Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘That’s because people like to go to the café to have a mixed grill after church, die boere, that come in from the farms, it’s their Sunday treat,’ I replied. Marie had told me that Sunday lunch was the big day for mixed grills with the farmers after church, many booking their places and having permanent chairs they always sat in.

  ‘You trying to be cheeky, hey?’ Mevrou shouted, unable to think of a reply. I was beginning to do this a bit lately, use stuff called logic, but you had to be careful, like now with Mevrou, people don’t like it when you’ve got them stumped for words.

  ‘No, Mevrou. It’s just that if boeremense think it’s okay to go into the Impala Café after church then they must have asked God, and He would have said it was okay. These are very religious people, you know? The best churchgoers there are, the Dominee is always saying that.’

  Mevrou sniffed. ‘The mixed grill is the devil’s temptation. You can smell it when you passing by that café, and next thing Satan is pulling your arm into that place for ice-cream also. But the coffee, you can’t drink it! You’d think a good Afrikaner woman could make a decent cup of coffee for a change.’

  I thought getting Mevrou onto other subjects would soften her up a bit. I was wrong, she went back to the clean-clothes business.

  ‘Meneer Prinsloo has to say yes to a high-up like Doctor Van Heerden, so that’s the reason why you got his permission to go to this old people’s wedding, Voetsek,’ she explained.

  ‘Dankie, Mevrou,’ I said, thanking her. ‘Can I go get —’

  ‘Hey, not so fast, man! You can go but you go dirty, you understand?’ She laughed. ‘A dirty little Engelsman!’ She suddenly turned grim-faced. ‘You think I’m frightened of that doctor? Ek is ‘n Van Schalkwyk! We Van Schalkwyks are frightened of no-one! Ha! Let him see he can’t go around giving me orders. I’m not in his theatre where he’s cutting up black baboons any more, he can stick his scalpel up his bum!’

  In my head I said, Ouch! ‘Please, Mevrou!’ I pleaded. ‘Just this once?’

  ‘Since when did I start changing my mind, Voetsek? With me, no is no, finish and klaar!’

  I was too old now to try the trick of crying, anyway with her it didn’t work.

  ‘If you’ve got any pride you won’t go, you hear?’ she said. ‘A person, even an Engelsman, can’t go turning up at weddings all dirty and smelly in front of all the nice clean guests.’ She stared at me for what seemed a long time. Then she sniffed, then sniffed again. ‘All of a sudden there is a bad smell around here. You can go now, Voetsek.’ I turned to go with my eyes downcast and there, under her chair hidden behind her sewing basket, was the half-jack of Tolley’s five-star brandy.

  I must say I didn’t usually take much notice of the state of my shirt and shorts. Dirt is dirt and boys get it. By Saturday we were all the same and you don’t take any notice. But, because I knew there was the possibility of a refusal to let me get clean clothes, I’d done my best to stay clean all week. But life doesn’t work like that. Only that morning when Tinker and I had been taking a walk by the creek, we had been playing, me throwing a stick for her to fetch, and I slipped in the mud and now I’m also dried mud all over the back of my arse and shirt.

  So there was now a big predicament. What to do? The answer, of course, was nothing. Without saying you can’t go to the wedding, Mevrou and Meneer Prinsloo had found a way to make it impossible for me to attend. But I couldn’t just not arrive, that would be the worst bad manners. I had to let Marie know I couldn’t come. The arrangement was that I would meet her at the Impala Café at one o’clock and we’d go on to the doctor’s house where she was doing Mevrou Booysens’ make-up, whatever that was, something to do with weddings, I suppose. So I decided I would walk the four miles into town immediately to tell her I couldn’t come, so they would know well before one o’clock and not have to wait around wondering what had happened to me. I whistled for Tinker and we set off.

  It must have been around ten o’clock when we arrived at the café, and Marie was in a real tizz. The little daughter of the woman who was doing the icing on the wedding cake had taken sick suddenly the night before and was vomiting all over the place. So, not only was the cake not ready, but also Doctor Van Heerden had been called. But that wasn’t the problem because he fixed up the little girl with some muti and put her in hospital. Now the woman was shaken and upset and couldn’t do all the squiggly bits and the writing on the cake. Marie had to do this, as well as sew some artificial flowers on her mum’s to-be-worn-at-the-wedding hat. And suddenly Tinker and me turn up on the doorstep.

  ‘Tom, you’re three hours too early!’ she cried, bringing her hands up to cover her mouth. You could see from looking into her eyes that things were not going too well. Then she explained about the cake and the little girl and the hat and she hadn’t even ironed her own dress and the toe of one of her high heels she suddenly noticed was scuffed. Boy! When things start going wrong, they go wrong all over the place!

  I explained that I couldn’t come to the wedding. ‘Now, Tom, things are bad enough already,’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s this now?’

  ‘I slipped in the mud and anyway I’m already too dirty, Mevrou wouldn’t let me have clean clothes.’

  ‘Why, that stupid bitch! She’s a typical Van Schalkwyk! They wouldn’t tell you thank you even if you saved their life.’

  I was beginning to realise, except for their legs of honeyed ham, Mevrou’s family was not generally liked around the district.

  Marie turned to me and said, ‘Off!’

  ‘Off?’ I asked. ‘Must I go now?’

  ‘Your clothes, man! Hurry up, Tom, I haven’t got all day.’

  I hesitated. You don’t just take off your clothes in a girl’s mother’s kitchen when you’re nearly twelve years old. ‘My clothes? Take them off?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Ag, man, I am a certified nurse, I have to wash grown men every day when they got nothing on, not even pyjama pants. Now hurry up, I got lots to do and we only got four hours before the wedding.’

  I removed my shirt and shorts and cupped my hand over my cock. Marie had disappeared into a bedroom. I forgot to say the house was directly behind the café. She reappeared moments later with a pink kind of woolly-looking dressing-gown. ‘Here, wear this, Tom,’ she instructed.

  Talk about all business suddenly. Before you knew it there’s hot water and bubbles in the sink, and my shirt and shorts are in them and out again, and rinsed and hanging on the washing line in the bright mid-morning sunshine. Even though she was so busy she couldn’t scratch her bum, I think she was quite pleased with what happened, she came in from the washing line with this sort of half smile on her pretty face.

  ‘We’ll show that bitch!’ she sniffed.

  ‘What colour are your shoes?’ I asked.

  ‘Black.’

  ‘Got any black polish?’

  ‘Ja, I think so, look under the sink.’

  I found some that was a bit dried up and cracked in the tin. I managed to soften it, and after half an hour or so working on her black high-heel shoes, if I say so myself, no scuff to be seen, even if you looked through a microscope. They were also so bright they would have left Meneer Prinsloo’s shiny brown boots in the dust.

  The bush veld sun dried my clothes in no time flat, and then I had to take a shower and wash my hair and between my toes. By the time I came out of the bathroom there were my clothes already ironed. That Marie was a woman and a half, I can tell you. The cake was iced with all the squiggly bits and the writing in pale blue icing, and little statues of a man in a black suit and a woman in a long white dress all made out of icing sugar standing at the top of the cake. But Marie didn’t make them, they came from Patel & Sons who’d sent for it from Pietersburg. Even the artificial flowers were sewn onto a white straw hat so it looked brand-new. Marie’s dress was ironed, and it was now one o’clock on the dot. I was surprised to see Sergeant Van Niekerk arrive in the police van and blow the horn.

  ‘Tell him five
minutes, Tom!’ Marie shouted from her bedroom.

  The police van was all shiny bright, and had white ribbon tied on the mascot on the front and stretched back and tied to the mirrors on either side of the van, but it wasn’t the bridal carriage, Marie said, because they were both married before and it wasn’t a white wedding, the Doctor and Mevrou Booysens were arriving together in his car. Mevrou Booysens had gone to his house just before I arrived and she was going to get her hat when Marie came to do her make-up.

  ‘Marie will be here in five minutes,’ I said to Sergeant Van Niekerk.

  ‘Typical woman, hey, Tom, always late,’ he replied with a grin.

  This didn’t seem fair knowing what Marie had just been through. ‘There’s been disasters everywhere,’ I said in Marie’s defence.

  ‘Ja, man, put a woman and a wedding together and you got a disaster on your hands every time!’ he laughed.

  I was beginning to understand that men seldom see life through a woman’s eyes.

  Marie came out to the van and, I must say, she looked really pretty with a pink dress and a little white straw hat and white gloves also. She wore lipstick that was very red and she looked like a film star. Sergeant Van Niekerk did a whistle of admiration and Marie smiled. So it was Marie and the sergeant in the front, and me and Tinker in the back of the van that had been scrubbed and cleaned so Tinker didn’t even smell the Alsatians, and she just sat quietly on my lap panting happily.

  Make-up, it turned out, was putting lipstick and powder on Mevrou Booysens’ face with something called ‘rouge for a bit of colour’. The hat looked nice and you’d never have known it was an old one.

  To my surprise, Doctor Van Heerden said, ‘You and Tinker are in the dicky-seat, Tom.’ So there I was with Tinker at my side arriving at the church with the bride and groom, and Marie and Sergeant Van Niekerk following in the police van. Oh, I forgot to say, the ’39 Chevvie also had this white ribbon on the front and a big bow and a kewpie doll tied on the radiator. Marie said she’d also got it from Pietersburg and it was ‘a nice finishing touch’.

  Remember I said it was only going to be a small affair. That’s not what the Boerevolk thought. All the farm folk in the district and lots and lots of the people in the town had come to the wedding service, because you don’t have to be invited to go into God’s house any time you like. So, instead of a handful of invited guests, the church is full and there’s people standing up at the back. Because, you see, Doctor Van Heerden is their doctor and they love him a whole lot because he brought some of their children into the world, and took out their tonsils, and so on and so forth. Afrikaners don’t forget a good deed in a hurry.

  The Dominee doesn’t say, ‘How come someone who never comes to church because he’s stitching up kaffirs’ stomachs and other wounds, gets such a big crowd?’ He says, ‘As a man of God I take my hat off to our dear brother in Christ, Alex van Heerden who even if he is a man of science, it is God’s hand that guides the knife and helps to stitch up the wounds.’ He indicated the audience with a sweep of his hand. ‘All these good Afrikaner volk have come to pay tribute to him and his lovely wife-to-be.’ After this he didn’t do a whole well-rounded sermon, nor did he bring up the subject of that other man of science, Charles Darwin. This is because he had to do a thing called ‘nuptials’, which is stuff they ask the bride and groom at weddings.

  And so the wedding begins. Meneer Van Niekerk is the best man and Sergeant Van Niekerk, it turns out, is the bride’s father pretending, because Mevrou Booysens’ father is long dead. The joke is that the sergeant is ten years younger than the bride! Marie is the bridesmaid and I’m sitting in the front row of the church with all the high-ups. Talk about posh! I was scared to even sniff, but I was quite good with the singing because it was two hymns we did at school.

  So now you thinking, that’s over? Now for the quiet reception. Magtig! Those volk who’d come from far and near hadn’t come empty-handed. They’d come to a wedding, invited or not, and brought food and meat and drink, and because Boerevolk are very musical they’ve also brought fiddles and banjos and concertinas and even two musical saws and a harp. They’ve come to dance and tiekiedraai because there’s no better time to do this than at a wedding. Everybody was turning to each other and saying, ‘No point in going home to the farm and back again in the morning for church when a good party can be had for the making.’

  To cut a long story short, Sergeant Van Niekerk closes off the street in front of the Impala Café at both ends for about a hundred yards and the biggest party at a wedding you’ve ever seen breaks out. Inside the café are the invited guests and outside the uninvited, but soon it’s all mixed up and a good time is had by all until deep into the night. It was a full moon and so bright outside you could read a newspaper without glasses. A better night for an outside party would be impossible to get.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon, when I was supposed to walk back to The Boys Farm, Marie got the good doctor to call Meneer Prinsloo to ask if I could stay out for the night, that I’d be staying with Marie in Mevrou Booysens’ house. When he came back from the phone he was laughing and told Marie what happened, and then later she told me.

  Meneer Prinsloo picks up the phone and Doctor Van Heerden says, ‘Can you hear all the noise going on, Pietrus?’

  ‘Ja, what’s going on, man?’

  ‘Well, the supposed-to-be-quiet little wedding turned into a big crowd all of a sudden, so why don’t you and your wife come and join us? The whole district is here, man.’

  ‘Ag, I’ve got better things to do with my time,’ the superintendent answered petulantly.

  ‘Sure, whatever you say, Pietrus. By the way, young Tom Fitzsaxby will be staying with us overnight. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Listen here, man, I am the Government-appointed parent and —’

  Doctor Van Heerden cut him short. ‘He’s got several nasty bumps on his ventriculi cardio-cular appendage and I’d like to keep him under observation overnight.’

  ‘What’s a ventriculi cardio-cular appendage?’ I asked Marie.

  ‘It’s just made-up nonsense words, but you better not get it,’ she warned. ‘Because it can be serious and has definitely well-known complications. Medical science is very worried and completely puzzled by these mysterious bumps!’ She grinned. ‘But not as puzzled as Meneer Prinsloo!’ We laughed and laughed our heads off.

  Only one bad thing happened at the wedding. Well, not really bad, I suppose, because it couldn’t happen to a better person. About ten o’clock on the wedding night, when the party in the street was still going full swing, I couldn’t stay awake any longer. So I went over to Mevrou Booysens’ house to find a place I could lie down. Earlier Marie had said I could take the spare bed in the sewing room where she was making the goosefeather quilt. It was right next door to the bathroom.

  So I said good night to Tinker and showed her where to sleep on a sack outside the kitchen door and then walked through the darkened house. I had to pass the open parlour door. It was full moon and light was coming through a window into the parlour and there on the settee was Marie and Sergeant Van Niekerk, and they were holding each other and kissing, and they didn’t have anything on! Marie drew back slightly from Sergeant Van Niekerk and sighed with closed eyes. I felt this sudden stab in my heart, like a dagger had gone right through it. I’d never seen a lady with nothing on, and you could see all of Marie’s top half, and her golden hair streaming down her back, and I knew what I saw was beautiful, but I didn’t know why. So I cried a bit in that spare bed, but very softly. I don’t think they would have heard because there was some sort of grunting sounds going on. Then I must have fallen asleep. It just goes to show in life you can love somebody with every bone in your body, but you can’t always have them only for yourself.

  I went straight to church from Mevrou Booysens’ the next morning and then went in the crocodile back to The Boys Farm. It was Mevrou’s day off when she carried her paper bag with the empty you-know-what�
�s-in-it to visit her family so I didn’t see her until my name was called out after supper on Monday.

  I don’t know if the news of my clean clothes at the wedding had reached her. If it had this would be the reason for sure for the sjambokking I expected to receive. ‘A person can’t go turning dirty clothes into clean ones without permission, you hear! This is government-supplied property, only the high-up inspector in Pretoria and me also can decide when they allowed to be washed. Next thing they all worn out from too much washing, and even a kaffir is ashamed to wear them! You getting six of the best and no questions asked. Take down your pants, touch your toes.’ I was the only one on punishment rollcall that night, which was also pretty unusual. I knocked on the sick room door.

  ‘Come!’ she shouted.

  I entered the sick room to be confronted by Mevrou with her arms folded across her big boobs. On the table beside her, neatly folded, was a khaki shirt and shorts. ‘You clean clothes are here,’ she said, pointing at them. ‘So now it’s bumps? What is this bumps business, Voetsek?’

  ‘Ventriculi cardio-cular appendage, Mevrou,’ I answered.

  ‘So where are they, show me where are these bumps?’

  It wasn’t a question I’d prepared myself for. Anywhere I indicated on my body she’d want to see the clear evidence. I panicked. ‘On the eyes, Mevrou.’

  ‘On the eyes? You got bumps on your eyes? I never heard of such a thing before,’ Mevrou said suspiciously.

  ‘Ja, medical science is very worried and completely puzzled by these mysterious bumps!’ I said, trying to sound convincing.

  ‘Let me take a look.’

  ‘Too late,’ I said. ‘They all gone. This morning when I woke up, not a bump to be seen. Then later Doctor Van Heerden gave the all clear.’

  Mevrou still looked suspicious. ‘I’m a medical person myself, you hear? I never heard of bumps on a person’s eyes,’ she repeated.