The Sound of Thunder (47 page)

“I’m sorry.” He spoke aloud, apologizing to the man who lay beneath it. Then he was embarrassed, angry at himself for the weakness. Only a madman speaks aloud to the dead. He strode away towards the second row of crosses.

“Leading Seaman W. Carter, RN.” The fat one,

“Corporal Henderson CFS. ” Twice in his chest and another in the belly.

He walked along the line and read their names. Some were just names, others he saw instantly and vividly. He saw them laughing, or frightened, saw the way they rode, remembered the sound of their voices. This one still owed him a guinea, he remembered the bet.

“Keep it. ” He spoke and immediately checked himself again.

Slowly he went on to the end of the line, his momentum running down as he approached the grave that stood separate from the others-the way he had ordered it.

He read the inscription. Then he squatted down comfortably on his haunches beside it and stayed there until the sun settled and the wind turned cold and plaintive. Only then he went to his saddle and loosened the blanket-roll. There was no firewood and he slept fitfully in the cold of the night and the icier cold of his thoughts.

In the morning he went back to Saul’s grave. For the first time he noticed that grass was growing up between the stones of the cairn and that the cross sagged a little to one side. He shrugged off his coat and went down on his knees, working like a gardener over the grave, weeding out the grass with his hunting knife, making certain the roots were removed. Then he went to the head and lifted the rocks away from around the cross. He tore the cross from the ground and re-dug the hole for it, setting it up again carefully, plugging the base with pebbles and earth and at last packing the whitewashed rocks firmly around it once more.

He stood back, brushed earth and flakes of whitewash from his hands and surveyed his handiwork. It was still not right, there was something missing. He thought about it, frowning heavily until he found the answer.

“Flowers,” he grunted and lifted his head towards the aloes on the kopJe above him. He set off up the slope, picking his way through the litter of boulders towards the summit. His knife slipped easily through the soft thick stems and the juice oozed heavily from the wounds. With an armful he started back down the slope. Out to one side a patch of colour caught his eye, a sprinkling of pink and white among the boulders. He detoured towards it. Hottentot Daisies, each one a perfect trumpet with a pink throat and a fragile yellow tongue.

Delighted with his find, Sean laid aside his burden of aloe blooms and went in amongst them. Stooping like a reaper he worked through them towards the lip of a narrow ravine, gathering the flowers into posies and binding the stems together with grass. Finally, he reached the ravine and straightened up to rest his aching back.

The ravine was narrow, he could have jumped across it with little effort-but it was deep. He peered down into it without much interest.

The cleft was floored with rainwashed sand, and his interest quickened as he made out the half-buried bones of a large animal. But what made him climb down into the ravine was not the bones, but the bulky leather object entangled with them.

Sliding on his backside the last few feet of the descent he reached the bottom, and examined his find. A leather mule pack double pouches, and the buckles of the harness almost rusted away. He tugged the whole lot loose from the sand and was surprised at the weight of it.

The leather was dry and brittle, faded almost white with exposure and the locks of the pouches were rusted solid. With his knife he slit the flap of one pouch and out of it cascaded a stream of sovereigns.

They fell into the sand, clinking upon each other in a heap that glittered with merry golden smiles.

Sean stared at them in disbelief. He dropped the pack and squatted on his haunches over the pile. Timidly he picked up one of the discs and examined the portrait of the old President, before lifting the coin to his mouth and biting down upon it. His teeth sank into the soft metal and he removed it from his mouth.

“Well, damn. me sideways,” he invited, and he laughed out loud.

Rocking back on his haunches and lifting his face to the sky he roared out his jubilation and his relief. It went on and on until his laughter dried suddenly, and he sobered.

Cupping a double handful of the gold he asked it: “Now, where the hell did you come from?” And his answer was in the grim face embossed upon each coin. Boer Gold.

“And who do you belong to?”

The answer was the same, and he let the coins trickle through his fingers. Boer Gold.

-The hell with it! he growled angrily. “Starting this minute it’s Courtney Gold.” And he began to count it.

As his fingers worked so did his brain. He prepared his case against his own conscience. They owed him the balance outstanding on a train of wagons filled with ivory, they owed him his deposits in the Volkskaas Bank, they owed him for a shrapnel wound in the leg and a bullet in the belly, they owed him for three years of hardship and danger, and they owed him for a friend. As he stacked the sovereigns into piles of twenty he considered his case, found it good and proven, justified it and gave judgement in his own favour.

“I find for the appellant,” he announced, and concentrated his whole attention on the counting. An hour and a half later he reached the total.

There was a huge pile of coins upon the flat rock he had used as a desk. He lit a cheroot and the smoke he drew into his lungs made him lighthearted. His conscience had surrendered unconditionally and in its place was a sense of well-being. All the more intense for the period of depression through which he had come.

“Sean Courtney accepts from the Government of the onetime Republic of the

“Transvaal an amount of twenty-nine thousand, two hundred pounds, in full discharge of all debts and claims. ” He chuckled again and began shovelling the gold back into the leather pouches.

With the heavy pack slung over his shoulders and with his arms full of wild flowers, Sean went down the kopJe. He saddled his horse and loaded the pack on to his mule before he went to pile the flowers on Saul’s grave. They made a brave show of colour against the brown grass.

He lingered another hour, fussing over his floral arrangements and resisting the temptation to thank Saul. For now he had decided the gold was not a gift from a Republican Governmentbut from Saul Friedman.

This made it even easier to accept.

At last he mounted and rode away. As the man and his horses dwindled into insignificance on the great brown plain, a dust devil came dancing up from the south. A tall, spinning column of heated air and dust and fragments of dry grass, it weaved and swayed towards the graveyard below the kopJe. For a time it seemed as though it would pass wide of it, but suddenly it changed direction and dashed down upon the double row of crosses. It snatched up the flowers on Saul’s grave, lifted them, ripped their petals and scattered them widely across the plain.

With Michael beside him lugging the carpet-bag which was the heaviest item of luggage, Sean left the buggy and crossed the sidewalk into the offices of the Ladyburg Banking & Trust Co. “Oh! Colonel Courtney,” the young lady at the reception desk enthused. “I’ll tell Mr. Pye you are here.”

“Please don’t bother. I’ll carry the glad news myself.

Ronny Pye looked up in alarm as the door of his office flew open and the two of them walked in.

“Good morning, Ronny,” Sean greeted him cheerfully.

“Have you bled any good stones today, or is it still too early?”

Guardedly Ronny murmured a reply and stood up.

Sean selected a cigar from the leather box on the desk and sniffed it.

“Not a bad line in horse-dung you’ve got here,” he remarked and bit the end off. “Match please, Ronay, I’m a customer, where are your manners? ” Reluctantly, suspiciously, Ronny lit the cigar for him.

Sean sat down and placed his feet on the desk with ankles neatly crossed.

“How much do I owe you?” he asked. The question heightened Ronny’s suspicion and his eyes settled on the carpet-bag in Michael’s hands.

-you mean altogether? Capital and interest?”

“Capital and interest,” Sean affirmed.

“Well, I’d have to work that out.

“Give it to me in round figures.”

“Well, very roughly, you understand, it would be around oh I don’t know-say He paused. That carpet-bag looked confoundedly heavy. Its sides bulged and he could see the tension in Michael’s arm muscles as he held it. “Say, twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and sixteen pounds, fifteen shillings. ” As he named the exact figure Ronny dropped his voice in veneration the way a primitive tribesman might evoke the name of his god.

Sean lowered his feet. Then he leant forward and swept the papers that covered the desk to one side.

“Very well. Pay the man, Michael.”

Solemnly Michael placed the bag in the cleared space. But when Sean winked at him his solemnity cracked and he grinned.

Making no attempt to hide his agitation, Ronny plunged both hands into the mouth of the bag and withdrew two pouches of unbleached canvas. He loosened the draw string of one and spilled gold on to his desk.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded angrily.

At the end of the rainbow.

“There’s a fortune here,” Ronny protested, as he dipped into the carpet-bag again.

“A goodly amount, I’ll admit.

“But, but Ronny was scratching in the pile of coins, hunting for the secret of their origin like a hen for a worm.

However, Sean had spent a week in Johannesburg and another two days in Pietermaritzburg visiting every bank and exchanging small parcels of Kruger coin for Victorian and Portuguese, and the coin of half a dozen other States. For a minute Sean watched his efforts with a smile of happy contempt. Then he excused himself.

“We’ll be getting on home now. ” Sean placed an arm around Michael’s shoulder and led him to the door.

“Deposit the balance to my account, there’s a good fellow.”

Further protest stillborn on his lips, and despair mingled with frustration, Ronny Pye watched through the window as Lion Kop Wattle Estates climbed up into the buggy, settled its hat firmly, waved a whip in a courteous farewell and trotted sedately out of his clutches.

All that summer the hills of Lion Kop echoed to the thud of axes and the singing of hundreds of Zulus. As each tree toppled and fell in a froth of heaving branches, men with cane-knives moved forward to strip the rich bark and tie it in bundles. Every train that left for Pietermaritzburg towed truckloads of it to the extract plant.

Each long day together strengthened the bonds between Sean and Michael. They evolved a language of their own, notable only for its economy of words. Without lengthy discussion each took charge of a separate sphere of Lion Kop activity. Michael made himself responsible for the maintenance of equipment, the loading and dispatch, all the paperwork and the ordering of material. At first Sean surreptitiously checked his work, but when he found no fault in it he no longer bothered. They parted only at the end of each week; Sean to Pietermaritzburg for obvious reasons, and Michael to Theuniskraal in duty. Michael hated those returns home, he hated Anna’s endless accusations of disloyalty and her occasional fits of weeping. But even worse was the silent reproach in Garrys face. Early each Monday morning, with the joy of a released convict he set off for Lion Kop and Sean’s welcome: “What about those bloody axe handles, Mike?”

Only in the evenings they talked freely sitting together on the stoep of the homestead. They spoke of money and war and politics and women and wattle-and they talked as equals, without reserve, as men who work together with a common purpose.

Dirk sat quietly in the shadows and listened to them. Fifteen years old, but Dirk had a capacity for hatred out of all proportion to his age, and he used it all on Michael. Sean’s handling of Dirk was in no way different; his school attendance was still spasmodic, he trailed Sean about the plantations and received his full share of rough affection and even rougher-disciPline yet he sensed in the relationship between Sean and Michael a terrible threat to his security. Merely by reason of age and experience he was excluded from the evening discussions on the stoep. His few contributions were received with indulgent attention, then the talk would be resumed as though he had not spoken. Dirk sat quietly planning in lurid detail his assassination of Michael. On Lion Kop that summer there were small thefts and unexplained acts of vandalism, all of which affected only Michael. His best riding-boots vanished, his single dress shirt was ripped down the back when he came to don it for the monthly dance at the schoolhouse, his pointer bitch whelped a litter of four puppies, which survived only a week before Michael found them dead in the straw of the barn.

Ada and her young ladies began preparing for the Christmas of 1904 in the middle of December. As their guests, Ruth and Storm came down from Pietermaritzburg on the twentieth and Sean’s frequent absences from Lion Kop left a heavy burden of work on Michael. There was an air of mystery in the Protea Street cottage. Sean was strictly excluded from the long sessions in Ada’s private rooms, where she and Ruth retired to plan the wedding dress, but this was not the only secret.

There was something else, which was keeping all the young ladies in fits of suppressed giggles and excitement. With a little eavesdropping Sean gathered it was something to do with his Christmas present from Ruth. However, Sean had other worries, chief of which was maintaining his position in the fierce competition for Miss Storm Friedman’s favours. This included a heavy expenditure on sweetmeats, which were delivered to Storm without Ruth’s knowledge. The Shetland pony had been left in Pietermaritzburg and Sean was required to substitute at the cost of his dignity and grass stains on the knees of his breeches. As reward he was invited to take tea each afternoon with Storm and her dolls.

Favourite among all Storm’s dolls was a female child with human hair and an insipid expression on its large china face.

Storm wept with a broken heart when she found that china head shattered into many pieces. With Sean’s help she buried it in the back yard and they stripped Ada’s garden of flowers for the grave. Sullenly Dirk watched the funeral. Storm was now completely reconciled to her loss and so thoroughly enjoyed the ceremony that she insisted Sean exhume the body and start again.