Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  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.

  CHAPTER 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.

&nbs
p; ‘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.

  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 i
n 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?