Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  But Mevrou wasn’t finished by a long shot. ‘Now, listen carefully before you answer and just understand that I will protect you, Kobus,’ she said in a soft and kind voice I had never before heard from her. It was a voice you’d like to hear before you go to sleep at night. ‘How many times did he piss on you? How often, Kobus? Once? Twice? Ten times, more than ten times?’ It was clear she wasn’t going to accept the ‘just the one time’ story.

  Pissy swung his right leg up and down in agitation and looked in his lap for what seemed a long time. ‘More than ten times,’ he finally replied.

  Mevrou’s voice rang out like a shot. ‘Then after, did he get an erection?’

  Pissy jumped. ‘Ja, Mevrou!’

  ‘Did he bugger you, Kobus? Did he stick it in you, in your bottom?’

  Pissy remained silent.

  ‘Did he penetrate you, Kobus? Answer me, damn you!’

  Pissy started to howl, I mean really blub, so that Mevrou was forced to wait, but she didn’t get up and comfort him or anything like that. She just waited while his shoulders quaked and quaked, and the snot ran out his nose. He didn’t even wipe it away with the back of his hand, he just let it run down his top lip and some went in his mouth and some over his chin together with the tears that were falling, splashing down nineteen to the dozen. He sobbed and sobbed and began to cough violently, but she still waited and didn’t even slap his back.

  ‘Speak, child!’ Mevrou said at last and stood up suddenly and pointed her finger at Pissy. ‘Fonnie du Preez buggered you! He fucked you, didn’t he? Frikkie Botha’s favourite little boxer fucked you up the arse! You were his dirty little whore!’ she was screaming and her breasts were wobbling like mad.

  I was shocked but also ready to applaud. In this place it was every boy for himself and the survival of the fittest was the only rule, and I can tell you for certain Fonnie du Preez was headed for Pretoria. Pissy only had to say yes and he’d made himself a victim. Although I personally doubted his innocence, he really enjoyed being under Fonnie du Preez’s patronage and I hadn’t forgotten ‘Tastes lekker, Voetsek . . . jus’ like boerewors.’ Pissy, if he was a victim, was a willing one. That was easy enough for anyone to see, which, when all is said and done, was very clever of him, if you ask me. Though, if he’d escaped the reformatory, what they’d do with him I couldn’t say. If Fonnie went to Pretoria then Pissy wouldn’t survive for long here. Fonnie was a boxing hero and Pissy was the worst kind of a nobody, even if he was a Boer. There was another Boys Home in Pietersburg, they’d probably send him up there.

  With Mevrou standing there screaming at him my whole world exploded into smithereens.

  ‘No! No, it wasn’t him, I swear it!’ Pissy cried out. ‘It wasn’t Fonnie du Preez who done it to me. It was the kaffir. The pig boy!’

  ‘The pig boy? The kaffir? The kaffir did it?’ she said incredulously. ‘When, for God’s sake! Tell me, man.’

  ‘When I had my epileptic fit he saved my life, and then after I came out the sick room I went to see him at his hut by the pigsty to thank him for putting the stick in my mouth, like you said I should.’

  ‘Here, man! He did it to you then?’ she asked. ‘In his dirty kaffir hut where you went to say thank you?’

  ‘Ja, he threw me on his bed and did it to me!’ Pissy howled and looked up despairingly at Mevrou. ‘It hurt a lot.’

  Mevrou was nearly beside herself. ‘In his stinking bed! In his dirty blankets?’

  Pissy nodded and sniffed some snot and looked miserable.

  ‘Sis, man . . . Why didn’t you report it, child?’

  ‘I couldn’t, Mevrou, I . . . I was too ashamed. I only told Fonnie du Preez.’

  ‘You told him what the kaffir did to you, everything?’

  ‘Ja, Mevrou, I told him and Fonnie said he would kill the fucking kaffir, that’s why we were – Fonnie didn’t piss on me that time.’

  ‘Say again, it wasn’t about Fonnie du Preez pissing on you?’

  ‘No, Mevrou, I jus’ made that up,’ Pissy said, looking sort of half ashamed. ‘He was going to donder the pig boy, that’s why we were there.’

  Mevrou drew back. ‘Made it up?’ She looked at him sternly. ‘What else are you making up, Kobus?’

  ‘No, it’s God’s truth, Mevrou,’ he sniffed.

  ‘Stoppit!’ Mevrou yelled. ‘Calm down, no more crying, you hear? Genoeg! Now you going to tell everything that happened, from the beginning.’

  Pissy sniffed and sobbed down to quite a quick calmness. Mevrou leaned forward and said, ‘The big rock. Now I want the truth, you hear? What were you really doing there – first it’s bush doves, then it’s pissing all over a person’s head, now it’s . . . what?’

  ‘Fonnie sent me to tell the pig boy one of the cows was caught in a whitethorn bush at the big rock and he must come there. The pig boy came and when he got there Fonnie hit him and knocked him down. It was a good punch,’ Pissy elaborated. ‘The kaffir got angry and he jumped up on his feet and Fonnie hit him again, a left and a right, but it was no use, the pig boy jus’ kept coming at him and lifted Fonnie in the air and threw him against the big rock. I ran to tell Meneer Botha.’

  I had to admit Pissy’s lying was a genuine world championship performance and he’d even got Fonnie du Preez off the hook. Pissing on somebody wasn’t a very nice thing to do to a person, but it could be seen as just boys’ pranks, and while masturbation was a definite sin, it wasn’t Pretoria material. Fonnie would get the long cane, six or maybe even ten of Meneer Prinsloo’s special running-at-you cuts and then the tank. When he came out he’d be a hero, because he had the guts to take on and pick a fight with the stinking kaffir who, what can you expect, fought dirty and not like a white man. He’d also gone to avenge Pissy. Even if they were related, it was a most honourable thing to do. The kaffir was much bigger and stronger but Fonnie didn’t care, he took him on all the same. That’s how it would go. What’s more, when it was over Pissy Vermaak’s reputation wouldn’t be much worse, because, like me, he was a complete nobody already and what’s more, he might even get people to be sorry for him because of what the kaffir went and did to him.

  Don’t think I worked all this out on the spot because I didn’t. It took a lot of thinking about it later and, at the time I was listening from in the bushes, my heart was pounding like billyo for Mattress who was in the deepest of deep shit.

  Amazingly, Mevrou seemed to believe this third version of events which was still not the truth. ‘It accounts for his injuries,’ she exclaimed. ‘I always knew he couldn’t get them just falling down a rock like Frikkie Botha and you said it happened. A nurse like me doesn’t get easily fooled, you understand. We trained so we know what’s going on,’ she said smugly.

  Pissy did his masterstroke. He all of a sudden started to shake all over and to weep uncontrollably, you’ve never seen such a performance, it pissed on the one before with the snot and tears running over his chin.

  ‘What am I going to do now everybody knows?’ he wailed. He wailed even louder and choked and sobbed and sobbed and wailed again and threw himself down on the leather examination couch and beat his fists against it, as if he was suddenly heartbroken. I saw the surprise, then the sympathy on Mevrou’s face and she went over to him and took him in her arms.

  ‘Be still, Kobus, don’t cry,’ she said, brushing her hand through his cropped hair and drawing his snotty face into her large bosom. ‘Shhhsh, skattebol . . . that kaffir is already dead, you hear.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Until Death We Do Part

  I DON’T KNOW HOW long I sat there under the hydrangea bushes shaking from the shock of what I had just heard. Like a bolt of electricity through my body I suddenly realised that I had no time to waste. The days were closing in and the mountains were starting to get in the way of the sun. It would shortly become dark and the washing-hands bell would be going and then it was supper. Because it was late autumn you couldn’t guess the time like you could in summer, but nevertheless
I had to take a chance and get to Mattress to warn him. I crawled out from under the bushes and ran like hell down to the pigsty, hoping to find him there.

  As I arrived he was pouring swill into the pig trough and at first I was unable to talk. I stooped down with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. I hadn’t even given myself time to compose a correct sequence of the events that had taken place between Mevrou and Pissy Vermaak. As I stood panting I tried to collect my thoughts, then translate them into Zulu as Mattress couldn’t speak Afrikaans very well and might miss the meaning of what I was trying to tell him. I was six years old and a lot of the words I had to use I hadn’t come across in Zulu.

  I know I said I was six but, in fact, I had just turned seven by a few days. I only knew this because when I got to school one morning my class teacher, Miss Bronkhorst, told me it was my birthday.

  ‘Can I learn to read now, Juffrou?’ I pleaded.

  ‘No, Tom, you have to wait until next year. You’re halfway between the sixes and sevens and can’t be a special case because I am much too busy to go back to the beginning again.’

  I’d asked if I could sit in with the other seven-year-olds and try to catch up. But she said it was May already and that I was being a show-off if I thought I could catch up with five months of reading lessons already gone. ‘Besides,’ she’d said, ‘Afrikaans isn’t your first language and you’re going to find it difficult.’

  You can’t argue with a teacher but I couldn’t understand why this would be so. I had been in the orphanage since I was four and the first language I spoke was Zulu, and as far as I knew I’d never spoken English. It was just my name, Tom Fitzsaxby, that got me into all the trouble I’ve already told you about. Maybe, I thought, a person is born with a certain language in their head and so it’s difficult to learn to read in a language that God hadn’t put into your brain already before you were born.

  Anyway, it was going to be much easier for me to talk to Mattress in Zulu. I just had to hope I could explain those things Fonnie du Preez had done to Pissy and the other things that Mevrou asked him about. I could do the pissing bit dead easy, that’s umchamo, but things like arse-kissing, penetration, buggered, masturbation – how was I ever going to get those across to him when I didn’t really know what the last three were or how they happened? I didn’t even know if black people did those things the same as us, or whether any of those words I couldn’t translate would mean anything to him. Maybe Pissy was accusing him of doing something to him he didn’t even know how to do.

  ‘Sawubona, Kleinbaas,’ Mattress called cheerily to me. ‘It is late for you to come and see me, but you are running very fast. I think, for sure, a lioness she is chasing you. With your strong heart, you have left her panting in the dust?’ He laughed at his joke, then put down the milk churn and stepped over the pigsty wall, his big platform feet with the deep cracks in the sides making little puffs as they landed in the soft dust on the far side.

  ‘Mattress, it is terrible news!’ I gasped.

  ‘Ten-Kaa?’ He looked concerned. ‘But she was at the dairy just now, she is having some milk.’

  ‘No, not Tinker, you!’

  Mattress looked puzzled. ‘Mena? Today I have worked very, very hard, Kleinbaas. There is no trouble.’

  ‘There is trouble,’ I said urgently. ‘Makhulu trouble, big trouble.’

  Mattress took a step towards me and rested on his haunches so that we could be the same size. Next door the big sow was grunting and grumbling, waiting for the rest of the swill. Mattress placed his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘What are you hearing? Is the Big Baas angry?’ He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Why it is so? All the time I am work very, very hard. That one cow, that black one, it is sick all night from the bloat, she is eating too much the wet clover. I stay by that one and run her around so she farts out the sickness, but it doesn’t work so I put a knife in her stomach to let the air out, now she is coming better. Big Baas Botha . . . why he is not happy with me, Kleinbaas? If I don’t put in the knife to that black cow she is going to die.’

  ‘Not him, it’s Mevrou! She says you already a dead kaffir.’ I hadn’t meant to tell it exactly like that, it just came out in a rush and I started to cry.

  Mattress squeezed my shoulder. ‘This is not the time to cry, Kleinbaas. You must tell me what happened in this news you have for me. I must hear it in your way.’

  The trouble was where to start. I decided to go right back to me having to kiss Pissy’s arse. Mattress shook his head. ‘Ahee, that is before I am coming to you, that Fonnie he is very bad man.’

  I told him about the conversation that went on in the sick room. While I had some trouble with those words I spoke about, Mattress seemed to understand and supplied the Zulu words I needed. When I got to the last part where Pissy had accused Mattress of doing it to him, Mattress slapped his knee with the palm of his hand. ‘Ahee, that one of the goat fit is very, very bad also. That one is a coward and a liar and a skelm.’

  ‘You must run away at once, Mattress, go into the mountains, they will never find you there.’ I pointed to his feet. ‘You can go over the sharp rocks, they will not be able to follow.’ In my mind I could see him scrambling like a goat much too quick for anyone to follow.

  ‘Ahee, Kleinbaas, they will catch me, they have the dogs, they will follow my scent.’

  I’d seen the three big Alsatian dogs the police sergeant kept when he came around to visit Meneer Prinsloo, but I had simply thought he kept them as pets. I had to admit it would be pretty hard to outrun a dog, even in the mountains.

  ‘But what will you do?’ I asked in a panic.

  Mattress thought for a moment and seemed to be weighing up his options. ‘I am AmaZulu, I am not running away. If I run away they will think I have done this bad thing. This Boer boy he is lying and he is bad.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but it’s your word against his,’ I protested.

  Even if we, the boys in the orphanage, belonged to the Government and so were a nobody, we were a better class of nobody than the blacks. The word of a white boy would almost always be taken more seriously than that of a black man who was a pig boy. Even at seven I knew this to be true. What’s more, Pissy Vermaak had proved he was a consummate liar and if he could convince Mevrou, who was a world champion lie detector, then he could do the same with the police sergeant.

  Sergeant Jan van Niekerk was famous in this part of the world, and was known to be a ‘regte Boer’ who had the reputation for treating kaffirs harshly and carried a sjambok, a proper rhino-hide one, wherever he went. We’d sometimes see him on the way back from school. Black people would step off the pavement if they saw him coming, even if there remained lots of room for him and for what I had thought, until moments ago, were his three pet Alsatian dogs. The black people would step into the road and stand with their eyes averted, not daring to look at him. They could get a severe slash from his sjambok if they looked directly at him, because then he thought you were ‘a cheeky blêrrie kaffir’.

  Mattress looked at me. ‘I am a Zulu, the grandson of a great warrior of the Paramount Chief, Dingaan, I will not run away like a village dog. Baas Botha, he must tell me I have done this bad thing and I will tell him this boy who had the goat fit is lying. I am not lying before to Baas Botha and he will believe me, he will know the truth in his heart.’ Mattress said it with such conviction that I almost believed him.

  Meneer Botha knew the truth, alright, but he’d warned us never to tell it so why would he come clean all of a sudden? But worse still, we were dealing with Mevrou, who was a different kettle of fish. On the other hand, Mattress was a grown-up and I was just a small kid and he had rescued Pissy when he’d had his epileptic fit. It was certainly something they’d have to take into account. Him putting the stick in his mouth and all that. ‘Wragtig! How a kaffir would know to do a thing like that, I just don’t know, you can only thank God,’ was what Mevrou had said.

  I suddenly realised I had to run back because the w
ashing-hands bell would have rung by now as only a deep orange glow showed behind the dark silhouette of the high mountains. If I was late for supper then I’d go without, and also get three of the best or six if my hands were dirty as well.

  ‘Sala kahle, stay well,’ I said to Mattress. ‘I hope it will be all right.’

  Mattress looked sad but did not reply as we shook hands in the proper African way, first like white people do and then switching by grasping hold of each other’s thumb, two movements instead of one.

  ‘Hamba kahle, go well,’ he replied. My parting memory was of his large dark hand and my small white one, and how the black hand completely swallowed the white one.

  I got back just in time to join the end of the supper queue. I didn’t have time to wash my hands before the cook, Mevrou Pienaar, who always wore this greasy apron that she wiped her hands on, rang the bell for us to enter. Fonnie du Preez was with the big boys at the front of the queue, he had a plaster of Paris arm and people had written their names on it for luck. Obviously Mevrou hadn’t taken any action as yet. There was no sign of Pissy Vermaak, which wasn’t a good sign, although not entirely unexplainable, he’d been in a pretty overwrought state and she’d probably kept him in the sick room. We didn’t have a hands inspection because Mevrou didn’t appear, which was lucky.

  When we’d all sat down my heart really sank. Meneer Prinsloo and Mevrou were not at the staff table. When supper was over there was still no Meneer Prinsloo and Mevrou. Meneer Botha took over the job of reading from the Bible and saying prayers thanking God for our food and for looking after us. In both cases I wasn’t at all sure God was doing a good job and, in my opinion, was getting a bit too much praise. No Mevrou announcements followed, which meant there’d be no sjambok for the little kids that night. Instead, old Mevrou Pienaar said that if anyone needed to go to the clinic and it couldn’t wait until the morning, they should see her afterwards on the stoep and she’d do the best she could. As we went to the hall where we had to do our homework, through the big window at the end, I saw the lights of a car pull up. It was Doctor Van Heerden’s new Chev with a dicky-seat at the back. The outside light went on and Meneer Prinsloo and Mevrou came out to greet him and took him inside. You didn’t need to think too hard to know what that was all about. Doctor Van Heerden was here to examine the bruises on Pissy’s arse.