You couldn’t come to terms with the loss of your Jersey cows, and her voice trying to create order and call things by their name, made you cry more. It was the third day that you had stayed in your room after the catastrophe with the botulism. Jakkie was with you most of the time in his cradle. Even his rosebud mouth, his little hand around your finger, couldn’t console you.
First bone-hunger, then general dirt-craving, she started. First os-teopha-gia, then allo-tri-opha-gia.
She sounded out the big Latin words.
Degenerated appetite it was. That’s how the vet had explained it to her, she said. Then she went and read up all the rest in her book.
Agaat looked at Jak who had come to listen in the doorway. He nodded at her to carry on. You felt how the accident had brought you closer to each other, closer, but in complex self-conscious ways. Jakkie woke up later in his cradle, he was the only one who reminded you all of your capacity for innocence.
When you could no longer contemplate the deaths and the putting-down, you took the child and left Agaat there with the autopsy. You saw how she came forward to lend a hand, her white apron like a standard in the midst of the carnage. And there she stood, three days later, grey with exhaustion, but with all the pieces of wire and cartridge cases and tin and horn and bone that had come out of the stomachs, scrubbed clean in a bucket to come and show you.
An unnatural craving, she said, her recitation-voice wilted with exhaustion, that’s what causes cows to eat carrion. Sheep can also get it. Then they eat the wrong things, then they get sick. Of germs in carcases. Bo-tu-li-nus germs. But it’s the soil that lacks something first. Phosphorus. And then the grazing. The problem is in the soil. It works through the grass into the blood. That’s what causes the wrong hunger in the first place, the lack in the soil.
It’s the first time the vet has seen it in The Spout, Agaat explained. Mostly it occurs in the north-west, it’s a poverty disease.
She indicated with the little hand an approximate direction supposed to represent the north-west.
We are rich, she said, but you have to know well on what soil you’re farming. It’s not just botulism they can get, but stiffsickness as well, cro-talism, then the back hunches and the limbs thicken and the mouse swells up.
On her strong arm, on the knob of the joint she showed where the mouse was situated, behind the front foot of the cow, just above the hoof.
Jak was standing in the doorway listening. You smiled at each other at Agaat’s book-learning, a small smile. He was flabbergasted. It was the first time that you’d seen him of his own volition deliver a pocket of onions and a pocket of potatoes and a leg of lamb to the vet to thank him, over and above his fee, for his support. And it was also the first time that you saw him give Agaat a present — a little bag of liquorice and a See magazine when he came back from town.
Even picked Jakkie up in his lap. As long as you just stay good and healthy, Pappa’s little bull, he said and stroked the child’s head.
That was not the only disaster with cows during Jakkie’s infancy.
Was it August of the following year? No, September ’61 it was, a month after Jakkie’s first birthday that Jak decided to add some more new Simmentals from South West Africa to his herd. New stud material needed to be added, he said, to the first herd of the German cattle that he’d started to build up in ’55 when he tired of his wheat experiment. You were reluctant. Jerseys were what you knew, delicate of hip and legs, finely-moulded of head. A Simmental, a dual-purpose animal with a blunt head and full shoulders and heavy legs, was to you an alien concept. To milk cows, help them calve and then after a few years to sell them for slaughter, felt to you like treason.
The calving was another story. That you knew well enough from the first group of Simmentals. They were small-hipped and calved with difficulty. Nights long you and Dawid had to struggle in those first years to turn breached calves. Jak assisted clumsily, walked off after a while in impatience and from squeamishness at the blood. And then you remained behind alone, with over your shoulder the pair of eyes there on the stable’s partition wall, under the lanterns, murmuring after you the little words which you prattled at the cows. Six or seven she must have been then.
If you put new animals from a different environment with old herds that had multiplied for generations on a farm, it always caused problems. You didn’t fancy more problems. The problems in the backyard were already simmering again. And now, a year after the botulism disaster, another seventy of the Simmentals arrived. You insisted that they should be kept in a separate herd and that most of them be utilised singly for slaughtering while you would continue the dairy farming with which you were familiar, with the Jerseys.
How exactly did it come about on that spring day that the new herd of Simmentals were grazing with the Jerseys next to the river amongst the blue and yellow flowers? A gate left gaping? The new stable boy, Dawid’s town cousin Kadys, who didn’t know any better?
The guilty one would never be found. It was a Saturday afternoon, not a good afternoon for searching for culpable parties. And Jak wouldn’t listen to you about the glass flagon that he gave each worker on weekends with their rations. Otherwise I have to take them to town and then they drink in any case and I don’t drive with drunken hotnots on my lorry. And I don’t milk with drunken people over weekends, you said, but it fell on deaf ears. And now here was the trouble.
And if it hadn’t been for Agaat. She’d gone for a walk with Jakkie in his pram.
We’re going to the river, she said as she packed the bottle and his hat.
You knew why there specifically. It was sorrel time. It was the time for stringing garlands of pink sorrel and yellow sorrel on the long thin leaves of the wild tulips, an old game of Agaat’s, you had originally shown her how. You pull the sorrel flower off the germen so that the flower has a little hole at its point underneath and then you string them one by one tightly packed against one another on the tulip string until it’s full and then you tie the two ends together in a knot. Then you hang it around your neck. The garland of flowers, once in spring around her neck, around your neck. Such a garland took two hours to string and served as a necklace for a quarter of an hour. Then it was wilted. You knew that on that afternoon she would sit Jakkie down on his little blanket in the grass and plait him a garland and sing to him. In veld and vlei the spring’s at play. There was a hare, a fox and a bear, and birds in the willow tree. All the old spring songs.
Agaat came into your room, ten minutes after she’d left, without knocking and gave the child back to you in your arms.
And now? Are you back already? you asked.
And then you noticed her cap that was crooked.
They’ve been to the water already, they’re shitting slime, Agaat said.
She gulped to recover her breath. She push-pushed at her cap with the one hand.
You knew at once that it was the Simmentals she was talking about. They’d been to the poison plants. Cows that have grown up on a farm with wild tulips, don’t eat them. They learn from an early age that they’re more bitter than grass. So the old herd of Jerseys were safe even though the tulip bulbs were juicily in flower. It would be the new cattle, South West African cattle with a mindless hunger for greenery. After their arrival they’d been herded into a bare south-facing camp with hay and dry powerfeed and radishes to get them back into condition after their long journey in trains and lorries. Let loose in a green camp they would eat as if they were being paid for it, the young tulips first. And that would make them thirsty. And then they would drink. And water on tulips, that everyone knew, was as good as arsenic.