Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [42]
Once Ros lets him hold his pocketknife, shows him how easily it cuts a hair. The hair does not bend, just springs in two at the merest touch of the blade. Ros sharpens the knife every day, spitting on the whetstone, brushing the blade across it back and forth, lightly, easily. So much of the blade has been worn away with all the sharpening and all the cutting and all the sharpening again that there is only a sliver left. It is the same with Ros’s spade: so long has he used it, so often sharpened it, that only an inch or two of steel remains; the wood of the grip is smooth and black with years of sweat.
‘You shouldn’t be watching that,’ says his mother, after one of the Friday slaughterings.
‘Why?’
‘You just shouldn’t.’
‘I want to.’
And he goes off to watch Ros peg down the skin and sprinkle it with rock salt.
He likes watching Ros and Freek and his uncle at work. To take advantage of the high wool prices, Son wants to run more sheep on the farm. But after years of poor rain the veld is a desert, grass and bushes cropped to the ground. He therefore sets about re-fencing the entire farm, breaking it into smaller camps so that the sheep can be shifted from camp to camp and the veld given time to recover. He and Ros and Freek go out every day, driving fence posts into the rock-hard earth, spanning furlong after furlong of wire, drawing it taut as a bowstring, clamping it.
Uncle Son always treats him kindly, yet he knows he does not really like him. How does he know? By the uneasy look in Son’s eyes when he is around, the forced tone in his voice. If Son really liked him, he would be as free and offhand with him as he is with Ros and Freek. Instead, Son is careful always to speak English to him, even though he speaks Afrikaans back. It has become a point of honour with both of them; they do not know how to get out of the trap.
He tells himself that the dislike is not personal, that it is only because he, the son of Son’s younger brother, is older than Son’s own son, who is still a baby. But he fears that the feeling runs deeper, that Son disapproves of him because he has given his allegiance to his mother, the interloper, rather than to his father; also because he is not straight, honest, truthful.
If he had a choice between Son and his own father as a father, he would choose Son, even though that would mean he would be irrecoverably Afrikaans and would have to spend years in the purgatory of an Afrikaans boarding school, as all farm-children do, before he would be allowed to come back to the farm.
Perhaps that is the deeper reason why Son dislikes him: he feels the obscure claim this strange child is making on him and rejects it, like a man shaking himself free of a clinging baby.
He watches Son all the time, admiring the skill with which he does everything from dosing a sick animal to repairing a wind pump. He is particularly fascinated by his knowledge of sheep. By looking at a sheep, Son can tell not only its age and its parentage, not only what kind of wool it will give, but what each part of its body will taste like. He can pick out a slaughter-sheep according to whether it has the right ribs for grilling or the right haunches for roasting.
He himself likes meat. He looks forward to the tinkle of the bell at midday and the huge repast it announces: dishes of roast potatoes, yellow rice with raisins, sweet potatoes with caramel sauce, pumpkin with brown sugar and soft bread-cubes, sweet-and-sour beans, beetroot salad, and, at the centre, in pride of place, a great platter of mutton with gravy to pour over it. Yet after seeing Ros slaughtering sheep he no longer likes to handle raw meat. Back in Worcester he prefers not to go into butchers’ shops. He is repelled by the casual ease with which the butcher slaps down a cut of meat on the counter, slices it, rolls it up in brown paper, writes a price on it. When he hears the grating