Free Devil's Valley by André Brink Page A

As early as Friday I became aware of a barely repressed excitement building up like some sort of bloody fever in the settlement. Tant Poppie started baking like mad, and from what I could discover on my regular walks the same thing happened in all the other kitchens. Tall-Fransina was getting so fucking agitated beside her pot-still one could swear she had turps under her tail. The old folk in the cemetery were throwing up clouds of dust as they dug and weeded like fucking ants, especially around old Lukas Lermiet’s empty grave. At ever shorter intervals Henta Peach and her gang came charging through the streets and into the bluegum forest or up the dry riverbed, chattering like a fucking swarm of weaverbirds that had seen a snake. Jurg Water broke into a near-gallop as he moved about from bloody dawn to dusk in search of unseen waters.
    The most visible sign of something unusual was the increase in the numbers of mentally and physically handicapped breaking out from the dark hideouts in the houses where they were usually kept out of sight: the dim-witted and the maimed and the retarded, the waterheads, the mongols, the spastic, the blind, the cross-eyed, the crippled, the dribblers and babblers, the eaters of earth and grass and shit, some of them on foot if not on all fours, others pushed on wooden carts and wheelbarrows. They’d been around in the settlement every day, here and there, usually tended by a mother or an older sister or an aunt; but since the Friday morning they were coming out in fucking droves, like flying ants before a storm. It was getting on my bloody nerves, an all-too blatant exhibition of sins better kept secret.
    Smothered Cry
    Towards nightfall on the Friday I was beginning to feel like a fucking bee in a bottle. I’m sure Tant Poppie’s customary series of toasts to Father, Son and Holy Ghost made it worse, but even without them I just had to get out, especially as it was such a fucking beautiful night, with a kind of late-summer balminess in the air; and full moon too. But as it happened, I wasn’t allowed out, because over supper Tant Poppie announced that she was expecting a ‘patient’ and wanted me to stay in my room.
    “Something serious?” I asked, not just from curiosity but to show some goodwill.
    She pursed her lips in a chicken-arse kind of pout, and her two quick eyes looked past me on either side. “It’s just something that’s got to be done before Nagmaal.”
    It was too early to go to bed, so I tried to get on with one of the porn paperbacks I’d brought along in my rucksack, even if the candlelight made reading heavy going. Soon after dark—a sliver of the full moon was just showing above the slope at the back of the house—I heard Tant Poppie’s visitor arrive. Two, as far as I could gather when I went to listen at the door: an older woman and a girl. They spoke in whispers, which made it impossible to discover more; but from time to time a voice broke through, allowing me to draw my own conclusions. A journalist with my experience needs little more than a wink and a nudge. For about an hour there was a bustle of activity in the voorhuis: the shuffle of bare feet, a rustling and fidgeting about, once or twice the sound of a pitcher put down heavily on table or floor, sometimes a more audible cryptic word from Tant Poppie: “Hold her tight”—“Open up”—“Come on, it’s not so bad”—“Just press my arm”…And once there was a smothered cry from the girl, followed by Tant Poppie’s contented voice. “Good. Now just lie quietly for a while.” But the girl kept on whimpering softly.
    If it was what I thought was happening under this damn godfearing roof, the Devil’s Valley was an even tougher nut to crack than I’d believed before.
    I drifted into sleep while the girl was still moaning away in the voorhuis; and so I never saw the bloody full moon rise—as, with frustrating pigheadedness it followed the curve of the mountain slope all the way to