Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  “Did they bite your legs?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then take off your trousers.”

  —

  WHILE THIS WAS TAKING PLACE, Zuko approached the dark green beast. It was dusty from the road, but its body gleamed beneath the dust. He stroked it, relishing the brightness beneath. He looked behind him. The door to his mother’s hut was closed. His heart sped up. He was a well-brought-up child, and rejoiced in the absence of his father, who had twice hit his mother in front of him. She often told him he was the man of their homestead. This inspired a powerful sense of duty. He knew she would be cross with him for playing with the Strange One’s beast, and yet the temptation to do so was powerful. Too powerful. He stood on the step and tried the handle. He pulled down on it as hard as he could and the door swung open.

  Zuko was met at once by the scent of leather and oil and petrol. It was intoxicating. The bench creaked as he sat on it. Ahead was a wheel and beyond that many circles with numbers on them. He knew what a Strange One number was, though Strange One letters made no sense. Zuko placed his hands on the wheel. It was moulded to receive his fingers. He turned it, and it moved! He began turning it right and left, throwing his full power into it. He could tell from the crunching on the road that the wheels were moving. Oh the joy! There was a large stick, and he moved that too from side to side, delighting in its resistance.

  To Zuko’s left was a lever with a button on it. He felt compelled to touch this button. When he did, the lever responded. He pushed it down as far as it would go.

  The lorry began to move. Backwards.

  This gave Zuko a terrible shock, and reminded the law-abiding part of his nature of the magnitude of his transgression. Cattle thieves were not sympathetically treated by the village council of Idutywa. How much worse to be caught stealing a beast like this. The lorry continued to roll. He wanted to leave it, but what if it went off by itself? He knew he would be blamed.

  It took a great deal of courage to touch the lever again. He wondered what to do. But it is in the nature of a lever to be pulled, and he pulled it. There was a loud, scratching sound, and the vehicle stopped.

  Zuko felt immensely powerful.

  He got down from the cab and closed the door. Then he went round to the back. He had often asked himself what mysteries were housed in the body of this beast. He lifted a flap of the tarpaulin and peered into the gloom. It was a little room. He climbed onto the step and let the tarpaulin fall behind him. There were treasures in here—crates and a bucket, soft blankets.

  To his consternation, he heard the Strange One and his mother bid farewell to one another.

  Then the beast started to roar.

  —

  NTSINA BOUGHT A HORSE in Idutywa for a generous price and disdained the offer of a bridle. “Would you like to come with me?” he asked Luvo. “You can rest up for the journey ahead.”

  But Luvo shook his head. He could barely wait to take this money to his parents, to liberate the Rankes from the burden of caring for them, and purchase his ticket to England. He felt powerfully rewarded by God for tempering Ntsina’s murderous instincts.

  They embraced one another.

  “When you are back from the Great King, you must visit us,” Ntsina said. “Promise me.”

  “I will do my best, brother.” Luvo was careful not to promise. He preferred to leave his friend like this, at the height of their glory, and to nurse his memories of him in secret, than to see him happy in the arms of another.

  “The destiny of our people is in safe hands with you,” said Ntsina.

  “I will do my best to be worthy.”

  Luvo set off down the hill towards Butterworth, denying himself the bittersweet pleasure of a backwards glance.

  Ntsina leapt on his horse. The animal knew at once that a man with experience sat upon his back, a strong man who was also kind. He had not had a happy life at Idutywa, and relished the prospect of freedom. Ntsina’s heels had only to touch him lightly for him to break into a canter, and then a gallop. As they climbed towards the forest, Ntsina saw Piet in the distance, moving aside the barrier of ferns that hid the elephant track. He did not wish to spook his horse by following a lorry and turned to the left. There were many entry points to the forest, and another path would do as well. The air was close. The humidity was rising. It was pleasant to feel the warm breeze against his cheeks, and the energy of a willing animal beneath him.

  As they entered the wood, the temperature dropped. It was deliciously cool. In this part of the forest, there was no trace of the destruction Piet’s band had wrought. He leaned down and kissed his horse’s neck. “I will show you such a happy life,” he said.

  Ntsina took the animal as fast as he could. He did not approach the Ancestor Grove. He had decided not to think of it again, and happiness is a potent aid to the suppression of unhappy memories. He skirted it with care, then joined the track that led directly to Gwadana. He felt uncontainably joyful. So joyful that when he saw a dead leopard ahead, maggots already festering in his wounds, he got down from his horse. He saw at once that a larger creature had been killed and suspected that this old leopard had lost his life in the jousting that follows a kill. It did not seem dignified to leave him in the road. He got down and pulled him by his leg into some bushes. There was a gash in the foliage where the larger kill had been dragged and he did not pursue it, in case those who had feasted were sleeping there. He said a prayer for the leopard, for it is known that certain noble creatures can enter the realm of the hallowed Dead.

  Then he got back on his horse and galloped for home.

  —

  THE MECHANICAL BEAST took Zuko a long way in the dark, over rough ground. He clung to the side and watched the earth shoot by where the tarpaulin was strapped to the chassis. He was excited, but also afraid. As the journey continued, and the ground got rougher, and the scratch of trees told him they had entered the forest, fear began to prevail over excitement. He began to worry for his mother, who would miss him. He had never been further from her than the village, and the beast was taking him an incalculable distance from home.

  In the cab, Piet felt many contradictory things. The ant bites were sharp little pricks that chafed him when he moved. Carnal pleasure had soothed his pain, physical and mental. But as it lifted, his mood plummeted. He had now broken his first promise to his wife, a promise it had cost him dearly to keep for seven years. He tried to tell himself that Stacey had broken their bond of fidelity first, but he knew in his heart that there was no equivalence between her furtive embrace of Frank Albemarle and the frenzied coupling that had taken place in Lindiwe’s hut. The taste of another woman on his lips made him sad. And beyond that sadness was Ntsina’s delight as he handed over the money.

  He drove into the clearing grateful for one thing only: solitude. He got out of the truck. The grove, usually full of working men, was eerie in its emptiness. He reached for the brandy.

  He could not bear to go back to his house. It held too many painfully unrealized hopes. He wanted to work but had drunk too much to carve with precision. He went into the workshop. The absence of the bed depressed him. He might have christened it with his wife, and sent it into the world with pride. The fact that his masterpiece should be owned by Percy Shabrill—Percy Shabrill!—was galling. So galling he was able to forget, for a few blessed moments, the horrors of the day before.

  It was Bela’s eye that reminded him. The eye of the woman whose sister he had danced with. Whose husband even now was racing home to give her a diamond.

  He went out into the clearing. Only one thing still stood in this vast open space: the scaffolding from which the branches of the last Ancestor Tree had been felled. The last tree to die had been the largest. The scaffolding was much the tallest thing in the vicinity, for the trees that grew around the grove had been too deferential to attempt the height of the giants.

  Piet hated all this evidence of destruction. He took the brandy bottles and went to the wooden ladde
r. He wished to be consoled by the nearness of the sky and the view of healthy trees. The rungs of the ladder were far apart. It was not easy to climb with two bottles of brandy. He went into the workshop and found the knapsack he had brought from Cape Town. He put the bottles into it and slung it around his neck and climbed towards the heavens.

  He climbed to the height of the standing trees, and climbed on, leaving them behind. He reached the level where the eagles glide. The clouds were white, the sky blue. It was possible to believe in redemption.

  He reached the small platform at the top and sat down. The structure swayed in the wind, and made him afraid. But the view was irresistible. “It has been an adventure after all,” he thought, and opened the brandy. He drank it straight from the bottle. It burned his throat, and made him retch. But he drank on, till half the bottle was in him.

  He had never before drunk like this, and the knowledge that he now belonged to that hopeless race who seek oblivion in alcohol came to him painfully. For several minutes, nothing happened. But alcohol is drawn to water, and it raced through the expansive walls of his small intestine and into his bloodstream. The ground below swayed. He held the rail for support. The turbulent flow of his feelings was dampened. Bela’s eye still watched him, but it was further away. He was distracted by the sudden movement of the earth, the spinning of the trees.

  He did not know how long he sat there. But while he sat, dark clouds began to drift from the sea. The rising heat of the forest drew them towards itself. The pressure in the atmosphere mounted. He grew conscious of the clamminess of his skin, the drip of sweat down his back. The pain of the ant bites lifted, as Lindiwe had said it would. He thought of her—the vastness of her curves, her smell. Her tightness in the midst of all that undulating flesh.

  A plump raindrop landed on his cheek.

  He looked up. The darkening sky lent a majesty to the scene. He thought how beautiful forests are, in any weather. Large drops began to fall, zinging on the hot metal, evaporating instantly, leaving dark traces.

  In the lorry, Zuko heard these raindrops too. He was a brave boy, but one thing made him mortally afraid: thunder. He heard a rumble of it, and then another. He knew it was coming closer. He sat in the lorry, his knees hunched under his chin. In a dark place in a forest it is easy to imagine that the thunder might find you. What then? He started to rock back and forth. The Strange One would be angry with him, no doubt. But he was a strong Strange One. An adult. He would know what to do.

  As the first fork of lightning jabbed between two great clouds, a thousand trees distant, Zuko found the courage to get out of the lorry. He had expected trees, having driven through so many, but none were here. He had never seen such a landscape. Its devastation undermined the last of his courage. He looked frantically for the Strange One. He was nowhere to be found.

  At the top of the scaffolding, Piet tilted his head back and let the rain wash his face. The drops were coming faster now, the water a benediction. He remembered being taught, as a child, that a baptism in water cleanses sins. He held fast to this thought and closed his eyes, and let the rain run over his lids. With his eyes closed, the earth’s instability increased. When he opened them, the trees below were lurching crazily. He was now very drunk, and for the first time it occurred to him that he should perhaps seek shelter. A CRACK of thunder made him jump. The storm was hurling itself towards him.

  Zuko saw him. He felt an overpowering urge to seek the comfort and protection of another human being. He ran across the clearing, leaping the trenches. The ladder stretched above him, dauntingly. He was not a tall boy. He began shouting, but still the Strange One did not see him. He banged the ladder. The sound was drowned by thunder. He pulled it with all his might. It lifted away from the scaffolding and clanged back into place. Zuko pulled the ladder again. Piet saw that the ladder was leaping about, of its own accord. His fuddled brain struggled to comprehend why this might be. He looked over the edge and saw a child—but he was not Arthur. He was a Xhosa child. He felt sure he had seen him before. Who was he?

  Their eyes met. There was something glazed and terrifying in the Strange One’s gaze. Zuko clung tighter to the ladder. As it drifted from the platform, approaching the vertical, Piet reached for it. But his reflexes, usually so fast, were blunted by brandy. In the time it took his brain to process the information relayed by his eyes, the ladder had moved further away. He grabbed for it, and his knuckles connected with it—but not his fingers. This final push sent the ladder upright. It swayed, awaiting the instruction of the Wind.

  And the wind blew it away from Piet Barol.

  Zuko leapt aside as the ladder hit the forest floor. It made a dead, violent sound that disturbed six nearby snakes. The storm was upon them.

  “Shed into go!” cried Piet. “There safer!”

  He spoke with such authority that the boy obeyed him. He ran into the open workshop and sat on one of the sofas intended for Percy Shabrill’s morning room. He waited as the wind became a tempest. Rain lashed the tin roof, and then the darkness was banished by a light that was brighter than day. Not half a second later came the loudest bellow of thunder Zuko had ever heard.

  The storm was right above them.

  It is said in many tongues that Nature will have her vengeance on those who injure her. The lightning bolt that illuminated the workshop as Zuko sat on Percy Shabrill’s sofa, biting his lip till it bled, reached a temperature of twenty-seven thousand degrees Celsius. It was five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

  The clouds could not contain such energy, nor dispute it amongst themselves while a flash channel of steel was at hand. The electricity leaped from the heavens, found the steel scaffolding, and shot down to the earth—and up through the water and brandy in Piet’s body. The first flash burned the linings of his lungs. One hundred and eighty-two capillaries ruptured. The second came swiftly. It struck Piet’s head directly, which was the highest object for miles around. The lightning entered through his eyes, nose, mouth and ears and converged on his brain stem—and then his heart. The damage to his central nervous system was so acute that he lost forever the power to breathe.

  And in Gwadana, Nosakhe Zini watched the storm, and knew that the Great Goddess had joined the battle at last.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Luvo Yako returned too late to Johannesburg to participate in the delegation sent by the Native National Congress to plead their case in London. A member of this congress, Sol Plaatje, left a remarkable account of it in a book called Native Life in South Africa. Despite widespread support from South African missionaries in Britain, and the British public and press, the delegation achieved nothing. The Colonial Secretary, the Right Honourable L. Harcourt, informed the House of Commons that “the day the deputation saw me, the period of twelve months during which that Act could be disallowed on my recommendation had already expired.” At a meeting at Downing Street, he assured the deputation that he had the “assurance of General Botha, the Prime Minister of South Africa, that the Natives have too much land already.”

  The Natives Land Act remained law in South Africa until 1994. Less than 10 percent of the land confiscated in 1913 has been returned to the descendants of its original owners.

  —

  NTSINA ZINI NEVER FOUND Bela’s body, and never married again.

  When the villagers of Gwadana were compelled to abandon their homesteads in the forced removals of the 1970s, he was eighty-two years old. For several years he worked as a security guard in the hotel built at the top of the escarpment, where the view of the bay is still the best. During this time he lost his health and his wits and on the morning of March 21, 1983, he walked into the Sea.

  —

  WHEN PIET BAROL failed to arrive in Butterworth in time for the Johannesburg train, Stacey returned to Gwadana to search for him. She drove into the forest with Albemarle and found the clearing and the ladder lying on the ground, but no trace of Piet, whose body lay at the top of the scaffolding.

  She waited a we
ek in Butterworth, then left word at the Travellers’ Rest that he should follow her to Johannesburg. Two months later she returned to Butterworth alone. No one had seen her husband. She waited a full year, fighting against the knowledge that he had abandoned her.

  Six months later, in a rage, she married Frank Albemarle.

  Pieces of Albemarle furniture, inspired by the beauties of an African forest, remain some of the finest objects South Africa has ever produced.

  —

  THE FOREST OF GWADANA ENDURES. It is now a fraction of its former size, and shrinks each year as human beings chop the trees at its perimeter. To this day, no Xhosa will venture far into it. When asked why, they will tell you that a creature lives there, in a stream, with the face of a woman and the body of a snake.

  A creature whose glance can kill.

  HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE

  There is a forest in South Africa that no one enters. It is said that a monster lurks there, a creature whose glance can turn you to wood. Few white South Africans have heard of it, but every black South African knows its name: Gwadana.

  In 2007, I paid a visit to Gwadana. It is deep in the homeland of the Xhosa, and I asked permission of the village’s chief to enter the forest. He granted it, uneasily. A witchdoctor led me to the edge of the trees, and cast spells of protection. “This is a powerful place,” she said. “Be careful.”

  Gwadana is a primordial forest, just a few acres large now—a remnant of the ancient past. I went in alone. In a few steps, I was out of all time. I had recently gone through a personal tragedy, which rose through me unstoppably. Somehow, I’m not sure how, the forest gave me peace.

  The next day, I met a man named Mr. Mbiko, who was one hundred years old. I asked him how he knew there was a monster in the forest. He said: “When I was a boy, the white men came. They told me of the monster.”