The Power of One (8 page)

“Run, Granpa Chook, run for your life!” I pleaded.

Granpa Chook tried to get up from where he had landed, but the stone from the Judge's powerful catapult had broken his rib cage. He made several more attempts, each time falling back onto his wing. I think he knew it was useless. After a while he just sat there, looked up at me, and said, “Squawk!”

Danie Coetzee ran over and grabbed Granpa Chook. I managed to kick him once, but then he held Granpa Chook triumphantly upside down by his legs. Granpa Chook beat his wings furiously. The pain must have been terrible. Quite suddenly he stopped and I thought he must be dead. But then I saw his bright, beady eye trying to find me from his upside-down position.

“No blery kaffir chicken shits on me! Hang him up by the legs next to Pisskop,” the Judge commanded. He was still doing little dry spits and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Two storm troopers slung a piece of rope over a branch and Granpa Chook soon hung upside down just beyond my reach and at about the level of my head.

“Please, sir. I will do anything! Anything you ever ask! Anything you want! Please don't kill Granpa Chook!”

The Judge, his eyes cruel, bent down and looked into my face. “Now we'll see who'll cry,” he grinned.

I was seized by panic. “Kill me!” I begged. “Please kill me. But don't kill Granpa Chook!”

The Judge butted me on the forehead with the heel of his hand and my head slammed against the trunk of the jacaranda, leaving me dazed.
“Ag,
shit!” he exclaimed. Some of the shit on my face had rubbed off onto his hand. Then he wiped his hand in my hair once again.

“You're shit and your fuckin' kaffir chicken is shit. Did you see what he did to me? Me, Jaapie Botha! That fuckin' chicken shit in my mouth!”

Still dazed, I tried another desperate tack. “I'll tell Mevrou!” I shouted, trying to sound threatening.

“Mevrou kan gaan kak!
” (Mevrou can go to shit!). The Judge spat on the ground, this time with a proper, not a chicken-shit, spit. He turned to the storm troopers. “Prisoner of War Kaffir Chicken Rooinek will be executed, two shots each!” He moved to take his place in the shooting line as the rest of the storm troopers loaded their catapults.

I sloughed the last of my camouflage. “I'll tell Mr. Stoffel about how I did your arithmetic for you!” I screamed at the Judge.

I heard the soft “pfflifft” of his catapult at the same time as I felt the stone slam into my stomach. The pain was terrible. It seemed to be happening in slow motion, as though the stone had a life of its own, gnawing at my gut, burning and squirming through my intestines and into my back. A vicious, determined, alive, eyeless thing. The shock to my system was enormous. My eyes bugged out of my head and my tongue poked out in involuntary surprise.

“Fire!” A series of dull plops tore into the fragile bones of Granpa Chook's breast. The first stones had set the rope swinging, but the storm troopers were expert shots and their second shots also tore into the funny old body of that upside-down chicken. Spots of blood dropped into the dry dust and among the fallen jacaranda blossoms, the rope swinging so that no two drops landed in the same place. Granpa Chook, the toughest damn chicken in the whole world, was dead.

A tiny feather drifted toward me. It was one of the soft downy ones that grew at the very top of Granpa Chook's scrawny legs. It stuck to a piece of shit on my face. The Judge walked over and untied the rope from around my waist and I dropped to my haunches at his feet. He placed his bare foot on my shoulder.

“What are you, Englishman?”

“Dog shit, sir.”

“Look at me when you say it!” he barked.

Slowly I looked up at the giant with his foot resting on my shoulder. High above him I could see a milky moon hanging in the afternoon sky. We had gotten so close, Granpa Chook and I had gotten so close to making it through to the end. Just a few more hours.

I suddenly spat at him. “You're dog shit! Your ma is a whore!”

He pushed violently downward with his foot, sending me sprawling. Then he let out a howl, a mixture of anger and anguish. “Why won't you cry, you fucking bastard?” he sobbed and started to kick blindly at me.

The storm troopers rushed to restrain him, pulling him from me. The Judge allowed himself to be led away, and Granpa Chook and I were left alone behind the shithouses under a white moon set in a flawless blue sky.

I untied the broken body of Granpa Chook and we sat under the jacaranda tree and I stroked his bloody feathers. No more gentle African dawn folding back the night, no more early “cockle-doodle-doo!” to tell me you are there, my loved and faithful chicken friend. Who will peck my ear? Who will be my friend? I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. The great drought was over, the inside man was out, the rains had come to Zululand.

After a long, long while, when the crying was all out of me and the loneliness bird had entered to build a nest of stones in the hollow place inside of me, I carried Granpa Chook to the orchard and laid him in the place I had made for him to keep him from the rain. Then I climbed through the window into the dormitory to fetch my new red jumper, the one my mother had knitted in the concentration camp and Nanny had fixed.

I gathered as many rocks as I could find, and then I pulled my red jumper over Granpa Chook's body. His wings poked out of the armholes and his long neck stuck out of the head part and his feet poked out of the bottom.

He looked the best I'd ever seen him. I took the jam tin I had used for his water and, in about five minutes, I'd collected twenty little green grasshoppers, which are the very best chicken scoff there is. I placed the tin beside his body so that he'd have a special treat on the way to heaven. Finally, I covered his body with the stones.

South Africa's first victim in the war against Adolf Hitler was safe at last.

I sat there on my haunches beside the pile of stones as the afternoon sun began to set. Now the sun was passing beyond Zulu-land, even past the land of the Swazi, and now it leaves the Shangaan and the royal
kraal
of Modjadji, the rain queen, to be cooled in the great, dark water beyond.

The first bell for supper rang, and I moved to the tap and began to wash the blood and shit from my hands and face and hair.

Deep inside me the loneliness bird laid a large stone egg.

The bell for supper sounded. Our last supper at school. Everything comes to an end. Tomorrow I would be going home for Christmas and Nanny. Wonderful, soft, warm, Nanny.

But life. doesn't work that way. I, most of all, should have known this. At supper Boetie van der Merwe told me Mevrou wanted to see me in the dispensary. “If you tell about this afternoon, we'll kill you,” he hissed. I wasn't frightened. I knew a proper ending when I saw one.

Only hours remained until my liberation. Nothing the Judge, Mevrou, and, for the moment anyway, Adolf Hitler could do would alter that. Soon I would be returning to my quiet backwater.

I didn't know then that what seemed like the end was only the beginning. All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives. Unbeknown to me, the tide had turned and I was being swept out to sea.

AT
the end of supper, after Mr. Stoffel had read the Bible lesson and concluded evening prayers, I waited for Mevrou outside the dispensary. She arrived a short time later.
“Kom!”
Mevrou said as she brushed past me. I entered and waited with my hands behind my back, my head bowed in the customary manner.

“Why is there blood on your shirt, Pisskop?”

I looked down at my shirt, which was stained with Granpa Chook's blood and a biggish spot where the stone had torn into me.

Mevrou sighed and sat down heavily on a bentwood chair painted the same light green as the dispensary walls. “Take off your shirt,” she commanded.

I hurriedly removed my shirt and Mevrou made a cursory examination of my stomach.
“Ag,
is that all?” She prodded at the wound the stone had made and I flinched involuntarily.

“Please, Mevrou, I fell on a rock.” Mevrou removed the cork from a large bottle of iodine and upended it onto a wad of cotton wool.

“Yes, I can see that.” She dabbed at my wound. The iodine stung like billyho and I winced and hopped up and down in dismay, wringing my hands to stop the burning pain. “Come, that's not enough.” She upended the bottle once again and dabbed hard at my tummy. This time I knew what to expect and, gritting my teeth and closing my eyes tightly, I managed to hold back most of the pain. “You can't go getting blood poisoning on the train,”

she said, tossing the wad on the table. She retrieved the cork and pushed it back into the bottle.

“What train, Mevrou?” I asked, confused.

“Your
oupa
called long distance on the telephone from a
dorp
in the Eastern Transvaal called Barberton. You are not going back to the farm. He says Newcastle disease has made him kill all his chickens and he has sold the farm to a Mevrou Vorster.”

“What's my granpa doing in this town called Barberton, Mevrou?”

My head was swimming, my whole world was coming apart. If Granpa had sold the farm to fat Mrs. Vorster and was making telephone calls from some strange town in the Eastern Transvaal, where was Nanny? Without Granpa Chook and Nanny, life was not possible.

“I'm not a mind reader. Maybe he got work in this place.” She reached into her bag and held up an envelope. “In here is the ticket. Tomorrow night you will catch the train to Barberton. Two days and two nights. I will take you to the train.” She dismissed me with a wave of the envelope.

I turned to go, and as I reached the door Mevrou called me back. “You can't take the chicken, you hear?” She looked at me smugly. “South African Railways won't let you take a kaffir chicken, not even in the goods van.” She seemed pleased with this thought. “I will take the chicken. He will earn his keep, even if he is only a kaffir chicken.”

“He is dead, Mevrou. A dog ate him today.” I managed somehow to keep the tears out of my voice.

“That is a shame, he was good in the kitchen.” She rose from her chair with a sigh, fanning herself with the letter. “I'm telling you, man, a kaffir chicken is no different from a kaffir. Just when you think you can trust them, they go and let you down.”

I had never owned a pair of shoes. At that time, in the Northern Transvaal, a farm kid only got boots if he had rich parents or if he had turned thirteen. That's when the Old Testament says a boy becomes a man. A pair of khaki shorts, a shirt, and a jumper when it was cold was all you got. Underpants hadn't been invented. Even if they had been, Boer kids wouldn't have worn them. More expense for what?

The day after Granpa Chook's funeral was the last day of term. Everyone was up and packed long before breakfast. After breakfast Mevrou summoned me to the dispensary to tell me that

after lunch we would be going into town to buy a pair of tackies for me at Harry Crown's shop.

“What are tackies, Mevrou?”

“Domkop!
Tackies are shoes, only made of canvas with rubber bottoms. Don't you know anything? Make sure you have clean feet, or we will be shamed in front of the Jew.”

From my secret mango tree, I watched the kids leave the hostel. Parents arrived in old pickup trucks and mule carts. Some kids left on donkeys brought to the school by a farm servant. I watched as the Judge left in a mule cart. He made the black servant sit on the tailboard, then he jumped up into the driver's seat, took up the reins and the whip, and set off at a furious pace, whipping at the mules and making the whip crack like a rifle shot. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. As my mother used to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Finally everyone had gone and I climbed down from the mango tree and crossed the school playground. It wasn't the same without Granpa Chook. The sun felt the same. The little green grasshoppers still couldn't make it across the playground in one hit. The day moon, made of skimmed milk, still hung in the cloudless morning sky. But it wasn't ever going to be the same again. I saved the need to grieve for a later time. I had enough on my mind with the prospect of going to town to buy a pair of shoes and catching the train. I'd never owned a pair of shoes and I'd never been on a train, never even seen a real train. Two nevers in one day is enough to fill anyone's mind.

After a lunch of bread and jam with a mug of sweet tea, I hurried to meet Mevrou in the dispensary, stopping only long enough to give my feet and legs a good scrub like Mevrou said. The same shower that had been dripping that first night when I thought I was in a slaughterhouse was still sounding, drip, drip, drip like a metronome. Funny how little kids can get things mixed up like that. It all seemed such a long time ago. I sure had been a baby then.

I had been waiting at the dispensary a few minutes when Mevrou arrived. She was wearing a shapeless floral cotton dress and a funny old black straw hat with two cherries on it. A third wire stem stuck up where a cherry had once been. In her town clothes she looked not unlike fat old Mrs. Vorster, except younger and with a moustache.

The town I knew to be about two miles from the school.

“Maybe we could visit the railway station as well as Harry Crown's shop?” I suggested tentatively.

“It is enough that I do this for you, Pisskop. What do you want? Blood from a stone? Tonight I must do it all over again for you. There is nothing at the station to see, only sleeping kaffirs waiting for the train.”

For the remainder of the journey we said nothing. Mevrou walked three paces ahead of me all the way to town. Her huge shape sort of rocked along, stopping every once in a while to catch her breath. The early afternoon sun beat down on us. By the time we arrived Mevrou was very hot and bothered and her special smell was worse than ever.

Harry Crown's shop was closed and nothing much seemed to be happening in the main street. Mevrou took a large red
doek
from her basket and proceeded to wipe her face. “Everyone is still having their lunch, we must wait,” she explained. With great effort she climbed the five steps up to the
stoep
of the shop and sat down on a bench beside the padlocked door. “Go and find a tap and wash your feet,” she panted.

I crossed the street to the garage, which had a sign that read
ATLANTIC SERVICE STATION
. It had two pumps outside a small office and workshop bay. Just inside the bay was a tap. The whole place smelled of oil and grease. I washed my feet and walked back across the road on my heels so as not to dirty my feet. Half a dozen Africans were asleep at the far end of the verandah, where there was a second entrance to the shop. Above this entrance was written
BLACKS ONLY
. I wondered briefly why whites were not allowed to enter.

Flies, flying heavy in the heat, settled on sleeping eyes and every now and again a desultory black hand would come up and brush at them, its owner seemingly still asleep.

One black man with his left eye missing remained awake and sat with his back against the shop wall. His cupped hands and mouth concealed a Jew's harp that twanged an urgent rhythm.

“The Jew is late. Who does he think he is?” Mevrou said impatiently. She half turned and addressed the African playing the Jew's harp. “Hey, kaffir! Where is the
baas?”

The black man jumped to his feet, removing the tiny harp and placing it in the pocket of his ragged pants. He said nothing, not understanding Afrikaans.

“Do you work here?” I asked him in Shangaan.

“No, small
baas,
I also, I am waiting. The big
baas
for the shop will be here soon, I think. When the hooter goes for the sawmill he will surely come.”

“He doesn't work for Mr. Crown, Mevrou.”

Just then a hooter sounded. We were familiar with the sawmill hooter, which blew at one o'clock and again at two.

Almost on the dot a big black Chevrolet drove up and parked outside the shop. It was the most beautiful car I had ever seen. I had never imagined a motorcar could be as shiny and powerful. The man inside it revved the engine before he cut the ignition, and it roared as though alive. Obviously being a Jew was a very profitable business. Maybe I could be one when I grew up.

Harry Crown was a fat man in his late fifties. He wore his trousers high so that his entire tummy and most of his chest were covered with trouser top, held up by a pair of bright red braces. His white open neck cotton shirt seemed to extend no more than eight inches from his collar before it was swallowed by his trousers. He was almost completely bald, and when he smiled he showed two gold front teeth.

“A thousand apologies, Mevrou. Have you been waiting long?” he said, making a fuss of unlocking the padlocked doors to the shop.

“Ag,
it was nothing. Not even a few minutes,” Mevrou said, all smiles for the fat bald man.

In the part boarded off for white customers, two large ceiling fans whirred softly overhead and the shop was dark and cool. Mevrou heaved herself gratefully onto a chair beside the counter, and Harry Crown poured her a cup of coffee from a pot he removed from a small hotplate on a shelf behind the counter.

“What can I do for you, Mevrou?” he asked. Then, turning to me, he bowed slightly. “And for you, mister?” he said solemnly.

I was not used to jocularity. Not knowing what to do, I dropped my eyes to avoid his gaze.

Observing my shyness, he turned from me to a large glass jar on the counter and from it produced a raspberry sucker, its ruby head wrapped in cellophane. He held the sucker out for me to take. I looked at Mevrou, who took a polite sip from her coffee cup and then nodded. I took the delicious prize and put it into my shirt pocket.

“Thank you, Meneer,” I said softly.

“Ag,
eat it now, boy. When we have finished business you can have another one.” He paused. “A green one maybe, huh?” He turned to Mevrou. “I have had this shop for thirty years and I can tell you with God's certainty that children like raspberry first and green second. If I know nothing else for certain in this life, of this one thing I am sure.” He snapped his braces with his thumbs and gave a loud, happy snort.

I had never met a man who laughed and carried on like this and I felt intimidated, so I left the raspberry sucker in my pocket, where I hoped it was safe.

“What is your name, boy?” Harry Crown asked.

“Pisskop, sir,” I replied.

Harry Crown's shiny bald head jerked back, and he looked down at me in consternation.

“Pisskop? Pisskop! This is a name for a nice boy?” he asked in alarm. “Who calls you this name?”

Mevrou interrupted sharply. “Never mind his name, what have you got in tackies? The boy must have some tackies. He is going on the train alone tonight to his
oupa
in Barberton.”

Turning momentarily to acknowledge he had heard her, Harry Crown turned back to me and gave a low whistle. “Barberton, eh? That is in the lowveld in the Eastern Transvaal. Easy two days away in the train, a long journey alone for a small boy.” He had moved around from behind the counter and was looking at my feet. “We have nothing so small, Mevrou. I don't have much call for tackies. The Boers around here don't play much tennis.” He chortled loudly at his own joke, which was completely lost on Mevrou and me.

“Show me what you got, Mr. Crown. His
oupa
did not send enough money for boots, only tackies.”

“It makes no difference, boots, smoots, tackies, smackies, the boy's foot is too small.” He moved back behind the counter, where he pulled a battered cardboard box from the shelf. From it he withdrew a pair of dark brown canvas shoes.

“Let the boy try them,” Mevrou said.

“It is useless, Mevrou. These tackies are four sizes too big for him. It is a miracle I have these, but they are too big already.”

“The boy will grow,” Mevrou said, a trifle impatiently.

“
Ja
, certainly, Mevrou. Maybe in five or six years they will fit him like a glove. In the meantime they will fit him like the clown in a circus.” He slapped his stomach. “Very amusing,” he said to himself in English.