The Covenant Part 45

Fortunately, at this moment an extraordinary man came along looking for Van Doorn, and this gave Tjaart an excuse to defer the negotiations: 'Think it over, Probenius.' And he threw out a price markedly lower than the one the storekeeper had just proposed, but not enough to be insulting. 'I promised to talk with this gentleman.'

It was a curious use of words, for if there was anyone at the Nachtmaal who was not a gentleman, it was this odd fellow Theunis Nel, forty-eight years old, short, rumpled, unshaven, poorly dressed, and with a pitiful little mustache that made his upper lip tremble when he talked. Three times during Nachtmaal he had come seeking guidance from Tjaart, and thrice he had been put off. Now he arrived at a time when Tjaart found it convenient to interrupt his bargaining with Probenius, and to the little man's surprise, he was welcomed warmly.

'Theunis, my trusted friend, what can I do for you?'

In addition to his other infirmities, Nel had two which irritated many persons: he lisped slightly, and his left eye was both c.o.c.ked and watery, so that anyone speaking with him had a confusing time looking first at one eye and then the other without ever knowing which one was functioning, and whenever a decision was reached, Theunis would interrupt the conversation by taking out a grubby handkerchief and wiping his eye: 'I have a cold, you know.' Now he said in pleading voice, 'Tjaart, please speak one more time with the predikant.'

'It's quite useless, dear fellow.'

'Maybe things have changed. Maybe he'll be more compa.s.sionate.' 'Haven't you got a job? Aren't you eating?'

'Oh, yes! I'm teaching school ... for several families . . . beyond the mountains.'

'I'm very happy that you have work, Theunis.'

And then the terrible fire that burned in the heart of this little man manifested itself. In words that tumbled upon each other, and with his lisp worse than usual, he said, 'Tjaart, I am indeed called of G.o.d. I have a mission. I feel driven to pa.s.s through this community, helping and praying. Tjaart, G.o.d has spoken to me. His voice echoes in my ears. For His sake if not for mine, beg the predikant to ordain me.'

He was a pitiful man; refused entrance to any real theological school back in Holland, he had been half trained at a kind of missionary school in Germany. He was certainly not a predikant, which was why he sought ordination so compulsively, but he was not a layman either, because he had been on his way to Java to work in a mission when the last Dutch governor at the Cape had plucked him off his ship to serve in that capacity in South Africa. Itinerant teacher, wandering scholar, frontier sick-comforter, busybody, aspirant, his only virtue was that of all the Dutch sick-comforters in Africa and Java, he was the one who truly brought comfort to the dying. Insignificant, without pomp or pretense, but convinced that he was touched directly by the finger of G.o.d, he came into the meanest frontier hut and said, 'Life runs its course, Stepha.n.u.s, and now the commando saddles up for the last charge. I have watched you for a dozen years, down and up, and I am convinced that G.o.d has His eye upon you. Death has not yet come. You have days and days to reflect upon the providential life you've enjoyed. Those children. The fields. Stepha.n.u.s, you are quitting one glory to enter another, and I wish I could go with you, hand in hand, to see what you're about to see. Spend these last days in reflection. Would you like me to read you a sermon preached in Amsterdam about the nature of heaven?'

And that was the constant anguish! As a sick-comforter, Theunis Nel could read the sermons of others but never preach one of his own; the church laws which governed his deportment were severe. If he had ever presumed to preach in those early days when Holland governed, he would have been thrown in jail; now, under English law, he would escape jail but not the ostracism of his own people. So he carried with him always a small book of sermons, which he had memorized but which prudently he continued to read, because only this was permitted.

'Please, Tjaart, the years slip by and I am not yet ordained. Will you speak with the predikant?'

'Have you a Bible?' Tjaart asked. Theunis nodded eagerly, so they went to his wagon, and there in Leviticus, Tjaart found the citation he needed; it was terrifyingly explicit: And the Lord spake unto Moses saying ... Whosoever... that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his G.o.d ... Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or hath his stones broken ... he shall not come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries.

Leaving the book open so that Theunis could see for himself, if he so wished, Tjaart said, 'There it is. You have a blemished eye. You give the impression of being crookbackt. It's impossible for you to be a predikant.'

'It's just a cold,' the little man said, daubing at his offending eye. And then the pretense ended and he scratched at his eye, crying, 'I would to G.o.d I could pluck it out.'

'Then you'd be blind,' Tjaart said, 'and the blemish would be even greater.'

'What can I do?' Nel pleaded, and all Tjaart could say was 'You're a teacher. You are G.o.d's sick-comforter. That's the way you must serve.'

'But I could do so much more. Tjaart, did you hear those dreadful sermons the fat Scotsman gave? No fire. No touch of G.o.d. It's a disgrace.'

'For reasons of His own, G.o.d has forbidden you to preach. Be content.'

And he shoved the difficult little man away, watching him as he returned to the wagon that would carry him to the four farms where he conducted his school, and when those children were grown, to four other farms, and then four others, until some younger sick-comforter should in due course come to him to ease his dying. He was the man of G.o.d whom G.o.d rejected.

On the way back to De Kraal in the new wagon, Tjaart thought several times that he would burst into tears before his entire family, something he had never done. But his anguish over the despair of little Minna was almost more than he could bear, and even as he tried to console her he felt himself coming apart, and he would leave before he made a fool of himself. Walking beside the lead oxen, he would try not to think of her sorrow, and his mind would fix on Aletta as she worked in the store, stretching to find a box, or as she appeared on the day of her wedding like a spirit risen from the veld, all gold and smiles and enchantment. He was entertaining such visions one afternoon when he heard a sudden cry from the wagon, and when he rushed back he found that Minna had undone the cloth in which her new dress was being carried and was tearing the garment apart, throwing the bits upon the veld.

'Daughter!' he cried in rage. 'What are you doing?' 'It's no use! I am lost!'

Climbing into the wagon beside her, he took her in his arms and told the slave women to recover the bits of cloth and take the dress away; it could be mended. He was not so sure about his daughter's heart, for in the days that followed she fell into a fever and lay in the wagon shivering and not caring whether she lived or died. The women had several remedies for such afflictions, but none sufficed, and on the third night Tjaart crept into bed with her, and kept her warm and comforted her, and when the dawn broke he said a strange thing: 'We must both forget Nachtmaal.'

Ironically, it was Van Doorn's oldest slave who announced the long-awaited decision on slavery. 'Baas, Baas!' he cried. 'Die big baas Cuyler, he here.' And that remarkable man from Albany, New York, Colonel Jacob Glen Cuyler, strode heavily into the De Kraal farmhouse. The two men with him did not presume to enter, but remained respectfully outside: Saul, the Xhosa deacon at Golan, and Pieter, son of Dikkop. The first was old and gray, the second hastening in that direction.

They were at the first stage of an incredible venture: Cuyler had fetched them from the mission village and was taking them to Port Elizabeth, whence they would go by ship to London as guests of Dr. Simon Keer, who wanted them to partic.i.p.ate in one of his grand lecture tours. Hesitant about entering the home of a Boer, they would be entertained at Buckingham Palace.

Colonel Cuyler, now a respected magistrate and soon to be a lieutenant-general, had a message which was brief and shocking: 'Parliament have pa.s.sed a law that says all slaves will be emanc.i.p.ated next year. On December 31, 1834, every slave in the empire will be freed.'

'Good G.o.d!' Tjaart cried. 'That's revolution!'

'Oh, you'll be compensated, fully. Every penny you spent. And the slaves must work for you during the first four years, so they can move in an orderly way into their freedom.'

Cuyler saluted and departed. For three days the Van Doorns and their neighbors discussed the new laws, and at the end of that time they still could not grasp the full meaning of this radical changethat it defined a whole new way of lifeand to their surprise it was not any of the men who saw clearly the new landscape, but Jakoba van Doorn, the quiet, unlettered woman who had been ignored both at Nachtmaal and in these discussions. Now she spoke with fierce determination: 'The Bible says that the sons of Ham shall work for us and be our slaves. The Bible says there shall be a proper difference between master and slave. The Bible says we shall keep apart, His people to themselves, the Canaanites to themselves. I have never struck a slave. I have always tended my slaves and my Coloureds when they were sick. And I think I have shown that I love them. But I do not want them at my table and I do not like the sight of them in my church. For G.o.d has ordered me to live otherwise.'

Driven by her forcefulness, the illiterate men urged Tjaart to consult the Bible, desiring to hear for themselves what the strictures of good Christian life ought to be, and he found and recited those satisfying pa.s.sages upon which their social order was so securely founded: 'And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren . . . Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my G.o.d . . .'

After he had read a dozen such pa.s.sages, which proved conclusively that G.o.d had ordained and blessed the inst.i.tution of slavery, Jakoba, a woman fierce in righteousness, demanded that he seek further for two verses which predikants had explained to her, for upon them she based her belief that the Boers were special people, set free by G.o.d to behave in their own special way. After some searching in Leviticus, a book whose laws governed Boer life, Tjaart uttered the statement: 'And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.'

'See,' Jakoba cried with grim satisfaction, 'G.o.d Himself wanted us to be apart. We have special obligations, special privileges.' And she urged her husband to uncover that particular verse on which she hung the main body of her belief. He could not find it, and with some impatience she riffled the large pages of the book she could not read, then pushed the Bible back to Tjaart, with the command: 'Find it. It deals with tribute.'

It was this word that reminded Tjaart of a pa.s.sage in Judges dealing with the establishment of Israel in a new landan exact parallel to the situation of the Boersand with a good deal of useless help from the men, he finally located what Jakoba wanted to hear: 'And it came to pa.s.s, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out... but the Canaanites dwelt among them and became tributaries.'

'And that,' said Jakoba, 'is how it should be. We have conquered the land. We live here. We are to be just to the Kaffirs, but they are tribute to us.' 'The English say that's all done for.'

'The English know nothing about Kaffirs,' Jakoba said. She was a small woman, daughter of a trekboer who had defended his land eleven times against black marauders, and in the harshness of her family's hut she had learned the principles by which a Christian lives, and to such a life she was committed. She was honest, hard-working, a good mother both to her own daughter and to Tjaart's children by his first marriage, and although she could not attend church each Sunday, for the nearest was many miles away, she did hold personal services in which she thanked G.o.d for His merciful guidance. What He wanted in the matter of relationships between white masters and black slaves was so clear that an idiot could understand, and she proposed that she, her family and her nation obey those precepts.

'We will not abide by English laws,' she said as she left the men, 'if they run counter to the word of G.o.d,' and when she was gone, Tjaart called after her, 'What have you in mind?' and from the kitchen she replied, 'Leave here. Go over the mountains and form a nation of our own.'

Late one morning as Tjaart returned from inspecting his flocks he was alarmed to find five horses tethered at his house, and he a.s.sumed that new troubles had erupted on the frontier: 'd.a.m.n! Another commando!'

But when he entered the kitchen he found no sense of urgency. Five neighbors were drinking gin and joking with Jakoba and Minna as the two brought large platters of food. 'Veldkornet!' the men cried noisily as Tjaart entered, and there was ribald joking as to why he had been absent when they arrived.

Leader of the group was Balthazar Bronk, a man Tjaart instinctively distrusted. Bronk endeavored to be two quite different persons at the same time: with superiors he was obsequious; with others he tried to dominate in various pompous ways; and sometimes he was downright objectionable. He could never be simply Balthazar Bronk, farmer.

'Veldkornet,' he said humbly as Tjaart reached for a gla.s.s of gin. 'We've come to enlist your services.'

'No commando. I'm tired of fighting those d.a.m.ned Xhosa.'

The men laughed, for they knew that the first man to saddle up if trouble came would be Van Doorn, but Bronk continued: 'We're worried, Veldkornet. With English rule'

'Stop right there!' Van Doorn snapped, slamming his two hands down on the table. 'The English are in command, and slowly they're learning to do things right. Accept them.'

'Exactly what I said,' Bronk cried eagerly, and when he looked to the others for confirmation, they nodded. Then he coughed, adjusted things on the table, and went on: 'Under English rule our children will have to know moreto compete, to make us proud.'

Tjaart could not guess what would come next, but a quiet member of the group said, 'You're the only one of us who can read. None of our children can read'

'We need a teacher,' Bronk interrupted. 'Find us a teacher.'

'Who would pay him?' Tjaart asked cautiously.

'All of us. We have so many children.'

A census was taken, and when the numbers were announced they gave a good picture of Boer life: 'Eleven, nine, nine, seven.' And proudly Bronk declared: 'Seventeen.'

'You mean they all want to go to school?'

'Only the young ones,' Bronk said. 'Six of mine are married.' Then he smiled unctuously at Tjaart and said, 'You have how many?'

Tjaart swigged on his gin, then said, 'First wife, two boys. They're past schooling, but they have children. Jakoba, tell them how many you have.'

Wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n, she said, 'Minna here.'

Five heads turned toward the girl, who blushed deeply, for she could see that they were thinking: Why isn't she married?

'Mejuffrouw Minna is not for school,' Bronk said with a wide smile, and the others returned to the task of finding a master, and as expected, Tjaart was of help: 'At Nachtmaal, I was speaking with Theunis Nel . . .'

Bronk groaned. 'We want a real teacher. Not a squint-eye.'

Another said, 'We must have a school. Go see him, Van Doorn.'

When Tjaart reined his horse at the northern farm of Gerrit Viljoen, he was astonished by what the owner said: 'Welcome! Have you come to talk with us about emigrating north?'

'Why do you ask that?'

'Six wagons pa.s.sed here the other day. Men like you and me.'

'Why would you go north?'

'Freedom.'

'I'm staying where I am.'

'I'd expect you to. All those good stone buildings.'

'They are good,' Tjaart agreed, not catching the challenge to his worldliness.

'You might have to reach a decision sooner than you think, Tjaart.' 'Why?'

'Freedom. Boers love freedom. And ours is being stolen from us.' 'Gerrit,' Tjaart said abruptly. 'I came here to steal your schoolmaster.' 'No complaint from me. He's about done his job at these farms.' 'Do you recommend him?'

'I do. I do. Knows his numbers. Knows his Bible.' 'Have I your permission to speak with him?'

'I'd be relieved if he found a good job.' He paused. 'A man so ill-favored needs help.'

Viljoen dispatched a slave to fetch the itinerant teacher, and when Tjaart saw the man againcrookbackt, and almost fifty years oldhe shuddered: This man could never teach! But when he consulted the families, he found that all spoke of Nel with affection. One mother said, 'He's small and he has a high voice, but he's a man of G.o.d,' and the oldest Viljoen boy said, 'Any of us in cla.s.s could have whipped him, but he kept order.'

'How?'

'He told us that Jesus was a teacher, too, and we listened.'

That night Tjaart offered Nel the job, and the little man wiped his watery eye and blessed him. 'But if I handle the children well, will you ask the predikant to ordain me?'

'Theunis,' Van Doorn said as if talking with a child, although the schoolmaster was older than he, 'you'll never be a dominee. I've told you that. We need you as a schoolmaster.'

'How many children?'

'Thirty, maybe.' Tjaart was afraid this might sound like too many, but Nel smiled broadly.

'It's better when there's lots. Then the school doesn't end too soon.'

'How many schools have you conducted?'

'Eleven.' Quickly he added, 'I was never discharged. The children grew up and I moved on.' He looked at the two farmers. 'I move on,' he said.

During Tjaart's absence it had been agreed that the new master, if found, would live with Balthazar Bronk and his many children, but when Jakoba heard of the arrangement she snorted: 'No charity there. Bronk wants him to help discipline the children. They're rhinoceroses.' And when Nel saw where he was to domicile, he, too, understood.

Bronk's farm lay nine miles east of De Kraal and proved quite suitable; it was central to the partic.i.p.ating families, and had a small whitewashed storage shed that could be converted into a schoolroom. Here Theunis collected his thirty-three youngsters to teach the alphabet, the Bible and the counting tables. Nel had only the slightest knowledge of history, literature, geography and such related subjects, so he did not presume to teach them, but whatever he did attempt carried a heavy overlay of moral instruction.

'Bronk, Dieter. Stand and recite the First Psalm.' After the oafish lad had stumbled through, Nel would ask, 'Bronk, Dieter, suppose you walked in the counsel of the unG.o.dly. What would you be doing?'

'I don't know, Master.'

'You would be breaking commandments.' And here Nel would launch into a small sermon about not lying, not stealing, not coveting another man's wife; though forbidden to deliver large sermons in church, he was free to deliver small ones in school.

All his pupils, age five to fourteen, met in one squarish room furnished only with benches, and often the school seemed more riot than rote, but patiently Nel established order, and with various groups sequestered in odd corners, he taught first the five-to-seven, then the eight-to-eleven, then the twelve-to-fourteen, but the best part came each morning at eleven and each afternoon at three, for then he a.s.sembled the students in one big group. In the morning he discussed the Bible, especially the Book of Joshua, which proved that G.o.d had chosen the Boers for some special task; in the afternoon he taught Dutch, or rather, the semi-Dutch of the frontier. He was a lively actor and would tell his children, 'I can speak English as well as anyone at Graaff-Reinet.' And here he would become a magistrate or a Scots minister, offering a fairly garbled English. 'But when I am a true man, I speak Dutch. Learn this manly language. Hold on to it.'

In a year of Nel's teaching a child might learn what he or she could have mastered in two weeks at a real school, but would certainly learn a wealth of moral instruction which children in better schools never acquired.

He had one weakness as a schoolmaster, and the farmers who employed him could not correct it. 'I am,' he told them, 'first and last a sick-comforter,' and if anyone in the region fell ill or approached death, he felt obligated to appear at the bedside. This meant that his school went unattended, and for this he was rebuked, but he told Balthazar Bronk, 'G.o.d has two concerns in the Graaff-Reinet district. That his young people get started right on their journey through life. That his old people get started right on their journey to heaven. In both instances I am the teacher.'

He was indeed a sick-comforter. With dying men he recalled their vigorous contributions to Boer society; with women he reminded them of the essential role they played in producing and rearing good people. He made the termination of life respectable, proper, inevitable, a thing to be as much appreciated as a beginning: 'You have seen the meadows fill with grain. You have seen six cattle multiply to sixty-six. These have been the signs of a good life, and through them G.o.d has marked you for salvation.'

In strict obedience to John Calvin's teaching, he was convinced that every human being he met was destined either for heaven or for h.e.l.l, and he usually knew which; but this did not mean that he treated the condemned with any less benevolence than he treated the saved, and in the final moments whenever a dying person asked, 'Dominee, am I to be saved?' he replied, 'I am not a dominee, and I often wonder whether I am saved. This crooked back. This blemished eye. All I know about you is what I know about myself. In this life G.o.d has been just to me, and I'm sure He will be so in the next.'

The Van Doorns became personally affected by Nel's dual functions when the old grandmother fell ill. Wilhelmina was past sixty and her life was ending in a painful sickness. Nel, hearing of this, closed school and rode the horse his farmers had given him over to De Kraal, where he said simply, 'I am told Ouma is dying.'

'She is,' Tjaart said, tears marring his broad face and beard. 'She built this farm.' He led Nel to the dark room in which the old woman lay, and the first thing Theunis did was open the blinds and the windows. He then stepped to the bedside and spoke to Wilhelmina as if she were one of his scholars: 'Now tell me how you got this farm,' and when she had spoken only a few words, he interrupted, ran to the kitchen and told Tjaart, 'You must a.s.semble all the children, immediately. Ouma wants to talk with them.'

She had in no way indicated that she wished to speak with her grandchildren, but Nel recognized that she possessed words of importance which ought to be pa.s.sed from one generation to the next. So when they were all a.s.sembled, Nel arranged them in the sickroom and said, 'The generations of man are but as the winnowing of grain, and when the chaff is blown aside, the wheat must be treasured.'

'What in h.e.l.l is he talking about?' Tjaart whispered.

'This Ouma who lies here with us has had a powerful life, and you must know about it, and tell it to your children's children.' And with this he started Wilhelmina on the story of how she had come to De Kraal.

In a wispy voice, sensing that she had only hours to live, she began: 'I lived by the sea in a family that knew not G.o.d, and a pa.s.sing smous smous told me that up north a good man had lost his wife, so I got on my horse, and without saying goodbye to anyone I left that wrong house, rode north and told your father ...' She was speaking to Tjaart, who listened dumfounded. told me that up north a good man had lost his wife, so I got on my horse, and without saying goodbye to anyone I left that wrong house, rode north and told your father ...' She was speaking to Tjaart, who listened dumfounded.

'They called your father the Hammer, which was an ugly name, really, and not at all the proud one he thought. But we needed a Hammer. Forty times or more he rode off, and always I prayed that I would see him come back.'

One thing worried her: 'Lodevicus died because he did a wrong thing. He offered to betray his government. I am ashamed . . .' Here she broke down momentarily, then said an unfortunate thing: 'I want to tell you about Nachtmaal at Graaff-Reinet. We went four times, I think, and the farmers were always glad . . .'

At the mention of Nachtmaal, Tjaart thought hungrily of that exquisite girl, but he stopped when he became aware that someone near him was sobbing. It was Minna. Death she could tolerate, but Nachtmaal carried memories too bitter to accept. Dashing from the death-room, she ran from the house and toward the hills that protected De Kraal.

'You must find her a husband,' the dying Ouma said. 'I rode alone more than a hundred miles to find your father, Tjaart.'

One of the children asked, 'Were there lions when you rode, Ouma?'