Willem looked at him. The word was one he didn’t know. He took a chance.
‘It can get cold in the Hantam during winter. People have the wrong impression of the Karoo. Stinking hot in the day, shivering at night. You can have a bad chest here, just like anywhere else.’
Krisjan Kloot nodded. ‘Did he suffer?’
‘Pa never spoke about his pain. Right to the end he pretended it was a cough. He said more to his grandson, Roeloff, than to anyone else. If anyone knew what ailed Pa, he did.’
Krisjan smiled at David.
‘Not me,’ David said quickly. ‘My brother.’
The old man studied David; he had been quick to distance himself.
‘Yes, a grandchild can be a blessing. I have three children and twelve grandchildren. Pieter came to live with me last year after Emily died. I’ve lost both wives to the bladder. Of them all, he’s the one—well, you don’t want to favour one grandchild over another, but there’s always one who has a little time for old people.’
Pieter looked down at his hands, which already had huge calluses on the palms and around the index fingers. He didn’t say anything.
Vinkie watched her father and brother. Her father had not yet addressed Pieter, and David looked unimpressed. Were they as amazed by his looks as she was? Was that why no one spoke to him? Pieter’s light grey eyes and dark skin looked strange, but he was handsome, and he had a nice way with Oupa Krisjan. She liked him.
Supper was a forced affair with Krisjan Kloot doing most of the talking, and Drieka falling over herself offering plates of potatoes and meat to the guests. After coffee, the tension eased up a bit. Krisjan Kloot talked about the journey: how the entrails of an ostrich they’d killed along the way kept a pack of wild dogs on their trail for several days, and how Pieter and Karel had had to take turns guarding the oxen at night as the dogs hung back during the daytime, waiting for darkness to attack. To get rid of them took the killing of one of the pack and leaving behind a slain eland. Then he spoke about life at the Cape, and they listened in awe to stories of travellers and explorers, and people who had enough money and time to be able to just idle about, doing nothing. He had Willem Kloot’s full attention when the talk turned to farming and he mentioned the hardy merino sheep with their long, fine, silky wool, that were arriving in ships from Spain and other countries into the Cape. These sheep were sheared only once a year, the wool sorted and baled and then sent out on the ships to buyers overseas. Willem asked whether merinos had made their way into the interior yet, and Krisjan said he knew of a family who had left the Cape more than five years before with about fifty merino to settle in the drier regions north of Roodezand. He was sure that by this time they would have got there and increased their stock, but he didn’t think farmers would part with the merinos easily, as disease was wiping out whole flocks and merinos were so hard to obtain. Because of their thick fleeces, it was particularly difficult in the hot months to keep them free of parasites and dirt. Some farmers docked the tails of the lambs to help control the problem and facilitate mating, as well as to put more fat on the body and less on the tail. It was all worth it, Krisjan said, as the wool fetched quite a high price.
The stories were entertaining and everyone enjoyed them, even though here and there a word was thrown in that no one understood, and no one queried. When the lamp started to flicker and the last of the coffee had been drunk, Willem said he was going to bed. He offered the visitors Roeloff’s room while he was away.
Vinkie was lying awake on the cot in the room she shared with her parents thinking of the guests and everything Oupa Krisjan had said, when she heard her mother and father whispering.
‘He’s black,’ she heard her mother’s voice, ‘your oom’s grandson.’
‘He married outside.’
‘A Hottentot?’
‘No.’
There was silence for a few minutes.
‘What if the Retiefs or Steenkamps visit? People will talk.’
‘Oom Krisjan won’t stay long,’ her father said. ‘There’s nothing for him here with his brother gone.’
Her mother was right about the talk. The next morning when she saw Kleintje, the first thing he told her was that the Koi-na were bristling with the news. They had seen Pieter. Karel had told them he was a Kloot. Kleintje’s mother said Pieter was from the seed of a black man, there were black people in the Cape. Was it true? Was Pieter’s mother or grandmother black?
Vinkie didn’t know who to talk to about it, and wished Roeloff was there. The way her parents and David behaved, she knew they would be the wrong people to ask. She had also noticed the strain in the house. Her father was pleasant and respectful towards his guests and sometimes even started conversation with Oupa Krisjan, but there was an awkwardness between them that everyone felt. Oupa Krisjan came out on the stoep in the mornings to see her father and brother leave on their horses, and didn’t see them again until dusk. They never asked Pieter if he wanted to go with them. Vinkie was anxious for Roeloff to return and wondered what was keeping him. He would have known exactly what to say to Oupa Krisjan and his grandson to keep them from looking so long-faced every day.
On the fifth morning after their arrival, Vinkie found Pieter outside spanning in the oxen, the cases with which they’d arrived waiting to be loaded onto the wagon.
‘What are you doing?’
He looked up.
‘Loading the wagon. We’re leaving today.’
‘But you have only just arrived. And Oupa Krisjan looks tired. My brother will come any day now. You’ll like him.’
‘Don’t I like your other brother, then?’
‘I don’t know. But I know you’ll like Roff. Everyone does.’
‘Oupa wants to leave while he still has a tiredness in his bones. He feels that once he sits down and gets too comfortable, he won’t feel like getting up again. We would also like to miss the rain on the way back.’
She watched him in silence for a few minutes.
‘Are there many people in the Cape?’
‘Oh, yes. They arrive in ships from all over the world. My grandmother came on such a ship.’
‘Your grandmother? You mean Oupa Krisjan’s wife?’
‘His second one, yes, the one who died last year.’
‘I didn’t know we had family who came here on a ship.’
Pieter straightened up and smiled.
‘You never even knew you had an Oupa Krisjan, so how could you know that?’
‘My brother Roeloff’s always talking about going down to the Cape. Oupa Harman told him stories when he was little. He says you have people living just across the road from you.’
Pieter laughed.
