Months later Geertruy is making soap. She asks the children in the yard to fetch her some ganna bush for the lye. The children tell tales of a leopard lurking in the kloofs of late. She asks me to go with them to keep an eye. I drag Saterdag along for company. We find a leopard track and walk up the kloof with the children’s voices echoing behind us. At the far end of the kloof we come upon more pictures. Nothing as delicate and clear as the swallow people: faded eland and elephants against a rock without overhang where the sun and rain efface the traces of human beings.
Saterdag goes quiet and runs his hand over the drawings. I tell him about the swallow people in the poort. Saterdag remembers what he was told as a child. Stories about his mother and the old folk who once hunted in the mountains before they were brought down to sit and fatten the Senekal cattle. He tells me about the rock that is the veil between this world and another. He tells how worlds melt into one another in the caves where magicians ape nature and where people turn into birds to fly to the other side and how the drawings keep these voyages in motion. He tells it all to me as he remembers the old folk told it to him and in this way he mimics and parrots them without ever having danced like that.
I don’t pay him much attention. Saterdag drones on. Now and again the children come and listen to a fragment of story before scrambling into the ganna bush again.
Those swallows, Coenraad, they know when to move on, they know when the bad weather with its lightning comes. Nobody can catch those swallows. They fly so fast because they’re little more than wind. Those wind birds. Windvogelen.
We make ourselves small, Windvogel, I say. Like a light breeze. Then, one day, from out of the blue sky we let loose a goddam storm on them.
Windvogel, says Windvogel, deep in thought. Windbird. Yes, he says, Windvogel gets me together more than Saterdag.
I come of age and I sue Scrotum Senekal because he’s not paying me my share of the butter profits. He promised to pay me for my labour on the farm. Every blessed time we walk past the four butter-churners, it’s the same story. Swears high and low that half the proceeds of the butter will be mine as soon as I turn twenty-one. But for the last few years the wet blood-fart has been too much of a spineless slacker for the month-long journey to the Cape markets. One evening I ask him again about the butter. He grumbles in his greyer-by-the-day beard about the low prices. How the butter has started stinking by the time they get to the Cape. He whinges about the Bushmen and the foot-and-mouth and the ravening creatures lying in wait next to the road for an ox wagon. I sit back and listen with my smile. Geertruy jumps up and starts mewling and snarls something at me. She says my heart has gone cold. I say it’s because I no longer lie by their hearth like their damn dog. The case is turned down and I appeal and the magistrate rules that Snail-trail Senekal must inspan his oxen and get his hindquarters to the Cape and give me the money. So there, thank God for the powers that be. Hardly two years later the magistrate gets to hear about us again when I batter Snake-slime Senekal half to death.
With the money that I at last get out of David Doddle-dick, I sign a leasehold on a piece of fallow land near the Kammanassie Mountains, to the north and inland through the poort. It’s not quite far enough from my family, but I don’t expect very many visits. My brother Johannes abandoned the land recently when he packed up for the eastern frontier. I called there from time to time and liked the black soil, the grey underbrush, the sudden spaces opening out from the ever-stifling Cloof. I don’t tell anybody; why should I? Of my being a father I don’t say much either. What can one say? It makes Maria happy. The baby’s hair is red like my beard.
I wake Maria one morning and tell her to start packing. I fetch Windvogel and we go and herd my cattle and sheep.
Go fetch your bundle, I say. Tie it up good and fast.
The rain is on its way. I saw it the previous evening by the meagre light of the crescent moon and by morning the mist from the sea is pouring over the southern mountains, all along the Cloof like milk boiling over. Surging cold churns over the mountain until the grey mountainside disappears. The shimmering mist settles behind the trees at the foot of the mountain like a second mountain, a solid spectre. The buttermilk clouds join heaven and earth and undo both.
I fetch my saddle in the house and cart the thing on my back over the fields to David Deathwatch. I tell him that Windvogel is coming along. Bumcrack-boil Senekal is not impressed. The Bushman who grew up among his Hotnots and guzzled his food and nowadays calls himself Windvogel Whatever can’t just bugger off at will, he says. The sooner I clear out from under his feet, the better, is his decision. But if I trek, I trek alone. I smile. I have my own land. Scurvy Senekal is no longer my boss. He prattles on about how he raised me and how he fed me and that he deserves better than being dragged in front of the magistrate for a few barrels of butter. I look down at my godfather, then up and into the distance.
Windvogel wants to come along.
He can want what he wants, he’s my Hotnot or Bushman or Godknowswhat and I decide where he puts his flat feet, I don’t care what the creature calls himself nowadays.
I smile.
So what’s so bloody funny now?
I’m just thinking what you’re going to look like soon.
I was like a father to you.
I was your tame Hotnot, I was never your child.
David Damnation loses his temper and then two of his teeth when my fist meets his face. He staggers, stoops to pick up his hat, then comes upright again. On his head here below my chin I see the sunburnt bald patch.
I’m done with you. Take your stuff. Hotnot-humper.
I’m not done with you, I say.
The smile again. Then the fists again until he’s lying flat and doesn’t get up again. I chuck his saddle off Horse’s back and cinch my own. Li’l Senekal mumbles something on the ground.
I ride to the homestead and take my leave of Geertruy.
Did you say good bye to David?
After our fashion.
Go well, Little Brother.
Go well, Sis.
She doesn’t press me to her and doesn’t cry and watches me riding away on her husband’s horse in my makeshift wagon with my common-law wife and my bastard child and my Bushman friend till she can no longer see me and then, I know, she stays watching the wagon trail. I ride on and look back.
What was to follow in my wake on that yard is all too predictable: The maid who screams as Shit-shanks Senekal walks into the kitchen. Geertruy whose eyes narrow when she hears the screams. My sister who turns around in the gravel, back to her husband’s house, to face the wrath awaiting her there.
A red dog with one ear and the hair bristling on its back comes walking out of the brush into the wagon trail, sniffs the air and watches us moving past. It puts out its tongue to taste the first few drops. It trots behind the wagon. Something rustles in the bushes on the road ahead. Maria points at two more dogs trotting along in the grass. The rain sets in. Further along in the bushes another ten or so of them, spread out in front of and next to and behind the wagon in the veldt; a whole pack.