Andre arrived at the church only just in time for the 10 a.m. Sunday service.
Thankfully, he thought, the flock had already filed in and were seated. It was the first time in living memory that he was there alone without the family he was so proud of—his beautiful wife and breath-taking daughter.
That the congregation knew JJ was in town and hadn’t attended last week and again today was more embarrassment than he could bear. But now his wife and daughter had refused too.
Sonja had not refused outright but her mother had done so on her behalf, insisting that she needed the girl there to take care of her, sick as she had suddenly become. Lately, Sonja had been seeking excuses not to attend but even laying down the law this morning to her had not won her submission.
Getting that girl to submit to many things these days was harder and harder, he pondered. In a time not long ago, a good tanning on her backside would do it, he considered. Though, he had to concede that at seventeen she was a little old for that.
Besides, Johanna forbade it. “It’s not the done thing anymore, Andre.”
Just another blerry problem the rooineks and their communist government have forced on us. These frustrations were without end.
The last of the worshippers were funnelling into the building as he approached. Mercifully they only had a chance to nod greetings and no time to quiz him as to why he was attending all alone, but the question in their eyes was a nagging accusation. The questions were there and would come when tea was served.
When the service began, he heard little of it but a drone, his head so full of voices as it was. Full of arguments with his wife, stubborn as she was; with his son, rebellious as he was; and with his daughter, impressionable as she was.
He fought each of them a dozen times and then another dozen—he heard every argument they put to him and combated them.
Amid his internal dialogue, he’d see one or another of the parishioners chance a glimpse in his direction, trying to make it look as if they were casually scanning for friends. But he was a policeman with an eye for motive, and they’d instantly truncate their casual scan as soon as they saw him eyeing them back.
Throughout the service, his humiliation continued to grow as whispers went all around the flock behind hands; the gossip telephone was in perfect working order this morning.
As Diaken, he’d normally take his seat near the front and at the right hand of his Dominee. But with his police uniform donned this morning, he was on duty and this gave him the excuse he desperately needed to sit at the back and beat a hasty retreat just before adjournment.
His gaze ran over the crowd, out of habit doing a roll call of familiar heads and profiles.
Many of the pews stood open these days, more open spaces than people. Sitting at the back of the church today as he hadn’t done in years, this truth was plain to see—gaping holes of empty benches between the small family and social groups that sat together in clumps.
There was a time he recalled when one had to be inside and seated early to ensure a seat, when the throng stood all out the door and hymns raised the roof. Today, the choir was more a collection of individual voices than its old solid chorus of overwhelming and enveloping beauty.
And, he admitted to himself sourly, that kind of full house was even before they’d let just anyone in. Blacks and coloureds had their own churches back then, and the laws of that time aside, non-whites would never have dared to come interfere with the time-honoured patriotic mood of the whites celebrating their God-given land as they now did.
But now, even though this was the major church in town, attendance was so pitiful that darker skins threatened to outnumber pale ones.
What to do about this dreadful situation?
This new voice now joined the other arguments in his head, also conspiring to keep his mind out of what the Dominee was roaring about, his accusing finger jabbing down from the high pulpit here and there into the congregation at anyone known to be involved in nefarious deeds.
Then he felt a little relief and hope for a better future as he picked out Neels Vermaak’s block-cut hairstyle in the second from front row, his father’s head alongside his son’s, the pair cutting an identical silhouette. Andre felt the pang of this morning’s loss all over again.
A good boy, Andre contemplated, to thwart the assortment of miseries of his morning. Much better to send him on the American holiday and let this nonsense with that prrrrretty boy blow over.
He heard the Dominee talking about “die Hemel”, the heavens, and the new foe, the SKA, trying to pry the community apart. Talking about the help that God would soon send to them from America, the Answers in Genesis organization; his new soldier in arms, Ken Ham; the Discovery Institute, and delegation from the Templeton Foundation. Just the need-to-know information that he’d said at last night’s meeting he would share with the community.
Just as Andre finally disciplined his concentration to the important task of participating in the prayer, the heavy grumble of the Ferrari went slowly past outside and his mind chased it down the road like a dog off its leash.
With the sound’s departure, his heart sank for the son he had banished, and it boiled with anger at the boy’s stupidity in forcing his hand.
He tried to bring his thoughts back inside to help raise the rafters with the beautiful hymn being sung, but his mind would not obey. It was a bloodhound out on the trail trying to sniff where that car had come from and where it was heading. Passing the church was not the route back to Cape Town and his son had clearly not departed directly for Cape Town as he should have done an hour earlier.
JJ had been elsewhere… making trouble; of that Andre was certain.
Chapter 22
JJ left the desperate embrace of his mother and sister locked together in the old family driveway. He didn’t looked back as he let the engine burble away at an idle down the street without allowing it its head.
In the cockpit, the phone call he’d dialed rang through the car speakers and Marsha answered.
“Could I stop by? It’s quite urgent,” he said.
The good news from Marsha was that Dara was discharged and Al and her would be picking him up on their way home after some shopping in the town.
“We could have a quick coffee if you suggest somewhere,” she offered.
They met at their only option—where he’d had dinner with his sister the night before—Meerkat Restaurant.
Meerkat was surprisingly stylish as small-town establishments go. Its décor and menu anticipated the expected growth of a more discerning market of inbound professionals.
JJ arrived a few minutes early and chatted mild pleasantries with the proprietor until they arrived.
Over coffee, he briefly recounted to them the information he’d gleaned from his secret recording the night before.
“Jesus… They’re getting that lot involved now? We should probably have seen this coming,” Al said, referring to the organizations that were planning a delegation out to discuss a resistance movement with their church counterparts. “They picketed some of my book and speaking engagements last month, with their ‘Burn in Hell’ placards. I do have to tell you, there’s just no reasoning with them.”
“It’s the same old story,” JJ had agreed. “If you could reason with fanatics, there would be no fanatics.”
“Question is, what to do?” Marsha posed.
“I don’t think there’s much to do until they make the first move. I get a sense that your locals don’t grasp the magnitude, that it runs to billions of dollars and international influence,” Al suggested. “But the Americans will, and they’ll throw plenty of cash at a fight too.”
“I woke early and skimmed ahead in my video recording, sampling; and something is up with a Heritage Claim they’re planning,” JJ confided. “But I haven’t had a chance to really detail it. I’ll do that in Cape Town. I’ve got to get back as things there are unravelling… Unfortunately, things here unravelled completely this morning with my
family too.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Marsha said.
JJ briefly outlined it before Marsha asked, “Heritage Claim?”
“They’ve got some notion the Bushmen can get a bid in and tie this all up in red tape.”
“Sounds ominous,” Al said.
“Could be…”
After the meeting, JJ wanted one last chat with somebody. He could have avoided the road past the church but burned to see if the police van was outside, which meant Pa was inside and wouldn’t accidently discover his next port of call.
His car slid down the road, its thoroughbred engine grumbling moodily to itself at the indignity of walking when it could run.
The van was there, but Ma’s car was not. If she’d gone to church on a day Pa had duty, they’d have come separately; of that he was certain.
The issue gnawed at him and several times he resisted the urge to turn back for home to check in on her. He did not want to violate his father’s wishes, but he also did not want to re-inflame her agonies—or his own.
He knew that below the exterior of her gentle spirit lay a rod of iron and that she would right herself and immerse quickly into the mundane of being a policeman’s wife in a small town full of minor intrigues of major importance.
He’d call Sonja later and catch up on news from the home front.
When the asphalt ended, the gravel began, and JJ nursed the moody vehicle over its well-graded surface at a crawl. Oom Willem Bauer sure ran a tight operation, JJ marvelled—his roads always the best in the district, his storage sheds, livestock pens and staff quarters betraying his second generation German roots, down from Namibia.
On the fork leading to the labourers’ housing, the road suddenly degraded. The roots of the Australian blue gums made the surface severely uneven, so JJ halted in favour of caution.
Etiquette held that he should first take the main route to the farmhouse before visiting the farm laborers, to pay homage and at least hint at what business took him to see staff. But, it being church time, the entire Bauer family would be absent till noon or beyond, and he reckoned if ever quizzed he could claim he’d undertaken the ritual but nobody was home to witness it.
He parked away from the shade of the trees, preferring the superheating of the sun to bird droppings that might corrode his precious darling’s paintwork. It would be hours before he could wash it clean.
The walk from the car was a pleasant three hundred meters in the shade of the trees, and a small delegation who had heard the unaccustomed rumble of the performance engine edging toward them had already gathered, their ears and instincts for changes in their environment tuned at uncanny levels of sensitivity. Some of the kids came in a racing gaggle heading directly toward him, two of them steering old bald car tires with planks of wood—the universal toy of the farmlands.
“Hello Baas JJ!” they exclaimed in excited unison when they recognized him, long before his dulled city eyes could pick them out as recognizable individuals.
“Hello kinders,” he replied, and he could see that as the road curved, their attentions were already past him and on his car in the distance behind him. This strange beast of a vehicle needed their expert attentions and they barely checked stride as they flew past and onward.
“Kyk, maar moenie aan die kar vat nie... hou daai tire ver van die kar af!”
Looking, but not touching was never going to happen and JJ didn’t mind, but he was genuinely concerned about the tire scraping the car.
“Jaaaaa baas!” they sang in unison over their shoulders as they tore off bare-footed, galloping down the thorn-laden track.
Most of the girls not interested in the car had whirled early and were running with hitched-up dresses howling like town-criers back in the direction they’d come from, heralding to their elders, “Dis Baas JJ! Baas JJ.”
JJ arrived to an almost celebrity enthusiasm from the small group. Although it was still pre-noon, several of the adults were already well inebriated, stumbling and tottering about, trying to fix a focus on JJ so that they could touch him; the sober ones scolding them away.
They all liked JJ. He’d grown up between the farms and most of the older generation knew him very well from when he was a rough and tough farm boy with a good heart. Even then, he’d had the uncompromising Calvinist ethos on the sports field and as a taskmaster, when their Baas Bauer had hired him to help oversee lambing season.
Oom Karel lay where he’d always be found if he had time off, under his favourite tree, with an ancient battered FM radio producing tinny treble-rich renditions of tunes popular six and more decades earlier.
On seeing JJ, he made to get up.
“Sit, sit maar Oom.” JJ gestured for him to stay put.
The old man gave him a haasbek grin—a single last tooth visible—his face disappearing into folds of delight. “Jaaaa my boy,” he said in Afrikaans. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
The reference to waiting caught JJ a little by surprise. “It’s kind of you to say so, Oom.”
JJ made to sit down cross-legged in the dirt but Karel forestalled him and yelled for someone to bring a blanket. It was hurriedly folded for comfort and laid down with humble apologies for its threadbare state. JJ knew it would be the best in the house.
Some of the youngsters milled about close by trying to remain inconspicuous yet within earshot to soak up whatever portentous news might promote their standing in the community if they heard it first-hand from this visiting luminary.
There was some small talk about the ongoing drought and distressed state of the farm and its livestock. Then JJ smoothly moved into the matter he’d come for—the snippets he’d gleaned from the video recording of the secret meeting in his father’s kitchen the night before.
“Ja, my boy. I know about this thing coming to us.” The Oom was just cagey enough for JJ to pick up that there was more afoot than what he’d get in one meeting. “My boy, my grandson Dawie, he tells me what they tell him at his school.”
Dawie? JJ knew that name, and then it hit him—the boy’s name had come up in discussions with both Dara on that first day in Loxton, and then through Marsha subsequently. By all accounts he was a bright boy. This connection was quite fortuitous.
“Is Dawie about?” he asked the Oom, “I’d like very much to meet him.”
Karel sent a runner to go fetch the boy who was off playing with a slingshot. Such an important errand caused some squabble among the boys, each wanting the honour. Two took off racing one another out into the heat.
“I’m glad the kids are learning about this new development,” JJ was saying. “It is going to bring a lot of good here.”
Karel frowned, weighing this sudden turn of events.
“These ears are going to bring good?” he asked of JJ in a testing manner.
“Yes,” JJ volunteered. “More work, more money to the town can only be good, no?”
The Oom began to worry at his chin with his nails, thinking, scheming what this meant.
“En Baas,” he inclined his head, “the Baas thinks it is not listening for the Devil?”
JJ chuckled. They’ve gotten to him, he thought. “No, my Oom. I’m certain the Devil has nothing to do with this. But I heard some stories, Oom, that the Dominee came to talk to you.”
“Ja,” the Oom responded simply—his eyes now betraying no direction of his thoughts. “Didn’t the Dominee send you?” he asked tentatively.
JJ was confused by the question and frowned. Karel saw his genuine puzzlement.
“Baasie… you are a law man now, in the big city?”
“Yes, Oom—I’m a lawyer.”
“And did the Dominee not send you then?” The old head was cocked to the side, shrewd suspicion in his eye.
“No, my Oom, why would the Dominee send me?”
“Because, excuse me Baas, but the Dominee said that lawyers will come—you know, to help with our claim.”
It all began falling into place. The old man thought he was here at the Domin
ee’s behest to fight the case for the Heritage Claim.
“Ah… yes, Oom—now I understand. No… no-no. The Dominee and your Baas Bauer don’t know I’m here, and I don’t want them to know I’m here,” he said, pointedly looking at the children close by who were eyeing him and straining to hear.
Karel tracked his gaze and understood.
With colourful, expletive-laced language and threats, Oom Karel promulgated JJ’s request into law to be disseminated to all others by everyone in earshot.
Enthusiastic nods accrued, and the whites of eyes showed with earnestness that the insistence was agreed to.
“Ja Baas,” said the old man, his eyes twinkling with conspiratorial cunning. He and his people loved a good intrigue; in the absence of television, it was their living soap opera. “Nobody will talk, I’ll see to that,” he assured JJ.
“Good.” JJ knew Karel wielded power beyond his frail appearance. He was a living representative not just of the surviving elders, but the departed ones too and nobody would cross that line. The wrath they’d face went several steps past the mere judicial law of the courts.
“Another lawyer will come,” JJ predicted, “…and I’m sure he’ll come with the Dominee and papers. They will tell you how much good putting your name to those papers can bring to all, but you must say that you need to think on it—don’t let them have your mark immediately.”
“Ja Baasie.” It was what Karel had decided to do anyway.
“And you have Dawie ask his friend—the new boy, Dara—to arrange a copy for me. I’ll arrange for Dara and his mother to get them to me.” He paused a moment, then continued, not leaving anything to chance. “Nobody…. absolutely nobody must know what we’ve talked about,” he emphasized.
“That is the right idea, Baas,” Karel agreed, the cogs spinning behind his canny old eyes. And then he shouted out, “Where is that boy? Did those other boys fall asleep looking for Dawie? Somebody go find them!”
Another small delegation ran off into the sun and the bushveld.
“And I’ll be back soon to come help,” JJ assured. “I’ll bring something nice from the city.” He winked at the old man. “Now, when I leave here, Oom, send one of the boys with me, a trustworthy boy—I have something in the car for you.”
A Trojan Affair Page 18
