The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  So the commando, practicing extreme caution, since everyone feared that terrible flight of thin arrows which brought agonizing death, moved toward the rocks that could be hiding the thieves, and when Boeksma saw twigs move, he shouted, ‘There they are!’ and his followers cheered as they swept down on their target.

  There was so much gunfire that none of the Bushmen had any chance of escape, but as they fell, one man maintained control and calmly aimed his arrow at a specific rider, launching it just before he collapsed with four bullets through him. The arrow struck Marthinus van Doorn in the neck, lodged deep within, and broke apart.

  By nightfall he felt painfully dizzy and asked Andries Boeksma to cut the arrowhead out, but the big Dutchman said, ‘I can’t do it, Marthinus. I’d cut your throat.’ So the agony increased, and at dawn Marthinus was again pleading that the arrow be cut out, but the men agreed with Boeksma that this was impossible. They built a litter and slung it between two horses, hoping to get Van Doorn back to the apotheek at Stellenbosch, but by midday the poison had spread furiously, and in the late afternoon he died.

  ‘Shall we bury him here?’ Boeksma asked Hendrik. ‘Or would your mother want him at Trianon?’

  ‘Bury him here,’ Hendrik said. The Van Doorns had never feared the veld. So the men of the commando broke into two groups, one to dig a grave, one to gather stones that would mark it, and when the hole was deep enough to keep away hyenas, Marthinus van Doorn, forty-three years old, was buried. Andries Boeksma, as leader of the commando, said a brief prayer, then tied the bridle of Van Doorn’s horse to his and started homeward.

  Hendrik would never forget what happened at Trianon when the mournful procession rode in to inform Annatjie of her loss. It was not what his mother did that shocked him; she was resolute, as he had expected—a tall, gaunt woman of fifty-one, with rough hands and deep-lined face. She nodded, started to cry, then pushed her knuckles into her eyes and asked, ‘Where did you leave the body, Andries?’

  ‘Decently buried … out there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and that was all.

  Nor was it her impersonal reaction that appalled young Hendrik—he knew that she was not the wailing kind—it was what happened after the commando had ridden off. No sooner had the horsemen left Trianon than Paul de Pré hastened over from his house, crying in a loud voice, ‘Mon Dieu, is Marthinus dead?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Hendrik said.

  ‘I saw the empty horse. The way the bridle was tied to Boeksma’s.’

  ‘And what did you think?’

  ‘I thought, “Marthinus must be dead. I must go comfort Annatjie.” ’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Hendrik said. ‘Mother’s inside.’ And he saw the avidity with which the Huguenot hurried through the door. Hendrik should not have listened, but he did, hearing De Pré say with great excitement, ‘Annatjie, I’ve heard the dreadful news. My heart is pained for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Paul.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Bushmen. Poisoned arrow.’

  ‘O mon Dieu! You sorrowful woman.’

  ‘Thank you, Paul’

  There was a silence which Hendrik could not interpret, and then De Pré’s voice, urgent and nervous: ‘Annatjie, you’ll be alone, trying to work the vineyard. I’ll be alone, trying to do the same. Should we not join forces? I mean … well, I mean … What I mean is, should we not marry, and hold the place together?’

  Hendrik quivered at the brazenness of such a question, at the awful impropriety of its coming on this day, but he was restrained from bursting into the room and thrashing the Frenchman by what his mother replied: ‘I knew you would come quickly to ask that question, Paul. I know you’ve been plotting and scheming and wondering how you could gain control of the Trianon. I know you’re nine years younger than I am and that not long ago you wanted to marry my daughter, not me. And I know how shameful it is of you to ask that question this night. But you’re a poor, hungry man, Paul, with only one desire, and I have pity on you. Come back in seven days.’

  De Pré spent those days in drawing plans, in adding up acreages and in supervising the slaves and the Hottentots as they prepared the grapes for harvest. He neither went to the big house nor attended the memorial service in Stellenbosch at which the predikant and the members of the commando told the community of Marthinus van Doorn’s heroism. He stayed completely apart, working as he had never worked to get Trianon in top condition, and at eight o’clock in the morning of the eighth day he walked over to Trianon in his pressed and dusted clothes.

  He did not find Hendrik there. The young man had loaded his wagon—first putting in it, carefully wrapped, his grandfather’s Bible and brown-gold crock—with the equipment necessary for a life on the veld, and with a slave and two Hottentot families, had departed for the lands beyond the mountains, taking with him a small herd of cattle and sheep. Before leaving he had said farewell to Petronella and Bezel Muhammad; he judged they were as happy as human beings were allowed to be on this earth, but he could not know that their two dark children would soon be lost in that human wilderness called Coloured; for a brief while they and their descendants would be remembered as Van Doorns, but after that, their history, but not their bloodline, would vanish as surely as would the antecedents of the three little girls fathered by Andries Boeksma. Later, it would become fashionable to claim that all such half-castes were the spawn of those lusty sailors who could not control their urges at the halfway house between Europe and Asia. That a Van Doorn or a Boeksma had contributed to the Coloureds would be unthinkable.

  Hendrik had no feeling about his brother Sarel; the boy showed no courage, no deep interest in anything, and he guessed that with the De Pré boys gone, Sarel would inherit the vineyards; but in this development he had no interest whatever. He did have enormous feeling for Annatjie and supposed that in her place he would do as she was doing; she had been a most excellent mother, loving and understanding; he had seen how tenderly she cared for old Katje when the grandmother was troublesome, and she had been just as attentive to Paul de Pré’s two motherless boys. Tears came to his eyes as he admitted to himself that after this day he might never see his mother again, that this break was final; Trianon and the lovely river and the white walls and the gables were lost forever.

  With his wagon he headed eastward, as old Willem had done years before; the difference was that he traveled without a wife.

  The wedding took place in the church at Stellenbosch at eleven in the morning, and by three that afternoon Paul de Pré, now master of Trianon, had his slaves tearing down the huts that stood in front of the house, and when the space was cleared, he and Bezel Muhammad paced off the dimensions of the proposed wings.

  ‘It’s important,’ Paul explained, ‘that they come away from the main building at an angle, and that the two angles are the same.’ When the stakes were driven and the two men had gone far down the entrance road to satisfy themselves that they had found the proper relationships, Paul said, ‘I think that’s it,’ and he could visualize the finished buildings, stark-white but with shadows playing across the surfaces like breezes in a glade, the arms extended in welcome, with the two flanks helping to form with the house a spacious enclosure such as farms in France sometimes had.

  ‘It will be glorious!’ he cried with deep pleasure as the sun began to sink, throwing bold colors on the hills behind the house, and he could visualize travelers from the Cape approaching this haven of white buildings and generous spaces.

  Construction started immediately. Ten slaves dug foundations, piled rocks, and mixed mud for the walls. Cadres were sent into the fields to cut the heavy thatch that would form the roofs, and Bezel Muhammad led still others into the forests to find yellow-wood for the rafters. Under the constant urging of De Pré, the two rows of buildings seemed to spring from the soil, and when they were nearing completion, and Muhammad’s supervision was no longer needed, Paul took him aside to explain what would later prove to be the most engaging aspect of
the buildings.

  ‘What I want,’ he told Bezel, ‘is for each of the eight compartments to have over the door, in the darkest stinkwood you can find, an oval plaque, carved in high relief, indicating what goes on in that segment of the building.’ And he stepped along the two flanks, suggesting by big movements of his hands what he had in mind.

  ‘As we ride in, first door on the left, a pigeon, dark against the white wall. Next a pig, because we’ll use this as part of the sty. Next a stack of hay, and over this door near the house, a dog. Now let’s go back and look at the right-hand side. First a rooster, then a measure for grain, then a pot of flowers, and on the one nearest the house, a rake and a hoe.’ Bezel nodded, already planning in his mind how he would carve certain of the signs, but as he started for the two-room home he had built for Petronella some distance from the main house, Paul called him back: ‘On the right-hand side, have the tools over the next-to-last door. Save the flowers for the door nearest the house, so that Mevrouw de Pré can get to them easily.’

  In all he did, he consulted the wishes of Mevrouw. He might have been tempted to be unpleasant with Annatjie, for she was both older and plainer than he; fifty-one years of ceaseless work had roughened her face, while he remained a handsome youngish man of only forty-two. Girls from surrounding farms, and sometimes their mothers, too, had looked at him with affection, but he had so desperately yearned for control of Trianon that he was willing to pay the price, and that was faithful attention to Annatjie, through whose hands he had acquired it. He would never belittle her, or mention her advanced age, or in any way fail to pay the debt he owed her.

  He gave evidence of this attitude on the day the two outreaching buildings were completed, each door with its splendid identifying oval, for after Annatjie had inspected everything and approved this handsome addition, Paul said, ‘And now we attend to your needs.’

  ‘I have none,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes. Your house is too small for you.’ She noticed with approval that whereas he often said ‘my farm, my vineyard,’ and even ‘my fields at Trianon,’ he invariably referred to the house as hers. There she was mistress, and he proposed making it worthy of her.

  Leading her inside, he showed how the T could be improved by the simple device of adding two large rooms to the stem. ‘What we’ll do,’ he explained, ‘is change it from a T to an H.’ And he pointed out that if this were done, she would also gain two small gardens in the empty parts of the H. ‘In hot summers, the cool wind will come at us from all sides.’

  When the H was completed, it worked exactly as he had foreseen, and the De Prés now had the finest house in Stellenbosch, a low gracious set of buildings beautifully associated with meadow and mountain. But still his insatiable urge to build drove him on: ‘Bezel, I want you to carve me a monstrous oval, six times bigger than the little ones.’

  ‘Showing what?’

  ‘Wine casks decorated with vines.’ And while the Malay carpenter carved the symbols, Paul directed his slaves in building a huge wine cellar at the rear of the house but closely attached to it, so that a Spanish-style patio resulted. Trianon now had four lovely gardens: the big one in front, the two little ones tucked into the angles of the house, and this quiet, restricted one at the rear, closed in by white walls and dotted with small trees. When Bezel Muhammad bolted his carving into position, Paul said, ‘Here’s a building in which wine of distinction might be housed.’

  His building mania was almost ended. When the great wine casks from France were placed in position, and the pigeons and chickens and pigs were in their cubicles, he informed Annatjie that he would build one final thing for her, and when she tried to guess what it might be, he told her to visit with the Boeksmas in Stellenbosch for five days. When he came to the Boeksma farm to fetch her, she asked what he had done, and he told her, ‘You must see for yourself,’ and as they drove up the lane, and into the areaway between the two embracing arms, she could detect nothing new, but as they approached the house she gasped, for at each end of the low stoep on which they sat in the evening Paul had directed his workmen to build two ceramic benches perpendicular to the front wall and faced with the softest white-and-blue tiles from Delft. They showed men skating on frozen canals, women working at the river, views of old buildings and sometimes simply the implements of Dutch farm life. They converted ordinary benches into little jewels, glistening in sunlight, and the great house of Trianon was complete.

  It was great in neither size nor height, nor was it Dutch. Its chief characteristics had been borrowed from Java, its secondary ones from rural France, but the spirit that animated it and the manner in which it hugged the earth came only from South Africa. Dutch workmen had helped build it, and a French megalomaniac, and a Malay carpenter, and slaves from Angola, Madagascar and Ceylon, with Hottentots doing much of the light work. It was an amalgam, glorious yet simple, and its chief wonder was that when one sat on the Delft benches at close of day, one could see the sun setting behind Table Mountain.

  Paul’s attitude toward his five children would always be ambivalent. Concerning Annatjie’s boy Hendrik, who had vanished into the wilderness, he was glad to see him go, for he recognized him as a threat. He did not worry about his own son Henri, now in Amsterdam, for he judged this one would never have wanted to farm; indeed, he felt some relief at the boy’s disappearance, for he sensed that sooner or later he would have had trouble with him. Annatjie’s boy Sarel he considered a dolt and was pleased to see that girls thought so, too, for the boy was not married, would produce no heirs to claim the vineyards, and could be dismissed. His son Louis was a different matter; Paul was still convinced that after a few years at the Cape, the boy would want to come back to the farm, and it would be to him that Trianon would ultimately revert; often he consoled himself by thinking: The experience with the Compagnie will make him a better manager. He’ll know about ships and agents and markets. That the boy would ultimately return he never doubted, and that Louis could wrest the vineyard from silly Sarel was evident. ‘Trianon of the De Prés’ he saw as the ultimate title, and if the French name should be submerged in the Dutch Du Preez, that would be all right with him.

  It was his attitude toward Petronella that surprised Annatjie, for he had bitterly opposed her liaison with Bezel Muhammad, but now his opinion changed radically. One day he said, ‘Annatjie, I’m not using my house, and the boys seem to have fled. Why not give it to Petronella and Bezel?’

  ‘I think they’d like that,’ Annatjie said, and she was astonished when he not only gave the young couple the house, but also helped Bezel erect a workshop in which his tools would have an orderly place. He even assigned three slaves to the task of cutting stinkwood trees for Bezel and shaping them into timbers.

  Later, of course, Annatjie discovered that Paul had talked Bezel into building only wall cupboards, which were carted to Louis de Pré, who sold them at top prices at the Cape. Bezel was given less than a third of the profits, but he and Petronella did occupy their new home rent-free, and he appreciated the fact that Paul’s patronage was of great value to a carpenter who had been a slave.

  Then came the years of conflict. Paul was determined that Louis come back to inherit the vineyard; Annatjie was equally insistent that her son Sarel pull himself together, take a wife, and produce the Van Doorn children who would supervise Trianon far into the future. In this struggle De Pré used vicious weapons, denigrating Sarel at each opportunity, spreading in the community rumors that he was an imbecile. He spoke casually of the day when Louis would return to take command: ‘He’s studying the wine business, you know. The Compagnie has sent him to Europe to ascertain who the trustworthy merchants are.’

  The struggle took an ugly turn whenever Annatjie maneuvered her self-conscious son into contact with any marriageable girl, for then Paul would arrange to meet, by happenstance, her parents, to whom he would drop bits of intelligence: ‘I don’t really suppose he’s an idiot. He can buckle his shoes.’ And since Sarel, who blushed beet-red at t
he sight of a girl, did nothing to advance any courtship, the meetings arranged by his mother came to naught.

  She wondered what to do. She was fifty-seven now and did not expect to live far into her sixties; Sarel was not deficient, of that she was certain, but he was shy and awkward and he needed a wife most urgently. But where could she find one for him?

  She arranged an excuse for taking him to the Cape, but accomplished nothing, so in desperation she looked toward Holland and the orphanage from which she had come. She very much wanted to commission Henri de Pré to make contact with the women who supervised the girls, but her peasant instincts warned her that Henri could be trusted no more than his father, so in desperation she sat in her corner of the big house and penned a secret letter to a woman she had never seen, the mistress of the orphanage where the King’s Nieces resided:

  Dearest Mevrouw,

  I am a child of your house, living far away where there are no women. Please find me a healthy, strong, reliable, Christian girl of seventeen or eighteen, well-bred and loyal, who can be trusted to come here to marry my son. She will have to work hard but will be mistress of nearly four hundred morgen and a beautiful house. My son is a good man.

  Annatjie van Doorn de Pré

  Trianon, Stellenbosch, The Cape

  She forwarded the letter without letting her husband know, and nearly a year of anxiety passed before a courier arrived with news that a Compagnie ship from Amsterdam would soon be putting in with a wife for Sarel van Doorn.

  ‘What’s this?’ De Pré demanded.

  ‘Someone’s sending out an orphan, I suppose. The way I came.’

  ‘But who asked for an orphan?’

  ‘Many people know that Sarel needs a wife.’