Men of Men (5 page)

The man turned and aimed a kick at the nearest labourer. ‘Sebenza, you black monkey!’

‘Where will I find him?’

‘Other side of Market Square, behind the Lord Nelson.’ The man answered off-handedly without turning his head.

The dusty pitted open square was as littered with filth as the rest of the settlement, and crowded with the wagons of the transport riders and the carts of farmers who had come in to sell milk
or produce and of the water sellers, peddling the precious stuff by the bucket.

The Lord Nelson was a stained red dusty canvas over a wooden frame. Three of the previous night’s drinkers were laid out like embalmed corpses in the narrow alley beside the canteen, while
the single bar-room was already filling with the early morning customers.

A pariah dog sniffed the breath of one of the unconscious drunks, and recoiled with shock before slinking away to raid the open drum that served as a rubbish bin behind the shack.

Zouga stepped over the sprawling bodies and gingerly made his way into the noisome slum beyond. He had to make half a dozen further enquiries until he found Jock Danby’s hut. So obsessed
were the diggers with their own race for the hidden glitter of wealth, and so transient the population of the diggings, that a man seemed to know only the names of his immediate neighbours. It was
a community of strangers, every man caring only for himself, completely uninterested in the other human beings about him, except in as much as they could either hinder or help him in his quest for
the bright stones.

Jock Danby’s hut was hardly distinguishable from a thousand others. Two rooms built of adobe bricks and covered with thatch and tattered canvas. There was a lean-to at one end, with a
smoking cooking fire on which stood a sooty black three-legged pot.

In the cluttered dusty yard stood the inevitable diamond sorting-table, a low structure with sturdy wooden legs, the top covered with a sheet of flat iron which was scoured shiny bright by the
diamondiferous pebbles that had brushed over the surface. The wooden scrapers lay abandoned on the table top, and a heap of sieved and washed gravel formed a glittering pyramid in the centre of the
table.

A two-wheeled cart stood in front of the main door of the hut, two somnolent donkeys still in the traces, flicking their ears at the swarming black cloud of flies. The cart was piled with lumps
of yellow earth, but the yard was deserted.

Incongruously there were a few straggling scarlet geraniums growing in galvanized one-gallon syrup cans on each side of the doorway. There were also dainty lace curtains in the single window, so
freshly washed that they had not yet turned ochre red with dust, nor become speckled with the excrement of the swarming flies.

The touch of a woman was unmistakable, and to confirm Zouga’s guess there was the faint but harrowing sound of a woman weeping from the open doorway.

As Zouga hesitated in the yard, disconcerted by the sounds of grief, a brawny figure filled the doorway and stood blinking in the sunlight, shading his eyes with a gnarled and dirt-ingrained
hand.

‘Who are you?’ Jock Danby demanded, with unnecessary roughness.

‘I spoke to you yesterday,’ Zouga explained, ‘up at the pit.’

‘What do you want?’ the digger demanded, showing no sign of recognition, his features screwed up in an expression of truculence and something else, some other emotion which Zouga did
not immediately recognize.

‘You spoke of selling your briefies,’ Zouga reminded him.

Jock Danby’s face seemed to swell and turn dark ugly red; the veins and cords stood out in his throat as he ducked his head down on the thickly muscled shoulders.

‘You filthy bloody vulture,’ he choked, and he came out into the sunlight with the heavy irresistible crabbing rush of a gut-shot buffalo bull.

He was taller than Zouga by a head, ten years younger and fifty pounds heavier. Taken completely by surprise, Zouga was a hundredth part of a second late in ducking and spinning away from the
man’s charge. A fist like a cannon ball smashed into his shoulder, a glancing blow but with the force to send Zouga reeling to sprawl on his back across the sorting-table, scattering
diamondiferous gravel across the dusty yard.

Jock Danby charged again, his swollen face working, his eyes mad, his thick stained fingers hooked as they reached for Zouga’s throat. Zouga jack-knifed his legs, drawing himself into a
ball, tense as the arch in an adder’s neck at the moment before it strikes, and he drove the heels of his boots into the man’s chest.

The breath whistled out of Jock Danby’s throat, and he stopped in mid-charge as though hit in the chest with a double charge of buckshot. His head and arms snapped forward, nerveless as a
straw-man, and he flew backwards, crashing into the unbaked brick wall of the hut and beginning to slide down onto his knees.

Zouga bounded off the tabletop. His left arm was numb to the fingertips from the unexpected blow, but he was light on his feet as a dancer, and the quick rush of cold anger armed and
strengthened him. He closed the gap between them with two swift strides and hooked Jock Danby, high in the side of his head just above and in front of his ear; the shock of the punch jarred his own
teeth but sent the man spinning along the wall to slump on his knees in the red dust.

Jock Danby was stunned and his eyes were glazing over, but Zouga jerked him to his feet and propped him against the side of the cart, setting him up carefully for the next punch. His anger and
outrage driving him on to revenge that unprovoked and senseless attack, Zouga shifted his weight, holding Jock Danby steady with his left hand and pulling back the right fist for a full-blooded
swing.

Then he froze. He never threw the punch. Instead he stared incredulously. Jock Danby was blubbering like a child, his heavy shoulders shaking uncontrollably, tears greasing down the sunraddled
cheeks into the dusty beard.

It was somehow shocking and embarrassing to see a man like this weep, and Zouga felt his anger swiftly extinguished. He dropped his fist and unclenched it at his side.

‘Christ—’ Jock Danby choked hoarsely. ‘What kind of man are you to try and make a profit of another man’s grief?’

Zouga stared at him, unable to answer the accusation.

‘You must have smelt it, like a hyena or a fat bloody vulture.’

‘I came to make you a fair offer – that’s all,’ Zouga replied stiffly. He took the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it to Jock Danby. ‘Wipe your face,
man,’ he ordered gruffly.

Jock smeared his tears and then studied the stained linen. ‘You didn’t know then?’ he whispered. ‘You didn’t know about the boy?’ He looked up and studied
Zouga’s face sharply and, seeing his answer, he handed back the handkerchief and shook his head like a spaniel shaking off the water from its ears, trying to steady his reeling senses.
‘I’m sorry,’ he grunted. ‘I thought somehow you had learned about the boy – and come to buy me out.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Zouga told him, and Jock Danby started for the door of the shack.

‘Come,’ he said, and led Zouga through the hot stuffy little front room. The chairs covered with dark green velvet were too bulky for the size of the room, and the family treasures
– Bible and faded ancestral photographs, cheap cutlery and a porcelain dish commemorating the Queen’s wedding to Prince Albert – were on display upon the central table.

In the door of the back room Zouga paused, and felt a sickening little lurch in the pit of his stomach. A woman knelt beside the bed. She had a shawl spread over head and shoulders. Her hands
clasped before her face were roughened and reddened by the drudgery of labour over the diamond sorting-table.

She lifted her head and looked at Zouga in the doorway. She might once have been a pretty girl, but the sun had coarsened her skin and her eyes were swollen and reddened with grief. The wisps of
hair that hung lankly from under the shawl were greasy and prematurely greyed.

After that one glance she lowered her head again and her lips moved silently as she prayed.

A child lay upon the bed, a boy no older than Jordan. His eyes were closed, his features very pale, bloodless as candlewax, but infinitely peaceful. He was dressed in a clean nightshirt, his
limbs neatly arranged, the hands folded on his chest.

It took Zouga a full minute to realize that he was dead. ‘The fever,’ whispered Jock at Zouga’s side. He broke off and stood dumb and massive as an ox awaiting the
butcher’s stroke.

Z
ouga took Jock Danby’s cart down to Market Square and purchased a dozen rough-sawn planks of lumber, paying the transport rider’s
price without haggling.

In the dusty yard in front of Danby’s shack he stripped to his shirtsleeves and planed the raw planks, while Jock sawed and shaped them. They worked in silence except for the whicker of
plane and saw.

The rough coffin was ready before noon, but as Jock lifted his son’s body into it Zouga caught the first whiff of corruption; it happens very swiftly in the African heat.

Jock’s wife rode on the battered cart with the coffin and Zouga walked beside Jock Danby.

The fever was ravaging the camp. There were two other carts already at the burial ground, a mile beyond the last tents on the Transvaal road, each surrounded with a silent knot of mourners; and
there were graves ready dug, and a grave-digger to demand his guinea.

On the way back from the burial ground Zouga stopped the cart in front of one of the canteens that fronted the market square, and with the remaining coins in his pocket he bought three bottles
of Cape brandy.

He and Jock sat facing each other on the over-stuffed green velvet chairs, with an open bottle and two tumblers on the table between them. The tumblers were embossed with cheery gold
letters:

Zouga half-filled the tumblers and pushed one across to Jock.

The big man studied the contents of the tumbler, holding it in his huge fists between his knees, hunching his shoulders and drooping his head.

‘It was so quick,’ he muttered. ‘Yesterday evening he ran to meet the cart, and rode home on my shoulder.’ He took a swallow of the dark liquor and shuddered. His voice
was husky as he went on. ‘He was so light. No meat on his little bones.’

They drank in unison.

‘There was a jinx on me from the moment I drove my first peg on these bloody claims.’ Jock shook his great shaggy head. ‘I should have stayed on the river-diggings, like Alice
told me.’

Outside the single lace-covered window the sun was already setting, a lurid red show through the dust clouds; and as the gloom gathered in the room, Alice Danby came through and placed a smoky
hurricane lantern on the table between them and followed it with two bowls of Boer-meal porridge swimming in a thin and oily mutton stew. Then she disappeared silently into the back room and, from
time to time during the long night, Zouga heard her gentle sobs through the thin dividing wall.

In the dawn Jock Danby lolled in the green velvet armchair, his shirt open to the navel and his hairy stomach bulging out of it. The third bottle was half empty.

‘You are a gentleman,’ Jock slurred unevenly. ‘I don’t mean a swell or a toff but a bloody gentleman, that’s what you are.’

Zouga sat upright, grave and attentive; except for a slight reddening of his eyes he seemed totally unaffected by the night’s drinking.

‘I wouldn’t want to wish the Devil’s Own on a gentleman like you.’

Zouga said quietly, ‘If you’re going, you have to sell to someone.’

‘They’re jinxed, those two claims,’ mumbled Jock. ‘They’ve killed five men already, they’ve broken me, they’ve given me the worst year of my life.
I’ve seen men on each side of me pull big stones; I’ve seen them become rich – while me—’ he made a drunken gesture that encompassed the sordid little shack,
‘look at me.’

The canvas that screened the connecting doorway was jerked aside and Alice Danby stood bareheaded beside her husband. It was evident by her drawn grey features that she had not slept either.

‘Sell them,’ she said. ‘I cannot stay here another day. Sell them, sell everything – let’s go, Jock, let’s get away from this dreadful place. I cannot bear to
spend another night here.’

T
he mining commissioner was a dour little magistrate appointed by President Brand of the fledgling Boer Free State, who laid claim to the
diggings.

Brand was not the only one to have done so. Old Waterboer, the chief of the Griqua Bastaards, made cross claim to the arid plains where his people had lived for fifty years and more. In London,
Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, had only just awakened to the potential wealth of the diamond diggings, and for the first time was listening attentively to the pleas of the
Imperialists to support old Nicholaas Waterboer’s claim and take Griqualand into the sphere of British influence.

In the meantime the Free State mining commissioner was trying, with only qualified success, to maintain some order over the unruly diggers. Just as his roadways were crumbling into the
surrounding pits on Colesberg kopje, so his authority was eroding before the onrush of events with the gathering of national interests and the emergence from obscurity of the first powerful figures
as the financial aristocracy of the fields.

Zouga and Jock Danby found the commissioner bewailing his task over a liquid breakfast in the bar of the London Hotel and, supporting him by each elbow, they escorted him back across Market
Square to his office.

By mid-morning that day, the commissioner had copied the details of the Devil’s Own, claim Nos 141 and 142 held under perpetual quit-rent letter, from J. A. Danby, Esq. to Major M. Z.
Ballantyne, and noted payment in full in the sum of £2,000 by cheque drawn on the Standard Bank.

An hour after noon, Zouga stood at the corner of Market Square, and watched the cart piled high with the green velvet armchairs and the brass bedstead pull away towards the northern corner of
the square. Jock Danby led the team, and his wife sat thin and erect upon the load. Neither of them looked back at Zouga, and the moment they disappeared into the maze of narrow alleys and shanties
Zouga turned towards the kopje.