Devil's Valley (29 page)

Rare Gift

“You didn’t come here to talk about Ouma Liesbet, did you?” asked Hans Magic, at peace with the world.

“Did you kill Little-Lukas?” I asked him straight out.

He placed his elbows on his knees, staring into the distance. “When I was still a little pisser,” he said, “I discovered a curious thing. I’d be sitting in my ma’s kitchen, on the foot-stove, when suddenly a strange feeling would come over me and I’d see somebody’s face before me. Then, without knowing what got into me, I’d start to cry and say that person’s name. And before nightfall someone would bring news that such and such a one had died.”

“And it still happens?”

“It happens. You see, it’s a rare gift. And if you ask me, it comes all the way from old Seer Lermiet himself. But he misused it, and that’s a bad thing.” He fell silent for so long that I began to think he’d lost track of his thoughts, but then he resumed. “At first it scared me. I didn’t want to know about it. It’s not a pleasant thing to have in you, people start giving you dirty looks, no one wants to have anything to do with you. You can see how far apart I live from them.”

“Were you never married?”

He chuckled. “Why should I? In my father’s family he was the only man who got married and he died young. It doesn’t agree with us.”

“It must be a very lonely life.”

“It’s really because of my mother,” he said, sucking pensively on the calabash pipe. “It hit her hard when my father died. She was scared of getting old on her own. And when I was four years old she took me to the church and made me swear an oath on the Bible that I’d never marry but look after her till she died.” A resigned sigh. “She didn’t die before she was in her eighties, and by then my time was over.”

“Did you never regret that oath?”

“Ag.” He cleared his throat. “When I was younger and before I knew any better, yes, I suppose I did. Once the urge became so great it got as far as the church. But when we stood before the pulpit, my mother got up from her pew and told everybody I took an oath before the Lord, I couldn’t break it. And so I came back without my bride.”

“Who was the bride?” I asked.

“It was so long ago it doesn’t matter any more.” He began to puff furiously and the flies rose up in a buzzing cloud before coming to rest again.

“Was it Tall-Fransina?” I guessed out loud.

“Leave Fransina out of this.” He narrowed his eyes. “What did she tell you?”

“I was just asking.”

He sat mumbling to himself for a while. Unsavoury as he was, I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of pity for the old fucker. I remembered Tall-Fransina’s words,
There was a time when he was very different. Before he became so bitter and so filthy
.

“This loneliness must kill you,” I commiserated.

But his moment of vulnerability had passed. “I’m well looked after,” he said. “The women take turns to send me food and things.” He exhaled another godawful whiff over me. “In the past, when my blood was still warm, they used to send me some tail too, in the evenings. Their way of staying in my good books. Now I’m done with such things. Life gets easier as you grow older.”

He handed me the pipe again. I was beginning to feel more relaxed.

“And the gift has remained with you?”

“All these years, yes.” His eyes gleamed with malicious glee.

“I’d like to know more about it. Little-Lukas told me about a thief you once trapped.”

“Ja. I caught his shoe in Jos Joseph’s vice.” He laughed deep in his throat. “And if you must know, it was Ben Owl who came crawling to me with his shattered foot to claim his shoe and beg for mercy. To this very day he walks with a limp. And I promise you he never tried to steal again. Of course he can’t stand the sight of me, but he’s shit-scared all the same.”

“Useful gift to have,” I commented. “You can strike anyone you take a dislike to.”

Heap of Goosefeathers

“It’s not for me to decide, man. It either comes over me or it doesn’t. That’s where Grandpa Lermiet went wrong. You see, he lost interest in his first wife when she became sickly and turned his eye to someone else. So he told everybody he’d seen a vision that Bilhah was to be his wife and he promptly took her into his bed. No wonder Mina gave up and died. That kind of thing just leads to trouble.” Once again his briny little laugh. But he chose to puff away for a while before he spoke again. “Now take the widow of old Giel Eyes. She’s another one that picked up problems with me. Drieka. One day when old Giel was still alive, she was sitting there on her stoep tearing up an old sheet for cloths. I came down from the mountain where I went to have a chat to the old Seer, and I was so thirsty my tongue was like shoe-leather. So I asked her for a drink of water. Now can you imagine, she lost her temper. “Can’t you see I’m busy? You bloody old good-for-nothing, you can wait, can’t you see I’m tearing cloths?” And right there the feeling came over me. I couldn’t help myself. And I said, “All right then, to hell with you, go on tearing cloths, tearing cloths.” And off I went.”

“What happened?”

“Drieka has been tearing cloths ever since, I can tell you. She tore up that sheet until it looked like a heap of goose-feathers. And then she started on the curtains. When all her windows were stripped she went on to the next house. That’s why you won’t see a single curtain in the Devil’s Valley. Old Giel got so angry, he was a short-tempered old bastard, he got a stroke and within a week he was dead.”

“And then it stopped?”

“Not a damn. They had to start tying Drieka up in her chair, out of reach of all kinds of cloth. Because if she breaks loose she starts tearing whatever she can lay her hands on. There isn’t a single table-cloth or sheet or blanket left in her house. These last few years old Petrus Tatters started calling on her, at first because he felt sorry for the poor thing, so he took her old sheets and stuff to tear up. But one day she got so carried away she tore the clothes from his body and that set them off on new adventures. These days he goes over with or without cloths to tear. Every night, when they think no one sees. That’s where he got his name. Petrus Tatters. If he visits Drieka he has to leave all his clothes outside on the stoep, otherwise he goes home bare-arsed.” Through a deeply pleasurable puff he started choking with laughter; I no longer tried to keep up. “Not that that stops him.”

“Don’t you think the poor woman has suffered enough?”

“I told you it’s out of my hands. If I get the feeling, I’ll make it stop. Otherwise there’s nothing I can do. People don’t understand, and then they get mad at me. Not that it takes all that much to make them mad.”

“I noticed at yesterday’s prayer-meeting,” I said. “They all had some pretty nasty things to say about the others.”

“That’s just the way we are,” he said. “Everybody knows everything about everybody else, so they can get their teeth into the juiciest bits. At least it keeps life interesting.”

But as he spoke I was wondering: perhaps there was something even worse in the Devil’s Valley—the suspicion that
nobody
really knew anything. Because when you know that others are watching all the time, you make sure that they only see what you want to be seen. In the end you reveal nothing at all, and all remain huddled over their own riddles. It’s like a pond covered with leaves. Where everything seems so open and exposed, it’s easy to miss what lurks below.

Quite Forward

“Are you sure you never misuse your gift, Oom Hans?”

“How do you mean?” He was too far gone from the dagga to become angry, but I did pick up an edge to his voice; and his fumes seemed to give off a more pungent smell than before.

“What have you got against Emma?” I asked him point-blank.

“Is that what she told you?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.” I pointed at the tape recorder and reminded him, “Remember this thing hears everything, and it never forgets.”

He sat staring at the little black gadget for a minute. “It’s Emma who hates me,” he said at last, like a wizened old child trying to pass the buck. “I never did anything to her. She got a grudge against me because I’m the only man in the Devil’s Valley who never fell for her. Not that she hasn’t tried. Emma can be quite forward. It was she who kept on asking Poppie to send her over here with food or this and that, a jug of witblits, a jersey or a scarf or a pair of gloves.” He grunted. “But I don’t fall for that.”

I nearly blew a gasket, but the old swine looked so pathetic with indignation that I felt more pity than rage. Also, I knew I should try not to antagonise him, as it could boomerang on Emma. “All I’m asking, Oom Hans, is that you try to understand. She’s been through a rough time.”

“You mustn’t believe everything she says.”

His eyes looked at me, a greyish dullness in them, and it took a while for me to remember what they reminded me of: Little-Lukas’s ashes in their box, sodden with White Horse. Not a particularly inspiring association.

“Ever since she was a little girl,” he said, “she got thrashed for the lies she told. Poppie had her hands full with that one.” He began to work himself up. “She’s got this crazy idea that her mother was stoned; Apparently because she got pregnant from a stranger after she ran away from the valley.”

“And it’s not true?”

“Not a word of it. That woman, Maria, was much loved in these parts. She made a good marriage and everything, but her husband got killed in an accident when she was six months pregnant. He went on a hunt with some of the other men, and there was some confusion, and he was shot by accident.” After what I’d seen on the porcupine hunt it didn’t sound far-fetched at all. “It sent Maria round the bend and she never fully recovered. Which was why she didn’t want to have the child either, so Poppie had to bring Emma up.”

“What became of Maria?”

“She ran away. She was a difficult one, I tell you, and Poppie tried to keep her locked up but every now and then she broke out. They usually went after her and brought her back, but one night she got away. And no one ever found a trace of her again.”

“Even a gifted man like you couldn’t find her?”

“Of course I knew what became of her,” he quickly changed tack. “But by that time she’d already taken her own life, so it was in nobody’s interest that I told them. Let her be, that’s the way she wanted it.”

I didn’t know what to think any more. In a way something felt rounded off; yet it was all still wide open. My thoughts were in the same kind of mess the Devil’s Valley had been in that morning, after the storm. It would take a long time to clear up.

Those Children

But I refused to leave it at that. “Oom Hans, can you swear to God that Maria was not stoned to death?”

“Absolutely.”

“But they do stone people in the settlement? I saw the way they punished Alwyn Knees and I can easily imagine a mob like that stoning somebody.”

“They do indeed.”

“The throwback children: were
they
stoned?”

He just looked at me through a new cloud of dagga smoke. I glanced at the tape recorder. The cassette still had some way to go.

“Were they dark-skinned?”

“You must realise that nothing is as important as the purity of our blood, Neef Flip. In the end you can take away everything from a man, but if his blood is pure you can’t touch him.”

“But those children must come from somewhere. Could it be connected in some way with all the old Hottentot stories and superstitions in the Devil’s Valley?”

“Why ask me?”

“Because I have a hunch that you know.”

He grinned, but said nothing.

“Oom Hans, I came here…”

“…to write up our story. I know.”

“History.”

“One word is as good as another.”

“I must know where those children came from.”

He leaned forward, his chin with its dirty, wispy beard propped up on two cupped hands so encrusted with the filth of a lifetime that one couldn’t make out their colour any more. At first it seemed as if he was going to ignore me. But at last he decided to speak.

Dirty Bastards

“All right, I’ll tell you. After they survived the hard times in the beginning and the old Seer tamed the Devil’s Valley, his family lived untroubled for a few years. Lukas Lermiet and his wife began to prosper.”

“That was Bilhah, I presume?”

“Of course. Don’t interrupt. Well, after a few years a tribe of Hottentots moved in here. A heathen lot that stole and plundered and murdered as far as they went. That’s mos the way they are. And the Seer couldn’t allow such unruliness in his valley. So having seen in a dream that they were coming he called up a commando and went up to meet them. At first the Lermiets tried to negotiate, the Seer was a peaceful man by nature. And in exchange for some beads and a length of copper wire and a couple of half-aums of the witblits they’d already begun to distil in these parts, the Hottentots agreed to bring in a flock of goats, and for a while they all lived together without any trouble. But you can’t trust a bunch of heathens like that. Soon there were problems with theft and pilfering and rowdiness, that kind of thing. Lukas Lermiet was a man of law and order, so he had the culprits properly punished. In this manner there was bad feelings building upon both sides, until one of the Seer’s grandchildren was murdered in the veld. That was the last straw. He called up his men again to drive the murderers out of this valley for good. And for a while it seemed as if that was that.

“But one night, just as the people were beginning to go back to their old ways, the Hottentots crept back and attacked the settlers in their sleep. Fourteen men, women and children were slaughtered. Lukas Lermiet was tied up by the dirty bastards and forced to watch while they raped his wife. The whole pack of them. And then they scuttled off into the night again.

“Lukas Nimrod was away hunting at the time. He only came back several days after the massacre. Without stopping to rest he rounded up his men again and set out after the Hottentots. They rode on, day and night, until at last they tracked the bastards down and cornered them in a cave. There they visited the judgement of God upon the heathen and only stopped when every man and woman and child and goat and dog was slaughtered. They brought the ears back as trophies, dried like peaches in the sun.