Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  There was no water and no seconds so the two boxers just stood there in what was turning out to be a very hot autumn morning. The whistle went and this time Mattress left his corner. Frikkie Botha started to stalk him and Mattress tried to stay away. But a boxing ring is only a small space and there’s no place to hide. Soon he had Mattress in a corner protecting his head with the gloves and Frikkie was landing dozens of blows to his stomach, hard as he could. Mattress managed to get out of the corner and Frikkie came for him in the centre of the ring, rushing at him, throwing all caution to the wind, hands open, determined to finish the kaffir off. Mattress threw a haymaker and it landed right under Frikkie Botha’s jaw and practically lifted the big Boer off the ground. Frikkie sank to his knees and lay still.

  There was silence from the crowd. Then Meneer Prinsloo said, ‘We gave the kaffir a long count, now Frikkie has one.’ I don’t know exactly how long they waited but eventually Frikkie Botha got to his feet and for the rest of the round he sort of shadow-boxed around Mattress until the whistle blew.

  The last round came and Frikkie Botha came out hard, he realised that Mattress had landed a lucky blow and all he had to do was box him and the time would come to knock him out. But Frikkie Botha was running out of puff, he’d thrown too many punches and his oversized stomach was heaving as he started to blow like a whale. With Frikkie slowed down to a crawl Mattress was learning fast and back-pedalling and moving around the ring, staying out of the way. You could see Frikkie’s frustration as he tried to nail Mattress with the one big punch. He was throwing punches that didn’t land, and at one stage had to stop and bend over, resting his boxing gloves on his knees. Mattress was a bloody mess, with both eyes closed and scarlet blood dripping from his nose, over his chin and onto his dark chest. Instead of going for Frikkie Botha he too took the opportunity to recover.

  Halfway through the third round, when Frikkie had knocked him down on two more occasions, and you could feel the crowd grow silent. ‘Lie down, you black bastard,’ Frikkie called out, but the black man refused and kept getting up. Frikkie Botha was totally spent and he dropped his gloves to his side, trying to summon up enough strength to hit the defenceless kaffir with one big punch, one last time. But Mattress was trying to do the same thing while he could still see his opponent through the slits that had become his eyes. The Mattress punch came first. It was an uppercut and it hit Frikkie on the chin with a force like a runaway steam engine crashing into a solid wall and again Frikkie’s feet lifted off the canvas.

  He tried to regain his balance as he frantically back-pedalled, hitting the ropes and then spinning sideways before crashing to the canvas where he lay on his back with both arms stretched out. Mattress had landed only two punches in the whole fight. But when you have to polish a dairy floor your arms are strong. Frikkie Botha lay completely still and it was apparent to everyone that he’d be a long time getting up. Meneer Prinsloo stooped over him and evidently didn’t like what he saw because he turned and called out for Mevrou to come and help without first counting Frikkie out. Everyone had gone very quiet. There was some blood running out of Frikkie Botha’s nose. Mattress just stood there, not knowing what to do next.

  ‘Go back! Go back to a neutral corner, you hear, kaffir,’ Meneer Prinsloo cried out in a panic-stricken voice, his arms waving. Once again he stooped over Frikkie Botha, but obviously didn’t know what to do about anything.

  Mattress walked towards the nearest corner but then changed his mind and walked back to Frikkie Botha’s prostrate form and said, ‘I am very, very sorry for what I am doing in the boxing, Baas Botha.’

  I don’t suppose Frikkie Botha heard him because he’d really and truly had the daylights knocked out of him and he hadn’t moved.

  ‘Go away, kaffir! Can’t you see he’s hurt?’ Mevrou shouted, arriving in the ring, immediately taking control. She stooped over Frikkie and you could see her huge bosoms, one with the dead fly, rising and falling as she bent over. ‘Take him to the sick room,’ she yelled at nobody, then turned and pointed to several of the bigger boys crowding around the edge of the ring. ‘Fetch the stretcher, you hear!’ They nodded and went running off.

  Frikkie Botha started to stir. I reckon by this time four minutes had passed. With help from Mevrou he sat up and locked his arms about his knees and dropped his head between them. Blood dripped from his nose onto the canvas while Mevrou massaged the back of his neck.

  Mattress stood for a moment at the far end of the ring with his back turned to Frikkie Botha. In the mid-morning sun his sweat-burnished black skin shone, showing all the muscles. Turned away like that you couldn’t see the damage to his face and, for a moment, he stood tall and proud, a great and awesome warrior. He stepped down from the ring, then onto the grass and began walking away with his boxing gloves still tied at his wrists, the white tape stained red from trying to wipe the blood from his nose. The gloves, the same colour as his skin, looked as if they were a natural extension of his long powerful arms. No one shouted at him to take off his gloves.

  Nobody knew what to do because this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. I ran after Mattress and caught up with him as he passed the punishment water tank where the other servants, the Shangaan kitchen boys, were standing. Their eyes were shining with pride, but they didn’t say anything, instead they reached out and touched him as he passed. In their heads they must have said something because their lips moved silently.

  ‘You are a Zulu warrior!’ I cried out.

  At the sound of my voice Mattress stopped and turned around slowly. I observed that both eyes now seemed completely closed. Blood covered his chin and chest. His left ear was twice its normal size and his bottom lip was badly swollen and split, one side hanging down in a fold of raw pink flesh and ragged black skin, exposing bloody gums and several bottom teeth.

  ‘You didn’t forget to hit back,’ I said.

  ‘I am Zulu,’ he replied.

  ‘And a son of Dingaan.’

  Mattress tried to laugh but he couldn’t. He must have swallowed some blood or something because he suddenly bent over and spat out a tooth. He straightened up and, resting a boxing glove on my shoulder, said, ‘You were right, Kleinbaas, now I am already a dead kaffir.’ He turned and continued walking towards the pigsty, his big platform feet raising the usual puffs of powder dust on the surface of the footpath. I watched as Mattress, proud Zulu and the father of Joe Louis, slowly walked away from me. In the background I could hear some bush doves cookarooing high up in the giant blue gum trees by the creek. Four dead ones were worth three cigarettes.

  Two nights later, at approximately three o’clock in the morning when the whole town was fast asleep, the body of an unidentified Bantu man was dumped outside the Duiwelskrans police station. His facial features had been removed completely and the skin and flesh from the front of his chest and stomach was largely missing. His hands were tied together at the wrists with a piece of rope that had cut so deeply that the hands were almost parted from the wrists. The rope extended for several feet where it had been cut.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Love That is Beyond Understanding

  YOU PROBABLY THINK BY now that being cruel to black people was so common that nobody hardly noticed when one of them was murdered, but you’d be wrong. It was on the front page of the Zoutpansberg Nuus and everyone at school was talking about it. You couldn’t just go around the place murdering people, even if they were kaffirs. Murder is murder. ‘Revenge is mine sayeth the Lord’ is what the Dominee said in church over the murder. He got very angry from the pulpit and for once in his life he forgot about what the English did, and said that a lynching was a sin against God and decent God-fearing Boerevolk and if anyone knew who was responsible they should go to the police at once. He even said never mind if it was a brother or a father or a cousin or a friend, it was our Christian duty to report what we knew to Sergeant Jan van Niekerk who, as everyone knew, was also the brother of the school headmaster, Meneer Van Niekerk, who was a chur
ch elder and greatly respected in the community.

  ‘We know that the black people are savages!’ the Dominee shouted and he thumped the pulpit with his fist. ‘But people who go around murdering them, taking the law into their own hands, they are also savages of the worst kind! The Children of Ham’ (which is what he called the black people) ‘were innocent savages because they hadn’t met Jesus Christ yet and those people who did this terrible thing to this savage were guilty savages whatever the colour of their skin. God would see them burn in hell!’

  The thing was that because the murdered kaffir had no face left nobody could identify him. There he was, missing and everything, but nobody at The Boys Farm would say perhaps Mattress was the murdered person. Everyone pretended they didn’t know where he was and claimed that maybe after the fight he’d got afraid because he’d knocked Frikkie out and that was something he wasn’t supposed to do. A kaffir fighting a white man in the boxing ring was not an everyday thing, especially if he was only a lowly pig boy. So they said that’s why he’d run away into the mountains.

  It was all bullshit, because he’d left his good trousers behind and his knobkierie and a few other small personal things. Like, for instance, an enamel mug and his three-string guitar made from a petrol can with a hole cut in it, and a copper bracelet. They were definitely things he would have taken with him, even if he did decide to run away. He also had an old alarm clock that didn’t work any more but that he liked a lot; I admit he probably wouldn’t have taken that. And even if he was in a hurry, a person doesn’t leave his best trousers behind and a Zulu always carries his knobkierie wherever he goes. There was one other thing. He would have said goodbye.

  All the guys at The Boys Farm also knew the victim had to be the pig boy. There were whispers all around the place that it was the Broederbond, a secret underground society of Boere who were determined to get rid of the British and get the old republic back, who were responsible. There was also the Ossewabrandwag, who sided with the Germans in the war that had been going on for a year. Others said it was certain to be them. It was suppposed to be a big secret if you belonged to these societies, except that in our district everybody knew the secret, but nobody was allowed to talk about it. If a policeman asked you if someone was a member you had to swear on a stack of Bibles that he wasn’t, otherwise you’d become a traitor. Frikkie Botha belonged, of course. But then so did Meneer Prinsloo and Sergeant Van Niekerk and just about everyone around. So the murderers could have been anyone, except Sergeant Van Niekerk, because a police sergeant wouldn’t go about lynching kaffirs when they can easily as anything send them to Pretoria to be hanged by the neck. Meneer Prinsloo was also not a suspect; he was a lay preacher and a church elder, and he wouldn’t be game enough to be a part of a kaffir lynching as he was much too holy and worked for the Government.

  Besides, even in the deep north, a kaffir wouldn’t get lynched just because of beating a white guy in the boxing ring. A Boer is much too proud to do something like that. He would have a return bout and beat the shit out of the kaffir, but to murder him just because he was beaten in a fight was unthinkable. A lynching took more than one guy and he’d have to convince all his friends and that was very unlikely. If Frikkie Botha was a suspect, then it was against his character. After the fight he could hardly talk because of a swollen jaw, but he stood up and said that it was a fair fight and the result showed that the best man won, even if it was a lucky punch. That was because some of the boys were saying Meneer Prinsloo hadn’t officially counted him out so there was no result. But Gawie Grobler, who told me that hens don’t have teeth, said he’d counted Frikkie Botha out silently and it was 200 when he finally sat up. Everyone was turning to everyone else and asking, ‘If it isn’t about the boxing and if the kaffir without the face is the pig boy, then what is the motive for the lynching?’

  You must remember that among us boys only Pissy Vermaak and Fonnie du Preez knew about the Mevrou version of what happened at the big rock, where Pissy said Mattress had penetrated him. So they knew, and I knew, and Meneer Prinsloo, Frikkie Botha and Mevrou knew that there was a motive, that is, if you believed the pack of lies Pissy had told Mevrou, which Mevrou and Meneer Prinsloo did, and Frikkie Botha pretended he did. If you think it was getting complicated, you are right. I was seven years old and I kept having to remind myself that the true version was the kissing and licking and sucking version where Mattress had rescued me and Fonnie du Preez had been hurt. Only five people knew the real truth. Us three boys, Frikkie Botha and Mattress. Only four really, because I was certain Mattress was already dead.

  The morning after the fight I had gone down after breakfast to feed Tinker before we had to go to church and, of course, to see Mattress. What a calamity! The pigs were carrying on and the old sow was kicking up a terrible fuss, grunting and running from one side of the pigsty to the other. The piglets had long since been weaned and they were in the big sty next door doing all the squealing, and the reason was that they hadn’t been fed. The cows had come up to the dairy by themselves for milking and were mooing and bellowing something terrible.

  I called out for Mattress but there was no reply. Clearly, something was wrong. Mattress just wasn’t the sort to let something like this happen, and besides, Frikkie Botha would have been down before breakfast to check on everything like he always did.

  What I didn’t know was that Frikkie Botha’s jaw had been broken in the fight and he’d been taken into town to hospital and Doctor Van Heerden had wired up his jaw and kept him there for observation and to drain the sinuses in his mashed nose. I walked over to Mattress’s hut and peeped through the open doorway. It was always as dark as an African mud hut, called a kaya, and didn’t have any windows.

  ‘Mattress, wena lapa? Are you there?’ I heard a grunt, so I entered. It took some moments for my eyes to adjust to the semi-dark interior but when they did I got a real hundred per cent shock. Mattress was lying on his grass mat and his face was about twice the size it should be, and his eyes seemed to be completely closed. Half his bottom lip hung off the side of his mouth, even worse than before, and was hugely raw and swollen. It was all the things I’d seen yesterday but twice as bad. He still had the boxing gloves on. I could see he was trying to greet me but no words came out, just a sort-of grunt.

  I realised that no one had come down to see him, not even one of the Shangaan kitchen boys. He’d been on his own and couldn’t take the boxing gloves off because the tape was tied too tightly and he couldn’t even use his teeth to undo it because of his terribly torn lip and loose teeth. You could see where he’d tried because there was the brown of the dried blood from yesterday staining the white tape and red from the new blood of today. The yesterday blood had also dried on his face and chest and a few flies buzzed around, frequently landing on him. Luckily, it was late in the season for flies and most of them had already gone because of the approaching winter when flies go who knows where.

  Mattress sat up with a great groan and held his gloves out for me to undo. I couldn’t undo the knot at first, blood had soaked in and spit and stuff, and it wouldn’t budge, but then I found an old kitchen knife and sawed through the tape. Using both my hands I pulled the gloves off. Mattress grunted and rose to his feet and groaned. He was bent almost double and held his hands against both sides of his waist. Later in life I would realise it was because Frikkie Botha had hit him probably fifty times in the kidneys and Mattress had been bleeding internally all yesterday and last night. He was shuffling very slowly, rocking on his big feet like an old man, and he walked towards the door of his hut and into the morning sunlight.

  In the daylight he looked even worse. He sat down on the pigsty wall and I ran and got his enamel mug and filled it with water from the cow tank. He drank it, holding the mug with both hands, and maybe because of his torn lip, he spilled most of it down his front. I did it again, and after four mugs he raised his hand to say it was enough.

  Mattress must have been able to see something because otherw
ise how would he find the pigsty wall to sit on? But I couldn’t see his eyes because they were so puffed up. I told him to wait and I ran to the back of the dairy and found some old used cheesecloth for making butter and I wet it at the cow tank and wiped down his face and chest. I had to have several goes before all the old dried blood was gone. On his face it must have hurt a lot when I wiped but he didn’t say anything. I didn’t touch his lip because it was too sore. I also noticed that his nice straight nose wasn’t straight anymore.

  The water he drank must have helped because he managed to say to me, but in a very strange sort of voice, ‘The pigs must eat, the cows, I must milk them.’ Then he said, ‘Cabbages.’ I realised that the cows have to be milked twice a day and that they’d been standing there since yesterday evening making milk inside them and now their udders couldn’t hold any more and it was like a bag about to burst.

  I couldn’t milk a cow, but behind the pigsty was this bin where Mattress kept old vegetables that had gone to seed and some perfectly good ones we didn’t need in The Boys Farm kitchen. This week it was cabbages. So I went around to the back of the pigsty to the bin and got an armful of cabbages and threw a big one to the sow and three more to the piglets. The piglets started to squeal even worse as they fought over the cabbages, so I got some more and threw another one in for the sow and the rest for the piglets and things definitely began to calm down. It’s hard for a piglet to squeal with a mouthful of cabbage leaves. Chomp, chomp, chomp.