by Guy Butler
The young Doctor got out of his car, and looked at the concertina gate with contempt, and sneered in a superior way at its primitive appearance, and at the entire backveld culture of which it was a product. It took him a little time to discover which was the end that opened. He thought the catch clever in a funny way: it consisted of a short piece of wire attached to a two-foot pole, threaded through the top of the fence and doubled back to the gatepost, and held there by a loop of wire. He chuckled to himself. ‘It’s the sort of thing Heath Robinson might dream up.’
He woke up with a pigeon egg bump on his forehead, enveloped in barbed wire like a vienna sausage in a role of pastry. The more he struggled, the less freedom he had – and the more punctures in his skin. Punctures? Sorry. To puncture the skin is a misuse of language. ‘Lesion’ is the proper word. To inflict even a minor lesion is taken seriously by the courts.
His temper was not improved by the behaviour of a flock of his patient’s bokkapaters, who, seizing this opportunity to change farms, stampeded past his recumbent from, covering him in dust.
On a rise about half a mile away, enjoying a pipe on his stoep, Horrelpoot’s neighbour, Gideon Galblaas Grobbelaar, had witnessed the Doctors’s discomfiture with equanimity, if not positive pleasure. Not that he disliked the Doctor. He simply did not wish his neighbour a speedy recovery. In fact, from Gideon’s point of view, the behaviour of the fence in trapping the Doctor could be seen as an act of Providence; and the trespass of the goats a blessing in disguise. Was it not a heavensent excuse for him to get on to the party line, to tell the hypochondriac old miser to fetch his animals at once, or he’d impound the lot? Life may be a vale of sorrows, but there are moments of unexpected pleasure.
Gideon’s message on the party line jerked old Horrelpoot out of his bed like a puppet on a string. What damned stray Hottentot had opened the gate? He’d flay the hide off him. But the first thing was to get the goats off his skin-flint neighbour’s veld. From his stoep he could see them in the camp, already some distance from the gate, and moving steadily west. There was no time to get into his working clothes. He simply slipped on his veldskoens and took a short cut across his veld. For a sick man, he got over the fence with remarkable ease, and pursued the goats over the ridge and out of sight.
‘There’s nothing like anger for working a temporary cure of deepseated melancholia’, said Gideon Galblaas aloud to himself, watching through his binoculars. And he went inside to call his wife, to share his enjoyment.
Within ten minutes, Horrelpoot reappeared, driving his truant goats towards the concertina gateway.
Gideon Galblaas thought how beautifully Biblical he looked in his long white nightshirt. Handing his binoculars to his wife, who had joined him on the stoep with a tray of rusks and coffee, he said as much: ‘Take a look at Abraham’, he said. They hadn’t been so happy in years.
In the meantime, however, the Doctor had unrolled himself from the concertina, for which he had acquired such a blend of hatred and respect that he made no attempt whatever to close it. He simply got into his car and drove up to his patient’s house, where he rang and knocked, with no response. He was distinctly angry at the snags in his suit, the holes in his skin. He was about to leave when he thought of his Hippocratic oath. This is a noble oath to think of in times of crisis, and made him feel good and generous inside.
‘Maybe the old chap has died, or had a fit, or something.’
So he went round to the kitchen, but there was no one there. He did not have to inspect the kleinhuisie, because the door was open. So he went inside the house, calling ‘Mr Harmse, Mr Harmse’.
No response.
He then found the bedroom, with the bedclothes turned back, still warm to his hand. One thing was clear: his patient was not dying, and he had been called out for nothing, nothing at all. The sooner he got shot of this patient the better.
Having seen to his goats and counted them, Horrelpoot returned to his homestead. He was naturally surprised to see the Doctor’s car, but no Doctor in sight.
So that was it! The Doctor was the culprit who’d left the gate open! But why hadn’t he seen the car before? Deeply puzzled and very annoyed he crossed the yard towards his house.
When his own front door opened and the Doctor emerged, there was a rare surprise on both sides: a double double-take.
What ensued between them has never been established. That, after all, was what the case was all about. Two advocates and their attorneys couldn’t sort the sequence out. Not for R20 000, even though their costs were taxed on the higher scale. It went something like this, without the swear words.
Horrelpoot: Are you the Doctor?
Doctor: Are you supposed to be bed-ridden?
Horrelpoot: What sort of a Doctor are you, to leave my gate open?
Doctor: Do you call that a gate?
Horrelpoot: Where were you educated, man? In the gops?
Doctor: I have no time to waste on bogus backveld patients. Good afternoon!
Horrelpoot: Off my farm, off! And if you send me a bill, I’ll have you up for housebreaking.
Doctor: And I’ll have you up for criminal neglect resulting in bodily injury.
Horrelpoot: Injury? What injury?
Doctor: Lesions all over me, caused by your apology for a gate.
Horrelpoot pretended to find this phrase funny. He repeated it laughing: ‘Apology for a gate!’, then turned his back on the Doctor, went through his front door, banged it, and poured himself a treble brandy.
The Doctor drove up to the gate, got out of his car, and with great circumspection, undid the catch, dragged the loose portion of fence aside, and drove through. He did not stop the car, get out or even try to close the gate. He drove off, his engine roaring, sending up a small thundercloud of dust .
Horrelpoot was just beginning to feel the relaxing effects of the treble brandy, when the party line rang. It was Galblaas. Galblaas was not at all polite. Horrelpoot’s goats were in his veld again, and he was sending his ‘boys’ to go and round them up …
Apart from the Doctor and Horrelpoot, who each gave evidence in their own behalf, Galblaas and his wife were the only other witnesses. The case turned heavily on three questions:
1.The culpability of Horrelpoot in calling a Doctor when he was not ill: an intolerable insult to the dignity of a noble profession.
On this first point the court was not sympathetic. Such frivolous calls on the medical profession were an occupational hazard. Indeed, it was even argued that it was a form of frivolity without which the medical profession could hardly survive.
2.The culpability of Horrelpoot in erecting a gate which wrapped up a member of a noble profession in barbed wire, inflicting manifold lesions.
On this second point, Galblaas and his wife were adamant that they had witnessed the gate’s misdemeanour.
3.The culpability of the Doctor in letting Horrelpoot’s goats get onto Galblaas’s veld, twice, in one afternoon, and the resultant impounding of the said goats by the said Galblaas.
On the third point, Galblaas and his wife denied that they had seen the Doctor leave it open when he left.
The judgement was long and complicated, and cost both sides a fortune. People have forgotten it, but they still remember Galblaas’s and his wife’s evidence in support of the Doctor’s contention that Horrelpoot was not sick at all, but exceptionally fit for a man nearing seventy.
‘He was fit enough’, said Galblaas in the witness box, ‘to hop over a barbed wire fence like a mannetjiesbobbejaan.’
‘In his nightgown’, his wife added: ‘Twice, in one afternoon.’
2
Water Diviners
I grew up among water diviners, and I don’t want to hear a word against them.
Their profession still flourishes, so there must still be a demand for them; hard-headed, practical people are prepared to pay for their services.
You sneer: they only have a success rate of fifty per cent.
Well, just na
me another profession which can better fifty per cent.
It was the last day of a holiday on the farm of my favourite uncle, Danby. He had stopped the horse and cart at one of the farms on the way to the station, where I would be put on the down train for Coleville.
It was one of those bad times when a big drought, a bad government and a world depression all came together, like now. I must have been about six, or maybe eight. There was little to do on the farms because most of the stock was dead and the soil was too dry and hard to plant anything; so farmers would kill time by going to anti-government meetings, or prayer meetings for rain, or visiting each other to mingle their moans with coffee; or to admire someone still hopeful enough to be building a dam with a couple of spans of moth-eaten donkeys and rusty scrops; or to watch the style and antics of the latest water diviner. Uncle Danby said that the water diviner he’d stopped to watch was unusual because he was religious. He explained that all diviners ought to be religious ‘because “to divine” comes from the same Latin word as “a divine”, which means a minister of religion’. When we got to the place chosen for the search for water hidden under the baked and dusty ground, we joined a small knot of people, and the diviner. The diviner looked more like a tramp than a minister of religion to me: he had no tie; his shirt was grey with dirt; he hadn’t shaved; and his left jacket pocket sagged with something heavy which I thought must be a bottle.
He went up to the willow tree, and cut a twig with a fork, just like Uncle Danby said he would; then he held the two ends in his hands, palms upward, the wrists pressed against his body, so that the point of the fork stuck out straight ahead of him.
‘When he walks over the underground water, the point will turn down’, said my Uncle.
But before the wonder-worker started walking forward, he took off his sweaty old hat, and put it down-side-up on the dry ground white with brak at his feet, and carefully put this beautiful clean willow fork in it. Then he fumbled in the sagging pocket and pulled out – a Bible.
The Bible’s end was prickly with burnt out matchsticks, which marked the places. He shut his eyes to pray; so I shut mine too, but peeped to see if Uncle Danby had shut his. He hadn’t. So I opened mine again.
I don’t remember what he prayed for, but I recall the familiar bits of the Bible he read. The Israelites were in the desert of Zin. Zin, not Sin. I never forgot that desert of Zin. And they moaned at Moses: ‘Why have you brought us into this wilderness, that we and our cattle should die here? This is no place for planting seed, nor figs, nor vines, nor pomegranates, neither is there any water to drink.’ Then the Lord spake unto Moses, saying: ‘Take the rod’, and Moses took the rod, and said to the gathered people: ‘Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch water out of this rock for you?’ And Moses lifted up his hand and with his rod he smote the rock, twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and the beasts also.’
Then, after a long prayer, the diviner picked up his stick, and put on his hat, and started to walk slowly forward.
‘What rock is he going to strike?’ I asked.
‘No, my boy. He’ll just show the place where the man with the jumper drill will have to strike the rock. You see, we’re not quite as good these days as old Moses was …’
The train whistled in the distance.
‘Damn!’ said Uncle Danby. ‘He prayed too long. Now we must hurry to put you on the train.’
So that time I never saw the stick turn down.
During the next time of depression and drought Uncle Danby and I were present at another water divining, and this time we did stay until the place was fixed for the jumper drill to strike the rock. The water finding was done by a team of two, Oom Dwarrelpoot Blankenberg and his agterryer or groom, Boom de Swart. Both were slender and tall, with tight-fitting clothes and leather leggings. They came together on an old tandem bicycle ‘which the Tommies had used for their despatch riders’.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Well’, said Uncle Danby, ‘I suppose two men on a bicycle are faster than one. And also a smaller target than one man on a horse. And you don’t have to find fodder for a bicycle. Only air, for the tyres, and that’s every where, and free.’
He grinned at me. I nodded wisely.
Apart from the fact that Boom de Swart was so dark-skinned that he spent his nights at the huts, they were so alike they could have been blood brothers. Some said they were.
When Dwarrel talked to the farmer about the fee his whole body went into action from his toes to his twitching nostrils, with all sorts of squirming and ingratiating movements, very different from Boom, whose face was quite impassive, and his body stiff, without enough joints. Yet though he moved like a marionette, he never fumbled a difficult thing. He took a piece of brown paper from an old sugar packet, tore it, shaped it in his fingers to a little trough, which he filled with some funny-looking loose tobacco from his pocket, rolled it up, put it in his mouth, and lit it without a hitch as though he could do it blindfold in the dark. As soon as he had finished inhaling, slowly and deeply, four times, he said to his boss: ‘Kant en klaar, Meneer.’
At this Dwarrel stopped talking. Instead of looking for a willow tree to cut a twig, he pulled two longish bits of copper wire out of his leather leggings, and bent a right angle in each. One was held in each hand, and the hands were held in front and apart.
‘You see’, said Uncle Danby, ‘copper is a good conductor of electricity.’
I nodded without comprehension.
Then Dwarrel started a slow shuffle with his feet; to the left, forward; to the right, forward; watching how the copper wires pointed this way, and that way; then in half-moon; and full moons; round in spirals and circles, getting faster, and more excited, turning into a little whirlwind on an irregular path, moving steadily out into the vlakte.
I followed, surprised and wondering, tagging behind the grownups, some of whom were impressed, some smiling unkindly. At last, panting, Dwarrel stopped, and slipped the long ends of the shining copper indicators back into his leggings. Without looking round he waited for Boom, motionless, staring into the distance at Renosterberg.
‘He’s concentrating his mind’, said Uncle Danby.
Still smoking the brown paper cigar Boom had walked behind him, with long, slow strides like a heron stalking fish in shallow water. And he looked neither to left nor to right.
‘You see his hands?’ said my Uncle, ‘– clasped behind his back like a diaken with a big moral problem on his mind? Well, his business is to keep that homemade cigar alight. Once it is lit, he mustn’t touch it with his ordinary old hands, because there’s magic in it, you see.’
Boom did not increase his pace when Dwarrel stopped, but simply drew up beside his boss, like a train on time. Dwarrel seemed not to notice him, but his arm whipped out and back, quick as a chameleon’s tongue, transferring the magic cigar to his own mouth; and there he stood, dead still, staring at the Renosterberg, inhaling deeply, and exhaling great expanding smoke rings into the still air. I’d never seen such a thing before, so hardly heard what Uncle Danby was saying about old times: something about cart horses on long journeys; if they got tired you mixed a nice handful of dagga leaves with the fodder in their nosebags, and they did the last stint with their knees high. ‘You just watch old Dwarrel’s knees now’, he added, as the cigar was plugged back into Boom’s mouth with a single accurate swing from the elbow.
Sure enough, when he set off his knees came up to right angles with his body. His dancing was more vigorous than ever. He seemed to be in another world, and so did Boom.
‘In a trance’, said Uncle Danby. ‘The dagga helps. The Bushmen in the Kalahari still dance themselves into a trance.’
After the third pause for inspiration Dwarrel’s knees came almost up to his chin. Then he started tracing a circle which got smaller and smaller. His eyes were concentrated on the ends of the two copper rods, which seemed to be pointing to some spot just ahead of them, coming closer and closer toget
her, drawing Dwarrel’s eyes into a frightening squint.
Suddenly the rods touched each other. I did not see any flash of lightning which other spectators later swore they had seen, but certainly something startling had struck Dwarrel. He was shocked motionless, into trembling stillness, like a tuning fork. His dancing veldskoens were welded into the veld.
Then he grabbed the magic cigar, inhaled four times, stopped trembling, relaxed, and became just like any other man. He kicked his left heel into the ground and turned round on it to make a mark, and told the farmer to knock a peg in there. He put the wires back in his leggings, and dusted off his hands. And that was that.
‘Even if you don’t get a drop of water’, said Uncle Danby to the farmer, ‘that was a performance worth paying big money for.’
Most of the other acts of divining in my file have reached me by hearsay only. For instance, I never had the privilege of watching the Pennyfeather brothers from Lower Albany. They were twins, and identical, and they worked as a single unit. One small mind split between two big bodies, some said. No one could tell them apart, not even themselves.
Twins ran in that family. Somewhere among their distant forebears there’d been a gentleman who loved the classics. He christened his boy twins Romulus and Remus. And those names still keep cropping up when twins occur in Lower Albany. But classics have declined around Salem and Bathurst, so that in some places Romulus has become Roomys and Remus has become Riempies – Roomys en Riempies, – but mostly it’s just Romulus and Remus. If you called ‘Romulus’, Remus came; if you called ‘Remus’, Romulus came. No one was the wiser.
They did a fine business because most farmers like a bargain and, although their fees were high, they said they were getting two for the price of one. Romulus and Remus didn’t work with willow forks but with one longish copper wire pointer each. They got themselves placed on the boundary of the camp as far apart as possible, and at sunset. And they sat there, dead still and alone in the veld as the sun sank. Then, when the full moon came up, each rose, and started walking slowly in the direction the wire pointed. And sooner or later, in the mysterious early moonlight, their lines of advance would cross, and where they crossed was the place to drill.
