Chapter three
The greedy stir up conflict, but those who trust in the Lord will prosper.
Proverbs 28: 25
And then, one bitingly cold midnight, yet another vehicle left the wide tarred road when it hit the crater of a pothole just before the turn-off to the Paal’s petrol station. This time, unfortunately, it wasn’t a truck carrying goods of value. It was an expensive four-by-four Porsche, the property of the Hertz Rent-a-Car branch at Capetown’s international airport. Built to seat six plus driver in air-conditioned comfort, the Porsche was only carrying two souls on that fateful night.
Two very important souls; more on their unexpected visit later.
The village gossips, that fiendish Greek Chorus dedicated to the spread of evil tidings, whisper the infamous pothole could have been filled long ago, but it serves a dark yet necessary purpose.
The road from the south to the north, the gossips will tell you without explaining it clearly, is a great river from which the dorp named Breipaal often catches, like an angler, what it wants and throws back what it doesn’t want.
Free beer it most certainly wants, of course. On a flaming hot day the long-distance driver of a heavily loaded truck fell asleep behind the wheel, sending the South African Breweries truck off the bridge of the hopefully named Stormrivier to land on the bone-dry, soft sand of the riverbed.
Beer truck off the road but nothing broken. The message flew into town from the petrol station by the side of the road. The Paal sent cars and cars with trailers to gather the liquid bounty. From the township came wheelbarrows, supermarket trolleys, jogging women with pails balanced on their heads, even a skinny donkey with empty milk cans clattering against its flanks.
The village stayed drunk for weeks.
Once the road river brought carved headstones, a bounty not even undertaker Tony Fivaz really wanted; he orders and collects his own from the stone carving place up in Bloemfontein city. And yet, when the big truck owned by White Dove Undertakers struck the pothole, destroying a barbed wire fence, killing two sheep and ending its journey against the stone wall of a farmer’s dam, the Paal was soon there with its cars and trailers, wheelbarrows and supermarket trolleys. Today the dorp boasts a number of marble driveways and marble paths in private gardens where you walk on In Loving Memory Of Our Dear Mother, Rest In Peace, Johannes, At Peace In The Arms Of The Lord and so on and so forth, as part-time preacher Leah Haasbroek would say.
Giel Swiegers, her arch enemy, had his colored workers take a dozen headstones from the fallen truck to his Paal backyard and grind the names and messages off them. Giel then tried to sell the mutilated headstones as uncarved marble to Tony Fivaz. And the undertaker, wearing his funeral hat indoors to hide the scars of the journey Troffel Fouche had sent him on, escorted bleddy Giel off his premises with a baseball bat.
Giel Swiegers didn’t learn anything from this, of course.
When the locusts left the desert world of the Paal looking worse than a desert, the wool price fell so violently it started a desperate war of survival the village and its sheep-farming district are still fighting. Giel gave up the struggle to work the family farm, rented it out to his only daughter Gertjie who has a greater understanding of sheep and the market than her father ever did. Without turning her back on wool, she invested in the meat market by introducing Dorper sheep to the farm. She has to buy feed in times of drought, but she’s not going hungry.
Giel moved to the family dorphuis in the Paal, a fine old Cape style house built by Giel’s great-grandfather who had to trek by ox-wagon to the village on Fridays so the Swiegers family could do some bartering on Saturdays, attend Sunday church and then spend Mondays trekking back to the farm.
Unlike his great-grandfather, Giel doesn’t care much for hard work. And being a still handsome widower and fast talker he’s able to do as he pleases whenever he pleases.
“I deeply believe in fulfilling the needs of others,” Giel likes to say when it’s his turn to preach at the Dutch Reformed Church.
As a widower, of course, he’s always ready and eager to fulfill the needs of the many lonely widows in the district. Sister Sanna Retief, the Paal’s clinic nurse, foolishly believes Giel is in love with her. Older men is her thing. She still believes Meester Hoffman actually wanted to marry her before his wheelchair had that fatal accident and he became the Paal’s most famous ghost.
As an elder of his church Giel’s also willing to fulfill its need for a preacher. In the sad absence of an ordained predikant he wants to be the only unordained one thundering forth from the pulpit and giving succor by an open grave, so it came as no surprise when he fought the congregation’s decision to allow a female to take on the part-time role as well. The women of the church chose Leah Haasbroek, and for a very obvious reason.
They know Leah bleddy hates Giel Swiegers. Everyone who stays on the Paal or in the district knows that, of course. They know he posed as a plumber when the Haasbroeks moved into the house haunted by its previous owner, Meester Hoffman. He overcharged Leah’s father and caused such chaos with the house plumbing Charles Haasbroek had to pay a trained plumber from Bloemfontein to repair the damage.
To this day Giel swears he did a good job for which Leah’s father still owes him money. And he feeds the village gossips fake stories about his daughter Gertjie and Charles Haasbroek moving in with her after his divorce from Leah’s mother.
Yes, things can become involved when you stay on the Paal or in its district. To make their lives even more complex, Leah and Gertjie used to sleep with Hennie the Hunk, the local vet, but not at the same time, of course. They drew the line at threesomes. Then Hennie went to South America to study tropical animal diseases and stayed there. Today Leah and Gertjie joke he’s probably humping two peasant girls in Peru or Colombia.
Listen to the village gossips, the dorp’s Greek Chorus, on the subject:
Hennie the Vet didn’t just cure Gertjie’s sheepdogs of worm, he also gave her one.
Hennie the Vet was such a loyal lover, he only slept with Gertjie when Leah was away studying for her degree or busy waving her red flag of the month or buying bread and milk at Dot’s shop.
The ways of the heart are not always like that, of course. When you see then together, Leah blonde and Gertjie brown-haired, you can’t help but think they look and act like still attractive widows sweetly consoling each other over the loss of a husband. Leah’s fierce hatred of Giel Swiegers doesn’t bother Gertjie: the last time she saw her father she pointed her loaded shotgun at him and gave him five minutes to get off the farm.
And now, deep in their forties, Leah and Gertjie are starting a business together. Not something they could do on their own, of course, but together they own just about enough to talk a bank manager into a loan for a supermarket to serve the Paal and all the sheepfarms around it. Quite possibly Charles Haasbroek, Leah’s financially astute father and Gertjie’s live-in lover, had some influence with the bank manager as well.
“They’re renting the old co-op building,” Giel gleefully tells Dot Volschenk while she rings up a roll of toilet paper for him. “It’s for a new supermarket, they plan to drive you out of business.”
“Bleddy cows,” Dot complains to Troffel Fouche in the hotel bar that night, she loyally AA with her orange juice and ice while he sips a brandy and ice. “You’d think we’re mates when they come into my shop for something they can’t bleddy get anywhere else.”
“Lekker, nice,” Troffel growls, “let’s show them where King David buried his bleddy carrot. This dorp only has room for one proper shop and no-one can’t beat Dot’s shop.”
“I wonder where they think they’re going to get shop workers,” Dot wonders, lighting another cigarette. “Hitting a till is hard on the back and counting change takes brains.”
Later, in bed, Troffel wakes to the sound of Dot crying. He takes her in his arms and she whispers, “Gertjie shoots a springbok, she brings me the ribs with the best fat, always. Leah smokes Camel cigarettes, yet every month she buys a box of pipe tobacco from me, jokes it’s for Meester but I know he only smokes cigars. The pipe tobacco is for her garden boy, she just doesn’t want me to think she’s too soft on a worker. Why are these good Christians doing this to me, Trof?”
School teacher Breggie Petersen, living rent free with Leah, writes on her laptop in chapter three of her unfinished book:
Why a supermarket here? Because Leah and Gertjie can buy cheaper in bigger bulk to fill a bigger space than Dot’s shop and thus bring prices down sharply for the suffering people. Dot gives to charity, often pays Fivaz the Portuguese for a coffin the family can’t afford, but she doesn’t believe in lowering prices. Doesn’t have to, she owns the shop, the hotel and its liquor store, the petrol station and its truckstop. Leah and Gertjie offered me the position of supermarket manager for a nice salary, they know I often ran the shop for Dot in her drinking days. Dear Father in heaven, Leah has given me a free roof over my head, Meester no longer watches me shower because Leah gave him such a talking to, but I really love teaching and I love my class, how can I look in their trusting eyes and tell them I’m leaving for more money?
Breggie’s book is supposed to be a history about the Paal and its people, but it often turns into a personal journal and has the occasional tear stain to prove it.
Waiting for Breggie to make up her mind, Leah and Gertjie decide to buy Dot lunch in her own hotel and pave the way for healthy competition. Hopefully. If the lunch proves unsuccessful, it’s a battle to financial death then. They are waiting for her in the air-conditioned sitkamer under a strange attempt by Anna Appel to paint Dot when Troffel starts shouting in his manager’s office.
“A bleddy Porsche four by four? How can the Creator of heaven and earth allow such a wicked thing? A four by four is just a lorry, a Porsche is heaven on wheels!”
He was on his phone with the mechanic running the workshop and truckstop at Dot’s petrol station, Geweld Pretorius. With such a nickname literally meaning violence, you would expect Geweld to look like a powerful gorilla covered in tattoos and motorcycle scars. The tattoos and scars are indeed still there, the muscles as well, his habit of working topless in the Karoo heat proves that. For the love of a good woman Geweld changed his ways many years ago, married the sweetly smiling Hazel and took a steady job working for her sister, Dot Volschenk. These days he only takes his great motorbike out for rides in the desert, and most rides end at the Long Trees where he sits by Hazel’s grave and tells her how well their two married boys are raising their six grandchildren in Australia, millions miles away.
Troffel’s outburst brings a sympathetic Leah to his office door. Unlike Gertjie who likes her transport rough and tough so she can load her sheepdogs and unwell sheep in the back, Leah loves fast and classy cars.
“I read what they bleddy did to the Porsche,” she tells Troffel, “but I’ve never actually seen this four-by-four monstrosity. You’re saying there’s one somewhere around here?”
“Geweld’s fixing one.” He’s not exactly friendly; Leah and her friend are trying to put his love out of business. “Rent-a-job from Capetown airport, dropped the ball at the pothole in the middle of the bleddy night, wheel balance and alignment kaput.”
Leah snorts. “Lekker, nice, who rents such a stupid thing? Get a four-by-four bakkie if you’re taking on the Karoo, mate.”
In the sitkamer Gertjie, checking on her phone if the weather report is still lying about the so-called possibility of rain tonight, hears footsteps and looks up. Two men enter the cool room. The older one looks like a bodyguard, the bulge in his belt under his white t-shirt must be a pistol holster unless the man’s severely disformed, the younger one looks like…
Gertjie stops breathing. Here? In the middle of bleddy nowhere, wearing ordinary sunglasses, a khaki shirt, knee-length shorts and walking boots like a regular Karoo person? It bleddy well can’t be him! What on earth is he doing here?