. I’m not sending my blood to the slaughter again. Death is sure to sniff you out in due course; no need to go looking for her.
When I, Omni-Buys, rummage through the archives, I find that my signature by 1811 looked very different to when I moved into the Couga in 1803. Where once a man would sign his name with care, believing as he did that he had just cleansed that name of all blot and disgrace, in later years he will scratch and stab at a piece of paper with the nearest quill to hand, from anger and frustration, because he realises that you can rid yourself of everything except your name. That it is your name that brands you as scapegoat to be driven into the desert. I had a name, and no matter how I signed it, it refused to allow me to find peace between the beloved baboons and aloes of the Couga.
Omni-I sees you all standing in the Couga with your sunburnt necks taking snapshots of my farm. Sometimes one of you will enquire which route I would have taken, through the kloofs and over the mountains. In your time the main roads are tarred, criss-crossing the land, like the lashes of a whip. Do you know that these were once elephant trails, these national roads? Your mountain passes were designed by antelopes and elephants. You merely came to cast the tar and set off the dynamite and bury your prisoners of war next to the road they made. There are many routes out of the Couga. The roads have always been there.