Whitethorn (3 page)

Mattress picked her up again. ‘Back you go, little lioness,' he said and placed her on the spare teat. This time she had a good feed, sucking for dear life, her tiny jaws working overtime, the sow's rich milk running from the corners of her mouth. After a while you could see her tummy grow as big as a tennis ball so we knew she'd had enough.

‘The sow's milk is good,
Kleinbaas
,' Mattress said, handing Tinker back to me. ‘She will grow strong and soon she'll be eating
inyama
,' which means meat in Zulu.

The next problem was accommodation and here Mattress wasn't to prove very helpful. ‘Can Tinker live with you in your
kaya
?' I asked him.

He sat down on the pigsty wall and sighed heavily, looking down at his cracked feet, unable to meet my eyes. ‘This thing, it is not possible,
Kleinbaas
, the Big
Baas
Botha will not allow it. He will say I have a
kaffir
dog and they are not allowed here. We cannot have such a dog in this place, he will wring her neck.'

I should explain the word ‘
kaffir
'. It was used like the word ‘nigger' was used in America, which wasn't very nice, so a
kaffir
dog was something that whites thought was pretty bad. Even I was shocked at the idea of Tinker being thought of as a
kaffir
dog.

‘Oh, but she is
not
a
kaffir
dog!' I protested.
Kaffir
dogs were thin and scrawny with their ribs showing, they skulked around with their tails between their legs and with sores showing through their mangy pelts. They understood
Voetsek
very well and couldn't look you in the eye. Tinker wouldn't grow up to be like one of them.

‘We cannot have a dog in this place, we are black.' Mattress said it without sadness, just sort of resigned. I knew he was right, we had rules in The Boys Farm and he had rules as the pig boy and you simply couldn't go against the rules, no matter what. ‘I will lose my job,' he said.

I wanted to cry but what use would that be? Crying never solved anything and, besides, I wasn't much good at the business of blubbing. It was bad enough being English but if they saw me blubbing all over the place they'd really have a go. I did what crying it was impossible to avoid at the big rock where nobody ever came except me. Then it struck me. I would keep Tinker at the rock, it had plenty of overhang and I could make her a sort of burrow underneath and every day take her to the pigsty for a feed. She'd be okay while I was at school, and when she got a bit bigger I would build a stone enclosure under the overhang where she could play when I wasn't around or had to work in the vegetable garden.

I felt pretty cheered up as I outlined this plan to Mattress, although from his expression I could see he seemed less than convinced. He nodded gravely and said maybe it was a plan that could work and that he was very sorry about not being able to help, but jobs were hard to come by and he had to send money back to his wife in Zululand.

I was amazed to think that Mattress had a wife and that I didn't even know about her, but there you go, white people didn't spend much time asking black people about their lives, so Mattress was just the pig boy and didn't exist beyond his immediate occupation. I had fallen into the same white-people-total-disinterest-in-black-people trap, and even at six years old I felt ashamed.

‘Do you have children, Mattress?'

His face lit up. ‘One boy same like you, already he is with the goats and his feet I think they will soon be hard and will not bleed.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Mkiti Malokoane, but he also has a white man's name, it's Joe Louis, same like Joe Louis the mighty fighter who is
Amabantu
.' Mkiti means ‘Big Feast' and Malokoane was Mattress's surname. I confess that I'd never heard of Joe Louis the boxer and thought he must be someone from Mattress's tribe. But not long after Meneer Frikkie Botha, who was Mattress's boss and who looked after the farm but was also the boxing coach, was answering a question from one of the boys, Fonnie du Preez, who was the best boxer at The Boys Farm. The question was, ‘Why are American
kaffirs
like Joe Louis such good boxers?'

There was the name again, so I listened to the answer. ‘
Ag
, that Joe Louis is good, but he was knocked out by a white man, a German, Max Schmeling. With those American
kaffir
boxers they all one-punch Johnnies, you hear. Then they come across a white man with brains who can
really
box and it's, “Good night, lights out, hear the dicky bird singing,
kaffir
!” Mostly those black guys they got glass jaws, man!'

I thought that I'd better not tell Mattress that Joe Louis had a jaw that was made of glass and what happened to him, because I didn't want him to be disappointed and maybe think he should have called his son Max.

Much later on I heard that it must have just been a lucky punch from Max Schmeling that knocked Joe Louis out, because the next time they boxed Joe knocked out Max in the first round. Meneer Botha didn't tell us that bit or that Joe Louis stayed Heavyweight Champion of the World for ages afterwards. So Mattress had every right to be proud and name his son after the great boxer. All this had happened already and Meneer Botha
must
have known it at the time. But he didn't tell us, did he? He just made us think that Schmeling was the white hero that beat the black bastard. Which goes to show you have to find out about a person yourself and not listen to all the badmouthing going on all over the place. In life you can't just take the part of a story that suits the way you think and leave the other stuff out.

‘I will help you find some rocks to make a home for the little lioness,' Mattress offered kindly. But I knew he shouldn't because if Meneer Botha caught Mattress helping me beyond his pigsty and dairy territory it could mean big trouble for him. Meneer Botha wasn't kind to black people and always referred to them as black
kaffirs
and even sometimes as baboons.

‘It's okay, I can do it myself,' I said and I could see Mattress was relieved.

‘Maybe if you need some big rocks moved I can do it,
Kleinbaas
.'

‘She is only a very small dog,' I replied. ‘There are lots of small rocks around.'

So I dug a sort of burrow under the big rock and found some old
mielie
sacks to keep her warm and this became Tinker's home and at night I'd close it using an old cut-in-half four-gallon paraffin tin so nothing could get at her.

For a while all went well and the weeks passed and I'd take Tinker for a feed in the morning before going to school and then again when we returned to the farm. Soon she was a fat, happy puppy jumping up and down and being very playful. She was still on the sow's teat but now she was the boss. Even though she was a lot smaller than the piglets they soon learned to stay away from her because she'd grab them by the tail or an ear and hang on for dear life. The piglet would try to shake her off to no avail and squeal blue murder. Mattress said that Tinker the lioness was learning to survive in the jungle. I began saving crusts for her from our breakfast bread and Mattress cut a jam tin in half and he'd bring her milk from the dairy when she was old enough not to need the sow's teat.

When things go well you tend to grow careless and I was taking Tinker for walks well away from the big rock when one day we turned a corner and there stood Pissy Vermaak with his knobbly knees and snotty nose and sort of caved-in chest.

‘Whose dog is that,
Voetsek
?' he sniffed, pointing at Tinker.

‘It's a dog. I found it just now,' I lied.

‘Look, man, he's fat, he must be someone's,' Pissy observed.

‘I dunno, I suppose,' I said.

‘You jus' found him?' Pissy said suspiciously. ‘He jus' came walking along all of a sudden, hey?'

I nodded. I was still learning to lie and wasn't very good at it yet. All this lying was getting me deeper and deeper into the shit. Pissy wasn't someone I needed to be afraid of, as he couldn't fight or anything, even though he was ten years old. He'd got his name when he was smaller and used to wet his bed. He was dangerous though because he had a reputation for reporting things to Mevrou, the matron. He had this bad chest and had to go to her every night to get medicine and that's when he'd tittle-tattle. He'd tell her about the things that went on in the dormitory and other places so that before you knew it Mevrou called you in and you got six of the best with the
sjambok
. Nobody liked Pissy for that reason and also, he always smelled of piss, his skin when you got near smelled like piss when it has been standing in the chamberpot all night. People said that he could have fits ‘out of the blue' if he got a fright or was beaten or something like that, although it had never happened while I'd been there. Maybe his smelling of piss had something to do with him having out-of-the-blue fits. He had ginger hair and lots of big brown freckles and his skin where he wasn't sunburnt was pale pink, all of which was unusual for an Afrikaner.

‘He's yours, isn't he,
Voetsek
?' Pissy bent down and picked up Tinker who was too small to know she was in enemy hands. ‘I think I'll have him, take him for me.'

‘No!' I screamed. ‘She's mine, she's my dog.'

Pissy Vermaak laughed. ‘
Ja
, man, I thought so all the time. I'm going to tell on you,
Voetsek
. Wait till Mevrou hears what you been doing, hey.'

‘Please, Pissy, don't tell her!' I begged.

‘Only if you give him to me.'

‘She's a her, not a him.'

He mustn't have heard when I first called Tinker a she and now his expression changed to one of alarm. ‘
Sis
, man! A bitch dog! She'll have babies all over the place!'

He started to squeeze Tinker around the neck as if to strangle her. Tinker gave a desperate yelp and bit him on the thumb. Pissy yelled ‘
Eina
!' and dropped Tinker, who fell to the ground yelping and afraid. Pissy hopped up and down and wrung his hand in the air and then he brought his thumb up to his mouth to suck the hurt.

I didn't even realise I'd done it until after Pissy had doubled up and began to cough, holding his stomach and coughing like mad and staggering all over the place. I'd driven my fist straight into his stomach, hard as anything. I can tell you I didn't hang around to admire the result, but grabbed Tinker and ran back to the big rock and put her safely in her burrow.

I knew that wasn't the end of the matter. Far from it, a person doesn't get away with that sort of thing with Pissy Vermaak around. He'd be reporting to Mevrou and she'd tell Meneer Botha, that was for sure.
This time you in the deep shit,
man!
I was about to lose the one thing I loved the most in the whole world. Without Tinker I was on my own again and my happy days were all over, finish and
klaar
. So I just sat there under the rock and I blubbed a bit and tried to think what I might do. But my brain was scrambled and no ideas would come and I was becoming desperate and the bell would soon go for us to wash our hands before going in to supper. I'd cleaned out Tinker's burrow so it was a bit deeper in case someone came looking for her, and we had to clean our nails for inspection before we went in to supper. Mine were bad from the burrowing and I would have to take my place at the end of the queue in the shower room for my turn to use the scrubbing brush and if I didn't get a go before the supper bell went I'd get the
sjambok
. Not that it mattered, dirty nails got three cuts and you'd only be sore sitting for about an hour before it wore off. Right now dirty nails were the least of my problems.

If Tinker and me ran away there wasn't any place for us to go. I was deep inside enemy territory and a war was coming and Meneer Botha said he'd joined both the
Broederbond
and
Die Ossewabrandwag
, both sort of secret societies made up of Boere on Hitler's side. He said the whole district felt the same and they were not going to fight for the
blêrrie
English, no matter what General Jan Christiaan Smuts said in all the newspapers and on the radio. Meneer Botha said that Jannie Smuts was a known traitor, a Boer War General who had gone over to the English in the First World War and became a hero to the British. So he was a definite traitor to the
Boerevolk,
to his very own
herrenvolk
.

‘Never you mind, we know about him, Jan Smuts now has the same blood on his hands as the British for the women and children who died in the concentration camps.' That's what Meneer Botha said. So you can see, running away with Tinker, especially with me being English, was a hopeless proposition. People wouldn't lift a finger to help an English boy and his little bitch dog that was one day going to have babies that would need to be drowned in a sack.

At supper that night, which was the usual boiled potatoes and cabbage and stew that was gravy with only a very little bit of meat and lots of carrots and bits of tomato skin, I hardly managed to finish what was on my plate and I didn't mind when someone took two of my potatoes and I didn't even clean the plate with a piece of bread. I just didn't have an appetite for life at that moment. I'd looked for Pissy but his table was at the other end of the dining room and I was too small to see him over all the heads that were in the way.