He puts his foot down hard on the accelerator and the wheels spin. Outa grabs the dashboard and the fence becomes a blur as Isak shouts, “twenty … thirty … forty.”
Only the whippet keeps up. Kalbas drops back and the sausage flies wildly.
“Forty-two!”
“O Gotta, the fence, Basie!’
Isak slams on the brakes. The Holden shifts sideways, banking into the fence as Danie and the sausage fly off the back and the whippet is on him, wolfing down the raw meat.
“Where’s Jaffie?” The small boy feels his pockets.
Isak swaggers over to the dogs, laughing in amazement. “Forty-two miles per hour!” He pats the whippet. Kalbas sits to one side.
Danie finds the matchbox. Inside is the smashed beetle. “It’s all your fault!” Furiously he dives at Isak, punching him in the stomach.
“Is not.” Isak shoves Danie away from him. The sight of the beetle is stranger than the rabbit. It unsettles him. “Let’s go,” he shouts to Outa, climbing in behind the wheel.
“Won’t!” Danie picks up the box. Kalbas follows him back to camp but the whippet stays with the Holden. Isak watches the small figure disappear into the darkness.
* * *
Danie eats breakfast off a tray, as do the old men in the ward. Isak is fed via pipes. For a moment he is nowhere, the memory of a boy disappearing into the darkness, clearer than the ward around him.
“What does the doctor say?”
Danie lifts the corner of the mask and Isak repeats the question.
“The shoulder ligaments have torn off, so the arm is only being carried by surrounding muscle. Your ribs pierced the left lung, and the hole in your head is what he calls ‘cause for concern’.”
“Will they operate?” He imagines what an operation costs in this country.
“Maybe a steel pen can help for the shoulder but for now, no one can say. It needs to heal like the rest of you, and that takes time.” Danie places the mask back over his face and he is trapped.
Nothing will ever be the same.
Frustrated, he tries to follow a man in the field outside the window with a dog. What must be saved? He tries to lift himself up but to no avail.
The dog in the field is not a sheep dog. Isak can see by the dog’s disinterest. Even the dogs here have forgotten what dogs are meant to be.
But not the dog with the smiling face, bringing the flock home for summer, lead by Outa on foot. Flock, dog and old man trekking all the way along allemansgrond, back to the farm that he cannot forget.
All the nonsense with the dogs started with the Ford parked in the garage and the Holden bakkie with the tractors under the shed’s roof. His father was forbidden to drive after the heart attack. The frustrations of a man encamped and confronted by his own frailty.
A bitch was on heat. A dull, neglected animal with a bloated belly and dangling teats. Her heat spread with the wind through the valley and as the nights passed, dogs headed on footpaths through fields, breaking loose from chains. The dogs collected at the farm of Oom Frans, showing off amongst one another, growling and snapping, while the mangy bitch paraded with a mournful face. He knew the dog. It belonged to one of the workers, one of those animals that knew only beatings.
The stronger dogs got through the fence to cover her and some of the weaker dogs, bored with waiting, drifted off towards the paddocks, sniffing the scent of lambs, their bleating a call to the hunt. But it was more the bitch’s yelping that drove them on.
He thinks about it calmly. It is as though the fall has opened dungeons, closed up for so many years. One of the dogs found an opening in the fence and the rest followed to where the ewes and lambs slept. It was a cold night. The heavens were clear. He went out that night onto the back stoep to look at the stars that had lowered themselves to the earth and the hills were silent.
He did not hear them that night. Perhaps if the wind had blown towards the farm he would have picked up the sound of frightened ewes, running back and forth, forming a laager around the lambs. The dogs broke through, scattering the sheep this way and that and the flock stormed for the dam, empty but for a little water, just enough for them to drink, just enough for them to get caught in the clay. And their hooves stuck and the lambs fell and sank in the shallow water, just enough water to drown them.
The ewes were trapped. The pack of dogs descended in a frenzy onto the dying lambs as they thrashed helplessly. One or two dogs started to bite wildly. It always went that way. Not for hunger but for madness. At the throat, the body, anywhere they could get their teeth into, until the flock lay still.
The madness passed. The dogs trotted home, each dog to his own home. Some climbed into baskets, others dropped down in the sand, exhausted, pieces of bloodied wool around their snouts.
The call came from Oom Frans at sunrise. He heard the phone, then his father opening the clothes cupboard, then the front door closing and his father walking down to the barracks. It was the way things happened, no one questioned it. Your neighbours expected it from you, they would have done the same. It was just another thing he expected, like all the other things it is what he knew, that is until she came and turned everything upside down.
His father cleaned them out, every dog, whether it was a puppy or an old dog whose teeth had loosened and yellowed with age. All were shot, even the forgotten dog of Katjie at Poppenshuis. He was in bed on the back stoep when he heard the shots from the hunting rifle, the rifle with the silver filigree work.
Kalbas was in his room on the mat, sharp of mind and body when his father whistled as he came up the hill, just a single whistle and Kalbas pricked up his ears, traipsing through the open door. There were two shots. A shot for Kalbas and a shot for the whippet, right there in the basket, under the camphor trees.
His mobile phone rings. Danie answers it. “Amelie.”
He loves her name. He wishes he can tell her that, that he loves her and her name. She can look into his head. It saves him from speaking. Words are clumsy offerings for the pictures in his mind and her thoughts read his pictures perfectly.
He has had so many chances to tell, missed so many chances to tell.
Unfortunately, he has never been able to see inside her head.
SEVEN
The phone rings, two short and one long. Isak gets up and opens the window for the owl. It rings again in the kitchen. The owl sits on the headboard, ears twitching, stretching its wings over the bed.
“Going out to party, Skatlam?”
The bird hops onto Isak’s arm. Carefully, he lifts a wing, poking with his fingers to feel the wound in the soft flesh, but it has healed, only a scab indicating where the wing was torn. The generator and lights of the kitchen come on. He walks onto the stoep with the owl, listening.
“Ja, ja, I hear it all …” His father rings off. “Swartskoen se moer,” is all he says as the house darkens again and the generator cuts off. The owl takes flight over the garden. There is no moon. The Milky Way hangs as a ribbon of light in the sky over the hills, where he finds the Southern Cross and the three sisters.
The bottle of beer is still in the hydrangea bush. He fishes it out and tries to open it on the edge of the stoep. Behind him the back door opens and Danie peers out, wrapped in Ouma’s blanket.
“Boetie, who phoned Pappa?” he whispers.
“The swartskoene.”
“Why do they phone Pappa so late?”
“Because they meet at midnight when it’s dark moon and they drink each other’s blood while they