Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  Mattress rose and pointed to the dairy and indicated that I should lead him there. So I took his big hand and we walked slowly over to the cows. Those cows all knew him and I think they must have been very glad to see him because the mooing really got going. Mattress felt the side of a cow to guide him to the udder and then squatted down, his big hands found the teats and suddenly there was milk splashing in the dust. We did that for every cow. Splash, splash, splash in the dust until it was milk mud everywhere. I knew there’d be lots of trouble because there’d be no milk for The Boys Farm but the cows didn’t care because they weren’t sore anymore. They turned and went back into a nearby field all on their own and started grazing and being happy again.

  Mattress’s lips looked really bad and you could see he needed stitches. I knew this from the cut Fonnie du Preez got in his head from when Mattress threw him into the big rock. If he needed stitches for that cut, then so did Mattress for a lip that was hanging half off his face. But it was now Sunday and Mevrou had gone to visit her family at their farm in the mountains and there was nobody to ask. I told him I would try to find Frikkie Botha and maybe he would drive Mattress to the hospital where there was a special part at the back that looked after the blacks.

  Mattress couldn’t talk much but he said I should take him back to his hut because now the pigs had been fed and the cows milked, he had the day off until milking tonight and he’d just like to rest and I should not go to see Big Baas Botha. I led him back to his hut and then fed Tinker who, I forgot to say, was with me all the time this was going on, and I’d got her cut-down jam tin and filled it with milk for her.

  I left Tinker at the dairy and went back to The Boys Farm because that afternoon we were getting a visit from a missionary who played the violin and had a mission station near Bulawayo in Rhodesia. Meneer Prinsloo said at supper the night before that although this missionary lady wasn’t from the Dutch Reformed Church, she was still a good Christian spreading God’s work among the heathen and we all had the afternoon off from working in the vegetable gardens to go and listen to her.

  I must say I didn’t think the violin sounded very good doing hymns, but we also prayed for the heathens who she said were ‘cast into everlasting darkness unless they saw the light and repented and accepted Jesus into their heart’. Then she asked if anybody in the audience wanted to do the same, but nobody did because our hearts were too hard and we’d been to church already once that day.

  I’m only telling you this because I didn’t know at the time that I would never see my friend Mattress again, because usually after we’d finished in the vegetable gardens I’d go and see him and Tinker again, but this Sunday I couldn’t because of the missionary.

  Back to the murder. This is what the newspaper said happened and I also heard it at school.

  Some persons unknown had assaulted the murder victim and tied his wrists together with a long piece of rope. They tied the end of the rope to the back bumper of the bakkie and drove off so that the murder victim had to run behind the lorry. They went faster and faster so he couldn’t run fast enough, so he fell and they dragged him along until he was dead, and had no face or chest or the front part of his body left after being scraped along the surface of the dirt road. They’d cut him loose outside Sergeant Jan van Niekerk’s police station sometime between midnight and three o’clock in the morning. Because it was Sunday night and very late there wasn’t even anyone on duty at the station, except a black policeman who was asleep in the station cell and didn’t hear anything. Of course, we only heard about all this later when it came out in the newspaper.

  But to go back to the time before I knew of the murder, at breakfast on Monday morning after the Saturday fight, we didn’t get porridge as usual because they said there wasn’t any milk. Everybody moaned and complained but there was no further explanation so we only had bread and black coffee that tasted horrible and bitter, even with sugar. I knew why there wasn’t any milk because Mattress and me had poured it straight onto the ground on Sunday. The milk we used was always the day-before milk, because butter and cream were made with the fresh milk and then what was left was sent up to the kitchen later in the morning for use that night in our coffee and breakfast the next day. Frikkie Botha wasn’t at breakfast so I thought he was probably down at the dairy and poor Mattress was getting a terrible scolding for pouring Sunday’s milk onto the ground. Of course, I still didn’t know that Frikkie Botha was in hospital for his broken jaw and his sinuses.

  After breakfast and before school on that Monday I took Tinker her crusts and there were the cows mooing and waiting at the dairy to be milked and the pigs making a fuss about getting no breakfast again. My heart started to thump and I thought Mattress might be sick and couldn’t get up. I ran over to his hut and turned the corner and ran straight into Sergeant Van Niekerk. And then I saw there were two black policemen and the police van. There was also Meneer Prinsloo.

  ‘What are you doing here, boy?’ Meneer Prinsloo asked.

  I was suddenly in a terrible fix. I couldn’t tell him about Tinker; thank goodness I hadn’t yet called her with a whistle or shouted out her name. Tinker knew she wasn’t allowed to come until she was called and she’d learned to stay away from everyone accept Mattress and me. If I couldn’t tell the truth about Tinker I had no other choice but to say, ‘Mattress is my friend and I help him to feed the pigs, Meneer.’

  ‘Who is this Mattress?’ he demanded to know.

  ‘The pig boy, Sir.’

  ‘The pig boy!’ He looked at Sergeant Van Niekerk and shook his head and addressed me again. ‘Sunday you get your clean clothes for church and they still clean on Monday so you can go to school and show them you get good care here.’ He pointed in the direction of the pigsty. ‘Now you come down here and feed the pigs in your nice clean clothes?’

  ‘Yes, Sir. I’m sorry, Sir.’

  ‘Does Mevrou know about this?’

  ‘No, Sir,’ I said in a timorous voice, then added, ‘it’s allowed, Sir. Meneer Botha says I can.’

  ‘You are the English child, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Ja, Meneer.’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk stepped forward. ‘You say you knew this Bantu, son? What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Mattress, Sir.’

  He smiled. ‘Mattress, hey? Did he lie down a lot?’

  I could see he meant it as a small boy’s joke. ‘No, Sir, he slept on a grass mat and he worked very hard.’

  He went down on his haunches. He was a big man but not as big as Mattress, and he put his hand on my shoulder just the way Mattress would sometimes do. ‘Did he, this Mattress, ever touch you? What is your name?’

  ‘Tom, Sir, but they call me Voetsek.’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk drew back in surprise. ‘I will call you Tom. Tom, did this Bantu, er, Mattress, ever touch you?’

  ‘Touch, Sir?’ I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  ‘In places, private places.’ As far as I knew we didn’t have any private places at The Boys Farm.

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘Did he touch you at all?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Oh, how was that?’

  ‘Like you are touching me, Sir. He sometimes put his hand on my shoulder.’

  ‘He was your friend, hey?’

  ‘Yes, Sir, I already told Meneer Prinsloo that, Sir.’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, you hear!’ Meneer Prinsloo snapped.

  ‘No, he’s not being cheeky,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk said, quickly defending me. ‘He’s right, he did tell you. How old are you, Tom?’

  ‘Seven, Sir.’

  ‘Seven! Magtig, and already you a farmer helping with the cows and the pigs. Will you be a farmer when you grow up?’

  ‘I dunno, Sir, I’m an orphan,’ I told him.

  ‘But you won’t always be an orphan,’ he said.

  ‘Yes I will, you can’t not be an orphan.’

  ‘He is a clever child,’ he said, looking up at Meneer Prinsloo, who
didn’t reply. Sergeant Van Niekerk looked back at me and said, ‘Did you and Mattress talk about a lot of different things then?’

  ‘Yes, lots of things.’

  ‘Did you talk about your bodies?’

  ‘Only about his feet and Joe Louis’s feet.’

  ‘Eh? His feet? What about his feet?’

  ‘In Zululand there are high mountains, much higher than here,’ I explained. ‘The rocks there are really bad and sharp and when you an umfaan and are minding the goats you cut your feet a lot until they get a proper platform. Until that happens you not a goat boy’s arsehole,’ I said, quoting Mattress. ‘Joe Louis is still getting a platform.’

  ‘Joe Louis, the boxer?’

  ‘No, Mattress’s son, who is the same age as me.’

  ‘So, what’s this platform? Do you mean the callused soles of a kaffir’s foot?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what we talked about.’

  ‘No other mentions of the body?’

  I tried to think but I couldn’t remember any other part of the body we’d ever discussed. ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘What else did you talk about, Tom?’

  ‘Cows and goats and the rains. It can get very dry in Zululand, you know, and even rivers dry up,’ I informed him.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, did you know goats can have fits? That’s how Mattress knew how to put the stick in Pissy, er, Kobus Vermaak’s mouth.’

  ‘Kobus Vermaak?’ The sergeant turned to Meneer Prinsloo. ‘Isn’t he —?’ He stopped. ‘Never mind, later,’ he said and turned back to me. ‘Anything else you talked about?’

  ‘Women.’

  ‘Women? What did he say about women?’

  ‘That a man can never understand them. You see, Mattress has a wife and every month he goes to the post office and sends her a postal order and when she’s got enough she buys a goat and then they sell six goats and buy a cow. She always complains that the milk from six goats is better than milk from one cow and it costs too much to get a bull, ten calabashes of kaffir beer and ten shillings and sixpence to the chief. One day he’s going to go back to Zululand to sit under a marula tree and watch his cattle and his wife working in the mielie field and drink kaffir beer all the time,’ I explained.

  ‘I see,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk said. He went down on his haunches in front of me again. ‘How would you like to come in my van back to the police station?’

  I looked at him and was suddenly very frightened. ‘I haven’t done anything bad, Sir!’ It was all getting too much for me. Here I was in trouble with the police and I was only seven years old and going to gaol already. Maybe to Pretoria to be hung by the neck until I was stone dead because that’s what a sergeant of a police station could do any time he liked.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk laughed. ‘No, Tom, I am not placing you under arrest. I just want you to help the police with their enquiries.’

  ‘What’s an enquiries?’ I asked. It didn’t sound a very nice thing to help to do.

  ‘Just talking together and you’ll get a cool drink and an ice-cream . . . an Eskimo Pie if you like.’

  I’d tasted ice-cream because we got it at Christmas, also a cool drink, but I’d never tasted an Eskimo Pie, which was this small block of ice-cream that had chocolate frozen around it and was wrapped in paper like a little parcel. You saw them when the ice-cream boy came around on his bicycle at school, a rich kid could buy one for a tickey.

  ‘I don’t think we could allow that, Sergeant,’ Meneer Prinsloo said suddenly. ‘The boy is only seven years old.’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk gave my shoulder a squeeze and stood up. ‘Ja, I know it’s not usual, hey. But this boy is very intelligent and nobody around here seems to know anything about this native who is missing. Frikkie Botha is in hospital with a broken jaw and bandages around his nose and face, and the doctor says he can’t talk for at least two days. He’s the only person who can tell us anything about this Zulu, except, of course, Tom here.’

  ‘I don’t think a seven-year-old boy’s testimony would be accepted in a court of law,’ Meneer Prinsloo protested.

  ‘Who said anything about a court of law? I have a corpse with no face, a lynching on my hands and a charge of indecent assault from you involving a farm boy who’s missing from your premises. I have no idea who did this lynching or even if the two crimes are connected. I also know nothing about the missing Zulu you are reporting.’ He glanced down at me. ‘Tom is the only one who knows anything about him. It would be most helpful if you would cooperate with the authorities on the matter, Meneer.’

  I sensed that the farm boy mentioned was Mattress who was somehow involved because of what Pissy had said to Mevrou, and now Meneer Prinsloo seemed to have reported it to Sergeant Van Niekerk. But otherwise nothing he said made any sense.

  ‘No! I forbid it! The boy is too young,’ Meneer Prinsloo said, flapping his hands and sticking out his great stomach with his trousers pulled high by his braces to halfway up his chest. ‘Absolutely forbid it, you hear? That’s my last word, finish and klaar!’ He turned to me. ‘Go now, boy.’

  Believe you me, I didn’t need to be told twice, but then I remembered the pigs and the cows. ‘The pigs haven’t been fed, Meneer, and the cows must be milked or they’ll burst,’ I said.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk laughed. ‘He is a real farmer. Can you milk a cow, Tom?’

  ‘No, Sir, but I can get some cabbages for the pigs.’

  He turned to ask if either of the black policemen could milk a cow and they both said they could, so he sent them off to do this.

  ‘Come, Tom, I’ll help you feed the pigs.’

  ‘This boy must go to school. Go on, off you go,’ Meneer Prinsloo said, pointing towards The Boys Farm.

  ‘Why don’t I drive him to school in the police van?’ Sergeant Van Niekerk turned to me. ‘How would you like that, Tom?’

  I didn’t know what to do and looked to Meneer Prinsloo for guidance. I would have liked a ride in the police van and I liked Sergeant Van Niekerk a lot.

  ‘Over my dead body!’ Meneer Prinsloo said emphatically. ‘You are not going to interrogate this child alone, he is Government property and under my care.’ I could see things were a bit strained between the two men. Meneer Prinsloo turned to me. ‘Go on, hurry up and go, man,’ he instructed me.

  ‘One more question,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk said, looking straight at the superintendent. ‘Tom, would you recognise Mattress’s feet if you saw them?’

  ‘Ja, Meneer, I think so.’

  ‘You are not showing this boy a dead kaffir’s corpse, you hear?’ Meneer Prinsloo shouted. ‘Genoeg!’

  ‘A photograph. I will arrange for a photograph to be taken of the victim’s feet,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk said calmly. ‘Until we have a positive identification of the victim, we don’t know if we’ve got two cases or only one.’

  ‘Go on, off!’ Meneer Prinsloo shouted down at me. He was red in the face and snorting like a wounded buffalo.

  I set off at a run and heard Sergeant Van Niekerk call, ‘Thank you, Tom, you’ve been a big help.’

  Ja, I thought, thanks for nothing. You not the one who’s going to get Meneer Prinsloo’s extra-long cane sjambok when you get back from school. Him running at me, whack! whack! whack! Chinese writing on my bum that won’t go away for a month!

  I hadn’t seen the last of Sergeant Jan van Niekerk. Halfway through the morning at school the headmaster Meneer Van Niekerk came to our classroom and told our teacher he wanted to see me and to come with him to his office. Now I had a second Meneer Van Niekerk involved with me and both on the same day, that was pretty frightening stuff. When we got to his office who should be there but Sergeant Van Niekerk, who was the younger of the two brothers.

  ‘Howzit?’ he said with a smile. ‘We meet again, hey, Tom.’

  ‘Sit, Tom,’ the headmaster said, indicating a straight-backed chair. I knew you weren’t supposed to sit in front of a headmaster, especially in his office where you only went
if there was some trouble.

  ‘Can I stand, please, Sir?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Tom, we want you to sit, this could take a bit of time.’

  I sat on the chair but my feet couldn’t quite reach the floor and I wasn’t comfortable at all with two Van Niekerks, a policeman and a headmaster, facing me. I knew I must be in some terrible trouble but I couldn’t think what it might be. Especially as Sergeant Van Niekerk had been so nice to me only this morning at The Boys Farm.

  The police sergeant reached for a big envelope that lay on the headmaster’s desk and from it he withdrew a black-and-white photograph. ‘I want you to look very carefully at this photograph, Tom. Tell me if you recognise anything.’

  He handed it to me and there, staring me in the face, were Mattress’s big platform feet. ‘It’s Mattress!’ I said, looking at the snap of his feet.

  ‘Are you sure now, Tom?’ the sergeant asked.

  I was certain. You couldn’t mistake Mattress’s platform feet with the cracks in the side. ‘Yes, Meneer. Does that mean he’s dead? Mattress is dead?’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk didn’t answer at once. ‘If they are his feet, then yes, son,’ he said softly.

  I couldn’t help myself, I started to sob. Mattress was the best friend Tinker and I had and they’d gone and killed him stone dead. They let me blub for quite a while because I couldn’t stop, even if I wanted. Then the headmaster handed me his handkerchief to wipe my eyes and gave me a cup of water.

  When I’d calmed down a bit Sergeant Van Niekerk said to me, ‘Tom, we are going to ask you a few questions, you hear? The headmaster here is my big boetie and he’s here to see that you are not harassed and he is also a witness to our conversation. Do you agree to talk to me?’

  ‘Yes, Sir . . . but I’ll get into trouble, Sir.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘With Meneer Prinsloo, Sir.’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk looked at his brother and rolled his eyes. ‘Prinsloo’ is all he said.

  The headmaster looked at me. ‘Never you mind about that, Tom. I will be writing down everything, there will be nothing to get into trouble about.’

  The headmaster obviously didn’t know very much about The Boys Farm where you were always guilty and innocence wasn’t something anyone believed possible anyway. If you didn’t do something, then the sjambok was thought to be a down payment on some future crime you were certain to commit.