Agaat (38 page)

Never mind Agaat, you wanted to say, but your voice wouldn't come. You sat there crying but she struck up and launched into her lesson. She wanted to force you upright. In spite of the battle between
you, or for its sake, because how was she to fight you if you were weak? How was she to hate you?

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.

Agaat couldn't talk fast enough.

Chased them out of the grazing shut the gate so that they can't get to the river but there's a small drinking trough in that dosing-camp where they are now it's probably also been drunk dry they're thirsty they're shitting green strings their eyes are watering they're going to die off Hamburg's in the holding pen in front of the crush pen but he won't take one pace farther will have to get him in the headclamp quickly!

She was right. A bull like that, even when he's ill, couldn't just be doctored in the open. One swing of his head and you'd all be sent sprawling in the mud.

You wanted to know where Dawid was, where Kadys and Julies were.

I had them called down there by the cottages, they don't come out.

How did she get the bull into the holding pen single-handedly?

Agaat was trotting down the passage to the pantry. Jakkie put up a bawl. Jak was gone, would only be back from tennis by milking-time. Saar and Lietja arrived heavy with sleep at the kitchen door with a cluster of littl'uns. Big and small stretched their necks to see into the kitchen if under the licence of irregularity there was something to loot.

Hey you, back! Agaat scolded them.

You had your hands in your hair. That sort of time on Grootmoedersdrift. Agaat gave you a look of pull-yourself-together-on-the-spot.

So listen well now, she said to Saar and Lietja, the new cattle have eaten tulips. Do just what I say and do it quickly! Coffee first, four cans full, double-strength, with sugar!

She looked at you. It could mean only one thing. Hamburg was critical. Sweet strong coffee was all that could save the most valuable animals.

Agaat issued orders non-stop while she worked. The little canister of raw linseed oil she'd already had rolled out of the pantry and the bag of linseed had also been dragged out. In the big white basin with the red roses on the bottom she measured out three measuring jugs of linseed oil and added hot water and stirred with a spatula as she talked. In another gallon-drum she ordered ten measuring jugs of barley and water.

You just stood there, your legs paralysed.

Brandy! she shouted at you! Quicklime! Five double handfuls!

You managed to secure the child in his pram. He would just have to scream now.

Four dozen eggs, whites and yolks separated! she ordered Saar.

Four cups of brandy with the whites! Stir! In the hanslammers' bottles! Screw shut! When the coffee's brewed, get it cooled down! Pour it into cooldrink bottles! Be quick quick quick! Bring the roll of rubber piping with the elastic ring around the end behind the pantry door! And a knife! Have it ready! Get a move on!

Now you felt the adrenaline, quickened your pace, grabbed Jak's ten-year-old brandy out of the cabinet, went and dragged the bag of lime out of the storeroom. You understood everything that Agaat commanded. You just couldn't have remembered it all yourself so exactly. You knew what was at stake. The new bull was a champion and had cost tens of thousands of rand. You threw a few handfuls of lime into a canister. How much water? you called.

Fifteen jugs! Mix well!

Agaat was already measuring off the raw linseed oil in the big glass rusk canister.

Together you added the lime-water to the oil and shook it up in the bottle, you with your hands above and below, Agaat with her unbalanced grip round the sides.

First to and fro! Agaat directed. Up and down!

Now it's right, leave it, put down! she called when it had formed a thick cream.

The vet! she called after you. Ring him, give him a list of our medicines, ask him if it's right, tell him to come, quickly!

In the topsy-turvy you hadn't even thought of that. But she was right. There had to be a control. So that nobody could say that you'd made mistakes.

Doctor is playing golf, said Mrs Vet.

Take a pen, sweetheart, you heard yourself say, and write! Raw linseed, lime, barley, tannic acid, coffee, brandy, Hamburg tulip poisoning, crisis Gdrift, 13 September, 5 p.m., have you got it? You rang off before she could reply.

You went and fetched the bakkie and parked it in the backyard. Agaat had the bakkie loaded with bottles of sugared coffee and the bottles of egg-whites with brandy, the big rusk bottle full of lime-and-oil cream, the drum of barley water and the drum of slimy raw linseed on water, all sorted into boxes. And the thin rubber tubes, the Coopers dosing-syringes from the shed, a bottle with tannic acid, a measuring spoon, the thicker rubber tubes and cans for the enemas, plastic funnels, tins full of boiled water and bottles with screw-tops and extra bottles and containers.

The whole rescue mission was ready to roll within an hour. Everybody wanted to bundle into the back of the bakkie. Agaat looked at you, now you had to speak. She tried to calm Jakkie. He was bawling his head off with the hubbub.

That they had to be very calm not to frighten the animals, you said, that they had to work slowly and with a plan to your and Agaat's orders nothing more and nothing less, that they must not talk loudly, and make no restless movements, that everybody first had to go and scrub their hands and rinse them every time between every animal. And that Saar and two big boys and one littl'un were in your team. And Lietja and two striplings and the other three littl'uns in Agaat's team. And that they should remain behind you when you arrived in the camp because you first had to get to the bull in the holding pen to doctor him.

O-alla-got, Saar said and tied her headscarf tighter.

Don't come and o-alla here now, where are your menfolk? you scolded. Why can't you keep them on track?

Saar looked away. But was there also something else in her attitude? Because she'd seen Agaat ordering you about and you doing everything exactly as she said, a little servant-girl of hardly thirteen? Her face was cunning. There wasn't time to say arrange your face. In any case you thought twice before saying that to the kitchen-maids.