Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [199]
You look as if you’ve been in the wars, Ma, said Jakkie.
Jak put his knife down hard.
Agaat carelessly slid the pudding-dish from her oven gloves onto the table.
With the back of his spoon Jakkie tapped the hard crust of the pudding.
Oops, little accident, he said.
Such little accidents will happen from time to time, you said. Why don’t you rather tell us how exactly you hurt your leg? Did somebody tackle you badly, or what?
Then Agaat rammed the serving-spoon into the centre of the pudding and it stayed upright.
Just above Koggelmanklip, she said, to the left of the upper reservoir next to the kloof, there in the dry stubble and all along the protea bushes.
What about that? Jak asked.
There the foothill is burning.
I could swear I’ve been smelling something, Jakkie exclaimed and got to his feet before he remembered about his leg. Agaat darted him a sharp look.
Au! he exclaimed and fell back in his chair.
So why don’t you speak up if you can smell it? she asked, her eyes fixed on Jakkie’s face.
You ran out onto the front stoep. If that was where the fire had started, it had jumped in the meantime. There were several patches on fire all along the flank of the first foothill in front of the house. The flames were leaping up high and moving forward fast in the gusty wind. You could hear the crackling all the way from the yard. The strip of proteas and fynbos stretching from under the reservoir almost all the way to the wattles, was one seething mass of flames. You could hear from the loud cracks how the brittle wood of the wattles and the rooikrans caught fire.
What I’ve always predicted will happen, has happened, you said.
Of course you’ve always predicted it and of course you’ve been saying for a long time we should eradicate the alien invaders because they burn too easily, because of course you’re a nature conservationist but nobody ever listens to you until it’s too late, Jak said without looking at you.
It was clear that there was nothing to be done about the fire. The labourers were arriving in batches on the yard. Dawid hooked the water cart to the tractor. There was a shouting for sacks and spades. But they remained standing there dazed in a little group, pressing their hats to their heads. Now and again looked at you on the stoep. Making a firebreak wasn’t an option with the wind. That everyone knew, extinguishing even less.
Look! Look! Jakkie called. It was a klipspringer that had come over the river. The first one, with bewildered zig-zag leaps. As you stood there, more and more small game scattered over the yard. Hares, buck, skunks, even a jackal or two. You sent two farmboys to the river to rescue the tortoises. You knew how they could run from fire.
My goats, Agaat said suddenly. Her hands flew to her cap. She pulled it deeper over her forehead, My goats, my goats, she mumbled. Jakkie gazed after her anxiously but she didn’t return his look. Agaat’s goats were tethered on the other side of the river in a patch of lucerne that she had sown there for her herd. Every year her cows calved and her handful of slaughter-lambs she could sell well to the butcher in Swellendam. The goats were the latest addition, bought from the Okkenels.
The poor things are perishing of neglect down there at the huts, she’d said, the workers can rather buy cheap healthy goat’s meat from me than have them suffer from mange and blowfly and get slaughtered before they’re properly dead.
Gone she was with her quirt to go and untether her goats and drive them out.
Jak had the roofs of the sheds watered and the vehicles moved out. You had wet newspaper packed on the hay in the shed. You felt as if you were drifting a few centimetres above the ground. In a stupor you packed a few cases and put in food so that you could get out if need be. The yard was dry, there were bales of hay, dry lucerne in the shed. One spark on the thatched roof of the homestead could spell the end.