The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  “Kettle came out to the ranch to see me,” said Brooke. “Said he was looking for a new adventure—a new kind of mountain to climb, as he put it. So I challenged him to come to South Africa. We may not agree on approach, or even on a preferred outcome, but we do agree we’re here to make a difference.”

  Back in the barn, in the dark, Young Sam did imitations.

  “Don’t nag me, Allan.”

  “Very funny, Lionel.”

  “We are here to make a difference”

  When the barn cooled enough for sleep, Frank lay atop his blankets and worried that Allan Kettle’s push for action might actually produce some. He thought of the biltong hanging on the racks: shrinking small, smoking, drying, becoming indestructible. In Frank’s head, he could make Alma smile for him. He imagined cradling her work-worn hands in his own rough, wounded mitts. He knew her hands would have sympathy for his, for what work and war had done to them.

  “Jimmy, Young Sam, get our horses ready!”

  Brooke was shouting up the ladder, though the loft was still dark. Frank remembered that it was the day Lionel, Allan, and Jim were going to Middelburg. As Young Sam and Frank sat up and groped for their boots, they saw that Jimmy was gone.

  “Where is he?” asked Frank.

  “Don’t know. Goes early, sometimes.”

  Jimmy’s horse was in its stall downstairs, and Frank and Young Sam led it out with Brooke’s stallion and Kettle’s bay. They began to groom the three. The stallion was huffy and posturing, probably because it was excited to be going somewhere after days of idleness. When the breakfast call came, they stood the saddles by the gate and lay the tack on top.

  Jimmy was at his place at table. Frank peeked into the kitchen and Young Sam said in a deep, fake voice, “Alma.”

  Kettle and Brooke entered from the hall, engaged in argument. Both had wet hair, brushed straight back. Kettle was clean-shaven as always.

  “Middelburg is closer” Brooke was saying emphatically. “We would also excite less suspicion there. Jimmy can stay on the edge of town.”

  “It’s a small town, Lionel, in the middle of nowhere. Why would it have recent British newspapers?”

  “Because it has a British camp. Officers live there.”

  “But why does Jimmy have to come at all?”

  “To guide us and protect us. That’s what he does.”

  “Fine, but when we go from Middelburg to Pretoria—after we find out there are no newspapers—why not take the train? Leave our horses in a livery barn. I’m sure journalists don’t ride horses everywhere they go.”

  “Churchill does—or if not a horse, a bicycle.”

  “Winston is a show-off. He’d do handsprings if he thought enough people were watching.”

  “That’s harsh. And why don’t you want Jimmy? I thought you liked Jimmy.”

  “Of course I like Jimmy. I revere him. But the Boers and British treat him like he’s black. I don’t see why we need to put him through it.”

  “Oh, very well, we’ll take the train, and leave Jimmy behind. But it’s not London to Brighton, you know? There’ll be permissions needed. Delays. Army red tape.”

  “All of which you’re very good at.”

  “You don’t really think that for a moment. But I won’t have some Boer looking after my horse. Jim will have to come as far as Middelburg. If we continue on, he can bring the horses back.”

  Before they set out, Brooke wanted to leave instructions for Young Sam and Frank. He could not think of much for them to do.

  “Make sure the horses, mules, and guns are shipshape. No loose shoes. Rifles cleaned and oiled. When Jimmy returns with the horses, if that happens, do what he tells you.”

  As the others rode away, Young Sam stood beside Frank.

  “Shipshape. No loose shoes. Cleaned and oiled.”

  Frank’s and Young Sam’s time in charge was brief. As it was getting dark next evening, Frank saw the white circles on Brooke’s stallion juggling in the dark. Jimmy returned leading Century and Allan’s bay. No recent English newspapers in Middelburg. Kettle and Brooke had gone to Pretoria. They would return to Middelburg in four days.

  In the meat-cutting shed and smokehouse, Alma made faces at Frank that made him laugh. He decided it was progress. Finally, she smiled at him, and the smile he had fashioned for her in his imagination was greatly inferior to the real one.

  At mealtimes, watching Frank rally to his slight success, Young Sam teased him without mercy, gawping open-mouthed and swivelling his head as Alma passed. It made Frank wonder whether Alma’s mother noticed too. When he put his mind to that, he noticed she was chilly toward him, more so than to the others. She went out of her way to serve him last.

  Still with no language between Alma and himself, Frank did not know how to heat up the romance—to get beyond the smiling point. Halfway through the four days of Lionel Brooke’s and Allan Kettle’s absence, it began to seem hopeless. Weren’t his feelings for Alma stupid and overwrought, anyway, when he couldn’t even bid her hello or goodbye? He could not even thank her properly when she brought a bucket of water for them to drink in the cutting room.

  Frank was peeling the last bits of meat from the rib cage of the second ostrich, as Alma was waiting to cut these bits into strips for the smoker. Most of the meat cut when the birds were large cadavers was biltong already. Frank had tried it and found it edible. It had come down to these last few scraps: the little pile that he now pushed with the cleaver across the wood to the tip of Alma’s knife.

  She stared at the meat, then turned toward the door. She was looking at how the afternoon sun was pouring a dusty sash over the half-door. When Isaiah stuck his head into that light to ask something, Alma growled and shooed him away. Isaiah held up his pale palms and backed away, but before disappearing, he winked at Frank. Mrs. Kleff, meanwhile, was in the garden with Tia and Little Alma. Frank could hear her urging them up the rows.

  They stood on opposite sides of the work table they had shared for days, its surface beaded with pale pink flesh and stained where the cleaver had chopped pink into the surface. Franks hand on his cleaver and Alma’s on her knife were the same colour as the board. Frank saw the instant that Alma’s fingers uncurled from her knife’s black handle. He released his cleaver, and it toppled off its blade.

  Frank swept his eyes up Alma’s bloody dress to her face. She was looking at him, at his face. It should have been awkward to be looked at so, but Frank found it wasn’t. Her eyes were moving around his face and his hair, and he did the same: studied her almost-white eyebrows and noted that they looked as if they’d been groomed with a tiny comb; a sun-coaxed freckle that altered the surface of her nose; the shelves of her cheeks on which the work sweat gathered. Frank could not remember ever having looked at someone this long from this close.

  Alma reached over and touched his sleeve above the elbow, tugged a bit on the rolled cloth. She turned and walked the few feet into the flecked sunbeam. She meant for him to follow and he did.

  The sun had made her eyes light up gold. She ran them across his chest and out to the points of his shoulders, then down past the rolled sleeve to the cleaver arm where the veins rode on the outside of the muscle. He looked at the skin just above the square neck of her dress, at the pulse beating in the hollow of her neck. She moved her eyes down his belly to his crotch and studied the fullness there: He looked at her breasts, each one plump, then rode his eyes down the centre of her body. Her hands went behind her and she pulled the bulky pleats tight against herself, her slim form emerging.

  Then a shrill cry came from Mrs. Kleff, closer than before. The sound scared them back to the table. In quick flashes, Alma cut the final bit of ostrich meat and took it to the smoker.

  Late that night, in his nest of hay and blanket, Frank held nothing back. In his imagination, he took Alma’s dress off and made love to her. She enjoyed it very much.

  Next morning, in the dusty pre-dawn light, Jim Whitford was yelling up the barn ladder for him a
nd Young Sam to come.

  When the two pushed past the horses, stuffing their shirttails, they found Whitford with his rifle levelled at another man. It was a slim, fair-skinned Boer, somewhere around Frank’s age. A bandolier crossed his chest. His beard was white-blond and thin. Blue-eyed, innocent looking—even at the wrong end of a rifle, he was smiling and looked calm.

  “He was on the hill last night,” said Jim. “Says he’s their family.”

  As if on cue, the women ran out of the house. Mrs. Kleff was in the lead with Alma behind her. Mrs. Kleff hugged the young man tightly, crying a little. Then, as Alma hugged the visitor, Mrs. Kleff thrust herself at Jim Whitford. She spoke slowly and harshly, her words spaced, as if that would make Jimmy understand Boer.

  Next, the women and the newcomer had a lengthy talk among themselves. The Canadians were not used to hearing so much out of the women, whose words clambered on top of each other. The Boer man drank it in, only interrupting once in a while to ask a question. Then he turned to Jim, Young Sam, and Frank, and spoke to them in good English.

  “My aunt and cousin are telling me about you. They say you’re English, but I wouldn’t have thought you were.”

  “No questions,” Jim Whitford said.

  “As you like,” said the Boer.

  “How come you speak such good English?” Frank asked.

  “My family is part English. The grandfather on my father’s side. I’m related to the Kleffs through my mother. My name is Denny Straytor.” He held out his hand to shake, and Frank was reaching for it when the barrel of Jim’s rifle pressed Straytor’s arm down. It seemed unnecessarily rude.

  “But you’re in a commando?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t deny it. But I still visit my relations.”

  At this point, Mrs. Kleff told them, through her nephew, that she wanted to take him inside and feed him. Jimmy insisted that Straytor stay outside on the veranda. Mrs. Kleff could feed him there. This dictation of the terms of her hospitality—and from a source not even white—inflamed Mrs. Kleff to rosy heat. She grabbed her dress by the sides and marched for the house. When she arrived on the veranda and found that Alma was not with her, she hurried back, grabbed her daughter’s elbow, and towed her inside.

  Jimmy directed Straytor to the veranda and pointed to a chair made of woven willow. Then Jim told Young Sam where the Boer’s horse was tied on the opposite side of the kopje. He should bring it in, unsaddle it, and tie it in the corral. Whitford sat on the veranda’s edge, with his rifle barrel across his thigh so it pointed up at the young Boer’s midsection.

  Frank was already taken with Denny Straytor. The fellow seemed neither false nor servile. What came off him was an infectious calm that soothed Frank in a way he needed. Because he liked Straytor, Frank was annoyed with Jimmy Whitford for taking such a hard line. Frank had ended his own war by deserting. Allan Kettle was leaning in a pro-Boer direction. Even Brooke was not necessarily in favour of killing low-ranked Boers, having decided to end the conflict by killing De Wet. Given all that, could Straytor even be described as an enemy?

  Frank told Jimmy he wanted a private talk. Though Jimmy did not like the request, he handed his rifle to Young Sam when he returned from the horse corral. Jim followed Frank into the veldt a few yards and stopped.

  Frank explained his thoughts on Straytor. As the words came out of his mouth, he understood his own stratagem. Just like the ridgling tried to make a friend of Young Sam’s gelding, in order to curry favour with Whitford’s mare, Frank was making a friend of Denny Straytor to be his advocate with Mrs. Kleff.

  Jimmy folded his arms and stood as widely based as his short, bowed legs allowed. His body was frowning as much as his face was. He spat a stream of tobacco juice in the grass, then dug in his pocket and held a fist out to Frank. He rolled it over and opened it, revealing six rifle shells.

  Frank did not understand. “I saw his ammunition belt,” he said. “I know he’s a soldier.”

  Jimmy shook the hand so the bullets jangled. “Dumdums,” he said.

  Frank looked more closely. He wasn’t sure how you told a dumdum from a normal bullet. A dumdum was a kind of bullet that exploded inside you rather than sailing through, he knew that much—and that their use was illegal in the war. Jeff had said the bullets they dug out of Spence and Ratcliffe were dumdums.

  Seeing the stupid look on Frank’s face, Whitford set his finger on each bullet’s point. Frank saw it then: how they were filed off so the lead core showed. That was what made them split apart when they hit.

  “They were in his pocket,” Jimmy said. He nodded at the kopje. “He was up there with field glasses all night.”

  Jim meant that Denny was a spy and intended to harm them, but Frank held back from these conclusions. He would have argued more but Jimmy lost interest, walked back, and took the rifle from Young Sam.

  In a few more minutes, Jimmy told Frank and Young Sam to go out and hunt for an antelope and to keep their eyes peeled in case Straytor had friends. Frank said it would be better if Jim and Young Sam went, as Jimmy was more likely to find the antelope, and see the Boers if they were there. Jimmy didn’t like the suggestion, but saw the truth in it. Kettle and Brooke would arrive tomorrow, and Lionel would want fresh meat. If there was only ostrich biltong, he would complain.

  “I’ll hold the gun on him,” said Frank. “See what I can get out of him.”

  “See he don’t get more out of you.”

  After Young Sam and Jim had left, riding west, Frank and Denny stayed on the veranda. It was still early in the day and the spot was in the shade. Frank sat on its edge like Jimmy had and let Denny have the willow chair. He had the rifle across his lap but did not point it.

  They launched into conversation about the war, and Frank could detect no secrecy or trickery in what Denny was saying. It was just a river of amusing talk.

  “You know the pastries Auntie’s been making for you? One kind iced, one not? They’re called Smutsies and Hertzoggies. The women invented them to honour two of our Boer generals, the local ones.”

  When Frank thought about grim-faced Mrs. Kleff baking and serving them this piece of satire every day, he laughed. He remembered how each of them thanked her for the kind treat.

  Alma came out and joined them. Mrs. Kleff stayed inside, except to serve them a lunch of sandwiches and a big jug of cool well-water.

  “What do Boers think of Canadians?” Frank asked.

  “We barely know you exist,” said Denny cheerfully. “Your uniforms are so much like British ones. Only the hats make you different. A lot of Boers didn’t know about the Canadians, or the Australians and New Zealanders, until Pretoria fell. Even then, we had no idea why you would come so far to fight us.”

  “How about you?” Frank asked.

  “What? You mean, do I understand why you fight us? No, I don’t. Turn it around. Would the Boers cross the ocean to fight Canada?”

  “Some say we’re here to protect the blacks.”

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh,” said Straytor, laughing. “Your side sends blacks out with dispatches if it’s too dangerous to send your own. They dig your trenches same as they dig ours.”

  “We don’t whip them.”

  “Don’t you? If some Boer hands-upper does the whipping for you, is that better? When your food runs short, you’re going to tell me it’s not the blacks who go hungry?”

  Frank thought of Dakomi, gut shot and bleeding to death while the medic plucked slivers out of the major’s side. He did not argue.

  “Why are you here?” Denny asked Frank, and Frank remembered just in time Jimmy’s warning about not giving out more than he got.

  “To fight. That’s all.”

  “What’s your unit?”

  “Can’t say.”

  When Frank fell silent, Alma and Denny filled the gap with a long yap in Boer. Frank saw how readily and excitedly Alma talked to her cousin and felt jealous. Their own familiarity was thin as paper by comparison.

  “A
ctually, I can tell you your battalion,” said Denny, when he decided to speak in English again. “Canadian Mounted Rifle.”

  Frank looked at him in amazement and Denny made a face. “I won’t tell you my job either, but recognizing enemy insignia is part of it. Alma tells me you are nice to her, and that your boss here pays them for food and work. That’s unusual, no?”

  Frank balked again, then decided he could tell Denny Straytor anything Lionel Brooke would tell him if he were present. He said that the two leaders were journalists, and the other two were horse wranglers. No one but Frank was a soldier.

  “Pro-Boer or anti-Boer?”

  “Pro-Boer horse wranglers?”

  Denny smiled at Franks joke. “The journalists.”

  “Pro-Boer.”

  “Are you pro-Boer?”

  Frank said no. He told him his official lie. A knock on the head during a battle had left him confused. Made him get lost. He would return to his unit when he found them. He added (because it made it seem more true) that he had been well enough to go for a while, but had been dogging it on account of the good food.

  “And the pretty daughter?”

  Then Mrs. Kleff came out with dessert. A plate of Hertzoggies. Frank and Denny burst out laughing and she looked hurt. That changed the mood again, and while they ate the pastries and after, they had a more casual conversation that included Alma, via translation by Denny. Frank realized it was the first conversation he’d had with his girlfriend, and he learned several things. He found out that a British unit had threatened to burn the Kleff farm a week before Brooke arrived. It stayed whole because a scout had come and asked for help chasing a Boer patrol.

  “What did the scout look like?” Frank asked, and when Denny translated that, Alma made a face and shrugged. It was a dumb question but Frank was entertaining the idea that it might have been Jeff: that Jeff had seen Frank’s girlfriend before Frank had.

  Frank learned that Alma knew a few words of English, having studied that language from a book in the years before the war. She had not tried them out on Frank because she was embarrassed about her accent. Also, if her mother heard her, she would be angry about Alma cozying up to the enemy.