Devil's Valley (13 page)

“How did that happen?”

“Emma never watches her mouth, that’s what happened.” She went through to the kitchen with clattering plates and bowls.

I stood up to give her a hand with the rest of the dishes, but she quickly stopped me. “You sit right there, it’s woman’s work.”

Against my better judgement I sat down again. “What happened to Emma’s mother?”

“Maria died.”

“I gathered that. But how?”

She started wiping the dishes with her dirty apron; there was no water to be wasted. Everything in the kitchen was greasy from long use.

“Maria fell to her death,” she said, blowing on a plate. “An accident. It was the will of God.”

I took a chance: “I didn’t see her grave in the churchyard.”

“You haven’t seen everything in this place yet,” she said curtly. Adding smartly, “And you better pray that you never get to see it all.”

L
UKAS DEATH WAS the person I now wanted to talk to. But in the mornings he gave lessons in the schoolroom tacked on to his house. So I had to find another target for the time being. Isak Smous, I thought; he was a direct link with Little-Lukas. And rightly or wrongly I felt that after our nocturnal escapade I’d come closer to my fellow hunters. Just as Emma, in Tant Poppie’s eyes, carried the sign of the Devil on her body, I must now be marked by what we’d done together. And talking to Isak might somehow confirm my rites of passage.

But as I set out from Tant Poppie’s house, I was waylaid by Tall-Fransina who beckoned me from the lean-to where her still was rigged up. She needed a hand to feed her fire with bluegum faggots from the stack against the far wall. As always, she was surrounded by cats. A few of them immediately began to weave through my legs, stiff-tailed, purring possessively.

“This must be hard work for a woman on her own?” I asked.

“I get help when I need hands,” she answered brusquely.

“Have you been living alone like this for a long time?”

“Of course.” She was watching with falcon eyes the mouth of the snake from her still. Tall and strong, legs planted apart, in her man’s shirt and waistcoat and skin trousers, with the broad-brimmed hat on her head and a small calabash pipe stuck in her mouth (I never saw her smoking, but she always had that pipe between her strong white teeth). Only when I came right up to her did I realise how tall she was. It was difficult to guess her age: fifty-five? Sixty? In her youth she must have been a stunner. As if she’d been reading my thoughts she said, “No, I never married. I can’t bear the smell of a man.”

“It must have been a loss to the Devil’s Valley.”

She laughed deep from her stomach and showed me how to feed the wood into the oven under the still for the heat to spread evenly.

“You have a deft touch,” I complimented her.

“Takes a lifetime,” she said contentedly. “My father taught me himself. It’s come down a long way in our family. After he became bedridden I took over.” After a while she added, “In all the years I’ve been here there was only one man who really understood what it is about, and that was Little-Lukas.”

Surprised, I looked up. “I didn’t realise he knew anything about distilling.”

“I wanted him to take over from me.” She closed up suddenly. “Now it’s too late.”

“Is there no one else you can talk to?”

“I don’t have time to sit and talk. When it’s pressing-time I work night and day. I distil other kinds of fruit too—peaches, prickly pears, whatever. For the rest I have my cats.”

“You seem to have a whole house full of them.”

“Twenty-four. There isn’t place on my bed for more.”

I bent over and held out my hand to a large black tomcat with smooth pelt and green eyes that was rubbing itself voluptuously against my leg. A small rough tongue licked the hair on the back of my hand.

I looked up at her. “I’d like to know more about Little-Lukas.”

“Little-Lukas had his chance, but he wasted it on a bowl of lentils.”

“You can’t blame a young man for being ambitious, Fransina.”

“It had nothing to do with ambition, it was his prick.”

“Emma?” I asked pointedly.

“What was there Emma could teach him that I couldn’t?” she snapped. Then, brusquely: “You must go now, I’ve got work to do.” She picked up a leaf from an overhanging branch of the lemon tree next to the lean-to and held it under the mouth of the thin copper tube from which the first drops were just beginning to pearl.

Ugly Too

Still thinking about what Tall-Fransina had said, I came past Ouma Liesbet Prune’s little house, one of the more dilapidated dwellings in the settlement. She was too old to care, and her distant nephew Ben Owl too fucking hopeless. As always, she was perched on her rooftop, her tin trunk clutched to her chest, staring up into the sky as if she could see what was hidden from ordinary mortals. But I was distracted by Jurg Water coming round the corner, rod in hand. He stopped when he saw me.

I greeted him with a show of camaraderie. “Hello, Jurg. How’s the great hunter this morning?”

“What’s it to you?” He glared at me as if I was something caught by one of Tall-Fransina’s cats.

“I’m all aches and pains myself,” I confessed. “Suppose I’m not yet used to your kind of nightly jaunts.”

“What’s this shit you’re talking, man?”

“We gave that porcupine hell, didn’t we?”

“Look, I haven’t got time for crap.” And off he went.

A funny feeling settled in my gut, but I tried to keep it down. Jurg was a screwed-up bastard, there was no point in letting him upset me. But to tell the truth, I wasn’t feeling all that sure of myself any more.

Just then I heard Ouma Liesbet calling in a high-pitched voice, “Boetie, I want to talk to you.”

It was a hell of a long time since anyone had called me Boetie; but given her age it was perhaps her good right.

“Ouma?”

“Come and talk to me.”

Well, it wasn’t as if I was in any hurry. But it meant climbing up to the attic landing, hoisting myself up to the roof from there and following the parapet to the chimney. God knows how that little wisp of a creature managed to get up and down.

It took me several minutes on the roof to catch my breath. From close by she looked fucking ancient, the thin skin on her face like the crinkled skin on a cup of boiled milk. Her eyes were watery and ringed with red. She gave off a sour smell.

From up there one could see the whole tract of the Devil’s Valley, running all the way from the dry riverbed in a long gentle curve to Tant Poppie’s house at the far end. The two rows of houses past the solid church which stood there like Luther of old, so-help-me-God-I-can-do-no-other. Some distance away in the bushes, well beyond Tant Poppie’s house, I noticed another dwelling, more a hut than a house, which I hadn’t seen before.

The little sparrow beside me must have followed my gaze, because she said in her tiny insect-buzz of a voice, “That’s Hans Magic’s place.”

“Why does he live so far apart from everybody else?”

“That’s how he wants it.” A dry chuckle. “Just as well. No one can stand it too close to him. It’s years since he last had water on his skin. And then he’s ugly too.”

“I’ve seen other ugly people around the Devil’s Valley, Ouma Liesbet.”

She sniffed. There was a bright drop at the end of her bony nose. “Boetie, when I say ugly I mean
ugly
. You see, there’s a dull kind of ugly, which is the ordinary kind. And then there’s an ugliness that’s all bright and bold. That’s the way God himself meant ugly to be. And that is Hans Magic.”

Lightning Bird

I would have liked to find out more about the man, but by the set of her sunken mouth it was obvious that she wasn’t so inclined. I continued my survey of the settlement. The sheds and backyards and haystacks. The long line of common fields, vegetable gardens, vineyards and orchards on the opposite slope; and on the near side, the ostrich pen with its hedge of aloes and stacked thorn-branches, and the bluegum wood beyond. From here one could look unhindered into all those lives.

“How did the ostriches get here?” I asked.

“Isak Smous’s grandfather brought in a few eggs many years ago. That was in the time of the feather-boom.” A tinny chuckle. “I hatched them myself.”

“How did you do that?”

“It was easy. I was still young. I had a good body. And let me tell you, you won’t find such fine feathers anywhere else.” A dry laugh. “In my youth, when we celebrated New Year, I used to dance for them, I’d wear nothing but feathers. And then the menfolk plucked me.”

“How come that you’re spending your days all alone up here?”

“I’m waiting for the Lord, didn’t you know? No one can tell the day or the hour. When the time comes His judgement will fall on all of us, that’s what we were brought up with.” Suddenly inspired, she continued with a tone of deep satisfaction. “This is only a temporary abode, says the Bible. Sooner or later God will send His thunder and lightning to raze the whole world to the ground. If you read Revelations you’ll see there will be nothing left.” She made a pause, then added quietly, “But there’s another kind of lightning too, and I sometimes ask myself if that isn’t worse. It’s the one inside us, the one laid by the lightning bird the old people spoke about, you know, they had so many stories.”

“How does it go?”

“It comes from far back. They used to say that if God gets angry with the world He sends a storm, and in the storm a lightning bird comes down from the clouds to lay her eggs deep inside an antheap, like coals of fire that go on smouldering in the dark. And there they stay, sometimes for years and years, no one knows they’re there. It’s like a fever in the blood. When their time comes, they hatch; and then their fire destroys everything.”

“It must be tough if you never know when they’re going to hatch.”

“That’s just how it is,” she said resigned. “All we know is that sooner or later it is going to end. One day will be the last. That’s why I’m waiting up here. Only at night it’s not so easy, the stars make such a racket.”

“You need someone to look after you.”

“There’s my distant nephew, he’s three or four times removed, Ben Owl. He sleeps in the daytime because his eyes are too weak for the light. But in the dark he misses nothing. He looks after me as well as anyone could, every night he brings me food and drink and spends some time with me. Even if it’s a bit of a nuisance, what with all those voices in his head talking so loudly, and all at the same time, I can hardly hear myself.”

Chameleon

Before I could answer, and without any transition, she asked, “What are you doing with that thing?” She pointed at the chameleon on my shoulder.

“Oh, he’s quite harmless.”

“It’s his kind that brought death into the world, did you know?”

“How can you say so?”

“That’s what the old people used to tell us.” She leaned back against the chimney. “They said that in the time of Adam and Eve God sent a chameleon to Paradise with a message: Just as the moon wanes and dies and then grows full again, you mortals will die and always rise again. But the chameleon is a slow creature, as you know, and it took its time. One day, when it was resting on a twig, a hare came past and asked about his business. The chameleon told him about the message and from the goodness of his heart the hare offered to run ahead and spread the news. But he was in such a hurry that he forgot half the message. And when he arrived in Paradise he told Adam and Eve that God wanted them to know: Just as the moon wanes and dies, you mortals will also die.” The laugh she gave sounded almost cheerful. “Well, that was that. The harm was done, and by the time the chameleon arrived in Paradise the people had already received the message of death. Which is why, the old people said, Adam and Eve maar turned to eating figs.”

I tried to sort through all the irrelevant shit in my mind. “If I’m not mistaken, Ouma,” I said, “that story was first told by the Khoikhoi people.”

“And who might they be?”

“The Hottentots.”

“We’ve never had those in the Devil’s Valley,” said Ouma Liesbet with comic indignation. “It’s a story handed down by our own people.” Without waiting for an answer she asked, “What are you going to do with the little dragon?”

“Piet Snot gave it to me to bring me luck.”

“What would he know about luck?” She clicked her tongue. “Poor little turd. He hasn’t got it easy with that father of his.”

“Who is his father?”

“Jurg Water of course.”

I added two and two together and arrived at rather more than four.

“Can you tell me more about the Valley?”

“Of course I can, but why should I? Life is too short to waste on gossip.” And then she seemed to forget all about me and started mumbling to herself, something that sounded like a counting-out chant. “Lukas Seer begat Lukas Nimrod, and Lukas Nimrod begat Lukas Up-Above, and Lukas Up-Above begat Strong-Lukas, and Strong-Lukas begat Lukas Bigballs, and Lukas Bigballs begat Lukas Devil, and Lukas Devil begat Lukas Death, and Lukas Death begat Little-Lukas.” Another dry chuckle. “And that’s only one of the lines. Because you must know, the old Seer had seventeen children, nine sons and eight daughters. And with each of the eight daughters he had a few more. And just before he died he even had a child with one of his granddaughters. All scriptural, of course. You know, like Lot and his daughters. Today evil is sprouting like weeds in the valley. That’s why I prefer to sit up here until the Lord comes to fetch me.”

“How can you be so sure that He’ll come?”

“He came for Elijah, didn’t He? And He came for Enoch. And He came for Lukas Up-Above. He told me Himself I’m next.”

“What exactly happened to this Lukas Up-Above?”

Single Bird

“He spent his whole life trying to get out of here,” she said. “If you ask me, it’s because he had such a shrew for a wife, no one could stand it with her. But poor Lukas was so fat, he could barely walk. They say he was twice as double as Jurg Water, and high on his legs. That put him on the idea of flying. He first made wings of all kinds. Feathers, branches, wood, bags filled with tumbleweed and thistles and reed-plumes. But every time he nearly killed himself. Then he tried wind. First he got all the children together to rake up a wind with branches. When that didn’t work he started eating anything that would blow up his stomach, so that he could fart himself across the mountains. That time he very nearly died.”