Jacobus’s gumboots leaked. The upper on the left foot had come away from the sole; he had worn them out during the drought, forgetting the purpose for which they had been provided, and now they could not serve it. The telephone would not serve him, either. He spent long periods in the house, turning the handle; the thing was dead, it was not merely the refusal of the white man at the other end to take any notice. At last he went from the telephone through the rooms of the house in a way he had never done before; he opened the cupboards as possessions must be sorted after a death, putting objects aside like words of a code or symbols of a life that will never be understood coherently, never explained, now — here was a box of stones (what did they want stones for); here that stick whose handle opened out into a seat (yes, the farmer had once stuck it into the ground and sat on it, watching a fence being put up); here was a nice radio, bigger than Izak’s, and they just leave it in the rubbish as if it were nothing to them, the son had forgotten to take it back to his school at some time. He found a pair of gumboots that must have belonged to the son, too; they were all right: he could work into them his soles the wet had made pink and lined as a washwoman’s hands.
He drove Phineas and Solomon, Witbooi, Izak and Thomas hard about the reconstruction and repair necessary on the farm. A calf had wandered off and drowned, but only one; the other one hundred and forty-nine of the herd were intact. A cow calved and developed mastitis and he had found the right medicine for that, in the house, and filled up the syringe and injected it the way he had seen the vet do. He had had the lucerne and teff that was on the flooded side of the barn moved to the verandah of the house, where the drainage was good even if the rain slanted in under the roof. He would get everyone busy soon digging the irrigation canals free of the muck that blocked them. Whoever it was who came to the farm when the road was open again, when the telephone worked again, would see how everything had gone on without instructions just as it did under instruction. Nobody would be able to accuse him or prove anything against him, whoever it was who came next, who came first — farmer, police, vet, one of those inspectors who might be from the government, asking about the people working on the farm or the cattle.
All along the vlei, broad river of islands of reed and willow, the lands remained underwater. No one could get near; no one went down there. The yellowbill duck with their neat, clear markings, the pin-stripe black and grey on the pinions, the flash of sheen-blue as they opened their wings to air them, the shaded purple over the gorge, sailed themselves; calm barges. The black coots shrieked and quarrelled and skittered behind screens of half-submerged reeds. As the water gradually fell back new sand and mud shoals rose, where the flesh of the earth had been furrowed aside by the strength of water. Obscene whiskered balloons of dead barbel were turned up to iridescent-backed flies in the steamy sun. The crystal neck of a bottle stuck out of the mud; pappy lumps of sodden fur with rats’ tails. A woman’s ring or perhaps only the tin loop that lifts to tear open the top of a can of beer glittered in there among the trident-marks of birds’ feet. Other objects appeared and sometimes disappeared again, flushed, rolled up by the waters for a day, and then slowly sinking down to the mud they had come from, that covered them with a coating of itself so that even while visible they seemed to remain of the mud, the leg and broken back of a chair protruding bones through the thick skin of the mud, the door-panel of a car curved like the chest-wall of a living creature under the same thick black skin. A pair of shoes appeared. They held still the shape of feet, like the ones put out to dry up at the compound. They held more than the shape; they were attached still to a large object, a kind of long bundle of rags and mud and some other tattered substance more fibrous, less formless than mud, something that suggested shreds, despite its sodden state and its near-fusion with mud and rotted cloth — something that differed, even in this advanced state of decay, from any other substance, as a wafer of what was once fine silk retains unmistakably its particular weave and quality, its persistent durability in frailty, even when it is hardly more than an impress of cross-woven strands, a fossil imprint against the earth that has buried it. Bits of actual woollen cloth were bonded with the bundle; if such things could have been read by the eyes of birds, which perhaps do not see colour but only tones of dark and light, despite their remarkable sight, the fragments would have been seen to be recognizable as pin-striped, the pin-stripes of a man’s jacket. Bits of another kind of wool, greyish-black, had floated up with the bundle and caught here and there on the mud-bank. Some were stranded quite far from the head-shaped object at the opposite end to the pair of shoes; but on the top of this object, that resembled a hairy coconut (almost human) washed up on some deserted African beach, were traces of more of this wool, and from the object’s withered greyness shone, gleaming white as the nose-bone of a child pressed against a window out of the rain, a naked nose that had cast its flesh. And a jaw of fine teeth, long, strong and even. Set rather prognathously, in the forward-jutting rounded arc that, in life, would make a wide white-toothed smile. One of them.
Yebo, my baas. -
There’s Thomas, the nightwatchman, at the gate, although he must be off duty by this time in the morning. Perhaps he heard the car from afar (as usual; at last) and has come running with his dog to show he’s been on the job, flood or no flood. He has his balaclava cap and is wearing his single little gilt ear-ring: — Yêbo baas, yêbo baas — An all-hail rather than an ordinary greeting; the ridge along the dog’s skinny spine rises and the beast capers round the old man in response to the ring of his voice. — Yêbo, my baas. —
Jacobus is standing near the house in the pathway of the approaching Mercedes. His hands, at his sides, are palms forward, open. His mouth is open, his face wide, but not with a grin. He will have his tale to tell, all right.
The horn is sounded playfully, the car will pretend to run him down as if to say, yes, it’s true, the road’s restored, here I am… But Jacobus isn’t going to move; this is no time for levity, apparently: one must respect their sense of ceremony.