Devil's Valley (7 page)

“Excuse me, but could you possibly tell me something about Seer Lermiet’s grave over there?”

“I’m busy,” he muttered without looking up.

Windblown Black Stork

Frustrated, I beat a retreat. Past the little house where Ouma Liesbet Prune was perched on the roof, as always, like a windblown black stork.

“Good morning, Tante.”

“Satan, be gone. I’m waiting upon the Lord.”

Lewdness of Thy Youth

On to Brother Holy, striding stiff-legged like a secretary bird along his rows of withered cabbages, hands behind his back, perorating at the top of his voice.

“Good morning, Brother, and how are you this fine morning?”

“Terrible, terrible. It’s a weary life on this wretched earth.”

“Lovely weather we’re having.”

“We’ll pay for it, don’t worry.”

“Big vegetable patch, this.”

“But dry.”

“The cabbages seem, to be doing well.”

“A good harvest ruins the soil,” he commented morosely. Then, without warning, he intoned, “The word of the Lord came again to me saying: Thus saith the Lord God, Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee. All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shall be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.” Under the onslaught the cabbages were wilting visibly.

“Cigarette?” I proffered.

“A sin, Neef, a venal sin.” He glanced round quickly to make sure there was nobody near. “But if you insist.” He hastily thrust it into his inside pocket, preparing in a spray of spittle to lunge into the next passage: “Thus thou callest to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth.” The cabbages began to look up again, but he suddenly interrupted his sermon to ask, “Did you know we had a man here who travelled through the whole world, including Egypt and the Great Karoo? And he brought back wondrous things from far places.” I thought it was merely his way of speaking. Only much later did I discover how literally he’d meant it. At any rate he gave me no opening to put any questions, as without pausing for breath he broke into a new tirade on paramours whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. By that time I was already out of reach both of his showers of blessings and his lecherous imprecations.

Milk

In the main doorway of the church, propped up against the massive doorpost, legs languidly outstretched, I found Bettie Teat with her brood, looking for all the world like a complacent pink sow with a litter of piglets. God knows how many of them there were, as they were squirming and wriggling and climbing all over her, squealing and shrilling and grunting as they jostled and elbowed their way to her ample dugs. Dishevelled hair covered her eyes, her belly looked nine months pregnant, and her face was a study of utter contentment. Intrigued, if a bit apprehensive, I stopped. If I’d heard Tant Poppie correctly, Bertie’s offspring had been fathered indiscriminately by the men of the settlement, since she couldn’t find it in her heart to say no. And apparently it didn’t take much to impregnate her. “She’s like a flower,” Tant Poppie had said with what might or might not have been disapproval. “If you ask me, she gets pollinated by the wind.”

“What are you looking at?” asked Bettie, shifting a child from her left breast, a trickle of milk dripping from its chin.

“I’m trying to meet the people in the settlement,” I explained. “And how are you?”

“I’m in a bad way,” she answered with a broad smile. “They say mos everybody around here is in a bad way.” She gave a generous, inviting wink.

“What are their names?” I asked, gesturing at her litter.

“I get all mixed up,” she confessed with disarming frankness. “So now I’ve started calling all of them Brother. He talks to me so beautifully about sin.”

Involuntarily I cast mine eyes up to the mountain where the preacher was standing, staring fixedly at us with an expression that seemed disconcertingly possessive to me. And indeed, after a minute or two he began to amble down in our direction.

“Oh my God,” said Bettie in a fluster, beginning to collect her brood and tuck away her breasts. “Here he comes. It was only yesterday he told me it was time I got more careful and here I’m sitting in the sun again.”

Before I could reply she scrambled round the corner, followed by a squeal of little pigs. In the background, I noticed, Brother Holy had resumed his sermon among the vegetable beds.

Just As Well

I’d noticed Jurg Water from a distance, strutting as always behind his weathered forked stick. Usually he moved out of sight the moment he noticed me, a thunderstorm brewing on his large face; but this time I came upon him from behind.

“Any hope of finding water?” I asked, feigning interest.

“There’s no hope for nothing or nobody,” he snarled, glaring at me. “This stick is no bloody use. I might as well have used my dong.”

“You may still find something where you least expect it.”

“What do you know about water?” he grumbled. “What do you know about anything?”

“I’m just saying.”

“You can shove your saying up your arse.”

And he stalked off after his fruitless rod.

Raisins and Figs

For a while I wasn’t sure what to do next. But just as I started off again, I became aware of sounds from the shed behind his house and decided to investigate. The moment I appeared in the doorway the giggling and whispering and scurrying among the wheat-bags and the piles of dried quinces and raisins and figs abruptly stopped like a gust of wind suddenly dying down. Once my eyes had grown accustomed to the fragrant darkness inside I could see dishevelled girls’ heads popping up from everywhere, with blushing cheeks and hay-stalks in their hair.

“What are you doing here?” I enquired expansively.

“Nothing, Oom.”

Embarrassingly unconcerned about the much too tight dark frock that clung to the precocious curves of her buxom body, a redhead appeared from behind a pile of tobacco leaves.

“And what’s your name?”

“Henta, Oom.”

A chorus chanted, “Henta Peach, Oom.”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

A wave of giggles and whispers from which I couldn’t glean anything.

“What do you think I’ve come here for?”

With shocking directness, Henta said, “Cunt, Oom?”

It came so fucking unexpectedly, it must have been the first time in thirty years that I’d blushed. Then, in a stern teacher’s tone, I said, “I’ve come to find out about your history.”

They stared at me blankly.

On the spur of the moment I asked the question that had been prickling on my tongue ever since Lukas Death had spoken the name: “Does anybody here know a girl called Emma?”

An urgent whisper did the rounds, but they gave no answer.

“I believe she used to swim down there in the river, when there was still water in the rock-pool.”

This time one of them ventured, “Ma told us to tell you nothing.” And ten others took up the refrain. “Tell you nothing…tell you nothing…tell you nothing.”

“I’ve heard that she and Little-Lukas were close friends.” This provoked some giggling, followed by, “nothing…nothing…nothing.”

End of conversation. Outside, my little private pest was waiting again, at a safe distance, the usual green patina on his upper lip. I said something, but he pretended not to hear. Pissed off, I moved on to try my luck elsewhere. Petrus Tatters, large and angular, with flapping jacket, the shoemaker who wouldn’t stay home at night. Job Raisin like a dried fruit among his trays. Tall-Fransina in a man’s shirt and trousers beside her still, her hair chopped short. But nowhere could I find an opening. And my supply of smokes was dwindling fast.

Bloody Glass Darkly

Gert Brush, too, was happy to accept a cigarette. With his sloping head, hair over his eyes, a loner by nature, and blessed with a perpetual grin, his appearance seemed to have been fixed by a clock striking six at the wrong moment. In his long tunic which looked more like an outsized shift, one could find him sweeping the street with a broom of branches every morning. But in the afternoons he withdrew into his voorhuis to work on the paintings which I was told were his real passion. His paints and brushes and oil, I’d heard from Lukas Death, were brought in by Isak Smous when he came back from his bartering trips; and like all the other men in the settlement he’d taken over the job from his father. On the floor, with their faces to the wall, stood a dozen or so canvases on which, Lukas Death had told me, Gert Brush had painted, over the years, the portraits of all the inhabitants of the Devil’s Valley. As soon as he’d completed a round of canvases he would start again at the beginning, overpainting the previous portraits. It was his habit, as it had been his father’s and grandfather’s, to dilute his paint quite excessively with linseed oil, for reasons of parsimony rather than aesthetics, as a result of which all the earlier faces remained vaguely and disconcertingly visible, staring up at one as if through a bloody glass darkly. The first time I met Gert Brush, Lukas Death had brought me round, if somewhat reluctantly and only at the price of an extra cigarette. The potential historical importance of the collection excited me, but I soon discovered that in spite of his chronic grin Gert Brush was as pigheaded as the rest.

“Who’s this one, Gert?” I asked in front of a man with an unusually ruddy face.

“It’s Little-Lukas’s grandfather, Lukas Devil. He was mos born with two goat feet.”

“And the face looking over his left shoulder?”

“Our first predikant, Doep Dropsy.”

“Tell me more about the Lermiet family.”

“The people wouldn’t like it.”

“They needn’t know about it.”

“They’ll know.”

“Another cigarette?”

He had no qualms about accepting, but he stuck to his guns. And the mere thought of all those images with their faces to the wall, beyond my reach, stuck in my gullet.

No Shortage

The only person I found more or less approachable was Lukas Death, yet by no stretch of the bloody imagination could even he be called forthcoming; and like Tant Poppie Fullmoon he gave the impression of tolerating my presence only because for some reason he had to. I could, however, exploit his weakness for cigarettes. There were few questions he gave straight answers to, but at least he was prepared to give me an idea of how the settlement functioned. How occupations were handed down from father to son, or mother to daughter; how he conducted his lessons, which were more or less restricted to the three Rs, a smattering of geography and whatever passed for history in this place; how Brother Holy ruled his congregation through the fear of God; how Isak Smous left for the outside world every three or four months, accompanied by a safari of helpers, with the products of the valley to be exchanged in the Little Karoo for whatever the Devil’s Valley needed in return.

Most of our conversations were rather patchy, and they never lasted long; sometimes it would be very awkward indeed, as on the Saturday morning when we had to talk over a small child’s body he was preparing for burial—a waterhead with shrivelled limbs. It was while working in his morgue that Lukas Death gave me the lowdown on the formal organisation of the settlement: the Council of Justice, the Council of Policy, the Church Council, the Burial Committee, the Water Management, the Missionary Action Committee, the Chamber of Commerce. Each of these bodies was composed around Lukas Death himself, and the same members served on each, with some provision for co-option; and although in theory it was possible to call elections it never happened in practice since whenever anything of importance happened all the inhabitants would automatically flock to the church to discuss it and take action.

What got my goat was the bloody Missionary Action Committee, but Lukas Death was unable to shed much light, apart from conceding that in the absence of heathens to convert this particular committee had never met in living memory. “But it has to be there,” he insisted, “just in case, you see.”

He placed old brass pennies on the bulging eyes of the deformed child. Not an appetising sight. And as Lukas Death pointed out, after a century and a half of inbreeding there was no shortage of such as these.

Hit My Father

It was on the same Saturday morning, on my way home from Lukas Death’s morgue that my snotty shadow risked for the first time coming a few steps closer. He’d needed several days to rake up the courage. I only realised he was creeping up on me when he was a mere five yards or so behind me. Then, staring far into the distance as if talking to himself, he asked:

“Does Oom come from far away?”

I looked round. “You talking to me?”

He took a step back, his eyes still avoided me.

Catching on, I continued on my way, but walking more slowly now to give him time to keep up. I said, “I come from very far away.”

A pause. “Does Oom come from heaven?”

I made a vague gesture towards the distant peaks. “From very high up.”

“Is Oom the Lord God?”

I knew I had to play it skilfully. “Why do you ask, boetie?”

“If Oom is the Lord God, won’t Oom please hit my father with a thunderbolt?”

“Why?”

“He’s too hard on us, Oom.”

“What does he do then?”

“Is Oom really the Lord God?”

“Not actually.” I stopped to light a cigarette. “But I’m a close friend. I can always put in a word for you.”

“No, jus’ give me then a smoke-stick.” He pointed to my packet of Camels.

“You’re too small to smoke.”

“It’s not to smoke,” he mumbled, on his face an I-didn’t-ask-to-be-here kind of expression.

For the hell of it I took out a cigarette and held it out to him, meaning to snatch it away if he made a grab for it. But he was much too fast for me. Swift as a vervet monkey he zapped it from my hand and scuttled off. At a safe distance he sat down on a rock and, keeping a furtive eye on me, tore the paper from the cigarette, shook the tobacco into a cupped hand and greedily gobbled it up. When he’d finished the last bit, he got up again, chucked his bubble of snot in reverse, and darted off. Another dead end. Yet this time I felt that some kind of progress had been made.