Whitethorn (2 page)

Mattress sat on the low stone wall of the pigsty with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands and listened intently while I explained my problem to him in Zulu.

‘
Ahee
,
Kleinbaas
, we have a big, big problem here.' He dropped one hand to rest on his thigh and rubbed his chin. ‘That dog is too small.'

I explained to him that there were bigger ones but they were dead.

‘No, it is too small to feed on its own. Look, its eyes are not yet open, it must have milk from the bitch and where is she, eh?'

I shrugged and pointed to a higher part of the mountains. ‘Up there, he came downriver.'

‘The bitch, she must be on a farm upstream somewhere.'

‘Can we find this bitch?' I asked hopefully. ‘You could go and take a look?'

He thought for a moment. ‘You found this dog in a sack?'

I nodded.

‘And the sack was tied with string?'

I nodded again.

‘Intentional murder.' He pointed to the puppy cradled in my arms. ‘If we find the bitch the Boer will murder the dog all over again. He didn't want those dogs.'

‘That's all very well but what are we going to do?' I said, shifting the responsibility onto Mattress, the way white people are allowed to do with black people any time they like.

He didn't reply for a long time and you could hear him thinking,
Ahee
! What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? I could almost hear it going round and round in his head like things sometimes go in mine when I'm in the deep shit. ‘
Voetsek
, you in the deep shit, man,' one of the boys would say when something went wrong in the dormitory and I was going to be the one they were going to blame and I didn't know why I was guilty. Deep shit . . . deep shit . . . deep shit, the words would go round and round. I preferred just getting the
sjambok
rather than having all that deep shit running around in my head.

All of a sudden Mattress's eyes lit up and he clapped his hands and laughed. ‘The sow! We'll put him with the big black sow, she won't know the difference.'

‘Are you sure?' I asked, uncertain. The big black sow wasn't completely black but black and white just like my new dog and she weighed about 300 pounds. What if she rolled over all of a sudden and my little dog, which probably weighed less than a pound, was in the way? He couldn't even see to jump out of the way.

The sow had twelve piglets that were two weeks old who never let up fighting over the ten available teats, the two left out would squeal like billyo, snuffling and pushing and carrying on a treat until they pushed someone out of the way and got a go. They had fat round bums and curly tails and already they were three times the size of my new dog. I can tell you it was everyone for themselves in that pigsty, just like it was in the orphanage and I didn't like his chances. Frankly, I didn't think much of the solution, how does a puppy that can't even see compete with twelve piglets fighting over ten teats?

‘Are you sure?' I asked again, holding up the puppy who was now whimpering and no doubt very hungry. ‘Wouldn't he be squashed?'

Mattress thought for a moment. ‘We'll give the dog a free go,' he said at last.

‘How do you mean?'

‘We'll take some of the piglets away from the sow, give her a chance on her own to get a good feed until she's old enough to fight back.'

‘She?'

He clapped his hands and took a step closer and took my puppy by the tail and lifted its bum and hind legs. ‘See, no snake, we got ourselves a bitch,
Kleinbaas
.'

I took a look for myself and Mattress was right, he was a she all right. All of a sudden everything was going wrong. Even at six I knew female dogs have babies and mongrel puppies in an orphanage wasn't possible. I'd just seen an example of what happened in the bottom of that sack. Even having a dog of my own wasn't going to be possible, but a bitch was totally out of the question.

‘What will we call her?' he asked.

‘Can't, she's a bitch, she'll have babies,' I said sadly.

He nodded. ‘
Ahee
, woman, always trouble,' he agreed. He paused as if thinking. ‘Shall I wring her neck?' He brought his big black fists together, turned them in opposite directions and made a sort of cluck that sounded like a bone breaking.

‘No!' I yelled. My vehemence was so strong that my whole body trembled and my knees began to shake.

Mattress laughingly placed his large hand on my shoulder to comfort me.

‘I'm going to keep her,' I said fiercely, my voice close to a sob. ‘She's mine forever!'

He didn't tell me that was impossible, which it was, he just said, ‘In that case you'll have to give her a name.'

‘Tinker,' I said, not knowing why or where the name came from, it was something deep down from an unknown past, but plain as anything, sounding in my head like a stone shot from a catty striking a tin can.

‘Ah, Ten-Kaa!' Mattress said approvingly, splitting her name in half and softening it, because you can't say hard sharp words in the Zulu language.

With her name out of the way I became all business, names give an identity and now Tinker was definitely here to stay.

‘Will she drink pig's milk?' I asked.

‘Soon see,
Kleinbaas
.' He swung his legs over the pigsty wall where a whole heap of grunting and sucking and squealing was going on. Pigs are not exactly silent types.

‘Hey, look,
Kleinbaas
,' he laughed and pointed to Tinker. ‘Same like her.' He said it in Zulu and what he meant was that the sow and piglets were black and white and so was Tinker. ‘The sow won't know the difference.'

She'd have to be pretty dumb, I thought to myself. Tinker was about a sixth of the size of the greedy piglets. It was obvious she stood no chance if she was going to have to compete for the sow's milk.

The enormous sow lay on her side in the muddy pigsty, her great belly heaving, flies buzzing around her eyes, flicking her ear to chase them away. Every few moments she'd give a deep grunt, but you couldn't tell if it was because she was happy or was simply putting up with the squabbling going on down below. Looking at it from her point of view you had to wonder. Twelve piglets pushing each other aside to have a go, their snouts concertinaed right up into their foreheads. Each sucked like there was no tomorrow in an attempt to get as much scoff as they could before being bumped aside. It can't have been all that comfortable for her. Pigs don't muck about when it comes to food, that's for sure. I suppose it was the same at the orphanage, if you didn't cradle your plate within your arms and scoff it as fast as possible, the food on it soon disappeared into someone else's mouth.

I keep calling it ‘the orphanage' and that sounds pathetic, as if it was in the olden times or something, whereas the time was 1939 with everyone saying there was going to be a war with the Germans. The English against the Germans and you can guess who wanted to fight for the Germans. More about that later. The real name for the place was ‘The Boys Farm'.

It was in the country, about four miles out of a small town known as Willemskrans, which means the Williams Cliffs. This was because it was in the Lebombo Mountains and the town snuggled against a mountainside and was slap-bang up against these tall, rocky cliffs that rose nearly a thousand feet upwards. People said that the climate and the flora and fauna at the top were different to those at the bottom. I wondered how this could be. Mattress said that the people who lived up there were a different tribe. One big cliff and all of a sudden everything changes, the trees, flowers, climate and the people. Maybe Tinker came from up top and she'd come down the Letaba River. This was improbable because she'd have to have fallen down some mighty waterfalls. To do this and to be still alive would be some sort of a miracle, so I guess she came from some place not too high up, where the creek started.

Anyway, The Boys Farm was on twenty acres with its own vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, ten milking cows and a small dairy for making butter, there were also two donkeys to pull the small hand plough used for tilling. There was talk of a secondhand tractor but it never came to anything. Lots of things never came to anything in that place. We all worked in the vegetable garden and the older boys chopped wood and milked the cows.

What we did was usually considered
kaffir
work. But
they
decided that we'd all grow up to work on farms or as motor mechanics, timber cutters, lorry drivers or maybe get an apprenticeship to be a carpenter or boilermaker in the mines. We had to learn early to do things around the place with our hands, as brains were not considered a high-up commodity. It's funny when you don't belong to anyone that the people responsible for looking after you just assume you're nobody. You are the Government's children and they can do as they wish with you. So they train you to be the lowest common denominator, except, of course, for the blacks. You definitely can't be allowed to be as low as a black
kaffir
. So pigs are definitely not a white man's work, they're stinking creatures that live in mud and their own shit that gets squished up together to make a fearful greeny-black mud paste that stinks so much that you have to hold your nose as you approach. Even an orphan boy couldn't be expected to work in the pigsty, which is why we had a pig boy. Although I must say, I got used to the pigs' smell and didn't mind it. Mattress said that if humans lay around in their own shit they'd smell just as bad as the sow.

Mattress moved over to the sow, the greenish black stink-mud squelching between his toes. He had very large feet because he was a very big man and they were almost worn out. If they'd been shoes they would have needed to be thrown away long ago. The soles of his feet were about an inch thick and were splayed out with deep cracks running down the sides. It was as if he walked on an old pair of really thick leather soles about an inch and a half wider than the top part of his foot. This callused platform of hard, rough skin looked like it was glued to the underpart of his feet. He'd once explained this had happened from his having been a herd boy in the mountains when he was about my age.

‘
Kleinbaas
, I was a herd boy in the mountains of Zululand and the small boys looked after the village goats. Goats like to be on the high slopes and on the rocks and they've got you jumping from rock to rock and running and slipping and sliding down the razor-sharp shale. Soon you're bleeding and sore and when you get back limping to the
kraal
at night the old men sitting under the marula trees laugh and say, “
Umfaan
, you are not a herd boy's arsehole until the bleeding stops and the hard skin comes”.' Mattress laughed at the memory. ‘Slowly, slowly, the soles of your feet grow hard.' He pointed proudly to his feet. ‘And then when they get like this you know you have beaten the mountains and the rocks and the wicked whitethorns and the shale that cuts like a knife.'

Mattress made me see that having feet like his could be a very big advantage in life because you didn't need boots and could go anywhere you liked.

As he walked over to the sow she looked at him with a suspicious eye and grunted a warning a bit louder than usual but otherwise didn't move. Pigs can be dangerous and a sow protecting her young is not to be trifled with. She must have known Mattress because she didn't seem to mind when he picked up four piglets by the tail, two in each hand, and walked over and dumped them over the short stone wall into a vacant pigsty next door. Boy! You should've heard the squealing going on! This left two teats vacant. He turned, walked over to me and reached over the wall and took Tinker from me. The tiny, sightless puppy seemed to disappear within his large hands. With each piglet having a teat to itself the remaining piglets were going at it hell for leather and didn't even see Mattress placing Tinker next to a vacant teat. I waited anxiously as Tinker's nose bounced against the huge teat that was bigger than her nose. At first she didn't seem to know what to do but Mattress held her against the pig's great pink teat and sort of rubbed her nose on it and a small drop of yellowish milk came out. Tinker was on it like a shot. Her tiny mouth opened and I don't know how she got that big sow's teat into her mouth but she did, and then she hung on.

‘
Ahee
! The mighty one!' Mattress exclaimed, clapping. ‘She is a lioness this one. She will survive!'

I can tell you I was very relieved. But then disaster struck, one of the piglets let go of his own teat and wanted Tinker's.

‘Quick!' I shouted to Mattress. ‘Save her!'

Mattress did no such thing and Tinker was sent rolling into the stink-mud. Mattress laughed and picked her up. ‘She must learn that life is hard,
Kleinbaas
,' he explained, but then he moved the piglet away and placed it back on its former teat and reinstated Tinker. It happened again. This time Tinker was sent sprawling against the wall near where I was standing and she gave a yelp and at that very moment, lying on her back, trying to get to her feet, her eyes opened and she looked straight into mine. I was the first thing she saw in her life, and I can tell you it was love at first sight. Her and me, from now on we were in this together, Tinker and Tom, a deadly combination in the making.