The Drought Broke Me Before It Broke, and So I Opened My Father's Ring Box

The dam was a bathtub of cracked mud

I have farmed this stretch of the Free State for the better part of forty years, and I have never seen the veld go the colour it went this year. Not brown. Brown would have been a mercy. It went a kind of grey, the grey of old bone, and the grass that was left crunched under my boots like something already dead. By June the dam that my grandfather scraped out with a borrowed grader in the fifties was a bathtub of cracked mud, and the two boreholes that keep this place alive were coughing air more often than water.

I have a small herd. Not a big operation, nothing that would impress the men who farm the flat lands out past the tar road. Just a handful of cattle that I know by their faces, by the way one of them, an old red cow I call Rooikop, always comes to the fence when she hears the bakkie. They are not livestock to me in the way the word sounds on paper. They are the thing my hands have kept busy with since I was a boy standing on the bottom rung of the kraal gate.

And this winter I could not feed them. That is the plain fact of it. The feed price climbed every week like it was competing with itself. A bale that cost me one thing in autumn cost me nearly double by the middle of winter, and the co-op fellow just shrugged when I asked him why, because what could he say. Everyone was short. Everyone was buying. The whole province seemed to be holding its breath and waiting for a rain that the weather men kept promising and the sky kept refusing.

The box I had not touched in nine years

My father died nine years ago, in the spring, which felt like a cruel joke because he loved the spring. After the funeral my sister handed me a small box, the kind of hinged box that a watch or a ring comes in, covered in a dark blue material gone soft and shiny at the corners from being handled by a man who did not handle it much. Inside were his things. His signet ring, the gold worn thin on one shoulder from decades of him turning it with his thumb when he was thinking. A chain that had snapped at the clasp years back and never got fixed. A ring that had been his own father's before him. Some other odds and ends of gold, small things, a tie pin he never wore, a ring of mine from a marriage that did not last that I had thrown in there because I could not stand to look at it in my own drawer.

I put that box on the top shelf of the wardrobe nine years ago and I did not open it again. I knew it was there the way you know a sore tooth is there. You just learn to chew on the other side.

I want to be honest about the pride part of this, because the pride was the real animal I was wrestling. A man of my age and my upbringing does not sell his father's gold. You keep it. You pass it down, even if there is no one especially waiting to receive it, even if your own boy is in Australia and phones on birthdays and would not know a signet ring from a washer. You keep it because keeping it is the whole point. Selling it felt, in those first weeks of the drought, like a kind of surrender I was not prepared to sign my name to.

What the cattle taught me about pride

But the cattle do not care about pride. Rooikop does not know what a signet ring is. She knows that her ribs were starting to show and that the feed trough was emptier than it should have been, and every morning when I walked out into that grey cold and saw them standing there, patient, trusting, waiting for me to be the man I have always been to them, something in me shifted a little further.

There is a particular loneliness to standing in a dry kraal at first light with your breath smoking in front of your face, doing sums in your head that will not come out right no matter how you arrange them. I did those sums for weeks. I sold what I could sell that did not hurt. I put off the diesel. I put off my own things. And still the gap between what I had and what the winter was going to cost me sat there, wide and dumb, refusing to close.

It was on one of those mornings, back in the kitchen with cold hands wrapped around cold coffee, that I finally admitted to myself what I had been circling. The gold was just sitting there. Metal in a box on a shelf, doing nothing for anyone, least of all for my father, who was nine years past caring about it. And down in the kraal were living animals that his own hands had helped me raise the bloodlines of. I sat there a long time. Then I got up, took the box down, and put it on the kitchen table in the light.

Weighing a man's life on a small scale

I did not know the first thing about how any of this worked. I am a farmer, not a man who deals in fine things. So I asked around, the way you do out here, at the co-op and at church and to a cousin in town, and I learned that there are places that deal properly in this, actual Jewellery Buyers who weigh the stuff and test it and tell you what it is worth by the gram rather than by the story attached to it. That last part turned out to matter more to me than I expected, but I will come to that.

I drove into town on a Thursday with the box on the passenger seat, buckled in with the seatbelt like it was a small nervous passenger, which I suppose in a way it was. The whole drive I kept glancing at it. I had half a mind to turn around twice. I did not.

The fellow who helped me was younger than my son and had a quiet, unhurried manner that I was grateful for, because I think if he had been slick about it I would have walked out. He tipped my father's things out onto a cloth and looked at each piece properly, not the way you look at scrap but the way you look at something. He weighed them one by one on a little scale, and he explained the testing to me plainly, what the marks meant, why the worn signet weighed less than it looked like it should. When I asked, a little defensively I will admit, how a place decides what to give a man, he walked me through how the whole business of getting Cash for Jewellery is tied to the metal price on the day, which moves about, and to the weight, and to the purity, and to nothing at all to do with whose thumb had worn the ring thin. I found that oddly steadying. It meant no one was pretending to me.

Driving home lighter and heavier at once

I sat there while he worked and I found, to my own surprise, that I was not falling apart. I had braced for grief and instead what came was something quieter and more practical, almost like relief. My father was a practical man. He fixed his own windmills and he never once in his life paid another man to do a thing he could do himself. Sitting in that shop I had a clear feeling, not mystical, I am not a mystical man, just clear, that he would have thought me a fool for letting cattle go thin over a box of metal on a shelf. Keep the beasts alive, he would have said. The gold was only ever going to be gold.

I had thought, before I went, that the hard part would be the letting go. It was not. The hard part had been all those mornings of not deciding. Once the thing was actually done, once I understood that what I was really doing when I chose to Sell Gold Jewellery was turning something useless into feed for animals my father knew, the shame I had been carrying just quietly got up and left.

The money was not a fortune. I want to be clear about that, in case anyone reads this hoping for a fairy tale. It did not fix the drought and it did not make me comfortable. But it was enough. Enough for feed to carry my few cattle through the worst of the winter, enough to take the diesel worry off my chest for a while, enough to buy me time until, God willing, the rain remembers where we live.

I kept the signet ring. I want to say that too. When it came to it I could not put that one across the counter, and the young fellow just nodded like he understood, and set it back on the cloth for me without a word. I wear it now, on the small finger, and I turn it with my thumb when I am thinking, standing at the fence in the grey cold while Rooikop comes up to see what I have brought her. The rest of it went to keep them standing. I think that is the most honest thing I have ever done with an inheritance, and I think my father, wherever practical men go, would agree.