Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [43]
Weekends and holidays were worst, and the quiet times on the farm between seasons. Because then he wanted to go mountain-climbing or running or rowing, or to read his books by Ian Fleming and Louis L’Amour, always as far away as possible from you. You had to think up things to keep him on the farm. Painting, a new silage tower, large-scale yard clearance, the big compost project with the adjacent farms.
You saw to it that other people came to inspect the work at the most dramatic moment. When a project had just been completed, you arranged parties, lunches for the neighbours, agriculture days with information sessions for the members of the farmers’ associations.
Then Jak beamed in the glow of all the attention, his best foot well forward.
Let’s redesign the garden, you said, there’s nothing that makes a homestead look as attractive as a garden. You haven’t forgotten, have you, that you promised it to me, my paradise?
Don’t think I can’t see through you, he said, you’re more wily than the snake. That’s the only bit of paradise that there’ll ever be on this farm.
You thought, if we can’t be lovers, let us then at least be friends. Friends can learn to differ, even over paradise. But he was forever wanting away, to other people.
You tried to console yourself with work. When there was plenty of pressure on the farm, things that had to be done urgently and accurately, you were at your happiest. You liked working with people in a team, according to a fixed plan, with a predictable outcome, with a view to the long term. That’s the only way a farm can work, you’d learnt from your mother.
We can buy you an American saddle horse if the wool price is good, you said to Jak, or a new car if we sell the new Jersey heifers.
If you rewarded him, he helped you well at times. But simply to ask him for something, that wouldn’t do.
Why must I always hold your little hand in everything that you want done? After all, you’re the real farmer here, or so you’d have me believe.
It took you a long time to accept that if you wanted things done on the farm, you would have to think it all up yourself. And that you should turn to OuKarel and his son to help you take things in hand and make a start. They looked at each other and OuKarel wordlessly signalled to Dawid: Do as you’re asked to do. That Jak did not like. If he saw that they were helping you, he would make a show of lending a hand for a while. They soon discovered what was going on, pressed him for more pay.
They’d lost their sharecrop, was OuKarel’s argument, how was he supposed to support his dependants? Not that you knew who exactly he meant, he’d been a widower for most of his life, and Dawid was to all appearances a loner, but as Jak with time succumbed to the pressure and restored half of the Okkenels’ status by making them foremen on Grootmoedersdrift, the dependants came and presented themselves: OuKarel’s second cousins and their wives and children who couldn’t all live off the carpentry business that his brothers ran in Suurbraak. A never-ending influx it was. The houses were over-full, but Jak refused to build on and forbade them to construct shacks.
Do you want the whole mongrel rabble with their so-called Scottish surnames and mission-station affectations here on your front stoep, Milla? Over my dead body, he said, enough is enough.
You tried to keep the peace by seeing to it that enough bags of flour and pails of milk found their way over the drift to the labourers’ cottages. And you tried to establish goodwill by regularly going to buy a chair or a little table from the family business in Suurbraak. The five Okkenel brothers, all of them like OuKarel with the high brow and the green eyes and the sharp nose, looked at you with shrewd understanding and knew just how to fix a price that accorded with your feelings of guilt. With the passing of time you realised that it had been a mistake to abolish the sharecropping. It was their only source of capital for buying good timber