Chapter five
I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.
James Taylor
Meester Hoffman, schoolmaster, widower, ghost. Does his restless spirit truly haunt the Haasbroek house where he once lived or is it a figment of the Paal’s imagination?
Sanna Retief, the district’s clinic sister who rents a nice house in the shadow of Whatshername Koppie, believes he’s real. She insists Meester haunts the Haasbroek garden before sunrise and talks to her as she walks by on her way to the clinic. Why Sanna should walk all the way to work past the Haasbroek house makes no sense, of course; the township and its clinic being on the west side of Whatshername Koppie with her house close by on the slope of the rocky hill. And how, the village gossips would love to know, does church elder Giel Swiegers feel about his lover Sanna still pining for her dead lover Meester?
Giel, of course, swears he’s not having carnal relations with Sanna Retief. That would be a sin.
Breggie Petersen knows better. As teacher at the township school she used to walk past Sanna Retief’s house in the early morning and regularly saw Giel Swiegers urinating in her garden, and he was still wearing his pyjamas.
Breggie, now manager of the new supermarket, is also in charge of the plumber, carpenter, painter and other tradesmen employed to turn the dark and cow-webbed co-op into a bright, modern space nearly twice the size of Dot’s shop. Breggie didn’t do the hiring, Leah Haasbroek did and she made bleddy sure they were experienced, had their trade papers, didn’t drink or smoke grass on the job and so on and so forth. She definitely didn’t want a chancer like Giel Swiegers on any of the jobs. She did allow Breggie to pay boys and girls from the township school to pick up litter and clear all the weeds from the co-op’s grounds.
No, overpaying children an adult’s wage didn’t bleddy clear Breggie’s conscience. The teacher in her will always feel she abandoned her class when she took the well-paid position of supermarket manager.
Leah and her business partner, sheepfarmer Gertjie de Beer, wanted a simple but effective name for their new venture and compiled a long list of names. They did this over cheap red for Leah and beer for Gertjie, sitting on the back stoep of the Haasbroek house with a sun-blasted view of the meerkat community and the vast Karoo in front of them.
None of the names worked.
“They don’t sing,” Gertjie said and opened another beer.
She had to sleep over that night, of course. The village gossips cannot believe all the beer Gertjie can put away and still keep that trim figure; they forget she works physically harder than her farm help to keep the place from going under.
The next morning Leah, reeling from the punch of the cheap red herself, was making strong black coffee when spilled sugar on the kitchen table started forming letters, as if by magic, and ended up spelling out KOOP.
“Gertjie!” she called. “Get out of that bed! We’ve got the best supermarket name and it’s so bleddy obvious!”
Gertjie, wearing one of Leah’s nightgowns, staggered into the kitchen and stared at KOOP written in sugar. It took her befuddled mind an entire minute to get it: Of course, dammit! The building used to house the Karoo Co-operation For Agricultural Products, Kooperasie in Afrikaans, Koop for short.
“Nice, clever, even Troffel Fouche will get it,” she said. “But why sugar? Don’t you have pen and paper around here?”
Leah chuckled. “I didn’t write it, stupid. The sugar ants didn’t write it either.”
Gertjie’s eyes went wide and she whispered, “Bleddy hell.”
“Thank you, Meester,” Leah said.
“Thank you, Meester,” Gertjie repeated.
They knew it had to be the ghost, sugar ants can’t spell.
That same morning Anna Appel, failed artist, knocked on the front door of the Haasbroek house.
“I woke up this morning with the strangest feeling,” she told Leah and Gertjie. “I felt strongly you need someone to do your supermarket’s name out front and I used to be a signwriter before computers killed signwriting. I’m very good with lettering, really, don’t hold my paintings against me.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Leah asked Anna Appel.
The village gossips say:
Lekker, nice, Anna Appel’s dam killed a child and now she’s killing that supermarket before it can even open its doors. If she can’t draw a simple picture of anything around here she bleddy definitely can’t draw the letters of KOOP.
When the gossip reaches Dot Volschenk, she starts shaking with laughter and then coughs herself into a sweat.When she tells Troffel Fouche about it, he looks worried.
“Lekker, nice,” he frowns, “but let’s remember people don’t go to a rugby match ‘cos they like both sides. They go ‘cos they want to see who scores the most tries.”
“Trof, speak Afrikaans,” Dot frowns back, “What the hell you’re trying to say?”
“Never mind how Anna Appel screws up their sign, Dottie, there will be people who go there ‘cos people are curious.”
Dot looks at him. It still amazes her how clever this big dumb ox can be. She lights a cigarette, coughs and stares at her bedroom wall.
Usually, at month’s end when the government support for the poor pays out, Dot’s shop and her hotel’s liquor store put on little shows to draw shoppers in: Rap and hip hop roar out of speakers, balloons fly, kids get free sweets and their parents are offered all kinds of discount specials.
Suddenly, on a Friday in the middle of the month, the speakers start blaring on the cement pavement outside Dot’s shop and her liquor store, the balloons are filled with helium and sent soaring, the free sweets are handed out and the special discount signs go up in the shop windows.
“This means war,” Gertjie laughs when she and Leah drive past the show outside Dot’s shop, on their way to the Breipaal Hotel to pick up the two Americans.
As if choosing sides, God sends a bleddy storm that same afternoon and the hard rain washes out Dot’s promotional effort; she shrugs and smiles, at least she knows it’s all tax deductible.
Over a landscape as extreme as the desert you rarely get what weather watchers call polite rain, a tiny cloud formation gathering quietly and dropping its water gently. Not in the Karoo, no, never. Here ill-mannered clouds announce their coming like an insane symphony orchestra clashing, thundering. Lightning runs brightly along exposed wires, sets telegraph poles, tall trees and thatched roofs on fire; slashing rain drowns snakes, ants, lambs, meerkat and springhare babies, land turtles, field mice and mole colonies; it even forces the dense prickly pear forest on Springbokfontein to bleed sticky white milk, and the hammering raindrops cause the cactus jungle’s eerily beautiful spider nests to fall into ruin.
Watching the awesome display of nature’s special effects, Tom Ryder and bodyguard Gabriel are ecstatic. They sit on the glassed-in veranda of Gertjie’s farmhouse on Springbokfontein and shout their joy, but can’t quite hear themselves. The corrugation iron roof over their heads is a giant drum and the storm its drummer. You could fire both barrels of Gertjie’s shotgun in here and it’s possible no-one would hear it.
Leah is treating the American visitors to coffee and carrot cake when Gertjie rushes in from the house, snatching a raincoat and gumboots from the rack of bad weather coats and boots by the outside door. She looks frightened.
“I forgot to check the drainpipe!” she shouts.
Leah gets a sick look on her face. This has happened before and she saw the tragic result.
“I’m coming with you!” she shouts, quickly getting a coat and squirming into Wellington boots.
Seeing the expressions on the women’s faces, Tom Ryder starts shouting as well. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“Pregnant ewes!” Leah cries. “Merino sheep! Bleddy expensive! Going to drown!”
“Not on my watch!” the film star screams and goes for a coat and boots.
Yes, it’s a hackneyed old line from hundreds of bleddy movies, but the women see he means it, and Gabriel is reaching for a coat and boots as well.
The four of them run out into the dark day, shoulders hunched against the force of nature. Gertjie leads the way. They are wet to the bone before they reach The Queen Victoria Maternity Ward. That’s what the handwritten pink sign on the steel gate says. Tom Ryder and Gabriel love it.
Gertjie shouts something in Leah’s ear, Leah quickly veers off and disappears in the rain.
The Queen Victoria gate opens on a cement slope leading down to a muddy square-shaped pool with sides of yellow Karoo stone. At least a dozen frightened and extremely pregnant ewes struggle to keep their heads above the smelly mixture of mud, rainwater and sheep dung. The rain keeps pelting down, keeps deepening the pool.
Gabriel wants to know what happened to the roof?
“Stolen,” Gertjie shouts. “Waiting for a new one. It’s not a pool, it’s a safe place for ewes about to drop a lamb. If I leave them with the flock outside predators will get them. There’s a nice cement floor under all that bleddy shit. And a drainpipe in case of rain.”
Tom Ryder understands. “Blocked by mud and sheep dung.”
“I’ve got to get a new drain system,” Gertjie admits.
Leah arrives, carrying three shovels and a rolled-up length of garden hose. The plan seems simple: Leah and the men use the shovels to try and clear the drainpipe from inside, Gertjie goes outside the wall and uses the garden hose to hopefully force a way through the blockage.
Gabriel wants the exact location of the drainpipe. Leah points. The men have to believe her, they can’t see a bleddy thing.
Gertjie takes the roll of garden hose, uses a loudly complaining ewe as a step and climbs over the stone wall.
“Please hurry!” she shouts. “Going to be over their heads in a minute!”
“Why don’t we get the sheep out first?” Gabriel suggests. “Buy us time to open the pipe.”
Gertjie, on the other side of the shoulder high wall now, shakes her head. “They will try to find the flock, scared sheep do that.”
“Then they’re jackal or rooikat food!” Leah shouts.
Tom Ryder wants to know what’s a rooikat?
“Caracal, wild cat.” Gertjie is struggling to get the hose into the drainpipe’s outlet, sounds anxious and irritated. “Please don’t tell me they’re so bleddy cute, ours are a lot bigger than yours, vicious flippin’ killers.”
Leah shouts one or more of the killers could be watching the flooded pen right now. They smell sheep a mile away.
“Let’s get this mother open!” Gabriel roars.
With the rain nearly blinding them and the pool liquid thicker than pea soup, the three use their shovels to prod around in the murky, stinking mess. The fat sheep, already terrified, try to head butt them.
There’s nothing funny about the hard head of a sheep; it’s even less funny when an expectant mother slips in the mess under her hooves and starts sinking beneath the murky surface. An anxious squeak is the last sound heard before she disappears completely. A desperate Leah starts groping with one hand, trying to find the submerged sheep and keep her grip on the shovel.
On the other side of the stone wall Gertjie screams God knows what. It could have something to do with the monetary value of a pregnant Merino ewe.
And then a genuine Hollywood hero comes to the rescue. Tom Ryder hands his shovel to Gabriel, gulps his lungs full of wet air and dives.
That night Gertjie, with stars glinting through storm-cloud outside her bedroom window, gives herself to Tom Ryder.
Later the Paal’s version of a Greek Chorus, virtually all of them church members, will have this to say on the matter:
How will Giel Swiegers feel when he hears his daughter Gertjie entertained a Yank actor on the family farm? Entertained him for an entire bleddy night! Hopefully Giel will have harsh words to say when it’s his turn to praise God from our pulpit again.
That same night, of course, Gabriel also tries his luck with Leah who decided to sleep over on the farm. He figures she might just be willing because he was the one who got that damn drainpipe open. Unfortunately for him Leah’s not in the mood, but she lets him down so sweetly he saves her words on his phone so he can use them when he next faces a romantic entanglement. Deep in his heart, of course, Gabriel believes Leah would have said yes if he had saved her pregnant Merino sheep from drowning.
Leah really might have said yes if she knew for sure her father wouldn’t suddenly knock on the guest bedroom door and walk in. Charles Haasbroek went to Bloemfontein on business for a few days, but what if he decided to drive home that night?
And what, Leah can’t help but think, would have bothered her father the most? Finding her in bed with a muscled stranger or his lover Gertjie in bed with a handsome film star?
The morning after all the drama, when they have a moment alone, Gertjie begs Leah to take the Americans back to the Paal before Charles suddenly comes driving up the rocky road to the farmhouse.
“Lekker,nice, now you worry my dad might pop up?” Leah grins.
Gertjie pulls a face. “I love your father, you know that.”
“Ja, but what about Tom bleddy Ryder?”
“He means nothing, Leah. It’s just like…it’s sort of like getting his autograph, man, that’s all.”
Leah understands this perfectly.
So she drives the famous actor and his bodyguard back to the Breipaal Hotel. And to her shock discovers, during the drive, that Tom Ryder and Gabriel have their own plan for Gertjie de Beer’s immediate future.
A very interesting plan.
One week later, Sunday morning early, Breggie Petersen is in the Haasbroek kitchen boiling water for coffee when a huge fist thunders against the front door.
“Breggie!” Leah calls from her bathroom. “Please tell my dad if he breaks that door he’s paying for it!”
Leah obviously thinks it’s Charles Haasbroek and it probably took him the whole bleddy week to find out what happened with the Americans and pregnant sheep and his Gertjie. Breggie thinks the very same thing and heads for the front door with her heart in her throat. The glowing pine floor of the long corridor creaks under her bare feet, but not under the wheels of Meester’s wheelchair. The ghost is already on his way to the front door, his eyes aflame with anger.
“It’s Leah’s dad,” Breggie tries to pacify him.
“it’s not Leah’s bleddy dad,” Meester snarls. “But don’t worry, I’m right here,” and he fades away.
Breggie unlocks and opens the door: it’s Gertjie’s dad, church elder Giel Swiegers wearing black suit and tie, Bible like a weapon in his hand, furiously ready to do battle in the name of the Lord.
“Good morning, Oom Giel,” Breggie smiles.