The Power of One

by Bryce Courtenay

  I had put on my tackies, even though I wouldn’t arrive in Barberton until well into the evening. At the beginning of my journey the original oversized tackies had been a banal signal of the end of the Judge, his storm troopers, the school and Mevrou. Equally this second pair, fitted to my feet so perfectly by the beautiful Indian lady, with a diamond in her tooth, seemed to symbolize the unknown. The two days between the first tackies and the snugly fitting ones I now wore were the beginning of the end of my small childhood, a bridge of time that would shape my life to come.

  It was just after ten in the evening when the train puffed into Barberton station. My head was dizzy with sleep and mussed up with the events of the day.

  I climbed down the steps of the carriage onto the gravel platform with my suitcase. The platform was crowded with people hurrying up and down, heads jerking this way and that, greeting each other and generally carrying on the way people do when a train arrives. My granpa didn’t seem to be among them. I decided to sit on my suitcase and wait, too tired to think of anything else I might do. I expected any moment that I would hear my nanny’s big laugh followed by a series of tut-tuts as she swept me into her apron. That was when everything would be all right again.

  A lady was approaching. She bent down beside me and crushed me to her bony bosom. “My darling, my poor darling,” she wept, “everything will be the same again, I promise.”

  My mother was here! Yet I think we both knew, everything would never be the same again.

  “Where is my nanny?” I asked.

  “Come, darling, Pastor Mulvery is waiting in his car to take us home to your granpa. What a big boy you are now that you are six, much too big for a nanny!” Reaching for my suitcase, my mother straightened up. “Come, darling.”

  Her remark about my not needing a nanny now that I was six struck me so forcibly that it felt like one of the Judge’s clouts across the mouth. My nanny, my darling beloved nanny, was gone and I was six. The two pieces of information tumbled around in my head like two dogs tearing at each other as they fought, rolling over in the dust.

  My mother had taken my hand and was leading me to a big gray Plymouth parked under a streetlamp beside a peppercorn tree. A fat, balding man stepped out of the car as we approached. His top teeth jutted out at an angle, and peeped out from under his lip as though looking to see if the coast was clear so that they might escape. Pastor Mulvery seemed aware of this and he smiled in a quick flash so as not to allow his teeth to make a dash for it. He reached for my suitcase, taking it from my mother. “Praise the Lord, sister, He has delivered the boy safely to His loved ones.” His voice was soft and high-pitched.

  “Praise His precious name,” my mother replied. I had never heard her talk like this before.

  Pastor Mulvery stuck his hand out. “Welcome, son. The Lord has answered our prayers and brought you home safely.” I took his hand, which was warm and slightly damp.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. It felt strange to be speaking in English. I climbed into the backseat of the car next to my mother.

  Granpa Chook was dead, Hoppie had to go and fight Adolf Hitler and maybe he would never come back again, and now my beloved nanny was gone. Like Pik Botha, my mother seemed to have entered into a relationship with the Lord that was bound to create problems. My life was a mess.

  We drove through the town, which had streetlights and tarred roads. Only a few cars buzzed down the wide main street. We passed a square filled with big old trees. The street was lined with shops one after the other—McClymonts, Gentleman’s Outfitters; J. W. Winter, Chemist; the Savoy Café; Barberton Hardware Company. We turned up one street and passed a grand building called the Impala Hotel that had big wide steps and seemed to have lots of people in it. The sound of a concertina could be heard as Pastor Mulvery slowed the Plymouth down to a crawl.

  “The devil is busy tonight, sister. We must pray for their souls, pray that they may see the glory that is Him and be granted everlasting life,” he said.

  My mother sighed. “There is so much to be done before He comes again and takes us to His glory.” She turned to me. “We have a lovely Sunday school at the Apostolic Faith Mission. You are not too young to meet the Lord, to be born again, my boy.”

  “Can we meet Him tomorrow, please? I am too tired tonight,” I said.

  They both laughed and I felt better. The laugh that rang from my mother was the old familiar one. “We’re going straight home, darling, you must be completely exhausted,” she said gently.

  I had almost dropped my camouflage, but now it was back again. Pik Botha had said he was a born-again Christian and also that he belonged to the Apostolic Faith Mission. How had my mother come to this? Who was this strange man with escaping teeth? What was this new language and who exactly was the Lord?

  I had seen my return to Granpa and to Nanny first as a means of escape from Adolf Hitler and then, when Hoppie had calmed my fear of his imminent arrival, the continuation of my earlier life on the farm. Living in a small town hadn’t meant anything to me. Living with Granpa and beautiful Nanny had meant everything. My mother had been a nice part of a previous existence, though not an essential one; she was a frail and nervous woman and Nanny had taken up the caring, laughing, scolding and soothing role mothers play. My mother suffered a lot from headaches. In the morning when I was required to do a reading lesson and had come to sit on the verandah next to her favorite bentwood rocking chair eager to show her my progress, she would often say: “Not today, darling, I have a splitting headache.”

  I would find Nanny and I would read my book to her and then she would bring a copy of Outspan magazine and point to pictures that showed women doing things like making cakes or sewing dresses, or going to posh places. I would read what it said about the pictures and translate them into Zulu. Her mouth would fall open in amazement at the goings-on. “Oh, oh, oh, I think it is very hard to be a white woman,” she would sigh, clapping her hands.

  I guessed that was why my mother was always getting headaches, because it was a very hard thing to be a white woman.

  We drew up beside a house that sat no more than twenty feet from the road. A low stone wall marked the front garden, and steps led up to the stoep, which ran the full width of the house. The place was only dimly lit by a distant streetlamp so that further details were impossible to make out. Two squares of filtered orange light, each from a window in a separate part of the house, glowed through drawn curtains, giving the house two eyes. The front door made a nose and the steps to it a mouth. Even in the dark it didn’t seem to be an unfriendly sort of place. Behind the funny face would be my scraggy old granpa and he would tell me about Nanny.

  Pastor Mulvery said he wouldn’t come in and he praised the Lord again for my delivery into the bosom of my loved ones and said that I would be a fine addition to the Lord’s little congregation at the Apostolic Faith Mission Sunday school. It was becoming very apparent to me that the Lord was a pretty important person around these parts.

  We watched the red brake lights of the big Plymouth disappear down a dip in the road, for we seemed to be on the top of a rise.

  Lugging my case in front of me with both hands, I followed my mother up the dark steps. Her shoes made a hollow sound on the wooden verandah and the screen door squeaked loudly on its hinges. She propped it open with her toe and pushed the front door. Sharp light spilled over us and down the front steps, grateful to escape the restrictions of the small square room.

  This room, at least, was not much altered from the dark little parlor on the farm. The same overstuffed lounge and three high-backed armchairs in faded brocade with polished arms, the backs of the lounge and chairs scalloped by antimacassars, took up most of the room. The old grandfather clock stood in a new position beside a door leading into another part of the house, and it was nice to see the steady old brass pendulum swinging away quietly. On one wall was my granpa’s stuffed kudu head, the horns of the giant antelope brushing the ceiling. On either
side of the bookcase hung two narrow oil paintings, one showing a scarlet and the other a yellow long-stemmed rose. Both pictures were the work of my grandmother, who had died giving birth to my mother. On one wall was a colored steel engraving in a walnut frame showing hundreds of Zulu dead and a handful of Welsh soldiers standing over them with bayonets fixed. They stood looking toward heaven, each with a boot and putteed leg resting on the body of a near-naked savage. I had always thought how clean and smart they looked after having fought the Zulu hordes all night, each soldier seemingly responsible, if you counted the bodies and the soldiers in the picture, for the deaths of fifty-two Zulus. The caption under the painting read: The morning after the massacre. British honor is restored at Rorke’s Drift, January, 1879. Brave men all.

  The tired old zebra skin, which, along with everything else, I had known all my life, covered the floor. The only change in the room, for even the worn red velvet curtains had come along, was a small wireless in brown Bakelite on top of the bookcase.

  Perhaps only the outside of things had changed and the inside, like this room, largely remained the same. For a moment my spirits lifted. Just then my granpa walked into the room, tall and straight as a blue gum pole. His pipe was hooked over his bottom lip and he stood framed by the doorway, his baggy khaki pants tied up as ever with a piece of rope, his shirtsleeves rolled up on his collarless shirt. He looked unchanged. He took two puffs from his pipe so that the smoke whirled around his untidy mop of white hair and curled past his long nose. “There’s a good lad,” he said. His pale blue eyes shone wet, and he blinked quickly as he looked down at me. He raised his arms slightly and spread his hands palms upward as though to indicate the room and the house in one sad gesture of apology.

  “Newcastle’s disease, they had to kill all the Orpingtons,” he said.

  “They killed Granpa Chook,” I said softly.

  My mother put her hand on my shoulder and moved me past my granpa. “That’s right, darling, they killed all Granpa’s chooks. Come along now, it’s way past your bedtime.”

  I hadn’t meant to say anything about Granpa Chook. My granpa, after all, had never known him. It just came out. One chicken thing on top of another. He had been enormously fond of those black Orpingtons. Even Nanny had said they must be Zulu birds because they stood so black and strong and the roosters were like elegantly feathered Zulu generals.

  Nanny. Where was she now? Was she dead? Tomorrow I must speak urgently to my granpa. My granpa would tell me for sure. I would ask him when I returned his shilling to him in the morning.

  I awakened early as always, and padded softly through the sleeping house to find the kitchen. The black cast-iron stove was smaller than the one on the farm and, to my surprise, when I spit-licked my finger before dabbing it on one of the hot plates, it was cold. On the farm it had never been allowed to go out. The two little orphan kitchen maids, Dee and Dum, had slept on mats in the kitchen and it had been their job to stoke the embers back to life. This kitchen smelt of carbolic soap and disinfectant and I missed the warm smell of humans, coffee beans and the aroma of the huge old cast-iron soup pot that plopped and steamed on the back of the stove in a never-ending cycle of new soup bones added and old ones taken out. This stove was bare but for a blue and white speckled enamel kettle.

  The doorway from the kitchen led out onto a wide back stoep, which, unlike the front of the house, was level with the ground and looked out into a very large and well-tended garden. The fragrance of hundreds of roses filled the crisp dawn air and I observed that stone terraces, planted with rosebushes, stretched up and away from me. Each terrace ended in a series of steps and at the top of each set of steps an arbor of climbing roses bent over the pathway. Blossoms of white, pink, yellow and orange, each arbor a different color, cascaded to the ground. The path running up the center of the garden looked like the sort of tunnel Alice might well have found in Wonderland. Six huge old trees, of kinds I had not seen before, were planted one to each terrace. It was a well-settled garden and I wondered how it came to be Granpa’s.

  I now saw that our house was situated a little way up a large hill. Beyond a line of mulberry trees at the far end of the garden the hill of virgin rock and bush rose up steeply, its slopes dotted with aloe, each tall, shaggy plant carrying a candelabra of fiery blossoms. A crown of rounded boulders clustered at its very top.

  As I walked up the path, I saw that each terrace carried beds of roses set into neatly trimmed lawns, though the last terrace was different. On one side it contained a stone wall enclosure too tall for me to see over; on the other it was planted with hundreds of freshly grafted rose stock, behind which stood the line of mulberry trees.

  In this very tidy garden only the fences on either side testified to the subtropical climate. Quince and guava, lemon, orange, avocado, pawpaw, mango and pomegranate mixed with Pride of India, poinsettia, hibiscus and, covering a large dead tree, a brilliant shower of bougainvillea. At the base of the trees grew hydrangea, agapanthus and red and pink canna. It was as though the local trees and plants had come to gawk at the elegant rose garden. They stood on the edges like colorful country hicks, too polite to intrude any further.

  I ducked under the canopy of dark mulberry leaves. As I walked fallen berries squashed underfoot, staining the skin between my toes a deep purple. I hadn’t eaten since the previous day, and I began to feast hungrily on the luscious berries. The plumpest, purplest of them broke away from their stalks at the slightest touch. Soon my hands were stained purple from cramming the delicious berries into my mouth.

  Emerging from the line of mulberry trees clear of the garden, the first of the aloe plants stood almost at my feet, its spikes of orange blossom tinged with yellow. In front of me, the African hillside rose unchanged, while behind me, embroidered on its lap, gaudy as a painting on a chocolate box, lay the rose garden.

  Without thinking I had started to climb, skirting the rocks and the dark patches of scrub and thornbush. In half an hour I had reached the summit and, scrambling to the top of a huge boulder, I looked about. Behind me the hills tumbled on, accumulating height until, in the far distance, they became proper mountains. Below me, cradled in the foothills, lay the small town. It looked out across a beautiful valley that stretched thirty miles over the lowveld to an escarpment that rose two thousand feet to the grasslands of the high-veld.

  It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. The sun had just risen and was not yet warm enough to lap the dew from the grass. I could see the world below me but the world below could not see me. I had found my private place; how much better, it seemed to me, than the old mango tree beside the school playground. Above me, flying no higher than a small boy’s kite, a sparrowhawk circled, searching the backyards below for a mother hen careless enough to let one of her chicks stray beyond hasty recovery to the safety of her broody undercarriage. Death, in a vortex of feathered air, was about to strike out of a sharp blue sky.

  Chimneys were beginning to smoke as domestic servants arrived from the black shantytown hidden behind one of the foothills to make the white man’s breakfast. The sound of roosters, spasmodic when I had started my climb, became more strident as they sensed the town start to wake. Part of the town was still in the shadow cast by the hills, but I could see it was crisscrossed with jacaranda-lined streets. My eyes followed a long line of purple that led beyond the houses clustered on the edge of the town to a square of dark buildings surrounded by a high wall perhaps a mile into the valley. The walls facing me stood some three stories high and were studded with tiny dark windows. The buildings were in a square around a center quadrangle of hard, brown earth. On each corner of the outside wall was a neat little tower capped with a pyramid of corrugated iron that glinted in the early-morning sun. I had never seen a prison, but the architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.

  My grandpa, an early riser, would be out and about soon and it took no more than twenty minutes to clamber down the hill, back into the rose garden. He w
as cutting away at the arbor on the third terrace, snipping and then pulling a long strand of roses from the overhang and dropping it on a heap on the pathway. He looked up as I approached.

  “Morning, lad. Been exploring, have you?” He snipped at another string of roses and pulled it away from the trellis. “Mrs. Butt is an untidy old lady. If you don’t trim her pretty locks, she’s apt to get out of control,” he announced cheerfully. I said nothing. Much of what my granpa said was to himself. I was soon to learn the names of every rose in the garden and Mrs. Butt, it turned out, was the name of this particular cascade of tiny pink roses.

  I pulled the lining of my shorts pocket inside out and unclipped the large safety pin that held Mevrou’s doek. Crouching on the ground, I unknotted the cloth to reveal Granpa’s shilling and my folded ten-shilling note. I removed Granpa’s shilling and once again knotted the cloth and pinned it back into the pocket. “This is your change from the tackies, Granpa,” I said, rising and holding the shilling out to him. He paused, holding the secateurs above his head, then reached down for the coin and dropped it into the pocket of his khaki trousers. “There’s a good lad, that will buy me tobacco for a week.” I thought he sounded pleased so I took a deep breath and came out with it.

  “Granpa, where’s Nanny?” He had moved back to the roses and now he turned slowly and looked down at me. Then he walked the few paces to the steps leading up to the terrace and slowly sat down.

  “Sit down, lad.” He patted the space beside him. I sat down. He removed his pipe from his pocket, tapped it gently on the step below and blew through the pipe twice before taking his tobacco pouch from his pocket and refilling it. My granpa was not one for hurrying things so I waited with my hands cupped under my chin. Lighting a wax match on his thigh, he started at last to stoke up, puffing away until the blue tobacco smoke swirled about his head. For a long time we sat there, my granpa looking out at nothing, his pipe making a gurgly noise when he drew on it, and me looking at the roof of the house, which had patches of faded red paint clinging to the rusted corrugated iron.