The Covenant (148 page)

It was a blast Detleef had not expected. On the rugby field he had been knocked about by the biggest—mouth cut, eyes blackened—but the dominee’s words were blows to his pride, and he gasped.

“There’s a fine young woman in Carolina who is wasting her life for love of you. Maria Steyn, daughter of heroes, a heroine herself. For God’s sake, Detleef, open your eyes. It was never intended that you marry Clara van Doorn. It would have been wrong. It would have ruined your life to have beat your head against that wall. And all the time you had a sweet, good woman waiting for you, and you were too blind to see.”

After a long silence Detleef asked weakly, “Did she send you?”

“I heard about her, and I came on my own, as your friend.” When Detleef made no comment, the predikant asked in a low voice, “Detleef, shall we pray?” And on his knees beside the young man for whom he had such high hopes, he talked with God about the extreme difficulty men face when they want to lead a Christian life.

The wedding was to be held in the Dutch Reformed church at
Carolina, where numerous Steyns from the region gathered to honor Christoffel’s memory. At the strong suggestion of Reverend Brongersma, Maria’s predikant was asked to perform the ceremony, but on the evening before the wedding Detleef went to the church in Venloo and said, “Reverend Brongersma, I wouldn’t feel properly married unless you helped,” and when the pastor said that he would drive Detleef down to the wedding, the young man fumbled with a package and asked hesitantly, “Dominee, tell me. I paid a lot of money for this Bible. Could I give it to Maria?”

Brongersma took the book, opened the cover, and saw that a page was missing; it required no cleverness to deduce what had happened. He thought for a moment, then asked gently, “Don’t you think that a bright girl like Maria might guess about Clara?”

“Yes, I suppose she would,” he said dejectedly.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Detleef. I’ve always wanted a leatherbound Bible. I’ll trade this for a new one of mine.” And next day Brongersma printed in firm clear letters on the page reserved for family records:

DETLEEF VAN DOORN
–
MARIA STEYN
Kinders van ons helde. Getroud 14 Maart 1919
 (Children of our heroes. Married 14 March 1919)

And then Detleef was thrown out into the world, just as the Trianon Van Doorns had advised; the committee that selected rugby players for a team which would tour New Zealand chose him to be one of the principal forwards, and Venloo expanded with more pride than it would have done had he been elected general of the armies. For a small town to provide a Springbok was a glory that rarely came.

A Springbok was any athlete of world class who wore the green blazer with its golden springbok emblem while representing South Africa against another nation. A cricketer could be a Springbok, so could an Olympic runner, and as such they were entitled to full honors; but it was generally understood that only a rugby Springbok was a true immortal. This was especially true in 1921, because the New Zealand All-Blacks, so called because of their ominous uniforms, were regarded as the finest team that had ever played the game, and it was agreed that the winner of the forthcoming matches would be world champions.

•  •  •

Detleef was twenty-six that year, the father of a boy, the master of a growing farm. When his picture appeared in the city papers, it showed a stocky farmer, feet wide apart, rope around his ample stomach as a belt, and with absolutely no neck. The line from the bottom of his ear to the break of his shoulder was straight and unbroken, and when he posed next to his heaviest pair of oxen, he resembled them.

The problem of who would tend the farm while he was absent was conveniently solved: when Piet Krause left Venloo he had expected to find work quickly in Johannesburg, but these were hard times, and at one industry after another he was rebuffed. Chastened, he was glad to accept Detleef’s offer of a free home and meals for himself and Johanna: “But only during the rugby tour. I know I can find work in Johannesburg. This nation needs men like me.”

When Detleef, accompanied by five of the horrible Morkels, stepped ashore at Auckland, he was like some gape-eyed child, for the people of New Zealand were immersed in frenzy over this championship series. The South Africans were allowed to warm up, of course, against regional teams, and in the first match Detleef discovered what he was going to be up against. When he hooked arms in the scrum, he looked into the face of a gigantic New Zealander with the sloping shoulders and quick moves of a true athlete; he was Tom Heeney, soon to fight Gene Tunney for the boxing championship of the world, and when he slammed into Detleef, the latter felt his knees jump backward. In the afternoons to come, he would face Heeney often.

When the regional warm-ups were finished, the two nations played a series of three games, the first on the southern island at Dunedin, the last two on the northern island, at Auckland and Wellington. Detleef would never forget that opening game: “When we lined up for the photographers to take pictures, I was like a little boy. I had to go to the bathroom. So I went and was almost late for the whistle. I remember nothing about the first half, except that I kept bumping into some very strong men. We ended the half ahead by five-to-nothing.” Whenever he spoke to audiences about that game he stopped at this point, laughed and said, “But I certainly remember the second half. New Zealanders kept running up and down my spine. The crowd kept roaring. The ball kept slipping away, and at the end of the game New Zealand won thirteen-to-five.”

But he was blooded. Like an animal that has gone up against a lion and escaped with its life, he knew what fear was; he understood
the meaning of pressure and became indifferent to the roar of the crowd. Before the opening of the second game he gathered the five Morkels on his team and said, “We show them no mercy.” It was an epic struggle, tied at five-all until the gang of Morkels made superhuman plays to eke out a 9–5 victory. “That night,” Detleef often said in later years, “was the high point of my life. Nothing could ever excel that victory over New Zealand.”

The third and deciding game should never have taken place, for the field was so water-soaked and the rain so incessant that play resembled swimming more than rugby. The score was a frustrating 0–0, but the last seconds were a kind of majestic triumph for Detleef; a huge New Zealander broke away for what seemed the game-winning score, except that Van Doorn made a diving tackle that slowed him down. Boy Morkel rushed up to help hold him, whereupon six New Zealanders piled on. In the tangle and mud, Detleef’s leg twisted, then broke. His rugby days were ended, but as he was carried off the field, refusing to surrender to the pain, he was able to tell Tom Heeney, “Well, you didn’t beat us,” and the Hard Rock from Down Under laughed and said, “We nearly did.”

In the ensuing years Detleef was remembered wherever he went as “the man who saved the day in New Zealand.” He treasured his green jacket with the emblazoned antelope and kept it on a special hanger in his wardrobe, taking it out occasionally for some sporting event. It became a sacred object, replacing the ceramic crock in which the men of his family had long made their bread puddings.

W
HEN
D
ETLEEF LIMPED HOME ON CRUTCHES IN
1921
AND
saw how ineptly Piet Krause had managed Vrymeer during the rugby matches in New Zealand, he was tempted to show his disgust, but Maria calmed him by pointing out: “Piet kept worrying about Johannesburg. Don’t blame him for what he overlooked here.”

Krause had found—or more accurately, Johanna had found for him—a minor job as labor advisor to the government. He specialized in gold-mine problems, and when he returned to Venloo for a visit, Detleef, seeing the excitement with which he attacked his new duties, forgave him: “You were never meant to be a farmer, Piet. Tell me, why do we hear so many rumbles from your city?”

That was all Piet needed. In wild bursts of words, interrupted by Johanna with her own interpretations, he explained why the burgeoning city had become the focus of the country: “It’s there the real battles are being fought. Our excursions up north, where General de Groot died and you and I took part, they were nothing. Echoes of the nineteenth century. But in Johannesburg …”

“Who’s fighting?”

“The Afrikaner. He’s fighting for his soul.”

He insisted that Detleef come back with him to witness the struggle
of the white Afrikaner workman against the English mine owner, the Hoggenheimer financier, and especially the Bantu worker, but Detleef said that until he could move without crutches that would be impossible. However, he did want to understand the gold mines and promised that he would read whatever Piet mailed him in preparation for his later visit.

Johanna made the selection, and what she sent was startling. One gang of workers wanted to establish a soviet in which laboring men would take control of the mines, overthrow the government, and establish a Communist dictatorship in harmony with Russia. One group of mine owners wanted to fire all white workers and use only Bantu to work the gold, but when Maria read the literature more carefully, she pointed out: “That’s not what the owners said, Detleef. That’s what their enemies said they said.” But then he received other mailings which proved that many owners wanted to cut back the number of white workers and increase the number of black.

From a distance, the city seemed such a jungle of competing forces that Detleef was actually eager to get there, and as soon as his leg mended he informed Johanna that he was ready. She advised him that if he caught a train at Waterval-Boven they would meet him at the railway station in central Johannesburg, and when they did they led him into a miasma of urban horror.

His education up to that moment, except for Chrissiesmeer, had been romantic: old generals fighting lost battles, gallant young men on the playing fields of New Zealand, sentimental remembrances of the Vrouemonument, unrequited love. Now his realistic instruction was to begin; he experienced it first in the section of Johannesburg called Vrededorp, where thousands of rural Afrikaners, driven off their farms by rinderpest and drought, had collected. They stopped at a small house occupied by a family named Troxel: tall, gaunt husband who should have been back on the open veld; scrawny wife with flat, sagging breasts; unkempt children, their faces drawn with hunger. In that dwelling there was little hope.

“Will you take us to other homes?” Piet asked, and Troxel led them to much worse hovels, whose occupants were desolate. After talking with these forlorn people, Detleef felt sick at the stomach, not figuratively but actually, almost to the point of vomiting. “We’ve got to do something, Piet. These people are starving.”

“Tomorrow we’ll see what lies behind the starving,” Piet said, and
on this day he took Detleef to a workers’ hall, where there was much agitation about new rules which the Chamber of Mines had promulgated.

“They’re cutting back the proportion of white workers,” an agitator explained. When Detleef asked what this signified, the man screamed, “Extermination, that’s what it means. Extermination of the white Afrikaner,” and he explained that tradition in the gold fields had been that for every eight Bantu diggers, there had to be one white man. “Now they want to make it ten blacks to one white. We can’t accept that. It would cost too many Afrikaners their jobs.”

A stronghold of the strikers was Fordsburg, a working-class district near Vrededorp, and here Detleef was taken to an inconspicuous shed in which the future soviet was being planned. Here rabid Afrikaners met with Cornish miners imported to do the basic work down deep and three fiery Englishmen who were determined to take South Africa into the Communist orbit: “There’ll be blood this time! Are you with us?” When Detleef said he didn’t work the mines, but was a farmer, four excited Afrikaners surrounded him, demanding to know why he did not bring food into the city to feed his starving compatriots.

That night he could not sleep, seeing the pinched faces bearing in upon him, for he knew what starvation was, and when on the third day Piet took him back to Vrededorp to talk quietly with Troxel and the other Afrikaner families, and he heard their pitiful tales of perished hopes on the farms, the doleful trek to the city, the cruel exploitation in the mines, and the endless struggle to maintain their rights against the pressure of the blacks, his earlier sickness returned, and abruptly he informed Piet and Johanna that he was going home. When they accused him of rejecting his own people, he assured them: “I’ll be back.”

And he was, with a convoy of three large wagons bringing all the spare food he had been able to collect in Venloo. He drove the lead wagon, Micah Nxumalo the second, and Micah’s son, Moses, the third. They brought the food into the center of Vrededorp and started to distribute it, but they occasioned such a disturbance that a riot would surely have ensued had not the Communist workers swept in, taken charge, and told the hungry miners that this food came from their committee.