A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  Frikkie de Kok knew of the crimes for which the four had been convicted. One had stabbed to death a White housewife after they had disagreed on what he should be paid for sweeping her drive. One had raped a six-year-old girl, White, and strangled her. One had shot to death a petrol station attendant during an armed robbery in East London. One had been sentenced to death for ritual witch-craft murder, the killing of two men and the cutting out of their organs for mud. To Frikkie de Kok's mind execution by hanging was the correct penalty for such crimes.

  He had stipulated in which order the four should be brought down the corridor and into the preparation room.

  He had heard once of a mistake, many years ago, before his uncle's time. Two men, one heavy and tall, one slim and small, brought in the wrong order. The small fellow had had the short rope and they'd had to pull on his legs under the trap. The big fellow had been on the long drop and nearly lost his head with his life.

  Frikkie de Kok had never made a mistake.

  The singing approached him. A tumult of harmony. He liked it when they were brave because that made it easy for him, and if it were easy for him then he could do better by them.

  He waved the spectators into the gallows room and over to the far wall. He saw that the governor had arrived in the preparation room. They acknowledged each other. Frikkie straightened his tie.

  A good hymn. Not four weeks before that hymn had been sung in his church in Waterkloof. Sung in Afrikaans, of course. Good theme, good words. He had the four freshly laundered white cotton hoods in his hand.

  They came fast into the preparation room. The first man had a prison officer supporting one arm and the chaplain the other, the three that followed had a prison officer on each side of them.

  They were wide-eyed, they were shivering. In the preparation room the words of the hymn died in their throats and the chaplain sang on alone, lustily. All the reading of the warrants, all the formalities, had been completed back in the cell block . . . time now just to get the work finished.

  Frikkie de Kok remembered each face from the view he had had of them in the exercise yard the previous afternoon.

  They were in the right order. He nodded his head. No man spoke in the hanging shed, only the chaplain sang. The four whimpered and seemed to fight to find their voices. They were moved inside. Moved onto the trap. If it were one man, or even two, then the assistant would have pinioned the legs, but with four it was necessary for the hangman to take two and his assistant to take two. They moved quickly and quietly behind the men, fastening the leather thongs. The chaplain was in front of them.The chaplain knew he was at God's will, otherwise how could he have looked them in the face.

  Hoods on.

  Two of them were singing. Muffled, indistinct, quavering.

  Nooses round the necks. Frikkie did this himself.

  Tightened the knot under each of the left side jaw bones.

  He saw the feet in line of the trap. He flicked his hand. The prison officers stepped back, releasing their hold on the condemns.

  With both hands he gripped the lever.

  * * •

  The explosion of the trap.

  Jeez lay rigid on his bunk.

  His breath came in great pants.

  The silence.

  He had heard the feet stamping and shuffling on their way to the gallows. He had heard the swell of the singing, seeking out new heights of sympathy. Then the crash of the trap.

  An awful sorrowing silence. The singing was to support four men, and the men were gone from where singing could boost them. The singing had ceased with the fall of the trap, cut in mid phrase.

  The God awful silence around Jeez, like he was alone, like he was the only man in the bloody place.

  He always heard the trap go.

  He heard it the day before when the hangman was practising his drops with the earth-filled sacks, he heard it go on the morning of a hanging. As the crow flies or the worm crawls, Jeez lay on his bed just 29 yards from the gallows beam. He heard everything in the hanging room, and everything in the workshop and the washhouse underneath.

  They'd be suspended now, they let them hang for twenty minutes. Then there would be the water running in the washhouse as they cleared up the mess after the district surgeon had completed his postmortem. Then there would be the hammering in the workshop as the trusties nailed down the coffin lids. Last there would be the sounds of the revving of an engine and the sounds of the van pulling away, running down the hill.

  Beverly Hills wasn't a place for seeing what happened.

  Christ, it was a place for hearing.

  Listen to a multiple execution.

  Singing, trap, silence, water, silence, hammering, van engine.

  Those were the sounds of four men getting to be stiffs.

  God Almighty, Jeez . . . It was the route they had in mind for Jeez. While he had been at Beverly Hills he had heard the sounds of one hundred and twenty-one guys getting stretched. And now one hundred and twenty-five. Jeez had heard the trap go under each last one of the mothers.

  He shouldn't have written the letter all the same.

  The letter was weakness. Shouldn't have involved her.

  But he had heard the trap go so many times. Shit, and he had to to call for someone . . . he felt so alone.

  This was a civilised gaol, not like the one a long time back. There were no beatings here, no malnutrition, no rats, no disease, no forced labour. Here, his cell door wouldn't be thrown open without warning for a kicking and a truncheon whipping. No risk that he would be frog marched into a yard and kicked down and shot in the nape of the neck.

  This was five star. So bloody civilised that Jeez had sat in a cell for more than a year, a cell that measured six foot by nine foot, while the lawyers debated his life. Three meals a day here, a good medic here, because they wanted him healthy on the day. He had written his letter because he was losing hope.

  What were the bastards doing? Why hadn't the bastards got him out?

  He hated himself for believing they'd forgotten him.

  They'd got him out the last time. Took the bastards long enough, but they'd got him out. They couldn't let a man, one of their own, couldn't let him . . . never finished.

  Couldn't let him . . . Course they couldn't. He hated himself when the hope went, because that wasn't the Jeez way.

  He was one of a team, a bloody good team, a team that didn't forget the men out in the field.

  He was fine on the days when he didn't hear the trap fall.

  It was only on those sodding days that the doubts bit.

  He'd done them well. He'd kept his mouth shut through interrogation, bloody weeks of it. He'd kept his mouth shut through the trial. He'd kept his mouth shut when the security police from Johannesburg and the intelligence men from Pretoria had come to talk to him in his cell. He hadn't let the team down.

  Jeez heard the spurting of the water hose in the washhouse.

  On the high ceiling of the cell the bulb brightened.

  Another day. God Almighty, it just wasn't possible that the team had forgotten about Jeez.

  In an hour, and after he had eaten his breakfast, he would hear the hammering start.

  * * •

  It was difficult ground for the Minister. Any by-election would be in these days, but the Orange Free State was the heartland of the Afrikaner world. A dozen years before, in Petrusburg and Jacobsdal and Koffiefontein, he'd been cheered to the echo by the White farmers when he talked of the inviolability of the policy of separate development.

  Today he would have to speak to the same White farmers with the currency collapsed, with further foreign sanctions in the air, with unrest in the townships, with taxes up, with markets disappearing. No easy matter up here to sell the ending of the homelands policy, to uphold the repeal of the Immorality Act, to defend their record in the collapse of law and order. One thing for the State President and his ministers to talk in Pretoria about dismantling separate development, quite another out in the
constituencies to explain to the faithful the reasons for the retreat. They had a big enough majority in Parliament, the National Parly, but by-elections counted. The most recent by-elections had shown the subsidence of the Party's vote and the increase of the pulling power of the Conservative right. The State President was enjoying the greasepaint and the television lights and his broadcasts via satellite to the American networks where he spoke earnestly of reform. The ministers, the donkeys, they were the ones who legged it down to the grass roots to explain that everything that was traditional and taught from the mother's knee was now subject to revision.

  The Minister of Justice had a long day in front of him.

  Public meetings at breakfast, midday and late afternoon.

  The by-election was to be held in twenty-seven days' time.

  The Minister of Justice had been preceded by Water Affairs, Forestry and Environment Conservation, and by Community Development and State Auxiliary Services. In this constituency alone he would be followed before polling day by State Administration and Statistics, by Transport Affairs, and by Minerals and Energy.

  The minister had slept in the back of the car for most of the drive from Bloemfontein to Petrusburg. He woke when they were three miles short of the town. His secretary passed him a battery shaver. The secretary sat in the front beside the police driver. In the back of the Mercedes with the minister was the local area Chairman of the Party, a fellow Broederbonder.

  "What'll they be like?"

  "Cool."

  "Which means iced." The minister strained his chin upwards to get the razor's teeth against the skin of his jowl.

  "We all want to know what the future holds."

  "Change."

  "You won't find this audience applauding talk about change. They like the old ways. They want reassurance that we're running our country, not American bankers."

  "I'll get them laughing . . . "

  "You'd have to get your trousers off to get a laugh."

  "What do they want?"

  "To know that our government is not abdicating its responsibilities in the face of overseas pressure, and Black pressure. Persuade them and we might just win."

  "It's rubbish to talk of abdication."

  The Party man shrugged. "Fine when you say that to me.

  Tell your audience that and they'll shout you out of the hall, I promise you."

  "What'll satisfy them?"

  "You know the name of Prinsloo?"

  "Should I?"

  "Gerhardt Prinsloo."

  "Don't know him."

  "His parents live in Petrusburg."

  "Don't give me riddles, man," the minister snapped.

  They were coming into the town. One street on a main road, low buildings, a small shopping arcade, a decent church.

  "His father runs a hardware store. His mother teaches in the nursery school. You should go to Gerhardt Prinsloo's grave."

  "If I knew who he was."

  "Everyone in Petrusburg knows the name of Gerhardt Prinsloo. He's the nearest thing they have to a genuine South African hero."

  "Tell me, man."

  "If the people here thought that you didn't know who Gerhardt Prinsloo was and what he did, then I assure you our vote would be halved."

  "What did he do?"

  "Warrant officer Gerhardt Prinsloo gave his life to save others. He smothered the terrorist bomb in the Rand Supreme C o u r t . . . "

  The minister bit his lip in anger. "You caught me cold, early in the morning."

  "I've heard it said in this town that our government of today is so preoccupied with foreign opinion, with the shouting of the liberals, with appeasement, that the men who murdered Gerhardt Prinsloo might receive the State President's clemency."

  The minister leaned forward, tapped his secretary's shoulder. "Give me my speech and your pen."

  Resting the speech on his knee he made a long addition to the back of the first page.

  The car came to a stop. There was desultory applause from a small group of the faithful out to greet the minister.

  "Straight after my speech I will visit the grave. I will lay some flowers there, and I want a photographer."

  • • *

  A tiny cramped cell, Jeez's home for thirteen months.

  In the top half of the heavy door was an aperture covered by close mesh, too close to get the fingers through. Beside the door, and looking out onto the corridor of C section 2

  was a window of reinforced glass. Against the far wall to the door was the flush toilet, and beside that, set in a cavity, was a drinking water fountain. If he sat on his bed, at the far end of the pillow, then his legs fitted comfortably underneath the work surface area that jutted out from the wall. He had brought no personal mementos with him to Beverly Hills, there were no decorations on the walls, no mementoes of any previous condemns. Eight feet above the floor a heavy metal grille made a false ceiling. The cell was sixteen feet high. On the corridor wall, above the grille, were slatted windows, and the guard who patrolled the catwalk above the corridor had a clear view down through these windows into the cell. In the ceiling the light burned, bright by day, dimmed by night, always burning. No daylight could reach the cell. Natural light came from windows above the catwalk, and then by proxy into the windows above Jeez.

  From his cell he could see no blue sky, could never see the stars. The windows onto the catwalk and into the cell were always open, so the temper of the seasons reached him.

  Stinking hot in high summer, frosty cold in winter. Now the cool of the autumn was coming. He doubted that he would shiver again in the winter cold.

  He had eaten his breakfast, he had shaved under supervision, he had swept out his cell. He waited for his turn in the exercise yard. Other than his turn in the exercise yard, this day would go by without him leaving his cell.

  He was the celebrity, the first White political to face death by hanging since John Harris and that was more than twenty years before. No one who worked in Beverly Hills had ever before handled a White political who was condemned. Many times in each day he would look up from his bed to the corridor window and see the flash of a pale face, the face of a watcher. They might have had a camera on Jeez for all the time they watched him. They watched him while he slept and while he ate and while he read and while he sat on the lavatory. He knew why they watched him, and why his shoes were slip-ons and without laces, and why he had no belt, and why there were adhesive tabs on his prison tunic in place of buttons.

  When he had first arrived at Beverly Hills he had been told why they would watch him. One guy, a White, had once stood on his bed and nose-dived onto the concrete floor to try to cheat them out of his appointment. No chance that they would provide Jeez with an opportunity not to show for his appointment.

  Because Jeez was a political he was allowed no association with the other two White condemns in C section 2. They were new boys. One had moved in three weeks before, and one had been there for four months, and three had gone because their sentences had been commuted to imprisonment. The other White condemns were permitted to exercise together in the yard leading off C section 2, but Jeez was only taken out when they were back and locked in. Jeez's cell was at the far end of the section corridor. The cells of the other two condemns were opposite each other and beside the door that led to the main C

  section corridor; there were empty cells separating the White criminals from the White political. He had never seen their faces. He had heard their voices in the corridor. He knew they called him the "bleddy commie" or the "bleddy ter". These two bastards wouldn't be singing for him, not if it came to him keeping his appointment.

  Sergeant Oosthuizen was the prison officer who had responsibility most days for Jeez. Most days Sergeant Oosthuizen escorted Jeez to the exercise yard.

  Each time he heard the slam of the door that separated the main C section corridor from the C section 2 corridor, and each time he heard the key slot into his cell door he hoped, a short soaring hope, that the governor was comin
g with the message that would tell Jeez that the team had not abandoned him.

  They always slammed the door between the main corridor and C section 2.

  The team had been his life. The team was names and faces, clear as photographs, no blurring with time. The captain of the team was Colonel Basil, big and bluff and with thin blue veins surfacing on apple red cheeks. The men in the team were Lennie who had a patter of whip crack jokes, and Adrian who flirted with the fresh new recruits, and Henry who on a Friday evening at the end of the working office week played the piano in the saloon bar of the pub that the Century men used. Colonel Basil and Lennie and Adrian and Henry were his team and his life.

  He hadn't let them down, neither a long time ago nor in Johannesburg. Of course they'd be working for him, moving bloody mountains for him. Probably old Colonel Basil would have set up a special task force desk to supervise the prising of Jeez out of the hole he was in.

  Sergeant Oosthuizen was smiling at him from the opened cell door. They were cutting it rather fine. Hell of a good lime he'd had on the team, the real friendships, home and away. Being on the team mattered, because membership of the team was the guarantee. Shit, the guarantee was important to a leg man. It said that the team would never stop working their balls off for a leg man who was in trouble.

  And Christ, was he in trouble. Jeez Carew, member of the team, was going to hang. And his faith in the team was slipping.

  "Nice morning for a walk. Come on, Carew."

  * * *

  The solicitor had driven that morning from Johannesburg because it was useless to telephone for information, and worse than useless to write letters to the Justice Ministry.

  He was not shown in to the civil servant's office until after the lunch hour.

  It was a brittle meeting. The elderly Afrikaner South African and the young English heritage South African. The man on government pay and the man on private practice.

  The solicitor's questions were blunt enough.

  Had the decision been taken by the State President on whether James Carew would hang?