The next morning, an hour before dawn, he is woken by the trampling of hooves as the first troops of sheep are driven past the house to be penned in the kraals beside the shearing-shed. The household begins to awake. There is a bustle in the kitchen, and the smell of coffee. By first light he is outside, dressed, too excited to eat.
He is given a task. He has charge of a tin mug full of dried beans. Each time a shearer finishes a sheep, and releases it with a slap on the hindquarters, and tosses the shorn pelt on to the sorting-table, and the sheep, pink and naked and bleeding where the shears have nipped it, trots nervously into the second pen — each time, the shearer may take a bean from the mug, which he does with a nod and a courteous ‘My basie!’
When he is tired of holding the mug (the shearers can take the beans for themselves, they are country-bred and have never so much as heard of dishonesty), he and his brother help with the stuffing of the bales, jumping up and down on the mass of thick, hot, oily wool. His cousin Agnes is there too, visiting from Skipperskloof. She and her sister join in; the four of them tumble over each other, giggling and cavorting as if in a huge featherbed.
Agnes occupies a place in his life that he does not yet understand. He first set eyes on her when he was seven. Invited to Skipperskloof, they arrived late one afternoon after a long train journey. Clouds scudded across the sky, there was no warmth in the sun. Under the chill winter light the veld stretched out a deep reddish blue without trace of green. Even the farmhouse looked unwelcoming: an austere white rectangle with a steep zinc roof. It was not at all like Voëlfontein; he did not want to be there.
Agnes, a few months older than himself, was allotted to be his companion. She took him for a walk in the veld. She went barefoot; she did not even own shoes. Soon they were out of sight of the house, in the middle of nowhere. They began to talk. She had pigtails and a lisp, which he liked. He lost his reserve. As he spoke he forgot what language he was speaking: thoughts simply turned to words within him, transparent words.
What he said to Agnes that afternoon he can no longer remember. But he told her everything, everything he did, everything he knew, everything he hoped for. In silence she took it all in. Even as he spoke he knew the day was special because of her.
The sun began to sink, fiery crimson yet icy. The clouds darkened, the wind grew sharper, cutting through his clothes. Agnes was wearing nothing but a thin cotton dress; her feet were blue with cold.
‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’ asked the grown-ups when they returned to the house. ‘Niks nie,’ answered Agnes. Nothing.
Here on Voëlfontein Agnes is not allowed to go hunting, but she is free to wander with him in the veld or catch frogs with him in the big earth-dam. Being with her is different from being with his school friends. It has something to do with her softness, her readiness to listen, but also with her slim brown legs, her bare feet, the way she dances from stone to stone. He is clever, he is top of his class; she is reputed to be clever too; they roam around talking about things that the grown-ups would shake their heads over: whether the universe had a beginning; what lies beyond Pluto, the dark planet; where God is, if he exists.
Why is it that he can speak so easily to Agnes? Is it because she is a girl? To whatever comes from him she seems to answer without reserve, softly, readily. She is his first cousin, therefore they cannot fall in love and get married. In a way that is a relief: he is free to be friends with her, open his heart to her. But is he in love with her nevertheless? Is this love — this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?
All day and all of the next day the shearers work, barely stopping to eat, calling out challenges to each other to show who is fastest. By evening on the second day all the work is done, every sheep on the farm has been shorn. Uncle Son brings out a canvas bag full of notes and coins, and each shearer is paid according to his number of beans. Then there is another fire, another feast. The next morning they are gone and the farm can return to its old, slow ways.
The bales of wool are so many that they overflow the shed. Uncle Son goes from one to another with a stencil and ink-pad, painting on each his name, the name of the farm, the grade of wool. Days later a huge lorry arrives (how did it get across the sand-bed of the Boesmansrivier, where even cars stall?) and the bales are loaded and driven away.
Every year this happens. Every year the shearers come, every year there is this adventure and excitement. It will never end; there is no reason why it should ever end, as long as there are years.
The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is belong. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm.
He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily into its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that. The thought of actually living on Voëlfontein, of calling the great old house his home, of no longer having to ask permission to do what he wants to do, turns him giddy; he thrusts it away. I belong to the farm: that is the furthest he is prepared to go, even in his most secret heart. But in his secret heart he knows what the farm in its way knows too: that Voëlfontein belongs to no one. The farm is greater than any of them. The farm exists from eternity to eternity. When they are all dead, when even the farmhouse has fallen into ruin like the kraals on the hillside, the farm will still be here.
Once, out in the veld far from the house, he bends down and rubs his palms in the dust as if washing them. It is ritual. He is making up a ritual. He does not know yet what the ritual means, but he is relieved there is no one to see and report him.
Belonging to the farm is his secret fate, a fate he was born into but embraces gladly. His other secret is that, fight though he may, he still belongs to his mother. It does not escape him that these two servitudes clash. Nor does it escape him that on the farm his mother’s hold is at its weakest. Unable, as a woman, to hunt, unable even to walk about in the veld, she is here at a disadvantage.
He has two mothers. Twice-born: born from woman and born from the farm. Two mothers and no father.
Half a mile from the farmhouse the road breaks in two, the left fork going to Merweville, the right to Fraserburg. At the fork is the graveyard, a fenced plot with a gate of its own. Dominating the graveyard is his grandfather’s marble headstone; clustered around it are a dozen other graves, lower and simpler, with headstones of slate, some with names and dates chipped into them, some with no words at all.
His grandfather is the only Coetzee there, the only one who has died since the farm passed into the family. This is where he ended, the man who began as a pedlar in Piketberg, then opened a shop in Laingsburg and became mayor of the town, then bought the hotel at Fraserburg Road. He lies buried, but the farm is still his. His children run like midgets on it, and his grandchildren, midgets of midgets.
On the other side of the road is a second graveyard, without a fence, where some of the grave-mounds are so weathered that they have been reabsorbed into the earth. Here lie the servants and hirelings of the farm, stretching back to Outa Jaap and far beyond. What few gravestones still stand are without names or dates. Yet here he feels more awe than among the generations of Botes clustering around his grandfather. It has nothing to do with spirits. No one in the Karoo believes in spirits. Whatever dies here dies firmly and finally: its flesh is picked off by the ants, its bones are bleached by the sun, and that is that. Yet among these graves he treads nervously. From the earth comes a deep silence, so deep that it could almost be a hum.