The Covenant (44 page)

“He is dreaming.”

“I saw him the other day drawing designs in the dust—uniting all the little huts into fine buildings stretching out like arms from this one. It could be quite fine, as he plans it.”

“Let him do it. Bezel likes nothing better than to start carpentering a new building.” The wings that De Pré had sketched could easily
be erected between seasons, but Annatjie guessed correctly that he would not start until the farm was more securely in his grasp.

Trianon now comprised about three hundred and eighty acres, all with access to water. It owned more than thirty slaves from various parts of Africa, the eastern ocean and Brazil. Fifty Hottentots and Coloureds worked also from five-thirty at dawn till seven at night, receiving no wages; they were given food, tobacco, an occasional blanket, and the right to graze the few animals that remained from their once-vast herds. Once each day they would queue up with the slaves for a splendid reward: a pint of raw wine.

One evening Farmer Boeksma arrived to buy a cask of Trianon at the very time the slaves and servants were lined up for their tot, and he observed, “Maybe they have bartered away their freedom, but what a marvelous way to forget the past.” Marthinus, thinking of what old Willem had told about Jango’s lust for freedom, and the prices he had been willing to pay, said nothing.

And then the Bushmen struck. The little brown people had watched with dismay as white farmers kept extending their holdings farther into traditional hunting grounds. At first they had merely observed the invasion, retreating ten miles ahead of the plow, but now they were beginning to fight back, and on many mornings a farmer on the outskirts of Stellenbosch would awaken to find his kraal broken, a prize ox slaughtered in a gully, and the spoor of Bushmen leading north toward the open country.

Every tactic had been used to combat the voracious raiders: armed Hottentots had been sent against them, commandos had been mounted, guards had been posted on twenty-four-hour duty, but the little men loved animal meat so much, and the placid cows of the Dutchmen were so inviting, that they circumvented every device the farmers tried. Losses were beginning to be intolerable, and in August of 1702 most of the farmers of Stellenbosch decided they must eliminate the pests.

They were led by Andries Boeksma, who argued that since the Bushmen were not human, they could be wiped out ruthlessly. Others, guided by Marthinus van Doorn, contended that Bushmen did have souls and must not be shot down like wild dogs; he was willing to have the worst offenders disciplined and even hanged if they
persisted, but their basic humanity he defended. At first the community divided evenly, the tougher old men insisting that the Bushmen were not much different from dogs or gemsbok, the younger granting that they just might be human.

After a week of debate it was agreed that the argument be settled by recourse to the Bible, but no guidance could be found there, because little people with enormous bottoms and poisoned arrows had never molested the Israelites. When a vote was taken, it stood eleven-to-six in favor of exterminating the Bushmen, since it was decided that they were animals and not human. But before the commando could be started north, young Hendrik van Doorn, twenty-one years old, startled the assembly by volunteering a special piece of evidence:

His evidence stunned the eleven men who had voted to kill off all the little people in the way hyenas were destroyed if they came too near a farm, and Andries Boeksma said gravely, “If they can tame dogs, they’re human, and we cannot shoot them all.” To hear the leader of the commando reason thus impressed the others, and the final vote was sixteen-to-one that the Bushmen were human, the lone dissident arguing, “Human or not, if they steal my cattle, they have to be dealt with.” He would say no more in public meeting, but he planned to kill every Bushman he saw.

The seventeen horsemen found a substantial spoor to follow, the trail of five or six Bushmen dragging cattle parts back to camp, and for several days they narrowed the gap between the two parties. On the fourth day Andries Boeksma saw signs which satisfied him that the Bushmen must be close at hand, hiding perhaps behind low rocks: “They know we’re after them, so they won’t lead us to their camp. That proves this bunch are scavengers, and we can kill them all.” This was agreed upon, even by those who had defended them: the little
things might in principle be human, but this particular group were cattle thieves who must be slain.

So the commando, practicing extreme caution, since everyone feared that terrible flight of thin arrows which brought agonizing death, moved toward the rocks that could be hiding the thieves, and when Boeksma saw twigs move, he shouted, “There they are!” and his followers cheered as they swept down on their target.

There was so much gunfire that none of the Bushmen had any chance of escape, but as they fell, one man maintained control and calmly aimed his arrow at a specific rider, launching it just before he collapsed with four bullets through him. The arrow struck Marthinus van Doorn in the neck, lodged deep within, and broke apart.

By nightfall he felt painfully dizzy and asked Andries Boeksma to cut the arrowhead out, but the big Dutchman said, “I can’t do it, Marthinus. I’d cut your throat.” So the agony increased, and at dawn Marthinus was again pleading that the arrow be cut out, but the men agreed with Boeksma that this was impossible. They built a litter and slung it between two horses, hoping to get Van Doorn back to the apotheek at Stellenbosch, but by midday the poison had spread furiously, and in the late afternoon he died.

“Shall we bury him here?” Boeksma asked Hendrik. “Or would your mother want him at Trianon?”

“Bury him here,” Hendrik said. The Van Doorns had never feared the veld. So the men of the commando broke into two groups, one to dig a grave, one to gather stones that would mark it, and when the hole was deep enough to keep away hyenas, Marthinus van Doorn, forty-three years old, was buried. Andries Boeksma, as leader of the commando, said a brief prayer, then tied the bridle of Van Doorn’s horse to his and started homeward.

Hendrik would never forget what happened at Trianon when the mournful procession rode in to inform Annatjie of her loss. It was not what his mother did that shocked him; she was resolute, as he had expected—a tall, gaunt woman of fifty-one, with rough hands and deep-lined face. She nodded, started to cry, then pushed her knuckles into her eyes and asked, “Where did you leave the body, Andries?”

“Decently buried … out there.”

“Thank you,” she said, and that was all.

Nor was it her impersonal reaction that appalled young Hendrik—he knew that she was not the wailing kind—it was what happened
after the commando had ridden off. No sooner had the horsemen left Trianon than Paul de Pré hastened over from his house, crying in a loud voice, “
Mon Dieu
, is Marthinus dead?”

“Why do you ask?” Hendrik said.

“I saw the empty horse. The way the bridle was tied to Boeksma’s.”

“And what did you think?”

“I thought, ‘Marthinus must be dead. I must go comfort Annatjie.’ ”

“He’s dead,” Hendrik said. “Mother’s inside.” And he saw the avidity with which the Huguenot hurried through the door. Hendrik should not have listened, but he did, hearing De Pré say with great excitement, “Annatjie, I’ve heard the dreadful news. My heart is pained for you.”

“Thank you, Paul.”

“How did it happen?”

“Bushmen. Poisoned arrow.”

“
O mon Dieu!
You sorrowful woman.”

“Thank you, Paul.”

There was a silence which Hendrik could not interpret, and then De Pré’s voice, urgent and nervous: “Annatjie, you’ll be alone, trying to work the vineyard. I’ll be alone, trying to do the same. Should we not join forces? I mean … well, I mean … What I mean is, should we not marry, and hold the place together?”

Hendrik quivered at the brazenness of such a question, at the awful impropriety of its coming on this day, but he was restrained from bursting into the room and thrashing the Frenchman by what his mother replied: “I knew you would come quickly to ask that question, Paul. I know you’ve been plotting and scheming and wondering how you could gain control of the Trianon. I know you’re nine years younger than I am and that not long ago you wanted to marry my daughter, not me. And I know how shameful it is of you to ask that question this night. But you’re a poor, hungry man, Paul, with only one desire, and I have pity on you. Come back in seven days.”

De Pré spent those days in drawing plans, in adding up acreages and in supervising the slaves and the Hottentots as they prepared the grapes for harvest. He neither went to the big house nor attended the memorial service in Stellenbosch at which the predikant and the members of the commando told the community of Marthinus van Doorn’s heroism. He stayed completely apart, working as he had never worked to get Trianon in top condition, and at eight o’clock in
the morning of the eighth day he walked over to Trianon in his pressed and dusted clothes.

He did not find Hendrik there. The young man had loaded his wagon—first putting in it, carefully wrapped, his grandfather’s Bible and brown-gold crock—with the equipment necessary for a life on the veld, and with a slave and two Hottentot families, had departed for the lands beyond the mountains, taking with him a small herd of cattle and sheep. Before leaving he had said farewell to Petronella and Bezel Muhammad; he judged they were as happy as human beings were allowed to be on this earth, but he could not know that their two dark children would soon be lost in that human wilderness called Coloured; for a brief while they and their descendants would be remembered as Van Doorns, but after that, their history, but not their bloodline, would vanish as surely as would the antecedents of the three little girls fathered by Andries Boeksma. Later, it would become fashionable to claim that all such half-castes were the spawn of those lusty sailors who could not control their urges at the halfway house between Europe and Asia. That a Van Doorn or a Boeksma had contributed to the Coloureds would be unthinkable.

Hendrik had no feeling about his brother Sarel; the boy showed no courage, no deep interest in anything, and he guessed that with the De Pré boys gone, Sarel would inherit the vineyards; but in this development he had no interest whatever. He did have enormous feeling for Annatjie and supposed that in her place he would do as she was doing; she had been a most excellent mother, loving and understanding; he had seen how tenderly she cared for old Katje when the grandmother was troublesome, and she had been just as attentive to Paul de Pré’s two motherless boys. Tears came to his eyes as he admitted to himself that after this day he might never see his mother again, that this break was final; Trianon and the lovely river and the white walls and the gables were lost forever.

With his wagon he headed eastward, as old Willem had done years before; the difference was that he traveled without a wife.

The wedding took place in the church at Stellenbosch at eleven in the morning, and by three that afternoon Paul de Pré, now master of Trianon, had his slaves tearing down the huts that stood in front of the house, and when the space was cleared, he and Bezel Muhammad paced off the dimensions of the proposed wings.

“It’s important,” Paul explained, “that they come away from the main building at an angle, and that the two angles are the same.” When the stakes were driven and the two men had gone far down the entrance road to satisfy themselves that they had found the proper relationships, Paul said, “I think that’s it,” and he could visualize the finished buildings, stark-white but with shadows playing across the surfaces like breezes in a glade, the arms extended in welcome, with the two flanks helping to form with the house a spacious enclosure such as farms in France sometimes had.

“It will be glorious!” he cried with deep pleasure as the sun began to sink, throwing bold colors on the hills behind the house, and he could visualize travelers from the Cape approaching this haven of white buildings and generous spaces.

Construction started immediately. Ten slaves dug foundations, piled rocks, and mixed mud for the walls. Cadres were sent into the fields to cut the heavy thatch that would form the roofs, and Bezel Muhammad led still others into the forests to find yellow-wood for the rafters. Under the constant urging of De Pré, the two rows of buildings seemed to spring from the soil, and when they were nearing completion, and Muhammad’s supervision was no longer needed, Paul took him aside to explain what would later prove to be the most engaging aspect of the buildings.

“What I want,” he told Bezel, “is for each of the eight compartments to have over the door, in the darkest stinkwood you can find, an oval plaque, carved in high relief, indicating what goes on in that segment of the building.” And he stepped along the two flanks, suggesting by big movements of his hands what he had in mind.

“As we ride in, first door on the left, a pigeon, dark against the white wall. Next a pig, because we’ll use this as part of the sty. Next a stack of hay, and over this door near the house, a dog. Now let’s go back and look at the right-hand side. First a rooster, then a measure for grain, then a pot of flowers, and on the one nearest the house, a rake and a hoe.” Bezel nodded, already planning in his mind how he would carve certain of the signs, but as he started for the two-room home he had built for Petronella some distance from the main house, Paul called him back: “On the right-hand side, have the tools over the next-to-last door. Save the flowers for the door nearest the house, so that Mevrouw de Pré can get to them easily.”