The covenant - James A. Michener [476]
'I won't let it rain,' De Groot promised, and during the four weeks it took to assemble a kind of roof over one room of the ruined farmhouse, it did not.
In the second week they stopped work when Detlev cried, 'People coming!' Across the veld they saw a distant file walking toward them, and ominously Jakob reached for his gun. 'Kaffirs,' he said, indicating that his son must stand behind him.
In the chaos after the war, bands of homeless hungry blacks had started raiding Boer farms in the district, stealing what they could find and roughing up any farmer who tried to protest, but there was nothing to fear from this company, for Detlev shouted, 'It's Micah!'
At the sight of only three Van Doorns and one De Groot, tears began to roll from Micah's eyes, for he knew that the absence of the others could mean only one thing, for he, too, was returning from a camp, one for blacks, in which his family and friends had been interned, and of his four wives, only two had survived; of nine children, only three were left.
The suffering of these black Boers would go unrecorded. Even Maud Turner Saltwood, who had done so much for Boer women and children, had to admit, in a final report, that the situation of the black internees had been without hope: 'Beyond affording a little relief to the sick in the few camps I visited, we were able to do nothing.' More than one hundred thousand blacks and Coloureds had been herded behind barbed wire; how many came out alive would never be known.
When De Groot learned of Nxumalo's heavy loss he was overwhelmed. In a gesture from the heart he held out his arms to his saddle companion and embraced him: 'Kaffirtjie, as true as there's a God in heaven we'll not forget what they did to both of us. Stay close and one day we'll ride again.'
Nxumalo nodded.
'This what's left of your family?' the general asked, and when Nxumalo nodded again, the old man took a step back to survey the land where the handsome rondavels had once stood. 'We must all start over. But this time, by God, they'll not be able to burn down what we build.'
So Nxumalo and his people returned to their security at Vrymeer, and he sketched in the ruins how his women must build the new huts. Early next morning he led the men who'd accompanied him from the camp to the Van Doorns' farmhouse, where they all started work. They did not ask what the arrangement would be for their employment. They just carried on as before.
The Van Doorns were surprised at the end of the first month when the old general informed them that since they now had protection from the weather, he would like to start rebuilding his farm. 'But you're to live with us,' Johanna protested with great warmth.
'No, I want a place of my own.'
'Who will cook? How will you live?'
The answer came from one of Nxumalo's wives. 'He is old,' she said. 'He needs help. We go to his place.' And Micah agreed that the woman and a young girl must accompany the old warrior to his shattered home.
Utilizing the foundation of what at best had been a miserable house, they put together what could only be called a hartebeest hut, a pitiful affair with a flap-door and no windows. One morning as Jakob surveyed the astonishing place he thought: In our barbarism we retreat many centuries. A hundred years ago our people lived better than this. Two hundred years ago they surely built better huts.
Could he have gone back to the year when Mai Adriaan, Dikkop and Swarts lived here beside the lake, he would have found them in simpler but better quarters than these, and certainly in the days of the first Nxumalo the village and fine rondavels that stood here were superior to what the old man occupied. The centuries pass, Jakob thought, and men stay about where they were.
The rains were coming late this year, producing a drought so severe that many farmers in the area, faced by the necessity to rebuild and also to fight dust, were giving up and moving to Johannesburg, where they could at least find some kind of employment in the mines. 'I don't like this,' the general complained when he heard that