LITMIR.BIZ

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But there was Chris Welman’s son, Tobie …

      It was almost as though Jurie Steyn had challenged Gysbert van Tonder to mention the name of Chris Welman’s son. For then there would, indeed, have been trouble. In any case, Gysbert van Tonder sat silent for a few moments. And you could see that it was on the tip of his tongue to talk about Chris Welman’s son, Tobie. And to say that Chris Welman might be a good churchgoer, and all that. But that Chris Welman’s son, Tobie, was even more regular. Singing a lot of hymns and psalms every Sunday without fail, for almost three years, in the chapel of the reform school.

      From his silence, it was clear that that was something Gysbert van Tonder dared not mention. So Gysbert van Tonder contented himself with explaining that whatever Jurie Steyn was hinting at, about the time the stationmaster refused to have those oxen trucked unless he knew who the owner was, well – Gysbert van Tonder said – a lot of people had already had occasion to complain about how officious that stationmaster was.

      “What about the time our Volksraad member’s brother-in-law himself went down to the station and spoke to the stationmaster very firmly?” Gysbert van Tonder went on. “And he asked the stationmaster if he thought that every farmer in the Groot Marico was a cattle thief. He asked him that straight out, because he had brought witnesses with him. And the stationmaster said, no, but he knew that every Marico farmer was a cattle farmer, and he knew that any cattle farmer could make a mistake.”

      We all said, then, that that was quite a different thing. And we said that if you weren’t there to see to it yourself, and you left it to a Bechuana herd-boy to go and have a lot of cattle railed to Johannesburg, why, mistakes were almost sure to happen, we said. Thereupon At Naudé started telling us about a mistake that one of his Bechuana herd-boys had made on a certain occasion, as a result of which six of Koos Nienaber’s best trek-oxen got railed to Johannesburg along with some scrub animals that At Naudé was sending to the market.

      “That was the time Koos Nienaber went to Johannesburg to have his old Mauser mended,” At Naudé explained. “And it just happened that because he didn’t know where to get off, Koos Nienaber was shunted onto a siding, somewhere, past Johannesburg station. And what should take place but that Koos Nienaber alighted from his second-class compartment just at the same time that his six trek-oxen should be walking out of a truck on the other side of the line. That caused quite a lot of trouble, of course. And before he got his six trek-oxen back, Koos Nie-naber had to explain to a magistrate what he meant by loading all the five chambers of his Mauser on a railway platform, even though the bolt action and foresight of the Mauser were in need of repair. I believe the magistrate said that there were quite enough brawls and ugly scenes that had to do with gun-play taking place in Johannesburg every day, without a farmer having to come all the way from the Marico with a rusty Mauser to add to all that unpleasantness. Naturally, I gave my Bechuana herd-boy a good straight talking-to about it afterwards, for being so ignorant.”

      At Naudé paused, as though inviting one of us to say something. But we had none of us any comment to make. For we had long ago heard Koos Nienaber’s side of the story. And from what he had told us, it would appear that all the fault did not lie with At Naudé’s herd-boy. At Naudé seemed to fit a little into the story, himself.

      “Anyway,” At Naudé added – smiling in a twisted sort of way – “what Koos Nienaber was most sore about, in court, was that that Johannesburg magistrate spoke of his Mauser as a rusty old fowling-piece.”

      Koos Nienaber didn’t object to the fowling-piece part of it, so much, At Naudé said. Because he wasn’t quite sure what a fowling-piece was. But it took him a long time to get over the idea of the magistrate saying that his Mauser was rusty.

      There was an uncomfortable silence, once again. It was broken by young Johnny Coen. Often, in the past, when there had been some misunderstanding in Jurie Steyn’s post office, Johnny Coen had said something to smooth matters over.

      “Maybe it’s like what it says in the Good Book,” Johnny Coen remarked. “Perhaps it’s to do with Mammon. Perhaps if we sought the Kingdom of Heaven more, then we wouldn’t have such thoughtless things happening. Like a farmer sending some of his own neighbour’s cattle to the market by mistake. It’s a mistake that happens with every truck-load, almost. I was working at Ottoshoop siding, and I know. It used to give the stationmaster there grey hairs. Loading a lot of cattle into a truck and then not knowing how many would have to be unloaded again before the engine came to fetch that truck. And all the time it was through some mistake, of course. A mistake on the part of an ignorant Bechuana herd-boy.”

      It was then that some of us remembered the mistakes that the herdboy of Deacon Kirstein had made, long ago, along those same lines. We felt not a little pained at having to mention those mistakes, considering the high regard in which we held Deacon Kirstein, who was Jurie Steyn’s wife’s cousin. We only made mention of it because of the circumstance that that mistake on the part of the deacon’s herd-boy had gone on over a period of years, before it was detected. And maybe the mistake would never have been found out, either, if it wasn’t that, along with a truck full of Deacon Kirstein’s Large White pigs, there was also loaded a span of mules belonging to a near neighbour of Deacon Kirstein’s.

      And because he was already a deacon, we all felt very sorry for Deacon Kirstein, to think that his herd-boy should be so ignorant. And we winked at each other a good deal, too, in those days, one Marico farmer winking at another. And we said that it was just too bad that Deacon Kirstein should have so uneducated a herd-boy, who couldn’t tell the difference between a Large White and a mule. And we would wink a lot more.

      That was the line that the conversation suddenly took, in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. We were just recalling the old days, we said to each other.

      And we were enjoying this talk about the past. And we could see that Jurie Steyn was enjoying it also. And then Johnny Coen tried to spoil everything. Johnny Coen, without anybody asking him, began to talk about the Sermon on the Mount. And let any of us that was without sin, Johnny Coen added, cast the first stone.

      Jurie Steyn summed it all up.

      “Maybe a lot of sense gets talked here in my post office,” Jurie Steyn said, “but a lot of –––, also.”

      Jurie Steyn said that word softly, because he didn’t want his wife to hear.

      Birth Certificate

      It was when At Naudé told us what he had read in the newspaper about a man who had thought all his life that he was white, and had then discovered that he was coloured, that the story of Flippus Biljon was called to mind. I mean, we all knew the story of Flippus Biljon. But because it was still early afternoon we did not immediately make mention of Flippus. Instead, we discussed, at considerable length, other instances that were within our knowledge of people who had grown up as one sort of person and had discovered in later life that they were in actual fact quite a different sort of person.

      Many of these stories that we recalled in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer as the shadows of the thorn-trees lengthened were based only on hearsay. It was the kind of story that you had heard, as a child, at your grandmother’s knee. But your grandmother would never admit, of course, that she had heard that story at her grandmother’s knee. Oh, no. She could remember very clearly how it all happened, just like it was yesterday. And she could tell you the name of the farm. And the name of the landdrost who was summoned to take note of the extraordinary occurrence, when it had to do with a more unusual sort of changeling, that is. And she would recall the solemn manner in which the landdrost took off his hat when he said that there were many things that were beyond human understanding.

      Similarly now, in the voorkamer, when we recalled stories of white children that had been carried off by a Bushman or a baboon or a werewolf, even, and had been brought up in the wilds and without any proper religious instruction, then we also did not think it necessary to explain where we had first heard those stories. We spoke as though we had been actually present at some stage of the affair – more usually at the last scene, where the child, now grown to manhood and needing trousers and a pair of braces and a hat, gets restored to his parents and the magistrate after studying the birth certificate says

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