Safety, solid ground.
That little gully: who would have thought it. Mehring read about these things with the intense, proprietorial excitation with which one learns that a murder has taken place only two doors away from a house one has lived in for years — in an ordinary house on whose mat the newspaper has been seen lying each evening, a house from whose gate the same dog has barked the countless times one has passed by. That little gully. There ought always to have been a paling there — a drunk might have gone over some night, swerving too quickly. But who could ever have imagined that the trickle of water that sometimes dried up altogether for months on end so that that gully was nothing more than a culvert full of khaki-weed and beer cartons thrown in by the blacks, the trickle of water that in normally rainy weather was never more than a gout from the big round concrete pipe that contained it under the road, could become a force to carry away a car and its occupants. ‘Without a trace’, the reports said, ‘before the horrified eyes of astonished witnesses’; the search went on for three days during which hundreds of people drove as near as they could to the washed-away road and walked the rest, scrambling along behind the police who were dredging the water. These fans and afficionados of an unnamed sport were so enthusiastic a following that more police were deployed to keep them back; finally the area had to be declared closed to the public. In addition to a nine-year-old wedding picture of the missing couple, a Mr and Mrs Loftus Coetzee, supplied by their relatives, there were pictures of the disappointed crowd with their children and umbrellas. Mr and Mrs Loftus Coetzee were found drowned in the car from which they had been unable to get out, deep in the new river that had made its bed for them; the reason why their car had been so difficult to find was that the water had carried them to, and flooded, one of those wide pits between the disused mine dumps that had long been a graveyard for wrecked cars and other obstinate imperishable objects that will rust, break and buckle, but cannot be received back into the earth and organically transformed.
Although he had every reason to visit the scene — he was cut off from his farm by the washaway, after all, it was greatly to his interest that repairs to the road should be begun at once — he kept away until that business was over. The telephone wires on the farm itself must have been down; the exchange said they could get through to other farms on the party line but his place couldn’t be raised. He phoned old De Beer and got Hansie, who said the only other road — the long way round, 60 kilometres by way of Katbosrand Station — didn’t make sense because the vlei had risen so much the approach was impassable from that side, too. But Hansie thought everything was all right on Mehring’s place; one of the boys from there had got across at some point and reported that apparently no stock had been lost. De Beer had forbidden his boys to attempt any crossing since then because one of the women had been fool enough to try and she was drowned — washed up right away down at Nienaber’s.
That ordinary little gully — no more than a ditch, really. There were road-menders’ barriers with lanterns looped from them in a half-circle along the great bite into the road where it had collapsed under the impact of water. Water no longer flowed over the road but down there — even from the distance at which he had parked his car and now stood balanced on the fender to see — it was still a bile-coloured river dropped back from the banks of its spate which, ragged with the bared roots of eucalyptus, dripped like torn gums a yellow and rust-red slime from the chemicals in the mine waste dumps. There was easily room for the Mercedes to edge along the side of the barriers. Easily. But the road-menders’ boy with the red flag started prancing about frantically and the provincial traffic policemen kicked their motorbikes aggressively alive: it wasn’t worth it. He made the whole thing appear a feint, he merely used the space to turn the Mercedes back to face town, and left them standing. Who would it have been who went over to De Beer’s? Jacobus? No, he would have sent someone else, one of the younger boys — Izak or Solomon. At least the sense to realize it was necessary to send some reassurance through a neighbour; God knows how long before the telephone people would get round to putting up the telephone poles again. His secretary had been to see the telephone manager, but the obvious thing to do was to use a contact with the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. He sat on a Board with someone who knew the man well. But that would mean a lunch and the admittance — evidence — that he himself was back; back from wherever it was he couldn’t be found. - To think it could have been you, coming from your farm; you’re on that road all the time. — He said, mocking the secretary’s satrap or sincere concern for him — But I’d never do a thing like that, my dear! Never! —
At night the noise of frogs was the drugged, stertorous sleep of the drowned earth. The pastures and fields were water-meadows; under a hot sun the area of water, that was greater than the area of burning had been, shrank back every day, leaving a stained and sodden margin. On the highest ground, the hooves of the kraaled cattle squelched imprint after imprint, one cancelling-out or breaking down the swelling ridges of the other, kneading a rich black mud and dung that oozed a brown buttermilk. The ash-heap of years of cooking fires had washed down and pasted grey all over the compound yard. The fowls were wet feather dusters. The L-shaped row of breeze-block rooms was reflected in puddles and if the walls were struck, gave back no ring of sound, solid with damp. The persistence of the rain had found those places in the roofs where sheets of corrugated iron did not overlap properly or rust had filed through, and water had overflowed the pots and buckets placed to catch it. Under the sun, all that the inhabitants possessed was spread out over the fowl-runs, the eucalyptus trees whose wet black bark was peeling, the fence of the paddock where the calves were kept. Blankets, torn shirts, remains of white men’s clothing, a blazer with the badge of a white school, some stained object recognizable as Izak’s cap, mattresses with their fibre appearing to grow out of them, shoes stiffened by wet into the shape of the feet that had worn them as white people commemorate their children’s first steps by having their baby shoes bronzed, the cochineal cobwebs of drenched bright thin head-scarves from the Indian shop — here was an inventory of everything the farm workers owned. Witbooi’s references from previous employers were spread on stones to dry, weighted at all four corners under smaller stones. Drops blown from the trees and dangling crystals from the fence shook down to magnify, then blotch still farther, the lettering TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.