The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  Michael must have felt my body quiver as I caught sight of my dad on the edge of the group. Silently, he crept a small hand up and clamped it over my mouth.

  The other men had the look of the hunt about them. I could see the cold savagery in their eyes, glowing almost red in the brilliance of the flashlight’s glow. They were closing in. The evil was closing in, encircling and clamping down on this place as coldly as these men were approaching the back of the bakkie. But my dad stood there, indecision in every jerky motion of his head and arms. He didn’t move away, he just stayed there on the edge of the group, not saying a word.

  My body jerked as the loud click of a closing shotgun sounded, halting the crickets in their Christmas song. The gun was pointed at Johannes’s juddering temple. Nobody touched him. This frightened me. Even in my innocence, I knew it would go better with him if they beat him now, if they shouted and swore. I remember that scene. Oh how I’ve tried to blot it out. On sweating, wakeful nights sometimes, all I can see is that circle of excited men, their breath coming fast, their faces hungry for hate and savagery.

  ‘Opstaan, kaffir!’ Mr Van Rensburg’s pistol-shot voice jerked my body as though a shock had run through it. Michael tightened his grip on my mouth. We watched Johannes try to rise. His fear-numbed limbs wouldn’t hold him and he collapsed. Lifting himself on painful hands and knees he tried again, and this time managed to stumble into a standing position. Again, the men held their taut fury intact. No one touched him.

  ‘Trek uit jou broek!’ His voice was low and quiet now.

  Johannes’s shaking hands fumbled with his fly and dropped to his sides. He moaned, an aching, eerie wail: ‘Ag, please, Baas. Take me to the police, Baas. Please.’

  ‘Trek uit jou broek!’ he said again, quieter than before. The gun pressed closer to his temple. I looked across at my dad, distress working his mouth and blinking eyes. And then he looked away across the veld where the moon lit a single horizon-held buck, and where the crickets sang still. When I looked back, Johannes had fumbled his pants off and dropped them.

  The men were still deathly, savagely silent. I didn’t want to look any more. The scene pierced my eyes and ate at my heart. I swear I didn’t mean to look. But my eyes couldn’t move away.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ said Mr Van Rensburg, still in Afrikaans. I couldn’t see what it was. It was shiny in the light, it glinted with the cruelty of the men.

  I felt Michael gasp, almost in pain. He let my mouth go and coiled himself into a painful foetal position, his hands clasped between his legs.

  Johannes was also clutching at himself, blubbering now in his terror of the mutilation and death to come.

  ‘You’ve done it to pigs,’ Mr Van Rensburg said. ‘Now you’ll do it to yourself, because you are a pig, ’n kaffir vark!’ He spat into the bakkie.

  He pressed the castrating knife into the slack, slippery hand which was imploring him. Johannes let the knife fall with a loud clatter, holding his hands together in shaking prayer position.

  ‘The police, Baas. Please, the police. No, Baas, no.’

  I tried not to watch. I felt as condemned as he. I felt condemned to watch that knife cut into my insides and slice away my life. I tried to look where my dad was looking, out over the hopeful horizon. I didn’t see who retrieved the knife and pressed it back into Johannes’s hand.

  I heard a click from the gun pressed against his head, and Johannes screamed. ‘OK,’ he said, shrieking his panic. ‘OK.’

  And then I watched, my eyes held by the horror of those glistening-eyed men surrounding the helpless creature. I watched his shaking hands move his penis aside and cut into the testicles which nestled below. Johannes was silent now as he operated on himself, alone in this ultimate pain. But I could hear Michael’s hot breath coming in small quiet sobs.

  When he was finished, Mr Van Rensburg lifted a stick from the ground and, with utter contempt, flicked two small objects from the bakkie floor. They fell in the dust.

  NOW

  That was the last time the family holidayed at the farm. We went to Cape Town the following year and spent Christmas Day in a hotel. Not long after, Oupa and Ouma moved to a flat in Grahamstown. They were just too old, they said, to cope with the farm any more.

  From the time my ouma moved into that flat, her mind began to fly from her, to whisk her back to the land she loved more than anything. When she died, unable to remember Oupa’s name, something in Oupa gave in too. He died not long after.

  It’s funny, but I can’t remember another detail about that night. I can’t remember how we got home or whether anyone spoke to us. For a long time it seemed my eyes and my sanity were fastened on two small objects falling in the dust.

  The next day, Boxing Day, was our last on the farm. I remember becoming aware that the men had driven Johannes to the police station and handed him over. But I can’t remember who told me this. I think Ouma told me that he would live – and would probably still go to jail.

  Mr Van Rensburg went to jail too. He was found guilty on a charge of assault with intent. Neil attended the trial in the Grahamstown Supreme Court. He told me later that all the District manne had turned up in their bakkies. They’d raised money to pay the fine they were sure he’d get. When he was sent to jail with no option, Neil said he thought they used the money in the Cathcart Arms to drown their sorrows. He saw what I didn’t want to ask, and told me Johannes was there to give evidence. He was serving ten years and seemed fine. He’d got plump in prison, he said.

  My mother told me old Mrs Van Rensburg healed too, from ‘that ugly incident’ – physically at least.

  It’s strange, but a person can shrink and die inside and still carry on with the business of being a daughter, attending school, passing exams. I did go to boarding school, though. I said I needed the independence. I didn’t change schools – merely moved out. I saw the family on alternate weekends. My father and I never spoke of what had happened to us. But he knew that I knew. My own guilt always stopped me from condemning him aloud, but he was never able to discipline me again, or tell me what to do.

  I think he had nightmares. On my alternate weekends I sometimes heard his snore break into a strangled cry and I could hear my mother’s quiet comfort. I wondered if he also felt haunted sometimes; if, when he closed his eyes, all he could see before him were those small objects lying in the dust.

  I left the Eastern Cape as soon as I could. And I have never gone back … until now, that is.

  Though I have felt tied to it all this time by a corrupted umbilical cord, I have hated it. I have hated its roughness, its frontier quality. I have hated its people and their rigid lives.

  I never ever went back to the farm after that Boxing Day. I knew that it couldn’t have remained the way it was. I know it should never have been the way it was. But sometimes in my dreams I can see the orange flutter of a hoopoe or the white omen streak of a wild cat. Sometimes I can taste a soetkoekie, dunked in condensed-milk coffee. And I can never feel the heat of the sun on my skin or hear the buzzing of a lazy fly without hearing the skree-bang of the screen door in the Eden of my childhood.

  The way it really was.

  The way it should always have been!