Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [123]
You’d never forget it, the sudden subservience of everybody, big and small. Something changed gear that afternoon on Grootmoedersdrift.
Agaat put the medicine containers precisely in sequence on the wall on either side of the headclamp. She blew into the rubber tubes to check that they were clear. She squeezed the triggers of the dosing-canisters and squirted medicine on the ground until she was satisfied that they were working correctly and without air bubbles. Her mouth was set in a line, her chin jutting far forward.
Bring a rope, you called to the boys, bring a stick.
For what? Agaat asked.
So that I can have something with which to pull you out if he runs amuck, you said, then you grab the rope or the stick.
She looked at you. Agaat Lourier can’t pull herself out of the gully with one arm, her face said.
Or I push the stick under your apron’s shoulder-straps and lever you out, you said. You couldn’t look her straight in the eye.
The gully is too deep. The stick is too short. You’re too weak. It wasn’t even necessary for her to say it.
Perhaps we should rather wait for the vet, you got out. Your voice was low.
Wait till I’m in, she said to you, climb on the wall and walk behind me. Don’t put things in his head. Think one thing and think it straight.
First try to prod him from behind, you said.
You try, Agaat said, he doesn’t want to, he’s too buggered.
You went around the back of the holding pen. You prodded the shitting bull in the flanks with a stick. He didn’t budge.
Agaat straightened her cap with both hands. There at the gate of the holding pen you saw it. The one shoulder pulled up, the pace forward, the pace back, the genuflection. Then she opened the gate and went in and closed the gate behind her. Plumb towards the dead strip between the bull’s eyes Agaat advanced, bold and high her mien.
Water came into your mouth, of iron it tasted, of blood.
She hooked her finger into the nose-ring, turned her back, took a pace forward. Through the bars of the holding pen you saw the bull bend its knee, dragging his hind leg, starting to move forward. Six, seven, eight paces and Agaat was in the crush pen with him.
You climbed onto the wall, the stick and rope in your hand. The bull lowered its head. On both sides of his muzzle gobbets of drool were hurled against the cement walls. His small sunken eyes were on the cross of Agaat’s shoulder-straps. Soon she was invisible. You could only deduce, from the steady pace at which the bull moved forward, that she was there walking ahead of him, and that she was exerting a constant force of traction on him.
The blood in your temples! The whole twenty, twenty-five, thirty yards of the crush pen! Triumph when the bull pushed his huge muzzle over the crossbar, when you pressed down the lever, and wedged in his head, and Agaat escaped through the shutter. A yelling from the littl’uns, cries of admiration as she emerged there.
She was opposite you on her scaffolding on the other side of the gully. She wiped her hands on the bib of her apron. She pushed at her cap. On her shoulders something glistened in the sun. It was wet where the big bull had drooled on her.
Agaat held out her little hand, the back, so that the bull could feel the warmth on his nose. He tried take a step back, felt his head was fast. It would be a business if he lay down in the gully. You had to work quickly. Agaat looked at you across the hump.
You wanted to praise her because she was so brave, but the expression on her face prevented you.
First the coffee, then brandy, he needs a kick-start, she said.
The main thing was that the liquid should not end up in the lungs. Agaat passed you the bottle with coffee.
Press on his cheeks, she said, you have two hands.
You pressed on the release knobs, the sensitive salivary glands. The jaws parted slightly, you pressed down the lever a notch to pick up the head another few degrees and lifted the lip and inserted the thin