Aunt Susann for not knowing any better. You can’t explain things like that to a child.”
Nevertheless, while we all sympathised with Gysbert van Tonder, we had to concede that it was not in any way Jurie Steyn’s fault. We had all had experience of white ants, and we knew that, mostly, when you came along with the paraffin and Cooper’s dip, it was too late. By the time you saw those little tunnels, which the white ants made by sticking grains of sand together with spit, all the damage had already been done.
The schoolmaster started talking some more about his book dealing with the life of the white ant, then, and he said that it was well known that the termite was the greatest plague of tropic lands. Several of us were able to help the schoolmaster right. As Chris Welman made it clear to him, the Marico was not in the tropics at all. The tropics were quite a long way up. The tropics started beyond Mochudi, even. A land-surveyor had established that much for us, a few years ago, on a coloured map. It was loose talk about wilds and gramadoelas and tropics that gave the Marico a bad name, we said. Like with that Aunt Susann of the Sunshine Children’s Club. Maybe we did have white ants here – lots of them, too – but we certainly weren’t in the tropics, like some countries we knew, and that we could mention, also, if we wanted to. Maybe what had happened was that the white ants had come down here from the tropics, we said. From way down beyond Mochudi and other side Frik Bonthuys’s farm, even. There was tropics for you, now, we said to the schoolmaster. Why, he should just see Frik Bonthuys’s shirt. Frik Bonthuys wore his shirt outside of his trousers, and the back part of it hung down almost onto the ground.
The schoolmaster said that he thought we were being perhaps just a little too sensitive about this sort of thing. He was interested himself in the white ant, he explained, mainly from the scientific point of view. The white ant belonged to the insect world, that was very highly civil-ised, he said. All the insect world didn’t have was haemoglobin. The insect had the same blood in his veins as a white man, the schoolmaster said, except for haemoglobin.
Gysbert van Tonder said that whatever that thing was, it was enough. Gysbert said it quite hastily, too. He said that when once you started making allowances for the white ant, that way, the next thing the white ant would want would be to vote. And he wouldn’t go into a polling booth alongside of an ant, to vote, Gysbert van Tonder said, even if that ant was white.
This conversation was getting us out of our depths. The talk had taken a wrong turning, but we couldn’t make out where, exactly. Consequently, we were all pleased when Oupa Bekker spoke, and made things seem sensible again.
“The worst place I ever knew for white ants, in the old days,” Oupa Bekker said, “was along the Molopo, just below where it joins the Crocodile River. There was white ants for you. I was a transport rider in those days, when all the transport was still by ox-wagon. My partner was Jan Theron. We called him Jan Mankie because of his wooden leg, a back wheel of the ox-wagon having gone over his knee-cap one day when he had been drinking mampoer. Anyway, we had camped out beside the Molopo. And next morning, when we inspanned, Jan Mankie was saying how gay and light he felt. He couldn’t understand it. He even started thinking that it must be the drink again, that was this time affecting him in quite a new way. We didn’t know, of course, that it was because the white ants had hollowed out all of his wooden leg while he had lain asleep.
“And what was still more queer was that the wagon, when he in-spanned it, also seemed surprisingly light. It didn’t strike us what the reason for that was, either, just then. Maybe we were not in a guessing frame of mind, that morning. But when our trek got through the Paradys Poort, into a stiff wind that was blowing across the vlakte, it all became very clear to us. For the sudden cloud of dust that went up was not just dust from the road. Our wagon and its load of planed Oregon pine were carried away in the finest kind of powder you can imagine, and all our oxen were left pulling was the trek-chain. And Jan Mankie Theron was standing on one leg. His other trouser leg, that was of a greyish-coloured moleskin, was flapping empty in the wind.”
Thus, Oupa Bekker’s factual account of a straightforward Marico incident of long ago, presenting the ways and characteristics of the termite in a positive light, restored us to a sense of current realities.
“But what are you supposed to do about white ants, anyway?” Johnny Coen asked after a while. “Cooper’s dip helps, of course. But there should be a more permanent way of getting rid of them, I’d imagine.”
It was then that we all turned to the schoolmaster, again. What did it say in that book of his about the white ant, we asked him.
Well, there was a chapter in his book on the destruction of termites, the schoolmaster said. At least, there had been a chapter. It was the last chapter in the book. But he had unfortunately left the book lying on his desk in the schoolroom over one weekend. And when he had got back on Monday morning there was a little tunnel running up his desk. And the pages dealing with how to exterminate the white ant had been eaten away.
Piet Siener
Jurie Steyn jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the square crate in the corner of the voorkamer. “That is for Piet Siener,” he announced. “Funny he hasn’t come to fetch it. Maybe he doesn’t know it has arrived.”
We realised that this was a joke of Jurie Steyn’s, of course. As though there was anything Piet Siener, living away at the back of Kalkbult, didn’t know …
I mean, that was why we called him Piet Siener. He not only knew everything that happened, but he also knew it before it happened. Some of his more fervent admirers in the Groot Marico even went so far as to say that Piet Siener also knew about things that didn’t happen at all.
So when Jurie Steyn said that maybe Piet Siener didn’t know that that square box had come for him on the Government lorry, and was waiting to be fetched – well, we understood right away that Jurie Steyn was being playful.
“Piet Siener doesn’t go about much these days,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “There’s nearly always somebody at his house, wanting to know from him about the future. They say he gets it out of the ground. That’s why you always see him walking about his farm with his eyes down, like that. It’s a great gift, knowing everything, the way he does. And he won’t take money for telling you what you want to know. All he’ll take is just a little present, perhaps.”
Then Johnny Coen told us about the last time he went to Kalkbult about something he was keen on getting enlightenment on.
“I came across Piet Siener on his lands,” Johnny Coen said. “He was walking about with his eyes cast down, just like Gysbert said. Piet Siener was walking over uneven ground to try out a new pair of shop boots that his last visitor had made him a little present of.”
But Piet Siener was actually looking more at his feet than at the ground, Johnny Coen added. It seemed that it was a pair of somewhat tight shop boots.
“And what did Piet Siener say?” At Naudé asked. “Did he tell you when Minnie Nienaber would be coming back from Johannesburg?”
Johnny Coen looked mildly surprised.
“Well, I did, as a matter of fact, mention something along those lines to Piet Siener,” he said. “I’m sure I don’t know how you guessed, though. You don’t seem too bad yourself at being a seer.”
But Gysbert van Tonder said that there was nobody in the Groot Marico north of Sephton’s Nek who wouldn’t have been able to guess, just immediately, what it was that Johnny Coen would want to go and see Piet Siener about.
“And, of course, Piet Siener guessed it, too,” Johnny Coen explained. “But in his case, naturally, he didn’t guess it so much as that he divined it. It gave me quite a turn, too, the way he was standing there on the veld with his black beard flowing in the wind and his eyes fixed on his feet divining, because all I said to him was that I had come to see him about a girl, and he asked me her name. And I said Minnie Nienaber. And he said, oh, that must be the daughter of Koos Nienaber. And I said, yes. And he asked me wasn’t she in Johannesburg, or something. He asked it just like that, with his eyes down and seeming as though his gaze would pierce right into the middle of the