Devil's Valley (37 page)

“I said all I wanted to say, Lukas. I only came to find out whether Ben Owl could tell me more about Ouma Liesbet’s empty coffin. He admitted that the two of them buried Maria after the stoning, but that he went back on his own later to dump the body in the Devil’s Hole.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?” asked Jurg Water, still from a safe distance.

“He said it was the only place where even Hans Magic wouldn’t find her.”

Lukas Death screwed up his eyes to peer through the billowing smoke. “Where do you fit into the story then, Oom Hans?”

“Maria deserved better than she could find here among us,” growled Hans Magic. “Ben Owl was the one who couldn’t understand that. It was to keep him away from her that I struck him with my gift. I only tried to protect her.”

“You had your own dirty designs on her,” Dalena-of-Lukas said unexpectedly from the back. “First on her, then on her daughter. But Maria wanted none of it, nor did Emma. Don’t pretend it isn’t true.”

“You’re just saying that because you picked Emma for your Little-Lukas,” Hans Magic hit back.

“Keep Little-Lukas out of this,” barked Lukas Death in a rare flash of anger.

“And why should I?” demanded Hans, also losing his temper. “He was the one who brought all this over us. He spread the story in the outside world and sent this man to us.” He was looking straight at me. “And from then on everything has been turned into a heap of shit. Even the rain stays away.”

I didn’t like this turn to the discussion. There was a barely subdued violence smouldering among the people, just waiting to break out.

“It was dry since long before I came, Oom Hans,” I said, trying to restrain my voice.

“That’s true,” cried someone from the back. Other voices agreed. It was like a wind that came up and then died down again, but only for now.

Its Own Tail

Like so many times before, it struck me how shallow the fucking resentment and the rage lay under the surface, how ready the people were to growl and bare their teeth at the slightest provocation. But also how diffuse everything was: no conversation ever pursued to a conclusion, no accusation followed up. It was all bloody random and haphazard, as they kept snapping in all directions, going in for the attack at the slightest opportunity. But it lacked conviction; it had become habit, as if they just went through the motions without really knowing or even wondering why they were doing so. And all I could sense below it all was a kind of panic. But where did it come from, what was its target? Each fucking dog kept on chasing its own tail.

Lukas Death, from whom I’d have expected some direction, wasn’t up to it either. Actually, I decided, he only wanted peace and quiet; and if anything could be swept under the carpet rather than solved, so much the better. Perhaps there
were
no solutions any more. The Devil’s Valley was a fucking dead-end. I should never have come to it. And if it hadn’t been for Emma, I’d have been on my way out by now.

“Lukas, will you take charge of the body?” I asked while he still dithered.

“There are more important things to do right now,” said Jurg Water. “There’s still yesterday’s damage to clear up. And what I want to know is where are we going from here? It’s clear that God has wiped His backside on us.”

“All we can do is once again to humble us before Him,” said Brother Holy. “Sooner or later he will hearken unto us. Tomorrow is the day of the Lord. We shall dedicate the service to prayers again.”

“Your service is as much use as a pile without an arsehole,” said Hans Magic. “It’s time we started doing something on our own without bringing God into it.”

Collective Fears

The argument spilled through the front door into the road outside. Those in favour of leaving the matter to God turned out to be the minority—much to Brother Holy’s apocalyptic indignation, as it meant that he was to be swept aside with God. What the people now demanded was a Plan of Action.

Right there in the road, between Ouma Liesbet’s rickety little house and the church, and without constitution or chair or agenda, a meeting was held. Democracy in the Devil’s Valley, I saw, meant fucking chaos. Those with the loudest voices soon shouted the others into cowering silence. But in the end it was Hans Magic who took control. For what he lacked in volume he made up by playing on their uncertainties, their collective fears, their superstition.

“Our ancestors had their own ways of bringing rain when nothing else helped,” he said slyly. “It’s time we returned to the example they set.” He glared at Brother Holy. “Seeing that nobody else has been able to do anything.”

The crowd made more room for him. But whether it was out of respect or just to move further away from his smell, was difficult to say.

“The ancestors had many ways to make rain,” said Hans Magic. “One remedy they often used…” He moved his eyes from one to the other until they appeared by accident to fall on me. But I was sure he’d long been planning it. “I noticed that Neef Flip always carries a chameleon on his shoulder,” he said. “Now that is just what we need.”

The crowd opened up around me. Like a lamb at the slaughtering block I stood where I was.

“Give it here,” said Hans Magic.

Suddenly there was a sharp cry from little Piet Snot. “Not my chameleon, Oom. Please, Oom, not my chameleon.”

Jurg Water struck him a blow to the head which sent the child reeling.

This made me so fucking mad that I didn’t think twice. “Jurg, you lay another finger on that child…”

He gave a leisurely step in my direction. “And then what?”

I’m not a fighter. If truth be told, I’m a bloody coward. There have been occasions, in a bar or at a rugby match, under serious provocation and in a state between medium and well-done, when I stood my ground and did my thing. Once or twice I came out of it not entirely without honour; on some of the other encounters I prefer not to dwell. But it’s not my nature. And Jurg Water spelled shit. But I swore by my syphilitic soul that I wouldn’t allow that child to be abused in front of me.

“You touch him and I’ll fuck you up properly,” I said. All bluff.

And then, not a moment too soon, Tant Poppie stepped up beside me. “If you’ve never been hit by a woman before, Jurg, then you got it coming to you today. You smack that child again and see what happens.” Before I could recover from my amazement, she turned to me: “Now, Neef Flip, give that chameleon to Hans and let him make his rain. I won’t believe it before I see it, but there’s no time to waste.”

Meekly, I detached the little green creature from my shoulder, and she passed it to Hans Magic.

“Ag please, Oom, please,” whined Piet Snot.

“Piet,” said his father.

“Jurg,” said Tant Poppie.

Before everything could start again, a woman like a large bale of wool gently took the child aside and smothered him against her. It must be his mother, I thought, Hanna-of-Jurg.

With Plagues and With Pestilence

“Now I need a spade,” commanded Hans Magic.

As soon as somebody had brought one from the nearest backyard, Hans tripped off to the open space in front of the church, followed by the rest of us. He started digging. The earth sounded as solid as bedrock, but there was no need to go deep, a mere bandwidth or so. He carefully placed the chameleon on its back in the hole, held it in position with one forefinger, and quickly filled the hole up again.

In the distance I thought I could hear Piet Snot whining again, but it could have been my imagination.

“A chameleon draws rain like a tick sucks blood,” explained Hans Magic. “As long as the clouds are right, of course. We’ll soon find out.”

“The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore,” chanted Brother Holy.

But he was promptly interrupted by Hans Magic. “You had your chance, Brother. Now shut up before you scare off the clouds. Today is my turn.”

“You can’t make anything happen on your own,” snarled the preacher.

“If you didn’t spend so much time fucking Bettie Teat, God might have taken you more seriously,” jeered Hans Magic.

“Slanderer!” fulminated Brother Holy, stretching out a trembling skeletal hand. “Antichrist!” And then something just snapped in him. “I curse you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he boomed in a shaking voice. “I curse you with plagues and pestilence, with locusts and worms and gravel and water in your intestines, with gout and arthritis and rheumatism and venereal disease, with lice in your groin and shit in your mouth, with boils and spitting of blood, I curse you and your house and your fields and your vegetables, and rust will slowly consume you and moths devour you, and you will return to your own vomit like a dog, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. I curse you…” He suddenly broke off just before the climax, his arm still stretched to the heavens. As we all stared, fucking flabbergasted, he turned round and ran into the church on his long spidery legs.

Nobody quite knew what was happening. Even Hans Magic was left gaping.

A minute later Brother Holy was back in our midst, clutching in his hands the little box Isak Smous had once shown me, the prize of their relics.

“…I curse you,” resumed Brother Holy exactly where he had left off and moving straight in for the kill, “with the Darkness of Egypt.”

I heard Isak Smous exclaim under his breath, but it was too late. Brother Holy tore open the lid and remained standing in the grip of silent convulsions as he shook the box. A few unimpressive grains of dust and a dead moth flurried out, but that was all.

The crowd uttered a muted lament, but it kind of stuck in their throats.

This Feeling

And then Hans Magic asked flatly, “Have you finished?”

“For the moment I have done,” said Brother Holy haughtily, but his voice didn’t sound altogether firm to me. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m just asking,” said Hans Magic, “because all of a sudden there’s this feeling coming over me.” He began to shake lightly.

“What sort of feeling?” asked Brother Holy, now openly apprehensive.

“A feeling that you are going to get an itch,” said Hans Magic, still shaking. “And that you will start scratching and scratching and scratching until you have no nails left, but the itch will not leave you.”

Brother Holy was drooping visibly, like a candle melting in the sun.

“You will itch behind your eyeballs,” said Hans Magic in a high droning voice, like a castrated bee; and I could see the crowd slowly edging away from Brother Holy, “and you will itch in your nostrils, and in your ears, and under your tongue, and on your palate. You will itch in your armpits and between your shoulder blades and up your arse. You will itch between your balls and behind your knees and under the soles of your feet. And then you will start itching inside, in your lungs and your liver and your kidneys and your intestines.” He stretched his neck forward like a chicken watching a worm. “Prepare yourself to start scratching,” he concluded. “The rest of us have enough to keep us busy until the rain comes. As soon as the clouds are right.”

And as the people started moving off in all directions, I noticed Brother Holy surreptitiously reaching a long cadaverous hand up between his shoulder blades to start scratching.

T
HE CHAMELEON DIDN’T work. How could it? Yet Hans Magic lost no face in the process, as he blamed it on the clouds which came from the wrong direction. In the night there was another storm, possibly even worse than the previous ones—we were all too bloody shell-shocked to care—but once again without a sign of rain. Three houses were left in ruins. Tall-Fransina’s shed was blown away, and her pot-still with it. It was something of a miracle that she hadn’t been working at the time, otherwise she’d have gone too. Four people were killed; two died under a collapsed roof, the other two simply disappeared without a trace. On the Sunday morning we all gathered outside the church after the morning service to watch Hans Magic opening the shallow grave in which he’d buried the chameleon. It was empty. I had a pretty strong suspicion about who might have spirited the little reptile away, but for obvious reasons I kept it to myself; and Piet Snot didn’t look at me once. Somewhat to my surprise, no one else appeared to have jumped to the same conclusion; perhaps they were too fucking dismayed by the most recent disaster.

The church service had been unusually short. What should have been an ideal opportunity for Brother Holy to make up some lost ground was squandered in the damn St Vitus’s dance he performed on the pulpit as he tried to scratch himself throughout the succession of prayers and hymns and sermon, so that no one paid much attention to his message. And afterwards, without murmur, they all accepted Hans Magic’s latest proposal to conjure up rain.

This time the remedy was very simple. Someone born in a heavy rainstorm had to be stripped to the skin, covered in honey, subjected to a general laying-on of hands, and sent off into the mountains, to remain there until the rains came. This, Hans Magic assured us, should happen well before nightfall.

There were no sources I could consult, of course, but I was pretty sure that it was some version of yet another old Hottentot custom. And if my hunch was correct, Bilhah’s legacy was indeed still running strong in the community. No matter how many little black sheep had been sacrificed over the years to exorcise her spirit, her hold on them was bloody permanent. But it was difficult to say whether the thought was comforting or distressing.

There was no long prelude to the new ceremony, due perhaps to the general sense of relief at discovering that there was still something they could do, on which to focus their much-distracted thoughts. And Jurg Water was the one who came forward, his huge hand closed like a vice over a cringing little Piet Snot’s shoulder.

“Piet here is mos a storm-child,” he announced. “We can send him off.”

“Pa,” the boy whimpered. But one look from Jurg smothered all protest in his throat.

Turbid Residue

As if summoned for the occasion, Henta and her flutter of finches came swooping down on us from behind the nearest house, raced past the gathered crowd and headed towards the bluegum wood. In less than a minute they were gone again, and only a cloud of grey dust remained as proof of their passage. Their brief appearance left a turbid residue among the assembled settlers—unless I was merely projecting on them the troubled state of my own mind. But I don’t think so, for almost immediately a loud male voice shouted from the throng: