The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  She had uncovered thoughts which had been germinating deep in the boy’s mind; he had chosen to stay by himself, away from the others, to communicate with the wagtails and his other friends of river and forest, because he was afraid to face up to the tragedy that he saw developing in the valley, with families quietly turning against Xuma’s father, and by extension, against Xuma and Mandiso. He knew instinctively what he had been afraid to voice: that before this year was out he would have to choose whether to stay with his parents, whom he loved, and with Old Grandmother, whom he loved most dearly, or go into exile with Mandiso and Xuma.

  His solution for the moment was to draw even closer to his grandmother, for she was the only person who would talk with him; even Mandiso was so occupied with starting a new family that he had little time for his brother.

  ‘Why does the diviner torment us?’ he asked the old woman one day.

  ‘He doesn’t. No, he doesn’t. It’s the spirits. It’s his job to keep the spirits happy or they’d devastate this valley.’

  ‘But Xuma’s father …’

  ‘How do we know what he’s done? Tell me that, Sotopo! How do we know what evil things a man can do without the rest of us being aware?’

  ‘You think he’s guilty?’

  ‘Of what? How should I know. All I know is that if the witch doctor says he’s guilty, he’s guilty.’

  ‘And Mandiso must go into exile with him, if he leaves?’

  ‘Oh, now!’ She thought about this for some time, sucking at her corncob pipe, then said to her grandson, ‘I think the time comes for all of us when we should move on. The field is no longer fertile. The neighbors are no longer kindly. For an old woman like me, death comes to solve the problem. For a young person like you, move on.’

  Neither of them said another word that day; they had stepped too close to the ultimate realities of life, and it would require weeks of reflection before complete meaning could be known, but in those days of silence Sotopo became aware that all things had deteriorated sadly in the community. Xuma’s father had been found one morning in a ditch with a gash on his head. Xuma’s cooking pot was shattered when she left it drying in the sun.

  So young Sotopo, now approaching sixteen, gathered the two assegais he had made of dark wood and went for the last time to see the diviner. ‘Come in,’ the old man said.

  ‘Why is Mandiso being punished?’

  ‘You bring me only two assegais? And a calf, perhaps?’

  ‘I have no more cattle, All-powerful One.’

  ‘But you still ask my help.’

  ‘Not for me. For my brother.’

  ‘He is in trouble, Sotopo, deep trouble.’

  ‘But why? He’s done nothing.’

  ‘He’s associated with Xuma, and her father has done much evil.’

  ‘What evil, All-powerful?’

  ‘Evil that the spirits see.’ Beyond this fragile explanation the old man would not go, but he allowed his visitor to sense the implacable opposition all good men ought to show against a member of the tribe guilty of evil practices, even though those practices were never identified.

  ‘Can you do nothing to help him?’ Sotopo pleaded.

  ‘It isn’t him you’re worried about, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s Mandiso.’

  ‘He shares the guilt.’

  ‘Can he do nothing?’ the boy asked.

  ‘No. The evil is upon him.’ And no amount of pleading, no amount of future gifts would alleviate this dreadful curse. The community, through the agency of their diviner, had named Xuma’s father as a source of contamination, and he must go.

  Shortly after this visit he was found beaten to death at the gateway to his kraal, an especially ominous way to die, implying that even the sleek and growing cattle had been powerless to protect him.

  That night Mandiso and Xuma came to the big hut, the wife sitting circumspectly to the left among the women as the fateful discussion began. ‘You must leave us,’ Old Grandmother said without any show of sorrow.

  ‘But why must I surrender …’

  ‘The time has come to go,’ she said forcefully. ‘Tell him, Makubele.’ And the boys’ father referred only to his own selfish interests: ‘The old one’s right. You must go. Otherwise the curse will apply to us all, won’t it, Old Grandmother?’

  But she refused to allow her own predicament or that of her family to intrude in this matter: ‘What is important, Mandiso, is not what will happen to your father, but what will happen to you and Xuma. What do you think your future is now, with her father killed in that manner, at the gateway to his kraal?’

  ‘If there is one sacred place—’ Mandiso began, but Xuma broke in: ‘We must go. And we must go before nightfall tomorrow.’

  ‘Can it really be so!’ her husband said, appalled at the implications of what Xuma had said.

  ‘Isn’t that true, Old Grandmother?’ the girl asked.

  ‘I’d go tonight,’ the old woman said. And it was agreed that before the next sun set Mandiso and Xuma would start for the west, to a new settlement, to a new home. They would take cattle, and skin bags of mealies for seed, and other oddments—but they must go, for the consensus of their community, arrived at in complex ways, had decreed that they were no longer wanted.

  But where did this leave Sotopo, not yet a man but deeply devoted to his brother and his brother’s wife? When the family conclave broke up, he remained with his grandmother a long time, discussing his difficult alternatives: remain, with the diviner probably opposed to him; or flee, when he had not yet been ordained a man? He had absolutely no hard evidence that the witch doctor had declared war upon him, but he knew it had happened and that sooner or later the rumors would begin to circulate against him. But he also knew that to face the future without the sanctions of circumcision entailed dangers too fearful to contemplate. Having watched his brother’s joyous entrance into married life, with a girl as admirable as Xuma, he had begun to sense how awful it would be to have the girls of his community categorize him as less-than-man and to be deprived of their companionship.

  This was something he could not discuss with his grandmother, so in the dead of night he crept to his brother’s kraal and whispered, ‘Mandiso! Are you awake?’

  ‘What is it, brother?’

  ‘I shall go with you.’

  ‘Good. We’ll need you.’

  ‘But how will I ever become a man?’

  Mandiso sat in the dark with his left hand over his mouth, considering this perplexing question, and then, because he felt he must be truthful, he listed the impediments: ‘There’d be no guardian to bless the hut. There’d be no other boys to share the experience. We probably couldn’t find clay to cover your body. And at the end there’d be no grand celebration.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that, Mandiso. I’ve thought of it all, but still I want to stay with you.’ And he added, ‘With you and Xuma,’ for he was not ashamed of his love for his sister-in-law.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Mandiso said, ‘looking back on everything that happened, that a boy becomes a man with the pain, with the courage. He becomes a man not with the dancing and the food and the cheers of others. He becomes a man within himself, through his own bravery.’

  They pondered this for a long time, during which Mandiso hoped that his brother would speak up, would volunteer proof of his courage, but Sotopo was too confused by this necessity to make at age sixteen a decision more difficult than most men make in their entire lives. So finally Mandiso tipped the scales: ‘In the woods that time, when we met the two strange men’—in his thinking, they were men, now—‘it was you, Sotopo, who devised the plan for sleeping in the tree. I believe I might have slipped away.’

  ‘Really?’ the boy asked, and the possibility that he had been brave, there in the woods, so captivated his mind that he said no more that night. Nor did he sleep. At dawn he was at the river saying farewell to the wagtails. At full-sun he was watching a pair of monstrous hornbills waddling across the fields, and at
midmorning he had collected his remaining goats, falling in line behind five of the young men who had shared the ritual circumcision with Mandiso and who now elected to go with him because of the profound brotherhood they felt. Three girls who hoped to marry with the young exiles trailed along for a short distance, then turned back tearfully, knowing that they must wait till their suitors brought lobola to their fathers.

  In this way units of dissidents had always broken off from the main body of the Xhosa. Perhaps the diviners performed a vital function in identifying those potentially fractious individuals who might ultimately cause trouble in the community; at any rate, the diviners served as the agencies of expulsion. For eight hundred years groups like Mandiso’s had broken away to form new clans on the cutting edge of expansion. They never moved far; they retained contact with the rest of the tribe; and they still acknowledged a hazy kind of allegiance to the Great Chief, who existed far to the rear but whom they never saw.

  This time the wandering unit proceeded to the east bank of the Great Fish River, which they settled upon because of the vast empty grazing fields on the west bank. ‘We’ll use those fields,’ Mandiso told his followers, ‘for the cattle that like to roam.’

  In this time-honored tradition the Xhosa innocently launched a westward move which would bring them into direct conflict with the Dutch trekboers, who with equal innocence were drifting eastward. These two great tribes were so similar: each loved its cattle; each measured a man’s importance by his herds; each sought untrammeled grazing; each knew that any pasturage it saw belonged to it by divine right; and each honored its predikant or diviner. A titanic confrontation, worse than any storm the fire-bird had ever generated, had become inevitable.

  When, in February 1725, Adriaan and Dikkop approached their farm at the conclusion of their wanderings, they faced none of the uncertainties that had perplexed the two Xhosa lads. True, they had been gone almost four months when only three had been intended; but their people knew what they were doing, and the extended absence was no cause for alarm. As Hendrik assured his wife several times: ‘If the lions don’t eat them, they’ll be back.’

  So when they straggled in, with the dust of distant horizons on their eyebrows, no one made much fuss, for Hendrik, too, had been wandering, six weeks to the north to trade for cattle with the Hottentots. He had returned with two hundred fine animals, the largest-ever addition to his herd. He asked Adriaan to ride with him to the easternmost part of the grazing lands, and from a low hill the two Van Doorns looked down approvingly. ‘God has been good to us,’ Hendrik said. ‘ “All the land that is Canaan He has given to us and the generations which will follow you.” ’ For a long time they sat astride their horses, watching the cattle, and there was joy in their hearts.

  The hartebeest hut had been lived in so thoroughly that it could scarcely be distinguished from the one on the previous farm, and on the perimeter of the holding, Hendrik had placed four more cairns, midway between the compass points. In less than a year the Van Doorns had themselves a stable farm, six thousand acres well marked and so far removed from any neighbor that intrusion of any kind was unlikely for years to come.

  The family was deeply interested in Adriaan’s report of the two black youths and this proof that a tribe of some magnitude occupied the lands farther east. Again and again the older Van Doorns asked their son to repeat exactly what he had learned during his four-day meeting with the blacks.

  ‘They speak with clicks,’ Adriaan said, ‘so they must be of the same family as the Hottentots, but Dikkop understood none of their words. They were a strong, really handsome people, but their only weapons were clubs and assegais.’

  Hendrik was so interested that he summoned Dikkop, who conveyed the important information that so far as he could discern, they called themselves the Xhosa: Hkausa, he pronounced the word, giving it a pronounced click in the back of his throat. ‘They said they were the Xhosa, who lived beyond a big river.’

  ‘What river?’ Hendrik asked.

  ‘There were so many,’ Adriaan and Dikkop said together, and for the first time they spelled out the geography of the vast lands to the east, and it was this report, laboriously written down in archaic language by Hendrik van Doorn, that ultimately reached the Cape, adding to the Compagnie’s comprehension of the lands they were about to govern, whether they wanted to or not:

  The land east of our farm is not to be traversed easily, because heavy mountains enclose it on the north, a chain unbroken for many miles that cannot be penetrated, for there seem to be no passes across it. Travel to the south along the seacoast is no easier, because deep ravines cut in from the shore, running many miles at times, not passable with wagons. But in between these impediments are lands of great productivity and greater beauty. Our farm lies at the western edge of what must be the finest lands on earth, a garden of flowers and birds and animals. Copious rivers produce water for every purpose, and if fruit trees can be made to grow there as easily as they do here, you will have a garden paradise. But we have reason to believe that black tribes are pressing down upon it from the east.

  When Hendrik finished this writing he was proud to have remembered so much of his education, and ashamed that he had neglected it. At Trianon his parents had taught him his letters and to speak correct Dutch, but long years in the company of Hottentot and slave, and then with an illiterate wife, had caused him to speak in rough, unlettered sentences. Worse, he had taught none of his children to read.

  But he engaged in no recriminations, for life was bountiful. With June came harvest time, and the family was busy gathering not only enough vegetables for the long winter, but also more than enough to dry for seeds: big yellow pumpkins, gnarled green squash, mealies, radishes, onions, cauliflower and cabbage for pickling. The fruit trees, of course, were too young to bear, but in his explorations of the surrounding terrain Hendrik had found wild lemons whose thick and oily skin proved so useful, and bitter almonds like the ones from the hedge his grandfather had cut down during his escape from Compagnie domination.

  One heard little of the Compagnie out here. The farm was so distant from headquarters—one hundred and sixty-two miles in a straight line, half again more according to the wandering path over the mountains—that no official could easily reach it. No predikant ever arrived for marriages and baptisms, and certainly no assessor or tax collector. Still, a kind of supervision prevailed, distant and unenforced, but ready for implementation when roads should penetrate the area. A petulant Compagnie official who crossed the mountains in vast discomfort had come as far east as four farms short of Van Doorn’s, and he had written upon his return to the Cape:

  Wherever I went I heard of divers Dutchmen who occupied stupendous farms, Rooi van Valck to the north, Hendrik van Doorn to the east. They graze their cattle on our land without the Compagnie deriving any benefit. They plant their seeds on Compagnie land without any profit to us, and I think the Compagnie deserves better treatment from these rascals. I recommend that every man who occupies a farm pay to the Compagnie a tax of twelve rix-dollars a year plus one-tenth of whatever harvest of grain or fruit or vegetables or animals he produces. But how this tax is to be collected from farms as distant as Rooi van Valck’s and Hendrik van Doorn’s, I have not decided.

  The loan-farm law was passed, but as the perceptive emissary had predicted, it could rarely be enforced. Distant farmers were instructed to carry their taxes to either the Cape or Stellenbosch, and they simply ignored the law. On farms close in, the officials did make a brave show of riding out in midwinter to demand overdue tithes, but with obstinate and dangerous renegades like Rooi van Valck, no collector dared approach his outlaw domain lest he be shot through the neck.

  In these years Adriaan had little concern with tax collectors; he was so occupied with extending his knowledge of the wilderness that weeks would pass without his being seen at the farm. It was then that the soubriquet Mal Adriaan was fastened most securely to him; he would come home from an exploration and say, ‘Whi
le I was sleeping in the tree …’ or ‘As I climbed out of the hippo’s wallow …’ or ‘In the days when I lived with the gemsbok …’ He caused outrage among his family and the slaves by insisting that lions could climb trees, for it was commonly accepted that they could not and that a man was secure if only he could find refuge in a tree.

  ‘No,’ said Adriaan, ‘I’ve seen a tree with seven lions sleeping on the higher branches.’ This was so crazy that even the slaves called him Mal Adriaan, and once when he was twenty he experienced for the first time the loneliness that comes upon a young man when he is ridiculed by his peers. The family was eating in the hut, scraping away at bones of mutton and cabbage, when his father asked, ‘Have the animals moved closer to our valley?’ and he replied automatically, ‘When I was staying with the rhinoceros …’ and his brothers and sisters said simultaneously, ‘Oh, Adriaan!’ and he had blushed furiously and started to leave the table where they huddled, except that his mother placed her hand upon his arm to restrain him.

  That night, as they sat outside the hut, she told him, ‘It’s not good for a man to wait too long. You must find yourself a wife.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘That’s always the question. Look at our Florrie. Where’s she to catch a husband? I’ll tell you where. One of these days a young man will come by here on his horse, looking for a bride. And he’ll see Florrie, and off she’ll go.’

  And sure enough, within four weeks of that conversation Dikkop, always frightened of new movement, came rushing to the hut, shouting, ‘Man coming on horse!’ And in came a dusty, lusty young farmer who had ridden a hundred and twenty miles on hearing the rumor that Hendrik van Doorn out beyond the river had several daughters. He made no secret of his mission, stayed five weeks, during which he ate enormous quantities of food, and on the night Hendrik offered him a bread pudding crammed with lemon rind and cherries and dried apples, he belched, pushed back the soup plate from which he had gorged himself, and said, ‘Florrie and me, we’re heading home tomorrow.’