by Peter Bowen
We ran for the horses and I could hear mounted troops behind us, coming on fast. I wished to Christ I had a good pump shotgun and plenty of buckshot.
The Boers come out of the mist when some of us was still mounting, me included, and they let off a volley that hit men and horses and turned what would have been a mere undignified rout into a disaster. (I’m a connoisseur of routs, been in so many. Disasters, too.)
My horse was every bit as scared as I was and he decided that my extra weight was hampering him and he tossed me onto a rock and headed out. Smart horse. I shot at him twice in tribute.
I was on foot and alone but for two bodies I thought I’d surrender to the first man or horse that come by. One soon did, and I put my hands high and left my pistols (Theodore’s, actually, so it didn’t hurt that much) on the boulder. The Boer rode behind me, and I trudged toward the sound of the cannon.
The terrain and the weather fooled the ear. I walked for perhaps five miles before I came to a trench line filled with Boers and then another and behind them the guns and a canvas fly stretched between a couple of blue gum trees that was headquarters.
There was a big black-bearded gent in farmer clothes and a tall gray hat sitting on a log, whittling. He motioned me to the log and went on whittling. The guns stopped firing.
“Well, English,” he said, his speech sharp with High Dutch, “I think your war is not going so well for you, eh?” He looked at my khakis, without so much as a single regimental badge on them.
“I’m an American observer,” I said. “Colonel Kelly, United States Army.” I held out my hand.
Black-beard looked at it like it was something unexpected in the bottom of the stewpot, when everybody’d already et.
“Do you shoot when you observe?” he asked.
“Only when I’m being shot at,” I says. One of the Boers who had marched me in came up and rattled off something in Boer, and walked off. I’d been twenty years away and only caught “liar” out of it.
“Why were you leading the troopers?” says Black-beard.
“A friend asked as a special favor.”
Black-beard nodded and went on chewing his tobacco and whittling his stick. He put his fingers in his mouth and blew a long sharp whistle.
Half a dozen Boers come up at a run. They was all big men but for one on the far end couldn’t manage five feet high.
“Shoot this one,” said Black-beard.
“Now just a gaddamned minute,” I roared. “I am an emissary of the United States of America, and I ...” I was drug off and tied to a sapling and blindfolded.
I wanted to live, so I could skin Teethadore alive.
Well, I heard the rifles cock, and the command to aim, and I wasn’t thinking on nothing much at all and waiting for the slugs when a good kick caught me right in the nuts. I said what you always say at a time like that—Whhoooooooffffffff—and slid down the pole. Some merciful soul cut my hands free and I clapped them over the pain and puked quietly sideways for an hour or two. There is nothing hurts a feller quite like that.
The little Boer and another one come by and they lifted me up and set me back against the sapling, with my knees drawn up and my hands still in my crotch. Red waves of pain danced in front of my eyeballs and my breath was a staggered wheezy thing, but I could actually think of small things other than my mashed glands down there.
The little Boer took off his hat and it was ...
“Oh, shit,” I wheezed. Marieke Uys, once a lovely young girl I had snuck out on. Back in ’79, when I had been here being entertained by the Zulu War.
“Kelly,” said Marieke, “I just couldn’t shoot you till I had a chance to kick you hard in the nuts.”
“I understand,” I wheezed.
“And this is your son Dirk ...” she said. I looked over and saw a paler version of myself, except the teeth in his smile were his mother’s.
“General Botha has paroled you to us,” said Marieke.
“I don’t give a damn what they do with you, Kelly,” rumbled Botha, he’d been behind me all along.
I got on the horse they gave me, standing in the stirrups, and away we went into the soft wet night.
9
MY WOUNDED BALLS WAS the best way of keeping me from escaping. Felt like I had a pair of sore cantaloupes down there. I walked like a duck and not all that fast. Better than chains and a dungeon.
“I waited twenty-one years to do that!” said Marieke. She was so happy about it I wanted to strangle her. I couldn’t really blame her, but I was sulky about the dirty pool with the firing squad and all. I always exhibit good taste in these matters. (No, I don’t.)
Fortunately she wasn’t one to dwell on such quarrels—having repaid my perfidy with a straight shot to the nuts she sort of fell right back into deciding what we were going to do and I was expected to foller along with it. Fine with me, long as I had these tender balls. Situations like this I have always proved to be an amiable and rather stupid feller. I play it well enough long enough and they start thinking so, too.
Our son had gone back to shoot Englishmen, the Boers called them “roineks”—rednecks, for they had no little capes over their necks like the French Foreign Legion favors.
Over the days she told me about her life after I’d taken ship and it was just what I suspected—she’d had a suitor or two, but they got the wim-wams and sheared off after a while. Marieke was stubborn as a mule that’s found a patch of chamomile. She knew her mind and once it was made up it was useless to argue.
Her little holding was a shallow valley on one of them long table mountains that country holds—she’d been supporting herself and son Dirk for all this time breaking and training horses and selling them to the English who flocked to the Rand goldfields or the Vaal River diamond diggings.
Then when the war come on she volunteered as a scout, and when one of the rough Boers who didn’t know her laughed, she lifted up a blacksnake whip and cut him up till he apologized. After that there was no more backchat.
I had my ears out for any hint of what was going to be done with good old Luther. As my nuts shrank and my gait improved I began to wonder just where the lines were. Well, it’s my habit when captured to figure on a way out of it—I’ve done it dozens of times.
Marieke seemed unconcerned. I was sleeping in a little lean-to on her house, on a cornshuck mattress with rough cotton sheets and a big heavy quilt. One night she slipped in bed with me and clung to me, breathing hot and sweet, and she stayed until the morning. Her perkiness returned and I was bothered by it, for I was thinking maybe she thought I was going to stay and break horses or run cattle, all of which I know how to do and don’t much like.
The rains got heavier and we even spent some of the days in the lean-to, with the pattering on the shakes and the clean smell of lightning coming through on the breeze.
“I want to have you come with me to look at some things,” she said one day. “No one in the world know what the British have done. We are a simple people. Few of us even read well. I want you to come with me, please. You won’t have to fight the English.”
I was coming up in the world. From the low position of husband I had climbed to journalist. I took her up on it.
“What things the British are doing?” I asked. She put her fingers to my lips and then her body tight and hot against mine. My parts was about back to normal, and she was a pretty thing, a small blond woman with a small body wiry and hard from riding and fighting, too, for she was a dead shot. (The light is so strange in Africa, compared to what I’m used to, that I missed things all the time, shooting high or shooting low. It’s funny, but true.)
One day she said we must go, and so we saddled and packed two horses with gear—she’d got my Colts somehow, and then she had a Mauser rifle for me, too, and bandoliers of ammunition. The food was veldt bread and dried fruit, sugar, and tea.
Marieke was closemouthed about what I was to see that angered her so. She came of a bloody clan in a bloody land, and I never was to se
e her flinch.
She led by narrow paths that skirted the flat-topped mountains, and we come up one morning to a Boer camp with the same black-bearded general setting on another log, whittle-shaping a piece of wood.
This time I got introduced to Louis Botha, who gave me a dry handclasp and inquired about the health of young Winston Churchill.
“I suppose the little shit is in splendid health,” I says, “Though it would cheer me to hear otherwise.”
Botha laughed, a series of booms, and he went to the saddlebags and got a poster and unrolled it. There was a crude likeness of Winston and some description and the reward was twenty-five pounds. Winston would be having blue screeching fits over the low amount, that’s for sure. He valued himself a bit higher than that.
“You could have made it twenty-five shillings,” I said.
“He would have known it for a joke,” said Botha, laughing again.
“We should not have begun this war,” he said suddenly. “We did not know that the strength of the Dutch and French and Germans is only on the land, and it is too far that way from them to us. They cannot help. Heaven help us, then. We cannot go near the sea, the guns from the ships are terrible. So the English will strangle us.”
’Twas true. England’s Navy was the equal of any three others on the face of the earth.
“Marieke will show you how they do this,” he said, looking both angry and sad. “Please tell your country how the English treat Christian white people.”
I didn’t know, but I could guess.
Crushed beneath the wheel. The Boers were a simple frontier folk; they bought only powder, lead, and cloth and had lived by their cattle for nearly three hundred years. They had a stern Old Testament God. It surprised me that men like Botha would rise up at need, but then I remembered Stonewall Jackson.
My son Dirk was here with the Boer rangers, the men who harassed the English and rode in the night. The boy—hell, man, he was taller than I am and probably nicer, too, he come and shook hands with me and said in pretty good English he was pleased to make my acquaintance. He turned to go. I clapped him on the shoulder and gave him the one piece of advice I could think of.
“Don’t make a life of this,” I said, waving a hand at the guns and the soldiers.
Then he was gone.
Marieke was ready to go. I swung up and I even saluted Botha, another day we might have been friends.
We made our way south, sometimes coming close enough to a town under siege by the Boers to hear the crump of the guns but not going near—a lot of Englishmen from the goldfields were either fighting or robbing or serving as couriers, the war was a mixed up brawl all over the map. It was easy to tell who was running the British end—Buller’s one notion of soldiering was to charge. He was as subtle as a raging bull and just as easily outwitted.
We made a long hook east and come out near to Durban, where I had sailed from twenty-odd years ago. The harbor was packed. We looked down from cover on a ridge to the west, and I suddenly saw a corral of barbed wire, and it was full of people.
“That’s what the Roineks do with the families,” Marieke said, her voice flat and drained. “They herd them here and put them behind wire and there they die.”
“Die of what?” I said. I doubted that the English would go so far as to just shoot women and children, like we done to the Sioux, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and all the others.
There was a big slit trench outside the wire. I saw a couple soldiers toss a child’s body into the pit and shovel quicklime after. What you’d do with an unclaimed dog run over by a carriage.
“They die of being packed together,” said Marieke, “the sicknesses come on them when they live too close.”
It was coming on dark, and we went on, winding up a trail into the Dragon Mountains, the Drakensberg. Marieke knew this country like her mother’s face. We stopped at dawn near a spring, hidden by the tambookie grass and the acacias. There was a little meadow for the hobbled horses to graze on, and the high lion-hiding grass would keep them in it.
We slept in the shade near the spring.
Marieke woke me with a poke in the ribs and a hand over my mouth. She jerked her head toward the little trail. We scurried off into the tambookie grass, me thinking my fifty-year-old ears was definitely losing their skill. We watched our hobbled horses all throw up their heads and point their ears forward, and then a man come along the trail on foot, looking down at the tracks. He saw the horses and held up an arm, stopping those behind.
Marieke stood up and whistled. The tracker whistled back, a bird call made to sound like the little honey creeper, and he motioned again to the Boers behind on the track.
There was about a ten-minute pause, and then all of them came out of the grass, they had circled us and would have made very short work of us indeed if we had fired.
Marieke and the leader of the band rattled at each other in Boer. Marieke pointed at me and said something funny and the rest of them had a good laugh on me, which annoyed me some as I could only catch the Boer word for “gelding.”
Take it like a man and get even later, I said to myself, when the odds is obscenely long in your favor.
The band of rangers went on, leaving me and Marieke to the hobbled horses and leafy bower and purling spring.
“The British aren’t fast enough to catch us and we are not strong enough to throw them out,” she said.
We went on this narrow trail, cutting through the foothills of the Dragon Mountains, and then right through them at a pass which was so low I didn’t notice it till I saw the mountains to each side of us and nothing up ahead but savannah. We passed whitened heaps of bones left by the Manatee Horde seventy years or so before, when for some reason thirty tribes fell apart and went to eating each other. They passed through and vanished toward the east.
This land was old with death, sure enough. Africa is much different than what I was used to in America, the landscape itself was all horizontal lines, where ours is mostly vertical.
We rode for days south and a bit east, even cutting across rails and highways time to time, and taking care to skirt round farms and the little towns.
We rode one day into a flat country, of sandstone and gullies—they call ’em dongas here—and once or twice we flushed lions from cover.
Marieke stopped and stood by her horse a while, looking as though she was praying. I put a hand on her shoulder and she came close and I held her still for a while, and then she snuffled and mounted up and we rode no more than a quarter mile and reined up on the lip of a gully and I looked down and there was hundreds of bodies—long dead, gnawed by the jackals and the birds—piled in this gully miles and miles from anywhere. I could tell by their clothing that they was Boers.
“The prisoners were too much trouble,” said Marieke. “They won’t escape now.”
I looked down at my feet. Brass from machine gun bullets lay at my feet. There was discarded belts and other litter, all British.
“The Americans don’t do this, do they, Kelly?” she asked. Her voice was wound tight, like she might start laughing and not stop till knocked unconscious.
“Yeah,” I said, “we do this.” I was thinking of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, where twelve thousand American troops vanquished four hundred unarmed Sioux of all ages, sexes, and kinds of helplessness.
“All the very best nations do this sort of thing, Marieke,” I said. “It’s the new fashion. And you know how nations is about fashions.”
There warn’t anything else to say. I supposed she wanted me to do something. There wasn’t anything to do.
“After you sneaked away and the Zulu War was over I went with my brothers—the ones left—to get the bones of Papa and Cornelius from Hlobane Mountain. When we found them, we found them back to back surrounded by the skeletons of the Zulus they had killed. We gathered up Papa’s bones and Cornelius’s bones and packed them in our saddlebags, so they would lie with the others in our own cemetery. We did not dishonor the Zulus, who were fighting to k
eep their Zulu order, as we were to overthrow it. Years later I met three Zulus who had fought my father and brother and they told me that my men fought like lions. One of the Zulus had killed Cornelius and helped to kill my father and I didn’t hate him, somehow he seemed part of my family, too.”
We mounted and rode on south, winding down pale gravels in the dongas, our heads turning to look for silhouettes of men against the sky.
I’ve been at a loss from time to time but never so utterly as this one. What could I say? That I could tour with magic lantern slides and a brass band and no one would care? They’d not be one bit interested.
Civilized nations did not do what was piled back there in the donga. So it hadn’t happened.
We camped that night up high and she clung to me and I kept telling her to come on with me, get out of this place, for it will only kill you. She wouldn’t talk, and I knew the answer was no. Her son (and mine) would fight till he got killed. She wanted to be around to wash his face and lower him down. She was probably right. Teethadore and Miles would be tossing me like a dart to wherever on the globe they was interested in. She’d be alone with her regrets a long damn way from home.
We come nigh to the sea and rode for miles on the hard-packed sand of the beaches, below the tideline so the tracks of the horses would wash away. It wasn’t all that far to Cape Town and I was getting worried.
And the worst of it was I didn’t know about what. The sea was shrouded in a fine low mist the sun hadn’t burned off yet, all glittery above the yellow-green swells. I couldn’t see any sign of travelers and the soft rolling hills were covered in short grass and I didn’t see how or why any lookout would be on any of them. There was nothing to guard against, no roads or rails or harbors.
The sun was behind the mist to us and glittery, I’d no notion anything was wrong when there was a sound like a great ripping and a rush like a train makes passing close by you, and then the hillside behind us away from the sea gouted dirt like a geyser does water, and then a second explosion blew me right off the horse and sent it sprawling too. Up ahead I could see Marieke’s mare bucking, and a small sprawl of clothes on the sand. I ran as fast as I could, one ear cocked for another shell.
