The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  As he slogged his way south Adriaan began to feel his age, the weight of time, and idly he calculated the farms he had used up, the endless chain of animals he had bred and passed along, the huts he had lived in and never a house: ‘Swarts, I’m fifty-seven years old and never lived in a house with real walls.’ Then he braced his shoulders, crying even louder, ‘And by God, Swarts, I don’t want to live in one.’

  He came down off the great central highland of Africa—not defeated, but certainly not victorious. He could still walk many miles a day, but he did so more slowly, the dust of far places in his nostrils. From time to time he shouted into space, addressing only Swarts, for now he was truly Mal Adriaan, the crazy man of the veld who conversed with dead hyenas, but on he went, a few miles a day, always looking for the trail he had lost.

  When he broke through the mountains into unfamiliar terrain he calculated correctly that he must be a fair distance east of his farm, and he was about to turn westward to find it when he said, ‘Swarts! If they had any sense, they’d have moved to better land over there.’ And like earlier members of his family, he headed east.

  But when he reached the territory that ought to have contained the new farm, he found nothing, so he was faced with the problem of plunging blindly ahead into unknown territory or turning back, and after long consultation with Swarts he decided on the former: ‘Stands to reason, Swarts, they’d be wanting better pastures.’

  At the farthest edge of where he could imagine his family might have reached, he came upon the shabbiest hut he had yet seen, and in it lived a man and wife who had taken up their six thousand acres with only the meagerest chance of succeeding. They were the first white people Adriaan had seen since setting out, and he talked with them avidly: ‘You hear of any Van Doorns passing this way?’

  ‘They went.’

  ‘Which direction?’

  ‘East.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Before I got here.’

  ‘But you’re sure they went?’

  ‘We stayed in their old huts. Four months. Trekboer came through, told us they had gone.’

  Since Adriaan needed rest, he stayed with the couple for a short time, and one morning the woman asked, ‘Who’s this Swarts you keep talking to?’ and he replied, ‘Friend of mine.’

  After two weeks, during which the trekboer gave him a supply of ammunition, which he used to bring meat to the hut, Adriaan announced casually that he was about to try to locate his family. ‘How long you been gone?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘Where’d you say you were?’

  ‘M’popo,’ he said, using a name the blacks had taught him.

  ‘Never heard of it.’ For a moment Adriaan felt that he owed it to his hosts to explain, but upon reflection, realized that to do so adequately would require another two weeks, so he departed with no further comment.

  On and on he went, well past the place where he had met Sotopo, the Xhosa, and one morning as he reached the crest of a substantial line of hills he looked down to see something which disturbed him greatly; it was a valley comprising some nine thousand acres and completely boxed in by hills. ‘It’s a prison!’ he cried, alarmed that people would willingly submit themselves to such confinement.

  What dismayed him especially was that at the center, beside a lively stream that ran from the southwest to the northeast, escaping through a cleft in the hills, stood not the usual Van Doorn huts but solid buildings constructed of clay and stone. Whoever had planned this tight enclave intended to occupy it not for the ordinary ten years, but for a lifetime. It represented a change of pattern so drastic that in one swift glance Adriaan realized that his old trekboer days were ended, and he groaned at the error these people were making: Stone houses! Prisons within a prison! To reach this at the end of three years on the most glorious land in Africa was regrettable.

  But he still was not certain that this was his new farm until an older woman with fading red hair came out of the stone house and walked toward the barn. It was Seena. This stronghold was her home, and now it would be his.

  He did not call out to his wife, but he did say to Swarts, ‘We’ve come to the end, old fellow. Things we don’t understand …’ Slowly and without the jubilation he should have felt at reaching the end of so long a journey, he came down the hill, went to the door of the barn, and called, ‘Seena!’ She knew immediately who it was and left the gathering of eggs, running to him and hugging him as if he were a child. ‘Verdomde ou man,’ she cried. ‘You’re home!’

  After the children had screamed their greetings and Lodevicus, now a solid thirty, had come forth with Rebecca, Adriaan asked the adults, ‘How did our farm get to this place?’

  ‘We wanted security,’ Lodevicus explained. ‘The hills, you know.’

  ‘But why the stone houses?’

  ‘Because this is the last jump that can be made. Because on the other side of the Great Fish River the Xhosa wait.’

  ‘This is our permanent home,’ Rebecca said. ‘Like Swellendam, a foothold on the frontier.’

  ‘I saw a place up north. It had hills like this, but they were open. There was a lake, and it was open too. Animals from everywhere came to drink.’

  The younger Van Doorns were not interested in what their father had seen at the north, but that night when Adriaan and Seena went to their bed after the long absence she whispered, ‘What was it like?’ and all he could say was ‘It’s a beautiful country.’

  That had to stand for the thundering sunsets, the upside-down trees, the veld bursting in flowers, the great mountains to the east, the mysterious rivers to the north, but as he was about to close his eyes in sleep, he suddenly sat upright and cried, ‘God, Seena! I wish we were twenty … we could go to a place I saw … that lake … the antelope darkening the fields.’

  ‘Let’s go!’ she said without hesitation or fear.

  He laughed and kissed her. ‘Go to sleep. They’ll find it in time.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ones who come after.’

  Lodevicus and Rebecca never once asked about the northern lands; their preoccupation was in building a paradise at hand; but in the afternoons their children gathered with Adriaan to hear of Swarts, the cave with leaping giraffes on the ceiling, the boisterous blacks who danced at the flash of gunpowder, and of the place he called Vrijmeer.

  When the excitement of his return died down, the battle between Seena and Rebecca resumed, with each woman confiding to her husband at night that the other was intolerable, and Adriaan would lie awake listening to his wife’s litany of complaint: ‘She’s a nasty tyrant. She has a withered lemon for a heart. It’s her intention to run this entire area, and Lodevicus supports her.’

  He shared with her his impression upon first seeing their new home: ‘This room with its tight walls is a prison cell—within the stone house, which is the small prison, within these hateful hills, which form the biggest prison of all.’

  ‘No,’ she corrected. ‘The big prison is the ideas he wants to enforce. Every person on every farm must behave the way he says. You know, he’s started fighting with the Xhosa when they come over the river to feed their cattle.’

  When Adriaan asked his son about this, Lodevicus said, ‘Three times I’ve heard you speak poorly about having our farm within these hills. Well, war with the Xhosa is inevitable. They’re pressing westward more strongly each month, and soon we’ll have real warfare.’

  ‘Let them graze their cattle,’ Adriaan said.

  ‘They’ll never be content with that. Mark my words, Father, they’ll want everything. They’ll overrun this farm. That is, if it wasn’t protected by hills.’

  In 1776 Lodevicus was proved right, for a large group of Xhosa, led by Guzaka, son of that Sotopo with whom Adriaan had spent four days of friendship, became increasingly angered by the constant pressure from the white farmers.

  As in the beginning days of Dutch-Hottentot contact, when an attempt was made to confine the
settlement so as to avoid irritations, once again the Compagnie, trying vainly to rule an area already ten times greater than Holland, forbade any further barter with blacks. But on the frontier their proclamations were like sand thrown in the wind. Daring white men crossed into the lands occupied by those they called Kaffirs, Arabic for infidels, reasoning that it was simpler to fire their guns and take what land they needed rather than sit out a protracted bargaining session with the Xhosa. No bitter-almond hedge could possibly demark hundreds of miles of borderland; also, Sotopo’s people provoked rage, for, when the white men’s herds moved placidly within range, they reverted to old ways, sang old songs, sharpened their assegais, and shouted with glee as they stole the trekboers’ cattle.

  And so the battles began, the blacks claiming land which was theirs by hereditary right, the trekboers grabbing for the same land because it had been promised to the children of God.

  Guzaka’s men struck south, smiting an isolated farm not far from the sea, killing everyone and driving some five hundred cattle back across the Great Fish. They then rushed northward to the Van Doorn farm set among hills, recognizing it as the major impediment to their westward expansion.

  ‘It will not be easy,’ Guzaka warned his men.

  ‘You said that about the other farm,’ one said.

  ‘It was not defended. At this place there are the hills.’

  ‘Which means they’re trapped inside.’

  ‘It could mean something else,’ Guzaka cautioned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That we will not be able to break in.’

  ‘We have so many. They have so few.’

  ‘But they have the guns.’

  ‘The others had guns.’

  ‘But only two to use them. Here there will be many.’

  ‘Are you afraid, Guzaka?’

  ‘I am,’ and before the others could ask if they should turn back, he added, ‘But we must wipe out this farm, or it will oppose us always.’

  It was he who led the charge down the eastern hill, coming first to the cattle byres and the other small buildings, and it was here that the Xhosa met their punishing taste of what real trekboers could do in defense of a farm. From crannies that the blacks could not have anticipated, gunfire snapped at them, cutting and killing until they had to retreat. No invader even came near the house.

  On the hillside, surveying what amounted to the first trekboer fort, Guzaka and his men consulted on what to do, and their leader reminded them: ‘I told you this would be different.’ He did not yet know that his father’s friend, Adriaan of the Van Doorns, occupied the stone house, nor would he have recognized the name had it been spoken, but he carried in the back of his mind stories his father had told of that compelling meeting with the white man and of the man’s capacities. Guzaka understood that there were degrees in manhood and that the futile defenders of that first farm stood rather low on the rod of measurement. The men in this house resembled more the one that Sotopo had encountered.

  ‘Shall we turn back?’ his men asked.

  ‘No. Then they would think it was too easy to defeat us. We will attack from two quarters.’ And he devised a plan whereby one group would come down the eastern hill, while a larger body would swing in from the south.

  In the stone house Adriaan said, ‘They’re not stupid. This time they’ll come at us from two directions.’ Looking at the hills and the position of the stream, which though small would prove difficult to ford under gunfire, he concluded that they would have to come in from the south, so along that wall he stationed three of his guns.

  ‘But they’ll try the east again,’ he warned. ‘Just to test us.’ So he alone went to the byre, satisfied that the number of eastern invaders would be smaller than before.

  When Guzaka saw that his own groups were in position, he gave the signal and dashed for the outlying building; to his delight, there was no gunfire, so with a wild yell he urged his men on to the house, but when they were abreast of the cattle byre, a deadly fusillade struck from the flank, and two of his men fell.

  Then from the south wall of the house, gunfire erupted, and that invading contingent was also thrown back.

  When the Xhosa regrouped on the eastern hill it was obvious that this farm could not be taken. Turning away from that stronghold, the blacks forded the stream well east of the house, rounded up such cattle as grazed in the far fields, and retreated through the northeast opening.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ Lodevicus warned. ‘Not today, but they’ll know that ours is the kraal that must be reduced.’

  ‘Kraal?’ Adriaan asked.

  ‘This refuge enclosed by hills,’ and from that time on the farm was called De Kraal, the protected place.

  The trekboers, having lost none and slain seven, should have celebrated, but they didn’t, for old animosities between Seena and Rebecca continued to smolder, always ready to burst into flame. Usually the brawls involved religion, with Seena ridiculing her daughter-in-law’s stern devotion and Rebecca complaining of her mother-in-law’s agnosticism. No compromise seemed possible, and when the old folk were alone, Seena resumed her pestering: ‘Let’s leave and build a little hut where we can live the way we used to. I’m tired of having the Bible thrown at me.’

  ‘It’s being thrown at your father, too,’ he said, referring to the rumor that a military expedition had been sent to eliminate Rooi van Valck’s outlaw empire. Some even claimed that Rooi had been hanged.

  Seena doubted this: ‘They’d have to catch him first. And then they’d have to get a rope around his neck. Not many at the Cape would like to try.’

  ‘If you’d be more patient with Rebecca,’ Adriaan began, whereupon his wife gave him a lesson on the future of South Africa: ‘She’ll never let up. With her quiet manners she’ll press on and on. The way her father did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He came here singing Psalms. Accomplished nothing with you and me. But he worked on Lodevicus, sowing seeds. And later on he trapped him.’

  ‘What do you truly think of our son?’

  ‘He’s going to grow stronger every day. As a boy he was like a piece of soft limestone lying in water. You can cut it with your fingernail. But when it stands clear of the water, and dries in the sun, it becomes harder than granite, and no one can cut it. Rebecca and Vicus, they’ll form a terrible partnership.’

  As she uttered this prediction, Rebecca was arguing with her husband: ‘Vicus, I know I’ve said it many times before, but I can no longer tolerate that woman. I can’t have her godlessness continue to contaminate my house.’

  ‘In point of fact,’ Lodevicus said, ‘the house is hers and my father’s, not yours.’

  ‘Very well, we’ll leave it to them and go build our own.’

  ‘But I worked three years building these walls. Be patient. They can’t live forever.’ Lodevicus was hardening, but he had not yet reached the point at which he could throw his parents out of their own house.

  Rebecca was sterner: ‘God has directed you and me to bring a new order into a pagan land. We’re to form a new life here among the trekboers. We’re to raise children according to the Holy Book and not the way that godless old woman raised you and the others.’ When Vicus started to protest, she silenced him: ‘Don’t you realize that God performed a miracle so that you could be saved? Suppose Father had not stopped at your farm to plant the holy seed? Suppose you had not visited Swellendam to have it nurtured? You’ve been set aside for a noble mission, and we cannot allow it to be diverted.’

  Of the four adults engaged in this continuing battle, Mal Adriaan was the only one who saw its dimensions clearly, for he possessed a childlike simplicity which he was willing to turn even upon himself: ‘I’m a man of the past, Seena. There’s no place in this family for wanderers. Frightened people want to retreat into stone forts.’ When his wife asked what he thought of her, he laughed. ‘You’re a pagan. Daughter of a pagan. There’ll be no place for pagans in the world Vicus and Rebecca are buildin
g.’

  As for Lodevicus, Adriaan supposed that Seena had been correct when she described him as limestone-about-to-become-granite: ‘I don’t think I’ll like the finished result. Too stiff, too unforgiving. And I pity those who cross him.’

  Rebecca he saw with unflinching clarity: he sensed that she had declared war upon Seena and him and was probably agitating for their expulsion; but he also saw that she was an exceptional woman whom he might have wanted to marry had he been younger. She was passionate and clean and shining, like a white stone at the bottom of a moving river. Her courage merited enormous respect, for in her zeal to discipline the trekboer world, which he had to admit was lawless, she was like some great mother elephant crashing through the underbush, headed for a destination which she alone perceived, and nothing would stop her. That she felt herself to be driven by God only made her more formidable. She was not cruel, nor did she try to overwhelm her opposition; like a cascade running to the sea, she simply kept moving in her predestined direction.

  She would be the inner strength of the new religion developing in South Africa, the silent woman who sat serene in church while the men roared and ranted and announced the Psalms to be sung; but in the privacy of the home it would be she who determined what the day-to-day applications of that public religion were to be, and if ever the men carelessly fumbled their way toward some wrongdoing, she would summon them back to the stern path of duty. She would be against change, against relaxation, against new ideas from abroad, against any bizarre interpretation at home. She would form the granite core of the church, and her quiet teaching would prevail.

  In short, Adriaan had grown to respect his daughter-in-law not only as the inexorable force of the future but also as the hard-grained, just human being who was needed at this moment in history. She was a stalwart wife, a compassionate mother; he liked her caustic wit and her capacity to hew to a single line. She was, all told, a good woman, and if she opposed him, the fault must be his.