The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  When they rode into the farmyard the first voice they heard was Seena’s, loud and raucous, shouting to her husband, ‘Adriaan! He’s back. With a bride.’

  When the family assembled, Lodevicus, with new-found assurance, attempted to share with his parents the miracle of his epiphany: ‘God called to me to go to the Cape to take a wife.’

  ‘Adriaan heard a call like that once,’ Seena said, ‘but I doubt God had much to do with it.’

  ‘So I stopped at Swellendam to pray with Dominee Specx, and Rebecca taught me the letters and how to put them together …’

  ‘I’ll warrant that wasn’t all she taught.’

  The young couple ignored these interruptions, and Lodevicus continued: ‘And when I learned to write, I got down on my knees and thanked God and told Him that as soon as I returned home I would write our names in the Bible. Fetch it.’

  He issued this request as a command, and Seena was somewhat irritated when her husband complied. Going to a wagon chest in which he kept the odd valuables that accumulate even in a hartebeest hut, he brought forth the old Bible, opening it to the page of records between the two testaments. ‘This time,’ Lodevicus said gravely, ‘we have a pen,’ and with everyone watching, he carefully inscribed the missing names: ‘Adriaan van Doorn, born 1712. Seena van Valck born …’

  ‘Maybe 1717,’ she said.

  ‘Father, Rooi van Valck. Mother …’

  ‘I never knew for sure.’ Lodevicus and Rebecca stared at her, and he said, ‘We’ve got to put something.’

  ‘Put Fedda the Malayan. I liked her best.’

  ‘Put Magdalena van Delft,’ Adriaan said. ‘You know she was your real mother.’

  Seena spat: ‘That for Magdalena.’

  Hurriedly Lodevicus wrote in the names of his brother and his two sisters, then, with a flourish and a smile for his wife, he wrote: ‘Rebecca Specx, Swellendam, daughter of the Predikant.’

  When he put the pen aside, satisfied with his work, Seena asked, ‘When you reached Swellendam, were you married?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ her son said. ‘When I had learned to write I marched on to the Cape, as God had directed.’

  ‘Over the mountains?’ Adriaan asked, showing respect for such a trip.

  ‘Over the tall mountains, but when I reached the Cape, I found Sodom and Gomorrah. Indecencies everywhere.’

  ‘What indecencies?’ Seena asked.

  Again he ignored her, telling of his revulsion, his rejection of the town and his return over the mountains. ‘We were married and spent the next weeks in a revelation. The four of us, Dominee Specx and his wife, I and my wife, we sat together and read the entire Bible.’

  For the first time Rebecca intruded. In a low voice, but with great firmness, she said, ‘The Old Testament, that is.’

  ‘And we discovered,’ Lodevicus continued, ‘how we trekboers are the new Israelites. That we have reached the point where Abram was when he changed his name to Abraham and settled in Canaan while Lot chose the cities of the plain, to be destroyed. And I learned that the time of our traveling is ended. That we must settle and build our houses of stone.’

  ‘Did you and the dominee,’ Adriaan asked, ‘ever discuss the fact that you new Abrahams would be building your houses of stone on land that can be worn out? That we have to move on from time to time to find ourselves better land?’

  ‘They’re not moving at Swellendam,’ Lodevicus replied, whereupon his mother said, ‘We are. This verdomde farm is worn out.’

  And while the old couple planned their next leap eastward, the young couple journeyed to the southern farms, there to advise the people how they ought to live.

  It was on their return journey that Lodevicus first shared with another human being the mysterious fact that at the stream God had told him that he was to be the hammer, the trekboer who brought order into shapeless lives, and as soon as he said the words, Rebecca understood. With great excitement she said, ‘It was why Father and I prayed that you would return from the Cape. And take me with you. That we could perform the tasks that lie ahead.’

  ‘God spoke to you, also?’

  ‘I think He did. I think I always knew.’

  It was with this common understanding of their salvation and their mutual reinforcement that the younger Van Doorns came back to the farm, secure in their knowledge of what was required, and the first person their wrath fell upon was Dikkop, now fifty-seven years old and as inoffensive as always. Because of the many years they had shared, and the adventures, Adriaan gave the little fellow unusual prerogatives, and Lodevicus decided that this must stop: ‘He is of the tribe of Ham, and he must no longer live with us or feed with us, or in any way associate with us, except as our Hottentot servant.’

  When Adriaan protested such a harsh decree, Lodevicus and Rebecca explained things carefully, step by step, so that even Seena would understand: ‘When the world started the second time, after the flood, Noah had three sons, and two of them were clean and white like us. But the third son, Ham, was dark and evil.’

  ‘Now, Ham,’ Rebecca continued, ‘was the father of Canaan and all black people. And God, acting through Noah, placed a terrible curse on Canaan: “Cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.” And it was ordained that the sons of Ham shall be hewers of wood and drawers of water, for as long as the world exists. Dikkop is a Canaanite. He is a son of Ham, and is condemned to be a slave and nothing more.’

  It really didn’t matter to Adriaan and Seena what the Hottentot was called; he was necessary to their lives, and as such, he was well treated. Seena especially liked to have him in the hut when food was being prepared or eaten, and it was this that caused the first open rupture with her daughter-in-law, for one day Rebecca said in some exasperation, ‘Seena, you must not allow Dikkop in the hut ever again.’ Then she added, in a voice of honest conciliation, ‘Except, of course, when he cleans up.’

  ‘But he’s always been with me when I cook.’

  ‘That must stop.’

  ‘Who says so?’ Seena asked belligerently.

  ‘God.’

  With the snap of a cloth and a sharpness of tongue that invited trouble, Seena said, ‘I doubt that God troubles Himself over a woman’s kitchen.’

  ‘Lodevicus!’ Rebecca called. ‘Your mother refuses to believe.’ And when Vicus came into the hut to hear the complaints, he, of course, sided totally with his wife, taking down the Bible and turning to those short, inconsequential books that end the Old Testament, and there in Zechariah he found the concluding passage which had loomed so large in the teaching of Predikant Specx at Swellendam: ‘ “And in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of Hosts.” ’ He added that from this time on, the hut was the house of the Lord, and since Dikkop was clearly a Canaanite, he must be banished.

  Curiously, Adriaan did not support his wife in this argument, for he was coming to believe that Rebecca spoke for the future; it was time that order be brought to the frontier, although he himself wanted none of it. The truth was, he rather liked his daughter-in-law, for she was capable, intelligent and forthright, and he suspected that Lodevicus had been lucky to catch her. Seena, however, saw her as a moralizing menace to be consistently opposed: ‘You think your Bible has an answer for everything?’

  ‘It has.’

  ‘Well, when you and Vicus make the Xhosa mad, and they come clicking over that hill armed with assegais, what does your Bible say about that?’

  With absolute assurance Rebecca said, ‘Vicus, fetch me the Bible, please,’ and in later years he would often remember this moment, when his wife and his mother argued over what might happen if the Xhosa struck.

  Turning the pages expertly, Rebecca came to that passage in Leviticus which formed a keystone of her father’s belief, and read triumphantly: ‘ “And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred …” ’ And then, as if this solved all problems of the frontier, sh
e glared at her mother-in-law and said, ‘We will have five to defend this farm.’

  Of course, the little brown men knew nothing of this prophecy and had no difficulty whatever in breaking through. One night a clan of Bushmen living beyond the mountains crept down, found large numbers of cattle roaming freely, and made off with some sixty fine beasts.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Lodevicus said, his voice betraying iron but no fire. ‘That’s just enough. And now we settle the problem of the Bushmen.’

  He organized a commando, all the men from thirty miles around, and he set forth, inviting Adriaan to come along but ignoring him when decisions were required. They went north about seventy miles, so far that Adriaan was certain they had left the Bushmen far behind, but when he started to alert his son to this fact, Vicus, grim-lipped, sat astride his horse, saying nothing.

  The old man was right. The commando had far outrun the little brown raiders, but Vicus had devised a super strategy, and when the riders reached a spot where whole families of Bushmen might be expected to congregate, he ordered his men to dismount and hide themselves near a spring that broke out from between the rocks. Adriaan, unable to discern his son’s plan, expected the hunting party to arrive with the stolen cattle and walk into an ambush, but instead, just at sunset, a huge rhinoceros lumbered in to catch his evening swill of water, and as he drank noisily, switching his wiry tail, Lodevicus dropped him with one powerful shot behind the ear.

  There the great beast lay, beside the spring, and before nightfall vultures gathered, perching in trees and waiting for the dawn. They were seen, of course, both by the Bushmen families awaiting the return of their men and by the cattle stealers coming north, so that by midafternoon some sixty Bushmen, counting the women and children, had gathered at the spring to gorge upon the unexpected feast of the dead rhino.

  During the first excitement as the little people butchered the huge beast, Lodevicus kept his men silent, and this was prudent, for the wait allowed another thirty brown people to assemble, and when they were all there, about ninety of them, cutting the rhino steaks and laughing as the blood ran down their wizened faces, Vicus leaped up and cried, ‘Fire!’

  Caught in the crossfire of a score of guns, the banqueters fell one by one. Cattle stealers, grandmothers, the makers of arrows, the young women who collected the beetles from which the poisons were made, and the little children, even the babies—all were exterminated.

  Lodevicus the Hammer he was called after that exhibition, God’s strong right arm, and whenever trouble threatened he was summoned. He organized the first church in this remote region and served as its sick-comforter during the years when it had no predikant. He read sermons from a book printed in Holland and sent him by Rebecca’s father in Swellendam; he was punctilious about never posing as a real clergyman, for that was a holy vocation requiring years of formal study and the laying on of hands, but he did enforce religious law on both his own family and the scattered farms. Whenever a young man and woman started living together, he and Rebecca would visit them, take their names down in a book, and make them promise that as soon as a predikant came their way, they would marry. He also kept a register of births, threatening parents with damnation if they failed to have their infants baptized when the dominee came.

  One night as he rode back after lecturing two young couples living carelessly down by the sea, he took Rebecca by the hand and led her a safe distance from the hut: ‘I’m sorely worried. I’ve been reflecting on Adriaan and Seena. It’s an affront to God for me to travel far distances to enforce His ordinances when in my own home …’

  ‘What are we going to do about them?’

  ‘It would be a dreadful act, Rebecca, to evict one’s own parents. But if they persist in evil ways …’

  When he paused to weigh the gravity of the problem, Rebecca enumerated the nagging difficulties she faced with Seena, the worst being her mother-in-law’s paganism: ‘She sneers at our teaching, Vicus. When you were gone she brought Dikkop back into the hut, even though she knows the Bible forbids it. When I pointed this out, she snapped, “Either he stays or you starve.” ’

  ‘Rebecca, we should pray,’ and they did, two earnest and contrite hearts seeking the right thing to do. They considered themselves neither arrogant nor unforgiving; all they sought was justice and sanctification, and in the end they resolved that Adriaan and Seena would have to leave: ‘They’re still young enough to build their own hut, they and that Canaanite Dikkop.’

  They rose early so as to be strengthened for the unpleasant scene that must ensue, but when they looked out to the meadow they found Adriaan and Dikkop already up, two horses laden with enough gear to last them for an extensive journey.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lodevicus demanded.

  ‘Seena!’ Adriaan shouted. ‘Come out here!’ And when the redhead appeared, her husband said, ‘Tell them.’

  She did: ‘He’s tired of your preaching. He’s ashamed to keep a hut in which his friend is not welcome. And he doesn’t like the new type of life you’re trying to force on us.’

  ‘What is he going to do?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘He and Dikkop are going up to the Zambezi River.’ The blank look on her son’s face betrayed the fact that he had no idea of where such a river might be. ‘The Swede told us about it. It’s up there.’ And with a careless wave of her arm she indicated a wild river of the imagination some fifteen hundred miles to the north.

  ‘And you?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘I’ll stay here. This is my farm, you know.’

  And in those few words Seena underlined the impossible situation that faced the young Van Doorns. They could not force his mother off this farm, nor could they in decency abandon her here. They would have to share the hut with her until her husband returned. ‘How long will you be gone?’ Lodevicus asked in chastened voice.

  ‘Three years,’ Adriaan said, and with a flick of his whip he started his oxen north.

  It was in October 1766, when Adriaan was at the advanced age of fifty-four, that he and Dikkop left. They took with them sixteen reserve oxen, four horses, a tent, extra guns, more ammunition than they would probably need, sacks of flour and four bags of biltong. They wore the rough homemade cloths of the veld and carried a precious tin box containing Boer farm remedies, medicinal herbs and leaves, their value learned through generations of experience.

  They moved slowly at first, seven or eight miles a day, then ten, then fifteen. They let themselves be diverted by almost anything: an unusual tree, a likelihood of animals. Often they camped for weeks at a time at some congenial spot, replenished their biltong and moved on.

  As the two went slowly north, they saw wonders that no settler had ever seen before: rivers of magnitude, and vast deserts waiting to explode into flowers, and most interesting of all, a continual series of small hills, each off to itself, perfectly rounded at the base as if some architect had placed them in precisely the right position. Often the top had been planed away, forming mesas as flat as a table. Occasionally Adriaan and Dikkop would climb such a hill for no purpose at all except to scout the landscape ahead, and they would see only an expanse so vast that the eye could not encompass it, marked with these repetitious little hills, some rounded, some with their tops scraped flat.

  In the second month of their wandering, after they had rafted their luggage wagon across a stream the Hottentots called Great River, later to be named the Orange, they entered upon those endless plains leading into the heartland, and late one afternoon at a fountain they came upon the first band of human beings, a group of little Bushmen who fled as they approached. Throughout that long night Adriaan and Dikkop stayed close to the wagons, guns loaded, peering into the darkness apprehensively. Just after dawn one of the little men showed himself, and Adriaan made a major decision. With Dikkop covering him, he left his own gun against the wheel of the wagon, stepped forward unarmed, and indicated with friendly gestures that he came in peace.

  At the invitation of the Bushmen, Adria
an and Dikkop stayed at that fountain for a week, during which Adriaan learned many good things about the ones his fellow Dutchmen called ‘daardie diere’ (those animals), and nothing so impressed him as when he was allowed to accompany them on a hunt, for he witnessed remarkable skill and sensitivity in tracking. The Bushmen had collected a large bundle of hides, which Dikkop learned would be taken ‘three moons to the north’ for trade with people who lived there.

  Since the travelers were also headed in that general direction, they joined the Bushmen, and twice during the journey saw clusters of huts in the distance, but the Bushmen shook their heads and kept the caravan moving deeper into the plains till they reached the outlying kraals of an important chief’s domain.

  The Bushmen ran ahead to break the news of the white stranger, so that at the first village Adriaan was greeted with intense curiosity and some tittering, rather than the fear which might have been expected. The blacks were pleased that he showed special interest in their huts, impressed by the sturdy, rounded workmanship in stone and clay and the walls four to five feet high that surrounded their cattle kraals. As he told Dikkop, ‘These are better than the huts you and I live in.’

  News of their arrival spread to the chief’s kraal and he sent an escort of headmen and warriors to bring these strangers before him. The meeting was grave, for Adriaan was the first white man these blacks had seen; they came to know him well, for he stayed with them two months. They were excited when he demonstrated gunpowder by tossing a small handful on an open fire, where it flamed violently. The chief was terrified at first, but after he mastered the trick, he delighted in using it to frighten his people.

  ‘How many are you?’ Adriaan asked one night.

  The chief pointed to the compass directions, then to the stars. There were so many people in this land.

  When Adriaan studied the communities he was permitted to see, it became obvious to him that these people were not recent arrivals in the area. Their present settlements, the ruins of past locations, their ironwork traded from the north, their copious use of tobacco—all signaled long occupancy. He was especially charmed by the glorious cloaks the men made from animal skins softened like chamois. He liked their fields of sorghum, pumpkins, gourds and beans. Their pottery was well formed, and their beads, copied from those brought to Zimbabwe three hundred years earlier, were beautiful. He accepted their presence on the high veld as naturally as he accepted the herds of antelope that browsed near the fountains.