The covenant - James A. Michener [184]
The loan-farm law was passed, but as the perceptive emissary had predicted, it could rarely be enforced. Distant farmers were instructed to carry their taxes to either the Cape or Stellenbosch, and they simply ignored the law. On farms close in, the officials did make a brave show of riding out in midwinter to demand overdue tithes, but with obstinate and dangerous renegades like Rooi van Valck, no collector dared approach his outlaw domain lest he be shot through the neck.
In these years Adriaan had little concern with tax collectors; he was so occupied with extending his knowledge of the wilderness that weeks would pass without his being seen at the farm. It was then that the soubriquet Mai Adriaan was fastened most securely to him; he would come home from an exploration and say, 'While I was sleeping in the tree . . .' or 'As I climbed out of the hippo's wallow . . .' or 'In the days when I lived with the gemsbok . . .' He caused outrage among his family and the slaves by insisting that lions could climb trees, for it was commonly accepted that they could not and that a man was secure if only he could find refuge in a tree.
'No,' said Adriaan, 'I've seen a tree with seven lions sleeping on the higher branches.' This was so crazy that even the slaves called him Mai Adriaan, and once when he was twenty he experienced for the first time the loneliness that comes upon a young man when he is ridiculed by his peers. The family was eating in the hut, scraping away at bones of mutton and cabbage, when his father asked, 'Have the animals moved closer to our valley?' and he replied automatically, 'When I was staying with the rhinoceros . . .' and his brothers and sisters said simultaneously, 'Oh, Adriaan!' and he had blushed furiously and started to leave the table where they huddled, except that his mother placed her hand upon his arm to restrain him.
That night, as they sat outside the hut, she told him, 'It's not good for a man to wait too long. You must find yourself a wife.'
'Where?'
'That's always the question. Look at our Florrie. Where's she to catch a husband? I'll tell you where. One of these days a young man will come by here on his horse, looking for a bride. And he'll see Florrie, and off she'll go-'
And sure enough, within four weeks of that conversation Dikkop, always frightened of new movement, came rushing to the hut, shouting, 'Man coming on horse!' And in came a dusty, lusty young farmer who had ridden a hundred and twenty miles on hearing the rumor that Hendrik van Doorn out beyond the river had several daughters. He made no secret of his mission, stayed five weeks, during which he ate enormous quantities of food, and on the night Hendrik offered him a bread pudding crammed with lemon rind and cherries and dried apples, he belched, pushed back the soup plate from which he had gorged himself, and said, 'Florrie and me, we're heading home tomorrow.'
The Van Doorns were delighted. It might be years or never before they saw this daughter again, but at her age it was proper that she ride away. Illiterate, barely able to sew a straight line, a horrible cook, a worse housekeeper, off she went with her illiterate husband to found a new farm, to raise a new brood of tough-minded trekboers to occupy the land.
Two nights after they departed, Johanna sat with Adriaan again and said, 'Take the brown horse and be going.'
'Where?'
'Three people now have told us that Rooi van Valck has a mess of daughters. Ride up and get one.'
'They also say Rooi's a bad one. Defames the Bible.'
'Well.' She hardly knew how to say what was required, but she had thought about this matter for some time, keeping her mouth shut lest she irritate her husband. But now she said in a low voice, 'Adriaan, it's possible to take the Bible too seriously. I can't read it myselfnever had my lettersbut