Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [119]
An unnatural craving, she said, her recitation-voice wilted with exhaustion, that’s what causes cows to eat carrion. Sheep can also get it. Then they eat the wrong things, then they get sick. Of germs in carcases. Bo-tu-li-nus germs. But it’s the soil that lacks something first. Phosphorus. And then the grazing. The problem is in the soil. It works through the grass into the blood. That’s what causes the wrong hunger in the first place, the lack in the soil.
It’s the first time the vet has seen it in The Spout, Agaat explained. Mostly it occurs in the north-west, it’s a poverty disease.
She indicated with the little hand an approximate direction supposed to represent the north-west.
We are rich, she said, but you have to know well on what soil you’re farming. It’s not just botulism they can get, but stiffsickness as well, cro-talism, then the back hunches and the limbs thicken and the mouse swells up.
On her strong arm, on the knob of the joint she showed where the mouse was situated, behind the front foot of the cow, just above the hoof.
Jak was standing in the doorway listening. You smiled at each other at Agaat’s book-learning, a small smile. He was flabbergasted. It was the first time that you’d seen him of his own volition deliver a pocket of onions and a pocket of potatoes and a leg of lamb to the vet to thank him, over and above his fee, for his support. And it was also the first time that you saw him give Agaat a present—a little bag of liquorice and a See magazine when he came back from town.
Even picked Jakkie up in his lap. As long as you just stay good and healthy, Pappa’s little bull, he said and stroked the child’s head.
That was not the only disaster with cows during Jakkie’s infancy.
Was it August of the following year? No, September ’61 it was, a month after Jakkie’s first birthday that Jak decided to add some more new Simmentals from South West Africa to his herd. New stud material needed to be added, he said, to the first herd of the German cattle that he’d started to build up in ’55 when he tired of his wheat experiment. You were reluctant. Jerseys were what you knew, delicate of hip and legs, finely-moulded of head. A Simmental, a dual-purpose animal with a blunt head and full shoulders and heavy legs, was to you an alien concept. To milk cows, help them calve and then after a few years to sell them for slaughter, felt to you like treason.
The calving was another story. That you knew well enough from the first group of Simmentals. They were small-hipped and calved with difficulty. Nights long you and Dawid had to struggle in those first years to turn breached calves. Jak assisted clumsily, walked off after a while in impatience and from squeamishness at the blood. And then you remained behind alone, with over your shoulder the pair of eyes there on the stable’s partition wall, under the lanterns, murmuring after you the little words which you prattled at the cows. Six or seven she must have been then.
If you put new animals from a different environment with old herds that had multiplied for generations on a farm, it always caused problems. You didn’t fancy more problems. The problems in the backyard were already simmering again. And now, a year after the botulism disaster, another seventy of the Simmentals arrived. You insisted that they should be kept in a separate herd and that most of them be utilised singly for slaughtering while you would continue the dairy farming with which you were familiar, with the Jerseys.
How exactly did it come about on that spring day that the new herd of Simmentals were grazing with the Jerseys next to the river amongst the blue and yellow flowers? A gate left gaping? The new stable boy, Dawid’s town cousin Kadys, who didn’t know any better?
The guilty one would