The covenant - James A. Michener [101]
When Willem returned to the fort he found that Jango had been retaken and that the heavy iron chains had been returned to his legs. Henceforth he would work at the vines slowly, dragging monstrous weights behind him. But in spite of this dreadful impediment, he ran away a third time, far to the north, where he survived three weeks prior to his recapture. This time, argued the junior officials, his ears really must be cropped, but once more Van Riebeeck refused to carry out the harsh measures which Commissioner van Doorn had authorized, and one of the commander's subordinates dispatched a secret message to Batavia, informing Karel of this nonfeasance.
The garden-hut in which Katje van Doorn started her married life echoed with an incessant chain of complaints; three were recurrent.
'Why do we have to live in this hut? Why can't we move to the fort?
'Why can't I have four slaves, like the commander's wife?
'How soon can we join Kornelia and your brother in Java?'
Patiently Willem tried to answer each complaint: 'You wouldn't like it at the fort. All those people. What would you do with so many personal slaves? And we'll have to prove that wine can be made here before they let us go to Java.' He deceived her on the last point: he had no desire whatever to return to Java; he had found his home in Africa and was determined to stay.
Katje was not convinced by his arguments, but she did appreciate it when he built a small addition to the hut so that she could have space of her own. Of course, when time came to finish the floor, and he brought in bucketfuls of cow dung mixed with water for her to smooth over the pounded earth not once but many times, she wailed in protest. So he knelt down and did the work for her, producing in time a hard, polished surface not unlike that of weathered pine. It had a cleansing odor too, the clean smell of barnyard and meadow.
He was startled upon learning that Katje had gone to Van Riebeeck, petitioning him for a servant. The commander pointed out that the only woman available was Deborah, adding delicately that it would hardly be proper for this girl to move into their hut, seeing that she was far pregnant, and with Willem's child. To his astonishment, Katje saw nothing wrong in this: 'He's my husband now, and I need help.'
'Quite impossible,' Van Riebeeck said, and Katje's complaints increased.
On the other hand, she was steadfast in tending the new vines, and so it was she who patiently watered the young plantings and wove the straw protections which shielded them from the winds. She watched their growth with more excitement than a mother follows that of a child, and when the older vines at last yielded a substantial crop of pale white grapes, she picked them with joy, placed them almost reverently in the hand press, and watched with satisfaction as the colorless must ran from the nozzle.
She and Willem had only the vaguest concept of how wine was made, but they started the fermentation, and in the end something like wine resulted. When it was carried proudly to the fort, Van Riebeeck took the first taste and wrote in his report to the Lords XVII:
Today, God be praised, wine has been made from grapes grown at the Cape. From our virgin must, pressed from the young French muscadels you sent us, thirty quarts of rich wine have been made. The good years have begun.
But the next year, when a heavy harvest of grapes made the production of export wine a possibility, it received a harsh reception in Java: 'More vinegar than wine, more slops than vinegar, our Dutch refused it, our slaves could not drink it, and even the hogs turned away.' And because sailors aboard the big East Indiamen rejected it too, the Cape wine did not even help to diminish scurvy.
As a consequence, Willem fell into further disfavor at the fort; his deficiency was harming Van Riebeeck's chancesas well as