The Power of One (49 page)

“It's God's justice,” Gert confided to me, “Geel Piet wasn't the only one he's used the donkey prick on.” He giggled, “I hope the bugger can't sit for six months!” No one said anything, but you could see it in their eyes. Those of us who had been in the gym that night all knew Borman was under a curse.

Geel Piet had once told me how prisoners could think so hard that collectively they could make things happen. Like when they knew I had beaten Killer Kroon hours before anyone brought the official news of my win. How they always knew when there was to be a hanging minutes after a judge had issued the warrant, sometimes hundreds of miles from the location of the prison where the hanging was to take place.

“Ja,
it is true, small
baas,
I have seen it heppen lots of times,” Geel Piet had said gravely. “Sometimes, when there is enough hate, this thinking can kill. The people will think some person to death. Such a death is always long and hard, because the thinking takes place over a long time. It is the hate; when it boils up there is no stopping it, the person will die because there is no
mootie
you can take to stop this hating thing.”

Anyone who is bom in rural Africa is superstitious, and the warders, who were mostly backwoodsmen, were particularly so. We all watched Borman as he started to shrink. His extended gut remained, but everywhere else the flesh started to fall off him.

He seemed to age in front of our eyes, and the thinner he became the more vicious he was with the prisoners.

Another prisoner died mysteriously, and after a short inquiry Borman was put on a charge and suspended from duty pending the inquiry. Shortly afterward he experienced a severe rectal hemorrhage and was rushed to Barberton Hospital, where the surgeon, in an attempt to stop the bleeding caused by a rupture of the wall of the bowel, packed his rectum with giant cotton swabs—a procedure known to be about as excrutiatingly painful as it is possible to experience. The doctor's cursory examination revealed the presence of a fungating growth.

Within weeks of leaving prison Doc was again fit enough to head for the hills, and we would climb away from the town at first light every Saturday morning. We'd breakfast on hard-boiled eggs and yesterday's bread with a thermos of sweet, milky coffee high up on a ridge somewhere or beside a stream. Sometimes we'd make for Lamati Falls, a smallish waterfall ten miles into the hills, and we'd wait for the morning sun to whiten the water where it crashed into a deep pool that stayed icy cold throughout the year. Doc was like a small boy; the years seemed to fall away from him as we scampered up the sides of mountains or slid down into deep tropical
kloofs,
where giant tree ferns and the canopy of yellowwood turned the brilliant sunlight into twilight and where the soil was moist and smelt of both decay and new life at the same time.

Doc was busy taking the photographs for his new book, and sometimes we'd hunt all day for a single perfect specimen. It was good to be working with Doc again. He was an exacting taskmaster who, when we found a specimen to his liking, demanded to know the soil types and the shales, the rocks, the other plants that grew within a radius of fifty feet, the direction of the wind, and the hours of sunlight the cactus or aloe he was photographing would receive. Some days we'd communicate all day in Latin, and in this way Doc gentled me into Ovid, Cicero, Caesar's conquest of Gaul, and Virgil. Mrs. Boxall countered this with the English poets. Wordsworth, Masefield, and Keats were her favorites, with Byron, Tennyson, and Walter De la Mare, if not her favorites, a matter of essential education for a gentleman. I asked Doc about German poets, and he replied that Goethe was the only one in his opinion who could be considered worthy, but that personally he found him a terrible bore and that the Germans put all their poetry into music. He declared I should study the English for their poetry and the Germans for their music.

It was a lopsided sort of a catch-as-catch-can education, added to by Miss Bornstein, who had been busy preparing me for a scholarship to a posh private school in Johannesburg, an education well beyond my mother's income as a dressmaker. I was not yet twelve, the minimum required age for entry into a secondary school, and I had languished in standard six for three years, during which Miss Bornstein had privately educated me in “all those things there's never time to learn at school.”

A month before my twelfth birthday I sat for the scholarship exam to the Prince of Wales School, and at the end of the term, to my mortification, Mr. Davis, the headmaster of Barberton School, announced that I had received the highest scholarship marks this school had ever given. That I would be starting as a boarder at the commencement of the first term in 1946. Doc, Mrs. Boxall, and Miss Bornstein had trained me well, if sometimes a little erratically. I was to find at the Prince of Wales School that my knowledge in some things exceeded that of the senior forms and even the masters themselves, while in others I was no better than the brighter chaps in my form. But above all things I had been taught to read for pleasure and for meaning, as both Doc and Mrs. Boxall demanded that I exercise my critical faculties in everything I did. At twelve I had already known how to think for at least four years. In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.

And so the last summer of my childhood came to an end. I also sat for the Royal College of Music Advanced Exams and passed, although my marks weren't spectacular. I think this was as much as Doc expected from me. He knew I had no special gift for music, and what I achieved had been simply out of love for him. For his part, he had fulfilled his contract with my mother, for whom my passing the exam was confirmation of my genius. In my mother's mind I had become the logical successor to the young Arthur Rubinstein, and it was one of the major disappointments in her life when at boarding school I elected to play in the jazz band. Jazz was the devil's music and another indication to her that I had hardened my heart against the Lord.

Before Geel Piet
ditd
he had been teaching me how to put an eight-punch combination together. I worked solidly all summer on this combination, and at the championships held in Boxburg I retained the under-twelve title, though this time without effort, even stopping a bigger kid in the second round on a TKO. Killer Kroon had not entered the championship, even though he would have been in the division above.

Everyone, even Doc, seemed pleased that I had won a scholarship to the Prince of Wales School in Johannesburg, though I think he was trying very hard to be brave about the breakup in our partnership. Writing for
The Goldfields News,
Mrs. Boxall really went to town in her column, “Clippings from a Cultured Garden,” writing about the town's
budding
intellect and its
finest flower,
which turned out to be me. News of my pass in the Royal College of Music exams had me declared a
blossoming
musician. In the Afrikaans section of the paper, my name appeared as the winner of the Eastern Transvaal under-twelve boxing title. My mother declared, “Our cup runneth over!” but if I would accept the Lord into my heart her joy would be a hundredfold what she was feeling now. But I could see she was pleased, especially when she started to receive invitations to tea from the town's most important families and her dressmaking business picked up so much that she only had time to accept the juiciest invitations.

I kept my apprehension about returning to boarding school to myself; it seemed I would once again be the youngest kid in the school, though this aspect anyway now left me unconcerned. If they had a Judge at the Prince of Wales School, all I could say was, he'd better be able to box. In fact, the only question I asked about the school was about boxing. The reply came back that boxing was a school sport and the boxers were under the instruction of Mr. Darby White, ex-cruiserweight champion of the British Army.

The final crisis of that last summer of childhood came when the clothing list arrived from the Prince of Wales School. As she read it the tears started to roll down my mother's cheeks. Marie was there on her afternoon off from the hospital, so it must have been a Wednesday. My mother read the list aloud. “Six white shirts with detachable starched collars, long sleeve. Three pairs of long gray flannel trousers (see swatch attached). Six pairs of gray school woollen socks, long. One school blazer (see melton sample attached), school blazers or blazer pocket badge and school ties, obtainable from John Orrs, 129 Eloff St., Johannesburg. One gray V-neck jersey, long sleeves. Shoes, with school uniform, brown. Shoes, Sunday, black. Blue serge Sunday suit, long trousers.”

“We don't have the money, we simply don't have the money,” she kept repeating.

“Ag,
man,
jong,
where's your faith?” Marie said indignantly, not at all impressed by my mother's tears. “The Lord will supply everything, just you see. We going to pray right now, go down on our knees and give the precious Lord Jesus Peekay's order. C'mon, let's do it now!”

My granpa rose from the table and excused himself, but I was obliged to kneel with Marie and my mother. Marie must have reasoned that, as a heathen, my prayers wouldn't have too much impact, because she took the clothing list from my mother and handed it to me. “We going to pray out loud to the Lord, it's always best when you need something bad to pray out loud. When I tell you, you read out the list, okay?”

I nodded, grateful that I wouldn't have to pray out loud.

“Precious Lord Jesus, we got a real problem this time,” Marie began.

“Praise the Lord, praise His precious name,” my mother said.

“You know how clever Peekay is and how he has won a thing to go to a posh school in Johannesburg for nothing.”

“Precious Savior, hear Thy humble servants,” my mother said, attempting to bring a bit of tone into the whole alfair.

“Well, we got lots of trouble, man, I mean Lord,” Marie continued. “The clothing list arrived today, and it broke our hearts.”

“Precious Jesus! Blood of the Lamb!”

“The cupboard is bare, there are no clothes for school hanging up in it. What we need, Lord Jesus, Peekay is going to say right now, so please listen good, and you talk up, Peekay, so the Lord can hear, you hear? He's going to tell you now, Lord,” Marie prayed, cuing me in.

I must say I'd never been quite as close as this to the Lord before, and I was quite nervous. “Ah, er—six white shirts with detachable starched collars, long sleeve,” I read. “Three pairs of long gray flannel trousers (see swatch attached).”

“Show him the swatch, man,” Marie whispered urgently. I didn't know quite what to do, so I held the swatch of gray flannel up to the ceiling. After a few moments, when I reasoned the Lord had had a good enough look, I continued, “Six pairs of gray school woollen socks, long.”

“Only three pairs, man! What about the three pairs you already got for school here?” Marie said in a stage whisper.

“Oh,” I said. “Only three pairs, please.” My mother had stopped punctuating Marie's remarks, and I looked at her. At first I thought she was crying, her face was all squished up and she was holding her hand across her mouth. Then I realized that she was desperately trying not to laugh. I started to giggle.

Without opening her eyes, Marie admonished me. “Peekay, stop it! God will punish you! It's hard enough asking the Lord for you, you not even being born again an' all that! But if you laugh we got no chance.” Her voice became conciliatory. “Sorry, Lord, he didn't mean it, you got my word for it, it won't happen again. Go on, start reading again, the Lord hasn't got all day, you know!”

I went on reading the list and also showed the Lord the swatch of green melton blazer cloth. When I got to the bit about school badges being obtainable from John Orrs, 129 Eloff St., Johannesburg, Marie whispered, “You don't need to give Him the address, He knows where it is.” I finally got to the blue serge suit. “That's his Sunday suit for going to church, Lord,” she said, to remind the Lord that I was still within his grasp every Sunday. My mother threw in a few more “Praise the Lord, praise His precious name” and the request for the contents of my clothing list was over: the rest was now up to the Precious Redeemer.

Marie's eyes blazed with faith, and I could see she was pretty pleased with the way she had asserted herself. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the Lord would provide. My mother also seemed considerably cheered up and called for Dum to make tea. I must confess, not being a Christian, I didn't share their confidence. There seemed to me to be a whole heap of clothes in that list, and all I had was three pairs of gray socks, two pairs of gym pants, and the tackies. These latter items had appeared on a separate list titled “Sport and Recreation,” which included two rugby jerseys, house and school colors, rugby socks, rugby boots, white cricket shirt, and shorts forms one and two, cricket longs form three onward. The optional section on this list included cricket boots and white cricket sweater in school colors. It seemed an amazing collection of clothes for one person.

I mentioned the clothing crisis to Doc. Not that he could have helped. Doc, at best, lived hand to mouth with just enough over for an occasional book and film for his Hasselblad camera. But he mentioned it to Mrs. Boxall and Mrs. Boxall mentioned it to Miss Bornstein and the two women went into action.