Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  As he told this story, he was almost able to forget the way Bela had looked at him; the numb unconcern on her gorgeous face as she walked naked into the kraal. He explained this by saying that Nosakhe had put a curse on the girl, who must not be blamed, he finished piously, for her actions.

  The Chief had no love for Sukude, but his wife had a burning hatred for Nosakhe Zini, and he knew he would never have a moment’s peace if he sided with her. He looked at Nosakhe, half beseechingly. He was used to being led by her. But at this crucial juncture Nosakhe found that she had lost the power to defend herself. Beneath the vileness of Sukude’s lies was a horrible, irrefutable truth—she had taken the child from his father, when he was young; she had wanted his love for herself, and had won it, and this left her without her usual faith in the righteousness of her own actions.

  Seeing the look on his Chief’s face, and knowing him to be a poor resource in a crisis, Lundi sidled into the centre of the throng and said: “We must seek the guidance of another witch doctor.”

  The Chief seized this opportunity to delegate authority for a terrible decision. He did not know that Lundi was thinking of one witch doctor in particular: Fezile Khumalo, who was well known in the taverns of King William’s Town. This Fezile was as corruptible as the cuckoo bird, and Lundi began to see that with his help he might perform a signal service for Sukude, and win for himself the gratitude of a rich man.

  “I am the only witch doctor in this village,” said Nosakhe. But even as she spoke, her voice sounded foreign to her; as weak as if she had been struck in the heart by an assegai—which is exactly how she felt when a lingering guest walked in and said: “Ntsina has vanished, and so has the Strange One.”

  —

  PIET COULD NOT CATCH Ntsina, who sprinted across the fields towards Bela’s homestead. He did his best, but he was carrying his pack, full of cash and irreplaceable possessions. Luvo kept up with his friend, and was with him when they found the homestead deserted.

  To this point, rage had sustained Ntsina. He had been certain he would find Bela here, and her absence brought upon him a fit of despair. He made a sound the samango monkeys heard, crashing through the canopy of the distant trees. They stopped leaping, drew their loved ones close to them. For it is the gift of every ape to understand the anguish of every other.

  He was howling when Piet reached him, and the mice who had been plundering the Jaxas’ grain store in their absence had retreated to their holes, afraid of this new beast. A tree snake, bright as the greenest leaf and deadly poisonous, shifted distastefully and slid up the trunk of the tree beneath which Ntsina flung himself—for the adult birds had flown, and their nests were unguarded. As the snake ingested their eggs, one by one, Ntsina said: “I want to kill him.”

  —

  IT WAS HER FATHER who led Bela away, and her mother who forbade any return to their home. She could not bear the curiosity of visitors. So they went to the homestead of their aunt Nceba, who was too old to pry.

  Zandi watched Bela, and through all the jealousies and cutting words of nineteen years, obliterating them, rose a powerful empathy. Zandi knew what it is like to be discussed in disparaging terms. Now Bela would face such judgements for the rest of her life. Her eyes were glazed, her movements automatic. There was dried blood on her ankle, and Zandi spat on the hem of her own skirt, and wiped it off, and all the while Bela—whose eyes had danced so brightly once—sat motionless.

  The effort of preparing coffee tired their aunt, who soon fell into a doze on her straw mat, and Mama Jaxa took this chance to signal to her husband that they must speak. Together they slipped out of the hut and stood behind it, out of sight of the track. Mama Jaxa had a rush of memories of their first meetings, as teenagers, when they had also sheltered from public view. Since then, they had never done anything illicit. They were used to being well known, and to honouring their reputations and their daughters by seamless conduct in public. “What can we do?” she said.

  “There is nothing we can do. Bela must go back to the Zinis—if they will have her.”

  “No!”

  “We gave her in marriage.” He began to cry. It was the first time he had cried since the morning of Bela’s birth. “It is Bela who has dishonoured herself. Not they who have dishonoured her. Did you not explain?” By which he meant: Did you not tell her that her husband should sex her?

  “Of course I told her!” Mama Jaxa’s anguish found an outlet in anger. “She cannot go back to them.”

  “It is for them to decide. And I tell you this: if they have her back, they will for sure demand some cattles with her.”

  —

  PIET FOUND A SMALL STREAM and led the younger men up it. At length they came upon a clearing caused by the toppling of a forest giant, its trunk rent in two by a strike of lightning. He sat Ntsina down and made him drink. He felt great sorrow for the boy—a determination to set him on his feet.

  The last few days had been exhausting in the extreme for Luvo. He had been the only sober guest at Ntsina’s wedding and worked harder than he ever had in his life, doing justice to Piet Barol’s social exuberance. Eventually he had seen that God was training him—for when the Native Congress’ delegation reached the English King, they would need to catch everything he said.

  As Ntsina began to relive the joys and horrors of the night before, Piet Barol watched as he listened. How different the Bantu face is, he thought, from the white man’s. And yet their suffering is the same. As the sun stretched across the sky and Ntsina cursed, he took up a piece of wood in the first, soft stages of decay, and with a file from his pack began to carve a bust of his friend. He worked almost unconsciously, his attention wholly absorbed in what Ntsina said—for in this forest clearing, out it all came. His mother’s death, his father’s vicious trickery. Now the theft of the woman he loved.

  Luvo was horrified by what he translated. He sank into himself as the Strange One and Ntsina spoke, thinking what a wonderful country South Africa would be if all civilized men had the franchise. To him, the superstitions of the Gwadanans were almost as bad as the thievery of the Afrikaners.

  It was the first time Piet had carved a human face. His conscious mind being focused on his friend’s story, his hands were free to act on what his eyes saw without the intervention of focus or effort. Ntsina’s anguish flowed through Piet’s fingers into the wood he carved. He caught the dome of Ntsina’s head, the precise ratio between his eyes and his nose and his mouth and his chin. He was thinking that catastrophes make many things possible.

  As Ntsina lapsed into silence, having said all he could, and Luvo fell silent also, Piet understood that he would never prevail by charm. In any case, charm took time: a commodity he did not have. It was clear from the way he had been dismissed the night before that the Chief would never sell him an Ancestor Tree—no matter whether or not he built his ancestors new shrines. If he were to have the wood he needed, he must take it.

  “Can you ever again live in your father’s homestead?”

  “Never.”

  “Nor in his village?”

  “No.”

  “To fetch your wife now, only to live in poverty. Would that do justice to her?”

  “It would not.”

  “Then you need money.”

  “That is so.”

  It had grown bitterly cold. Piet thought of how his friend had dressed for his wedding—like a statue, in his paste of white rock. His skin prickled. He would not sway the Chief and his councillors by rational argument—but that did not mean they could not be swayed. An idea of swashbuckling originality came to him and he smoothed the curve of Ntsina’s nose, capturing it precisely.

  “Are you willing to do whatever is needed to rescue your wife, and provide for her?”

  “Anything.”

  “Then sleep. I must plan.”

  Luvo made a fire. None of them ate. The day passed and evening came. The two Xhosas fell asleep and Piet sat in the moonlight, working on his bust. The wood was soft and h
e carved in the direction of its grain, winning it to him. Ntsina was lying on his back. His dreams troubled him, and his features creased in anger and fright. Piet’s files, lying on the ground, caught the light. He moved from the largest to the smallest. He was not conscious of effort, which is the enemy of great art. He was in a state humans rarely reach, but which every spider knows. His conscious intelligence stepped back; he was connected to the deeper rhythms of seeing and moving. His mind emptied of words, of worry, of thoughts for the future. He was wholly in the present—in this forest, in this moonlight, with this wood in his hands.

  He worked until daylight woke his companions. “We must spend some days here.”

  “But what of Bela?” asked Ntsina.

  “You have one chance to build a life worthy of her. Her parents have her safe and sound. A few days won’t matter.”

  Piet refused to be drawn further. He slept, and woke, and barely spoke. He worked on the bust, and his silence made the others silent also. Ntsina caught a hare and Luvo skinned it, and they all ate; but Piet took only a few mouthfuls. Inspiration had lifted his hunger. A slow excitement grew within him as he saw the quality of what he was making. The bust was life-size and caught Ntsina to the life—his face contorted in fear and anger. He began to worry that a hasty movement would spoil it; but he banished that thought, and his hands led him well.

  Periodically Piet asked Ntsina to sit still, and trained his total concentration on his left ear, or the jigsaw of his teeth when his lips were flared. The two Xhosas were spent of words and needed rest. They trusted this strange mlungu, whose movements were so purposeful.

  It took several days, and then it was done.

  At last Piet ate his fill. When the meal was finished, he sat on the trunk of the tree and said: “Here is what we will do.”

  He began by reminding his companions of Percy Shabrill’s immense wealth. They both had vivid memories of it. He told them that to win the patronage of this man he must have wood that excelled even that of the Furniture Tree.

  When he understood where the narrative was leading, Ntsina began to shake his head—and now it was Luvo who intervened. “Your ancestors reside in the mansions of heaven, not in these trees. They never knew Jesus Christ, but I believe St. Peter welcomed them at the pearly gates. You must free yourself of savage superstitions. Look what they have resulted in. No Christian father is permitted to take his son’s wife.”

  Ntsina stopped shaking his head.

  Piet was dazzled by the chance, so nearly in his grasp, to take the wood he must have to make great art. “When Shabrill pays me, I will give each of you three hundred pounds,” he said, impetuously. “Together we will see to everything, hire the help we need from another village. You will be able to rescue your wife, Ntsina. To keep her in a house with electric lights and comfortable beds. Your children will be educated. But until the money is made you cannot—you must not—return.”

  The possibility of this life shimmered before Ntsina. He thought again of the bed the Strange One had slept in at Cradock and looked at Luvo. Perhaps he was right—he had been to school, after all.

  “My people will never let us,” he said.

  “They need never know,” said Piet. “Later, when we are rich, we can build them new shrines.”

  “They will find out, when they come to make offerings.”

  “Not if they never enter the forest.”

  —

  IN THE CAUSE of finding a new witch doctor, the dearest possession of the chieftaincy of Gwadana was produced: a bicycle. Competition for the riding of it was fierce, and its winner was known to be swift. Lundi watched the young man set off for King William’s Town, then went to find Sukude. “If I bring the girl to you, you will be generous to me. Will you not, my friend?”

  Sukude looked at Lundi. He felt invincible after his unexpected success against his mother-in-law. The lordly part of his nature wished to tell Lundi that he had no need of him, that he could get the girl and anything else he wished for. But the shrewder part knew that he and Lundi had reached the stage of intimacy at which allies must either go further, or retreat into enmity. The Chief had no great liking for him, and village opinion was inclined to be conservative. It would not serve his cause to have an enemy on the Council, so he put on his warmest face and said: “I will always be generous to you, Lundi. You are a true friend.” And to prove it, he opened one of the brandy bottles that had lain untouched since the departure of the wedding guests.

  Across the village, a sense of unease had spread, intensified by the hangover that is the legacy of brandy and dagga. Since the rescue of their ancestors by the Great Founder, who had spared them and their cattles by thinking for himself, the Gwadanans had grown accustomed to feeling that they were on the right side of things unseen. The evil spirits swarming across the country, turfing families out of their homes in the middle of winter, had for a long time been prevented from crossing the great forest. Now something had happened, and they had come—but few could agree precisely what it was that had happened. Many men swore they had heard Sukude ask thrice for the goatskin, and public opinion did not judge him too harshly for sexing Bela when his boy couldn’t. That his boy had not sexed such a beauty, when he had ample time to do so, seemed the first assault on the order of things, and Sukude’s denunciation of Nosakhe found supporters, even among those who did not care for him. The matter of the cow who had failed to cry was raised in more than one homestead. Mothers forbade their children to leave home after dark, lest they encounter spirits bent on mischief, and the noise made by the children of Gwadana, thus cooped up, did nothing to improve their parents’ mood.

  In the village’s first household, a tense silence reigned.

  The Chief had often been envied by other men for the graceful subservience of his wives, and the sudden loss of it annoyed him greatly. Each of her fellow wives sided with Noni’s mother, and so did all their children. “You must force Nosakhe to lift the sentence on Noni,” was the universal cry, and his wives took to repeating it every time the Chief addressed a word to them. Sexual favours were withheld, which was a punishment he was not at all used to; and yet he had inner strength, when he could find it, and he knew the oath he had made the Great Founder, and it prevented him from acting against Nosakhe.

  “We must wait until an independent sangoma comes,” he said. “That man will fix everything.”

  But Noni’s mother knew this was not so. On the morning of the third day after the crisis at the Zinis’, she was woken by her daughter creeping under her blanket. The little girl understood that dark matters swirled and had lost her appetite. Her mother held her close, feeling how bony she was; so far from the physical ideal that she worried, for the first time, what lay ahead for Noni if her sentence of death was lifted and she was permitted to grow to womanhood. Which man would take her? She ran over the eligible boys of the village and found none to whom she would trust her darling child. For days she had waited, hoping for action from her husband. Now she acknowledged that there would be no action—and the fault was not her husband’s, but her own. By the fire at the Zinis’, as Piet Barol spoke, she had promised to make a sacrifice if the Strange One would confirm her daughter’s gift of Farsight. He had confirmed it. He had asked, before many witnesses, to buy an Ancestor Tree—using the exact words Noni had predicted. The Ancestors had kept their end of the bargain. Now it was time for her to keep hers.

  She began to cry, softly. She had been blessed with good health and strong bones. She had little acquaintance with pain. Now that the severing of her own limb was upon her she found it impossible to imagine. She fell to wondering how she might achieve it—she who did not look when a goat was slaughtered, for she hated the sight of blood. In the end, she knew she must seek another’s aid; the aid of someone who loved Noni, whose aim was sure and true.

  She chose Kagiso.

  When she had explained what he must do, Kagiso made no sound. He was distraught for Ntsina and had searched every outbuilding
in the village to find him. “Why did you make such a promise? She had already prophesied. There was already a witness.”

  “I wanted to make sure the prophecy would come true. If I go back on my word, our Ancestors will cease to help us.”

  There was no disputing this logic. They went behind the kraal and Kagiso fetched the Chief’s sharpest axe. “How much did you promise?” She showed him. “You must tell my father first, so that he does not punish me later.”

  When told the rash oath his wife had made, the Chief felt more than ever unequal to his destiny. Her sister wives cried for her and interrogated themselves. Pumza, the eldest, knew she would have made the same promise and honoured it. The others were less certain, and each of them looked at her hands, the soft hands that befitted a Chief’s wife, and gave thanks that her children were safe and healthy, that no such sacrifice was required of them.

  The Chief felt angry with Noni’s mother, but the look on her face as Kagiso picked up the axe softened him. “It was perhaps unnecessary to make this pact. But you made it with a good heart.”

  “I honour it so that the Ancestors may give you the courage to do what is right.”

  Her barb struck true. The Chief stood back. He turned his face away as she laid her delicate, plump hand on the tree trunk where the mealie meal was ground. “Aim true, and be swift,” she said, and closed her eyes.

  The axe flashed. Its blade caught the light. She felt the sunshine on her lids, heard the thud of the axe head on the trunk. The tip of her finger leapt from the wooden block, the nail as clean and smooth as it had ever been. First she felt nothing. And then WHOOOSH, the pain was upon her. A pain that engulfed the Universe. She started screaming. The blood from her finger poured onto the earth and spattered her dress and her face. She cried so loudly the piglets stopped suckling, and the snake that had slithered to the woodpile in quest of fat mice withdrew, seeking the shelter of the grasses beyond the homestead’s wall. Pumza bandaged her finger and held it tight to staunch the flow of blood. But the blood did not cease flowing. It poured from her, soaking the linen bandages that her fellow wives brought. She thought she would die of the pain, she who had never even broken an arm, who had so little pain to guide her. Her husband approached to give her comfort, but she turned away from him, and in her heart she blamed him for being weak and unmanly.