The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  It was always this way when generations clashed: the best of the old found it easy to appreciate the merits of those among the new who displayed integrity. It was the second echelons, deficient in understanding and empathy, who caused the trouble, and now Lodevicus was prepared to do just that.

  It was the second expedition against the Bushmen which demonstrated how stonelike he had become and how justly he merited the title Hammer. This time there had been no massive theft of cattle, only the constant spiriting away of a cow here, an ox there, but all farmers in the region were enraged with the little brown men, and when Lodevicus said, ‘They’re like vermin. Periodically they have to be exterminated,’ they agreed, and once more a commando was sent north to cleanse the area.

  On this expedition no rhinoceros was used as bait, and for good reason: there were now no herds of large animals in the region; most had been killed off or driven away. Rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, zebra, those glorious beasts who had roamed these hills had vanished before the horse and gun, and now these dreadful weapons were to be turned against the Bushmen.

  What Lodevicus did was separate his commando into three groups operating like a vast pinwheel, riding in circles that tightened toward the center, and as the men rode they watched for little brown men who might be trapped within their circle. As the bewildered Bushmen ran this way and that in sad confusion, the horsemen picked them off, one by one. There was no mass slaughter of ninety, as before, but only the deadly attrition of knocking down running targets—until two hundred were slain.

  Adriaan, remembering his friendship with the Bushmen, had spoken against the hunt, but he had been ignored. He was appalled at its inhumanity, and when one old man, hampered by a kind of belt he wore, stumbled about in confusion, Adriaan rode to rescue him, but Lodevicus swept in, lowered his rifle, and killed the man.

  ‘What have you done?’ Adriaan cried.

  ‘We’re clearing the land,’ Vicus shouted from his horse.

  ‘Damn you! Look at him!’ And Adriaan dismounted to inspect the dead man’s belt, and found it to be of rhinoceros hide imbedded with eight tips of eland horn. Holding the belt aloft, he cried, ‘What is it, Vicus? Tell me, what is it?’

  His son reined in his horse, rode back, and looked contemptuously at the leather. ‘Seems like a belt.’

  ‘Dip your finger into one of the horns,’ and when he did, the finger came out a deep-stained blue.

  ‘What is it, Vicus?’ And when his son said he didn’t know, Adriaan cried in pain, ‘They’re the pots of an artist. Who paints the living veld on the roof of the cave. And you murdered him.’ Looking up at his mounted son, he said with bitter scorn, ‘Lodevicus the Hammer. I won’t share my house with you one day longer.’

  ‘It’s my house,’ Lodevicus said. ‘I built it.’

  Whereupon the old man cried in terrible rage, ‘Read the Bible you prate about! It was Abraham’s house as long as he lived. But you’ve tainted it … with red blood … and blue paint. And I’ll have no more of it.’

  Turning his back on his son, he mounted his horse, hurried over the hills, and shouted as he rode into De Kraal, ‘Seena! Come on, old Redhead. Get yourself ready to leave this pitiful place.’

  ‘Good!’ she shouted back. ‘Where do we go?’

  ‘I’ll find a place,’ he assured her, and at sixty-five the old wanderers began scouting far lands to determine where they would build their own hut.

  In 1778 the Hollanders who came to Cape Town to govern the colony, spending temporary terms in a land that confused them, gave honest proof of their desire to administer the area justly, for they devised a solution to frontier problems that was more humane and considerate than any being offered at this time by either the British or the French in their colonies. The governor himself trekked all the way from Cape Town, on horseback and by slow oxcart, to talk with trekboers like the Van Doorns and native chieftains like Guzaka, and after painful consideration of what was best for all, sent an emissary back to De Kraal with a written order that was concise and unmistakable:

  We have decided that the only practical solution to the problem of having settled white farmers mingling with roaming black herdsmen is to separate the two groups severely and permanently. This will provide justice and security for each segment, leaving each free to develop as it deems best. Since the Compagnie plans to import no new settlers, and since the blacks certainly have sufficient land for their purposes, we order that each shall stay in their present places and move no farther. There shall be no contact of any kind between white and black.

  The Great Fish River shall be the permanent dividing line between the races, and a strict policy of apartness shall be maintained, now and forever. No white man shall move east of the Great Fish. No black man shall move west. In this manner, peace can be maintained perpetually.

  When the emissary rejoined the governor’s party he was able to state with assurance: ‘The frontier problem is settled. There can never again be conflict, because each side will keep to its own bank of the river.’

  The day after he said this, Adriaan van Doorn loaded his wagon, handed his wife a walking stick, and bade farewell to his son’s family. To Rebecca he said with sorrow, ‘You and Lodevicus have set a course so harsh I cannot follow. May your God give you strength to finish it.’

  ‘He’s your God, too.’

  ‘Mine is a gentler God,’ he said, but when this rebuke caused blood to leave her face, he kissed her and said, ‘The world throws up mountains, and sometimes we must live in separated valleys.’

  And he forded the river and built his hut right in the center of the area which the governor had promised would never again be touched by white men.

  When Xhosa spies informed Guzaka that a trekboer had violated the order before it was seven days old, he concluded that the only reasonable response was warfare, so he assembled a party and led his men in a swift charge that engulfed the trespass hut.

  Before Adriaan could reach for his gun, assegais flashed and Seena was dead. Swinging the butt of his rifle, he tried to beat off the attackers, but they overwhelmed him, and when his arms were pinioned, Guzaka lunged at him with a spear.

  Now Lodevicus became indeed the Hammer, exacting a terrible revenge. Inflamed by the knowledge that it had been he who forced his parents’ exodus, he confessed his guilt to no one, but led his commandos far across the Great Fish, rampaging deep into Xhosa lands, destroying forever the hopeful truce the governor had arranged. He burned and slaughtered, and for every cow the Xhosa had stolen, he took back a hundred. With flashing guns he rode against unmounted men armed only with spears, shouting, ‘Kill! Kill!’

  When he returned to De Kraal he claimed, in his apologetic report to the governor, that he had been lured across the Great Fish by Xhosa infamy, but that the border was now secured for all time. Although he convinced the governor, he was not persuasive with Guzaka, who heard of this report, and now it was he who planned revenge.

  ‘Every kraal must be destroyed,’ he thundered at night meetings, and if Vicus van Doorn had sought retribution after the death of his parents, Guzaka wanted nothing less than extermination.

  It was, in most respects, as uneven a war as would ever be pursued in Africa, with each side having outrageous advantages. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of one hundred to one and could extirpate any single white farm; but the whites possessed guns and horses, and when the latter galloped through a kraal, they spread such terror that one white gunman could methodically reload and shoot a dozen fleeing natives.

  It was a confusion, a clash of interests that could not even be defined. Guzaka was committed to moving his cattle slowly onward, as his people had been doing for eight hundred years, while Lodevicus felt that God Himself had ordered him to establish on the far bank of the Fish River a Christian community obedient to the rules of John Calvin. Land ownership was a constant problem, Guzaka’s tribe having always held their land in generality and believing that they were entitled to every lush pasturag
e reaching to the Cape, while the trekboers cherished a tradition which their Dutch forebears had defended with their lives: that a man’s farm merited the same respect as a man’s soul.

  It was impossible to detect at any moment in this vast struggle who was winning. At the beginning of 1778 Guzaka gained a signal victory by razing the hut of Adriaan van Doorn, but in the spring of that year Vicus retaliated with his famous ‘tobacco commando.’ Recalling his tactics with the Bushmen, when he used a rhinoceros to wipe them out, he scattered tobacco on the ground a Xhosa war party would traverse; when they bent to grab at this prize, they perished in a hail of lead. In 1779 recognized warfare erupted, black regiments pitted against white field forces, and this was repeated in 1789 and 1799, bloody preludes to the more terrible wars that would continue through the next century.

  During the battles Lodevicus never equated the Xhosa with the Bushmen, those troublesome little animals that had to be exterminated. Since the Xhosa were large men like himself, they commanded respect. As he told Rebecca, after one arduous expedition, ‘When we pacify them, they’ll be good Kaffirs.’

  Guzaka had no intention of becoming a good Kaffir. Six separate times he threw his warriors against De Kraal, still convinced that if he could humble it, he could break the spirit of the trekboers, and six times the protecting hills enabled the embattled farmers to repel the invaders, and in the chase that always followed, to massacre them. But on the seventh try, in 1788, Guzaka and his warriors broke into the valley unexpectedly and came upon Rebecca van Doorn as she was going from the cattle byre to her house. With flashing assegais they cut her down, and she died before Lodevicus could reach her.

  In contrast to the rage he felt at the similar death of his mother and father, this time he fell silent, brooding upon the harsh fact that God was not giving him the easy victories Dominee Specx had spoken of in those exciting days of revelation at Swellendam. He was also plagued by memories of that morning when his wife and mother resorted to the Bible to answer the question of what would happen when the Xhosa struck, and the mocking words reverberated: ‘An hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight.’ One of that ten thousand, the damned Guzaka, had killed his father, his mother and his wife. The New Jerusalem had not been established on the far side of the Great Fish; the Canaanites had not been expelled from the house of the Lord; indeed, they seemed to be chopping that house to bits.

  And then, in the depth of his despair, when it seemed that his mission and that of the trekboers had been completely frustrated, God visited him again, in the person of a girl of nineteen who came riding alone into De Kraal on the back of a white horse. She was Wilhelmina Heimstra, from one of the irreverent families down by the sea, and her mission was forthright: ‘I cannot live in idolatry. I cannot exist without the presence of God.’

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Lodevicus said. ‘I have no wife.’

  ‘That’s why I came,’ the girl said. ‘When the messenger told us that the Xhosa had killed Rebecca, whom I knew …’

  Lodevicus, then forty-nine, the Hammer of the frontier, stood silent. In all the territory he commanded there was no predikant to give direction, not even a sick-comforter other than himself, and he did not know what to do. But then he recalled the patristic figures of the Old Testament and how often they had been faced by such problems on their lonely frontiers: older men without wives, heads of families with no one to assist them, and his mind fell especially on Abraham, that first great trekboer:

  And Sarah was an hundred and seven and twenty years old … and Sarah died … and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her … Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah.

  It became apparent that God had sent this girl to comfort him in his old age, but the problem of how a Christian marriage could be performed without a cleric was perplexing. ‘You cannot stay here, when I have been so demanding of others that they follow in righteous paths.’

  ‘You demanded, Lodevicus, that’s true, but no one obeyed. Everyone to the south lives as they always lived. I’m the one who listened and obeyed.’

  This was so similar to his own experience, when Predikant Specx, now dead three years, had preached to scores who did not listen, and to one who did, that Lodevicus had to be impressed, and when he looked at the flaxen-haired girl, so smiling and so different from rigorous Rebecca, he was tempted.

  It was really quite simple. Wilhelmina pointed out that since she could not very well return to the south, having run away, there was no alternative but for her to stay at De Kraal, and this she did, moving into the room that Adriaan and Seena had once occupied; and on the third night, as she slept, her door opened and Lodevicus said, ‘Are you willing to be married of God? Without a dominee to enter it in the books?’ and she replied, ‘Yes,’ and nine months and eight days later the boy Tjaart was born.

  In 1795 news reached De Kraal which stunned the Van Doorns, news so revolutionary that they had no base for comprehending it. A courier from Cape Town had dashed across the flats to Trianon, then over the mountains to Swellendam, then along the chain of farms to De Kraal, and wherever he stopped to give his report, men gasped: ‘But how could this have happened?’

  ‘All I know, it’s happened. Every Compagnie holding in South Africa has been surrendered to the English. We’re no longer attached to Holland. We’re citizens of England and must be obedient to her.’

  It was incomprehensible. These frontier farmers had only the vaguest notions of a revolution in France or of the new radical republic that now controlled Holland. They knew that France and England were at war, but they did not know that the new government sided with France while the old Royalists supported England. They were bewildered when they heard that their Prince of Orange, William V, had fled to London, and from that refuge had ceded the Cape to his English hosts.

  And what they heard next was even more confusing: ‘The English warships stood in the bay. But Colonel Gordon behaved valiantly.’

  ‘Was he English?’

  ‘No, Scot.’

  ‘What was he doing in the fort, fighting the English?’

  ‘He was a Dutchman, fighting for us.’

  ‘But you just said he was a Scot.’

  ‘His grandfather was, but he came to live in Holland. Our Gordon is a born Dutchman … joined something called the Scots Brigade.’

  ‘So the Scots made him a colonel, in Scotland?

  ‘No, the Scots Brigade is Dutch. We made him a colonel, and he was in command at the Castle.’

  ‘Did he drive away the English?’

  ‘No, he surrendered like a craven. Never fired one of our guns and invited the English to take everything.’

  ‘But you said he was brave.’

  ‘He was. Brave as a tiger defending her young. Because after the disgrace of surrender, he blew his brains out, as a brave man should.’

  Lodevicus and Wilhelmina asked the courier to go over the details again, and at the conclusion the courier returned to the astonishing truth: ‘This colony is now English. You are all to be confirmed in the ownership of your farms. And English soldiers will be here soon to establish peace on the border.’

  When the young messenger rode on, to spread his confusion among the other trekboers, Lodevicus assembled his family, and with little Tjaart upon his knee, tried to pick out the truths that would govern their new life: ‘What do we know about the English? Nothing.’

  ‘We know a great deal,’ his wife contradicted, bowing quickly to ask forgiveness for her impertinence. ‘We know they don’t follow the teachings of John Calvin. They’re little better than Catholics.’

  That was bad enough, but soon a man rode in from Swellendam announcing himself as a patriot, and he lectured the Van Doorns about America, where England had once had colonies and where the citizens had risen in revolt against English rule. ‘What I learned when I was in New York,’ he said, ‘is that when English magistrates come ashore, English troops are always ready to follow. Mark my words, you’ll see
Redcoats on your frontier before the year is out. They’ll not have Lodevicus van Doorn telling them how to handle Kaffirs.’

  From a corner of the room, where he had been sitting with Tjaart, Lodevicus spoke of the real problems facing the Dutch in Africa: ‘New rulers who have not our traditions will attempt to alter our church, recast it in their mold, destroy our ancient convictions. To preserve our integrity, we shall have to fight ten times as hard as we fight against the Xhosa. Because the English will be after our souls.

  ‘Since they do not speak our language, they’ll force us to speak theirs. They’ll issue their laws in English, import books printed in English, demand that we pray from their English Bible.’ Pointing like an Old Testament prophet at the various children in the room, he said with an ominous voice, ‘You will be told that you must not speak Dutch. That you must conduct your affairs in English.’

  In later years Tjaart would say, ‘First thing I remember in life, sitting in a dark room while my father thundered, “If my conqueror makes me speak his language, he makes me his slave. Resist him! Resist him!” ’

  And when the Redcoats came, followed by the magistrates, the Van Doorns did resist, and looked very foolish for having done so, because within a few years everything was thrown again into wild confusion, for the same messenger came galloping eastward over the same route with news more startling than the first: ‘We’re all Dutch again! England and Holland are allies, fighting a man called Napoleon Bonaparte. You can ignore English laws.’

  So the Redcoats were withdrawn; Van Doorn’s fears proved groundless; and life resumed its orderly way, which on the frontier meant without any order at all. Guzaka continued his raids across the Great Fish, and Vicus hammered him for his insolence. Killing became so commonplace that often it was not even reported to Swellendam.