Free Pale Horses by Jassy Mackenzie Page A

was the old juke box at the Kasteel – that was the local pub.’
    ‘So you two dated?’
    ‘For a short time. She wasn’t taking any precautions. She had no sense of responsibility even back then.’
    Jade thought it wiser not to ask why Van Schalkwyk hadn’t been taking any precautions himself. Instead, she shifted her position on the uncomfortable chair and waited for him to carry on with the story.
    ‘So the next thing I knew, she was pregnant and I had her crazypreacher father just about banging my front door down. Yelling about the Book of Revelations, and how sinners like me would be cast out into the darkness.’
    He rubbed his beard. ‘I soon found out that was nothing new for him. He did it all the time. Ran a church outside town that was more like a cult. Put the fear of God into people by ranting on about the Apocalypse. Once Sonet was pregnant, I had to listen to him for hours, Sunday after Sunday. He even did it at our wedding. Loosened the congregation’s purse strings, I suppose. Not that it helped. They were forever getting evicted for not paying their rent.’
    While listening to Van Schalkwyk, Jade found herself glancing down at the piles of letters on the floor. A lot of them looked like bills, and she saw more than one final demand. Van Schalkwyk’s sour comment about purse strings was no doubt prompted by this fact. Near the bills was a crimson pamphlet with yellow writing which she found difficult to read because it was facing the wrong way and clearly in Afrikaans. Something about the ‘Boere Krisis Kommando’ was all she could make out.
    ‘So she married you at sixteen?’
    ‘She was seventeen by then. But yes, we got married. I often wonder if she got pregnant on purpose, just to get away from home. In any case it worked. We had a shotgun wedding; a month later she lost the baby. For a couple of years we tried again, but the same thing happened. Miscarried each time. So since having a family was obviously out of the question, she went to college. I paid for her to study. She qualified as a project manager or some such crap, and then went off to work. We hardly saw each other after that.’
    ‘Why? Did she work a long way from where you lived?’
    ‘Her job – well, she had a few different ones over the years, but she mainly worked in Johannesburg. My farm was in Theunisvlei, the other side of Bronkhorstspruit, just after the second toll gate. Not dangerous or difficult to get to at night, and not too far from Jo’burg to drive either. But for Sonet it was too far. She made it too far in her own mind, which was ridiculous for someone who loved dangerous sports as much as she did. How can you jump off a skyscraper but be afraid to drive home in the dark? It was just an excuse not to come home. Anyway, she ended up staying in the city most weeks.’
    ‘So she was a thrill-seeker back when you were married?’
    ‘Oh ja. She loved to parachute and to base jump. She’d spend all her – our – money doing jumps, travelling to crazy places, buying equipment. Sometimes she wouldn’t come home on weekends because she was off with skydiving friends or finding another bridge to jump off.’
    Thrill-seeking behaviour. Now Jade wondered again exactly what Sonet Meintjies had been trying to escape from every time she climbed to another precarious summit before leaping off.
    ‘And you are a farmer?’
    ‘I was.’ He snapped out the words.
    ‘Did you sell your farm?’
    Her question was answered with an angry shake of the head. ‘There was a land claim. The Siyabonga community told government the land was theirs. That their ancestors had lived on it and they had a right to it. Which was bullshit. The farm had been in my family for generations. Ever since the Boer War.’
    Jade fought back the impulse to point out that indigenous communities might well have been living there a thousand years before that. There was no point, she decided. In Van Schalkwyk’s world, history had only started in