The Conservationist

Pale, Freckled Eggs. Swaying over the ruts to the gate of the third pasture, Sunday morning, the owner of the farm suddenly sees: a clutch of pale, freckled eggs set out before a half circle of children. Some are squatting; the one directly behind the eggs is cross-legged, like a vendor in a market. There is pride of ownership in that grin lifted shyly to the farmer's gaze. The eggs are arranged like marbles, the other children crowd round, but you can tell they are not allowed to touch unless the cross-legged one gives permission. The bare soles, the backsides of the children have flattened a nest in the long dead grass for both eggs and children. The emblem on the car's bonnet, itself made in the shape of a prismatic flash, scores his vision with a vertical-horizontal sword of dazzle. This is the place at which a child always appears, even if none has been in sight, racing across the field to open the gate for the car. But today the farmer puts on the brake, leaves the engine running and gets out. One very young boy, wearing a jersey made long ago for much longer arms but too short to cover a naked belly, runs to the gate and stands there. The others all smile proudly round the eggs. The cross-legged one (wearing a woman's dress, but it may be a boy) puts out his hands over the eggs and gently shuffles them a little closer together, letting a couple of the outer ones roll back into his palms. The eggs are a creamy buff, their glaze pored and lightly spotted, their shape more pointed than a hen's, and the palms of the small black hands are translucent-looking apricot pink. There is no sound but awed, snuffling breathing through snotty noses.

The farmer asks a question of the cross-legged one and there are giggles. He points down at the eggs but does not touch them, and asks again. The children don't understand the language. He goes on talking, with many gestures. The cross-legged child puts his head on one side, draws in his lower lip, smiling as if under the weight of praise, and cups one of the eggs from one hand to the other.

Eleven pale, freckled eggs. A whole clutch of guinea-fowl eggs.

The baby at the gate is still waiting. The farmer goes back to the car, switches off the ignition and walks in the direction from which he has driven. He has left the road and struck out across the veld, leaping the dry donga to land with a springy crackle on dead cosmos and khaki weed that bordered it last summer. Over the hard ground his thick rubber soles scuff worn scrubbing brushes of closely grazed dead grass. He is making for the kraal; it is up beside the special paddock where the calves are kept at night. But the neat enclosure with oil drums cut in two to make feed troughs is empty; no one is about. From a line of rooms built of gray breeze blocks the sound of radio music winds like audible smoke in the clean fine morning: It's Sunday. A woman appears from behind the lean-tos of wire and tin that obscure or are part of the habitations. When she sees him approach, she stands quite still, one of those figures with the sun in its eyes caught in a photograph. He asks where the chief herdsman is. Without moving, but grimacing as if she strains to understand, she makes an assenting noise and then answers. He repeats what she has said, to be sure, and she repeats the assenting noise, long and reassuring, like the grunting sigh of a satisfied sleeper. Her gaze steers his back in the direction she has indicated.

He is crossing a lucerne field. The last late cutting of autumn must have been made sometime that week; although the shriveled scraps (like bits of busted balloon) that remain have lost their clover shapes and faded to gray-green, underfoot they give out now and then a sweet sickish whiff of summer—breath from the mouth of a cow or the mouth of a warm sleepy woman turned to in the morning. Involuntarily he draws it deep into his lungs and it disappears into a keener pleasure, the dry, cool and perfect air of a high-veld autumn, which, shut up in the car that carried with it the shallow breath of the city, he has not yet taken. Not this morning, not for a week. As the air plunges in him, his gaze widens and sweeps: Down along the river the willows have gone blond, not yet at their palest, combed out into bare strands but still lightly spattered and delicately streaked with yellowed leaves. Around them is a slight smudgy ambiance, a mauvish-smoky blend between their outline and the bright air ... extraordinary.

Eleven. A whole clutch of guinea-fowl eggs. Eleven. Soon there'll be nothing left. In the country. The continent. The oceans, the sky.

Suddenly he sees the figure of the black man, Jacobus, making for him. He must have come out of the mealies on the other side of the road beyond the lucerne and is lunging across the field with the particular stiff-hipped hobble of a man who would be running if he were younger. But it's he who's looking for Jacobus; there's a mistake somewhere—how could the man already know that he is wanted? Some semaphore from the kraal? The farmer gives himself a little impatient, almost embarrassed snigger—and continues his own progress, measuredly, resisting the impulse to flag the man down with a wave of the hand, preparing in his mind what to say about the guinea fowl.

Although it is Sunday, Jacobus is wearing the blue overalls supplied him, and although there has been no rain and none can be expected for four months, he has on the rubber boots meant for wet weather. He's panting, naturally, but stops, as if there were a line drawn there, ten feet away from the farmer, and goes through the formalities of greeting, which include a hand movement as if he had a hat to remove. The farmer approaches unhurriedly. "Jacobus, I was coming to find you. How's everything?"

"No—everything it's all right. One calf he's borned Friday. But I try to phone you, yesterday night---"

"Good, that's from the red cow, eh?"

"No, the red cow she's not ready. This from that young one, that ones you buy last year from Pietersburg---"

Each is talking fast, in the manner of a man who has something he wants to get on to say. There is a moment's pause to avoid collision; but, of course, the right of way is the farmer's. "Look, Jacobus, I've just been down at the third pasture there---"

"I'm try, try to phone last night, master---"

But he has in his mind just exactly how to put it: "The children are taking guinea-fowl eggs to play with. They must've found a nest somewhere in the grass or the reeds and they've taken the eggs."

"There by the river ... you were there?" The herdsman's lips are drawn back from his decayed horse teeth. He looks distressed, reluctant: Yes, he is responsible for the children, some of them are probably his, and anyway, he is responsible for good order among the dependents of the farm workers and already the farmer has had occasion to complain about the number of dogs they are harboring—a danger to the game birds.

"It's not as if they needed them for food. To eat, no, eh? You've got plenty of fowls. They're just pickanins and they don't know, but you must tell them, those eggs are not to play games with. If they find eggs in the veld, they are not to touch them, you understand? Mustn't touch or move them, ever." Of course, he understands perfectly well but wears that uncompreshending and pained look, to establish he's not to blame, he's burdened by the behavior of all those other people down at the kraal. Jacobus is not without sycophancy. "Master," he pleads. "Master, it's very bad down there by the river. I'm try, try phone you yesterday night. What is happen there. The man is dead there. You see him." And his hand, with an imperious forefinger shaking it, stabs the air, through chest level of the farmer's body, to the line of willows away down behind him.

"A man?"

"There—there"—the herdsman draws back from his own hand as if to hold something at bay. His forehead is raised in three deep wrinkles.

"Somebody's died?"

The herdsman has the authority of dreadful knowledge. "Dead man. Solomon find it yesterday five o'clock."

"Has something happened to one of the boys? What man?"

"No. Yes, we don't know who is it. Or what. Where he come to be dead here on this farm."

"A strange man. Not one of our people?"

The herdsman's hands go out wide in exasperation. "Nobody can say who is that man." And he begins to tell the story again: Solomon ran, it was five o'clock, he was bringing the cows back. "Yesterday night, myself, I'm try sometime five time"—he holds up his spread fingers and thumb—"to phone you in town."

"So what have you done?"

"Now when I'm see the car come just now, I run from that side where the mealies are——"

"But with the body?"

This time the jutting chin as well as the forefinger indicate: "The man is there. You can see, still there, master, come I show you where is it."

The herdsman stumps past. There is nothing for the farmer to do but follow. Why should he go to look at a dead man near the river? He could just as well telephone the police at once and leave it to the proper channels that exist to deal with such matters. It is not one of the farm workers. It is not anyone one knows. It is a sight that has no claim on him.

But the dead man is on his property. Now that the farmer has arrived, the herdsman Jacobus has found the firmness and support of an interpretation of the event: His determined back in the blue overalls, collar standing away from slightly bent neck, is leading to the intruder. He is doing his duty and his employer has a duty to follow him.

They go back over the lucerne field and down the road. A beautiful morning, already coming into that calm fullness of peace and warmth that will last until the sun goes, without the summer's climax of rising heat. Ten o'clock as warm as midday will be, and midday will be no hotter than three in the afternoon. The pause between two seasons; days as complete and perfectly contained as an egg.

The children are gone; the place where they were might just as well have been made by a cow lying down in the grass.

The two men have passed the stationary car and almost reached the gate. A coyly persuasive voice blaring a commercial jingle comes out of the sky from the direction of the kraal.... Your Giant Free...Send Your Name and Address Today To.... The baby in the jersey bursts from nowhere but is disconcerted at the sight of the herdsman. Hanging from his plump pubis, his little dusty penis is the trunk of a toy elephant. He stands watching while Jacobus unwinds the loop of rusty wire that encloses the pole of the barbed fence and the pole of the gate, and the gate, which is just a freed section of the fence, falls flat.

The road has ruts and incised patterns from the rains of the season before last, petrified, more like striations made over millennia in rock than marks of wheels, boots and hooves in live earth. There was no rain this summer, but even in a drought year, the vlei provides some moisture on this farm and the third pasture has patches where a skin of greenish wet has glazed, dried, lifted, cracked, each irregular segment curling at the edges. The farmer's steps bite down on them with the crispness of biscuits between teeth. The river's too low to be seen or heard; as the slope quickens his pace through momentum, there is a whiff held in the dry air as the breath of clover was. A whiff—the laundry smell of soap scum. So the river's there, somewhere, all right.

And the dead man. They are jogging down to the willows and the stretch of reeds, broken, crisscrossed, tangled, collapsed against themselves, stockaded all the way to the other side—which is the rise of the ground again and someone else's land. Nobody goes there. When it is not a drought year, it is impossible to get across and the cows stand in midstream and gaze stupidly toward islands of hidden grass in there that they scent but cannot reach. The half-naked willows trail the tips of whips an inch or two above the threadbare picnic spot, faintly green, with its shallow cairn of stone filled with ashes among which the lettering on a fragment of beer carton may still be read by the eye that supplies the familiar missing letters. With the toe of his rubber sole, the farmer turns, as he goes, a glint where the bed of the river has dropped back; someone lost a ring here last summer. The blue overalls are leading through dead thistle, past occasional swirls of those swamp lilies with long ragged leaves arranged in a mandala, through a patch of tough reeds like the tails of some amphibians that keep their black-green flexibility all through winter. The two men plunge clumsy as cattle into the dry reeds, exploding a little swarm of minute birds, taking against their faces the spider-web sensation of floss broken loose by their passage, from seeding bulrush heads. There lying on his face is the man.

The farmer almost ran onto him without seeing: He was close behind his herdsman and weltering along doggedly. The dead man.

Jacobus is walking around the sight. There is a well-trampled clearing about it—the whole kraal must have been down to have a look. "How is happen? What is happen here? Why he come down here on this farm? What is happen?" He talks on, making a kind of lament of indignation. The farmer is circling the sight, too, with his eyes.

The face is in the tacky mud; the tiny brown ears, the fine, felted hair, a fold or roll where it meets the back of the neck, because whoever he was, he wasn't thin. A brown pin-stripe jacket, only the stubs of button shanks left on the sleeves, that must once have been part of some white man's business suit. Smart tight pants and a wide belt of fake snakeskin with fancy stitching. He might be a drunk, lying there, this city slicker. But his outdated "stylish" shoes are on dead, twisted feet, turned in stiff and brokenly as he was flung down into the reeds. Except for the face, which struck a small break or pocket between clumps, his body isn't actually on the earth at all but held slightly above it on an uneven nest of the reeds it has flattened, made for itself. From here, the only injury he shows is a long red scratch obviously made by a sharp broken reed catching his neck.

The farmer bats at something clinging at his face. No mosquitoes now; bulrush gossamer. "He was dead when Solomon found him?"

"Dead, dead, finish." The herdsman walks over delicately toward the object and, bending toward it a little, turns his face back at his employer and says confidentially, rather as if he had been listening—"And now already is beginning to be little bit. ..." He wrinkles his nose, exposing the dirty horse teeth.

The farmer breathes quite normally; (continued on page 102)The Conservationist(continued from page 94) he does not take in the deep breaths of dry clear air that he did up on the lucerne field, but he does not reduce his intake, either. There is nothing, really nothing; whereas, up there, that sweetish whiff.

"You'd better not touch him. You're sure nobody here knows him? It's got nothing to do with any of you here?" He looks very deeply at his herdsman, lowering his head and hooding his eyebrows over his eyes.

Jacobus puts a hand dramatically on his own breast, where a stained vest shows through the unbuttoned overalls. He swings his head slowly from side to side: "Nobody can know this man. Nothing for this man. This is people from there—there"—he points that same accusing finger away in the direction of the farm's northern boundary.

The skin of the palm of a hand is too insensitive to detect the gossamer, but still it clings. The farmer projects his lower lip and blows sharply, upward over his face. And now he notices a single fly, one of the lingering, persistent kind, hovering just above the neat brown ear down there. The fly is on the side to which the head is fractionally turned, although it is fullface in the mud, the side on which the mouth must be close to being exposed. The fly hovers and lands, hovers and lands, unmolested.

"Just leave it as it is. The police must come."

"Ye-e-es, master," the herdsman says, long drawn out in sympathy for the responsibility that is no longer his. "Ye-e-es ... is much better."

There is a moment's pause. The fly looks as if it ought to be buzzing but cannot be heard. There is the customary silence down here among the reeds, broken by the rifle crack (so it sounds, in contrast) of a dry stalk snapped by the movement of some unseen bird. The seething of the wind through the green reeds in late summer is seasonal.

They turn and thrash back the way they had come, leaving the man. Behind them, he is lying alone on his face.

The farmer takes the car to get up to the house and Jacobus comes with him, sitting carefully with feet planked flat on the carpeted floor and curled hands together on neat knees—he has the keys, so that he can always get into the house to telephone to town during the week, when the farmer is not a farmer but an industrialist, in pig iron. The house is closed up, because no one lives there all week. They enter through the kitchen door and the farmer goes straight to the telephone in the living room and turns the little crank on the box. The party line is busy and while he waits, he frees from the thin tacky mud on his soles the slivers of dry reed that are stuck in it. He prizes one sole against the other and the mud wrinkles and blobs, like droppings, to the shiny linoleum patterned with range-and-brown roses. The table is laid ready with hardware for a meal, under a net weighted at the hem with colored beads; an authoritative refrigerator, placed across the angle of a corner, hums to itself. The ring that he is waiting for makes him start. The line is free now and the exchange puts him through to the police station.

He always talks the white man's other language to officials and he is speaking in Afrikaans. "Look—Mehring here, from Vleibos, the Groendal Road. You must send someone. There's a dead man been found on my farm. Down in the vlei. Looks as if he'd been dumped there."

There is a blowing noise, abrupt, at the other end, air is expelled in good-natured exasperation. The voice addresses him as if he were an old friend: "Man ... on Sunday... where'm I going to get someone? The van's out on patrol at the location. I'm alone here, myself. It's a Bantu, ay?"

"Yes. The body's lying in the reeds."

"Your boys have a fight or what?"

"It's a stranger. None of my boys knows who it is."

The voice laughs. "Yes, they're scared, they'll say they don't know. Was it a knife fight, I suppose?"

"I tell you, I've no idea. I don't want to mess about with the body and confuse your investigation. You must send someone."

"Hell, I don't know what I'm going to do about that. I'm only myself, here. The van's at the location. ... I'll send tomorrow morning."

"But this body was found yesterday, it's been lying there twenty-four hours already."

"What can I do, sir? Man, I'm alone here!"

"Why can't you get hold of some other police station? Let them send someone."

"Can't do that. This's my district."

"Well, what am I to do about a dead body on my property? The man may have been murdered. It's obvious he's been knocked on the head or something and dumped. You can see from his shoes he didn't walk a step in that vlei."

"There's injuries on the head or where?"

"I've told you, that's your affair. I don't want my boys handling someone who's been murdered. I don't want any trouble afterward about this business. You must get a man out here today, Sergeant."

"First thing in the morning. There won't be any trouble for you, don't worry. You're there by the vlei, just near the location, ay? It comes from there, all right, they're a terrible lot of Kaffirs there, we're used to that lot. ..."

The farmer replaces the receiver and says in English, "Christ Almighty"; and snorts a laugh, softly, so that Jacobus shall not hear.

The herdsman is waiting in the kitchen. "They'll come early tomorrow. I've told them everything. Just keep people away. And dogs. See that no dogs go down there." The herdsman doesn't react at all, although he has no doubt thought the farmer didn't know that the dogs that were supposed to be banished from the kraal have quietly reappeared again, not the same individual animals, perhaps, but as a genus.

"Excuse, my master"—he indicates that he wants to pass before him into the living room and tramps, tiptoeing almost, across to a piece of furniture that must once have featured as the pride of a dining-room "suite" for the previous owner of the farm but is now used as a bar (a locked cupboard to which Jacobus has not got a key) and also repository (unlocked drawers) for farm documents, and pulling out one of the stiff drawers by its fancy gilt handle, feels surely under the feed bills tossed there. He has found what he apparently had hidden for safekeeping: He brings in the bowl of his palms a huge, black-dialed watch with broad metal strap and a pair of sunglasses with a cracked right lens. He waits, indicating by the pause that his employer must put out his hand to receive, and formally gives over the property. "From him?" And the herdsman nods heavily.

"All right, Jacobus."

"All right, master."

"Send Alina up about one to make me some lunch, eh?" he calls after him.

So they have touched the thing, lifted the face. Of course, the dark glasses might have been in a pocket. No money. Not surprising; these Friday, payday, murders are for money, what else? Jacobus took the objects (the Japanese-made steel watch is the kind black men offer surreptitiously for sale on street corners) into safekeeping to show that the people here've got nothing to do with the whole business.

Going to the drawer Jacobus has just shut, he finds a window envelope, already franked, that had carried some circular. The watch, with its flexible steel-mesh strap wrapped close, fits in easily, but the glasses prevent the flap (concluded on page 165)The Conservationist(continued from page 102) from closing. He doubles a rubber band over his fingers and stretches it to secure envelope and contents. He writes on it, "Watch and Glasses, property of dead man." He adds, "For the Police," and places the envelope prominently on the table, on top of the net, then moves it to the kitchen, putting it on the draining board of the sink, where it cannot fail to be in the line of vision as one walks into the house.

Outside the kitchen door, he distends his nostrils distastefully at the smell of duck shit and three or four pallid kittens whose fur is thin as the bits of duck down that roll softly about in invisible currents of air run from the threatening column of his body. "Psspsspss," he calls, but they cower and one even hisses. He strides away, past the barn, the paddock where the cows about to calve stand hugely in company and the tiny paddock where the bull, used less and less now, with the convenience of artificial insemination available, is always alone, and he continues by way of the mealie fields the long walk around the farm, on a perfect Sunday morning, he was about to begin when he stopped the car at the third pasture.

The matter of the guinea-fowl eggs has not been settled. He's conscious of this as he walks, because he knows it's no good allowing such things to pass. They must be dealt with. Eleven freckled eggs. It would have been useless to put them under the black Orpingtons; they must have been cold already. A redlegged partridge is taking a dust bath where it thinks it won't be spied, at the end of a row of mealies reaped and ready to be uprooted. But there are no guinea fowl feeding down in the far field where they usually come. Those bloody dogs; their dogs have probably been killing them off all summer. Eleven eggs, pointed, so different from hens' eggs made to lie in the standard depressions of plastic trays, in dozens, subject to seasonal price fluctuation. Soon there will be nothing left. (No good thinking about it; put a stop to it.) The hands of the child round the pale eggs were the color of the underside of an empty tortoise shell held up to the light. The mealies are nearly all reaped, the stalks stooked in pyramids with dry plumy apexes, the leaves peeling tattered. Distance comes back with these reaped fields, the plowed earth stretching away in fan-shaped ridges to its own horizon; the farm extends in size in winter, just as in summer as the mealies grow taller and thicker the horizon closes in, diminishes the farm until it is a series of corridors between walls of stiff green higher than his head. In a good year. If there is going to be a good year again. A cultivator has been left to rust on its side (no rain to rust it, but still, standing out here won't do it any good). Now is the time to clear the cankerweed that plagues this part of the field, near the eucalyptus trees, which have made a remarkable recovery—he can scarcely notice, for new branches, the stumps where they (up at the kraal)had chopped at them for firewood before he bought the place.

Although he had no sign of it when he set out this morning, a Saturday-night headache is now causing pressure on the bridge of his nose; closing his eyes against the light, he pinches the bone there between thumb and finger. He feels pleasantly, specifically thirsty for water. He makes for the windmill near an old stone outbuilding. The cement round the borehole installation is new and the blades of the windmill are still shiny. He puts his head sideways to the stiff tap and the water sizzles, neither warm nor cold, into his mouth. The windmill is not turning and he releases the chain and arm that brake it in order to set it going, but although it noses creakily, it does not begin to turn, because there is no wind today, the air is still, it is a perfect autumn day. He sets the brake again carefully.

A little after one, passing the room of the servant, Alina, beside the fowl run, on his way up to the house, he sees Jacobus talking there to her. He and the herdsman do not acknowledge each other, because they have seen each other before and no greeting is exchanged. He calls out, "You'd better take something—to put over"—his head jerks toward the river—"down there. An old tarpaulin. Or sacks."