The Power of One (4 page)

“Death to all Englishmen in South Africa, the fatherland!” the jury chorused.

The Judge looked down at me. “We won't kill you tonight, Pisskop. But when Hitler comes your days are numbered, you hear?”

“Yes, sir. When will that be, sir?” I asked.

“Soon!” He stepped from the bed and, placing his huge hand over the top of my head, he turned me toward the dormitory door and gave me a swift kick up the bum that sent me sprawling headlong across the polished floor. I could smell the wax polish on the floorboards and then I got to my feet and ran.

Back in my own dormitory the little kids leaped out of bed, crowding around me, demanding to know what had happened. Too upset to mind my tongue, I sniffed out the story of the swastika and the blood oath and my threatened demise upon the arrival of Hitler.

An eight-year-old named Danie Coetzee shook his head solemnly. “Pisskop, you are in deep shit, man,” he said.

“Who is this person called Adolf Hitler who is coming to get Pisskop?” Flap-lips de Jaager asked.

It was apparent nobody knew the answer until Danie Coetzee said, “He's probably the new headmaster.”

There had been some talk among the kids the previous term about the headmaster and his “drinking problem.” I had wondered at the time what a drinking problem was. Obviously it was something pretty bad or the huge, morose man we all feared wouldn't be leaving.

One of the kids started to chant softly, “Pisskop's in trouble... Pisskop's in trouble...” The others quickly took up the chant which grew louder and louder. I placed my hands over my ears to try to stop it.

“Still!” The dormitory rang to the command. Mevrou stood at the doorway, her huge body filling the door frame.

“We was just talking, Mevrou,” Danie Coetzee said. As the eldest of the small kids he assumed the position of spokesman.

“You know that talking after lights out is
verbode,
Coetzee.”

Danie Coetzee was left standing at the end of my bed as the others tiptoed back to their beds, “Ja, Mevrou. Sorry, Mevrou.” His voice sounded small and afraid.

“Bend over the bed, man,” Mevrou instructed. The cane cut through the air in a blur as she planted it into the seat of Coetzee's pajamas. He let out a fearful yelp, and, holding his bum with both hands, hopped up and down. Without further ado, Mevrou left the dormitory. For a moment there wasn't a sound. Then Danie Coetzee, on the edge of tears, blurted out, “You will pay for this, you blery
pisskop, rooinek!”

I waited until everyone was asleep and then crept quietly to the window. The full moon brought a soft sheen to the leaves of the grapefruit trees, which seemed to shimmer in the ghosted light. Granpa Chook's headless snake made a silver loop in the moonlight, a beautiful and unexpected decoration on the branch of the cassia tree. “I didn't cry. They'll never make me cry again!” I said to the moon. Then I returned to my bed. It was the loneliest moment that had ever been.

The following morning Granpa Chook's cover was blown. Like all kaffir chickens he was an early riser. Before the six o'clock wake-up bell went, the whole dormitory had awakened to his raucous crowing. I awoke, startled out of a deep sleep, to see him perched on the windowsill nearest my bed, his long scrawny neck stretched in a mighty rendition of “Cockle-doodle-doooo!” Then he cocked his head to one side, gave a tiny squawk, and, from the window, flew onto my iron bed head. Stretching his long neck toward me almost to the point of losing his balance, he gave my ear a gentle peck.

The kids raced from their beds to surround me. “It's an old kaffir chicken come to visit Pisskop,” Flap-lips de Jaager yelled excitedly.

Granpa Chook, imperious on the bed head, fixed them with a beady stare. “He is mine,” I said defiantly. “He is my friend.”

Well! You should have heard them carry on. Danie Coetzee, temporarily forgetting his revenge for the caning the previous night, chortled, “Don't be stupid, man, nobody has a kaffir chicken for a friend!”

“I do, he can do tricks and everything.”

“No, he can't! He's a dumb kaffir chicken. Wait till the Judge hears about Pisskop's new friend,” Flap-lips de Jaager volunteered, and everyone laughed.

The wake-up bell went, which meant Mevrou would arrive in a minute or two, and so we all scrambled back into bed to await her permission to get up. I barely had time to push Granpa Chook through the window into the orchard and climb back into bed when her huge form loomed through the door.

Mevrou paced the length of the dormitory, her
sjambok
hanging from a loop on the black leather belt of her dark blue uniform. She stopped as she reached my bed, whipped off the blanket, and examined the dry mattress.

“Humph!” she snorted, dropping the blanket onto the floor. I jumped from my bed and stood beside it. She ignored me and turned slowly to address the dormitory. “I am warning you,
hinders,
if I hear you talking after lights out again, my
sjambok
will talk to all of you, you hear?”

“Ja,
Mevrou,” we chorused.

Suddenly her eyes grew large and seemed almost to pop out of her head. “Pisskop! There is chicken shit on your pillow!”

I looked down at my pillow in horror: between two lines of its mattress ticking cover, Granpa Chook had left his green and white calling card.

“Explain, man!” Mevrou roared.

No explanation but the truth was possible. Shaking with terror, I told her about Granpa Chook.

Mevrou glowered at me, and, undoing the buckle of her leather belt, she slipped the cane from it. “Pisskop, I think you are sick in the head, like your poor mother. First you come here and you piss in your bed every night. Then you come back and you fill it with chicken shit!” She pointed to the end of the bed where Danie Coetzee had taken his medicine the previous night. “Bend over,” she commanded.

She blasted me four strokes of the
sjambok
Biting back the tears, I forced myself not to grab my bum by clamping my hands tightly between my thighs and hunching my shoulders. This also seemed to stop me shaking.

What a shit of a day already!

“Clean up your pillow and bring this devil's chicken to the kitchen door after breakfast, you hear?” At the door she turned and faced us. “Go to the showers now,” she commanded.

Granpa Chook and I were in a terrible jam, all right. After breakfast I slipped out of the hostel to find him. He was still in the old orchard, clucking and scratching around looking for worms. I produced a slice of bread I'd saved at breakfast and, while breaking it up into bits small enough for him to swallow, explained the latest disaster to him. So much for my resolution not to cry. I could feel the tears running down my cheeks.

After Granpa Chook had had his breakfast I picked him up and, fighting my way through the khakiweed and blackjack, I took him to the edge of the orchard to a low corrugated iron fence that marked the hostel boundary. Standing on tiptoe, I looked over the fence. My heart gave a leap; in the distance I could see three kaffir huts with smoke rising from a fire. For sure they'd keep kaffir chickens, and Granpa Chook could board with them.

Considerably cheered, I explained this new plan to Granpa Chook and then pushed him over the fence. There is a blurred distinction between imagination and reality in a five-year-old child and the new plan, once imagined, was immediately achieved.

Granpa Chook, though, had other ideas. With an indignant squawk and a flap of his wings he was back on my side of the fence. We pantomimed for the next few minutes: over the fence I'd put him and back he'd come. Finally it became clear that the toughest damn chicken in the whole wide world had no intention of deserting his friend, even if his own life was at stake.

We waited at the kitchen door for about ten minutes before Mevrou appeared. “So this is the chicken that shits in your bed, Pisskop?”

“It wasn't on purpose, Mevrou. He's very clean and very clever too.”

“Look who talks of clean! A chicken is a chicken. Who ever heard of a clever chicken?”

“Look, Mevrou, I'll show you.” I quickly drew a circle in the dust and Granpa Chook immediately hopped into it and settled down as though he was laying an egg, which he couldn't of course. “He'll stay in that circle until I say to come out,” I said.

For a moment Mevrou looked impressed, and then she suddenly scowled. “This is just some dumb thing kaffir chickens do that white chickens don't,” she said smugly.

“No, Mevrou!” I begged. “He can do lots of other things too!”

I made Granpa Chook hop around the perimeter of the circle on one leg, going “Squawk” with every hop. I showed her how he would fly onto my shoulder and, at my command, peck my ear.

This last trick signaled the end of Mevrou's patience. “Your hair will be full of lice, you stupid boy!” she screamed. Just inside the kitchen door stood a butcher's block with a large cleaver resting on it. “Give me that filthy, lice-ridden, bed-shitting kaffir chicken!” she yelled, grabbing the cleaver.

Two cockroaches resting under the cleaver raced up the back of Mevrou's hand. She let out an almighty scream, dropping the cleaver and frantically flapping both arms. One cockroach dropped to the floor, while the other ran up her arm and disappeared down her bodice.

With a delighted squawk, Granpa Chook came charging into the kitchen and scooped up the cockroach that was frantically crossing the kitchen floor. Mevrou was waving her arms, her bosoms jiggling up and down. She made little gasping noises as though she was struggling to get a scream out as she danced from one foot to the other in extreme agitation. The second cockroach fell from under her skirt and made for a crack in the polished cement floor. But Granpa Chook was too fast for it and had it in a trice.

Mevrou had turned a deep crimson and her head seemed to vibrate from the shock. “It's orright, Mevrou, the other one fell out and Granpa Chook got it,” I said, pointing to Granpa Chook, who was strutting around looking very pleased with himself.

I rushed to fetch a kitchen chair and Mevrou plopped down into it like an overripe watermelon. Taking a dishcloth from a drying rack beside the huge black wood-burning stove, I began to fan her the way I had seen Nanny do when my mother had one of her turns.

I became aware of a dripping sound coming from under the rattan seat of the chair and realized in alarm that Mevrou had pissed in her pants. I think she must have been too upset to notice it herself. I wondered how many strokes pissing in your pants would earn in her book. When she had recovered somewhat, she pointed a trembling finger at Granpa Chook.

“You are right, Pisskop. That is a good chicken. He can stay. But he has to earn his keep,” she gasped. Then she seemed to become aware of what had happened beneath the chair. “Go now,” she said. Grabbing the cloth from my hand, she pointed to the door.

And that's how Granpa Chook came to do kitchen duty. Every day after breakfast he checked every last corner in the hostel kitchen for creepy-crawlies of every description. The toughest damn chicken in the world had survived. He had beaten the executor by adapting perfectly, and we were safely together again.

The weeks and then a couple of months went by. I had become slave to the Judge. In return for being at his constant beck and call, I was more or less left to my own devices. The odd cuff behind the head or a rude push from an older kid was about all I had to endure. Things were pretty good, really. If the Judge needed me he would simply put two fingers to his mouth and give one of his piercing whistles, and Granpa Chook and I would come running.

Granpa Chook was now under the protection of Mevrou, although he still needed to be constantly on the alert. Farm kids just can't help chucking stones at kaffir chickens. He would cluck around the playground during lessons, hunting for grubs. The moment the recess bell went he would come charging over to my classroom, skidding to a halt in the dust and cackling his anxiety to be with me again.

No class existed for my age, and so I had been placed with the seven-year-old kids, all of whom were still learning to read. I had been reading in English for at least a year so that the switch to reading Afrikaans wasn't difficult, and I was soon the best in the class. Yet I quickly realized that survival means never being best at anything except being best at nothing, and I soon learned to minimize my reading skills, appearing to pause and stumble over words that were perfectly clear to me.

Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man. Our teacher, Miss du Plessis, wasn't anxious for a five-year-old
rooinek
to shine in a class of knot-headed Boers. She was happy enough to put my poor results down to my inability to grasp the subtlety of the Afrikaans language as well as to my being the youngest in the class, whereas I already spoke Zulu and Shangaan and, like most small kids, I found learning a new language simple enough.

It became increasingly hard for the other kids to think of me as being different when no visible or audible differences separated us. Except, of course, for my hatless snake; but even this, like a kid with a birthmark or a little finger missing, started to go unnoticed. I was becoming the perfect stick insect.