Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [120]
And if it hadn’t been for Agaat. She’d gone for a walk with Jakkie in his pram.
We’re going to the river, she said as she packed the bottle and his hat.
You knew why there specifically. It was sorrel time. It was the time for stringing garlands of pink sorrel and yellow sorrel on the long thin leaves of the wild tulips, an old game of Agaat’s, you had originally shown her how. You pull the sorrel flower off the germen so that the flower has a little hole at its point underneath and then you string them one by one tightly packed against one another on the tulip string until it’s full and then you tie the two ends together in a knot. Then you hang it around your neck. The garland of flowers, once in spring around her neck, around your neck. Such a garland took two hours to string and served as a necklace for a quarter of an hour. Then it was wilted. You knew that on that afternoon she would sit Jakkie down on his little blanket in the grass and plait him a garland and sing to him. In veld and vlei the spring’s at play. There was a hare, a fox and a bear, and birds in the willow tree. All the old spring songs.
Agaat came into your room, ten minutes after she’d left, without knocking and gave the child back to you in your arms.
And now? Are you back already? you asked.
And then you noticed her cap that was crooked.
They’ve been to the water already, they’re shitting slime, Agaat said.
She gulped to recover her breath. She push-pushed at her cap with the one hand.
You knew at once that it was the Simmentals she was talking about. They’d been to the poison plants. Cows that have grown up on a farm with wild tulips, don’t eat them. They learn from an early age that they’re more bitter than grass. So the old herd of Jerseys were safe even though the tulip bulbs were juicily in flower. It would be the new cattle, South West African cattle with a mindless hunger for greenery. After their arrival they’d been herded into a bare south-facing camp with hay and dry powerfeed and radishes to get them back into condition after their long journey in trains and lorries. Let loose in a green camp they would eat as if they were being paid for it, the young tulips first. And that would make them thirsty. And then they would drink. And water on tulips, that everyone knew, was as good as arsenic.
Agaat couldn’t talk fast enough.
Chased them out of the grazing shut the gate so that they can’t get to the river but there’s a small drinking trough in that dosing-camp where they are now it’s probably also been drunk dry they’re thirsty they’re shitting green strings their eyes are watering they’re going to die off Hamburg’s in the holding pen in front of the crush pen but he won’t take one pace farther will have to get him in the headclamp quickly!
She was right. A bull like that, even when he’s ill, couldn’t just be doctored in the open. One swing of his head and you’d all be sent sprawling in the mud.
You wanted to know where Dawid was, where Kadys and Julies were.
I had them called down there by the cottages, they don’t come out.
How did she get the bull into the holding pen single-handedly?
Agaat was trotting down the passage to the pantry. Jakkie put up a bawl. Jak was gone, would only be back from tennis by milking-time. Saar and Lietja arrived heavy with sleep at the kitchen door with a cluster of littl’uns. Big and small stretched their necks to see into the kitchen if under the licence of irregularity there was something to loot.
Hey you, back! Agaat scolded them.
You had your hands in your hair. That sort of time on Grootmoedersdrift. Agaat gave you a look of pull-yourself-together-on-the-spot.