Whitethorn (6 page)

The bread was good on Monday and Tuesday, so crusts were always scarce on those days, but by Wednesday it was becoming a bit stale and by Friday or Saturday you could collect heaps. On Sunday it was the Lord's Day, so no bread. There was only
mielie
meal porridge with brown sugar and milk for breakfast, for lunch cold potatoes and other vegetables like beetroot and grated carrot and cold pumpkin and cabbage chopped up, raw stuff like that. At night it was always potato soup and bread pudding made from the leftover stale bread you couldn't even cut with a knife, so they'd soak it on Saturday. If you looked through the kitchen window on a Saturday afternoon you'd see all the leftover stale bread with the crust removed for the chickens soaking in these white enamel basins, ready for Sunday night's bread pudding. With no bread on a Sunday I had to get a double ration of crusts on Saturday, otherwise Tinker would starve.

Because Tinker didn't need too many crusts I could always rely on a pocketful for her and also at supper you could maybe manage to rub your own crusts in the stew gravy left on your plate. Sorry to go on about it, but feeding a puppy you're not supposed to have wasn't an easy business and I just wanted you to know how it was done. So I would give her the crusts and the half jam tin of milk that Mattress got for her at the dairy that would be put in a certain place behind the empty milk churns for me to get after school. Sometimes the milk went bad in the heat and turned into sour milk but Tinker didn't seem to mind. She was a dog and a half, I can tell you, I never saw anything she didn't eat. I loved her so much she made me want to cry.

Have you noticed that food is the biggest preoccupation people have in life? If people don't eat fast and they talk while they're eating then you know they came from a good family. The speed people eat is a dead giveaway to their past. I have to say that the brown bread we had at The Boys Farm must have been full of good things because although Tinker wasn't fat, she wasn't thin either, not like a
kaffir
dog. Mattress said she was good and would grow up to be strong. Sometimes he even saved a bit of gristle from the meat he was given by the kitchen to cook with his
mielie
pap, and occasionally there would be a small bone for her to gnaw. What a happy little dog she was, with her tail that hadn't been chopped off always wagging and when you saw her in the morning she'd yelp and turn round and round and jump up to tell you how nice it was to see you again.

The day when Mevrou had walloped Pissy's pillow and shouted ‘
Genoeg
!' I went down to the pigsty to see Mattress. Winter was coming and by the time we got back from school it was already sunset and getting a bit cold, but we didn't get our jersey until a month later. Mattress had a fire going at the pigsty where he was making a mash for the pigs – old vegetables, cabbage leaves and the like and some of the leftover buttermilk from the dairy and some
mielies
. He boiled it all up, stirring once in a while with a big carved wooden stick like a paddle. We stood by the nice warm fire and he told me how he'd found Pissy flopping like a
platanna
you've just caught in the creek.

A
platanna
is a kind of frog, dark green with a smooth skin on top and a yellowish stomach. Sometimes in the summer, when the creek wasn't so cold, you could take a bit of bread crust and tie it to a length of string and drop it into the stream just below the water. The
platanna
would come swimming up, grab it and wouldn't let go so then you could yank it onto the black pebbles or the grass. Boy, what a kerfuffle happened then! The frog would leap this way and that, land on its back and from that possie spring high into the air with no control of its movements, yellow belly then green top and shivering and shaking like all get-out, legs going like propellers. That's how Mattress said Pissy was when he had his fit. His eyes were rolled back in his head, which also happened to a
platanna
, and he was busy trying to swallow his tongue, which isn't a thing a
platanna
can do.

Mattress laughed. ‘
Kleinbaas
, I had to sit on his chest and hold his arms to the ground. I found a stick and I put it in his mouth just like you do with a goat if it has convulsions when they've eaten a certain poison fruit you find growing on a small bush in the mountains. If a goat swallows its tongue it will choke and it will not live, so I think that boy is same like the goat.
Ahee
! He is not a strong one, that boy, but when he had the “goat fit” he is strong like a buffalo. I have to hold him very tight with all my strength. After a while he finish that fit, but I left the stick in his mouth because sometimes with a goat it comes back. Then I go and fetch Big
Baas
Botha and he come with the Big Missus and a blanket.'

I was very glad to hear the story because now we were evens; I'd punched Pissy in the stomach and Mattress had saved his life. I confessed my role in the whole affair, telling Mattress what had happened, telling him how Pissy tried to take Tinker away from me. He shook his head slowly.

‘You have a strong heart,
Kleinbaas
, that boy he is a bigger one than you, but a man, he must protect what is weaker than him always.'

I must say I was rather pleased with the compliment, as there weren't that many compliments flying about in my life.

That night Pissy was in the dining-room queue again and seemed to have completely recovered. Later in the wash house, when we were washing our faces and hands and feet so that when we went to bed we didn't dirty our bottom sheet, he came up to me and whispered, ‘I'm still going to get you, you hear,
Voetsek
? Just you wait, man!' Those words with no further explanation. He had a sort of a half smile on his freckled face and I caught a whiff of his piss smell as he moved away. Now I knew an epileptic fit doesn't make you lose your memory. It made me worry a lot as we went into the dormitory to go to sleep.

You must be thinking that I didn't say we cleaned our teeth before we went to bed. Well, we didn't because the Government couldn't afford toothbrushes, let alone toothpaste. Twice a year the dentist would come in a van with a special dentist chair and a nurse and pull out your teeth if they were bad. If you couldn't wait, Doctor Dyke, who was a vet who owned the farm next door, would come in an emergency when aspirin and oil of cloves didn't help any more and you could see the swelling from the outside of a person's cheek. Mevrou would leave a white dishcloth hanging from the gate of The Boys Farm, and Doctor Dyke on his way to or from where he worked in town would see it and drive his Dodge truck in if he had the time. She could have called him on the party line but she didn't want everyone knowing our business: ‘
Ag
, man, Boys Farm business is private, you hear? The Government doesn't like it if people go telling its business all over the place.' This was intended as a general warning to us kids not to talk about The Boys Farm to anyone at school. Later I realised she didn't want to call Doctor Dyke on the party line in case someone listening in heard that the vet was taking out our teeth.

They'd strap your arms to the back of this big dining chair Mevrou had for the express purpose and strap your ankles to its legs. The front legs of this chair were placed on two wooden boxes so that it tilted backwards. Mevrou would stand behind the chair and clasp both her big hands over your forehead and pull your head hard against the back of the chair, holding it steady with her body. Doctor Dyke would tell you to open your mouth wide and he'd tap your teeth with his callipers and when your eyes got big and frightened he knew he had the right tooth. If he was doing an emergency on the way back from town you could smell the beer on his breath, a sort of sour smell that wasn't very nice. He'd take his horse pliers and just pull that tooth out, without chloroform or an injection. He'd hold up the tooth in the pliers and smile. ‘What pains no longer remains,' he'd announce happily. Except sometimes he'd say, ‘Oops, wrong tooth, let's start again.' Maybe they were proper dentist teeth extractors but we called them his horse pliers because they were definitely not the same as those used by the Government dentist.

Once when Doctor Dyke took out one of my teeth he did his ‘Oops, wrong tooth' routine and I started to cry.

‘Never mind,' Mevrou said. ‘Everybody can make a mistake and the doctor is only doing his best and does this for nothing out of the goodness of his heart, so crying is not a very grateful thing to do, you hear?'

I tried to stop blubbing but the extraction hurt like hell and I was swallowing a lot of blood and feeling sick and I was going to have to go through it all over again. Mevrou soon grew impatient with my sniffing. ‘
Ag
, we all got to learn to take a bit of pain in our life, Thomas. Just think of the Lord Jesus hanging from the cross. He's got six-inch nails through his hands and a sword from a Roman soldier stuck in his side and he has to suck a sponge full of vinegar. That's what you call pain, man! Compared to that, what we got here is just a little bit of hurt from a tooth.' It was okay for her, she didn't have any teeth, so how would she know?

When you were sixteen and could leave the place and be in the outside world, you could always tell an orphan from The Boys Farm because the only teeth he still had were the ones growing in the back of the jaw where Doctor Dyke couldn't get at them. It is very hard to look intelligent when you've only got empty gums in your mouth. So, if you could stand the pain, you'd hang on until the Government dentist arrived, because if things were really bad he'd give you an injection so it only hurt after, when the needle wore off, and besides, it was about a quarter of the pain or even less than a Doctor Dyke leather-chair-horse-pliers-extraction.

The morning after the night before when Pissy Vermaak had warned me in the wash house that he hadn't forgotten me hitting him passed without incident. It was only when we got back from school that the trouble started. As I always did on my return I put my pencil case safely away. If you lost it the Government got very angry because it was ‘Government Goods Department of Education', that is what our teacher told us it said on the back of the box. I waited until no one was looking and ran to the big rock that was a long way from the hostel building and quite deep in some bush. There were quite a lot of thorn bushes around so nobody ever went there except me because I knew a path through the thorns. I'd found it when I was quite little and had decided to run away. I had just walked and walked and when I got to this big rock I decided to take a rest and the rest made me change my mind because the situation was hopeless. But I knew I'd found a place I could come when I was miserable, which was quite a lot of the time. Now it was Tinker's home and no longer a place to come when you were sad.

Whenever I got close I'd call her name and put two fingers between my lips and whistle. She'd bark with excitement when she heard me coming. This time I called and whistled but nothing. ‘Tinker! Tinker!' I called again and let go another piercing whistle. Still nothing happened. My heart started to thump in my chest and I scratched my arm quite badly on a whitethorn bush in my haste to get to the big rock, but I didn't even feel it until after. I rushed around the big rock and there stood Fonnie du Preez and Pissy Vermaak. Fonnie cradled Tinker in his arms and I could see there was a rope around her neck, and he held it in his fist and was pulling slightly at the rope so that Tinker's head was forced upwards. Tinker was whimpering and shivering with fright and she tried to struggle free when she saw me, but Fonnie was too strong.

‘This your dog,
Voetsek
?'

I nodded, too overwhelmed for words.

Fonnie laughed. ‘Not any more, man, we going to kill it stone dead, you hear?'

Pissy grinned. ‘I told you I'd get my own back,' he said triumphantly.

I felt the tears well up but I knew that crying wasn't going to help. I knuckled them back, still unable to speak.

‘Please, Sir . . .' came out in a whisper because my throat and chest were filled up with a hurt so terrible I thought I was going to split wide open.

‘Watch,' Fonnie said. He released his arms around Tinker and held onto the rope so that she dangled from his arm, the rope pulling tight like a noose, her back legs kicking and her eyes filled with fear as she yelped frantically.

‘No!' I screamed and flung myself at Fonnie's feet and grabbed his ankles. ‘Please! Please don't kill her, Fonnie!' I pleaded, holding tightly onto his legs.

‘What will you give me if I don't?' he said, ignoring my tears. I could hear Tinker choking and whimpering above my head. I had nothing to give him, even my pencil box belonged to ‘Government Goods Department of Education'.

‘Please, I'll do anything you want,' I sobbed, looking up at him through my tears.

He put Tinker back into his arms, releasing the tension on the rope. ‘First you going to have to say you sorry for throwing Pissy with a stone so he got a fit and nearly died. It could have been murder, man!' He looked at me sternly. ‘Then they'd put you in gaol and when you old enough hang you by the neck until you stone dead.' He released his arms, Tinker fell and once again started to strangle in the noose.

‘Sorry, Pissy! Please don't, Fonnie!' I cried, reaching out to grab Tinker. Fonnie pulled away and Tinker swung away from my grasp and let out a terrible cry.

Fonnie grabbed her with his free hand and brought her back to his chest. ‘Throwing a stone at a person is a coward's way,
Voetsek
.' He paused. ‘But then you a
rooinek
, so what can you expect, you all cowards that murdered Boer women and children.'