Whitethorn (5 page)

Two of Mevrou's brothers played rugby for Northern Transvaal and Boetie, the one who had gone to fetch the lorry, was once the amateur heavyweight boxing champion of the Transvaal with twenty fights and seventeen knockouts. He was banned from amateur boxing because in a championship fight he was boxing against an English-speaking heavyweight from Johannesburg. It turned out to be a very even fight and Boetie Van Schalkwyk managed to knock the
rooinek
out but it happened right on the bell in the final round, or just
after
the bell, the three judges said. So the boxer from Jo'burg was given the decision. When the referee held up the other boxer's hand, Boetie lost his temper and turned around and smashed the other boxer in the jaw and knocked him out a second time for good measure. People said the Van Schalkwyks were wild men who talked first with their fists and were best left alone. I just thought you'd like to know this stuff about Mevrou's family.

Anyway, we're standing at the side of the road outside the church when this town kid on a bicycle comes riding towards us showing off big time, riding with his hands in his pockets. This kid knew none of us could ever own a bicycle and he was free to do what he liked and had the whole day to do anything he cared to do. He made the mistake of coming too close to Flippy Marais who was standing next to me so I saw the whole thing happen. Flippy quickly stuck his foot out, planted it against the frame of the bike and gave it a great push. With no grip on the handlebars the kid lost control. Next moment it veered straight into Mevrou who landed on her enormous fat bum and her legs stuck up in the air showing her pink
crepe de Chine
bloomers that came down to just above her knees where the elastic bands cut into the flesh. The brown paper bag went flying and landed with a crash of glass, and there were these empty half-jack brandy bottles sticking out of pieces of newspaper scattered all over the road. The town kid jumped to his feet, retrieved his bicycle, mounted it and was gone like a rat up a drainpipe. On Monday morning at school he probably expected to get the shit knocked out of him by Fonnie du Preez or one of the other tough kids from The Boys Farm, but instead we all went up and congratulated him. That's how we discovered that Mevrou went to bed with Doctor Half-Jack.

The morning following Pissy's absence was a nightdress morning and Mevrou snorted her ‘
Hurrump
!' and walked straight to his bed and brought her
sjambok
up and smashed it down on his pillow several times until she was panting, then she said, ‘
Genoeg
!' which means ‘enough'. As in, ‘Look, man . . . I've had enough, you hear!
Genoeg
!' Then she slammed the
sjambok
down once more across the pillow as hard as she could so that the whack resounded through the dormitory, making us all jump. If your bum had been that pillow I can guarantee you'd have trouble sitting for days. This time some feathers flew out of the side of the pillow and up into the air. I watched as one was caught by a draught of air and sailed right up past my nose and turned and floated out of the window behind my bed four rows away from Pissy's pillow.

‘Kobus Vermaak has had an epileptic fit and somebody here is to blame! I want to know who it is! If you don't tell who hit him then you all going to get in trouble, you hear?' She looked around, her bloodshot eyes taking in each of us. The fly resting on her tits was moving up and down with her heavy breathing. ‘I don't want you playing all innocent, hey! Somebody here knows, and if you don't tell me who it is you all going to get the
sjambok
!' She waited but only silence followed. ‘I'm going to ask each one of you, “Did you hit Kobus Vermaak?” and you going to look me in the face and if you done it, I'll know. It's no use, you can't fool me, you hear?'

I don't think any of us would have known what an epileptic fit was. Certainly I'd never heard Pissy's fits given a name like that. In fact, I was a bit surprised that fits had names other than ‘out of the blue'. How would we know one was different to the other? But an epileptic one was obviously bad and if it came about because you hit a person then I was to blame, one hundred per cent. But I had one thing going for me; nobody in the dormitory had seen me do it and I didn't have to own up, although I wasn't much good at duplicity. I'd have to try my hardest not to give anything away. But that's the trouble, in my experience, when you try to conceal you often reveal. I could feel the fear rising up from my stomach, and filling my throat and my knees started to shake and my whole body trembled so that I was a dead giveaway.

Mevrou started at the top bed and I knew I'd have to try to pull myself together before she got to me, but fear is something that's hard to control, the harder you try the worse it gets.

‘Dannie van Niekerk, did you hit Kobus?' she asked. Dannie was the oldest boy in the dormitory, nearly twelve, and almost ready to be transferred to the senior boys' dormitory.

‘
Nee
, Mevrou!' Dannie shouted out his emphatic denial.

‘Willem Oosthuizen, did you hit Kobus?'

‘
Nee
, Mevrou!' came the equally vehement response.

She continued down the beds. For once nobody was guilty so they could shout out their denial quick smart and with conviction. Then she came to my bed where I was shaking like a leaf, guilty as sin. I couldn't even get the words out to confess and I could feel my eyes blurring with tears. I was truly shitting myself and wouldn't have been surprised if I'd done a job right there in my pants. It's not every day you are responsible for an epileptic fit that nearly kills a person. Mevrou looked at me and said with a tone of contempt, ‘
Ag
, you couldn't do it, you too small to swat a fly!'

She moved to the next bed. ‘Bokkie Swartz, did you do it, did you hit Kobus?'

‘
Nee
, Mevrou!' Bokkie answered.

She reached the last boy's bed, only to be met with the same resounding denial. She stood there panting and was very red in the face.

‘Off!' she commanded, whereupon we all undid our belts and our khaki shorts dropped to our ankles, exposing our waterworks that we were quick to cup with our hands.

‘
Hou vas
!' came the next command and we all turned and gripped the bedpost from which the towel hung, one hand on either side of it.

‘
Buk
!' We all went into
sjambok
position, bending at the waist to present our bare arses for the leather strap. I could hear the whacks approaching, three to each boy. I'd stopped shaking, counting myself dead lucky, three cuts was a small price for not being found out. I gripped the end of the iron bed harder in anticipation of my turn but Mevrou just continued past me and gave Piet Grobler at the next bed three of the best.
Whack! Whack! Whack!

She arrived back at the top bed, her nightdress clinging to her large frame due to the sweat from the exertion of giving twenty-five boys three of the best. I must say it wasn't a very nice look. Afterwards all the guys said they'd seen her great black bush through her nightdress. But I must have forgotten to look or something, not knowing about black bushes on grown-up people.

‘Don't think you heard the end of this, you hear?' she screamed. ‘Kobus Vermaak had a very bad epileptic fit and he could have died,' she said. ‘Just lucky the pig boy found him lying in the dirt and called us. If it wasn't for the
kaffir
boy he could have swallowed his tongue and choked to death. We going to find out who done it, don't you worry about that. Kobus says someone threw him with a stone in the stomach but he didn't see who done it. But the
kaffir
saw it and he will know who is the guilty person. When we catch this wicked boy he will go to Meneer Prinsloo for punishment and spend a day in the tank!'

The tank was an empty, rusted corrugated iron 500-gallon water tank outside the laundry building that was just tall enough to hold a boy standing up and sufficiently wide to accommodate one sitting with his legs crossed. You had to climb in from a hole in the top and when they put the lid back on it was pitch dark with only tiny holes in the sides so a bit of air could get in. You could only be sentenced to the tank in the winter as it was too hot in the summer, and you could die from the hot air and the perspiration it caused. They said all the sweat would leak out of you and you'd just shrivel up and die, you'd become a piece of
biltong
.

It was my lucky day alright. I knew Mattress would never tell on me even if he had seen it happen, which he can't have, because he wasn't there. I'd punched Pissy so there was no stone throwing. It was funny. I usually got punished for stuff I
didn't
do and here I was getting away with a terrible epileptic fit crime I
did
do. But, there you go, the rule was that you took everything you could get away with because it didn't happen too often.

But the big question remained: why hadn't Pissy Vermaak dobbed me in? It just wasn't like him at all. All I could think was that perhaps he was unwilling to admit that the smallest and weakest boy in The Boys Farm had given him a hiding. That seemed to make sense, nobody, not even a sissy like Pissy, would be able to live with the shame when it was known that
Voetsek
the
rooinek
had got the better of him.

All I could think was that Tinker was safe and nobody except Mattress and me knew where her hiding place was in the burrow under the big rock. I decided I'd go and visit Mattress after school and he'd tell me his part of the story. For the first time in my life I felt as if I was in control of the information that guided my immediate future. Mattress and me knew more than all the others put together. Then I thought that maybe having an epileptic fit gives you such a shock that it wipes out your memory and Pissy clean forgot what happened and just made up the bit about how he'd been hit with a rock because he had to have someone to blame.

If only I'd known what lay ahead I'd have jumped over my own tongue in my haste to confess to Mevrou. I'd willingly have taken the punishment coming to me, even the prospect of six of the best from Meneer Prinsloo's terrible bamboo cane and a day spent in the dark and empty water tank.

But that's the problem with the road you travel in life, you never know what new disaster is waiting for you around the next corner.

C
HAPTER
TWO

The Terrible Consequence of Loving

I LOST NO TIME in going to see Mattress after school. Because Tinker was off the sow's teats, I didn't have to cart her over to the pigsty first thing after breakfast, an event that had always meant a rush as I'd have to let her get a good feed and take her back to the big rock. It would only just allow you time to get your pencil box for school and line up for the four-mile march into town.

Now that she was weaned Tinker ate breakfast bread crusts. Crusts were the only thing you were allowed not to eat in that place, so sometimes some of the boys would leave their crusts behind and I'd scoop a few of them up after breakfast, my own included. The reason we were allowed to not eat our crusts was that Meneer Prinsloo had these Black Orpington chickens and while they had plenty of
mielies
and all that to eat, he had this theory that bread crusts were good for their feathers. Don't ask me why. They were supposed to make the feathers more shiny or something, so that he'd win ribbons at the Magaliesburg Show. Gawie Grobler said his uncle in the Free State grew sunflower seeds that get crushed up for their oil and it's the oil that goes into the bread and that's what makes the chickens' feathers shine. How a person would know a thing like that I couldn't say but Gawie definitely wasn't a bullshitter, and was clever as well. I asked why Meneer Prinsloo didn't simply give his chickens sunflower seeds to eat.

Gawie thought for a moment. ‘Have you ever seen a sunflower seed?'

‘No, just a big sunflower, big as a dinner plate.'

‘Well, the black part in the middle, that's the seeds, man . . . and they as big as my fingernail and they hard as a rock when they dried. Chickens can't eat them,' he concluded convincingly.

‘Why not?' I'd seen chickens eating lots of things much bigger, grasshoppers for instance.

‘Chickens got no teeth, man. They can eat them but they can't break them open to get the oil inside and they just pop them out their bums, which doesn't make their feathers shiny.'

I'm always amazed at the things you can learn from a person. I'd never thought about chickens having no teeth. Anyway, that was good, Meneer Prinsloo would have to rely on bread crusts for his prize chickens' shiny black feathers and this meant Tinker's food supply was happily intact. One thing for sure, a dog wouldn't be able to eat sunflower seeds, even though he did have teeth.

There were these blue ribbons that Meneer Prinsloo's chickens had won at country agricultural shows plastered on the wall behind the staff table that was raised on a platform in the dining room. The staff didn't get the same food as us because they were grown-ups and deserved better.

You see, even though Meneer Prinsloo, because he was the superintendent, could do anything he liked about the crust situation, you still couldn't just go around hollowing out loaves of bread and giving the chickens the crust. This was because food was scarce and . . . ‘God will not tolerate waste and nor will I,' he'd say to us. But if we left a few crusts lying around after breakfast or any of the other meals, that was a different matter altogether. This was a definite thing God allowed you to do.