Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

It was after ten o’clock when we left Nelspruit. We kids huddled together in the back of the utility, sharing two rough prison blankets. The indigo night was pricked with sharp cold stars. We’d spent what energy remained in lavish praise of each other and of the glorious Barberton Blues, and now we were silent and sleepy. Klipkop drove this time, as Gert was not in such good shape and had gone home in the thirty-nine Chevy with Lieutenant Smit.

Bokkie, Fonnie, Nels and Maatie were soon sleeping fitfully. Jolts woke them momentarily, their dulled eyes opening for a minute before heavy lids shut them down again. I was enormously tired as well, but couldn’t doze off. In my mind each of my three fights kept repeating themselves. I played them back in sequence as though they were scenes on a loop of film which I was able to edit in my imagination, snipping here, joining there, remaking the fights, seeing them in my mind as they should have been.

I didn’t know it then, but this ability totally to recall a fight scenario made me a lot more dangerous when I met an opponent for the second time. In the years ahead I also taught myself to fight as a southpaw, so I could switch if necessary in the middle of a fight, as though it were entirely natural for me to do so.

It was nearly midnight when the ute stopped outside our house. Everything was in darkness. I crept around the back because the kitchen door was never locked. A candle stub burned on the kitchen table and on the floor, each rolled in a blanket, lay Dum and Dee. I tried to tiptoe past but they both shot up into sitting positions, like Egyptian mummies suddenly come to life, the whites of their eyes showing big with alarm.

They were overjoyed at my return and switched on the light to examine me. They burst into tears when they saw my swollen ear and it took some effort to calm them. When I told them that I had won, they showed only polite joy. They clucked and tut-tutted like a pair of old abafazi around a cooking pot and declared they’d be up at dawn to look for poultice weed against the horrible bruises which were undoubtedly concealing themselves all over my body. Despite my protests, for I was almost too tired to stand up, Dum sat me down and washed my face, hands and feet with water from a kettle kept warm on the stove. Dee dried me on a coarse towel and at last I was allowed to totter off to bed.

At Sunday School the next morning Pastor Mulvery noticed my fat ear and gave me a lightning on/off smile showing his escape-attempting front teeth. ‘Have you been listening to the devil again, Peekay?’ He hee-hawed quite a lot over his clever joke and no doubt repeated it to the Lord later. He always said you had to tell the Lord everything.

I remained unsaved, unborn again, despite the fact that I was officially slated in the minds of every lady in the church as my mother’s special prayer burden. I guess if they’d known what was going on in the prison they’d have mounted a whole revival campaign to try and bring me to the Lord. Once I asked in Sunday school if black was equal with white in heaven. The Sunday school teacher, a lady with big breasts and a sharp nose named Mrs Kostler who looked like a fat pigeon, stopped in mid-reply and sent one of the other kids to look for Pastor Mulvery.

‘Not exactly, but not exactly not,’ Pastor Mulvery said, and then thumbing through Mrs Kostler’s Bible he read, ‘“In my father’s house are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you”.’ He put the Bible aside. ‘Many mansions is the Lord’s way of saying that He loves all of mankind but that He recognises there are differences, like black and white. So He has a place for black angels and another place for white angels,’ he said smugly. I could see he was pretty pleased with his reply.

A girl called Zoe Prinsloo asked, ‘Does that mean we don’t have to have dirty Kaffirs in our mansion?’

‘Ag man, Zoe,’ Mrs Kostler cried, ‘in heaven nobody is dirty, you hear, not even Kaffirs!’

‘Will they still work for us?’ I asked.

Mrs Kostler looked to Pastor Mulvery for a reply. ‘Of course not, nobody works in heaven,’ he said, a little impatiently.

‘If nobody is dirty and nobody works in heaven and black and white are equal, why then can’t they live in the same place as us?’

Pastor Mulvery gave a deep sigh. ‘Because they are black and it wouldn’t be right, that’s all. The Lord knows more about such things than we do, man. We mustn’t question the wisdom of the Lord. When you are born again you’ll understand His infinite wisdom and you won’t ask such silly questions.’ I knew Mrs Kostler would report all this back at the next ladies’ prayer meeting and I’d have to face another session with my mother. It wasn’t easy being a sinner.

She would send me to my room and come and sit on my bed and sigh quite a lot. Then she would say, ‘I’m very disappointed in you, son-boy. Mrs Kostler says that you were questioning the word of God. Why do you mock the Lord so? You are not too young for His wrath. “I am not mocked,” sayeth the Lord. I pray for your precious soul every day, but you harden your heart and one day the Lord will not proffer up unto you His mercy and His everlasting forgiveness and you will be damned.’ She would sigh a few more times. It was the sighs that got to me, I couldn’t bear to think I was hurting her so much. But I didn’t really know how to stop either. It was natural for me to ask questions. Doc demanded them, had trained my mind to search for truth. To confront that which lacked logic or offended common sense was as natural for me as climbing trees. I was a sleuth in search of the truth and once on the track of biblical malpractice I found it impossible to let a contradiction pass or an assumption go unquestioned.

I would ask for forgiveness and agree to apologise to Mrs Kostler or whoever at the Apostolic Faith Mission I might have offended. But it was never enough. My mother demanded an orgy of confession. She wanted me to renounce my sins, retract my point of view and go down on my knees and beg forgiveness from the Lord. I couldn’t do it and so I compounded her disappointment in me.

So she would make me stay in my room and go without supper instead.

I kept a stick of biltong under my mattress for these occasions. Marie often brought these hard sticks of dried game home from the farm and Dee and Dum and I, being the only ones without false teeth, were the only ones who could eat it. I would sit in bed reading, cutting off delicious slivers of sun-dried venison with my Joseph Rogers pocket knife. It was Doc’s really, but I was minding it for him while he was in prison.

Marie had surrendered to the army of the Lord and in some measure made up for my recalcitrance. Creating born-again Christians for Pentecostals was like scalp hunting for Red Indians. Occasionally there was a really big coup, when a well-known drunk or fornicator or even a three-pack-a-day cigarette smoker was brought trembling to his knees before the Lord. This person then testified in front of the congregation. I’m telling you, some of these past sinners washed in the blood of the Lamb really got carried away when the congregation started to respond. When the hallelujaing and praise the Lording and spontaneous bursting into song and clapping of hands and sighs of joy were going on, the convert would be crying and sniffing and having a really good time telling about all his really bad deeds. Every time the testimony got really juicy a silence fell on the congregation as they soaked up the last drop of vicarious sin. I have to admit, it was pretty impressive when a repentant drunk was saved. One day you would have to cross the road so as not to go near him and the next, after he was born again, he was called brother, shaken warmly by the hand and loved by everybody. I guess the Lord has to be given credit for that.