The Conservationist (2 page)

The herdsman stumps past. There is nothing for the farmer to do but follow. Why should he go to look at a dead man near the river? He could just as well telephone the police at once and leave it to the proper channels that exist to deal with such matters. It is not one of the farm workers. It is not anyone one knows. It is a sight that has no claim on him.

But the dead man is on his property. Now that the farmer has arrived the herdsman Jacobus has found the firmness and support of an interpretation of the event: his determined back in the blue overalls, collar standing away from slightly bent neck, is leading to the intruder. He is doing his duty and his employer has a duty to follow him.

They go back over the lucerne field and down the road. A beautiful morning, already coming into that calm fullness of peace and warmth that will last until the sun goes, without the summer’s climax of rising heat. Ten o’clock as warm as midday will be, and midday will be no hotter than three in the afternoon. The pause between two seasons; days as complete and perfectly contained as an egg.

The children are gone; the place where they were might just as well have been made by a cow lying down in the grass. A coyly persuasive voice blaring a commercial jingle is coming out of the sky from the direction of the compound ... YOUR GIANT FREE ... SEND YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS TODAY.

The two men have passed the stationary car and almost reached the gate. The tiny boy in the jersey bursts from nowhere but is disconcerted at the sight of the herdsman. Hanging from his plump pubis his little dusty penis is the trunk of a toy elephant. He stands watching while Jacobus unhooks the loop of rusty wire that encloses the pole of the barbed fence and the pole of the gate, and the gate, which is just a freed section of the fence, falls flat.

The road has ruts and incised patterns from the rains of seasons long past, petrified, more like striations made over millennia in rock than marks of wheels, boots and hooves in live earth. There was no rain this summer but even in a drought year the vlei provides some moisture on this farm and the third pasture has patches where a skin of greenish wet has glazed, dried, lifted, cracked, each irregular segment curling at the edges. The farmer’s steps bite down on them with the crispness of biscuits between teeth. The river’s too low to be seen or heard; as the slope quickens his pace through momentum, there is a whiff in the dry air (the way the breath of clover came). A whiff - the laundry smell of soap scum. The river’s there, somewhere, all right.

And the dead man. They are jogging down to the willows and the stretch of reeds, broken, criss-crossed, tangled, collapsed against themselves, stockaded all the way to the other side - which is the rise of the ground again and someone else’s land. When it is not a drought year it is impossible to get across and the cows stand in midstream and gaze stupidly towards islands of hidden grass in there that they scent but cannot reach. The half-naked willows trail the tips of whips an inch or two above the threadbare picnic spot, faintly green, with its shallow cairn of stone filled with ashes among which the torn label off a beer carton may still be read by the eye that supplies the familiar missing letters. With the toe of his rubber sole the farmer turns, as he goes, a glint where the bed of the river has dropped back; someone lost a ring here, last summer. The blue overalls are leading through dead thistle, past occasional swirls of those swamp lilies with long ragged leaves arranged in a mandala, among the amphibian tails of a patch of tough reeds that keep their black-green flexibility all winter. The two men plunge clumsy as cattle into the dry reeds, exploding a little swarm of minute birds, taking against their faces the spider-web sensation of floss broken loose, by their passage, from seeding bulrush heads. There lying on his face is the man.

The farmer almost ran on to him without seeing: he was close behind his herdsman and plunging along doggedly.

The dead man.

Jacobus is walking around the sight. There is a well-trampled clearing about it - the whole compound must have been down to have a look. — How is happen. What is happen here. Why he come down here on this farm. What is happen. — He talks on, making a kind of lament of indignation. The farmer is circling the sight, too, with his eyes.

One of them. The face is in the tacky mud; the tiny brown ears, the fine, felted hair, a fold or roll where it meets the back of the neck, because whoever he was, he wasn’t thin. A brown pinstripe jacket, only the stubs of button-shanks left on the secondhand sleeves, that must once have been part of some white businessman’s suit. Smart tight pants and a wide belt of fake snakeskin with fancy stitching. He might be drunk, lying there, this city slicker. But his out-dated ‘stylish’ shoes are on dead, twisted feet, turned in stiff and brokenly as he was flung down. Except for the face, which struck a small break or pocket between clumps, his body isn’t actually on the earth at all, but held slightly above it on a nest of reeds it has flattened, made for itself. From here, the only injury he shows is a long red scratch, obviously made by a sharp broken reed catching his neck.

The farmer bats at something clinging at his face. No mosquitoes now; bulrush gossamer. — He was dead when Solomon found him? —

— Dead, dead, finish. - The herdsman walks over delicately towards the object and bending, turns his face back at his employer and says confidentially, rather as if he had been listening — And now already is beginning to be little bit... He wrinkles his nose, exposing the dirty horse-teeth.

The farmer breathes quite normally, he does not take in the deep breaths of dry clear air that he did up on the lucerne field, but he does not reduce his intake either. There is nothing, really nothing; whereas, up there, that sweetish whiff.

— You’d better not touch him. You’re sure nobody here knows him? It’s got nothing to do with any of you here? - He looks very deeply at his herdsman, lowering his head and hooding his eyebrows over his eyes.

Jacobus puts a hand dramatically on his own breast, where a stained vest shows through the unbuttoned overalls. He swings his head slowly from side to side. — Nobody can know this man. Nothing for this man. This is people from there - there — He points that same accusing finger away in the direction of the farm’s southern boundary.

The skin of the palm of a hand is too insensitive to detect the gossamer but still it clings. The farmer projects his lower lip and blows sharply, upwards over his face. And now he notices a single fly, one of the lingering, persistent kind, hovering just above the neat brown ear down there. The fly is on the side to which the head is fractionally turned, although it is full-face in the mud, the side on which the mouth must be close to being exposed. The fly hovers and lands, hovers and lands, unmolested.

— Just leave it as it is. The police must come. —

— Ye-e-es Master - the herdsman says, long-drawn-out in sympathy for the responsibility which is no longer his. - Ye-e-es ... is much better. —

There is a moment’s pause. The fly looks as if it ought to be buzzing but cannot be heard. There is the customary silence down here among the reeds, broken by the rifle-crack (so it sounds, in contrast) of a dry stalk snapped by the movement of some unseen bird. The seething of the wind through the green reeds in summer is seasonal.

They turn and thrash back the way they have come, leaving the man. Behind them he is lying alone on his face.

The farmer takes the car to get up to the farmhouse and Jacobus accompanies him, sitting carefully with feet planked flat on the carpeted floor and curled hands together on neat knees - he has the house-keys, anyway, so that he can always get in to telephone if necessary. The house is closed up because no one lives there or uses it during the week. They enter through the kitchen door and the farmer goes straight to the telephone in the living-room and turns the little crank beside the receiver. The party line is busy and while he waits he frees from the thin tacky mud on his soles the slivers of dry reed that are stuck in it. He prises one sole against the other and the mud wrinkles and blobs, like droppings, to the shiny linoleum patterned with orange and brown roses. The table is laid ready with hardware for a meal, under a net weighted at the hem with coloured beads; an authoritative refrigerator, placed across the angle of a corner, hums to itself. The ring that he is waiting for makes him start. The line is free now and the exchange connects him with the police station.

He always talks the white man’s other language to officials; he is speaking in Afrikaans. — Listen, Mehring here, from Vleiplaats, the Katbosrand Road. You must send someone. There’s a dead man been found on my farm. Down in the vlei. Looks as if he’s been dumped there. —

There is a blowing noise, abrupt, at the other end, air is expelled in good-natured exasperation. The voice addresses him as if he were an old friend: — Man ... on Sunday ... where’m I going to get someone? The van’s out on patrol at the location. I’m alone here, myself. It’s a Bantu, ay? —

— Yes. The body’s lying in the reeds. —

— Your boys have a fight or what? —

— It’s a stranger. None of my boys knows who it is. -

The voice laughs. — Yes, they’re scared, they’ll always say they don’t know. Was it a knife-fight I suppose? —

— I tell you I’ve no idea. I don’t want to mess about with the body. You must send someone. —

— Hell, I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. I’m only myself, here. The van’s in the location ... I’ll send tomorrow morning. —

— But this body was found yesterday, it’s been lying there twenty-four hours already. —

— What can I do, sir? Man, I’m alone here! —

— Why can’t you get hold of some other police station? Let them send someone. —

-Can’t do that. This’s my district. —

- Well what am I to do about a dead body on my property? The man may have been murdered. It’s obvious he’s been knocked on the head or something, and dumped. You can see from his shoes he didn’t walk a step in that vlei. —

— There’s injuries on the head or where? —

— I’ve told you, that’s your affair. I don’t want my boys handling someone who’s been murdered. I don’t want any trouble afterwards about this business. You must get a man here today, Sergeant. —

- First thing in the morning. There won’t be any trouble for you, don’t worry. You’re there by the vlei, just near the location, ay? It comes from there, all right, they’re a terrible lot of kaffirs, we’re used to that lot... —

The farmer replaces the receiver and says in English,
Christ almighty
; and snorts a laugh, softly, so that Jacobus shall not hear.

The herdsman is waiting in the kitchen. — They’ll come early tomorrow. I’ve told them everything. Just keep people away. And dogs. See that no dogs go down there. - The herdsman doesn’t react at all although he has no doubt thought the farmer didn’t know that the dogs which were supposed to be banished from the compound have quietly reappeared again, not the same individual animals, perhaps, but as a genus.

— Excuse, my master - he indicates that he wants to pass before him into the living-room and tramps, tip-toeing almost, across to a piece of furniture that must have once featured as the pride of a dining-room ‘suite’ but is now used as bar (a locked cupboard to which Jacobus has not got a key) and also repository (unlocked drawers) for farm documents, and pulling out one of the stiff drawers by its fancy gilt handle, feels surely under the feed bills tossed there. He has found what he apparently had hidden for safekeeping: he brings in the bowl of his palms a huge, black-dialled watch with a broad metal strap, and a pair of sunglasses with a cracked right lens. He waits, indicating by the pause that his employer must put out his hand to receive, and formally gives over the property. - From him? - And the herdsman nods heavily.

— All right, Jacobus. —

— All right, master. —

— Send Alina up about one to make me some lunch, eh — he calls after him.

So they have touched the thing, lifted the face. Of course the dark glasses might have been in a pocket. No money. Not surprising; these Friday murders are for money, what else. Jacobus took the objects (the Japanese-made steel watch is the kind of stolen goods black men offer surreptitiously for sale on street corners) into safekeeping to show that the people here’ve got nothing to do with the whole business.

Going to the drawer Jacobus has just shut, he finds a foolscap window-envelope, already franked, that has carried some circular. The watch with its flexible steel-mesh strap wrapped close fits in easily, but the glasses prevent the flap from closing. He doubles a rubber band over his fingers and stretches it to secure envelope and contents. He writes on it, Watch and Glasses, property of dead man. He adds, For the Police, and places the envelope prominently on the table, on top of the net, then moves it to the kitchen, putting it on the draining-board of the sink where it cannot fail to be in the line of vision as one walks into the house.

Outside the kitchen door he distends his nostrils distastefully at the smell of duckshit and three or four pallid kittens whose fur is thin as the bits of duckdown that roll softly about in invisible currents of air, run from the threatening column of his body.
Psspsspss
he calls, but they cower and one even hisses. He strides away, past the barn, the paddock where the cows about to calve stand hugely in company, and the tiny paddock, where the old bull, used less and less now, with the convenience of artificial insemination available, is always alone, and he continues by way of the mealie fields the long walk around the farm, on a perfect Sunday morning, he was about to begin when he drove down to the third pasture.

The matter of the guinea fowl eggs has not been settled. He’s conscious of this as he walks because he knows it’s no good allowing such things to pass. They must be dealt with. Eleven eggs. It would have been useless to put them under the Black Orpingtons; they must have been cold already. A red-legged partridge is taking a dust bath where it thinks it won’t be spied, at the end of a row of mealies reaped and ready to be uprooted. But there are no guinea fowl feeding down in the far field where they usually come. Those bloody dogs; their dogs have probably been killing them off all summer. Eleven freckled eggs, pointed, so different from hens’ eggs made to lie in the standard depressions of plastic trays, in dozens, subject to seasonal price-fluctuation. Soon there will be nothing left. No good thinking about it; put a stop to it. The hands of the child round the freckled eggs were the colour of the underside of an empty tortoiseshell held up to the light. The mealies are nearly all reaped, the stalks stooked in pyramids with dry plumy apexes, the leaves peeling tattered. Distance comes back with these reaped fields, the ploughed earth stretching away in fan-shaped ridges to its own horizon; the farm grows in size in winter, just as in summer as the mealies grow taller and thicker the horizon closes in, diminishes the farm until it is a series of corridors between walls of stiff green higher than his head. In a good year. If there is going to be a good year, again. A tandem harrow has been left out to rust (no rain, but still, the dew can be heavy). Now is the time to clear the canker weed that plagues this part of the field, near the eucalyptus trees which have made a remarkable recovery, he can scarcely notice, for new branches, the stumps where they were always chopping them for firewood until a few years ago.