Whitethorn (17 page)

‘Nothing,' he'd say, and for once you couldn't get anything out of him, not even lies. At night, it was his turn to cry. So we had his coughing and crying going on ten to the dozen. On the Friday when we were washing our hands for supper he had another fit and had to go to the sick room and the next day we all got the
sjambok
again. I'm telling you, that was a week and a half orright! But one good thing, nobody said anything about what happened at school with the headmaster and Sergeant Van Niekerk. I don't know how he did it but he kept me out of it, and when on one occasion I passed Meneer Prinsloo he ignored me like he'd always done.

In the second week after Mattress's death, when the lynching had been in the newspaper and the kids who could read had told everyone everything it said, lots of them were asking, ‘What is the motive?' On Tuesday morning two weeks and two days after Mattress's death, we were lining up ready to march to school when Sergeant Van Niekerk arrived in the van and stopped beside us. Meneer Prinsloo and Mevrou and Frikkie Botha, who still couldn't speak properly, came out and stood there as if they were expecting something to happen.

We all watched silently as Sergeant Van Niekerk got out of the van. He was on his own and he walked up to Meneer Prinsloo and said in a very loud voice, so I think he wanted us all to hear, ‘
Goeie môre
,
Meneer Prinsloo. Ek is hier om Fonnie
du Preez inhegtenis te neem
.' I am here to take Fonnie du Preez into custody.

There was a gasp of amazement from all of us, and Meneer Prinsloo started to wave his arms and stick out his stomach.

‘You can't do it!' he said to Sergeant Van Niekerk. ‘Not in front of everyone, it is not civilised, you hear!'

Before Sergeant Van Niekerk could reply, Fonnie du Preez, who still had his arm in a sling, broke from the ranks and started to run. Sergeant Van Niekerk turned around when he heard the noise from the kids and saw what was happening. He walked normally over to the police van and opened the back. Out jumped the three big Alsatian dogs. They landed beside him and sat.

‘Go and stop!' he commanded.

You should have seen those dogs go! We could see them catching up to Fonnie, who wasn't running his fastest because of his arm in the sling. The dogs skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust beside him and started to bark fiercely, jumping up and surrounding him so he couldn't move, but they didn't bite him or anything. He tried to run but the dogs bumped into him, knocking him off his feet and they stood over him, showing their fierce teeth and gums, but still not biting. They weren't barking now, just growling.

‘
Staan op en kom hier
,
du Preez
!' Sergeant Van Niekerk shouted, ordering Fonnie to get up and come to him.

We all watched as Fonnie struggled to his feet and Sergeant Van Niekerk put his finger to his lips and whistled. The dogs allowed Fonnie to walk, though they stayed right behind him, their big pink tongues lolling out of their mouths. I'm telling you now, it wasn't funny and I'm never going to try running from the police. I could see why the blacks got so scared when Sergeant Van Niekerk walked down the street with his three dogs.

Sergeant Van Niekerk never moved as Fonnie, with his head bowed, walked up to where he was standing. He took out his police whistle, blew it twice and the dogs jumped into the police van. He turned back to Fonnie.

‘I am placing you under arrest, du Preez,' he said. ‘If you resist again I will be forced to handcuff you. Now, come along.'

‘You can't do this, you hear, Van Niekerk!' Meneer Prinsloo shouted. ‘I am in authority here and this boy is under my supervision. On what grounds are you arresting him?'

Sergeant Van Niekerk had his hand under Fonnie's elbow, ready to guide him to the passenger seat of the police van. He turned and said, ‘We have already discussed the need and the reason for the arrest on the telephone this morning, Meneer Prinsloo. Or would you like me to tell the boys what it's for?'

‘It's not civilised, you hear! This could have been done low-key like decent people and you come here and treat us like we've done something wrong and embarrass me and my staff.
Wragtig
! You will hear more about this, that I can assure you, Van Niekerk!'

‘The title is Sergeant, Meneer Prinsloo, and may I say, when you and your staff act like civilised people then that is the way the law will treat you. Please feel free to report me.'

Meneer Prinsloo went very red in the face and waved his hands frantically. I thought his tummy was going to burst open and his braces snap right off. He turned and walked away, back into The Boys Farm.

Mevrou turned and shouted at the sergeant, ‘What would you know about civilised, hey? The
kaffir
's dead, so what is the use of arresting a good Afrikaner boy, one of your own
volk
?'

Sergeant Van Niekerk turned and said, ‘Mevrou Van Schalkwyk, if I were you I would be very careful what I said next.'

But Mevrou couldn't restrain herself. ‘You should be ashamed, you hear?' She turned and walked away and Frikkie Botha just looked at the sergeant and shook his head and went ‘tsk' and followed her.

Sergeant Van Niekerk guided Fonnie into the police van, started the engine and drove away slowly.

I caught a last glimpse of Fonnie du Preez. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I thought as we were marched off to school.

The next week Pissy was put on the train to Pietersburg to go to the boys home there and Mevrou said it was because his mother, who'd put him in the orphanage, lived there and wanted to be near him. I knew this was a lie but I didn't say anything.

But Pissy got me one more time! Before he left he tried to become the innocent victim and put all the blame for what had happened on Fonnie du Preez, now that he was safely out of the way. In telling the whole story he said how Fonnie had made me kiss Pissy's arse and lick his arsehole and how I had to suck Fonnie's prick. Suddenly I was an arse-licker and a cocksucker
and
a
rooinek
!
And
I was the one who was left behind.

Now that everyone knew the story they also knew how Mattress had saved me, and that he was completely innocent but still got murdered by whoever lynched him, and it looked like whoever did it had got clean away with murder.

But that's the funny thing. Not one boy at The Boys Farm or even an adult thought about Mattress and what he'd done to save me. Maybe he'd even saved Pissy's life by putting the stick in his mouth, but nobody wanted to remember that either. Mattress seemed to disappear from everyone's memory as if he was never there. One day he was milking the cows with his broken face and lip hanging off and his kidneys bleeding so the cows would be comfortable and not suffer, and the next day he was dragged face down by a
bakkie
in the dust until he was dead and couldn't be recognised. Mattress had a nice face and they went and wiped it clean off his head. It was as though if you don't have a face, you don't exist. I don't suppose his wife or Joe Louis would ever know what happened to him. The postal orders just wouldn't arrive in Zululand. I didn't even know where they buried him. I started to worry about what happened to a person who had no face when he arrived in heaven because maybe God wouldn't recognise him. Just in case, I prayed and told God to look at his platform feet and He'd be able to tell for sure it was Mattress.
We heard that the magistrate in Tzaneen sent Fonnie to the Boys Reformatory in Pretoria. I thought that would be the last of him in my life, but I was wrong. Pissy was another one I hoped never to see again, but I was also wrong about that.

I didn't understand things properly at the time, but as I grew older I realised how it was Pissy's malicious lies that had led to Mattress's death, and that Pissy was as much the murderer as the people who dragged Mattress behind their
bakkie.
This was another thing I had to think about in life: that everything we do has a consequence and that it is beholden on all of us to stop and think what the consequence of any action we undertake might be. That lying to save our own skin and getting away with it usually results in others being hurt or wronged.

One good thing did happen. Frikkie Botha said Tinker could be my dog anywhere and any time I liked because a month after the murder she caught her first rat in the dairy. It wasn't a very big rat, but then Tinker wasn't properly grown-up yet. Meneer Botha said it showed she had ‘all the right instincts'. He said that from now on she could get food from the kitchen so she could grow up strong and be good at her new job. It was after Frikkie Botha's jaw was mended that he managed to say all this.

Everyone said he was very lucky that Mattress had broken his jaw in the boxing ring and that Doctor Van Heerden had put him in hospital, because otherwise he would be suspect-lyncher-number-one in the murder case. But because he couldn't have been one of them, whoever did it remained a dark mystery and no charges were laid, even though Sergeant Van Niekerk did his best for justice.

All I knew was that I had lost the first person in my life I had ever loved, and that the love Mattress had given me had simply disappeared into thin air as if it didn't matter to anyone. I couldn't understand why that should be. I knew that I would love Mattress for as long as I lived. To have loved somebody is not something you can just go and forget, because you just can't.

C
HAPTER
FIVE

Falling in Love with the World

I HAVE TO TELL you now about how I became a thief. It all had to do with having hot showers. You see, in summer we had cold showers, but up there in the mountains it got cold as anything in the winter mornings and the pipes would freeze. Not snow, there had never been snow, probably not since the beginning of time, but in the morning the frost lay like a silver blanket on the ground and the pale, smooth bark of the blue gum trees were cold to touch. Some days on the way to school, until the sun rose, your toes would freeze to death. We got a jersey for the winter and you could pull the sleeves over your hands, that helped a bit, but on cold mornings it wasn't really enough and you were cold as billyo.

Back to hot showers, which needed extra wood for the boilers. The work in the vegetable gardens was less in the winter and instead we had to chop wood on a Saturday morning. Or rather, the big boys who weren't in a school rugby team had to chop wood and all the small ones would be sent along the creek to gather tinder – old branches that had fallen and the ones you could reach to snap off.

I'd found this big branch and started to drag it back to the woodshed, which was a long way away, and by the time I got back the bell for lunch had gone and everyone had left. Lunch on a Saturday was just bread and jam that they left out on a long table on the
stoep
, and also coffee. I knew it was useless trying to have some, because it was a free-for-all and we little kids didn't often get very much. Even if you ran like anything to be there first and stuffed some bread and jam into your mouth as fast as you could, you never got more than one slice down before the others arrived and then you'd better get out of the way fast, man!

With me bringing in the big branch I would have been much too late to get even a single bite. Maybe some crusts, but you couldn't guarantee it and that's why I always got double crusts for Tinker on Saturday. So I just stayed behind because there wasn't rollcall or a clean-hands inspection or anything like that on a Saturday. I dragged the branch to the big wooden box where we put kindling and started breaking off branches because they all had to be nearly the same size, about twelve inches.

That was when I saw a chopper resting on a woodblock. I'd always wanted to use a chopper but that wasn't allowed until you were ten years old. My hands were tired from breaking pieces of kindling, so I said to myself, Why not the chopper? Nobody was looking, so I picked it up and was surprised at how heavy it was. It wasn't one of those big choppers they used for splitting logs from tree trunks, just a small one called an axe, but it was still pretty heavy. I put a branch on the woodblock, took the chopper in both hands and lifted it up above my head and . . .
Crash!
Instead of chopping the branch in half like it was supposed to, the branch went flying into the air and landed several feet away. I remembered how I'd watched Mattress chop kindling for his fire when he cooked his
mieliepap
in the black three-legged
kaffir
pot he had. He'd hold one end of the stick and pick up the axe with one hand and, still holding the stick resting on the chopping block, he'd chop the stick in half, easy as can be, right in the middle.

So that's what I did and it worked easy as anything until I misjudged one stick and went
whack!
with the chopper and it cut deep into the forefinger of my left hand. At first there was nothing as I hopped up and down, but then the blood started to come out and I knew I was in the deep shit. If you got a cut doing something you weren't supposed to do you tried to hide it so no one could find out. But my finger seemed to be half off, not as bad as Mattress's lip, but I knew I couldn't hide it. I went to the dairy and found some of that old cheesecloth and wrapped it around my finger. It was soon red with blood because my finger wouldn't stop bleeding, and I knew I wouldn't be able to work without someone seeing it. So Tinker and me went over to the creek, because after lunch we had a free hour, and I washed it in the water, but the blood still kept coming.