The covenant - James A. Michener [135]
'Nine cheers for the widows!' she cried, then grabbing her granddaughter Petronella, she said solemnly, 'If you ever become a widow, outsmart them, Petra. Keep your wits about you and outsmart them.'
'Grandmother!' Annatjie said sharply. 'Don't talk like that to a child.'
'And you too!' the old lady said. 'If you become a widow, which God forbid, watch yourself. Women are smarter than men, much smarter, but in times of emotion'
'But you see,' Paul broke in, 'the Widows Bosbeecq were forewarned about Karel. They knew he was a tricky man.'
Suddenly Katje leaned forward, and reaching out to grasp the Huguenot by his arm, she asked, 'How did they know that?'
'They warned me about him when I went to work at his big house. They were ready to marry him, you understand, either of them, but they knew he was a thief. . . because of what he had done to you.' At this point he addressed Willem.
Katje tugged at his arm: 'What do you mean?'
'The way he stole from your husband.'
Sharp tug: 'Stole what?'
'When he sold your mother's house in Batavia. Everyone knew that half the money was for Willem, but he kept it for himself... all of it."
'I knew it! I knew it!' the old woman shouted, jumping from her chair and rampaging back and forth from table to door. 'I told you he was a thief.' Halfway back to the table she stopped, remembered old days, and cried, 'I told him to his face. "You're stealing from us." ' On and on she recalled scenes of that last confrontation when she had divined what the couple was up to. At the end she fell into her chair, dropped her head on the table and wept.
'There, there,' Willem whispered.
'But we could have had that money. We could have gone back to Holland in style. We didn't have to work like slaves . . .'
'I would never have gone,' Willem said, and his wife looked up at him in astonishment, then with slow understanding as he asked, 'Would you have missed this valley for a smelly house on a smelly canal?'
But as the De Pres started to walk home they could still hear the old woman haranguing her family: 'Always remember, your uncle was a thief. He stole what was rightfully yours.' On and on, until they could hear no more, she lectured on how she had been right, back in 1664.
It annoyed Paul that his sons used Dutch to refer to Katje. It was 'Ouma gave us a cookie.'
'Ouma said we could sleep over there.' It meant old mother, hence grandmother, and was a term of endearment, for if Ouma gave her husband a bad time over the various mistakes he made in his life, she compensated by her love for children. She knew they needed discipline and she was the one to dispense it, but she also knew they needed love, and she was as indulgent with the De Pre children as with the Van Doorn.
One morning, when Henri and Louis had gone to the big house to beg sweets from the old lady, they ran home in tears. 'Ouma's dead! Ouma died last night!' Three days later she was buried at the foot of a hill, and on the way back from the grave Marthinus said, 'She's had time to get to heaven, and right now she's advising St. Peter, sternly.'
Her death had a curious aftermath. Old Willem, recalling how often she had badgered him to enlarge the farmhouseseeking by this means to finally compensate for the cramped hut at the Capedecided that he would at last accede to her wishes. When he announced that he was riding to the Cape to buy a Malay carpenter, his son asked why, and he replied to Annatjie, as if she were old Katje's surrogate, 'It's about time I made this house the way she wanted it.'
By starting early and riding hard through the heat of day, the old man reached the Cape before dusk, and what he saw always delighted him. The bay now had a quay at which ships could tie, a handsome new fort of gray stone, streets with solid houses and spacious orchards growing pears and lemons and oranges and plums and apples. More than half the white people in the colony lived in the town, which had every aspect of a thriving communityexcept one: the entire place contained not a single formal