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You grabbed Agaat by the apron and shook her.

Why didn’t I hear the shots more often? Why don’t we ever hear anything? Why do I only learn about this now? Why did nobody come and tell me that the cows didn’t seem right? Why don’t you notice things, I know you know what a healthy cow looks like!

She looked you straight in the eye, her body ramrod-stiff. You could see the hurt settling in her gaze. On top of the poker face, a film of aggrievedness. More than that.

He screws a pipe into the front of the rifle’s barrel, she said, her voice neutral.

You let her go, she retreated. When she spoke it was soft, but clear and controlled.

I saw it yesterday for the first time. All you hear is thud like a bag of salt falling off a wagon. But I know what it sounds like now. From now on I’ll know to listen for it.

Don’t let him see you, Agaat.

You are my eyes and my ears, you wanted to say, he knows in the long run I find out everything, but just don’t let him discover that you’re spying on him.

You were silent, blew your nose. Her gaze forbade you to say anything further.

You should have said you were sorry you scolded so viciously. You should have said you would be more alert yourself. Never mind, it’s not your fault, Agaat, you should have said, you’re with Jakkie all day, how could you know what was happening in the fields? But you didn’t. You stepped past her, your hands to your face. Shattered because of the cows. Over those injured eyes of Agaat’s you stepped. Right over the insinuation flickering in that eye.

Must I see the germs even before they hatch? Must I keep death itself from your body? There was reproach on her face.

Sobering it was.

You gathered yourself. Saw to it that the old bones and tins and cartridge-shells and rusted wires and everything on the old grazings next to the river were cleared up. Jak trembled with dismay when he heard the name of the sickness. He buckled down and helped. You controlled yourself, said if it was really necessary, then he should go and lay out a proper shooting-range with real targets at the back of the fallow land in a special camp where he would be out of the way of man and beast. There would never again be a single thing shot and left lying in the veld, you said.

You immediately started administering bonemeal with the salt, for the sheep as well, and gave instructions for the making of new little troughs that would ensure that each head of cattle would get its eight ounces.

You got in a team of convicts and had the whole farm, next to the rivers and on the side of the drift, scoured for bones. More than a hundred bags full were collected.

You wouldn’t forget that, the shaven heads of the men as they moved stooped down in a slow phalanx before Agaat’s white apron over the lands. The old hymns there on the fallow, carried by the wind, you could hear them as far as the yard, Agaat’s descant high and bright above the deep voices of the men.

From depth of dark’st disgrace

of deliverance bereft

where hope’s forlorn last trace

in despair my heart has left;

from depths of desolation

oh Lord, I b’seech thee, hear,

and let my lamentation

ascend, Lord, in thine ear!

Everybody was flabbergasted. Cows that eat skeletons. As if death itself had nutritional value. Even Saar and Lietja who could produce a ribald laugh on any occasion, stood there in the kitchen singing, dragging it out with that lugubrious bending of the notes that the brown people could give to a song. A weeping and wailing it was in those days on Grootmoedersdrift, as the wagons full of white bones arrived in the yard. And as the digging of the trenches began and the skeletons of skunks and meerkat and guineafowl, and the carcasses of cattle, were cast into them, Agaat led the workers in the singing of another verse.

Hope, Israel in your sorrow,

trust, o nation that grieves;

His favour light’ns the morrow,

His grace your grief reprieves.

Then shines a sweet salvation:

all Israel is free

of trial and tribulation.

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