Kitchen Boy (20 page)

It hurt. He wasn’t a whiner and he had been describing how things were, not pleading justification. Springboks were honourable men – on the whole, not counting in the heat of the scrum or a ruck – and it wasn’t their fault that their country was out of step with the rest of the world.

Or was it? He gazes at the blurred colours concealing J J’s coffin and wonders: In hindsight, ou boet, did our wins on the rugby field keep feeding apartheid or were we just young men going for glory? Villains or heroes?

Retief was a Nationalist like his father. When the 1953 elections came, he took leave from Iscor to drive down to Newcastle with his wife Anna. His task was to man a tent outside a polling station to welcome voters and talk politics, wearing his church suit with a carnation-and-fern buttonhole. Anna in her best hat handed out coffee and koeksisters and advice to hesitant women. They knew who to vote for, of course. But the how was daunting for railway workers’ and colliers’ and farmers’ wives more used to heating kettles on coal stoves and bottling peaches than doing paperwork.

Dr Malan had said that it was imperative for all Nationalists to vote. Torch Commando parades were drawing crowds of English-speakers who would vote United Party, and the election could be lost if the volk were not galvanised. As the Springbok captain, Retief was a valuable vote-catcher and worked hard for that election and the next, by which time he had retired from rugby and been left the farm in the shadow of Majuba after his father died.

It was only as the Broederbond increased its stranglehold on jobs and team selections that he began to feel uncomfortable. He was a steel man turned farmer who had learnt through experience to employ reliable workers regardless of whether they spoke Afrikaans, and to treat them well to get the best out of them. When he saw newspaper photos and newsreels of white policemen hounding natives with flailing sjamboks, he felt it was wrong – though not strongly enough to protest. But after all those people running away at Sharpeville were shot, he handed in his party card and turned his back on the world beyond the farm. He was too loyal to criticise his community; instead, he would no longer take part in its politics. He focused on breeding Bonsmaras.

Now he thinks, That turning away made me complicit. Anna and I led our own lives and chose not to see the wrongdoing. As a man people listened to, I should have spoken out about what was shameful.

Must I apologise now? Or does age absolve me? His mind is full of such questions as he looks back on his long life.

‘Don’t respond, men!’ Major Irving rapped. ‘We stand together.

This is a trick to shift blame. You don’t have to answer.’

The harangue went on for hours until a man fainted when the Kommandant fired an order, which the Dolmetscher translated as ‘Dismiss. You are confined to your hut.

No food. No exercise. You will be questioned one by one. Starting with –’

P
EOPLE SIGH AND CHANGE POSITIONS IN THE PEWS
. Some lean sideways to whisper to their neighbours. Others yawn or watch the pigeons canoodling in the rafters. Bishop Chauncey’s reading is soporific. When he raises both billowing arms and exhorts, ‘Awake to righteousness, and sin not!’ there is none of the usual rustle of indignant denial.

Only the rugby men sit upright and eyes-front, doing their duty as sports icons – which doesn’t include having to listen to the words. Sitting in a packed church enduring a lengthy chunk of the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians is a big sacrifice on a Friday when players should be carbo-loading and psyching up for their Saturday match.

J J’s family and old comrades are listening, though for different reasons. When the bishop declares with ringing scorn, ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die,’ the Moths’ eyes glisten. Nelisiwe shivers. Stanley Magwaza nods his whiskery head as he contemplates his new shoes.

‘Thou fool … die,’ Lin hears and, with Bridget looking upset on the other side of Sam, feels herself on the slippery slope towards public tears. Throughout the demanding months of her once-powerful father’s decline, she has made it a point of pride to be the dependable daughter, coping with her work, and with doctors, specialists, lawyers, financial advisers, concerned Moths and J J’s few remaining friends. She has sat at her father’s bedside, listening to his worries about what was to happen to Shirley, reassuring him that she’d handle everything, she’s fine, she knows what to do. Now she just wants to cry.

To her surprise, Shirley had not gone to pieces at first, but moved into a nursing-sister mode Lin did not recognise, dealing firmly with J J when he tried to avoid his medication or postpone oncology and radiology treatments. ‘It’s no good resisting me, John,’ she’d heard her mother say in a no-nonsense voice. ‘I know what’s best for you. Knuckle down and fight this thing.’

Shirley had driven him to appointments and treatments, and conspired with Mtshali to serve nutritious light meals, maintaining the whisky ritual in the evenings, which always cheered the old man up. She had only succumbed and asked for hospice help when his pain grew more desperate and he needed round-the-clock nursing. With the hand-over of responsibility her brief rule petered out. She kept saying, ‘I don’t seem to have any oomph left,’ and looked ten years older. She dithered in and out of the bedroom where J J lay, fussing over his pills and drips though she didn’t understand the new drugs. People tiptoed around her offering tea and a footstool, which she rejected, grousing that
she
wasn’t the invalid. Lin stayed in the house so she wouldn’t be alone with the sister on duty – however kind – and the onset of death.

‘Are you okay?’ Hugh had asked Lin one afternoon.

‘Hanging in. They both need me now.’

Close up, her defiant eyes challenged him just as their father’s had done. The two of them were so alike. She should have been the eldest, charged with the derring-do and upholding the honour of the family, while Hugh could have coasted through life as a second child, allowed his space and little eccentricities – like not wanting to go to war – in the wake of the achiever. Yet he hadn’t been a complete disappointment; he’d managed a son to carry on the Kitching name that his grandfather had been so proud of. By the mid-fifties, Victor had the DTs and Granny Dot put him in a mental institution, sold the store, and went home to the Herald estate to end her days in the peace of luxury.

‘You can’t go on like this, Lin,’ Hugh insisted.

‘It won’t be for long. And there’s no one at home. Only my cat, and he can look after himself.’

The bleak look on her face was a jarring reminder of the troubles she’d had during her brief marriage. After the divorce, Lin had been so determined to rebuild her life that they took her strength for granted. ‘I’ve got things to do,’ she’d say, rejecting sympathy and hiding her scars as J J had.

Hugh pulled her into a hug. ‘Tell me what I can do.’

‘Just take over on occasional nights so I can go home to the flat and spend time with Impaka.’ The name meant witch’s cat – he was black and crabby and as self-sufficient as she was.

‘A well-named beast,’ he said. ‘Of course I will.’

‘We need to let Dad go, and help Mum to get sorted out,’ she’d mumbled into his shoulder. ‘I don’t know how she’ll cope. She seems so distracted and cross, as though she’s blaming him for abandoning her. As if he can help it.’

At the funeral now, Lin remembers one of J J’s last days when he’d managed a hoarse whisper, ‘I’m dying, aren’t I?’ She’d answered, ‘Yes. But I’m here. So are Hugh and Mum. We all love you.’ It had given her a chance to tell him what a good father he’d been, and to thank him before he slipped away.

Had he been a good father? To me, mostly, she thinks. Though Hugh’s right about his high expectations. We both let him define us: Hugh by rebelling and me by idolising him … The bishop’s voice and the murmuring congregation fade as Lin faces the truth she’s been avoiding: My relationships have failed because I chose men like Dad who were used to being worshipped and hiding their secrets. I’ve admired the wrong qualities in him, not appreciated enough the solid core. Poor Dad. His worst nightmares came back when he was dying, Mum said. He looked terrible at the end. Poor both of them. Poor deluded me.

She begins to weep.

Sam tugs her hand. ‘Lin? Please don’t cry.’

She hasn’t cried in years. Now she says, ‘I can’t help it,’ and gropes for the tissues she keeps in her camera bag, but she’s left it at home.

‘Here.’ Sam passes a smelly paper serviette that must have been in his pocket for weeks.

‘Thanks.’

Dabbing doesn’t stop the tears. Neither does Shirley who grabs her other arm and hisses, ‘Stop this! Everybody’s watching.’

‘I can’t.’ Lin bends her head.

‘You’ve
got
to stop. You know that Dad would have wanted us to keep up appearances.’

‘But he’s gone now,’ Lin sobs.

‘If I can control myself so can you, for God’s sake.’ Shirley swings round to the next pew. ‘Theodora, can you stop her?’

There is a creak as Theodora kneels behind Lin and she feels a familiar embrace. ‘Thula, Linnie. Thula, now.’

‘I can’t. It’s all too much.’

‘Thula, my Linnie. Just hold your tears, darling.’

It’s the reassuring voice of her childhood, but Lin can’t stop weeping. Heads turn towards them. Shirley is frantic with embarrassment at being the target of so many eyes.

Including the bishop’s. He sharpens his voice to read, ‘All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts –’

Sounds like a place of slaughter, Theodora thinks. That full-of-himself bishop is making the service longer to show off his church. Reverend George will have plenty to say about this in KwaMashu.

Bending over, she gets up and tiptoes round to the front pew where she crouches in front of Lin and holds her hands, trying to quieten her.

‘Take her into the vestry.’ Shirley’s face is bright red.

This is no time to be annoyed by the peremptory order. ‘Okay. Where is it?’

‘Ask those awful men.’ Shirley flaps her fingers towards Purkey and Clyde in the side aisle.

Theodora says, ‘Do you want to go out, Linnie?’

‘No. Yes. Oh no, I can’t –’

‘Just go! You’re ruining the service,’ Shirley insists.

Lin gives in and allows herself to be helped towards the shelter of the nearest stone column. The bishop stops reading and glowers at them as his voice echoes away into the rafters: ‘– and another of birds – irds – irds – irds –’

‘I’m coming too.’ Sam tries to follow them.

His grandmother clamps a restraining hand on his arm and says in a loud voice, ‘Don’t you
dare
desert me too. Sit down.’

Press cameras focus on the boy’s attempt to escape. ‘Hero’s widow says “No can do!”’ is the caption under the
Daily News
photograph on the front page the next day, taken from a position to the right of the altar. It focuses on the tug-of-war next to the flag-draped coffin in a wide-angle shot of the packed church showing the congregation – though not the bishop.

Sam is pulled back into his seat. Theodora mimes a silent query at Purkey, who wobbles his chins towards an arched doorway. ‘You can take her through there, ousie.’

‘Thank you,
sir
.’ If looks could kill he’d have been charcoal.

‘Pleasure,’ says Purkey, impervious.

The bishop clears his throat to regain attention and resumes, ‘There is also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.’

Are
also celestial bodies, surely? Hugh thinks. Dad would have growled, ‘It’s all bull,’ by now. I wish he was still here. Alive, I mean. He looks away from the coffin, blinking to spare his mother the further shame of a son’s tears.

She has been bristly with him since he said that war isn’t kosher any more. Yesterday she had brought it up again, accusing him of denigrating his father before he was even cold in his grave.

‘I wasn’t attacking him. All I meant was that there are better ways to resolve differences than going to war,’ he tried to explain.

‘Don’t you lecture me.’

‘Can it, bro,’ Lin said. ‘You old lefties never know when to stop.’

But Shirley raged on. ‘How can you hold forth about war when you know nothing about it? Dad and I put up with your student nonsense and your run-ins with the security police and going to jail, but you’ve never shown any respect for what he did. Those boys joined up straight out of school to save civilisation.’

‘Western civilisation.’

‘
All
civilisation. Don’t split hairs.’

‘Okay then, all. But I really did respect him. Very much.’

‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it.’

‘I just –’ But he stifled the riposte and said, ‘Sorry, Mum.’

Hugh bore all the stigmata of white suburban life until his student years, when reality kicked in and he joined an underground group to wage a just war against the Nationalists. The student cell organised furious meetings and distributed banned pamphlets, but stopped short of actual sabotage. They were arrested for being in possession of seditious literature and sentenced to a month’s detention, though without being tortured which would have provided him with proof of courage to impress the old man. Nothing else seemed to.

In the past few months, watching him pass on his legacy of war memories to Sam as the cancer spread, Hugh has at last conceded that his father also fought a just war. During his long rebellion against J J’s dogma, he had been too intent on their differences to acknowledge how alike they were.

‘I loved Dad. We made our peace, okay?’ he’d said, but Shirley was unmollified. In the days since J J’s death she has changed from the compliant wife and mother they’d always known. Hugh sits wondering if widows are always this angry?

Purkey murmurs to Clyde, ‘I wouldn’t call terrestrial bodies glorious. It’s obvious he’s never worked with cadavers.’

Clyde isn’t listening. He’s watching the undulations of Theodora’s buttocks as she helps Lin into the vestry.