Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [122]
O-alla-got, Saar said and tied her headscarf tighter.
Don’t come and o-alla here now, where are your menfolk? you scolded. Why can’t you keep them on track?
Saar looked away. But was there also something else in her attitude? Because she’d seen Agaat ordering you about and you doing everything exactly as she said, a little servant-girl of hardly thirteen? Her face was cunning. There wasn’t time to say arrange your face. In any case you thought twice before saying that to the kitchen-maids.
You sent one of the boys to go and commandeer OuKarel. You knew Agaat had everything right about the medicine and you had learnt from your mother about the procedures with tulip poisoning, but experience was what was lacking. You needed OuKarel’s eye there, you felt. You remembered your mother’s belief that a bull, not to mention a new one, wouldn’t co-operate if there wasn’t a man in the company.
In the camp the animals were huddled around the drinking trough as Agaat had predicted.
And there was Hamburg, his hump seven hands high above the rails of the holding pen. He’d be able to flatten it like nothing. His head was hanging, strings of drool from his mouth, and the piss and the thin slimy dung ran out of him. He pressed himself against the back of the partition.
How had Agaat got him in there? How would you move him to the threshold of the crush pen? Would the headclamp be in working order?
Wide-eyed the maids stood staring. Agaat trotted off to test the lever of the clamp. Up and down she pressed it so that the flat shaft first bent at the hinge in the middle and then lifted up. Open and shut she operated it, the steel arms of the clamp flashing in the sunlight over there at the far end of the crush pen.
How are we going to get him in there? you asked her.
He’s already half dead, Agaat said, look how deep his eyes are, he’s wonky in the front legs, he won’t give us grief.
How? you asked with the eyes.
Agaat hooked the index finger of her strong hand in front of her nose.
With the bare hand on his nose-ring?
That’s how I got him there in the pen, Agaat said.
You didn’t believe her. The holding pen’s gate was wide open. You were sure she’d prodded him in there from behind.
The holding pen was one thing, one would still be able to roll free under the lowest bar of the pen. But the crush pen was a narrow gully with high cement walls. There was one escape route, that was to the back. But how would you worm past the bull if you were in front of him and he gored you? He would fill the gully from wall to wall.
At the front end, in front of the headclamp, there was a shutter of steel that could be lifted if he should decide to rush forward.
But what if everything happened very quickly? You’d be paralysed with shock, you’d slip, the one who had to lift the shutter could lose his nerve, you’d be trampled.
Who should take the bull in there?
You hesitated.
I’ll take him, said Agaat, her mouth set in a straight line. He knows me. He’s soft in the nose. He won’t bugger around for no reason.
Ho my mother, said Saar.
You go and sit in the bakkie with Jakkie, Agaat said, and wash your hands before you touch him.
Push the other cattle away from the drinking trough, she ordered Lietja, count them, there should be seventy.
And for you she tallied on the fingers of her strong hand. One bottle of egg and brandy, one bottle of coffee, two pints of the rusk bottle’s lime-and-linseed water mixed with two tablespoons of tannic acid to the pint, decanted into two Coopers canisters.
She would lead the bull as far as the clamp, you had to secure his head. Then somebody had to open the shutter so that she could get out in front.
Agaat ordered two boys to go and fetch planks and to build a scaffolding on little drums outside the crush pen on both sides so that you could reach across to dose the bull.
What if he gores you? one whispered to her. What if he tramples you?
They retreated stepping on one another’s feet. Mush! they giggled. Arsgaat!
Dry up, said Agaat, a bag of acid drops for