Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [33]
You rocked lightly against his body, adjusted the rhythm to the pace of your instruction.
Jak stood behind you. He pressed his body against you.
He pointed over your shoulder at the grazing below in the direction of the river.
So here it’s dry and down there it’s wet, he said with a snigger.
Just so, Jakop, you said. You laughed at his innuendo while in truth you were irritated, you pressed back against him with your buttocks.
Along the river the water table is high in winter and there you find that the soil puddles and becomes waterlogged, there we have to dig drainage troughs.
Really? Now tell me Mrs Soil Expert, what do you call the resource down below? Crumpet catch, hmmm? Banana bower? He placed his hands on your hips and drew you tightly against him.
Estcourt, Westleigh, Oakleaf, you rattled off the names, Longlands, Dundee, Avalon. You showed him the pictures in the book.
Some are shallow wet duplex soils and others are wet saline alluvial sand-loam or clay-loam. Also on the poor side.
So how are we going to get rich on poor soil, tell me that? His mouth was in your neck, you had goose pimples all over. He knew the sign.
Slowly, you said, very slowly and gradually.
He misunderstood you, had only one thing on his mind, took off his belt, said he was a hasty hound, wanted you to service him right there on the open land. But you thought the lesson would take more readily in a cool room at home.
That’s the way it is with most things when you’re dealing with men, your mother had taught you, you have to dip your demands in a dab of sugar. Remember, the truth is nothing in itself. Package it prettily.
You unbuttoned the top of your blouse and said that to get rich on Grootmoedersdrift would take years, a decade or more. You took his hand and held it against your breast and told him stories about farmers who grew too rapidly and went bankrupt just as rapidly. You took off your dress while you instructed him in the principles of crop rotation, you opened his fly slowly. Button by button you tried to get his mind round the subsurface method of cultivation. You slid your hands under his shirt and rubbed his nipples and explained to him why soil had to lie undisturbed for long periods and that rest was the best way of getting the soil structure rich and crumbly. You bowed your head over his abdomen and pleasured him and swallowed it all, because spitting out you knew he took as an insult.
Well, said Jak that morning in bed, his criterion for good healthy soil is a good healthy yield.
Regular activity, my wife, that’s all that’s necessary, on the home front as on the farming front. What goes around, comes around, or as the farmers say, eating is easy, threshing is labour.
And you lay back and for a second time let him have his way. Strike, you thought, strike your sword on the water, you think you possess me, but you don’t know me. Penetrate, you thought, invade me. What are you without my surfaces for you to break? My surfaces are merely my surfaces. Underneath I am unfathomable and you are a splinter in the void. When he rolled off you, he sighed and took your hand, squeezed it.
Just think, my little Milla, in a few years’ time there’ll be a whole string of little de Wets who can help sow and harvest one day. So we’d better make enough profit to buy some more land for them.
That was the beginning of the differences. Jakop and little Milla’s differences. He wanted to plough under the large stretches of natural veld on Grootmoedersdrift immediately for small-grain. You said it was of incalculable value, you should divide it up in camps and use it just like that, unspoilt, for rotation pasture. He wanted to plough the fallow lands five discs deep and clear them and level them with a section of rail track as he’d seen other farmers do. You said no, we break up the soil just enough to sow, with a ripper so that it doesn’t get