Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘You’re right, man!’ Gawie said, quickly realising that if we went back and Adolf Hitler was just a smouldering roast chicken carcass, then we were also as good as dead meat.

  The road to town was about 400 yards from the other side of the creek, so we waded over again with Gawie carrying the red book, and me carrying Tinker. They must have made books very strong in the olden days because except for the burnt corner and it being a bit swelled up from being wet, the stitching still held together perfectly, and the gold on the edges of the pages was still there to be seen.

  When we got to the road we discovered we had problems. Not at first, but starting to come down the road were bakkies from the surrounding farms who must have seen the smoke from the big fire and were coming to help to put it out. So we had to hide in ditches and behind trees so they wouldn’t see us, and I had to tell Tinker not to bark. When we were in one ditch we could hear someone driving towards us with a siren going and we saw it was Sergeant Van Niekerk in the police van.

  ‘What now?’ Gawie asked.

  I had to think fast. ‘Mevrou Booysens at the Impala Café,’ I said, only because I couldn’t think of anybody else except Meneer Van Niekerk, the school headmaster, but it was Saturday and no school.

  ‘Who?’

  We were back to one word. ‘You don’t know her, but she’ll be good,’ I reassured him. From time to time I’d pop in after school to say hello to Mevrou Booysens. But not too often because she’d always give me a big welcome, and when I had to run to catch up with the crocodile going back to The Boys Farm, she’d give me a red sucker. I didn’t want her to think I was only coming for the sucker. Which was a bit true in any case, but I really liked her and Marie, her daughter, who was not yet completely a nurse, but nearly, and she would sometimes be home from the hospital in Tzaneen. Marie would make a big fuss of Tinker and give me a kiss. I was collecting quite a lot of kisses, ten of them, but only from her, because she said she was now my nooi.

  We made it safely to the Impala Café and Mevrou Booysens was there and also Marie. I told Mevrou Booysens what had happened, then I started to cry, but not because I was scared, which was also true, but because my books had been burned. My precious library that was now only the red book that I’d stolen from under Doctor Van Heerden’s house. Gawie also started to cry, but I think because he was scared about what was going to happen to us.

  Marie put her arm around me and Mevrou Booysens put hers around Gawie. I’d had Marie’s arm around me before, but Gawie probably couldn’t remember if it had ever happened to him, and now he really started to blub. After a while Mevrou Booysens said, ‘I’ve got just the recipe to stop crying in boys and it’s ice-cream with ten toppings!’

  It did the job, alright. Soon Gawie was right as rain, scoffing ice-cream out of his bowl with one leg and guessing what topping he was tasting next. I was eating mine a bit slow because I held the spoon in my left hand, not wanting to show my burnt hand. Marie went and got a wet dishcloth to wipe my dirty face, which she said was as black as a kaffir’s, and then she said, ‘Now your hands,’ and grabbed my right wrist and lifted it from my lap.

  ‘Eina!’ I cried.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she exclaimed. ‘Tom, what have you done to your hand?’

  ‘I burned it when I put it in the fire to get my red book.’

  ‘That’s silly! Now look what you’ve done! Why didn’t you just let it burn?’

  That was the first time I understood that women don’t think like men. ‘Because I couldn’t,’ I said, not knowing what else to say or how to explain.

  ‘This is a bad burn, Tom, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Doctor Van Heerden. I don’t have the right dressings, only a bandage,’ she explained. She must have seen the concern on my face. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t say,’ I whispered.

  ‘Look, Tom, you can’t move your fingers, that’s because the skin on you hand is burned, if it gets infected you could be in all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘We already in all sorts of trouble,’ I sniffed.

  Marie smiled. ‘This could be a lot worse, skattebol.’ She took the spoon and dug into my ice-cream that was hardly touched, making sure there was some topping on it. ‘Open your mouth or all the ice-cream is going to melt,’ she said.

  How could a burnt hand that hurt a lot be as bad as the trouble we were already in? Going to Pretoria was the worst thing that could happen to a person. This was another thing perhaps a woman wouldn’t understand that men would. ‘Only if you don’t tell him about the red book,’ I said.

  ‘What’s so special about that book, Tom? Why mustn’t the doctor know?’

  We were outside The Boys Farm so you couldn’t tell a lie. ‘I stole it,’ I said softly, not looking at her.

  ‘From Doctor Van Heerden?’

  ‘From a box under his house where Tinker and me slept the night I cut my finger.’

  ‘They should be ashamed!’ she exclaimed. I wasn’t sure who she meant, but then she said, ‘It’s okay, you’ve already been punished enough, God just burned your hand for stealing that book, now it’s yours for keeps.’

  That sounded all right, but I knew the world didn’t work like that. ‘You won’t tell him, will you?’

  ‘I swear it on a stack of Bibles,’ she said, raising her hand to her shoulder. ‘But what are you going to say when he asks how you burnt your hand?’

  ‘Can I tell him I tried to rescue a book but couldn’t?’

  Marie brought her forefinger to her lip and tilted her head so she could think properly. ‘Mmm, that’s only half a lie, that’s good because it could have happened like that quite easily.’

  I turned to speak to Mevrou Booysens. ‘Can Mevrou look after the book while we gone, please?’ I asked. ‘It has to dry out.’

  ‘Of course, Tom. This book looks very important, we’ll put it near the stove. There’s a nice warm place where we dry the dish towels.’ She turned to Gawie. ‘Maybe some lunch while Tom is at the doctor? How about a mixed grill?’

  My mouth fell open at the exact same time as Gawie’s. A mixed grill cost two and sixpence! I’d never heard of anyone who’d had one. You get everything in it – sausage, chops, liver, bacon, tomato, a fried egg, chips and all the tomato sauce you wanted. The Government gives you one pound when you leave The Boys Farm when you’re sixteen and every big kid always says the same thing, ‘I’m going to have a mixed grill,’ and then they tell you what’s in it. Gawie was going to have one and he was now only eleven and I had to go to Doctor Van Heerden. I can’t say I was too happy about that, but my hand was really hurting now and I don’t suppose I could have managed to hold the knife.

  All of a sudden Mevrou Booysens clapped her hands together. ‘Magtig! I must call The Boys Farm, they’ll be thinking that you’re two charred-up corpses and a little dog corpse, and they’ll be looking for you all over the place.’

  ‘They probably don’t even know they missing,’ Marie said, going all sarcastic. ‘That place just doesn’t care about the children, they think they just the Government’s kids.’

  ‘We saw Sergeant Van Niekerk going out, maybe you could talk to him first, Mevrou?’ I asked, pleadingly.

  She seemed to understand. ‘Ja, that’s the best idea, Tom. I’ll ask him to come to the phone.’

  Marie, Tinker (who’d had a nice piece of meat and a bone) and me set out for Doctor Van Heerden’s house. It was just like last time with all the farmers and their wives sitting with boxes and baskets of this and that they’d brought. One farmer had brought a pumpkin you couldn’t lift in one go and Doctor Van Heerden would have taken a year to eat it all, even if he liked pumpkin, which I didn’t. The old dog Helmut was nowhere to be seen.

  This time there was no waiting. Marie just barged in when someone walked out, pulling me in with her. She went straight to the same lady that had been there before. You could see the lady didn’t recognise me because it was now three years and I’d grown a lot bigger, nearly four
inches. ‘Good afternoon, Nurse,’ Marie began, ‘I am a registered hospital nurse, and this boy has a badly burned hand and must see the doctor at once.’

  Then to my surprise the lady said, ‘With him it’s always hands.’ So I was wrong, she did remember. ‘What have you done now?’ she asked.

  ‘It was a bushfire, Mevrou. What happened to the old dog?’

  ‘Ag, it was his arthritis, he couldn’t walk any more so the doctor gave him an injection.’ I knew I couldn’t do that to Tinker even if she was old. I’d just carry her everywhere. ‘Let me see your hand, child?’ I showed her my hand.

  ‘Magtig! It’s not so good.’ She looked up at Marie. ‘You can take him straight in.’ She turned back to me. ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘Tom Fitzsaxby, Mevrou.’

  ‘Oh yes, now I remember, blood all over you and you couldn’t hardly walk, you were with the little dog.’

  ‘She’s waiting outside, Mevrou.’

  She rose slowly from her desk with her hand on her hip, went to the surgery door and opened it. ‘Tom Fitzsaxby, Doctor. The boy with the chopper from The Boys Farm, he’s done it to his hand again.’ She turned and motioned with her head that Marie and me should enter.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ Doctor Van Heerden greeted me. ‘This time you bring with you a pretty lady and not so much blood, eh?’

  ‘This is Miss Marie Booysens, Doctor,’ I said, remembering my manners.

  Doctor Van Heerden chuckled. ‘We are old friends, Tom. I delivered Miss Booysens. Though I don’t suppose she remembers much about our first meeting. She has a fine mother.’

  Marie laughed and you could see she was accustomed to doctors, her being almost a nurse and all. ‘Tom has burned his hand rather badly, Doctor, and he’s being very brave.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about Helmut,’ I said.

  Doctor Van Heerden looked up in surprise and his eyes brightened. ‘You are a very different kind of boy, Tom Fitzsaxby. Thank you, he was a very good friend. Now let me see your hand.’

  I showed him my hand and he said, ‘Mmm, nasty.’ He looked up. ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘I tried to grab a book out of the fire,’ I replied, telling our agreed-upon half-lie. With a person as nice as Doctor Van Heerden I knew I should have told him about stealing his book, but I just couldn’t, yet.

  ‘A book? How did it get into the fire in the first place? Wait, I’ll give you an injection to stop the pain.’

  I didn’t have to answer his question, and he put in the injection and said we had to wait a bit. Then he said, ‘The book you tried to rescue from the fire, how did it get there and why was it so important?’

  So the whole story came out about my books being burnt because they were in English, and Miss Phillips and me doing lessons in English because that was what I was supposed to be.

  ‘Who would do such a thing as burn books?’ he asked, shaking his head.

  I shrugged because now my hand wasn’t hurting all of a sudden. ‘I don’t know but I think it was because of what the Dominee said in church last Sunday, Doctor.’ I had to tell him about the book called The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and how it was the most evil book that had ever been written and how the English didn’t burn their evil books like Adolf Hitler did.

  Doctor Van Heerden was silent for a moment, then he sighed and shook his head. ‘That stupid, stupid man.’ I thought he meant Charles Darwin. He reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Look at me, Tom,’ he said. ‘Just remember this, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is one of the most important books that has ever been written!’

  ‘As important as the Bible?’ I asked, thinking that maybe the Dominee was wrong and that the devil had written his own big evil book that now matched the Bible.

  Doctor Van Heerden laughed. ‘Different, but in its own way, just as important. You see, the knowledge of science and the history of God don’t always coincide, we must remember to keep an open mind, Tom.’ Then he said something just the opposite to the Dominee. ‘Read, always read. Read everything! In books there is every opinion on everything mankind has ever thought, but in men there are only the opinions and beliefs they have acquired or have been persuaded to adopt. Find out for yourself what you believe and what you think. Never listen to dogma.’

  Well, I have to tell you, there wasn’t much of that conversation I understood at the time. I knew I would have to look up ‘dogma’ for a start. Then I remembered I no longer owned a dictionary. And then Marie went and spilled the beans! ‘Doctor, Tom here has something to tell you about a book of yours,’ she said, smiling.

  All of a sudden I went cold inside and hot in the face. I was learning about women fast, and one thing for sure, they couldn’t keep a secret, even if they promised on a stack of Bibles.

  Doctor Van Heerden started to look closely at my burned hand that was now properly numb. ‘Oh, tell me?’ he said. ‘A book of mine?’

  I must admit, I was taken by complete surprise, and I stuttered and stumbled and told him how me and Tinker and Helmut had slept under the house that time he’d stitched my finger. I confessed I’d stolen the red book with the gold edging on the pages. His first words were, ‘I really must do something about those people at The Boys Farm. We are a close community and our children should not suffer neglect.’ He was talking mostly to Marie. He turned to me. ‘Tom, my dear brother died in a motorcar accident twenty years ago, those were his student books. He was a lawyer and I am a doctor. There was nothing in the packing case that interested me. I’m glad you found a book you wanted, what was its title?’

  ‘It was the one he rescued from the fire and burned his hand,’ Marie interjected. ‘It’s very important to him and we drying it out for him in the kitchen at the café.’

  ‘Abolition of Slavery 1834,’ I answered.

  ‘And you’ve read this book?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘I can now recite 113 pages, Doctor, that’s four chapters,’ I said, trying to be modest because I was secretly proud of what I’d done with the red book.

  ‘Magtig, you are an extraordinary child,’ he said.

  What he didn’t know was never mind the extraordinary, I was the one who was in the deepest shit it was possible to be in. In Pretoria there would be no more books, only the sjambok, and only if I was lucky. Starting fires that burn down pigsties and dairies is certain to be the death sentence. They were not going to believe it wasn’t me at the time. Why would I burn my own books? ‘Because you’ve already read them and they were in English and evil!’ they’d say. ‘Those evil books have put the devil in you, Voetsek. It’s just the sort of thing an English person planning sabotage would do!’ Having Gawie with me wouldn’t help either. They’d say it was just a clever trick by me to say he was also to blame and he was an Afrikaner, so how could it be sabotage, because an Afrikaner wouldn’t burn down his own country? All of a sudden I’d be responsible for kidnapping Gawie and that’s the death sentence again for sure! Two death sentences in one go. ‘You think now that the British are winning the war you can get away with this, hey, Voetsek? Well, we’ll soon see about that.

  Bring the rope, man!’

  Doctor Van Heerden started cleaning my hand with a saline solution and iodine, and then put sulphur paste on it and bandaged it. While he was doing it he asked if I could tell him what was on the opening page to Chapter Two in the red book. This was pretty easy because I could see the words plain as anything. So I told him and he said, ‘Quite remarkable,’ and that I should pay attention to the punctuation, that commas and full stops were very important in a person’s reading.

  Then he said, ‘I know Mevrou Van Schalkwyk at The Boys Farm was once a nurse and she can probably change this dressing every day, but how about you doing it, Marie?’

  As it turned out, the reason Marie was home was because she had ten days off to study for her final nurse exams, so she agreed. She also had to make my hand do some exercises that were just opening and closing the fingers every day f
or five minutes before she did the dressing. It was agreed I could go to the Impala Café after school every day and on Sunday she’d do it after church.

  The phone rang and the receptionist mevrou opened the door and said it was Sergeant Van Niekerk on the other end. The doctor picked up his phone and said, ‘Hello, Sergeant!’ and listened for a few moments and said, ‘This is a branchline and the whole district is probably listening in by now, can you come to the surgery?’ Sergeant Van Niekerk must have said ‘All right’, because the doctor said ‘Good’ and put down the phone.

  Doctor Van Heerden had to see all the other people waiting outside, so he told the receptionist mevrou to take us through to wait in the parlour. What a room this turned out to be. It had a big carpet on the floor and lots of big chairs you could sit on and a large wireless with a gramophone inside it. In one corner stood a grandfather clock that was something I’d read about but never seen. On one wall was a large painting of mountains with clouds in the sky and the bush underneath. On the other wall were two coloured photographs in round black frames of what I think was Doctor Van Heerden’s mother and father, because if you sort of squinted a bit you could see bits of him in their faces. There was also a piano. I’d never been inside a proper person’s house before, never mind a high-up one like Doctor Van Heerden’s. Against the back of the chairs there were these little squares of white lace, so when you sat in one you had to be careful not to put your head on the square in case you dirtied it. I could hear Mevrou saying already, ‘So now I heard you went and dirtied one of the good doctor’s white squares of lace, Voetsek! Take six.’ Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! ‘Maybe next time you’ve got some proper manners in high-up people’s houses!’

  It took ages for Sergeant Van Niekerk to arrive, by which time the doctor had nearly finished with the farmers. To my surprise Gawie was with him and we sat and chatted until the doctor could come and join us. Chatted wasn’t exactly the right way to describe it. Gawie and me were shitting ourselves while Sergeant Van Niekerk did the chatting. I was very sad to hear the pigsty was now roast pork because I liked the pigs a lot, especially the old sow. She had really been Tinker’s mother. I was relieved to hear that while Mattress’s hut had also burnt down, the dairy was saved and the fire had finally stopped when it reached the ploughed field where the new potato crop was soon to be planted. We’d all been cutting up seed potatoes so that there was an eye in each piece. The hostel building was still there and Meneer Prinsloo’s chickens were safe, which meant Adolf Hitler with his coming-alongnicely tail feathers was saved. If the fire had gotten him I’d have had the whole Chinese dictionary written across my bum.