legs under the trap. The big fellow had been on the long drop and nearly lost his head with his life.
Frikkie de Kok had never made a mistake.
The singing approached him. A tumult of harmony. He liked it when they were brave because that made it easy for him, and if it were easy for him then he could do better by them.
He waved the spectators into the gallows room and over to the far wall. He saw that the governor had arrived in the preparation room. They acknowledged each other. Frikkie straightened his tie.
A good hymn. Not four weeks before that hymn had been sung in his church in Waterkloof. Sung in Afrikaans, of course. Good theme, good words. He had the four freshly laundered white cotton hoods in his hand.
They came fast into the preparation room. The first man had a prison officer supporting one arm and the chaplain the other, the three that followed had a prison officer on each side of them.
They were wide-eyed, they were shivering. In the preparation room the words of the hymn died in their throats and the chaplain sang on alone, lustily. All the reading of the warrants, all the formalities, had been completed back in the cell block… time now just to get the work finished.
Frikkie de Kok remembered each face from the view he had had of them in the exercise yard the previous afternoon.
They were in the right order. He nodded his head. No man spoke in the hanging shed, only the chaplain sang. The four whimpered and seemed to fight to find their voices. They were moved inside. Moved onto the trap. If it were one man, or even two, then the assistant would have pinioned the legs, but with four it was necessary for the hangman to take two and his assistant to take two. They moved quickly and quietly behind the men, fastening the leather thongs. The chaplain was in front of them. The chaplain knew he was at God's will, otherwise how could he have looked them in the face.
Hoods on.
Two of them were singing. Muffled, indistinct, quavering.
Nooses round the necks. Frikkie did this himself.
Tightened the knot under each of the left side jaw bones.
He saw the feet in line of the trap. He flicked his hand. The prison officers stepped back, releasing their hold on the condemns.
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
