Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘It’s Lieutenant Van Niekerk, Meneer Van Schalkwyk, you’ve been away a long time. Now be sensible, man. I want to search only the home of Mevrou Johanna Katrina van Schalkwyk, that’s all.’ He turned, appealing to the gathered Van Schalkwyk clan. ‘The rest of you we won’t disturb, you can go back to sleep.’

  ‘What you looking for, hey?’ Frans van Schalkwyk asked. Through all this he was the only one to speak, the rest just stood slack-jawed and wary, not moving away.

  ‘Canned-fruit jars,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk replied.

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then the whole Van Schalkwyk clan burst into laughter.

  ‘Canned-fruit jars!’ Frans cried. ‘What the fok are you talking about?’ Then he turned to the Van Schalkwyk women standing together. ‘Does Johanna make canned fruit?’ he asked.

  Several of the women shook their heads, then one woman, an old crone much older than the rest, said, ‘Not canned fruit, only pickled pork, she sells it at the church bazaar. They rubbish, pigs’ feet, but some townpeople like it.’

  This caused another bout of laughter. Pickled pork trotters were obviously something the clan didn’t think much of. The laughter lifted the tension somewhat and Frans van Schalkwyk turned back to the sergeant. ‘Only pickled pork,’ he repeated.

  ‘Ja, that’s what I meant, we want to see this pickled pork.’

  ‘She’s sick,’ Frans declared suddenly.

  ‘That’s okay, man, we won’t disturb her,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk said, gaining confidence. ‘I don’t suppose she keeps her pickled pork in the bedroom?’ he added.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk later confessed to me, ‘Tom, I was shitting myself. I was gambling that after all this time and the fact that they didn’t know why we were there, they’d clean forgotten about Exhibit A in the canned-fruit jar. That is, of course, if it was still in her possession.’

  ‘But pickled pork? They could have twigged, guessed what you were searching for.’

  ‘Ja, that, I admit, maybe. But the old woman said it first. I said canned-fruit jars. I just got lucky with the pickled pork part. The Van Schalkwyks, they make the best smoked honeyed hams in the Northern Transvaal, so when the woman said pickled pork, me saying we wanted to see the canned-fruit jars made some sort of sense. After that it was easy, man. I’m not married to a nurse for nothing.’

  ‘Meneer Van Schalkwyk, we don’t want to make trouble, but you see we got here a medical problem. Someone who bought Mevrou Van Schalkwyk’s pickled pork, maybe at the church bazaar, got sick soon after eating one pig’s foot. Doctor Van Heerden sent what was left in the jar to the pathology lab in Pietersburg. They still not absolutely certain, you understand? But now we must have the rest of the jars for testing. It may be this new pork poisoning that’s going around.’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk laughed as he told me. ‘Tom, I don’t know what is pork poisoning or even if a person can get it. “It’s only a routine search,” I told them.’

  ‘Ja, and you bring three policemen and kill my dog for a fokken routine search?’ Frans van Schalkwyk snarled.

  ‘The dog attacked one of my men. Listen, this is nonsense, I don’t want to have to arrest you, you hear?’ At this the Van Schalkwyk males all started to laugh and Sergeant Van Niekerk heard the sound of several rifle bolts being pulled back and shotgun barrels snapping shut. ‘They all stood there in their nightshirts and their dirty bare feet, the women too, you can see they also dirty and their hair is unwashed, they like wild people, man. It’s filth standing there, holding guns and all the women have no teeth! I can tell the three young policemen with me, they shit scared.’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame them,’ I said to the sergeant.

  ‘Then a miracle happened, Tom,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk recalled. ‘The old crone stepped forward, she’s munching her gums and her hairy chin is nearly touching her nose. “Give them the jars! That one is no good! Your ousis is a drunk and she’s always made trouble. Now she’s poisoning the pork with her dirty ways, she’s not boiling the jars. For fifteen years it’s only women and children here. Do you want to go back to Pretoria? I don’t want you to be hanged for killing a policeman!” She pointed to the smallest of the houses. “Not for that one! Now listen to your ouma, Frans!” she squawked.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘Ja, man, the old woman was the baas. After that they led us to Mevrou’s house and surrounded it while we entered. “Go in, she won’t wake up, she’s too drunk,” Frans van Schalkwyk said to me. “But you only take the pickled pork, you hear? Nothing else.” ’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk shrugged. ‘In the end, Tom, it was as easy as that. Behind three-dozen big canned-fruit jars of pickled pork we found this small half-jar that is Exhibit A. It was covered in dust and looked as if it hadn’t been moved in years. I carried it out, inside my shirt, in case her fingerprints are on the glass under the dust. I also take two jars of pickled pork trotters with me, so they won’t see what’s inside my shirt. I hide Exhibit A inside the glove box in case someone takes a look in the police van. Then I go back into the house. We didn’t even wake Mevrou up. You could hear her snoring in her bedroom. She’s sawing down a whole forest. So I open the door and there she lies, like a great whale lying washed up on the strand. She’s sprawled crossways on the big brass bed with her nightdress pulled up round her waist, her fat legs over the edge. Everything up her nightdress is showing. Then I think “fingerprints”. I go back to the van and get the equipment – the ink pad and paper – and I go inside and she’s still snoring, so I take her thumb-print and her forefinger, two good prints. I put the search warrant in her hand and close her fat fist tight around it, and she’s still snoring like a sawmill and I wonder what she’ll think when she wakes up and she’s got two fingers turned black all of a sudden.’ He laughed. ‘Nobody can say later I didn’t serve the warrant to her in person. Then when we leave and Frans van Schalkwyk shouts out, “Don’t think you’ve heard the last of this, you killed my dog, you fokken bastards!”’

  ‘Oh, that reminds me, Sergeant. Do you know where we might get a good Alsatian pup? It’s just that, you know, after a while they may realise what we were looking for. For instance, Mevrou could alert them. If we deliver a puppy together with a note to say the pickled pork got the all-clear, it might just throw them off the track.’

  Sergeant Van Niekerk thought for a moment, ‘Ja, I know someone, maybe their bitch is having pups.’ He looked at me. ‘You know, Tom, you weren’t born yesterday, hey?’

  The next stop on the witness trail was Pissy Vermaak who had recently opened for business in Fordsburg, an inner-city suburb with a high proportion of Cape Coloured and Indian people. It was the centre of an alternative city culture rapidly growing up in Johannesburg. I’d been with Bobby from the basement at Polliack’s to Uncle Joe’s Café, an establishment that featured African and coloured jazz groups and singers such as Dollar Brand and Kippie Moeketsi. I’d also been with Pirrou for the same reason and, as well, to eat at an Indian restaurant, The Bombay Bus, nearly as famous for its curry as the renowned Turkeys in the centre of the city.

  The Lonely Hunter, Pissy’s new bathhouse and members-only club, was only one street back from Uncle Joe’s Café and sported its name on a small blue neon sign, at the time considered pretty posh signage. But my visit was at eleven in the morning when the club was shut; it only opened in the mid-afternoon. I’d called previously, asking Pissy if he’d visit me in my office. He’d insisted that he dearly wanted me to see his club and it seemed churlish to refuse. Pissy agreed to wait for me in the reception area. I’d braced myself at the prospect of meeting the odious Meneer Prinsloo, telling myself it was all in a day’s work. But childhood fears never go away and as I entered the premises I could feel my heart pounding and my mouth going dry. Pissy, true to his word, was waiting – seated prim and cross-legged on a bright purple lounge in the reception area, all very modern in the latest Danish-style light-coloured pinewood.

  ‘Howsit, Tom!’ he called,
rising to greet me as I entered. ‘Welcome to the Lonely Hunter, let me show you around, man.’

  ‘Kobus, we’ve got quite a bit to get through,’ I replied hesitantly.

  ‘Not Kobus, Tom. Now it’s Pissy for keeps. Maybe I’ll change it by deed poll, hey. In the club business Pissy is a good name.’ He took me by the elbow. ‘Ag, come, it won’t take long, you must see where my copper bonus went, hey. To make a place like this, it swallows money,’ he declared proudly.

  Pissy’s club was surprisingly well done, all in much the same taste as the reception area. It comprised a bar where patrons could be seated, an area extending from the bar with a dozen tables where drinkers could sit or order à la carte from the modern professional kitchen, a small gymnasium, men’s locker room, toilets and a not very large steam room.

  ‘The private one is much larger and is at the back, like that one in Pretoria, it’s got a side entrance and you must announce yourself and your club number. All very hush-hush, you understand? We don’t want rubbish.’

  After the inspection tour he ushered me into a small private sitting room. Upon entering I received the shock of my life. To a small child grown-ups always look big. Meneer Prinsloo was a huge and vastly obese man whose looming, stomach-propelled presence had been the stuff of nightmares when I’d been a small boy. Seated on a small lounge sat what was certainly once a tall man, huddled, pencil-thin, clothed only in some sort of hastily fashioned nappy. Flaps of semitranslucent excess skin fell in scallops from his exposed body and limbs. His head was completely bald but for a few nascent tufts of downy hair and his face was beardless and the colour of putty, but had two great jowls hanging from his near-skeletal skull. His sharp fleshless nose assumed the appearance of a beak and his tiny agate eyes darted around the room, not able to focus for a moment on anything. They seemed to be the only objects in his pale, inert frame that possessed life. What was once his gargantuan, braces-busting stomach was now reduced to a large apron of skin resting on, and almost concealing, the dirty towelling nappy. The bones of his legs traced down to large, splayed feet with curved, yellowed untrimmed toenails extending beyond his toes. In fact, that was exactly it! Meneer Prinsloo had turned into a scrawny giant rooster, plucked and ready to be dropped into a steaming cauldron in hell, chicken soup for demons and devils.

  ‘Cancer and then a stroke on the right side, then later two more,’ Pissy said nonchalantly. ‘Nice retirement present, hey?’

  I turned to Pissy and spoke in a half-whisper. ‘Can he hear us?’

  ‘I dunno, man. Maybe yes, maybe no.’

  ‘Does he understand what’s going on?’

  Pissy shrugged, indifferent. ‘Who knows, man.’

  ‘Pissy, shouldn’t he be in hospital?’

  Pissy thought for a moment. ‘He’ll be dead in a month, the doctor says so, it’s cancer of everything, man.’

  ‘And you want to take care of him?’

  Pissy shrugged. ‘He’s dying, man, what can a person do?’

  The room reeked of the pungent smell of urine and the pervasive smell of excrement. I sniffed. ‘And you keep him here in this little room?’

  ‘Ag, it’s the cancer, it smells like that,’ Pissy explained, then added, ‘He lives in a shed in the backyard. I’ve got a kaffir girl. She changes his nappy and feeds him. Sometimes she washes him, but I think it hurts him when you touch his skin.’ Pissy looked at me with a pained expression. ‘I do the best by him that I can.’

  ‘Pissy, why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Well, why have you shown him to me?’

  Pissy looked momentarily confused. ‘I thought you’d like to see what happened to him, Tom. Like it’s your sweet revenge, man.’

  I shook my head. ‘Bullshit! Pissy, you’re lying to me again.’

  ‘No, Tom, I swear it! You not the first one.’

  ‘Pissy, what the fuck are you trying to say?’

  Pissy grinned. ‘It’s like, you know, my publicity campaign.’ Then he added, ‘It happened clean by mistake.’

  ‘Your publicity campaign? Who is? Meneer Prinsloo?’

  ‘Tom, you right, this room smells of shit. Come, we go sit at the bar, hey? Maybe a drink, a beer, Scotch, brandy, we got anything you want. I can make you an American cocktail, a Manhattan or a martini?’

  Seated at the bar, Pissy poured me a beer and a Scotch for himself, then came from behind the bar and took the stool beside me. ‘Geluk! Luck!’ he said as we touched glasses. He took a small sip from his Scotch and placed it down on the bar. ‘Now let me tell you a story, Tom. About six months ago, one night sitting here at the bar is a lone stranger, that is what we call our private members from the big bathhouse at the back. They say it only to each other. It’s not for public consumption, you understand? He’s a bit drunk and he wants to talk, it’s a Monday night so I’m not so busy at the bar. Then in the conversation he mentions Duiwelskrans where he grew up. I tell him me also, I once lived in that dorp. Then it comes out he was at The Boys Farm about five years before us. “I wonder what happened to that bastard, Prinsloo?” he says. I don’t tell him I know. Then moments later, right in front of my eyes he starts to cry. I reach out and put my hand on his shoulder. “You okay?” I ask. “Ja,” he sniffs, but then it’s on again, he can’t help himself. “I was only ten when he fucked me!” he said, then he cries and cries and it was just lucky the bar was empty. When, after a long time, he stopped, I say to him, “Me also, ou maat! Prinsloo did it to me also.” ’ Pissy looked at me. ‘Then we got really drunk, him and me. So I say to him, “Come, let me show you what happened to Meneer Prinsloo.” It’s late, the club is closed. I take a torch and I take him into the backyard and show him what’s in the shed.’

  ‘Jesus! So you decided to do the same with me. Meneer Prinsloo didn’t rape me! I’m not a victim.’ But, of course, that wasn’t strictly true, I was simply a different kind of victim.

  ‘No, listen a moment, Tom. I know that. But there’s more. You haven’t heard the end of the story.’ He took a fairly hefty slug of Scotch. ‘A week maybe goes past and the lone stranger comes back with a friend who he says wants to be a member. Then he tells me it’s happened to him also at The Boys Farm and can he see Meneer Prinsloo. It’s been six months, now there’s ten already. It’s on the grapevine and then there’s others, not from The Boys Farm, but lone strangers who had the same thing happen to them, only at other institutions, and they also want to see what happens, what God does to a paedophile, they also want revenge.’

  I was shocked. ‘What? You’ve got him on exhibition?’ I pointed in the direction of the private sitting room. ‘In that miserable little room. He sits all day in that room on display?’

  ‘No, normally we only bring him out at night. The kaffir girl brings him to the back door in a wheelbarrow, then her and me, we carry him in.’ Pissy gave a bitter laugh. ‘I told you in the hospital in Bulawayo, he’s someone who knows how to run front of house, a very respectable old man and a good Afrikaner!’

  ‘Pissy, that’s unconscionable behaviour, it . . . it isn’t decent!’ I exclaimed, unable to think of a more reprehensible word.

  ‘Ja, maybe, but who said I was decent? Now I got maybe fifty more members, lone strangers, all because Meneer Prinsloo is sitting in there dying for everyone to see. In the end his front of house paid off big-time, man!’

  ‘You can’t mean that?’

  ‘No, you wrong, Tom, I do! If ten lone strangers have come from The Boys Farm, how many more, hey? How many more little kids like me has he buggered? Tell me, man, do you really think he deserves to die peacefully with clean sheets in a hospital? You know why I really brought him out for you this morning?’

  ‘Yes, you told me, revenge.’

  ‘Ja, that, but also something else.’

  ‘What, Pissy?’

  ‘Tom, I’ve got a life now. People know me. They like me, man. This is my club. To some people I’m an important man. Pissy Vermaak, club owner. It’s only a few more days,
then he’s dead and gone, it’s finish and klaar. I’ve been a lone stranger all my life, now when he’s dead, who knows, maybe I can forget. But first can you do me a big favour? I dunno if he understands, but I think so. I hope so.’ He pointed towards the room. ‘The main reason why I have him in there is because the doctor said sometimes they have these strokes but they can still know what’s going on around them. Inside their brain there’s nothing wrong. I want the dirty bastard to see his victims and to suffer.’

  ‘So, what’s the favour?’ I asked, curious despite my extreme disquiet at what he was telling me.

  ‘Will you tell him you going to have a murder trial for the pig boy? It’s all going to come out about him! The whole world is going to know what he did to helpless little boys. If you do this for me then I promise I won’t put him on exhibition anymore and he can die in a hospital in peace.’ Pissy gave me a wan smile. He sounded tired and looked a lot older than his thirty-one years on this earth.

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t do that, he wasn’t directly involved in the murder.’

  ‘Oh, yes he was!’ Pissy suddenly protested. ‘It was him who also encouraged Mevrou and her brothers to do it. He was afraid people would find out about what he was doing to me! He told me himself, only two years ago, before he got sick and got the strokes. He said he loved me, he couldn’t live without me, he couldn’t take the risk people would find out!’

  ‘And you will testify to this under oath in court?’

  ‘Ja, of course.’

  ‘But remember in Bulawayo you said you wouldn’t cooperate.’

  ‘Tom, I didn’t know then what I know now. You know, I really thought that old man loved me. How can a man be so stupid, hey?’

  ‘Pissy, in affairs of the heart there’s no such thing as stupid, the need to be loved paralyses every sense except our emotional reactions. We will do almost anything and believe almost anything to be loved,’ I said, trying to comfort him.