The Covenant (90 page)

By rumor she had learned that several of the girls she had met at the last Nachtmaal were already married at ages fourteen and fifteen, and two were mothers, so it was understandable that she should become apprehensive about her prospects. She had only one, really, the Naudé boy from a farm far to the northeast, and she began to worry each night when the family went to bed that the Naudés might not be attending this Nachtmaal, and one night when Tjaart could not sleep
he heard her whimpering and strode over to her room: “What’s the worry, Minnatjie?”

“I dreamed it was already Nachtmaal and Ryk Naudé didn’t come.”

“Don’t you worry, little lady. Lukas de Groot assured me he’d tell Ryk.”

“Oh, Father!” That her father had anticipated her concern without her voicing it was most unexpected and it pleased her greatly. Grasping his hand in the darkness, she brought it to her lips and kissed it. “Such a Nachtmaal we’ll have! And I with a new dress.”

Touched by her childish gratitude, he bent down and kissed her twice. “Did you think Mama and I would forget the necessary things?”

The next days were marked with butchering and the first steps in making an abundance of biltong for the trip to Graaff-Reinet, ninety-two miles to the northwest. Tjaart owned three transport wagons, long flat-bedded affairs, and he kept them in fine condition for journeys to market, but the family wagon was a rickety bone-shaker. As it was being washed down and greased, Tjaart instructed the servants as to how they must mind the farm during his absence and care for his mother, Ouma Wilhelmina, who would remain behind.

When all was ready, an English settler came posting in with disturbing news: a band of Xhosa had broken across the Fish and were committing depredations. The messenger said that Lukas de Groot was collecting Boers to the north and would meet Tjaart halfway to form a substantial commando for assistance to Grahamstown.

Without hesitating, Tjaart saddled up, called for four of his Coloureds to join him, and galloped east. Counting the massive battle of 1819, when he had helped save Grahamstown, this was the sixth time he had joined with fellow Boers to quell a border disturbance.

There were two reasons for their being so willing to help defend the English. As sensible men, they knew that in protecting the forward English farms they were protecting their own. But also, there was the acknowledgment that deplorable English mistakes, such as Slagter’s Nek and the recent turning of Coloured servants loose to become vagrants and banditti, were the acts of English officialdom and the philanthropicals and not those of Englishmen on the frontier. Indeed, the settlers in Grahamstown suffered as much from these laws as did the Boers, which is why they cheered whenever the Boer commandos reported. There was harmony of interests.

The Stevens Affair of 1832 was a brief, fierce clash, and as unfortunate an incident as could have been devised. On a small farm six miles west of the Great Fish, there was an outcropping of red-paint earth with such a powerful impregnation of pyritic elements that it glowed handsomely when dried on a black man’s skin. For generations untold the Xhosa had come to this spot to collect the clay treasured by circumcision boys and warriors, and the fact that a family from rural England had crossed the ocean to establish Stevens Farm did not diminish their desire—one might say spiritual need—to scrape up the earth and carry it back across the Great Fish.

Usually the expeditions were silent affairs, a few warriors braving considerable dangers to penetrate what had become English property and sneaking away without having done the white men harm. But in the spring of 1832 careless Xhosa, some drunk on Kaffir beer, had gone to the Stevens farm to collect not only red earth but also quite a few white sheep. A scuffle had ensued, with dead bodies, and now the Xhosa must be punished.

“What we’ll do,” Major Saltwood of the Grahamstown Irregulars proposed as the men assembled, “is ride east, cross the river at Trompetter’s Drift, and take them in the rear.”

But the local Xhosa who rallied to the defense of the raiders were a battle-hardened group, a hundred veterans of many skirmishes with the English and Boers, and were not likely to be surprised by any flanking action. So when Saltwood led the men forward at a gallop, Xhosa warriors in ambush peppered them with spears and bullets from the few guns they had been able to beg, trade or capture.

That was the first skirmish, with the white men losing. The second was inconclusive, but the third was quite a different affair. Major Saltwood, Tjaart van Doorn and Lukas de Groot concocted a plan that would smash the Xhosa from three sides, and everything worked to perfection except that a hiding spearman stabbed Thomas Carleton deeply in the left thigh, dragged him from his horse, and was about to kill him when Van Doorn saw the danger, wheeled in midflight and roared back to brain the black with his rifle butt. It was a near thing, and when Carleton realized that he was saved, and that the wound in his leg was much bigger than he could tend, he quietly fainted in Van Doorn’s arms, and the two men stayed on the ground till Saltwood and some others doubled back to find them.

When they returned to Grahamstown—victors, but with serious losses—Carleton was so effusive in his praise of Van Doorn’s heroism,
and repeated it so often, that Richard Saltwood told his wife, Julie, with some asperity, “You’d think he’d let it rest.” Then he added, with no malice, “But of course, poor Carleton’s not a gentleman. He hasn’t had the training.”

“Nor am I a lady,” Julie snapped. “So I can’t be expected to know, either. And I think it’s a thrilling story. So does poor Vera, because without it she’d be a widow.”

“But you must admit, he does overplay it, rather.”

“If I’m in trouble, first I’d want you to come riding up to rescue me. But next in line, Van Doorn.”

The victory celebrations were so congenial, with many of the English volunteers offering toasts in reasonably good Dutch, that Van Doorn and De Groot lingered, and this delayed their arrival at the Graaff-Reinet Nachtmaal.

When De Groot and Van Doorn, accompanied by their Coloureds, who had fought bravely, prepared for the ride home they were joined by a veldkornet who had conducted himself, as always, with notable dignity. It was Piet Retief, a farmer from the Winterberg far north; thin, tallish, with a small beard, he was a friendly, outspoken man in his fifties, but when Saltwood and Carleton came out to bid the Boers thanks and farewell, he stood apart.

Carleton hobbled over to Van Doorn’s horse, grasped Tjaart fervently, and said, “Old chap, you carry my life in your saddle. May God bless you for what you did.”

“I’d expect the same from you,” Tjaart said, and the Boers left town.

For a day and a half they were accompanied by Retief, and came to understand the perplexities that gnawed at him. He was a strange mixture, an esteemed commando leader from a Huguenot family, but also a reckless business adventurer who seemed destined to overreach himself. “The English sued me when the barracks collapsed,” he grumbled, referring to a disastrous construction venture in Grahamstown.

“But you had it complete,” Van Doorn said, “I saw it, and you did a fine job on the magistrate’s office.”

“I ran out of money. And do you know why I hadn’t any? I was always absent fighting the Xhosa to protect the very people that sued me.”

“You lost everything?”

“Everything. It always seems to happen that way.”

Van Doorn thought it best not to ask about the other disasters; what he wanted to hear was Retief’s attitude toward the English government, for he was a man whose voice was being heard more and more. He spoke often about what he considered “the persecution of the Boers.”

“The English will never give up until farmers like the three of us are ruined. Finished.”

“Why would any government adopt such a policy?”

“Because Keer will make them. His pressure will never cease until the Kaffirs control all the land. Look at your servants running wild over the veld …” His voice tapered off at the sight of De Groot’s expression. “They’re not satisfied with robbing us of belongings and blood. They want to steal our good name, too. I see that as the English program.”

“Wait, wait!” Tjaart protested. “You’ve seen that men like Saltwood and Carleton are decent.”

“They are good men, but they’re here in Grahamstown. Keer is in London, and every law he proposes favors the Kaffirs at our expense. The philanthropist ladies in their London parlors will continue to bleat when they hear we Boers are trying to defend our wives and children against their Kaffir darlings.”

Van Doorn was unable to decide how much of Retief’s grievance was justified, how much an understandable animosity springing from his ruined business contracts, but before they parted, Retief raised a new bold topic about which there could be no ambiguity: “Tjaart, would you contribute rix-dollars to a project that Pieter Uys is contemplating? You know Uys, a very good man.”

Van Doorn did not know him, but De Groot did, and most favorably: “Maybe the best Boer along the sea. What’s his plan?”

“He thinks to go on an exploring trip. Up the coast into the fertile valleys along the Indian Ocean.”

“Why?”

“He thinks that one day the Boers might have to move there. I don’t want to quit my farm. And I know you wouldn’t want to, Tjaart. But it might be prudent if we looked.”

“To what purpose?” Van Doorn asked, and in years that were to come he would never forget Retief’s reply. They had reached a landmark where Retief must turn north for his farm among the mountain
ranges. Up there lay the kind of place no man would willingly leave, but Retief said, “I fear the English are determined to drive us into the ground. Did you read Keer’s reports?”

“You know I can’t read English,” De Groot said.

“Well, I read them all,” Retief said with great force, “and you know what I think? After next year there will be no more slavery. They’ll take our Coloureds away from us, too, and then how will we farm?”

“What has Pieter Uys to do with this?” De Groot asked.

“A wise man considers many plans,” Retief replied. “Not for me or you. We can manage. But for the poor Boers who are going to be pressed down by English laws. Uys will look at the lands in Natal and tell us if we can farm them.”

“Aren’t the lands already taken?” De Groot asked.

“To the north, the Zulu. To the south, a few Englishmen. But in between, magnificent valleys with ample water, trees, good land.”

He asked again for contributions to the Uys expedition, and Tjaart had to say, “I have no money now. Advance it for me and I’ll pay back.” The English had recently introduced their own monetary system, thinking to replace the Dutch that everyone used, and De Groot did have some of the crisp notes. When he handed his offering to Retief the latter took it, held it in his two hands, and allowed the sun to play upon it.

“I do not like this money,” he said.

Nachtmaal (night meal) was Holy Communion. It was held four times each year, and those living near the church were expected to attend each one. But Boers in remote areas were forgiven if they missed entirely for three or four years, because at the first opportunity they would come swarming in on pilgrimages that might last a month. With them they brought children to be baptized, young lovers to be married, and elders who whispered, “This might be my last Nachtmaal.”

For such travelers, there could be nothing more exciting and spiritually satisfying than this joyous celebration of the Dutch Reformed Church, for in its companionship there was social renewal and in its religious services a deepened pledge to Calvinist doctrine. A week of Nachtmaal lent grace and harmony to the lives of the Boers and explained why they formed such a cohesive group.

The rite was carefully structured: church service each day for four days, the one on Sunday lasting four hours; public weddings and baptisms; acceptance of new members into the fellowship; much time set aside for buying and selling of properties; and wonderful singing parties at which youths were almost challenged to fall in love.

But what everyone cherished about Nachtmaal was the strengthened friendship of families who had shared common struggles: almost every man had been on commando; almost every woman had lost a baby, or a husband; and all had pondered during the difficult years their relationship to God. In the English community there was nothing similar to Nachtmaal, which was one reason why the English could never be mistaken for Dutchmen.

In 1833 the Van Doorn wagon was not of the best for this long journey: ninety-two miles over a demanding terrain, with the sixteen oxen able to do at best eight miles a day. The cart had worn wheels and such a tattered canvas that Tjaart had been saying for some years, “We must find ourselves a new wagon.” Upon his arrival at Graaff-Reinet, capital of the northeast, he was determined to acquire the best wagon possible, even if he had to trade all the sheep he was driving to the town to get it.

But his excitement in heading north was nothing compared to his daughter’s, for she had convinced herself that when the Van Doorn wagon overtook the De Groots’ in the far middle of nothingness, they would form a kind of royal procession, and at the entrance to Graaff-Reinet, near the miraculous mountain, they would meet Ryk Naudé, who would be waiting for her like a young prince. She had practiced her speech of welcome: “Good afternoon, Ryk. How pleasant it is to see you again.” She would speak to him as if their parting had been two days ago, not two years. She experimented with charcoal to make her eyebrows darker and red clay from the Stevens farm to touch her cheeks. She pestered her mother and the slave women to convince herself that she would be acceptable in Ryk’s eyes, and they assured her that she was a proper little lady whom any man would be pleased to have.

She was experiencing the wonderful days of awakening, and no one watched her with more approval than Tjaart. And he told his wife, “Jakoba, when a girl is almost fourteen she better think about catching herself a husband. You almost waited too long.” She had been all of sixteen when the Widower van Doorn rode seventy miles
to find her, and she could remember how worried she had been. “Minna’s just right for her age, Tjaart. She has a good head.”