The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Tjaart’s attention to these grievances was diverted when his daughter Minna, about to deliver her first child, became persuaded that because of her husband’s imperfect appearance, her baby would be a misshapen monster: ‘I can feel him in my belly. He’s fighting to get out. Because he’s grotesque and evil.’

  She became so convinced that she was about to bear some hideous thing, and that the fault was her husband’s, that she could not tolerate his presence. ‘I look at him,’ she whimpered, ‘and all I see in that crookbackt. Then he stares at me like a wounded bird and I see that pitiful eye, always weeping. God cursed him, and now Theunis has passed the curse along to our son.’

  She often became hysterical, and when Tjaart heard of her rantings he grew angry: ‘Damnit, Minna, thousands of women have babies every year. Mevrouw Bronk has how many?’

  ‘This wife has twelve’—Minna sniffed—‘but her husband is a whole man.’

  ‘So is your husband. He saved your life, didn’t he?’

  ‘He couldn’t even fire a gun. Mama had to. I know my son is going to be all bent and twisted.’

  Her obsession grew so strong that as time for delivery approached, Theunis had to leave the poor hut that served as their temporary home, taking residence with a Du Toit family that had three boys in school. These boys heard about their teacher’s troubles at home, and even the cause, and rowdier lads began to torment Nel, but when Tjaart heard of this he stormed into the school, brusquely told Theunis to wait outside, and threatened to thrash the entire student body if there was any more of this nonsense.

  ‘Your teacher is my friend,’ he growled. ‘A good, decent man, and as you’ve been whispering, he’s going to be a father in a few days.’

  ‘Du Toit says the thing’s going to be a monster.’

  ‘Who’s Du Toit?’ And when that boy stood, Tjaart rushed at him, stopping with his face close to the boy’s: ‘If I hit you, you’d bounce through that wall.’

  No one laughed, for the menace was real. But immediately Tjaart relaxed and said quietly, ‘Du Toit, go fetch the master.’ And when the bewildered teacher returned, dabbing at his eye, Tjaart said, ‘Boys, his son will be my grandson. And my father was Lodevicus the Hammer. We raise only the best.’

  He quieted the schoolboys but not his daughter, and now her apprehensions contaminated him, so that when Minna was about to have her baby, and women filled the hut, he fell into a sweat greater than any he had known when his own children were being born. As he paced near the doorway during the agonizing wait, he could see ill-formed cripples drifting across his vision, and he prayed that this child would be whole: God, this is an empty land. We need all the young ones we can get, and we need them strong.

  Cries came from inside, then women running out: ‘A beautiful baby girl!’

  Brushing people out of his way, he rushed into the hut, then slowly went to the cot and picked up the naked infant. Holding it aloft by its heels, he inspected it from all angles, satisfied himself that it was perfect, then returned it gently to Minna’s arms: ‘Thank you, daughter. Not a blemish. I must tell Theunis.’

  He galloped the miles to the school, where he crashed into the room, shouting, ‘Theunis! It’s a girl. Perfect in every detail.’ Then he pointed at the Du Toit boy who had led the disturbances: ‘You, fetch some water.’ For although Theunis was grinning happily, it was apparent that he might faint.

  The Boer frontiersmen could have withstood the drought and resisted the renewed Xhosa incursions, but now the English government insulted them with the disgraceful business of the slave payments. The Van Doorns and their Boer neighbors had been long prepared for the ultimate freeing of their slaves, and they did not object in principle, but they did sometimes wonder why England was so insistent when countries equally moral—Holland, the United States, for example—were content to hold on to their slaves.

  What happened was difficult to explain and impossible to justify. The English Parliament, even though Sir Peter Saltwood, M.P., as manager of the bill had promised otherwise, refused to provide the £3,000,000 which would have compensated the Cape slaveholders for their financial losses. Such a miserly amount was voted that Tjaart would receive for his six legally owned slaves not the £600 promised, but a grudging £180. And then, because the rules were mindful of London-based magnates with vast holdings in the West Indies, it was stipulated that no Cape farmer could receive even his diminished allowance unless he traveled personally to London to collect it.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Tjaart said, endeavoring to unravel these incredible instructions.

  ‘It’s simple,’ Lukas de Groot said as he listened to the law with a group of Boers. ‘Instead of six hundred pounds, you get one-third. And to get this, you have to trek to Cape Town, six weeks, then take a ship to London, four months, then back by ship, then trek back home. Better part of a year.’ And the reader added, ‘Look at this line at the bottom.’ There it was: Any claimant who comes to London must pay a filing fee of £1-10-6 per slave to cover the cost of drafting the papers.

  Tjaart was outraged. Under these insane regulations, there could not be in the entire region east of Stellenbosch one Boer slaveowner who could collect the compensation due him, and it became obvious that this had been London’s intention. Who could absent himself from his farm for most of a year? And who, if he did get to London, could argue before the claims court in English, the required language?

  It was such a gross injustice that it encouraged a brood of unsavory types to circulate through the hinterlands, offering to buy up the farmers’ rights at nine shillings to the pound; some of these scavengers were Englishmen who had failed at proper work and who saw this as a device for paying their passage back to London. The chances that any Boer would receive his funds from this gang of thieves was remote. ‘But look, Tjaart,’ one of them weasled, ‘I make the trek to Cape Town for you. I sail to London for you, I spend days in the claims courts and urge your case in English. I earn my fee.’

  ‘But the government owes me the whole amount,’ Tjaart argued in Dutch. ‘Why should I have to pay you more than fifty per centum?’

  ‘Because you will be here, on a farm, and I’ll be in London, in court.’

  ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘It’s the law,’ the would-be agent said with a bland smile, and Tjaart, realizing how impotent he was to press his legal rights, would probably have accepted the offer and received less than one-sixth of what he had originally been promised had not a deputation ridden in from Grahamstown to prevent this injustice.

  It was composed of three Englishmen at whose side Tjaart had fought in the Xhosa war, and two of them were his special friends: Saltwood and Carleton. ‘Have you signed any papers?’ Saltwood cried as he rode in.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God. Now you, sir, leave this district or be horsewhipped.’

  ‘I have my rights,’ the man whined.

  With a snap of his short hippopotamus whip, Saltwood flicked the intruder’s saddle and called to Carleton, ‘Show him what you can do.’ And with a somewhat longer whip the wagon builder also struck the saddle.

  ‘You’d better ride on,’ Saltwood said, and when the man started to protest that he had legal rights, Saltwood snapped his whip and caught him on the leg. ‘Thief, ride out of here,’ he said, and the man, now thoroughly frightened, hurried away. Throwing threats, but only after he was at a safe distance from the whips, he started across country to other farms whose rights he would try to buy at nine shillings to the pound.

  ‘Disgraceful,’ Saltwood said as he explained what he and Carleton were proposing to their Boer friends: ‘You’ve been our good allies. Without you we’d have no town back there, and we can’t stand by and see you robbed. So you give us your claims and I’ll send them to my brother in Parliament. I promise you nothing, Tjaart, except an honest deal. We may win, we may not, but at least you have a chance.’

  As they were discussing the matter, Carleton happened to see Van Doorn’s sco
rched wagon and identified it as one of his: ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘Traded for it at Graaff-Reinet.’

  ‘You should have come to me. I’d have given you a proper price.’

  ‘My sheep were in Graaff-Reinet.’

  Carleton picked up one of the charred timbers and pointed to a small rubric carved into the wood: TC–36 (Thomas Carleton–Wagon 36). Had he been satisfied to work rapidly and without careful attention, this wagon might have been numbered in the 80s.

  ‘You’ll need a new wagon,’ he said. ‘When you trek north.’

  Tjaart looked at him strangely. First it had been Jakoba, years ago; then Saltwood, when they were returning from the Xhosa war; and now Carleton—all saying that the Van Doorns must emigrate north, as though there were no alternative.

  ‘Who’s trekking north?’ he asked.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Hendrick Potgieter departed last week.’

  ‘For where?’

  ‘The north. That’s all he said.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No, he had forty or fifty people with him. Sarel Cilliers left with him, you know. And Louis Trichardt left with Van Rensburg. Months ago. Maybe ninety people and seventy or eighty servants.’

  Tjaart felt weak. Things were happening at a speed and magnitude he could not comprehend, and reluctantly he conceded that perhaps his neighbors were right.

  Saltwood said, ‘We thought that if men like you and Piet Retief do finally decide to leave us, you must not depart with ill feelings toward us. Hell, Tjaart, you fought with us—side by side.’

  So an agreement was made, whereby Saltwood took the warrants of several Boers—among them, Van Doorn and De Groot—promising to send them to Sir Peter in London to collect whatever the government might allow, but in order for the transaction to be legal, it was necessary for the Boers to sign away their rights for one shilling each, relying upon the good faith of their English friends. This the men did with absolute assurance that an honest reporting would be made, for the participants in this arrangement had fought as brothers in defense of their homes. That the Boers were now thinking of quitting those homes was as distressing to the Englishmen as it was to the Boers themselves.

  * * *

  Tjaart was deeply moved by the sympathy shown by Saltwood and Carleton during their visit to his still-ruined farm. In the war he had volunteered to protect the English establishments, yet the government had shown itself powerless to save Boer farms; hundreds had been ravaged, and now the government sided with the Kaffirs. However, he was convinced that the Grahamstown fighters like Saltwood genuinely sought his friendship and deplored the losses they had suffered. As he moved among the charred timbers of his barn he pondered seriously what he should do. Seeking Jakoba’s counsel, he asked, ‘Shall we build a new house?’

  ‘We must go north,’ she said bluntly. ‘To seek free land.’

  When Lukas and Rachel de Groot came south to report on the sad condition of their farm they fortified Jakoba’s advice: ‘We haven’t the heart to build again. We’re leaving.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Cross the Orange River. Then down into Natal.’

  ‘I think I shall stay here,’ Tjaart said deliberately. ‘This is a good farm in a good region. I think the English will govern it well, one day.’

  When the De Groots volunteered to stay and help him rebuild, he had an opportunity to see what a fine lad their boy Paulus had become. He was four, a stocky little man who wore heavy trousers like his father’s. His copious blond hair was cut straight across his forehead, bobbing this way and that when he ran, and his sturdy limbs indicated the strength he already had.

  In the repairs to the farm the boy took to himself many tasks that might have gone to men, such as struggling with broken timbers and keeping the cattle to their proper areas. Tjaart, looking at the lad, thought: How splendid it would be if that boy married Minna’s daughter. But when his thoughts ran in this pattern they were sooner or later diverted to that dazzling girl up north, Aletta Naudé, and he wondered if he would ever see her again. He pictured the inadequacy of Ryk, and imagined various ways in which he might come to a bad end: he proved a coward and Xhosa slew him; he stole money and an English officer shot him; he led a hunting party and an elephant crushed him. Always he disappeared, leaving Aletta to be saved by Tjaart van Doorn. The years would pass, but she would never age; never do household tasks. She was forever the nubile girl he had seen in her father’s shop at Graaff-Reinet.

  That name came up in the conversation quite often these days. From the first Theunis Nel had felt uncomfortable about living with a girl to whom he was not married, and when she became pregnant he felt downright immoral. But now that he was the father of the beautiful girl Sybilla, he began to nag Tjaart about taking the family to Nachtmaal, ‘so that we can become acceptable in the sight of the Lord.’ But Tjaart had no wagon and he was loath to borrow a neighbor’s; still, Theunis was so insistent in his desire to sanctify his marriage, that Tjaart had to respect him, for in his own marriages he had experienced the same emotion. He was not an overly religious man, and certainly his two wives were rugged, rough women accustomed to frontier exigencies, but they had felt vaguely uneasy until their marriages were solemnized; there was something about living with a person of the other sex which had mysterious overtones: the passing of the month, the spacing of fertility, the birth of a child, the establishment of a home, the blessing of a barn to prevent lightning. These mysteries deserved attention, and prudent men gauged their lives accordingly. If Theunis Nel, a man of God, found himself enmeshed in these human complications and sought verification, Tjaart van Doorn was not going to ridicule him, even though sanctification lay ninety-two miles away, with no wagon to cover the distance.

  Slowly, slowly in the rugged mind of this stubborn Boer his enthusiasm for rebuilding De Kraal waned and another stratagem began to coalesce: If we did go to Nachtmaal, Theunis and Minna could be married and Sybilla baptized, and we’d already be well on our way to the north. Three days’ turning to the east, we’d be on the track the others took. The De Groots could ride in their good wagon. And I’m sure he’d help me build something usable on the burned frame.

  Once he came close to weeping when he thought of that fine wagon, charred to dust in the ruin of his farm. But something could be built. The rims of the wheels were there, some of the fittings.

  Very cautiously he said to Theunis, ‘You are right. We must have a marriage and a baptism. In Graaff-Reinet.’ That’s all that was said, but everyone within the enfolding hills at De Kraal understood that the Van Doorns were preparing to abandon the farm they had spent sixty years in perfecting. The women began to sort away things for which they would have no space. The men sold off the weaker cattle. And little Paulus, approaching five, carried a hammer and banged away at everything.

  No one mentioned a date for their leaving, but someone said casually that Nachtmaal would start in seven weeks. No one picked up the comment, yet day by day departure became more inevitable, and one day when Tjaart came upon his wife gathering eggs he saw that she was close to weeping. ‘What a woman! You shout at me, “Go north!” and when I start, you weep.’ She denied this.

  He had a bad moment himself one morning when two Coloured herdsmen shouted, ‘Baas! Baas! Look what come!’ There, entering the farmlands from the hills at the southwest, came seventeen sable antelope, the most beautiful creatures in Africa, stately dark animals with white blazes across their faces and incredible scimitar horns that curved backward from the head, reaching forty, fifty inches. No purpose for these horns had ever been demonstrated; they swung so far back that they could not possibly be used in fighting. Perhaps, just perhaps, they were intended merely to be beautiful.

  All the Van Doorns came from the house to witness this elegant parade. ‘They must be the last ones south of the Orange River,’ Tjaart said. ‘See how gently they lift their feet.’ How beautiful they were, how stately, this remnant of a great herd now diminis
hed. Never before had they been seen at De Kraal, and their quiet passage across the farm seemed to presage a similar movement of the Van Doorns.

  That night, while the majesty of the sables lingered in the valley, Tjaart said simply, ‘We’ll be following them north. Our life, too, has been used up here,’ and once these words were thrown into the air, Jakoba and Minna felt free to weep.

  If ever a group of people entered their exile with heavy hearts and moral reluctance it was the Van Doorns, and they spent one night drafting a letter of justification to their English neighbors in Grahamstown and their Boer friends in Graaff-Reinet. Tjaart began by saying, ‘I think we’ve all heard the statement the Americans made when they broke away from England. I’m sure we must do the same.’ And with ample guidance from Theunis, plus an occasional strong remark from Lukas de Groot, he compiled these thoughts which appeared in the papers of each community:

  When in the course of human events a group of people decide to leave their homes, they must, out of decent respect for their neighbors, explain why they are doing so. We leave our farms with sadness, our neighbors with deep regret, but we can do no other. Our reasons for leaving will be adjudged by all good men to be just and reasonable.

  The ravages of the past war show to the world that this Government is incapable of protecting our farmers against invasions of the Kaffir, and it has removed the last hope for an effective barrier to keep these hordes out of the colony.

  Government has taken our slaves from us without compensating us adequately or honestly. It has ridiculed our traditional way of handling slaves and has listened only to contumelious adversaries who parade up and down England preaching lies and defamations. The honest citizens of this land, who live with the problem, have not been listened to.

  Government has placed in the pulpits of our church predikants unfamiliar with our language. It has sent us officials to try our law cases who cannot understand the words we speak in our defense. It fills our schools with teachers who erase our children’s knowledge of their mother tongue.