Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

With both hands he gripped the lever.

The explosion of the trap.

Jeez lay rigid on his bunk.

His breath came in great pants.

The silence.

He had heard the feet stamping and shuffling on their way to the gallows. He had heard the swell of the singing, seeking out new heights of sympathy. Then the crash of the trap.

An awful sorrowing silence. The singing was to support four men, and the men were gone from where singing could boost them. The singing had ceased with the fall of the trap, cut in mid phrase.

The God awful silence around Jeez, like he was alone, like he was the only man in the bloody place.

He always heard the trap go.

He heard it the day before when the hangman was practising his drops with the earth-filled sacks, he heard it go on the morning of a hanging. As the crow flies or the worm crawls, Jeez lay on his bed just 29 yards from the gallows beam. He heard everything in the hanging room, and everything in the workshop and the washhouse underneath.

They'd be suspended now, they let them hang for twenty minutes. Then there would be the water running in the washhouse as they cleared up the mess after the district surgeon had completed his postmortem. Then there would be the hammering in the workshop as the trusties nailed down the coffin lids. Last there would be the sounds of the revving of an engine and the sounds of the van pulling away, running down the hill.

Beverly Hills wasn't a place for seeing what happened.

Christ, it was a place for hearing.

Listen to a multiple execution.

Singing, trap, silence, water, silence, hammering, van engine.

Those were the sounds of four men getting to be stiffs.

God Almighty, Jeez… It was the route they had in mind for Jeez. While he had been at Beverly Hills he had heard the sounds of one hundred and twenty-one guys getting stretched. And now one hundred and twenty-five. Jeez had heard the trap go under each last one of the mothers.

He shouldn't have written the letter all the same.

The letter was weakness. Shouldn't have involved her.

But he had heard the trap go so many times. Shit, and he had to to call for someone… he felt so alone.

This was a civilised gaol, not like the one a long time back. There were no beatings here, no malnutrition, no rats, no disease, no forced labour. Here, his cell door wouldn't be thrown open without warning for a kicking and a truncheon whipping. No risk that he would be frog marched into a yard and kicked down and shot in the nape of the neck.

This was five star. So bloody civilised that Jeez had sat in a cell for more than a year, a cell that measured six foot by nine foot, while the lawyers debated his life. Three meals a day here, a good medic here, because they wanted him healthy on the day. He had written his letter because he was losing hope.

What were the bastards doing? Why hadn't the bastards got him out?

He hated himself for believing they'd forgotten him.

They'd got him out the last time. Took the bastards long enough, but they'd got him out. They couldn't let a man, one of their own, couldn't let him… never finished.

Couldn't let him… Course they couldn't. He hated himself when the hope went, because that wasn't the Jeez way.

He was one of a team, a bloody good team, a team that didn't forget the men out in the field.

He was fine on the days when he didn't hear the trap fall.

It was only on those sodding days that the doubts bit.

He'd done them well. He'd kept his mouth shut through interrogation, bloody weeks of it. He'd kept his mouth shut through the trial. He'd kept his mouth shut when the security police from Johannesburg and the intelligence men from Pretoria had come to talk to him in his cell. He hadn't let the team down.

Jeez heard the spurting of the water hose in the washhouse.

On the high ceiling of the cell the bulb brightened.

Another day. God Almighty, it just wasn't possible that the team had forgotten about Jeez.

In an hour, and after he had eaten his breakfast, he would hear the hammering start.

It was difficult ground for the Minister. Any by-election would be in these days, but the Orange Free State was the heartland of the Afrikaner world. A dozen years before, in Petrusburg and Jacobsdal and Koffiefontein, he'd been cheered to the echo by the White farmers when he talked of the inviolability of the policy of separate development.

Today he would have to speak to the same White farmers with the currency collapsed, with further foreign sanctions in the air, with unrest in the townships, with taxes up, with markets disappearing. No easy matter up here to sell the ending of the homelands policy, to uphold the repeal of the Immorality Act, to defend their record in the collapse of law and order. One thing for the State President and his ministers to talk in Pretoria about dismantling separate development, quite another out in the constituencies to explain to the faithful the reasons for the retreat. They had a big enough majority in Parliament, the National Parly, but by-elections counted. The most recent by-elections had shown the subsidence of the Party's vote and the increase of the pulling power of the Conservative right. The State President was enjoying the greasepaint and the television lights and his broadcasts via satellite to the American networks where he spoke earnestly of reform. The ministers, the donkeys, they were the ones who legged it down to the grass roots to explain that everything that was traditional and taught from the mother's knee was now subject to revision.

The Minister of Justice had a long day in front of him.

Public meetings at breakfast, midday and late afternoon.

The by-election was to be held in twenty-seven days' time.

The Minister of Justice had been preceded by Water Affairs, Forestry and Environment Conservation, and by Community Development and State Auxiliary Services. In this constituency alone he would be followed before polling day by State Administration and Statistics, by Transport Affairs, and by Minerals and Energy.

The minister had slept in the back of the car for most of the drive from Bloemfontein to Petrusburg. He woke when they were three miles short of the town. His secretary passed him a battery shaver. The secretary sat in the front beside the police driver. In the back of the Mercedes with the minister was the local area Chairman of the Party, a fellow Broederbonder.

"What'll they be like?"

"Cool."

"Which means iced." The minister strained his chin upwards to get the razor's teeth against the skin of his jowl.

"We all want to know what the future holds."

"Change."

"You won't find this audience applauding talk about change. They like the old ways. They want reassurance that we're running our country, not American bankers."

"I'll get them laughing… "

"You'd have to get your trousers off to get a laugh."

"What do they want?"

"To know that our government is not abdicating its responsibilities in the face of overseas pressure, and Black pressure. Persuade them and we might just win."

"It's rubbish to talk of abdication."

The Party man shrugged. "Fine when you say that to me.

Tell your audience that and they'll shout you out of the hall, I promise you."

"What'll satisfy them?"

"You know the name of Prinsloo?"

"Should I?"

"Gerhardt Prinsloo."

"Don't know him."

"His parents live in Petrusburg."

"Don't give me riddles, man," the minister snapped.

They were coming into the town. One street on a main road, low buildings, a small shopping arcade, a decent church.

"His father runs a hardware store. His mother teaches in the nursery school. You should go to Gerhardt Prinsloo's grave."