He looked the best I’d ever seen him. I took the jam tin I had used for his water, and in about five minutes, I’d collected twenty little green grasshoppers, which are the very best chicken scoff there is. I placed the tin beside his body so that he’d have a special treat on the way to heaven. Finally I covered his body with the stones.
South Africa’s first victim in the war against Adolf Hitler was safe as last.
I sat there on my haunches beside the pile of stones as the afternoon sun began to set. Now the sun was passing beyond Zululand, even past the land of the Swazi and now it leaves the Shangaan and the royal kraal of Modjadji, the rain queen, to be cooled in the great, dark water beyond.
The first bell for supper rang and I moved to the tap and began to wash the blood and shit from my hands and face and hair.
Deep inside me the loneliness bird sat on its crude stone nest and laid a large and very heavy stone egg.
The bell for supper sounded. The last supper. Everything comes to an end. Tomorrow I would be going home for Christmas and Nanny. Wonderful, soft, warm Nanny.
But life doesn’t work that way. I, most of all, should have known this. At supper Boetie Van der Merwe told me Mevrou wanted to see me in the dispensary. ‘If you tell about this afternoon, we’ll kill you,’ he hissed. I wasn’t frightened, I knew a proper ending when I saw one.
Only hours remained before my liberation, nothing the Judge, Mevrou and, for the moment anyway, Adolf Hitler could do would alter that. Soon I would be returning to my quiet backwater.
I didn’t know then that what seemed like the end was only the beginning. All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives. Unbeknownst to me the tide had turned and I was being swept out to sea.
FOUR
At the end of supper, after Mr Stoffel had read the Bible lesson and concluded evening prayers, I waited for Mevrou outside the dispensary. She arrived a short time later. ‘Kom!’ Mevrou said as she brushed past me. I entered and waited with my hands behind my back, my head bowed in the customary manner.
‘Why is there blood on your shirt, Pisskop?’
I looking down at my shirt which was stained with Granpa Chook’s blood and a biggish spot where the stone had torn into me.
Mevrou signed and sat down heavily on a bentwood chair painted the same light green as the dispensary walls. ‘Take off your shirt,’ she commanded.
I hurriedly removed my shirt and Mevrou made a cursory examination of my stomach. ‘Ag, is that all?’ She prodded at the wound the stone had made and I flinched involuntarily.
‘Please, Mevrou, I fell on a rock.’ Mevrou removed the cork from a large bottle of iodine and upended it onto a wad of cotton wool.
‘Yes, I can see that.’ She dabbed at my wound and the iodine stung like billy-o and I winced and hopped up and down in dismay, wringing my hands to stop the burning pain. ‘Come, that’s not enough.’ She upended the bottle once again and dabbed hard at my tummy. This time I knew what to expect and, gritting my teeth and closing my eyes tightly, I managed to hold back most of the pain. ‘You can’t go getting blood poisoning on the train,’ she said, tossing the wad on the table. She retrieved the cork and pushed it back into the bottle.
‘What train, Mevrou?’ I asked confused.
‘Your oupa called long distance on the telephone from a dorp in the Eastern Transvaal called Barberton. You are not going back to the farm. He says Newcastle’s disease has made him kill all his chickens and he has sold the farm to a Mevrou Vorster.
‘What’s my granpa doing in the town called Barberton, Mevrou?’
My head was swimming, my whole world was coming apart at the seams. If Granpa had sold the farm to fat Mrs Vorster and was making telephone calls from some strange town in the Eastern Transvaal, where was Nanny? Without Granpa Chook and Nanny, life was not possible.
‘I’m not a mind reader. Maybe he got work in this place.’ She reached into her bag and held up an envelope. ‘In here is the ticket. Tomorrow night you will catch the train to Barberton. Two days and two nights. I will take you to the train.’ She dismissed me with a wave of the envelope.
I turned to go, and as I reached the door Mevrou called me back. ‘You can’t take the chicken, you hear?’ She looked at me smugly. ‘South African Railways won’t let you take a Kaffir chicken, not even in the goods van.’ She seemed pleased with this thought. ‘I will take the chicken, he will earn his keep even if he is only a Kaffir chicken.’
‘He is dead, Mevrou. A dog ate him today.’ I managed somehow to keep the tears out of my voice.
‘That is a shame, he was good in the kitchen.’ She rose from her chair with a sigh, fanning herself with the letter. ‘I’m telling you, man, a Kaffir chicken is no different from a Kaffir. Just when you think you can trust them, they go and let you down.
I had never owned a pair of shoes. At the time, in the Northern Transvaal, a farm kid only got boots if he had rich parents or if he had turned thirteen. That’s when the Old Testament says a boy becomes a man. A pair of khaki shorts, a shirt and a jumper when it was cold was all you got. Underpants hadn’t been invented. Even if they had been, Boer kids wouldn’t have worn them. More expense for what?
The day after Granpa Chook’s funeral was the last day of term. Everyone was up and packed long before breakfast. After breakfast Mevrou summoned me to the dispensary to tell me that after lunch we would be going into town to buy a pair of tackies for me at Harry Crown’s shop.
‘What are tackies, Mevrou?’
‘Domkop! Tackies are shoes only made of canvas with rubber bottoms. Don’t you know anything? Make sure you have clean feet or we will be shamed in front of the Jew.’
From my secret mango tree, I watched the kids leave the hostel. Parents arrived in old pick-up trucks and mule carts. Some kids left on donkeys brought to the school by a farm servant. I watched as the Judge left in a mule cart. He made the black servant sit on the tailboard, then he jumped up into the driver’s seat, took up the reins and the whip and set off at a furious pace, whipping at the mules and making the whip crack like a rifle shot. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. As my mother used to say, ‘Good riddance of bad rubbish.’
Finally everyone had gone and I climbed down from the mango tree and crossed the school playground. It wasn’t the same without Granpa Chook. The sun felt the same. The little green grasshoppers still couldn’t make it across the playground in one hit. The day moon, made of skimmed milk, still hung in the cloudless morning sky. But it wasn’t ever going to be the same again. I saved the need to grieve for a later time. I had enough on my mind with the prospect of going to town to buy a pair of shoes and catching the train. I’d never owned a pair of shoes and I’d never been on a train, never seen a real train. Two nevers in one day is enough to fill anyone’s mind.
After a lunch of bread and jam with a mug of sweet tea, I hurried to meet Mevrou in the dispensary, stopping only long enough to give my feet and legs a good scrub like Mevrou said. The same shower which had been dripping that first night when I thought I was in a slaughter house was still sounding drip, drip, drip, like a metronome. Funny how little kids can get things mixed up like that. It all seemed such a long time ago; I sure had been a baby then.
I had been waiting at the dispensary a few minutes when Mevrou arrived. She was wearing a shapeless floral cotton dress and a funny old black straw hat with two cherries on it. A third wire stem stuck up where a cherry had once been. In her town clothes she looked not unlike fat old Mrs Vorster, except younger and with a moustache.