back into the undergrowth. Up he came again, neck arched, legs stretched with talons wide. Down again, the weeds shaking wildly where he landed. This time he didn’t come up and he had stopped squawking, though the khaki weed continued to shake where he’d disappeared. My heart beat wildly. Something had got Granpa Chook. A weasel or a feral cat? It was my fault, I’d left him helpless in the magic circle.
I stumbled blindly towards the tiny clearing where I’d left him, khaki weed and black jack lashing out at me, holding me back. Granpa Chook stood inside the circle; held firmly in his beak was a three-foot grass snake. With a vigorous shake of his head and a snip of his powerful beak he removed the head from the snake and, to my astonishment, swallowed it. The snake’s head went down in the same way as the fat cutworm had done. Unaware that the show was over, the snake’s brilliant green body continued to wriggle wildly in the weeds.
The toughest damn chicken in the whole world tossed his head and gave me a beady wink. I could see he was pretty pleased with himself. I’ll tell you something, I don’t blame him, how can you go wrong with a friend like him at your side?
The snake had ceased to wriggle, and picking it up I hung it from a branch of a cassia tree growing only a few feet from the window nearest my bed in the little kids’ dormitory. Now there were two hatless snakes in the world and I was involved with both of them.
The afternoon gradually filled with the cacophony of returning kids. I could hear them as they dumped their blankets and suitcases in the dormitory and rushed out to play. Granpa Chook and I spent the afternoon making his shelter from bits of corrugated iron I found among the weeds. He seemed to like his new home, scratching for worms where I’d pulled up the weeds. He would be safe and dry when it rained.
By the time the wash-up bell went at a quarter to five, I was a bit of a mess from all the weeding and building. I left Granpa Chook for the night scratching happily away in his new home and washed under a little-used tap on the side of the building facing the orchard. By the time the supper bell went the late afternoon sun had dried me and I was good as new. I waited until the last possible moment before slipping into the dining hall to take my place at the bottom table where the little kids sat.
Shortly after lights out that night I was summoned to appear before the Judge and the jury. It was a full moon again, just like the very first time. But also a moon like the one that rose above the waterfalls in the dreamtime when, as a young warrior, I had conquered my fears.
The Judge, seated cross-legged on a bed, was even bigger than I remembered. He wore only pyjama pants, and now sported a crude tattoo high up on his left arm. Cicatrisation wasn’t new to me, African women do it to their faces all the time, though I had not seen a tattoo on white skin before. Reddish-pink skin still puckered along the edges of the crude blue lines which crossed at the centre like two headless snakes wriggling across each other.
Absently rubbing his tattoo, the Judge shook his head slowly as he looked at me. ‘You are a fool, a
‘You have marks like a Kaffir woman on your arm,’ I heard myself saying.
The Judge’s eyes seemed to pop out of his head. He snorted in amazement and the snolly-bomb shot out of his nostril and landed on my face. His hand followed a split second later. I felt an explosion in my head as I was knocked to the floor.
I got to my feet. Stars, just like in the comic books, were dancing in a red sky in front of my eyes and there was a ringing noise in my ears. But I wasn’t crying. I cursed my stupidity, the holidays had blunted my sense of survival; adapt, blend, become part of the landscape, develop a camouflage, be a rock or a leaf or a stick insect, try in every way to be an Afrikaner. The jury was silent, struck dumb by my audacity. A warm trickle of blood ran from my nose, across my lips and down my chin.
The Judge grabbed me by the front of my pyjamas and pulled me up to his face, lifting me so that I stood on the very tips of my toes. ‘This sign means death and destruction to all Rooineks. And you, Pisskop, are going to be the first.’ He released me and I stumbled backwards but managed to stay on my feet.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, my voice barely audible.
‘This is a swastika, man! Do you know what that is?’
‘N… no, sir.’
‘God has sent us this sign from Adolf Hitler who will deliver the Afrikaner people from the hated English!’
I could see the jury was deeply impressed and I was too.
The Judge turned to address the jury, prodding at the swastika.
‘We must all swear a blood oath to Adolf Hitler,’ he said solemnly. The jury crowded around his bed, their eyes shining with excitement.
‘I will swear too,’ I said hopefully. The blood was still running from my nose and some had dripped to the floor.
‘Don’t be fuckin’ stupid! Pisskop, you
I had never been to the sea but I knew it would be a long march all right. ‘The blood oath! The blood oath!’ the jury chanted.
‘Come here, Pisskop,’ the Judge commanded. I stepped over to his bed. ‘Look up, man.’ I looked up at him as he stood high above me on the bed. He wiped his forefinger under my nose and then he pushed me so that I sat down hard on the floor. He held up his finger, my blood on its tip shining in the moonlight.
‘We will swear this oath with the blood of a Rooinek!’ he announced solemnly. Two members of the jury lifted me to my feet while the others crowded around me, sticking their pudgy fingers into the blood running from my nose. The supply wasn’t coming fast enough and one boy tweaked my nose to increase the flow.
This seemed to cause it to stop altogether, so that the last two members were forced to dab their fingers into the drops of blood on the floor.
The Judge, wiping the blood on his finger across the swastika, instructed the jury to do the same. Soon the swastika on his arm was almost totally concealed. ‘Death to all Englishmen in South Africa, the fatherland,’ the Judge cried, raising his arm once more.
‘Death to all Englishmen in South Africa, the fatherland!’ the jury chorused.
The Judge looked down at me. ‘We won’t kill you tonight, Pisskop. But when Hitler comes your days are numbered, you hear?’
‘Yes, sir, when will that be, sir?’ I asked.
‘Soon!’ He stepped from the bed, and placing his huge hand over the top of my head he turned me towards the dormitory door and gave me a swift kick up the bum which sent me sprawling headlong across the polished floor. I could smell the wax polish on the floorboards and then I got to my feet and ran.
Back in my own dormitory the little kids leapt out of bed, crowding around me, demanding to know what had happened. Too upset to mind my tongue, I sniffed out the story of the swastika and the blood oath and my threatened demise upon the arrival of Hitler.
An eight-year-old named Danie Coetzee shook his head solemnly.
‘Pisskop, you are in deep shit, man,’ he said.
‘Who is this person called Adolf Hitler who is coming to get Pisskop?’ a fellow we called ‘Flap-lips’ de Jaager asked.
It was apparent nobody knew the answer until Danie Coetzee said, ‘He’s probably the new headmaster.’
There had been some talk among the kids the previous term about the headmaster and his ‘drinking problem’. I had wondered at the time what a drinking problem was. Obviously it was something pretty bad or the huge, morose man we all feared wouldn’t be leaving.
One of the kids started to chant softly: ‘Pisskop’s in trouble… Pisskop’s in trouble…’ The others quickly took up the chant which grew louder and louder. I placed my hands over my ears to try to stop it.
‘Still!’ The dormitory rang to the command. Mevrou stood at the doorway, her huge body filling the door frame.
‘We was just talking, Mevrou,’ Danie Coetzee said. As the oldest of the small kids he assumed the position of spokesman.
‘You know that talking after lights out is verboten, Coetzee.’
