The covenant - James A. Michener [168]
The children begged their father to make one of his bread puddings, but without lemon rind or cherries or apples to grace it, he felt it would be a disappointment, and he refrained, but toward September, when the long winter was ending, an old smous driving a rickety wagon came through from the Cape with a miraculous supply of flour, coffee, condiments, dried fruits, and things like sewing needles and pins.
'You'll be the farthest east,' he said in a high, wheezing voice.
'How'd you get over the mountains alone?' Hendrik asked.
'Partner and I, we broke the wagon down, carried the parts over.'
'Where's your partner?'
'Took himself a farm. Down by the ocean.'
'How you getting back to the Cape?'
'I'll sell the things. I'll sell the wagon. Then I'll walk back and buy another.'
'You plan to come back this way?' Johanna asked. 'Maybe next year.'
'This'll be a nice place then,' Hendrik said. 'Maybe I'll build us a real house.'
No one believed this. Four years on this farm, a drought or two, a more fertile valley espied on a cattle drive, and the Van Doorns would all be impatient for a move to better land. But now there was food at hand, and a few rix-dollars to pay for it, so the entire family joined in fingering through the old man's stock.
'I'm not eager to sell,' he said. 'Lots of people on the way back want my things.'
'How many people?' Hendrik asked.
'Between here and the mountains... ten... twenty farms. It's becoming a new Stellenbosch.'
Johanna saw to it that they bought prudently, but at the end of the bargaining she said, 'Bet you haven't had a good meal in weeks.'
'I eat.'
'If you let us have some of that dried fruit, some of those spices, my husband will make you the best bread pudding you ever tasted.'
'That one?' The old man looked almost contemptuously at Hendrik, but when Johanna pressed him on the exchange, he began to waver.
'You got any mutton? Just good mutton?'
'We do.'
'Mutton and pudding. I'd like that.' So the barter was arranged, and while Johanna and Hendrik worked inside the hut, the old man sat on a rickety stool by the entrance, savoring the good smell of meat. Trekboers liked their meat swimming in grease.
It was a gala meal, there at the farthest edge of settlement, and when the meat had been apportioned and there was much surplus, Adriaan said, 'I'd like to give Dikkop some.' No one spoke, so he added, 'Dikkop and me, we're going on the walk, you remember.' So it was approved that the Hottentot could come to the doorway of the hut while Adriaan passed him a tin plate of mutton. 'Stay here,' he whispered.
Now Hendrik brought forth the crock with no handles, placing it before the old man: 'You first.'
This was a mistake. The old fellow took nearly half the pot; he hadn't had a sweet in ages, and certainly not one with bits of lemon rind and dried apples. The Van Doorns divided the remainder evenly, but Adriaan split his portion in two. 'Whatever are you doing?' Johanna asked, and her son said, 'I promised Dikkop a share,' and he passed it quickly out.
Their journey was planned for November, when protea blossoms were opening like great golden moons. Dikkop, brown and barefooted, nineteen years old and well versed in frontier living, would be in charge. Adriaan, well clothed in rugged leather vest and moleskin trousers, and exceptionally informed regarding animals and trees, would be the spiritual leader. They would head for a wild terrain with lions and hippos and elephants and antelope unnumbered. And in the end, if they survived, they would wander back with nothing whatever to show for their journey except rare tales of cliffs negotiated and rivers swum.
In the late spring of 1724 they started