Devil's Valley (14 page)

“And then he gave up?”

“Not a hope. No, next thing was, he tried fire. He stuffed big bags with dry grass and set fire to them. But one day the whole mountain caught fire and just about everything burned down, the fields, the orchards, the roofs of the houses. And he too. Scorched off all his tailfeathers. He fell from high up in the sky on his own roof, it was just flames all over, his own wife burnt to death, which was her just deserts.”

“That must have set him back.”

“Never. For a while he gave himself up to drink. He thought if only he could get drunk enough flying would come by itself. But it didn’t work either. Then, after he’d been cured of the drinking he made himself a little cart. His heaven-cart, he called it. A little square box of a thing, like the basket of rushes the mother of Moses wove to put her child in. And when it was finished he built a huge cage and sent out the children to catch all the birds in the Devil’s Valley. With traps, and cages, and lime, everything you can imagine. For weeks and months on end the children brought back birds. And when they’d caught every single bird in the mountains he hitched them to his heaven-cart and there they went, over the mountains, to hell and gone. He was never seen again. Up to heaven he must have gone. And now it’s my turn.”

“But it must be very uncomfortable up here.”

“Here on the roof I don’t bother anybody and they don’t bother me either. Also, I don’t have a coffin like the others, so it’s better to wait up here.”

“Weren’t you married then? I thought every woman in the valley gets a coffin as a wedding present?”

“That’s so. And I got mine too. All measured and everything. And my groom and I gave it a proper lie-in, I can tell you. But then I gave it away. That poor young girl Maria needed it more than I did.”

“Would that be the mother of the girl Emma?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“Please tell me about her.”

Kind of Mark

She sucked the inside of her toothless cheeks. Perhaps there was a story coming, I thought, but in the end she only shook her head, which looked like a frayed stocking drawn over a darning shell.

“The least said the better. All I know is that life in our valley has been going downhill ever since Maria died. That was a sign. These are the Last Days, Boetie. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood. You think you saw blood last night? But there’s more coming.”

“How do you know about last night?”

“I saw you, of course.”

Mad as a fucking coot. Yet it brought a brief, sense of relief too, after Jurg Water’s rebuff. At least I had a witness, so for once it hadn’t been a dream. If her word was anything to go by.

“So you saw the hunt?” I asked eagerly.

But her mind was wandering. “Ag, poor Maria. And what’s going to become of Emma now with Little-Lukas dead and all?”

Trying to get the conversation back on track, I prodded her: “Tell me about Emma, Ouma Liesbet.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“The day I came here I saw her swimming in the rock pool over there. And then she just disappeared again.”

“Perhaps it was better for you that way. Remember what happened to Little-Lukas.”

“Emma couldn’t have had anything to do with his death.”

“It was to get away from her that he left. All I know is that Little-Lukas was perfectly happy here, but he was so scared of her he’d have done anything to get away from her.”

“I thought he loved Emma.”

“He loved her, yes. But he was scared as a hare.”

“Tant Poppie Fullmoon said this morning that Emma has the mark of the Devil on her body.”

“Poppie knows what she knows.”

“What kind of mark would it be?”

“If there is a mark she must have got it from her mother. Ben Owl always said Maria caused trouble and Ben had reason to know. A thing like that is passed from mother to daughter. One doesn’t talk about it. You either see it or you don’t, and what you don’t see isn’t meant for you. Now go on, I must prepare to meet my Bridegroom.”

I
NSIDE, ISAK SMOUS’S house looked just like all the others, except that it had more rooms—a workroom and a store for his wares, space for his offspring, and bedrooms for himself and Alie, and Malie and Ralie.

One of the three meat-grinder women made us coffee. I should add that it was the only household in the settlement where I got offered proper coffee. Most of the other families were quite happy with a poison brewed from some bloody local root. I’d tried witgat once when I was on an assignment for my paper in the Northwest, but that was like ambrosia compared to the concoction of the Devil’s Valley.

The wife (or sister, or sister) served the coffee in the store where we sat, and then rejoined the others in their rounds of feeding babies, kneading dough, churning goat’s milk, swatting flies with a bluegum branch, sweeping floors with a brushwood broom, chasing poultry from under chairs or tables, or whatever their chafed red hands found to do. It was an interior like those described by Burchell in his
Travels
, in the early nineteenth century: or even earlier by John Barrow, whose accounts of Boer life in the deep interior so upset the colonists.

At one stage a din broke out when one of the three sisters climbed on the roof to throw a hen down the chimney. All hell broke loose as the squawking, flapping chicken came fluttering down, and I was on the point of jumping up when Isak calmly looked up through his stained and dusty half-moon reading glasses and explained, “They always clean the chimney on Mondays.”

Closing the Door

He returned to the much-thumbed exercise book in which he’d been adding up rows of scribbled figures when I came in. But there was a matter I just had to get out of my system, as pressing as any fart: “Looking at you right now, Isak, no one would guess you’d been on a hunt last night.”

Half-surprised, half-annoyed at being interrupted in his calculations, he stared at me. “What funny questions you ask,” he mumbled.

“I’ve got to know, Isak. You were there after all.”

He just shrugged his sloping castor-oil bottle shoulders and stuck his nose back into his work.

Sucking in my arsehole I went for broke: “Or are you telling me we weren’t there?”

“There are things better not talked about, Neef Flip.”

And that was bloody well it. I was left to my frustration while he finished his bookkeeping.

All around him stood boxes and chests and bags filled with merchandise. It was a mystery how he’d lugged all that stuff across the mountains and down the precipices of the Devil’s Valley. But when I asked him about it, he just laughed, stroking his hand across his bald pate as if to flatten an unruly mop of hair.

As restless as a fly he jumped up to show me the contents of his containers. Against one wall, the produce of the Devil’s Valley: honey and rolled tobacco, raisins and ostrich eggs and dried fruit and prickly-pear beer and calabash pipes, as well as Tant Poppie’s herbs, Jos Joseph’s miniature wagon chests, Sias Sjambok’s plaited whips, Petrus Tatters’s veldskoens. And piled up against the opposite wall the merchandise picked up in Oudtshoorn and Calitzdorp, or as far afield as Uniondale and Ladismith: sugar and salt and ammunition, needles and bolts of chintz, paraffin for when the lard ran out, here a hatchet head, there a ploughshare or a spade—only the most indispensable stuff, for in the course of time the Valley had become quite surprisingly self-sufficient.

At a given moment he grabbed me by the arm and took me to the master bedroom, carefully closing the door behind us so the women couldn’t see us, and removed from under the bed a battered old tin trunk which he unlocked with an ancient key to show, with all the pride of a new father, what clearly was his treasure: the trunk was half-filled with banknotes, which he scraped away to reveal a sizeable molehill of golden pounds.

“Where does this come from?”

“It’s from all the buying and selling over the years.”

“But what can you do with money in the Devil’s Valley?”

“It’s not a matter of doing but of having,” he laughed.

I grubbed in the coins with my hands, shaking my head.

“There used to be much more,” he said in a flush of anger. “But these people were a lot of scoundrels. It’s hard on an honest man to live among such sinners.”

“What happened then?”

“In my father’s time a bunch of good-for-nothings—Lukas Death’s father, old Lukas Devil, was the gangleader—waited until he’d gone over the mountains, then they stole all his money. They melted the gold and made a billy goat out of it and put it on the pulpit in the church, calling on all the people to worship it, can you imagine a thing like that, just like the Israelites in the desert.”

“Sounds a bit far-fetched to me,” I said curiously.

“It’s the honest truth I’m telling you, Neef Flip. And if you ask me why they did it, I’ll tell you it was from pure spite, spite and jealousy, because they couldn’t stand somebody else making a success of his life.”

He ceremoniously closed and locked the trunk again, and pushed it back under the bed. Then he steered me back to his store.

Every Word

What caught my eye this time was a small box filled with books. He wanted to shove it aside but I stopped him.

“And these books, Isak?”

“I picked them up outside too, at auctions and things.”

“Do you read them?”

“No, I’m not a reader.” It took him a while to open up. “There’s one or two people around here who sometimes ask for a book. Lukas Death of course. And Brother Holy, when I have something religious”—a sly wink—“or something with pictures, you know what I mean?” He cupped a hand over his crotch, then grew serious again. “But mostly I brought them in for Little-Lukas.”

“How did he get started?”

“He often went into town with me, you see, when he was a little boy. That’s how it began. First newspapers, then books from the library. But it was actually Emma who pushed him. And as they grew up the two of them would spend whole afternoons reading here in my store.”

I kneeled beside the box and started unpacking. A curious mix. Several were by older Afrikaans authors: a few volumes from Langenhoven’s collected works, ghost stories by Leipoldt, some poetry, an early grammar. A couple of Dutch titles, even some English ones, like
The Jungle Book
, and
Alice in Wonderland
, and
The Story of an African Farm
. And then Oscar Wilde’s collected works, and textbooks on biology and geography, history. The most unexpected was Immanuel Kant.

“And this one?” I asked, both amused and amazed.

He looked at the Kant and grinned. “That one had Little-Lukas stumped. He tried his damnedest, I can tell you. He went so far as to copy every word of it into his exercise books, and when his hand got numb men Emma took over. They thought that would help them understand. They never made it so far, but I tell you, they never gave up trying. And from then on Emma kept up with him, book after book. There was a kind of fever in those two.”

“You aided and abetted them?” I joked.

But Isak remained deadly serious. “There was no way I could stop them, Neef Flip. We had a few children before them who also liked to read, but they never had it so bad as these two. And the others always came back after Standard Eight or Matric. People from here don’t transplant easily. But Little-Lukas and Emma…If anything, she was worse than him.”

“Then why didn’t she go to university too?”

“How could she? What is the use of education for a woman if she can’t bake a loaf of bread for her husband?”

“And so he went off on his own?”

“He promised to bring her books every vacation. And then the two of them would work together for hours here in this room, all out of sight. Quite a touching thing to see. You can imagine how it was for her when he died.”

“I must talk to her, but no one gets to see her.”

“She’s still in mourning,” he said gruffly, closing up like a bloody clam, as if I’d trespassed on private property.

“There’s a lot about Emma I simply don’t understand, Isak.”

“It’s better to let her be,” he said, just as reluctant to pursue the subject as Tant Poppie and Ouma Liesbet Prune had been. “She carries bad luck with her.”

One Never Knows

“Because of her mother?” I asked.

He began to burrow in his merchandise again and didn’t answer.

“What happened to her mother?” I insisted.

“Sometimes I wondered if I could perhaps smuggle Emma out of here,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. “But one never knows with Hans Magic. He won’t let Emma go just like that.”

“What has he got against her then?”

“Hans Magic is a dark horse. All I know is that he’s got a grudge against her. They say she insulted him. But Hans Magic gets affronted so easily, it’s hard to say.”

“Little-Lukas told me about him, but I was stone drunk, so I can’t remember much. But there was something about a thief whose shoe he’d caught in a vice…?”

“So he told you. Yes. And then he died.”

I was waiting to hear more, but he was clearly not prepared to help me out. I decided to take the bloody bull by the horns: “What I don’t understand is how the news of Little-Lukas’s death reached the valley?”

He shrugged.

“And everybody seemed to be expecting me when I came,” I went on. “Lukas Death, Tant Poppie, Hans Magic, the lot.”

“It was Grandpa Lukas who told them.”

“But how did
he
find out?”

His answer was quite unexpected: “I told him.”

“You?!”

“Yes,” Isak said casually. “As it happened, I was in the Little Karoo with a load just after Little-Lukas died. That’s where I heard about it, so I went on to Stellenbosch and spoke to his landlady. She told me about you, and that you were going to come here.”

“Why didn’t she say anything to me?”

“I told her it was better not to talk about it.”

It took me a while to digest it all. Then, following a new track, I asked, “For how long have you been in your line of business?”

“It runs in the family.” He seemed relieved to move away from Little-Lukas. As he busied himself with his stocktaking again he started talking in fits and starts. If I hadn’t brought my tape recorder I’d have been screwed trying to sort it all out afterwards.