RECONCILIATION
I wanted to start this story with “My best friend is Jooste” which is the most important thing I could say and the most important for you to understand. But this is the same as to speak of the ocean as being “wet” - it’s true but does not say nearly enough. One of our teachers in the old grade five – it was Mr. Cilliers, the geography teacher – he also taught P.E. and maths – anyway, he said to my mother “These two boys are like the African land and the Indian Ocean. Where the one twists and turns so the other turns and twists together with him. But yours is the Wild Coast and this other one a gentle surf. It is not a good thing.” It may be he also was the teacher for the students of English in those days before we had educators and learners. Jooste would know.
I don’t remember a time when Jooste and I were not the best of friends, although it may not have turned out that way in other places. We lived in a small town out in the veldt – it doesn’t matter where – which boasted the only NG kerk for miles in any direction. Each Sunday it was a busy place as the nearby farmers and their families came in for the service. And once a month it was even busier, for those from the farthest farms would come without fail for their communion service. That’s what they called the Mass of the Eucharist. I never saw it done their way. Jooste and I belonged to the only two Catholic families in our town. We travelled twenty miles to go to our church, driving in the opposite direction to many of those coming in. We waved to them. They ignored us. Our two families did not travel in the same car because Jooste’s people are coloureds and we are white. My father and mother said, “We don’t want to buy trouble” which at first I thought was strange because the Hendricks owned a grocery store with hardware and seeds and also sweets but I was sure no trouble for sale at all. Later of course I understood they meant trouble with the neighbours, the Afrikaners. But that was also odd because those neighbours were good customers at Hendricks’ shop just as they were at my father’s garage. Anyway, although we carried Jooste with us to church most Sundays in our Rover, his parents drove an old Morris a short distance behind.
As I said, Jooste and I might not have been so close in a town such as Kroonstad or even Westminster. He made me laugh when he always called it “Westminister” just like the boers did. But in a larger place we would maybe not need to depend on each other – there would have been a lot of friends for each perhaps. Here in our little town the other boys, the Afrikaner boys with the right religion, forced the two of us together – back to back on many days.
I was the real fighter, not Jooste. He was brave but I got him into a lot of brawls he would have missed given the chance. He learned early that if I was to stay behind after school, a punishment for something, he also should misbehave and be sentenced with me. It was not safe for him to walk out alone while I stayed back. “David,” he would say to me, “please try to be good today. My father wants me to help in the store after school and I don’t want to choose between a detention with you and getting beaten alone.” Sometimes I was able to do that but most times not and still he stayed with me and never complained.
Jooste saved my life. We were twelve years old and fooling around on a kopje, the one with the broken lines of old stone walls in places and at strange, short angles that marked no kraal. These showed where an army, a boer commando, had prepared to defend the land against the British. We played at war there and Jooste was always the Anglo, the invader, the uninvited. It was, he said, just like being at school. Anyway, behind the kopje there was a place where the rock had fractured and fallen, leaving behind a smooth slope of stone with a crack running clear across. I said we can go from one side to the other, feet edged into that thin crack and leaning hard into the rock face. I went first but my foot jumped from the crack and I slid down the stone and over the edge, grabbing a small thorn bush as my legs dangled above the one hundred foot drop below them. I looked up and there was Jooste, somehow coming down the rock slope on his bum, his takkies and his hands steadying him. He reached me and took my hand, pulling me up alongside. Slowly and carefully we made our way back up to the crack and then across. “We are human flies,” said Jooste with a grin. We did not tell our parents – they do not understand that such things are not death but life. Even so, it was the last time we played that game because human flies cannot really fly and Jooste insisted that God gets tired of boys who scorn His mercy.
That is what Father Ignatius taught him. I don’t think he was a Father then but some deputy of the real one. But he liked to be called Father. He taught us the catechism in classes on Sunday while our parents worshipped in the church. We learned our saints and the Stations (“Where is the train?” I whispered to Jooste and he got into trouble for laughing as Father Ignatius was speaking of Christ and the Cross). This was unfortunate because Jooste believed it all and took it very seriously. I on the other hand did not care for religion. Was it not clear that God must be Dutch and our parents had made a mistake – whether of nationality or conviction? Where Jooste studied his Bible and brightly answered all the questions put to him, I concentrated on thinking of Bathsheba naked on my neighbour’s roof and drawing pictures of old Jews kicking against pricks.
I hated Father Ignatius. He could not keep me behind after church but he liked to use a wooden ruler to smash an out-held hand – sometimes he’d slice it down using the edge to get extra hurt into the skin. He tried to humiliate me in every way – standing before the class with a sign he made that said “Sinner – idiot” with a picture of a donkey. I thought that when I was bigger, I would come to meet Father Ignatius on a day that was not Sunday and make him wear that sign before I beat him with a ruler. But he moved away when I was seventeen and so the chance never came. That is, it did not come as I had long anticipated.
So there were six good days in the week for Jooste and I to enjoy together and as time passed the fights at school got fewer because I got bigger. Working in my dad’s garage, I toughened up and took to carrying a spanner in my pocket when I was thirteen. Some of the farm boys were very strong but they grew slower in mind and body as I grew quicker and, I should have to say, at heart they were not bad. They were not mean like me and they knew it. I was ready to use that spanner and I did once on a day when nothing was going on. I walked up behind one of the worst of the bullies, standing with his chinas, and before he could turn I smacked the flat of the spanner against his ear and sent him to the ground crying. I turned my back and walked away, unmolested then and thereafter. Jooste said this was not Christian and not brave – I shrugged and asked if he wanted them to keep on taking advantage of us? No, he said and we carried on as before, inseparable friends doing everything together.
There was one time when we did not. I broke a bone in my leg falling from a roof. Jooste asked did I never learn? Hadn’t he told me about tempting God twice? So I was in hospital far from town for eight days and then stuck in my own home for two weeks and then I got some kind of sickness that kept me from school and church for another three weeks. Jooste came to visit almost every day, except for the hospital time, and he was unfailingly cheerful on the outside. But inside I could see something was troubling him. It was, he said, a girl. At fourteen we had both begun to notice girls. It was obvious to me that they had begun to notice me as well – even though they were Afrikaners with brothers and boyfriends who despised Jooste and me. But Jooste, with his thin frame and love of books, and church, and good manners was not so impressive. He’d fallen in love, he said, some months ago and it was useless – he would never ever have a girl friend. He was right about that.
As the years rolled by, Jooste and I, best friends in school, were not together quite as much as before. He had a job – in his father’s store of course – and I worked for my father when I wasn’t drinking a little too much. Jooste and I would meet each evening at the pub where he’d sip lemonade until I’d had enough beer and he’d help me out into the night and home. It was a different time and the local people no longer made trouble for Catholics. Even their church was changing for the better, slowly to be sure. Everyone grows up eventually. That’s what Jooste said just before he asked when it might start happening to me? I hoped it would not – the cycle of work, a little money, and beer was as much as I expected from life. Jooste was after more. He had plans. Neither one of us had a wife – not even a girl friend. He said he didn’t have much hope that things would change swiftly enough for a white girl to go out with him before he died, but I thought this was an excuse. In my case, girls never bothered because they could see that engine grease and alcohol were my world.
Things might have gone on like that for all time if I’d not seen Father Ignatius’ face on the TV in the pub one evening. It was the news at seven p.m. and with the sound off I did not learn why he was in the news. I drank until the short news at nine o’clock and was ready with the remote when his face appeared again. It was terrible. He was now a real Father in a big city and was accused by some boys of making sexual advances to them and even performing lewd acts. Call me stupid but I did not know such things could happen between men. Perhaps if I’d paid more attention to the Bible I would have learned this because it is in there – I looked it up later. And as I sat there, drink in hand and a couple inside me, I saw how to pay Father Ignatius back for all those years of painful Sundays. But I was careful not to tell Jooste what the TV had said when he came to the pub later.
I made a complaint to the police and to the church twenty miles away. Father Ignatius had, I said, touched me in bad ways from when I was seven years old to when I was even fifteen. It was not such a good plan. I should have listened to the complete news and not just the headlines at nine p.m. Father Ignatius, I now found out, had been an exemplary man for all the first years of his new church in the big city. It was only in the last five years that his crimes had begun, at least according to the boys and those now in their teens who had known him there. I explained that of course he would not begin again so quickly in a new place – he would take time to cover his tracks and set everyone at ease. But this did not work. I heard the voices calling me a liar and each night Jooste sat silently with me as I drank my beer and tearfully asked him why did nobody believe me? Jooste said he understood why I’d never told anyone, even him – he believed me.
It was not a total surprise to me when Jooste also went to the police and told them he too was a victim of Father Ignatius. We always stood back to back. At first it made no difference – people said of course Jooste would say such things. Were those two not the best of friends since they could walk? So it was a shock when the newspaper began to print that Jooste had testified to such personal details about Father Ignatius there could be no doubt that he was truthful. Now I began to hear that the people believed us only too well. Those boys were too close – there’s no wife, no girl. So many things about Jooste and me were explained now. Even our parents began to look at us with questions where once there was only certainty.
I thought there was nothing about my friend I did not know – that there never was a time when such things could have happened to him. But there was, said Jooste. You broke your leg and got sick. I was alone then, alone with the Father. So it was my fault, was he saying? It was my fault that I wasn’t there for him – my fault that he hadn’t said a word to me about it, even later when I could have hit the priest with a spanner? Jooste tried to tell me it was not like that but the beer had me and I shrugged his hand from my shoulder and told him to go to hell. And I said that man had never touched me, not even once – so Jooste was stupid to have told his story – I was lying just to get back at Father Ignatius when the opportunity finally arose. He deserved it – look what he was doing there in the big city! It could have been us. But it wasn’t, said Jooste, as he walked away. It wasn’t you.
That was the last time I saw my best friend Jooste. The following afternoon some kids playing near the kopje found his body one hundred feet below that sloping rock face, the one with the crack. The church twenty miles away refused to conduct a funeral service for Jooste. I don’t know where he is buried. Not long after, his parents sold their store and moved away. For a while I endured the stares, the gossip and the coldness that surrounded me. I even confessed that I’d lied about Father Ignatius – and no one believed me. They thought it was an effort to escape what they considered me to be. I could have left the town but never did. My parents died and I was alone. But the truth was that I’d been alone since that day when Jooste walked out of the pub.
That old teacher had been wrong you see. Jooste was the sea all right but no longer the warm Indian Ocean. No, he was the strong and cold Atlantic smashing into the yielding rocks of the Cape. He was not conforming to the Wild Coast after all but shaping the land, finding the weakness, splitting rock from rock and rolling it into sand. When he was here, I could be his best friend. With him gone, I finally understood he was much more. So by the time you read this, if you ever do, I will be out on the kopje. I will set my feet in the crack on that sloping rock face and see if it was ever possible for me to make it across without my best friend, Jooste.
I don’t remember a time when Jooste and I were not the best of friends, although it may not have turned out that way in other places. We lived in a small town out in the veldt – it doesn’t matter where – which boasted the only NG kerk for miles in any direction. Each Sunday it was a busy place as the nearby farmers and their families came in for the service. And once a month it was even busier, for those from the farthest farms would come without fail for their communion service. That’s what they called the Mass of the Eucharist. I never saw it done their way. Jooste and I belonged to the only two Catholic families in our town. We travelled twenty miles to go to our church, driving in the opposite direction to many of those coming in. We waved to them. They ignored us. Our two families did not travel in the same car because Jooste’s people are coloureds and we are white. My father and mother said, “We don’t want to buy trouble” which at first I thought was strange because the Hendricks owned a grocery store with hardware and seeds and also sweets but I was sure no trouble for sale at all. Later of course I understood they meant trouble with the neighbours, the Afrikaners. But that was also odd because those neighbours were good customers at Hendricks’ shop just as they were at my father’s garage. Anyway, although we carried Jooste with us to church most Sundays in our Rover, his parents drove an old Morris a short distance behind.
As I said, Jooste and I might not have been so close in a town such as Kroonstad or even Westminster. He made me laugh when he always called it “Westminister” just like the boers did. But in a larger place we would maybe not need to depend on each other – there would have been a lot of friends for each perhaps. Here in our little town the other boys, the Afrikaner boys with the right religion, forced the two of us together – back to back on many days.
I was the real fighter, not Jooste. He was brave but I got him into a lot of brawls he would have missed given the chance. He learned early that if I was to stay behind after school, a punishment for something, he also should misbehave and be sentenced with me. It was not safe for him to walk out alone while I stayed back. “David,” he would say to me, “please try to be good today. My father wants me to help in the store after school and I don’t want to choose between a detention with you and getting beaten alone.” Sometimes I was able to do that but most times not and still he stayed with me and never complained.
Jooste saved my life. We were twelve years old and fooling around on a kopje, the one with the broken lines of old stone walls in places and at strange, short angles that marked no kraal. These showed where an army, a boer commando, had prepared to defend the land against the British. We played at war there and Jooste was always the Anglo, the invader, the uninvited. It was, he said, just like being at school. Anyway, behind the kopje there was a place where the rock had fractured and fallen, leaving behind a smooth slope of stone with a crack running clear across. I said we can go from one side to the other, feet edged into that thin crack and leaning hard into the rock face. I went first but my foot jumped from the crack and I slid down the stone and over the edge, grabbing a small thorn bush as my legs dangled above the one hundred foot drop below them. I looked up and there was Jooste, somehow coming down the rock slope on his bum, his takkies and his hands steadying him. He reached me and took my hand, pulling me up alongside. Slowly and carefully we made our way back up to the crack and then across. “We are human flies,” said Jooste with a grin. We did not tell our parents – they do not understand that such things are not death but life. Even so, it was the last time we played that game because human flies cannot really fly and Jooste insisted that God gets tired of boys who scorn His mercy.
That is what Father Ignatius taught him. I don’t think he was a Father then but some deputy of the real one. But he liked to be called Father. He taught us the catechism in classes on Sunday while our parents worshipped in the church. We learned our saints and the Stations (“Where is the train?” I whispered to Jooste and he got into trouble for laughing as Father Ignatius was speaking of Christ and the Cross). This was unfortunate because Jooste believed it all and took it very seriously. I on the other hand did not care for religion. Was it not clear that God must be Dutch and our parents had made a mistake – whether of nationality or conviction? Where Jooste studied his Bible and brightly answered all the questions put to him, I concentrated on thinking of Bathsheba naked on my neighbour’s roof and drawing pictures of old Jews kicking against pricks.
I hated Father Ignatius. He could not keep me behind after church but he liked to use a wooden ruler to smash an out-held hand – sometimes he’d slice it down using the edge to get extra hurt into the skin. He tried to humiliate me in every way – standing before the class with a sign he made that said “Sinner – idiot” with a picture of a donkey. I thought that when I was bigger, I would come to meet Father Ignatius on a day that was not Sunday and make him wear that sign before I beat him with a ruler. But he moved away when I was seventeen and so the chance never came. That is, it did not come as I had long anticipated.
So there were six good days in the week for Jooste and I to enjoy together and as time passed the fights at school got fewer because I got bigger. Working in my dad’s garage, I toughened up and took to carrying a spanner in my pocket when I was thirteen. Some of the farm boys were very strong but they grew slower in mind and body as I grew quicker and, I should have to say, at heart they were not bad. They were not mean like me and they knew it. I was ready to use that spanner and I did once on a day when nothing was going on. I walked up behind one of the worst of the bullies, standing with his chinas, and before he could turn I smacked the flat of the spanner against his ear and sent him to the ground crying. I turned my back and walked away, unmolested then and thereafter. Jooste said this was not Christian and not brave – I shrugged and asked if he wanted them to keep on taking advantage of us? No, he said and we carried on as before, inseparable friends doing everything together.
There was one time when we did not. I broke a bone in my leg falling from a roof. Jooste asked did I never learn? Hadn’t he told me about tempting God twice? So I was in hospital far from town for eight days and then stuck in my own home for two weeks and then I got some kind of sickness that kept me from school and church for another three weeks. Jooste came to visit almost every day, except for the hospital time, and he was unfailingly cheerful on the outside. But inside I could see something was troubling him. It was, he said, a girl. At fourteen we had both begun to notice girls. It was obvious to me that they had begun to notice me as well – even though they were Afrikaners with brothers and boyfriends who despised Jooste and me. But Jooste, with his thin frame and love of books, and church, and good manners was not so impressive. He’d fallen in love, he said, some months ago and it was useless – he would never ever have a girl friend. He was right about that.
As the years rolled by, Jooste and I, best friends in school, were not together quite as much as before. He had a job – in his father’s store of course – and I worked for my father when I wasn’t drinking a little too much. Jooste and I would meet each evening at the pub where he’d sip lemonade until I’d had enough beer and he’d help me out into the night and home. It was a different time and the local people no longer made trouble for Catholics. Even their church was changing for the better, slowly to be sure. Everyone grows up eventually. That’s what Jooste said just before he asked when it might start happening to me? I hoped it would not – the cycle of work, a little money, and beer was as much as I expected from life. Jooste was after more. He had plans. Neither one of us had a wife – not even a girl friend. He said he didn’t have much hope that things would change swiftly enough for a white girl to go out with him before he died, but I thought this was an excuse. In my case, girls never bothered because they could see that engine grease and alcohol were my world.
Things might have gone on like that for all time if I’d not seen Father Ignatius’ face on the TV in the pub one evening. It was the news at seven p.m. and with the sound off I did not learn why he was in the news. I drank until the short news at nine o’clock and was ready with the remote when his face appeared again. It was terrible. He was now a real Father in a big city and was accused by some boys of making sexual advances to them and even performing lewd acts. Call me stupid but I did not know such things could happen between men. Perhaps if I’d paid more attention to the Bible I would have learned this because it is in there – I looked it up later. And as I sat there, drink in hand and a couple inside me, I saw how to pay Father Ignatius back for all those years of painful Sundays. But I was careful not to tell Jooste what the TV had said when he came to the pub later.
I made a complaint to the police and to the church twenty miles away. Father Ignatius had, I said, touched me in bad ways from when I was seven years old to when I was even fifteen. It was not such a good plan. I should have listened to the complete news and not just the headlines at nine p.m. Father Ignatius, I now found out, had been an exemplary man for all the first years of his new church in the big city. It was only in the last five years that his crimes had begun, at least according to the boys and those now in their teens who had known him there. I explained that of course he would not begin again so quickly in a new place – he would take time to cover his tracks and set everyone at ease. But this did not work. I heard the voices calling me a liar and each night Jooste sat silently with me as I drank my beer and tearfully asked him why did nobody believe me? Jooste said he understood why I’d never told anyone, even him – he believed me.
It was not a total surprise to me when Jooste also went to the police and told them he too was a victim of Father Ignatius. We always stood back to back. At first it made no difference – people said of course Jooste would say such things. Were those two not the best of friends since they could walk? So it was a shock when the newspaper began to print that Jooste had testified to such personal details about Father Ignatius there could be no doubt that he was truthful. Now I began to hear that the people believed us only too well. Those boys were too close – there’s no wife, no girl. So many things about Jooste and me were explained now. Even our parents began to look at us with questions where once there was only certainty.
I thought there was nothing about my friend I did not know – that there never was a time when such things could have happened to him. But there was, said Jooste. You broke your leg and got sick. I was alone then, alone with the Father. So it was my fault, was he saying? It was my fault that I wasn’t there for him – my fault that he hadn’t said a word to me about it, even later when I could have hit the priest with a spanner? Jooste tried to tell me it was not like that but the beer had me and I shrugged his hand from my shoulder and told him to go to hell. And I said that man had never touched me, not even once – so Jooste was stupid to have told his story – I was lying just to get back at Father Ignatius when the opportunity finally arose. He deserved it – look what he was doing there in the big city! It could have been us. But it wasn’t, said Jooste, as he walked away. It wasn’t you.
That was the last time I saw my best friend Jooste. The following afternoon some kids playing near the kopje found his body one hundred feet below that sloping rock face, the one with the crack. The church twenty miles away refused to conduct a funeral service for Jooste. I don’t know where he is buried. Not long after, his parents sold their store and moved away. For a while I endured the stares, the gossip and the coldness that surrounded me. I even confessed that I’d lied about Father Ignatius – and no one believed me. They thought it was an effort to escape what they considered me to be. I could have left the town but never did. My parents died and I was alone. But the truth was that I’d been alone since that day when Jooste walked out of the pub.
That old teacher had been wrong you see. Jooste was the sea all right but no longer the warm Indian Ocean. No, he was the strong and cold Atlantic smashing into the yielding rocks of the Cape. He was not conforming to the Wild Coast after all but shaping the land, finding the weakness, splitting rock from rock and rolling it into sand. When he was here, I could be his best friend. With him gone, I finally understood he was much more. So by the time you read this, if you ever do, I will be out on the kopje. I will set my feet in the crack on that sloping rock face and see if it was ever possible for me to make it across without my best friend, Jooste.
