The covenant - James A. Michener [529]
It was not long after he recovered from his stab wounds that the permanent wounding of Moses Nxumalo began. One morning he was stopped by police on Eloff Street, Johannesburg's glittering shopping avenue, and his documents were demanded: 'I see you haven't paid your annual tax of one pound. You must come with me.'
With sixteen more black tax-dodgers he was hustled into a police van, but he never got to jail. He was taken instead to a vacant lot, where a different policeman snarled, 'Now, you damned Kaffirs, you listen. Tomorrow you go before the magistrate, he'll give you jail, three months. You know what it's like in there.'
'Yes, Baas.'
'But I'm willing to give you a chance.'
'Yes, Baas.'
'That truck you see over there belongs to a farmer from Hemelsdorp. He needs strong men who can work well. You sign a two-month contract with him, I'll forget about the magistrate, you can forget about jail.'
Moses and most of the others chose Hemelsdorp, Village of Heaven, but the farm to which they were headed lay not in heaven. For twelve hours a day they toiled in the fields; at night they were thrown into a stinking cattle shed, where they lay awake listening to two of their crew who had pneumonia. One morning the older of the pair was dead.
At the end of one fearful month Moses tried to run away, but was captured in the hills beyond Hemelsdorp and dragged back to the farm.
'Miserable Kaffir bastard!' the farmer screamed. 'Time you learned a lesson.'
The punishment was administered by two of the black overseers, who stripped Moses and bound him about a forty-four-gallon drum. With the rest of the workers forced to watch, he was thrashed with sjamboks till he fainted.
Two days later he was sent back to the fields, but on the first night, when others were asleep, he made another dash for freedom. A black overseer spotted him, but before the man could raise an alarm, Moses knocked him to the ground. When the overseer tried to rise, Moses smashed him in the temple with a large rock, then fled.
For six months he hid in lands along the Limpopo River, then crossed over into Rhodesia, following an ancient route which took him to the Zimbabwe ruins, but he did not tarry there. For two years he worked as kitchen 'boy' in a Bulawayo hotel, and he was at his job one day when a man from Vrymeer found him: 'Your father died last Christmas.'
Moses waited till the end of the month, took his pay and journeyed south, for he was now head of the Nxumalos, and his place was with his people. He slipped in quietly, said nothing to the Van Doorns, who hadn't even noticed his absence, but his family saw the scars on his back. Within a few weeks he was the acknowledged boss boy, and any dream of a more meaningful life vanished.
He said little as he went about his work, but sometimes when he was alone he would look across the veld and swear: 'If I have a son, he will go to college at Fort Hare, and get started right.' This hope compensated for the pain he felt at his own failure.
The Saltwoods made efforts to trace Moses, but when he stayed away for months they supposed that he had merely gone back to his kraal. 'You can never trust a native,' a neighbor said. 'You do everything in the world for a boy like your Moses, and when your back's turned, he steals you blind. How much did he take?'
'I rather think something terrible happened to him,' Laura said. 'He was so willing, so keen to please.'
'No doubt the tsotsis got him.'
'Could be,' Mrs. Saltwood said, but for a long time she continued to wonder about Moses Nxumalo.
In the heady atmosphere of Johannesburg, when the grand strategies of the Broederbond showed their initial signs of succeeding, Piet Krause was thinking one day about the opportunities that would present themselves for a patriotic outburst in 1938, the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Blood River, the culminating event of the Great