Whitethorn (38 page)

‘
Ja
, she is what is called “A one-man dog”,' I explained happily.

‘And the best ratter in the Northern Transvaal I hear, hey?'

It was a nice compliment, but it just goes to show, a police sergeant knows everything that's going on around the place.

‘Eight is the record,' I said, patting Tinker. ‘That's the most she can count.' I thought momentarily of Frikkie Botha who was lying in a hospital somewhere with no face. He always hoped for nine rats. ‘One day we going to get nine, just you wait and see, that little ratter will do it I guarantee.'

On our way into town we turned left into a farm road that headed towards the high mountains. It wasn't my place to ask and I thought Sergeant Van Niekerk may be visiting a farm or something before we went to the police station to do further enquiries on the fire. A subject that, I must say, I too was a bit tired of hearing about.

‘Aren't you wondering where we going?' he asked after a while.

‘
Ja
, I thought maybe somebody's farm you had to go and see,' I replied.

We were beginning to climb, going round narrow curves on a dirt road with Sergeant Van Niekerk constantly changing gears. Sometimes the road was so narrow the tyres sent small rocks down the steep slope at the one side of the road.

‘Have you ever been on a picnic, Tom?'

‘
Ja
, Meneer, once with the church to the sports field, we all had to help with the work. Nearly the whole town was there.'

‘No, a proper picnic by a waterfall in the high mountains?'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. ‘No, Meneer, does it have
boerewors
?' I had heard all proper picnics had
boerewors
and a
braaivleis.

‘
Ja
, for sure. All you can eat and maybe even fish, there is a pool and sometimes you can catch bass.'

I'd never tasted fish, but it didn't matter, because if I didn't like it, I could just taste a little bit just to be polite. Then eat
boerewors
as much as I could eat. Which was a lot, because I only had porridge this morning, not even a cup of coffee.

We climbed for more than an hour and passed only one farm that had four houses on it. ‘Van Schalkwyk,' Sergeant Van Niekerk said, then did this sort of spit out the window.

So this is where Mevrou lived when she grew up, I thought to myself. The four houses must be for the six brothers and the mother and father. Even with all the houses it looked a lonely place. There was also a big shed and a
kraal
but no cattle because they were probably grazing in the mountains. Outside the biggest house there was a Dutch oven and a smokehouse and a bit further on a big piggery.

‘They breed also pigs. I must say their ham is the best you ever tasted, they can do it with honey so you think it's Christmas every day,' Sergeant Van Niekerk remarked.

We travelled even higher and not changing gears because only the low gear was needed. You could see further than I had ever looked. The country all around had huge rocky outcrops and the bush
veld
stretched down into green valleys, and thousands of flat-topped fever trees and aloes dotted the countryside. It was the most beautiful country I had ever seen. I became aware of something else, although I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.

‘High mountain country,' Sergeant Van Niekerk said, as if he was reading my thoughts. ‘This is where the rainforest begins.'

It was true, the surrounding
kloofs
were deep green with tall trees and monkey ropes and even above the whine of the engine you could hear that the bird calls were different. At last, we turned into a roadway that you could hardly see and Sergeant Van Niekerk stopped and went to the back of the van and produced a sharp post with a small paper flag on it and pushed it into the ground at the entrance of the turn-off. We proceeded down this hardly-a-road-at-all and sometimes I had to jump out and pull a dead branch out of the way. There was very little sunlight and it felt sort of damp and cool and dark. Once a lourie called out and then a bird I'd never heard. ‘Cape parrot,' the sergeant said. We kept putting down these little flags for about a mile in the bush road, when suddenly you couldn't believe your eyes. There was first this thundering sound, then we turned into a sunlit clearing and I saw we'd come right up against a high
krans
from which a waterfall tumbled, a ribbon of whitewater that must have been 300 feet high. It seemed to fall in slow motion into a deep mountain pool and all about us were tree ferns and gigantic trees that rose up to the sky. Monkey ropes twisted and turned about them as well as other vines with huge green leaves big as dustbin lids that I'd never seen before. High up in lichen-and-moss-covered tree forks wild orchards grew.

‘
Magtig
!' was all I could say. ‘I didn't know there was such a beautiful place in the whole world!'

‘Nice, eh, Tom?' Sergeant Van Niekerk said, switching off the idling engine.

‘Is this where we going to have our picnic?' I asked somewhat foolishly.

‘
Ja
, don't you like it? Would you rather go somewhere else then?' he teased. ‘We've got to collect some dry wood and get the fire going before the others come. For a good
braai
we need only embers or the meat will burn on the outside and be raw in the middle.'

‘Others? There are going to be others?'

He grinned. ‘
Ja
, your friends, just you wait and see, man. Now let's get some wood. It's not so easy, hey, this is true rainforest where it rains every day, finding dry wood can be difficult.'

I didn't know I had any friends, so it was all rather confusing.

Tinker and me went looking for wood and it wasn't too hard and soon we had a big pile. When Sergeant Van Niekerk came and looked at it he laughed. ‘
Ag
, man, Tom, this wood is all rotten, it will burn up in five minutes, look for some that has some weight.'

How could I make such a mistake? Me, above all people, who had been collecting wood every Saturday for the boiler room at The Boys Farm and now that I was past ten years old had been chopping it for ages. Sergeant Van Niekerk must have seen the shameful look on my face because he laughed.

‘It's different country up here, Tom. Everything is different, wood rots before it dries, you can see the trees and plants are different and at three o'clock in the afternoon it rains every day, you can set your watch by it.'

This was the country Mattress had described to me so very long ago. I had a sudden stab of pain in my heart. Was he in heaven? Heaven was a high-up place, maybe it looked like this, waterfalls and big trees and sunlit glades. If I had been old enough when he died I would have pinned a note on his body with his name on it so God would know who he was now that he didn't have a face. But there were always his platform feet, even God, who is a very busy person, couldn't mistake them, and they hadn't been scraped off by the road.

This time it was less easy to find wood, but we got some and when it was enough we started the
braaivleis
fire. Sergeant Van Niekerk said, ‘We better get in a swim, hey? Because later there will be ladies here.'

So we took off all of our clothes and he said, ‘I dare you to dive in first.' So I did and when I came up I thought I must have just dived into a pool of ice. Sergeant Van Niekerk was laughing. ‘It's cold, hey, Tom!' Then he dived in and came up snorting like a walrus. ‘
Here
, man, it's cold!' he yelled above the sound of the waterfall.

Tinker was the only smart one who didn't jump in, she just barked at the edge, maybe dogs know these things. We couldn't stay in for long because it was too cold. When we got out we lay on this big sunny rock and got warm again and our skin dried.

‘Better get dressed, the others will be here soon,' said Sergeant Van Niekerk. By now the fire was burnt down and only a wisp of smoke was rising. ‘A bit more wood and the embers will be perfect,' he said.

It hadn't even started properly and already this was the happiest day of my life. You'll never believe what happened. Because the waterfall drowned out the sound, I didn't hear the car coming and I suddenly looked up and there, like a ghost car, was Doctor Van Heerden's '39 Chevvie with the dicky-seat, and there in the dicky-seat is Marie. In the front was the Doctor and Mevrou Booysens. I couldn't believe my eyes! Who was going to look after the Impala Café and the farmers coming to see Doctor Van Heerden? They had come all this way on their busiest day of the week, just to see me.

I'd hardly recovered from this shock when turning into the clearing is Meneer Van Niekerk's old Plymouth and in it is his wife Anna, who once gave me an end-of-the-year prize at school for history. The back door of the car opened and it was Miss Phillips! Can you imagine? Miss Phillips from Johannesburg!

Marie came and gave me a big kiss, and then Mevrou Booysens and then Miss Phillips who hugged me and said, ‘Oh, oh, you precious child!' and I thought she was going to cry because her voice went all of a sudden wobbly. She told me how she'd come down in the train and Meneer Van Niekerk had picked her up in Tzaneen. Then Mevrou Van Niekerk kissed me. Four kisses all at once, a brand-new world record!

Well! What a day-and-a-half it turned out to be! We didn't catch any fish, but I think I ate about a yard of
boerewors
, and cakes and pudding and
koeksisters
and a big roast potato and all the cool drinks I wanted in proper bottles. They even had some
biltong
and I could take some home with me. Other nice things you couldn't take, because they'd be confiscated, but nobody would know you had
biltong
in your pocket.

Then after lunch Meneer Van Niekerk made a speech and he said how proud they were of me winning the scholarship an' all.

‘It is one of the proudest moments in the history of the school,' he said. Then he added, if Gawie also won his scholarship it would make them all doubly proud, but they didn't know his results yet. ‘This day is in your honour, Tom, we are very proud of you, but we not only honour you, we also honour the selfless love of a woman, Miss Phillips. Without this very special person, who knows what might have happened to these two brilliant boys. A headmaster can only do so much and they would probably have been lost in the wilderness.'

I'm glad he also mentioned Gawie because it was true about him. Miss Phillips had gone all red in the face and said she'd only done her duty as a teacher, and that it brought her great pleasure watching two fine young minds grow. We all knew it was lots and lots more than that. I loved Marie, but I also loved Miss Phillips a lot, but in a different sort of way.

After all the speeches were over, Doctor Van Heerden said how lucky it was that he'd left that old box of his dear brother's books under the house and other nice things. ‘If half chopping off your finger brings young men like you into an old doctor's life, Tom, then chop away,' he said, and everyone laughed.

Then Mevrou Van Niekerk asked if they knew about the scholarship at The Boys Farm.

‘They got a letter,' I replied.

‘They? You mean
you
got one?' Miss Phillips exclaimed.

‘Yes.'

‘Did you tell them about your scholarship?' Mevrou Van Niekerk asked.

‘They knew already, Mevrou. We are not allowed to get letters that haven't been opened and read first by Meneer Prinsloo,' I explained.

‘Was there a little celebration, maybe?' Mevrou Booysens asked, offering me a brown-paper packet. ‘Have some dried peaches, they come from the Cape.'

I didn't know what to say. I couldn't tell them what had happened and I couldn't lie because we were not at The Boys Farm and they were all high-up people I loved and respected. I took a dried peach to cover up.

‘Perhaps I can explain,' Meneer Van Niekerk suddenly interjected. ‘Jan and I have an old aunt, Mevrou Pienaar, who is the cook at The Boys Farm. She told me what happened.' He went through the whole story and everyone was very quiet until the end when Doctor Van Heerden said, ‘I am ashamed that man calls himself a proud Afrikaner.' Everyone shook their heads and Miss Phillips said, ‘What an iniquity!' Marie came over and kissed me and gave me a big hug.

Which just goes to show, a person shouldn't go around in life criticising people who go, ‘Eh? What did you say?' all the time when you speak to them. It was obvious from how the headmaster told the story that Mevrou Pienaar had heard every word that went on that night. Now I also knew how Sergeant Van Niekerk knew so much about everything going on around the place and how Tinker was a famous ratter.

But then, all of a sudden, I knew something else. I now knew that they all knew the story of the letter before they came here. By deliberately telling it again in front of me it was Meneer Van Niekerk's way of telling me, ‘Remember, Tom, the truth shall set you free.' Badness doesn't always win and good people
must
fight bad people and not let them get away with stuff. That was why they had all given up their valuable time to give me such a lovely picnic.

At two o'clock, because of the high
krans
the waterfall tumbled over, the sun was already gone and the glade grew quite chilly. Sergeant Van Niekerk said we would need to go because at three o'clock sharp the rain would come down and the road out would be slippery and dangerous. Then another nice thing happened. Doctor Van Heerden said, ‘Why not drive home with us and sit in the dicky-seat with Marie and enjoy the open air.' I looked at Sergeant Van Niekerk to see if it was all right.