Coenraad de Buys:
Your honour, about five years ago a raggle-taggle Caffre and two women turned up on my farm and complained about the Ferreiras. I can tell you today only what I wrote at the time to my honoured friend, the late Jank-… Doctor van der Kemp. The Hottentot woman Griet left Doctor van der Kemp’s mission station to go and work for… er… Mrs Ferreira. Martha, Mrs Ferreira, apparently beat her and stoned her. Griet’s body was full of running sores and after a while her hands were no longer worth anything. She died in front of her straw hut and two women dug her in. That is what I know, what I heard.
Goddam Martha:
In her last days Griet complained of a hard band over her navel. She said she was drinking snake venom for it and at full moon I saw her wandering about muttering. Then she fell down in the door of the hut. Her belly was swollen. Even Mijnheer Buys would not have looked at her twice.
The rabble laugh.
And Rachel? Van Blokland asks.
To the devil with Rachel, I want to shout. I want to see Martha hang until her eyeballs pop and her tongue swells up like a rotten fish.
Coenraad de Buys:
The woman Rachel was one of Kemp’s Bethelsdorp Hottentots, a reborn child of our Lord, who went to work for that… for Mrs Ferreira. The phthisis made the woman spit blood. So I am told. Mrs Ferreira is alleged to have beaten her to death, and, so I am told, dragged her a hundred paces to her straw hut and, I swear that that is what I was told, that night set the hut on fire. Apparently Rachel was buried the next morning in the vineyard.
A Hottentot succeeds me and says Martha burnt down the hut only two weeks after the thrashing. Another one nods conspiratorially in my direction and to hell with him too. He alleges that Rachel was burnt alive. Yet another says that it was a high wind that brought the fire.
Crazy Clap-cunt:
Little Rachel suffered from the fever for a month and complained of a stitch under her right teat. I nursed that daughter of Ham. Gave her candles to burn at night when the sleep was elsewhere. The wind was strong that night: I pray that little Rachel was asleep when the flames overwhelmed her and she returned to the bosom of our Father.
I am excused, but Martha’s meagre smile does not let me go. The room around us vanishes. It is just she and I in the courtroom, on earth. I stare at Martha, how she tugs at her dress, irons out the wrinkles on her lap with the back of her hand. With one ear I hear how Long Piet’s labourer Esau buys himself the slave woman Steyn as wife. How Martha beats her with sjamboks, broomsticks, jukskeis, and heavy objects. The flesh that rots with all the bruising and starts to fall off the woman’s body. How with swollen and rotten arms and head she lies senseless. Esau was not allowed to visit her but he went to say good bye to his wife in secret. She died and her body was just gone.
When the young Hottentot Hans comes to speak in person, he does not look up once. He knows as well as I that once you look into those eyes, you’ve had it. When he was eleven or twelve he did housework at Elandsfontein and minded the children. He says when the children were naughty or cried, Martha beat him with river bush canes, brooms and jukskeis. And then nursed him.
One Hottentot after the other comes to testify that Martha beat one Abigaël so badly that the pus oozed from her wounds until she died. The story has many endings. The story has one ending. Abigaël died in Algoa Bay. She died in Dieprivier. She died at Elandsfontein. Abigaël is dead. Mother Martha, ungodly goodness personified, says the woman died in childbirth of red diarrhoea.
The Hottentots in borrowed Sunday best say that when old Mina one day botched a piece of embroidery, she was beaten till she was blind and her eyes pulp. They say her wounds stank to high heaven. The end of this story also takes many forms: Martha hit the woman behind the head with a plank while she was sitting in front of her hut. She is dead. Martha beat her with a yoke. She died in a ditch. Black-hearted Martha who could have been my mother:
Mina was old and small and poxy. Her whole body and face covered with the red scabs of the shame. The woman couldn’t work in the house any longer. No person could be expected to face such a sight. Mina henceforward worked in the garden. I didn’t touch the woman; the pox was the end of her.
On one point only everybody is agreed: Mina’s grave at Elandsfontein was shallow. The dogs dug her up.
The only charge on which Mad Martha was found guilty, was that of the blow to Hendrik’s head. She had to pay a fine. Outside the courtroom the Couga Christians surrounded her and shook her hand and hugged her. I walked past them and somebody snarled things at me. From the centre of the circle she waved at me.
I gather the Buys clan so we can set fire to the farmyard together. A father, after all, should worship with his family. The lot finish off or abandon whatever they were doing and walk across to where I’m starting to light the firebrands, but I myself stumble around, I fidget and fumble. My head is sputtering – stories about Martha, about the Couga, stories in the traveller’s book.
Oh, the stories doing the rounds in the Couga. Old Jan Prinsloo who haunts his farm, Wolwekraal, over there. They say he wanders about at night among his horses looking for souls to devour. Skinned and roasted by his labourers, he walks, red and liplessly grinning, around his old yard in the kloofs. Apparently tied a few pregnant women to a wheel and beat them to ribbons and killed their husbands when they wanted to resist and then all hell broke loose on the old horse breeder’s farm. Some say his labourers consumed old Jan after roasting him, others say that he ran all aflame to the stables and arrived there ablaze.
Are Martha’s victims already wandering about around her house? Are her maids awaiting their chance to skin her alive one night? I wish her such an eternal wandering, without skin or lips, for ever surrounded by her ghosts. Shall I write Prinsloo and Martha’s stories in the back of the book? My own nightmares? Shall I supplement the wanderings of the vagabond scientist with monsters of my own so that they too can be consumed by fire? Is there room for more ghost stories in a book that aspires to science and constantly bogs down in horrors?
It’s truly dangerous to get embroiled in stories. Take, for instance, this Vocis affair of the traveller sitting rotting under that tree, so many wagon trails ago. He boarded a ship and landed here with a fresh quill and a large flagon of ink and wanted to write down the world. One fellow came to commit Africa to writing and went mad. At least he found peace under the tree. His book survived him; did his book murder him? Something tells me the book is dangerous, contagious. As soon as you pen that first sentence, you’re up to your neck. Well, Flatus, may you find peace in the flames.
I plant the torches in the ground around me, light one from the other. See, here the Buyses come walking up across the yard. My family, my Buys clan, laughing, their faces glowing when they enter the circle of torchlight. The stuck-up neighbours can chase us away like rogue dogs, but we won’t cringe and roll over, we won’t bare our bellies to anybody. A lizard scuttles away before their feet, into a stone crevice, to stay behind and to live on tomorrow as if we’ve never been here. Oh, the indomitable lizards of this land.