The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
even though we who were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voor-kamer that also served as the Drogevlei post office were not astronomers, or anywhere near, we were nevertheless much impressed by Chris Welman’s statement that they were having ghost trouble at Spelonksdrift. When it came to seeing a ghost you didn’t need to be an astronomer and to have a telescope: a ghost was something that you could actually see best just with the naked eye.
Now, if the spirits of the dead were content to haunt only the drift after nightfall, then no harm would come to any human being. No human being was ever there after nightfall. It was when a pale apparition took to the road, and wandered through the poort to have a look round, that unfortunate incidents occurred.
If you were travelling along the Government Road at night and you saw a person walking – or riding on horseback, even – and you saw the moon shining through that person, then you would know, of course, that you had met a ghost. If there was no moon, then you would see the stars shining through the ghost. Or you might even see a withaak tree or a piece of road showing through the ghost.
Gysbert van Tonder once encountered an elderly ghost, riding a mule, right in the middle of the poort. And Gysbert van Tonder held long converse with the ghost, whom he took to be an elderly farmer that had come back from a dance at Nietverdiend – coming back so late because he was elderly. It was when Gysbert van Tonder recognised the mule that the elderly farmer was sitting on as old Koffiebek, that had belonged to his grandfather and that had died many years before of grass-belly, that Gysbert van Tonder grew to have doubts. What made him suspicious, Gysbert van Tonder said, was that he had never in his life seen Koffiebek standing so still, with a man on his back, talking. During the whole conversation Koffiebek did not once try to bite a chunk out of his rider’s leg. In the same moment Gysbert van Tonder realised that it was because there wasn’t much of his rider for Koffiebek to bite.
“What made it all so queer,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “was that I had been talking to the elderly farmer on the mule about a new comet that there was in the sky, then. And I had asked him if he thought it meant the end of the world, and he said he hoped not, because there were several things that he wanted to do still. And it didn’t strike me that, all the time we were talking about the comet, the old farmer was sitting between me and the comet, and I was seeing the comet through the middle of his left lung. I could see his right lung, too, the way it swelled out when he breathed.”
It was getting late, not only in Jurie Steyn’s post office, but everywhere in the Marico, and the lorry from Bekkersdal had not yet arrived with our letters and milk-cans. They must be having trouble along the road, we said to each other.
And because of the line of conversation that Chris Welman had started we were glad when Jurie Steyn, on his return from the milking shed, lit the paraffin lamp in the voorkamer before it was properly dark.
Oupa Bekker had been very quiet, most of the evening. Several times he had looked out into the gathering dusk, shaking his head at it. But after Jurie Steyn had lit the oil-lamp, Oupa Bekker cheered up a good deal. Then he started telling us about the time when he encountered a ghost near Spelonksdrift, in the old days.
“I had lost my way in the dark,” Oupa Bekker declared, “and so I thought that that stretch of water was just an ordinary crossing over the Molopo River. I had no idea that it was Spelonksdrift. So I pulled up at the edge of the stream to let my horse drink. Mind you, I should have known that it was Spelonksdrift just through my horse not having been at all thirsty. Indeed, afterwards it struck me that I had never before seen a horse with so little taste for water. All he did was to look slowly about him and shiver.”
At Naudé asked Jurie Steyn’s wife to turn the paraffin lamp up a bit higher, just about then. He said he was thinking of the lorry-driver. The lorry-driver would be able to see the light in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer from a long way off, if the lamp was turned up properly, At Naudé explained. It was queer how several of us, at that moment, started feeling concern for the lorry-driver. We all seemed to remember, at once, that he was a married man with five children. Jurie Steyn’s wife did not have to turn much on the screw to make the lamp burn brighter. We men did it all for her. But then, of course, we Marico men are chivalrous that way.
In the meantime, Oupa Bekker had been drooling on in his old-man way of talking, with the result that when we were back in our seats again we found that we had missed the in-between part of his story. All we heard was the end part. We heard about his dispute with the ghost, which had ended in the ghost letting him have it across the chops with the back of his hand.
“So I went next day to see Dr Angus Stuart,” Oupa Bekker continued. “In those days he was the only doctor between here and Rysmierbult. I didn’t tell him anything about what had happened at Spelonksdrift. I just showed him my face, with those red marks on it … And do you know what? After he had had a good look at those marks through a magnifying glass, the doctor said that they could have been caused only by a ghost hitting me over the jaw with the back of a blue-flame hand.”
That story started Johnny Coen off telling us about the time he was walking through the poort one night, with Dawie Ferreira who had once been a policeman at Newclare. And while he and Dawie Ferreira were walking through the poort, a Bechuana through whom they could see the Milky Way shining came up to them. In addition to having the Milky Way visible through his spine, the Bechuana was also carrying his head under his arm. But Dawie Ferreira, because he was a former policeman, knew how to deal with that Bechuana, Johnny Coen said. He promptly asked him where his pass was for being on a public road at that time of night. You couldn’t see the Bechuana for dust after that, Johnny Coen said. In fact, the dust that the Bechuana with his head under his arm raised on the Government Road of the Marico seemed to become part of, and to reach beyond, the Milky Way that shone through his milt and was also a road.
The lorry from Bekkersdal arrived very late. The driver looked perturbed.
“We had big-end trouble at Spelonksdrift,” the lorry-driver said, “and an old farmer riding a mule came up and gave me a lot of sauce. He acted as though he was a ghost, or something. As though I’d take notice of that sort of nonsense. I saw through him, all right. Then he sloshed me one across the jaw. When I tried to land him one back he was gone.”
The lorry-driver had marks on his cheek that could have been caused by a back-hander from an elderly farmer riding a mule.
Oom Tobie’s Sickness
From the way he was muffled to the chin in a khaki overcoat and his wife’s scarf in the heat of the day, we knew why Tobias Schutte was sitting on the riempies bench in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. We knew that Tobias Schutte was going by lorry to Bekkersdal to get some more medical treatment. There was nobody in the Groot Marico who suffered as regularly and acutely from maladies – imaginary or otherwise – as did Tobias Schutte. For that reason he was known as “Iepekonders Oom Tobie” from this side of the Pilanesberg right to the Kalahari: a good way into the Kalahari, sometimes – the exact distance depending on how far the Klipkop Bushmen had to go into the desert to find msumas.
“You look to be in a pretty bad way again, Oom Tobie,” Chris Welman said in a tone that Oom Tobie accepted as implying sympathy. Nobody else in the voorkamer took it up that way, however. To the rest of us, Chris Welman’s remark was just a plain sneer. “What’s it this time, Oom Tobie,” he went on, “the miltsiek or St. Vitus’s dance? But you got it while you were working, I’ll bet.”
“Just before I started working, to be exact,” Oom Tobie replied. “I was just getting ready to plant in the first pole for the new cattle camp when the sickness overtook me. Of a sudden I came all over queer. So I just had to leave the whole job to the Cape Coloured man, Pieterse, and the Bechuanas. The planting of the poles, the wiring, chasing away meerkats – I had to leave it all to them. They are at it now. I don’t know what I’d do without Pieterse. I must give him an old pair of trousers again, one of these days. I’ve got a pair that are quite good still, except that they are worn out in the seat. It’s queer how all my trousers get worn out like that, in the seat. The clothes you get today aren’t what they used to be. I buy a new pair of trousers to wear when I go out on the lands, and before I know where I am they’re