The Covenant by James A. Michener
‘Wait!’ the commissioner protested. ‘If you can make wine this good, we would …’
‘But where did you get the authority,’ the governor asked, ‘to make inquiries in Europe?’
‘Not in Europe, your Excellency. My wife carried samples to captains when their ships docked at the Cape. I wanted to save you trouble, your Excellency.’
And there the discussion ended as Geertruyd appeared in the doorway. ‘Oh,’ the man from Java cried. ‘Here’s your wife now, coming with tea and rusks. You must be very proud, Mevrouw van Doorn, of the excellent wine your husband is making.’
‘I am,’ she said, and when the interrogators were gone, and Sarel had laughed at how Andries Boeksma had tried to insert irrelevant probes, Geertruyd took her husband’s hand and led him to where Annatjie, exhausted, slumped in a chair.
‘Your son was magnificent,’ Geertruyd said. ‘He saved our vineyard.’
‘Did I?’ Sarel asked, and from the way he straightened up when he spoke, his women were satisfied that he was at last ready to be the master of Trianon.
In 1702 Hendrik van Doorn became a trekboer, one of those wandering graziers who moved eastward across virgin land at the slow pace of an ox.
Turning his back on any further claim to Trianon, because his mother had married the Huguenot only eight days after his father had been slain by Bushmen, he had penetrated the mountains, taking his wagon apart and carrying it piece by piece up precipices, then reassembling it for tortuous descents into the valleys.
He kept on till he reached a stream where kingfishers flashed blue as they dived toward crystal water, and when he saw the good pastures nearby, he knew he had reached his temporary home. For the first years he grazed his cattle and sheep, lived himself in the meanest reed-and-mud hovel, and shared his austere food with the one slave and the two Hottentot families who had come into exile with him.
Each spring he swore, ‘This summer I shall build me a real house,’ but as the season lengthened, his resolve weakened, and he watched idly as his Hottentots ranged deep into surrounding valleys, seeking their own people who still dwelt in the region, raising their own cattle, which they would readily barter. His herd increased, and every other year he was able to drive some of his stock back to a Compagnie buying-station; there he would acquire the supplies needed for the approaching two years, then vanish, for he was growing to treasure the freedom he had attained and feared contact with the merchants of the Cape.
Each year, two or three wandering white men might pass his way, or some other young trekboer ‘finished with the Cape,’ or one of the hunters who ventured far into the interior for months at a time, seeking his fortune in ivory or hides. Once Hendrik joined with a hunter who probed far to the south, where a mighty forest of stinkwood and yellow-wood concealed a herd of elephant.
In the fourth year, drought struck, spreading its ashen terror, choking the river where the kingfishers danced and destroying the pasture. The Hottentots, always aware of water, led them sixty miles to the edge of a great pan containing a little water, and here Hendrik remained with two other trekboers. When the rains finally came, he returned to his stream, but it was never quite the same again, for in the evenings when he sat near the fire with the Hottentots and his slave he felt a sense of restlessness, of loneliness. It never occurred to him that this feeling might terminate if he married, for there were no Dutch girls in that vast region.
In 1707, on a journey home from the cattle station, the Hottentot who guided the oxen realized that Hendrik was not pleased. There had been talk among the Compagnie buyers of a proposed rent for farms such as Van Doorn occupied—nothing definite … no legal placaats … just rumors of rix-dollars to be paid. ‘Verdomde Compagnie!’ the Hottentot heard the baas mutter over and over, and it was in this mood that Hendrik stomped alongside his wagon as it approached his hut. It helped his temper none to see another trekboer outspanned there.
The man shuffled toward him and held out his hand. He, too, had braved the mountains and carried his wagon piece by piece down the precipices. The difference was that he had women with him, a haggard wife and a pigtailed daughter named Johanna. Hendrik was twenty-six that year, the girl sixteen, and during the three months the itinerant family stayed at the hut he became enraptured of her. She was willow-thin, a most energetic worker, and the one who held her small family together, for her father was irresolute, her mother a complainer. It was Johanna who mended the clothes and did the cooking. Hendrik, who had lived off the simplest fare, learned to enjoy the curries this girl made; she had acquired the trick of making even the poorest meat taste acceptable by adding the fragrant spices concocted by the Malays at the Cape. She carried with her a plentiful supply, and when Hendrik asked, after a particularly fine supper based on steenbok flanks, ‘On eastward, how will you find curry?’
‘We have enough for three or four years. You don’t use very much, you know. By that time traders will be coming through, won’t they, Pappie?’
Pappie was an optimist: ‘Smous … two, three years, there’ll be a flow of such peddlers.’
One evening at supper, when they were rested and well prepared for the journey ahead, the father said, ‘Tomorrow we move on,’ and it was then that Johanna became aware that she did not wish to leave Hendrik. At the edge of the mysterious wilderness she had found a man, sturdy, gentle, and reasonably capable, and although he had said or done nothing to reveal his interest in her, for he would always be hesitant about his own capacities, she felt assured that if she could stay with him a little longer, she would find some way to encourage him.
She was not yet distraught about the passing years—sixteen years old and no husband—but she did foresee that if her family moved far east, it might be some time before a marriageable man came along, so after everyone had gone to bed she crept close to her parents and whispered, ‘I would like to remain here with Hendrik.’
The old people fell into a frenzy: ‘Would you leave us alone? Who will help us?’ They had a dozen reasons why their daughter must not desert them, and each was compelling, for they were an inadequate pair and knew it. Without Johanna they saw little chance of survival in the bleak years ahead, so they pleaded with her to come with them. Tearfully she said she would, for she knew that without her they could perish.
But when she was alone, staring at the empty years ahead, she could not bear the thought of the solitude that was being forced upon her, so she moved silently to Hendrik’s litter and wakened him: ‘Our last night. Let’s walk in the moonlight.’
Trembling with excitement, he slipped into his trousers, and barefooted they left the hut. When they had gone where none could hear them but the ruminating cattle, she said, ‘I don’t want to leave.’
‘You’d stay here? With me?’
‘I would.’ She could feel him shivering, and added, ‘But they need me. They’ll not be able to survive without me.’
‘I need you!’ he blurted out, and with that she dropped any maidenly reticence and embraced him. They fell on the ground, grappled hungrily with each other, and assuaged the loneliness and uncertainty that assailed them. Twice they made fumbling and inconclusive love, aware that they were not handling this matter well, but also aware that gentleness and love and passion were involved.
Finally she whispered, ‘I want you to remember me.’
‘I’ll not let you go. I need you with me.’
She wanted to hear these reassuring words, to know on the eve of her departure for strange fields that she had been able to inspire such thoughts in a man. But now when Hendrik said in a loud voice, ‘I’m going to speak with your father,’ she grew afraid, lest a confrontation occur that could have no resolution.
‘Don’t, Hendrik! Perhaps later, when the farm …’
Too late. The stocky trekboer marched to the hut, roused the sleeping pair and told them bluntly, ‘I’m going to keep your daughter.’
Perhaps they had anticipated such a denouement to their extended stay; at any rat
After they left, Hendrik experienced the most difficult days of his life, because now, for the first time, he could imagine what it would be like to live with a woman; he would lie in his hut and stare at the rolling land she had traversed, picturing himself on horseback galloping after her. He went so far as to worry about how they could marry, with no predikant in the region.
Four times he resolved to leave his hut and herds in care of his servants and ride east to overtake her, but always he fell back on the dirty paillasse he used for a bed, convincing himself that even if he did find her, she might not want to come back with him. But then the awful reality of how impoverished his life would be if he had no wife overcame him, and he would lie for days immobile.
After a year he conquered this sickness, and had almost forgotten Johanna, when his slave came running with news that people were approaching. Leaping from his bed, he instinctively looked to the west to see who had come across the mountains, and when he saw nothing, the slave tugged at his arm and cried, ‘This way, Baas.’ And from the east, shattered and nearly destroyed by their experiences on a bleak and distant tract, came Johanna and her family.
For two weeks Hendrik and his servants treated the sick, defeated travelers: ‘Our Hottentots ran away with most of our cattle. We planted a few mealies, but in the wrong soil. The winds. The drought and then the flooding rains. We had to eat our last sheep.’
The father assailed himself. His wife complained bitterly of their wrong choices. And Johanna, pitifully thin, lay exhausted on Hendrik’s paillasse, blaming no one, but obviously near death from having had to do all the work. For ten days Hendrik tended her gently, washing her wasted body and feeding her with broth made by the Hottentots at their open fires; on the eleventh day she got out of bed and insisted upon doing the cooking.
This time the family stayed for six months, and when it came time for them to resume their westward journey to the Cape, Hendrik gave them four oxen, a small cart and a servant, but as they were preparing to depart, Johanna moved to his side, took him by the hand, and without speaking to her parents, indicated that this time she would stay with him. Her thin face showed such anguish at the thought that they might force her to go with them that they could make no more protest; they knew that she loved this man and had lost him once through filial obedience, but she would not surrender him a second time. It was a solemn moment, with no minister to confer society’s approbation, no ritual of any kind to mark one of the great rites of human experience. There was no talk, no prayer, no chanting of old hymns. The girl’s father and mother faced a perilous mountain traverse on their retreat to the Cape, and there seemed little chance that they would ever return to see their daughter.
The Hottentot flicked his hippopotamus-hide whip. The oxen moved forward, and the broken couple retreated from their sad adventure.
In the fifteen years since that informal marriage, Johanna had borne nine children, each delivered in the corner of the harsh hut with the assistance of little Hottentot women, whose wails of apprehension and joy equaled the howls of the newborn. Two children had died, one struck down by a yellow Cape cobra in the dust outside the dwelling, another taken by pneumonia; but the seven survivors swarmed about the huts and hillsides. Johanna kept track of her brood, fed and swept and sewed clothes for them all, and kept her ramshackle home in reasonable order.
But she herself deteriorated, and one traveler described her as a slattern, a word she merited, since she had no time for her appearance. At thirty-three she was used up and practically dead, except that she refused to die. She had entered that seemingly endless period in which a scrawny woman, inured to work, moved almost mechanically from one bitter task to the next, perfecting herself in a ritual of survival.
‘The only attention she allows herself,’ the traveler wrote, ‘comes at dusk when, with her brood about her, she holds court as her two Hottentot women servants bathe her feet. Whence this custom came, I know not, nor would Mevrouw van Doorn explain.’
No matter how bleak her life, no matter how unattractive she became, she retained one assurance: Hendrik loved her. She was the only woman he had known, and that first night in the fields she had shown him that she needed him; without books to read or the ability to read them, without other Dutch people to consort with, she had been content to hold Hendrik as the core and source of her life, while he, able to read the great brassbound Bible, could envision no life other than the one he led with her. Sometimes, after reading a chapter of Genesis or Exodus to his family and relating the wanderings of the Israelites to the tribulations of a trekboer, he would speculate on the future of the children: ‘Where will the girls find husbands?’
And then in 1724 came the worst drought Hendrik had known, and even when the Hottentots galloped to the edge of the northern pan, thinking to herd the cattle there, they found that it, too, had retreated to a mere pond. Hendrik now had four hundred cattle, three times as many sheep, and he realized that his depleted lands could no longer support them. Even the modest garden that Johanna tended had withered, and one evening Hendrik directed all his clan to go down on their knees and pray. With thirty-five supplicants around him—his own eight, the twenty-two Hottentots, plus the slaves—he begged for rain. Night after night they repeated their prayers, and no rain came. He watched his cattle, his only wealth, grow scrawny, and one dark night as he crept into bed Johanna said, ‘I’m ready,’ and he replied, ‘I do believe God wants us to move east.’
‘Should’ve moved five years ago,’ she said without rancor.
‘I figure to move east. Maybe sixty, seventy miles.’
‘I been east, you know.’
‘Was it as bad as you said?’
‘It was worse. We was seventy miles east of here, just where you’re heading, and it was even worse than Pappie said.’
‘But you’re willing to try again?’
‘This place is used up. We better go somewheres before the drought ruins us.’
‘You’d be willing to try again?’
‘You’re a lot smarter than Pappie. And I know a lot more now than I did then. I’m ready.’
The older children were not. Conservative, like all young people, they complained that they wanted to stay where they were, especially since families were beginning to move into the area, but there were two boys at the farm who looked forward to the proposed move with considerable excitement. Adriaan was a mercurial stripling, lean and quick like his mother. He was twelve that year, illiterate where books were concerned but well versed in what happened on the veld. He understood cattle, the growing of mealies, the tracking of lost sheep and the languages of his family’s slaves and Hottentots. He was not a strong boy, nor was he tall; his principal characteristic was an impish delight in the world about him. To Adriaan a mountain had a personality as distinct as that of a master bull or his sisters. He certainly did not talk to trees, but he understood them, and sometimes when he ran across the veld and came upon a cluster of protea, their flowers as big as his head, he would jump with joy to see them whispering among themselves. But his chief delight lay in walking alone, east or north, to the vast empty lands that beckoned.
The other boy who was cheered by news of an eastward trek was the half-Hottentot Dikkop, fathered nineteen years earlier by a Coloured hunter who had lain with one of Hendrik’s servants. It was unfair to call him a boy, for he was seven years older than Adriaan, but he was so unusually small, even for a Hottentot, that he looked more like a lad than Adriaan did. He had a large bottom, a handsome light-brown skin and a shy nature that expressed itself principally in his love for the Van Doorn children, especially Adriaan, with whom he had long planned to set forth on a grand exploration. If the family now moved a far distance eastward, after the new hut was built and the cattle acclimated, he and Adriaan would be free to go, and they would be heading
‘It’s time,’ the baas agreed, and that was all the promise Dikkop required. On the journey he would work as never before, proving to his master that the proposed exploration was justified.
Two wagons heavily loaded, a tent to be pitched at dusk, a white family of nine, two slaves, two large families of Hottentots, two thousand sheep, four hundred cattle and two span of oxen—sixteen in each—formed the complement of the Van Doorns as they headed into totally unfamiliar land. Johanna had a meager collection of kitchen utensils, five spoons, two knives but no forks. Hendrik had a Bible published in Amsterdam in 1630, a few tools and a brown-gold crock in which on festive occasions he made bread pudding for his family. He also had a small assortment of seeds, which he was confident he could expand into a garden, and sixteen rooted cuttings of various fruit trees, which, with luck, would form the basis of an orchard. In the entourage he was the only one who could read, and he took delight in assembling all people connected with him for evening prayer, when he would spread the Bible on his knees and read from it in rich Dutch accents.
The trekboers traveled only modest distances on any day. The oxen were not eager to move and the herds had to be allowed time to graze. Hottentots had to scout ahead to locate watercourses, so that five miles became a satisfactory journey. Also, when a congenial spot was found, the caravan lingered three or four days, enjoying the fresh water and the good pasturage.
At the end of three weeks, when some sixty-five miles had been covered, Hendrik and Johanna stood together on a small rise to survey a broad expanse of pasture, where the grass was not excessive or the water plentiful, but where the configuration of land and protective hills and veld looked promising.