The Power of One (25 page)

I awoke in Barberton Hospital with a man in a white coat shining a torch into my eyes. My head was ringing as though voices came from the other end of a long tunnel. “Well, thank God for that, he's regained consciousness,” I heard him say.

“Thank you, Jesus,” I heard my mother say in a weepy voice. I looked around to see her seated at the side of the bed. She looked pale and worried and her hair hung in wisps around her eyes. She had come out without her hat and still wore her pink sewing smock. My granpa was also there, sitting on a chair at the opposite side of the bed. I tried to talk but found it impossible and my jaw hurt like billyho. I managed a weak grunt without opening my mouth, but that was all. My mouth tasted of blood, and, running my swollen tongue around my palate, I realized that several of my teeth were missing.

The doctor spoke to me. “Now, son, I want you to tell me how many fingers I'm holding up in front of you.” He held up two, and I held up two fingers. “Again.” He held up four fingers and I too held up four. He repeated this with several combinations before he finally said, “Well, that's something, anyway, he doesn't appear to have concussion. We'll have to X-ray the jaw, though I think it's probably broken.” He turned to my mother and granpa. “The boy is in a lot of pain, we'll be taking him into theater almost immediately. We may need to wire his jaw, and there are several broken teeth which we will have to clean up. He'll be sedated when he comes out, so there isn't any point in your staying.”

They both rose, and my mother leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “We'll see you tomorrow morning, darling. You be a brave boy, now!” My granpa touched me lightly on the shoulder. “There's a good lad,” he said.

I watched them leave the emergency ward, where I appeared to be the only emergency, as the other three beds were unoccupied. My jaw ached a great deal and while I think I may have been crying, I only recall being terribly concerned for Doc.

It turned out my jaw had been broken. They wired the top jaw to the bottom one in the closed-mouth position so I was unable to talk. I couldn't inquire about him. Adults decide what they want kids to know, and all my mother would say when she came to visit was, “You've had a terrible shock, darling, you mustn't think about what happened.”

In fact, that was all I could think about. Doc was the most important person in my life, and the thought of him lying in a dark cell, probably dying, was almost unbearable. I managed to communicate to a junior nurse called Marie, who had taken to calling me her little
skattebol,
that I wanted paper and a pencil. She brought a pad and a pencil and in running writing I wrote, “What's happened to Professor von Vollensteen?” She read the note, and her eyes grew large.

“Ag, no, man! Sister says we can't tell you nothing.” She held out her hand for the pad and pencil, but I quickly tucked it under the quilt. “Give it to me back! Please, I'll get into trouble with Sister!” I shook my head, which hurt. “I'll tell on you, you hear!” But I knew she wouldn't. I felt less vulnerable with the pad and pencil beside me. I tore a single sheet from the small pad and brought it out from under the bedclothes. Placing it on the cabinet beside my bed, I leaned over and wrote, “My name is not
skattebol
it is PEEKAY.” I didn't much like the endearment, as I didn't see myself as a fluffy ball, which is a name you give to really small kids. I tore the bit I'd written on from the sheet of paper and handed it to her. She read it slowly, then walked to the end of the bed.

“That's not what it says here,” Marie said, looking down at the progress chart that hung from the foot of the bed. “Don't you know your proper name, then?” she teased. “It's wrong,” I scribbled, tearing off a second note and holding it out to her.
“Sis,
man! You don't even know your own name. I never heard of a name like Peekay, where'd you get a silly name like that?” On the remaining scrap of paper I wrote, “I just got it.”

Marie took a sharp breath. “Anyway, it's a rotten name for a hero who tackled a German spy when he was trying to escape.” Her eyes grew big again, and she moved her spotty face close to mine. “It says in the paper you even maybe going to get a medal!” She drew back suddenly, alarmed that she'd told me too much. “Don't you tell Sister I told you, you hear?” She brought a finger up to her lips. “I promise I'll call you Peekay if you promise to stay
stom
.” I nodded my head, though I wondered how she thought I could tell anyone. The tears began to roll down my cheeks. I hadn't wanted them to, they just came because of the news about Doc. I could hear his voice when the officer had handed him the piece of paper. “The stupidity. Already the stupidity begins again.”

“Don't cry, Peekay. Sister'll know I told you if you cry,” Marie said, distressed. I knuckled the tears from my eyes, and then she bathed my face with a wet flannel. “I don't really think Peekay is a silly name,” she said gently. “Who showed you how to write so good? I went to school up to fourteen and even I can't write so good as you.”

After three days alone in the ward I was moved onto the verandah, where there were eight beds, all occupied. Except for the fact that I still couldn't talk, I was much better. I had walked into the ward with the sister, and with the exception of two old men who were asleep, all the others had applauded and said things like “Well done, son!” One man said that I was a proper patriot. As soon as Sister left the ward I wrote on a piece of paper as big as I could, “What happened to Professor von Vollensteen?” I jumped out of bed and took it over to the bed nearest me and gave it to the man in it. He read it and handed it back to me.

“You mean the German spy? Sorry, son, we're not supposed to tell you.” He winked at the others. “We got strict orders.” The others all nodded. “Mind you, you're a brave little bugger, I have to say that for you.” The other men seemed to agree with him.

My mother came to the hospital in the mornings, when Pastor Mulvery was able to bring her. She sat with me while he went around the hospital to witness for the Lord. But first he came in to see me, and he'd flash his lightning smile which prevented his two front teeth from escaping and held my hand in his damp, warm grasp for ages until it felt as though it wanted to jump out of his soft grip and run away and hide. In his soft woman's voice he said, “We're all praying that this terrible ordeal will make you accept Jesus into your heart.” Then, still holding my hand, he kneeled beside the bed and my mother also kneeled on the other side and Pastor Mulvery would pray out loud. When he prayed his voice rose even higher and he became quite excited.

He would start with a few random “Hallelujahs” and my mother would respond with “Praise His name! Praise His precious name!” Pastor Mulvery would say, “Lord, we are gathered here in Your precious name to pray for this poor child.” “Amen,” my mother would say. “In his terrible affliction, show him the path to salvation. O precious Redeemer, who died on the cross so we might be free.” “Hallelujah, praise the Lord,” my mother would answer. “Son, open your heart to Jesus, accept Him into your life. Lord, do not condemn him to the terrible fires of hell, grant him everlasting life with your glorious salvation.” “Hallelujah, blessed be His name!” “Bring your sin to Jesus, son, lay it at his feet so that he may grant you His precious redemption. Precious Jesus, answer our prayers, open his young heart, let him see you in all Your glory. Lord, we pray for this child's soul, we earnestly beseech You to bring him from darkness to the light, from the inky black of the stone tomb on Golgotha into the glorious morning of the resurrection of our sweet Jesus Christ!” “Yes, Jesus! Precious Jesus!” my mother would be saying on her side of the bed. And so it would go every morning.

Not long after I'd first met Doc, we were sitting on our rock on the hill behind the rose garden and I had asked him why I was a sinner and what I had done to be condemned to eternal hellfire unless I was born again.

He sat for a long time looking over the valley, and then he said, “Peekay, God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with such rubbish. Only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.” He paused and smiled. “In Mexico there is a cactus that even sometimes you would think God forgets. But no, my friend, this is not so. On a full moon in the desert every one hundred years he remembers and he opens up a single flower to bloom. And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven.” He looked at me, his deep blue eyes sharp and penetrating. “This is the faith in God the cactus has.” We had sat for a while before he spoke again. “It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don't go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil his day. Absoloodle.”

I still sometimes got a bit scared about going to hell, and I used to think quite a lot about being born again. But my heart didn't want to open up and receive the Lord. All the people I knew who had opened up their hearts to Jesus struck me as a pretty pathetic lot, not bad, not good, just nothing. I couldn't afford to be just nothing when I was aiming to be the welterweight champion of the world. I guess my mother was right when she said if I kept rejecting the Lord and hardening my heart one day He might just go away and leave me to it. That's what must have happened, because after a while it got a lot easier and I didn't worry as much. I decided I liked Doc's God a lot more than my mother's and Pastor Mulvery's and Pik Botha's and all the people who loved Jesus at the Apostolic Faith Mission. Jesus, who was God's dearly beloved son, seemed to be in charge of things there. He seemed to be very keen on saving souls and had actually died for their sins, but I couldn't help feeling it may have been a bit of a waste. Still, they seemed pretty grateful because they spoke a lot more about Jesus than about God. Jesus was definitely number one at the Apostolic Faith Mission.

Later I was to learn that there was a third party involved called the Holy Ghost, who spoke in tongues of invisible fire and gave people a thing called “the gift of tongues.” When he did this, people would jump up in prayer meetings and wave their arms around and shake a lot with their eyes closed. They never seemed to bump into anything either, it was quite uncanny. And they'd babble away and sing, using strange words. I'd try to do it afterward, but it never sounded right. It was a gift, all right.

A visiting pastor from the Assembly of God Church in America told us once when we were having a revival week that he had definite proof that a woman who had never been out of her small town in America spoke in Swahili when the Holy Ghost entered into her. There was a missionary from Africa who understood Swahili present in the same small church in America, and she'd understood every word. He didn't tell us what she'd said, but he said there were lots of cases like this and that he'd personally witnessed quite a few. I had listened from then on, but nobody in the Apostolic Faith Mission ever spoke Zulu or Shangaan. Maybe Zulu and Shangaan weren't exotic enough for the Holy Ghost. I wondered what was so special about Swahili.

Pastor Mulvery got up from beside the hospital bed and gave

me a flash smile and said that Jesus loved me anyway. Then he trotted off with the Bible under one arm and a handful of tracts to visit all the other patients and my mother called him a precious man and stayed with me.

After I got the pad, I wrote her a long note asking her about Doc. She took it and, without reading it, asked, “Is this about the Professor?” Her lips were drawn tight as I nodded. Then she scrunched the note in her hand. “I don't want you to ever mention his name again, do you hear? He is an evil man who used you to cover up the terrible things he was doing, and then he nearly killed you.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “The doctor says if he had caught you on the side of the head he would have killed you! Another three inches and you would have been dead. You've been through a terrible experience and I've prayed and prayed the Lord will make you forget it so you are not scarred for life.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“No! No!” I forced myself to say. What came out was two squeaks from the back of my throat which forced their way past my bruised and swollen tongue and out of my clamped mouth. I started to cry silently without wanting to in front of my mother. They were blaming Doc for what had happened to me, and I was the only one who knew the truth and I couldn't help him. It was my fault anyway. If I hadn't put the bottle of Johnnie Walker in his sugar bag, this never would have happened. Doc, whom I loved so dearly, had become another Pisskop victim, but this time it was much worse than a nervous breakdown.

My mother had stopped sniffing when she saw my tears. “You poor little mite, you've been through a terrible time. We'll never talk about it again. Mrs. Boxall from the library has asked to come and see you, but the doctor and I have agreed that you're not well enough to have visitors.” She opened her bag and withdrew a green folded card. “Now I have some good news for you. Your report card came, and you came in first in your class. Your granpa and I are very proud of you.” She beamed at me, her tears forgotten. “They've put you up another two classes, you're going to be in with the ten-year-olds. Fancy that, seven and in with the ten-year-olds!” She handed the report card to me, and through my tears I took it and tore it into four pieces. For a long time my mother said nothing, looking down at the pieces of green cardboard in my lap. Finally she gave a deep sigh. I hated her sighs the most because they made me feel terribly guilty. “The Lord has blessed you with a good brain. I pray every day