Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Kate Pullinger

  I have known the Kruger family all my life. I grew up on Bloumeer Farm. The Kruger farm, Veldplatt, was the nearest farm to us going on up the valley. Hendriks Kruger and I went to the same school in Bultdorp. He was five years older than me. His younger brothers, the twins Jacob and Isaac, never went to school. They had brain damage from birth. They hardly ever left the farm. Hendriks had no wife. He took over the farm when his father died. I have not retained a friendship with Hendriks and before today I had not been to the Veldplatt farm for thirty years. Occasionally I would see Hendriks when he came to town, in the hotel bar…

  The Soweto riots – they talked about it all the time in the hotel bar, especially on Fridays when Hendriks came to town. ‘You’ve got to treat them like animals,’ he lectured from his place at the end of the bar. ‘Show them who’s boss. Crack the bull-whip, my friends.’ His loud mouth, big frame and drunken arrogance pushed other drinkers into silent agreement. Like others in Bultdorp, I had learned to steer a wide path around him. And my path was wider than most.

  It was one of those days in high summer when the cool of night had failed to curb the heat of the previous day. The dirt road ahead of me swam in a haze, fired already by the early sun. Fine, red dust coated the windows and settled over my arms. I mopped away the beads of sweat gathering under my chin with my hankie and stuffed it back into my bra. The rains couldn’t come soon enough. Looking up, the brittle, blue sky gave no hope of salvation. In the town tempers frayed and dogs fought. The hotel bar erupted into brawls more often at this time of year. Water and money were scarce.

  The turning to Bloumeer farm came into view on the right. My father’s original hand-painted sign still pointed the way. I slowed as I always did and looked down the road as I passed. Swirls of dust blew across the familiar old track that wound its way into the distance across the veld, weaving through the small outcrops of rock that punctured the dry and wizened landscape. I guessed my brother would have put the cattle in the lower field until the rains came.

  I still dreamt about the farm. Twenty years didn’t dim the memory. These were happy dreams of waking to the rustling and creaking of the grass roof heating up in the early morning sun; of the soft wash of pink light hitting the gauzy walls of my mosquito net; of the gentle cooing of doves and raucous crowing of the cock who scratched around with his hens below my window. At weekends and holidays I would be up and out at dawn. Rumba would be waiting in the stable and I would sing to him as I saddled up. Like ghosts we would move slowly down the track, the baobab trees blackened against the sudden reddening of the sky, thin wisps of wood smoke curling up from the cooking fires in the farm workers’ compound. Thabo would be waiting at the edge of the kraal, making clucking and clicking noises to Rumba who would drop his head and whinny back his response.

  I have known Thabo Kefentse since I was a child. His father was our Head Herdsman. Thabo went to work for the Krugers when he was about sixteen…

  Thabo. We were inseparable back then, when it didn’t matter. Then, quite suddenly, childhood had melted away. ‘Mix with your own type now, Annelie,’ my father had said one day. ‘Play with kids from your school. Leave the workers now, hey?’ So I took to spending time at Veldplatt with Hendriks and his brothers. Thabo hadn’t wanted to work for the Krugers but we couldn’t afford to take him on. We never really spoke to each other after that. When I did see him around the farm or in town, sitting in the back of Hendriks’ bakkie, he would lower his eyes. I became ‘madam’. He remained ‘Thabo’.

  The sun was climbing fast as I approached the Veldplatt farm turn-off. I still had dreams about this farm too; dreams shot through with disjointed memories of storms, of pain and bruises and Hendriks’ face looming over mine, blotting out the sky. The welling sense of shame on waking would leave me sweating and choking. Every week I passed the turn-off and every week I gritted my teeth. I would gladly have travelled another hour to avoid it.

  The track leading down to the farm was overgrown with thorny scrub and tall, stubborn bush grass. It clogged the storm drains either side. Talk was that the farm had been disintegrating since Oupa Kruger had died seven years ago. Everyone knew the brothers were in trouble, even though no one from the town had been down there for years. We just watched as Hendriks slowly poured away the money on whisky and beer. His brothers, the twins, were never seen. Hendriks mentioned them sometimes with bitterness and a curled lip.

  I kept my foot hard on the accelerator as I passed. Then, a sudden quick movement in the culvert caught my eye and instinctively I slowed. An animal, maybe. Leopard had been seen on the farm many years ago. Again the movement – a hand clawing at the stones and grass on the side of the ditch. I slammed on the brakes and the bakkie slithered sideways on the dirt road, snaking to a stop. A red cloud plumed up from the spinning tyres. Taking Vernon’s rifle I scrambled out of the cab. A figure crouched at the verge, holding his arm over his head. I stopped and pointed the gun. The wind whipped the stinging dust against my legs and arms.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked. My voice sounded thin and strange. I felt my heart in my throat. The man raised his head. He tried to speak but his mouth was too dry to allow words and sound to form. Slowly I recognised the face.

  ‘Thabo?’

  I stumbled back to the bakkie, threw the gun across the seat and reached for the flask of water. Wrenching the cap from the top, I ran back and held the bottle to his mouth. He gulped and swallowed greedily.

  ‘Waiting,’ he said at last. ‘Monday. Knew you would come past, madam.’

  Thabo took another sip from the bottle. I tipped water on to his face and wiped the dust out of his eyes with my hankie. I looked around. The road was empty. I sensed he didn’t want to be seen.

  ‘Come, Thabo,’ I said. ‘I need to get you off the road. Can you stand?’

  Thabo nodded and painfully heaved himself to his feet.

  ‘I’ll get you into the bakkie. Then you can tell what’s happened.’

  With a growing sense of foreboding I helped him into the cab. I climbed back into the driver’s seat and took a large mouthful of the remaining water. I swilled it over my teeth and swallowed. My hands trembled against the steering wheel. I wiped my palms down the side of my dress and stared across the ochre veld to the Kruger farm, just visible on the horizon. I reversed quickly and turned the bakkie on to the overgrown and potholed track. A little way off a large, spreading baobab dominated the flat and scrubby bush-land. I recognised the silvered smoothness of the vast, old tree-trunk and the way the blue of the sky was cut out around the huge, spiky branches, tufted with green. I remembered back in Oupa Kruger’s time, his cattle had always gathered under its shade, stamping flat the ground and clearing the scrub. I pulled in out of sight of the road and slowly exhaled. The inside of the cab was stifling. I opened the door and let the breeze, cooled by the shade, blow over us. I turned to Thabo. For the first time I realised he was bleeding.

  ‘Thabo, you’re hurt.’

  ‘There is a fight, Madam Annelie,’ he whispered. ‘Up at the farm last night. Baas Hendriks he was very drunk…’

  Thabo’s voice tailed off. He looked terrified, ashen under his brown Tswana skin. He indicated the direction of the farm limply with his right arm. Blood, a lot of it, was dried on to his shirt and smeared across his hands and arms.

  ‘Thabo. Here, show me.’

  Thabo shook his head and held his arm stiffly to his side, his left hand moving to hold his shoulder.

  ‘I tried to stop Baas, but he was wild, like an animal. Baas Isaac and Baas Jacob… they are very hurt.’

  ‘How hurt, Thabo? How bad is it?’

  Thabo shook his head.

  ‘It is very bad, Madam Annelie.’

  ‘Did you call the police, Thabo? Did you ring Sergeant Van de Merwe from the farm phone?’

  Thabo slid his eyes to look at the ground.

  ‘No, madam.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Thabo, why not?’

  Thabo looked up and l
et his gaze drop again.

  ‘Because it is too bad, madam. I came to find you.’

  Thabo lifted his eyes again. I nodded and took his hand.

  ‘Okay. I’m here now, hey. So, let me look.’

  He sighed, then let me gently lift his arm. I could see a long, deep cut obscured by congealed blood that curved away from the top of his shoulder across his chest. As I moved the arm, fresh blood pooled in the wound and spilled on to his chest. It must have taken everything to manage the long walk to the main road.

  ‘Who did this to you, Thabo? Was it Baas Hendriks?’

  I already knew the answer. The wound was made by a panga knife –

  Hendriks’ weapon of choice when squaring up to his farm workers.

  ‘What about the others, Thabo? Your wife and daughter, her children? Are they safe?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’ Thabo paused. ‘He did not get them. I had to stop him, Madam Annelie.’

  Today, as I drove past the turning to the Veldplatt Farm, Thabo Kefentse waved me down. He explained there had been ‘bad trouble’ at the farm. Hendriks had been drinking all weekend and there had been a fight. He, Thabo, had made his way to the main road to find help. He was wounded and confused. He had lost a lot of blood. He said that he had tried to stop Hendriks and had received his injuries as a result. I believed this to be true. My first thought was to get Thabo back to the farm and ring for help from the phone…

  I felt suddenly exhausted. I didn’t want to think about what Thabo was saying. I had struggled all these years to blank Hendriks from my mind.

  ‘I’ve got to stop the bleeding, Thabo. Come, let me use your shirt.’ I pulled him forwards and gently lifted his shirt over his head. It was already tattered and torn, stitched and darned many times. As it came away from his skin I saw the weals and cuts on his back, extending up his neck and across his head. Hendriks had been generous with the bull-whip as well. I tore the shirt into strips and tightly bound up the wound. I gave Thabo more water and settled him back against the seat.

  ‘Okay. Let’s get you to the hospital.’

  Thabo caught my hand, his grip strong, urgent.

  ‘No, madam. You must go to the farm first.’

  I looked at his face, pinched, desperate. He released my hand but his eyes held mine. I nodded, started up the engine and swung the truck around towards the farm.

  We ground our way along, dipping and twisting, every jolt causing Thabo to grimace in pain. With every kilometre, memories were flooding my mind. I was back by the reservoir above the farm with the three brothers. I was thirteen years old. Hendriks towered over me. The day was hot and suddenly dark as a storm blew in from the distant hills. We could see it rolling over the veld – a black pillar of cloud joining ground to sky. The air crackled with electricity and lightning forked and flashed on the horizon. Hendriks was in a wild mood. The static lifted his hair from his scalp. I too felt electrified and excited. The twins were whispering and giggling. I knew I should go home before the storm broke but I stayed. I was flattered by the attention I was getting from Hendriks. I remember feeling hot and pleased. I didn’t have milk-white skin and hair like gold but Hendriks thought I was pretty. He was telling me so. I smiled up at him. The twins smirked and chattered behind their hands. Hendriks was holding me by my wrists and leering at his brothers. I had giggled, unsure of what was happening, and then I remember the pressure of the hard ground on my back, the sound of my clothes tearing and Hendriks breathing heavily into my neck. The sudden pain between my legs took me by surprise and as I cried out, lightning sparked across the sky, lighting up Hendriks’ face and hair. Over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of Jacob crying. Isaac was standing quietly at his side. Then there was shouting and Hendriks was on his feet, pulling me up roughly behind him. Catching me by the elbow he spat into my ear, ‘You asked for that, you little tease. Tell anyone and I’ll let them know how easy you are.’

  The din around us grew louder and I suddenly recognised Thabo’s voice. He was screaming. ‘Baas Hendriks, come quick. Baas Hendriks, I have just seen the leopard over by the vlei-side waterhole.’ Hendriks ran off, bellowing for his brothers to follow him. I sank down on to the grass as the metallic scent of the rain on dusty ground filled the air. That’s where Thabo found me. He gently took my hand and helped me up, smoothing down my dress, dusting off the burrs and ground dirt. ‘Go home now, tsala ya me,’ he said.

  I never went back to Veldplatt. I would see Hendriks in the town but we never spoke. Some years later in a quiet moment together Auntie Das asked me what had happened at the farm the day of the storm. ‘Was it Hendriks?’ she said. Shame had stripped me of the words but my silence exposed my secret. It took Vernon to help me lift my head again.

  Eventually the old farmhouse came into view and I stopped at the top of the drive. The neat, ordered farm I had known as a young girl had gone. The roof of the low-slung house had collapsed on one side. The front door was propped against the wall, its hinges rusting and useless. The paddock where Oupa Kruger had kept a couple of horses was overgrown, the fences rotting and trampled down. The neat orchard – ‘Jacob’s patch’ they used to call it – over to the right of the house had long since been reclaimed by nature, although the lemon trees still waved above the long grasses that tangled around their slim trunks. Hendriks’ old Land Rover stood in the yard. After rolling home from the bar he had probably carried on drinking all weekend. I slid out of the bakkie and reached for the gun. Thabo stayed my hand.

  ‘Madam… You won’t need that.’

  I nodded and let the rifle slip back against the seat. I reached over and took his hand.

  ‘Thabo. Tsala ya me, my friend. It’s all right. I believe you have done nothing wrong.’

  I found Isaac almost straight away in the main room of the house. A wide trail of blood showed he had dragged himself in from the back yard and propped himself against the leg of the large, rough-hewn table that dominated the room. He had pulled the thick family bible on to his lap from its place at the end of the table. I don’t know how long it would have taken for him to bleed to death from the shotgun wound in his stomach. Outside I followed the sound of the flies and found Jacob in his orchard, lying face down where he had fallen. The blood had dried thick and black across the wound in his back, clotting the long grass around him. I turned and followed the path from the back of the farmhouse along a rocky ridge towards the workers’ compound. I squinted into the distance. Nothing stirred. No smoke rose up from the cooking fires. From what Thabo had said I knew I would find Hendriks somewhere between here and the compound entrance. It didn’t take long. He was lying below the path in a shallow ravine. His gun lay at his side. The panga and a pool of blood on the path marked the place where Thabo had fought to protect his wife, his daughter, his grand-daughter. I stood looking down at Hendriks’ broken form.

  Once I got to the farmhouse, I found all three brothers were dead from gun-shot wounds I believed to be from Hendriks’ shotgun. Isaac was in the house, Jacob in the orchard. Hendriks was further away from the farmhouse, lying below the path to the workers’ compound. He had the gun with him. I returned to the farmhouse and called Sergeant Van der Merwe from the phone in the kitchen. After that I went to find Thabo’s wife and family. They were hiding in the compound but uninjured. I then returned with them to the bakkie and waited…

  As I slithered down the crumbling bank, Hendriks suddenly moaned and turned his head. I stopped, horrified, paralysed. I slowly took another step. His leg was shattered, bent backwards at an angle. His face was obscured by blood. His eyes moved in swollen sockets, unseeing in the glare. He forced his cracked lips apart, tearing his tongue from his mouth.

  ‘Dank God,’ he moaned. ‘Water, help me.’

  I knelt next to him, my head shielding the sun from his face. His eyes found mine. He reached out his hands and clung to my arm.

  ‘Annelie, dank God. Help me. Annelie, dank, dank God.’ His face twitched and his eyes rolled. ‘Bloody kaffir… beat me,
pushed me. I’ll see him bloody hanged.’

  I looked at Hendriks for a long time. Eventually I sat back on my haunches and glanced around. In the distance I could hear the wind rustling through the grasses on the veld and the cicadas singing loudly in the nearby Boer-bean tree. The sky was a deeper blue than earlier in the day and I found myself wondering again about rain. Hendriks’ hands pawed at my arms and clothes and his good leg kicked helplessly at the ground. Finally I reached over and pulled his gun on to his chest. I took his hands from my arms and placed them over the stock, wrapping his fingers round the trigger. I slowly eased the barrel up to under his chin. He muttered and tried to turn his head away. I caught his chin firmly with my fingers, pressing it on to the gun’s muzzle. I leaned closer to his ear.

  ‘Listen to me, Hendriks. Your brothers are dead. You shot them. There’s nothing left. It’s over.’

  I pulled back and spat full into his face. His bloodshot eyes stared.