The Power of One (18 page)

Her face was covered with chocolate icing. Stuffing the last bits into her mouth, she sucked at her fingers as a small child might, two at a time. Then she plopped her thumb in and out of her mouth several times and ran her hand across her bosom, her fingers moving like a fat spider hunting for any cake she might have missed. She looked up at me and I dropped my gaze, ashamed and frightened, though at the same time I instinctively knew I was watching a sickness or a sadness or even both.

When she had finished, Big Hettie was in a lather of sweat, the front of her dress soaked in perspiration, covered with cake crumbs, and stained with chocolate icing. She used the damp towel to wipe her face and then lay there panting heavily, her eyes closed. I watched as tears ran down the side of her face, but she said nothing for a long while.

When she had recovered her breath, she opened her eyes, which were red and looked puffy. “I am sorry, Peekay. I am very, very sorry,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

“It is nothing, Mevrou Hettie, it was only that you were hungry. Chocolate cake makes me feel like that all the time.”

“I'm sorry I ate all the cake, Peekay. But now you get first pick of everything!”

It had been a long time since I had been given first pick of anything, and I laughed. “There is enough for the whole train in here, Mevrou Hettie. I will have cold roast potatoes, after that sweet potatoes, they are my two favorites.”

“And maybe a nice piece of chicken, heh?”

Granpa Chook's death was still much too close to me. The prospect of eating one of his distant relatives, even if this chicken hadn't been a proper chicken person or even a kaffir chicken like Granpa Chook, was impossible to contemplate. Biting into a delicious golden potato, I shook my head.

“To be a welterweight you must eat properly, Peekay. Meat will make you strong. Some mutton, perhaps?” she said coaxingly.

When pressed by my mother to have a second helping, my granpa used to say, “A cow has eight stomachs but I, alas, have one. A cow must keep on chewing but I, my dear, am done.” I swallowed the potato and recited this to Big Hettie. It was bound, I felt, to cheer her up.

Instead she started to cry again.

“I'm sorry, Mevrou Hettie, I'm very sorry, I didn't mean to make you cry again, it is only a silly thing my granpa says to my ma just to tease her.”

Big Hettie sniffed, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. A piece of chocolate icing from the cloth smeared on the bridge of her nose. “It is not you,
liefling.
It's old Hettie. She's the one I'm crying for.” She smiled weakly through the tears. “What the hell, Peekay, what do you say?” she sniffed. “Might as well die eating as starving. Pass me that leg of mutton, my good man!”

I handed her the leg of mutton, one half of which had been sliced away almost to the bone. Resting the big end on her chest, she commenced happily to tear away at the meat on the bone while I demolished a large sweet potato and a mango.

When she finished, the bone was picked almost clean. To my surprise, she asked me to tear up one of the chickens and place the pieces on her stomach, also to put the slices of corned beef with it. She tore at the chicken as though she was starving, even crunching some of the softer bones. The chicken and corned beef were soon demolished, and with a soft sigh she wiped the grease and sweat from her face. Using the cake tin, I gathered up the chicken bones scatterecj over the area of her stomach and tipped them out of the window.

I then washed the mango from my face and hands and set to work, soaking and squeezing out the only remaining towel. This I handed to Big Hettie and retrieved the old one, which I washed with a bit of soap, rinsed, and hung over the compartment windowsill to dry. I had seen Dum and Dee, our kitchen maids, do the same thing with the wiping-up cloths at home after dinner, so I knew I was doing it right. Only they used to hang the cloths from a small line at the side of the big black wood stove, so the dry cloths always smelled a little of soup.

Big Hettie put the new cloth, wet as it was, over the front of her dress. “It's so nice and cool and the heat of my body will soon dry it,” she said, but I knew it was an attempt to hide the chocolate and grease stains. I thought about having to wash Big Hettie's dress. It would take all day and I would need a basin as big as a small dam.

There was a sudden rattle as the compartment door slid open and Hennie Venter appeared. “I'm sorry I've been so long, Hettie, but Pik Botha says he can't walk and is sulking in the guard van and I have had to do conductor duty because Van Leemin the guard is drunk again. But also I have had to serve lunch,” he finished in an apologetic voice.

“What's for lunch?” Big Hettie asked.

Hennie seemed surprised at the question. “Beef stew with mashed potato and peas like always.”

“Keep it! The boy and me would rather starve than eat that pig's swill,” she said haughtily.

“Banana custard for pudding today?” Hennie said enticingly.

“Ummph, and tastes like what comes out of a baby's bum,” Big Hettie said scornfully.

“Well, if you don't want any help I'll kick the dust.” Hennie looked over at the open hamper and winked at me. “I'm sorry you two decided to starve. Are you sure there is nothing I can do for you?”

“You can get me off this blery floor, man!” Hettie said in a forlorn voice.

The waiter clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Soon, Hettie. We get to Kaapmuiden in two hours. There they will know what to do.”

Hoppie had explained to me that from Kaapmuiden I would have to take the branch line to Barberton, a further three hours' journey “in a real little coffeepot,” he had said. He had told me the story of a washerwoman with a huge pile of freshly ironed washing on her head who was walking along the railway line when the Barberton train drew up beside her. The driver had leaned out of the train and invited her to jump aboard into the kaffir carriage. “No thank you,
baas,
” she had replied, “today I am in a terrible big hurry.” It was a funny story when Hoppie told it, but I knew it wasn't true because no white train driver would ever think to offer a kaffir woman a ride in his train.

The afternoon was still and hot and it was nearly four o'clock when we arrived in Kaapmuiden. The train pulled slowly, shyly, into the busy junction, the way trains do when they arrive in places where there are other trains. Kaapmuiden served as the rail link between the Northern and Southern Transvaal and the Mozambique seaport of Lorenzo Marques and so was full of its own self-importance.

The station was all huff and puff, busier even than Gravelotte, with engines shunting and trucks banging, clanging, and coupling on lines crisscrossing everywhere like neatly arranged spaghetti. Our train drew slowly into the main platform and, with a final screech of metal on metal, drew to a standstill.

“What do I do now, please, Mevrou Hettie?” I inquired nervously. I had put on my tackies, even though I knew I was to change trains and wouldn't arrive in Barberton until well into the evening. At the beginning of my journey the original oversized tackies had been a signal of the end of the Judge, his storm troopers, the hostel, and Mevrou: a grotesque chapter in my life. Equally this second pair, fitted to my feet so perfectly by the beautiful Indian lady, seemed to symbolize the unknown. Sometimes we live a lifetime in two days. The two days between the first tackies and the snuggly fitting ones I now wore were the beginning of the end of my small childhood, a bridge of time that would shape my life to come.

“We must wait here, Peekay. Hennie Venter will bring some men to help me and then I will put you on the train to Barberton. There is plenty of time, your train leaves at six o'clock.” Big Hettie was obviously in great discomfort and now that relief from her ordeal was at hand her great body had started to tremble with shock.

I watched from our compartment window as our carriage was uncoupled and, with much fuss, shunted into a small siding where a gang of men were waiting. Among them were Hennie Venter. As we came to a halt, he stuck his head through the open window. “Nearly over, Hettie, we'll soon have you back on your feet,” he said cheerfully.

I passed all our stuff through the window and then, rather than clamber over Big Hettie again, I came through the window myself, jumping the short distance onto the siding. It was nice to be standing in the sun again. Two of the men climbed through the window onto one of the bunks. Using monkey wrenches, they managed to loosen the bolts attaching the bunk to the compartment wall. Then they slung ropes around both ends of the bunk, secured them to the bunk above, and removed the bolts so the bunk was held suspended away from Big Hettie. Climbing onto the top bunk, they were able to lift the suspended one sufficiently for two men, crouching in the doorway of the compartment, to lift Big Hettie into a sitting position. The four men then tried to raise her to a standing position, but her weight was too much for them and she seemed unable to use her legs. Big Hettie was plainly in some distress and her face was very red. After a while it became plain that the whole ordeal was too much for her and she was too exhausted and weak to stand up. She simply sat on the floor of the compartment, flushed and panting, her back propped up by a mound of pillows. A huge, sadly battered rag doll.

The men left to fetch a block and tackle. I returned to the compartment and sat on the bunk next to Big Hettie. Hennie Venter remained outside looking into the compartment, his arms resting on the windowsill.

Big Hettie's breathing was becoming more labored as she asked Hennie Venter to go to her hamper, which now rested on the platform outside, and take the remaining chicken and potatoes and fruit from it, pack them into the cake tin, and put it into my suitcase. He nodded and left the window.

“It will be late before you get to Barberton,
liefling.
What will your
oupa
think of me if you have had no supper?” She panted, her hand clutching at her left breast.

I was too polite to tell Big Hettie that eating chicken was no longer my specialty. Instead I thanked her and then asked, “Will you not be coming to the train like you said, Mevrou Hettie?”

She said nothing for a long while, as though she were trying to gather up enough strength to speak without gasping. “I think it is the final round coming up for me, Peekay. I have a terrible pain.” The color had drained from her face and her lips had turned blue. Her left hand was kneading her left breast.

I scrambled over to the window. Hennie Venter had opened my suitcase and was putting the big cake tin into it. “Meneer Venter! Come quick! Mevrou Hettie is sick!” I yelled.

I turned back to look at Big Hettie. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Hold my hand, Peekay,” she gasped. I moved back along the bunk and she took my hand into her own. Her grasp was weak, as though no strength remained in her.

“I don't think I can come out for the next round,
liefling,,”
The words were sandwiched between sighs, quite different from the windy breathing of the morning.

Hennie Venter stuck his head through the window. “Oh my God! I'll fetch the doctor.” I could hear his boots scrunching on the gravel as he started to run.

“Please don't die, Mevrou Hettie,” I begged, suddenly very afraid.

“Ag,
Peekay, it has not been much of a life since my flyweight left me, it's not so much to give up.” She turned to look at me, and a tear squeezed out of the corner of her eye and rolled in slow motion down her cheek. “Peekay, you will be a great welterweight, I know it. You have pride and courage. Remember what I told you about pride and courage?”

“Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it,” I repeated, my lips trembling.

“You will be a great fighter, I know it,” she whispered. Big Hettie gave a little jerk and the pressure on my hand increased momentarily. Then her huge hand opened and she slid back into the pillows. For such a big, loud woman it was such a small, quiet death.

I started to cry. It wasn't a pain like Granpa Chook, it was a sadness. Even then I instinctively understood that the blithe spirit is rare among humans and that, for the period of an evening and a day, I had been with a part of the human condition at its best.

After a while I could hear the men returning with the block and tackle. They were laughing and chatting as men do when they are having a bit of a holiday from routine. Big Hettie could be moved now.

IT
was just after ten in the evening when the train puffed into Barberton station. The conductor woke me before we were due to arrive. My head was dizzy with sleep and mussed up with the events of the day.

Hennie had put me on the train, his mood a mixture of concern for me and the need to get back to the action, where he was such an important cog in the sad machinery of the day. “You eat something, you hear? Here's a ticky to buy a cool drink,” he said, handing me a tiny silver coin.

“I have money, Meneer Venter.”

But he insisted I take the threepenny bit. “Go on, take it, take it, it is only a blery ticky!” he blustered.

Fortunately, he didn't have to hang around too long, we had only just made it to the Barberton train in time. As we departed with a great chuffing sound that seemed too big for the little coffeepot engine, Hennie shouted, “I will tell Hoppie Groenewald you behaved like a proper Boer, a real white man!”

I climbed down the steps of the carriage onto the gravel platform of Barberton station, struggling with my suitcase, which had now become quite heavy with Big Hettie's tin. I had left its contents untouched, too tired and bewildered to eat. The platform was crowded with people hurrying up and down, heads jerking this way and that, greeting each other and generally carrying on the way people do when a train arrives. My granpa didn't seem to be among them. I decided to sit on my suitcase and wait, too tired to think of anything else I might do. I must have been crying without knowing it, maybe it was just from being tired or something. I had been in worse jams than this one, and I expected any moment that I would hear my nanny's big laugh followed by a series of tut-tuts as she swept me into her apron. That's when everything would be all right again.

A lady was approaching, although I could only see her dimly through my tears. She bent down beside me and crushed me to her bony bosom. “My darling, my poor darling,” she wept, “everything will be the same again, I promise.”

My mother was here! She was alive! Thin as ever, but not dead from dysentery and blackwater fever.

Yet I think we both knew everything would never be the same again.

“Where is my nanny?” I asked, rubbing the tears from my eyes.

“Come, darling, Pastor Mulvery is waiting in his car to take us home to your granpa. What a big boy you are now that you are six, much too big for a nanny!”

The hollow feeling inside me had begun to grow, and I could hear the loneliness birds cackling away, their oily wings flapping gleefully as they sat on their dark stone nests.

Clearing her throat and reaching for my suitcase, my mother straightened up. “Come, darling, Pastor Mulvery is going to take us home to your grandfather.”

Her remark about my not needing a nanny now that I was six struck me so forcibly that it felt like one of the Judge's clouts across the mouth. My nanny, my darling beloved nanny, was gone, and I was six. The two pieces of information tumbled around in my head like two dogs tearing at each other as they fought, rolling over in the dust.

My mother had taken my hand and was leading me to a big gray Plymouth parked under a street lamp beside a peppercorn tree. A fat, balding man stepped out of the car as we approached. His top teeth jutted out at an angle, peeping out from under his lip as though looking to see if the coast was clear so they might escape. Pastor Mulvery seemed aware of this, and he smiled in a quick flash so as not to allow his teeth to make a dash for it. He reached for my suitcase, taking it from my mother. “Praise the Lord, sister, He has delivered the boy safely to his loved ones.” His voice was as soft and high-pitched as a woman's.

“Yes, praise His precious name,” my mother replied. I had never heard her talk like this before. It was quite obvious to me that the concentration camp must have had something to do with it. My finely tuned ear could hear all sorts of crazy bits and pieces going on behind her words.

Pastor Mulvery stuck his hand out. “Welcome, son. The Lord has answered our prayers and brought you home safely.” I took his hand, which was warm and slightly damp.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. It felt strange to be speaking in English. I climbed into the backseat of the car next to my mother. All the loneliness birds had become one big loneliness bird on a big stone nest, and I could feel the heaviness of the stone egg as it hatched inside me.

Granpa Chook was dead, Hoppie had to go and fight Adolf Hitler and maybe he would never come back again, Big Hettie was dead, and now my beloved nanny was gone. Like Pik Botha, my mother seemed to have entered into a very peculiar relationship with the Lord that was bound to create problems. My life was a mess.

We drove through the town, which had streetlights and tarred roads. It was late and only a few cars buzzed down the wide main street. We passed a square filled with big old flamboyant trees. The street was lined with shops one after the other, McClymont's, Gentleman's Outfitters, J. W. Winter, Chemist, The Savoy Cafe, Barberton Hardware Company. We turned up one street and passed a grand building called the Impala Hotel which had big wide steps and seemed to have lots of people in it. The sound of a concertina could be heard as Pastor Mulvery slowed the Plymouth down to a crawl.

“The devil is busy tonight, sister. We must pray for their souls, pray that they may see the glory that is Him and be granted everlasting life,” he said in his girlish voice.

My mother sighed. “There is so much to be done before He comes again and takes us to His glory.” She turned to me. “We have a lovely Sunday School at the Apostolic Faith Mission. You are not too young to meet the Lord, to be born again, my boy. The Lord has a special place in His heart for His precious children.”

“Hallelujah, praise His precious name, we go to meet Him!” Pastor Mulvery said.

“Can we meet Him tomorrow, please? I am too tired tonight,” I asked.

They both laughed, and I felt better. The laugh that rang from my mother was the old familiar one, the concentration camp hadn't stolen it. “We're going straight home, darling, you must be completely exhausted,” she said gently.

I had almost dropped my camouflage, but now it was back again. Big Hettie had said Pik was a born-again Christian and also that he belonged to the Apostolic Faith Mission. Her tone had implied that both situations left a great deal to be desired. How had my mother come to this? Who was this strange man with escaping teeth? What was this new language and who exactly was this person called the Lord?

I had seen my return to Granpa and to Nanny first as a means of urgent escape from Adolf Hitler and then, when Hoppie had calmed my fear of Hitler's imminent arrival, as the continuation of my earlier life on the farm. Living in a small town hadn't meant anything to me. Living with silly old Granpa and beautiful Nanny had meant everything. My mother had been a nice part of a previous existence, though not an essential one; she was a frail and nervous woman and Nanny had taken up the caring, laughing, scolding, and soothing role mothers play in other cultures. My mother suffered a lot from headaches. In the morning when I was required to do a reading lesson and had come to sit on the cool, polished red cement verandah next to her favorite bentwood rocking chair, eager to show her my progress, she would often say, “Not today, darling, I have a splitting headache.”

I would find Nanny and I would read my book to her and then she would bring a copy of
Outspan,
a magazine that used to come once a month. She would point to pictures that showed women doing things and I would read what it said about the pictures and translate them into Zulu. Her mouth would fall open and she would groan in amazement at the goings-on. “Oh, oh, oh, I think it is very hard to be a white woman,” she would sigh, clapping her hands.

I guessed that was why my mother was always getting splitting headaches, because she was a white woman and like Nanny said, it was a very hard thing to be.

We drew up beside a house that sat no more than twenty feet from the road. A low stone wall marked the front garden and steps led up to the
stoep,
which ran the full width of the house. The place was only dimly
lit by
a distant street lamp so that further details were impossible to make out in the ghoulish darkness. Two squares of filtered orange light, each from a window in a separate part of the house, glowed through drawn curtains, shedding no real light but giving the house two eyes. The front door made a nose and the steps to it a mouth. Even in the dark it didn't seem to be an unfriendly sort of place. Behind the funny face would be my scraggy old granpa and he would tell about Nanny.

Pastor Mulvery said he wouldn't come in and he praised the Lord again for my delivery into the bosom of my loved ones and said that I would be a fine addition to the Lord's little congregation at the Apostolic Faith Mission Sunday school. My mother also praised his precious name, and it was becoming very apparent to me that the Lord was a pretty important person around these parts.

We watched the red brake lights of the big Plymouth twinkle and then disappear down a dip in the road, for we seemed to be on the top of a rise. “What a precious man,” my mother sighed.

Lugging my case in front of me with both hands, I followed her up the dark steps. Her shoes made a hollow sound on the wooden verandah and the screen door squeaked loudly on its heavy snap-back hinges. She propped it open with the toe of her brown brogue and opened the front door. Sharp light spilled over us and down the front steps, grateful to escape the restrictions of the small square room.

This room, at least, was not much altered from the dark little parlor on the farm. The same heavy, overstuffed lounge and three high-backed armchairs in faded brocade, with polished arms and ball-and-claw legs of dark lacquered wood, the backs of the lounge and chairs scalloped by antimacassars, took up most of the room. The glass bookcase still contained the red and gold leather-bound set of the complete works of Charles Dickens and the two large blue and gold volumes of
The History of the Crimean War.
The old grandfather clock stood in a new position beside a door leading out of the room into another part of the house, and it was nice to see the steady old brass pendulum swinging away quietly in its glass-fronted cabinet. On one wall was my granpa's stuffed Kudu head, the horns of the giant antelope brushing the ceiling. Above and on either side of the glass bookcase hung two narrow oil paintings, one showing a scarlet and the other an almost identical yellow long-stemmed rose. Both pictures were framed in the same flat brown-varnished frames and were the work of my grandmother, who had died giving birth to my mother. The paintings had been rendered on sheets of tin and the paint had flecked in parts, leaving dull pewter-colored spots where the backgrounds of salmon and green had lifted. Alone on one wall was a hand-colored steel engraving in a heavy walnut frame showing hundreds of Zulu dead and a handful of Welsh soldiers standing over them with bayonets fixed. They stood proud, looking toward heaven, each with a boot and putteed leg resting on the body of a near-naked savage. I had always thought how very clean and smart they still looked after having fought at close quarters with the Zulu hordes all night, each soldier seemingly responsible, if you counted the bodies and the soldiers in the picture, for the death of fifty-two Zulus. The caption under the painting, etched in a mechanical copperplate, read “The morning after the massacre. British honour is restored at Rourke's Drift, December, 1878. Brave men all.”

The tired old zebra skin which, along with everything else, I had known all my life, covered the floor, and the ball-and-claw legs of the lounge suite had been placed over the spots where they had worn the hair off the hide in their previous parlor existence. The only change in the room, for even the worn red velvet curtains had come along, was a small, round-shouldered wireless in brown Bakelite that rested on the top of the bookcase where the gramophone had previously stood.

Perhaps only the outside of things had changed and the inside, like this room, remained largely the same. For a moment my spirits lifted. Just then my granpa walked into the room, tall and straight as a bluegum pole. His pipe was hooked over the brown tobacco stain on the corner of his bottom lip and he stood framed by the doorway, his baggy khaki pants tied up as ever with a piece of rope, his shirtsleeves rolled up to below the elbow of his collarless shirt. He looked unchanged. He took two puffs from his pipe so that the smoke whirled around his untidy mop of white hair and curled past his long nose. “There's a good lad,” he said. His pale blue eyes shone wet, and he blinked quickly as he looked down at me. The smoke cleared around his head as he raised his arms slightly and spread his hands palms upward as though to indicate the room and the house and the predicament all in one sad gesture of apology.

“Newcastle disease. They had to kill all the Orpingtons,” he said.

“They killed Granpa Chook,” I said softly.

My mother put her hand on my shoulder and moved me past

my granpa. “That's right, darling, they killed all Granpa's chooks. Come along now, it's way past your bedtime.”

I hadn't meant to say anything about Granpa Chook. My granpa, after all, had never known him. It just came out. One chicken thing on top of another chicken thing. Granpa had been enormously fond of those black Orpingtons. Even Nanny had said they must be Zulu birds because they stood so black and strong and the roosters were like elegantly feathered Zulu generals. She had never commented on Granpa Chook's motley appearance. While Nanny had never seen him at the height of his powers, like Inkosi-Inkosikazi had, she knew him to be different, an exception, a magic chicken of great power who had been conjured up by the old monkey to watch over me. On only one occasion had she ventured the opinion that it was just like the old wizard to choose a lowly kaffir chicken and a Shangaan at that, when, to her mind, he could have dignified the relationship with one of Granpa's magnificent black Orpington roosters. If a chicken was to become home to the soul of a great warrior, why then could he not be an exemplary example of chickenhood? She had tut-tutted for a while and then, shaking her bandanna'd head, said, “Who can know the way of a snake on a steep rock?” Whatever that was supposed to mean.