Karoo Boy

by Troy Blacklaws

  I had thought it was a certain kind of man who was cruel, but my mother’s words make me feel there is something in all men that is shameful.

  Then the farmer digs out his wallet, curved from sitting on it in the bakkie all day long. He licks his fingers before counting out the rands. Jim fingers the buttons of his hipbag, like the buttons of a trumpet, to give the man change. There is no tip for Jim. The farmer taps a pipe against the sole of his boot, so the dead tobacco drops out. Then he bites the pipe and climbs back inside the bakkie. The diesel motor catches and throbs deep.

  The farmboys wave to Jim as they go. He gets an old Castrol tin and uses cardboard as a brush to sweep the tobacco into the tin. He empties the tin into a bin with a swinging lid, and then settles on his beer crate again.

  The ice in my mouth is now melted enough to swallow it.

  – Do you think you’ll be happy here? I ask my mother.

  I am thinking of her painting, and whether she will find the inspiration. She puts down her gin and tonic and sighs:

  – Dee, I can never be happy again. Perhaps there will be moments of happiness, but there will always be the pain.

  I too feel the undertow of pain tugging at my feet, drawing me down to shadowy, kelpy depths.

  – Aren’t you at all happy now, with me?

  – I love being with you, Dee. But you’d have to be blindfolded not to see how cruel life can be.

  I chew my straw to stop myself crying. I will never be enough to make my mother happy.

  My mother turns to history, perhaps to cheer me up.

  – You know there was a time when Delarey Straat, in front of us, was called Victoria Street. After the Second World War, when Malan came to power, the Afrikaners changed the names of streets to honour their boer heroes. This was their way of mocking the English who killed their women and children in the camps, and tried to kill their language.

  Lulled by the lilt of my mother’s voice, my mind drifts to the sea. I look down from a seagull’s view of the tidal pool at St James. Beyond the lagoon calm of the water, the Atlantic crashes against the breakwater.

  Standing on the breakwater at dawn, our backs to the vast blue of False Bay, Marsden and I wait for the big wave. I see a shark finning through the still water of the tidal pool. I shout: shaaaaark. But it is too late. The wave breaks. I drop to my stomach. The wall is as sandpapery as coral under my skin.

  Then the wave is over and I jump up to call out to Marsden, who is in the foamy pool. Beyond him is the shark. Marsden sees the fin and freestyles like crazy towards me. The shark zones in on the wounded-fish sound of his kicking. I catch Marsden’s hand and yank him out. The shark veers away, skimming the wall. I look into his cold, cat eye, before another wave breaks and we drop to the wall again. When the foam clears, we see the fin at the shallow end, as if the shark surfed the wave in. We run along the wall to shore before another wave breaks.

  Three coloured men come walking along the beach and we point out the shark. One man runs over the rocks and comes back with an old tennis net. Two of them unroll the net and drag it across the pool, from the deep end in, sweeping the shark to the shallows. Though there is a gap under the net the shark feels trapped. Then the third man wades in and clubs the shark on the head with a long wooden oar. The shark tosses his head towards him and he skips aside, lithe as the mongoosey snoekseller dodging motorcars. He clubs it again and skips away again, until the shark sinks.

  They drag the shark ashore by the tail, slit his white stomach to spill his guts. Some they toss to cawing seagulls but the rest they bury in the sand for stray dogs to dig up. They tie the shark to the long oar and two of them hoist the oar onto their shoulders. The third man, the clubber, rolls up the tennis net as if he has just played a set or two. They wave totsiens to Marsden and me.

  Then we cycle home for breakfast, picking up fresh Portuguese rolls and the Cape Times at the Sea Breeze Café for breakfast. My father reckons it happens sometimes, by a fluke of the tide, that a shark is washed in, but they are usually sandsharks and their teeth are too far back to take a bite out of you.

  – And one day, perhaps, Delarey Straat will be called Mandela Street, or Tambo Street. So you see how history is in flux.

  The history teacher at Klipdorp High, Meneer Jansen, has this way of killing history stone dead. He makes us underline key words and dates in our history textbooks and number the facts:

  Jan van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape in 1652.

  He bartered cows for beads from Harry the Hottentot.

  He gave the free burghers the right to farm the land that came to be called Stellenbosch.

  In 1688 the French Huguenots fled the Roman Catholics in France and settled in Franschhoek to plant grapes.

  And so it goes. He has taught out of the same textbooks for so many years, and the facts have been underlined so many times, the pencil often goes through the paper when you underline again. If you hold a page up to the sun the light shines through like a Chinese lantern. It does not help to point this out to Meneer Jansen.

  We underline the facts again, to imprint them on our minds.

  – Let me tell you, fingerwags Meneer Jansen, history is not like biology where you poke holes in lizards. One lizard more or less is neither here nor there. Twenty-six thousand boer women and children died in English camps during the War. Ja-nee, history is not made up of cold numbers like maths, where you can rub out mistakes. No, in history we do not rub out or poke about; we remember.

  As I sip another Coca-Cola I run through the facts in my head for a test on the reasons for the Groot Trek. The Dutch farmers did not want to give up their slaves. They did not want to learn English and give up Dutch. They did not want to bow to an English god.

  Thoughts of the Dutch go west as I become aware of the waiter at my elbow. He is an old coloured man called Ou Piet Olifant. He says he comes from District Six, the part of town at the foot of Table Mountain that the government bulldozed down. Ou Piet Olifant remembers the banjos and mandolins and the sugar girls and groovy-time bars. He has nowhere to go back to. The world of his youth is gone like it was just a bioscope flick.

  While Ou Piet Olifant conjures up the ghosts of District Six for us, he fans his face with a plaid cloth cap. It reminds me of a pub in England.

  An old man fans his cloth cap over a smoking bowl of mulligatawny to cool it. Then he cups the bowl in his hands and drinks from it like the French drink coffee at breakfast. Under the table he has slipped bootless feet under a black-and-white sheepdog. My mother tells Marsden and me not to stare. When I drink the pea soup from the bowl I get a clip on the head from my father.

  – It is a crying shame, says my mother, about the death of District Six.

  – It’s a mystery, nods Ou Piet Olifant. I mos fought in the war agenz Rommel’s tanks, but when the poleez came we jus’ stood there and watched the bulldozers ride our place flat.

  My hamburger is cold. It looks like a pat of cowdung, so I drown it in ketchup. My mother frowns at the farting sounds the ketchup makes. She has a Greek salad with Calamata olives and feta and quartered tomatoes.

  I wonder if the Cape slaves who were hanged, drawn and quartered were dead while being drawn and quartered. I would like to ask my mother, but I sense she is already queasy at the sight of all the ketchup bleeding from my hamburger.

  bad magic

  I PEDAL LISTLESSLY DOWN Delarey. The sun beats down on my head and stings my scalp. I turn in at the Shell for a cool-drink from the icebox. Jim jumps up from the Carling Black Label beer crate.

  – I see you, young baas.

  – I see you.

  – What is your name, young baas?

  – Douglas.

  – Douglas. A strong name.

  He makes me smile, but senses my sadness.

  – Kunjani? How are you, young baas?

  – Ndilungile, I say. Alright.

  I am not floating (I cry for Marsden and my father and my Muizenberg teacher-mother) and I am not sinking (for
I long to see the sun filter through Marika’s skirt again). I am just barely lungile.

  – Oh. You speak Xhosa?

  – A few words. Ndifuna Coca-Cola, Mister Jim.

  – A good day for Coca-Cola. But, my name, young baas Douglas, is Moses, not Mister Jim.

  – Then why is Jim sewn on your back?

  – I will tell you my story, young baas Douglas, but first the Coca-Cola.

  He bends his head into the icebox for a Coca-Cola and I see his lagoon of bald skin. He digs a can out and taps it three times with his finger before handing it to me. I finger up the ring pull and it fizzes cheerfully. I feel it is rude not to offer him a sip, but then I have never drunk from the same can, or cup, as a black man. I think of Hope’s yellow enamel dish, under the sink so it does not hobnob with the china. I feel his eyes on me.

  – You drink, young baas, he says, as if he senses my doubts.

  – Sure you don’t want a sip?

  – No no. You have been to school, reading and writing big things.

  I shrug and drink a deep long gulp.

  – Me? What have I done, just sit on my box and watch the cars go by.

  He laughs a deep laugh that rumbles up from somewhere in his drumskin stomach. It spooks the mossies on the overhead telegraph wire. They flit up into the blue, and then flutter down again.

  He reaches into his deep overall pockets and scatters seed for the mossies. They fly down to peck at the seed. Then, a black crow drops out of the sky and caws at the mossies until they abandon the seeds for the telegraph wire. Moses flicks his handkerchief at the crow to shoo it away, but it just darts a beady eye at him and dips down for the seeds. The mossies twitter on the wire. There is something slick and rat-like about the bird. It is like a seagull hungry for fish heads, but lacking all the cheeky charm seagulls have.

  Moses wildly flaps his arms to chase the bird away, then settles on his empty beer crate again.

  – I tell you my story, young baas, says Moses.

  He reaches deep into his pockets to pull out an orange packet of Boxer tobacco.

  – I am a Xhosa, from the Transkei. I spent my days as a man down the mines of Johannesburg. One day they said: you are too old to dig for gold. They put money in the post office for me, and said: Go home to the Transkei. But in the Transkei, there is nothing for me. My mother and father are long dead. I have no wife, no children. So I thought to myself, all your life you heard stories of Cape Town, of the fruit and the fish and the flowers. So now is the time to go. I was on my way down to Cape Town on this N1 road when I got a lift from Beaufort West on the back of a farmer’s lorry carrying sheep to the slaughterhouse. Twelve miles north of Klipdorp, the farmer picked up more sheep and there was no room for me on the back. The seat up front was free but he did not offer it to me.

  Moses tips the Boxer tobacco into a furrow of squared newspaper.

  – So I walked down the road under the burning sun, the jacket of my father folded over my arm. Then two white boys in a bakkie went past. The bakkie turned around and I knew there was going to be trouble for me.

  He licks the edges of the newspaper.

  – I had to jump out of the way of the hooting bakkie. When it went past I heard the words: Ride him dead. The bakkie turned again, kicking up stones. This time a boy put out his hand for the jacket I carried. The dogtooth jacket an English soldier gave my father long ago in the white man’s war. The jacket with my pass and the moneybook in my pocket. Gone.

  In my mind, the bakkie roars off, leaving Moses flapping his hands, as if chasing crows, or drowning in the dust.

  Moses lights the cigarette with a Lion match.

  – When I got to Klipdorp I saw a boer leaning against the diesel pump. I said: Baas, let me drink from the tap. He said: Go ahead. So I drank and ran cold water over my head. He said: Hey, old man, there’s a drought in the Karoo, don’t you know? I tipped my hat to say ndiyabonga and began to walk away. He called after me: Hey, old man, you want a job? My petrolboy Jim just landed in the jail.

  He glances down Delarey towards the Klipdorp jail.

  – They found out this petroljockey Jim was ANC. He was jailed in the jail down the road, but then they took him to Pretoria. There has been no word of him.

  He shakes his head.

  – So, my post office book was gone and I had no imali. It would be a good thing to have imali in my pocket for Cape Town, I thought, so I said: Yes, baas. Just for a time.

  Moses handkerchiefs the beads of sweat from his forehead.

  He bends his head, and the tobacco smoke hovers over his bald head.

  My father’s trick: he breathes cigar smoke into a glass of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and, instead of billowing out over the lip of the glass, it hovers over the tiger’s-eye liquid until it fades out.

  The patch of bald skin and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes are the only signs that Moses is an old man. He draws in a deep suck of tobacco, lifts his head, and goes on:

  – I can go nowhere without my pass. The post office will not give me my money. They will not believe I am me, Moses, until I produce my pass. I wrote to Pretoria a long time ago, a year now. But still no pass comes in the post, and no word from Pretoria. For now, I am lucky the Klipdorp police do not trouble me. They do not check for my pass, for they know me, Jim the petrolboy. But if I go to another town and the police catch me with no pass they will put me in jail. I was jailed under the earth for too long. I am too old to be in a sunless place again. I think to myself: Moses, you are lucky to be in the sun, untroubled by the police. So I sit on my box and wait for my pass to come.

  He laughs ruefully, flicks the cigarette to drop the ash.

  – Young baas, people have called me Jim for two years now. So.

  – I will call you Moses, if you call me Douglas, not young baas.

  – You will make an old man happy. It is good muti for the old to hear their name in the mouth of the young.

  He sucks deeply at his cigarette.

  – Tell me, Douglas, why is there rain in your eyes?

  – My twin brother is dead and my father gone.

  – Gone?

  – Sailed away.

  – Yo yo yo, Douglas. This is too much bad magic for one boy.

  For a long time we just sit under the black umbrella of bad magic, until Moses sweeps the gloom away.

  – How old are you, Douglas?

  – Fourteen. And a half.

  – Fourteen. A big boy. Almost a man. You know, when I was a boy of fourteen, I still herded cows and goats in the Transkei, Umtata way. All day in the sun, down by the river, chasing wild dogs away, shooting birds, catching lizards. We herdboys fought with sticks as long as spears, not to hurt, but to learn the skill of a warrior.

  Moses leaps to his feet, flings his empty hands overhead in a blurred flurry, as if parrying sticks. Then he shuffles to a standstill. Sighs for lost youth. Takes a drag on his flaring cigarette.

  – At night, when the coals died down and the tokoloshe walked under the moon, I lay down on the mat on the floor of anthill and cow dung. My heart beat against the bone of my mother’s back. I breathed in her mother smell. Surely, in my mother’s khaya, where my fingers combed through her hair, the tokoloshe would not dare? You know the tokoloshe, Douglas?

  I nod, as Hope has told me vivid tales of the stumpy hobgoblin with the fiery red eyes.

  – As a boy it was forgiven to cry, to curl up against your mother, to piss out of fear for the tokoloshe.

  I laugh so hard the Coca-Cola fizzes out of my nostrils.

  – Ewe. It is true. I pissed out of fear. But the longed-for time came when my father said I was to become a man. I was sixteen then, just two years older than you are now. I hardly knew my father, who was away on the mines all year. I too wanted to be a miner, to follow in my father’s footsteps. To be a miner was to be strong and brave. My father told me it was hard down the mines, that he wanted his sons to follow another path. He said it was better to work on a farm in the
Cape, for though you still left your wife and your children behind, you were outside, under the sky. To be under the earth was to die a slow death. But I did not believe him. I saw the men who came back from the mines, flashing money and shiny shoes.

  Now that my father has sailed away, he is becoming a stranger to me. In my mind his face is fuzzing at the edges. His eyes are a deadpan, soulless stare. The glint is gone.

  – To prove our manhood we had to do one daring deed. In the old times you would hunt a leopard or a lynx, but they were hard to find. So we chose to kill a dog that barked at us whenever our mothers sent us to buy bones or a pig head at the butcher. The butcher in our village was a bitter white man who lived in an old caravan. We hated that dog, the way he snarled and lunged at us, baring his teeth, fighting the rope that tied him to the caravan. One night I stalked up to the caravan when the dog was snoring and cut the rope. Then, from a distance, we whistled to wake the dog. When he ran to us, we speared the dog with sticks we had knifed at one end. It felt good to kill the dog. Years later, I saw that it was not the dog that was evil, but the man who taught the dog to hate.

  The memory of it bends his white-fringed head and a sigh whispers from his lips. Then he lifts his head to suck long at the cigarette stompie. Wisps of smoke flow through his yellowy, cobby teeth as he goes on.

  – My father and the fathers of my boyhood friends sent for the old tribal doctor, the ingcibi, to come with his assegai and make men of us. On the day the ingcibi came to our village, we boys of sixteen or seventeen smeared each other from head to foot in white ochre. Painted white, we would stay unseen by the evil spirits that waylay boys on the journey to manhood. For a moment I wanted to laugh at the sight of my black boyhood friends standing there white as ghosts, but I did not laugh, for I remembered the pain to come. The time for boyish fooling was over.

  Moses stubs his cigarette out under his boot.

  – We sat naked on our heels, the way bushmen do, waiting in a row for the ingcibi. We were surrounded by our fathers, and the other men. I wanted to catch my father’s eye, but knew I was not to glance around like an inquisitive boy. I was to stare ahead, and go through with it. If my face pinched with pain, I would shame my father. The shame of being a coward would dog me forever. I would never walk among men with my head held high. I would never be a soldier or a miner. I would run away, my bleeding tail between my legs like a scared, stoned dog.