Whitethorn Read Free Page A

around the place with our hands, as brains were not considered a high-up commodity. It’s funny when you don’t belong to anyone that the people responsible for looking after you just assume you’re nobody. You are the Government’s children and they can do as they wish with you. So they train you to be the lowest common denominator, except, of course, for the blacks. You definitely can’t be allowed to be as low as a black kaffir . So pigs are definitely not a white man’s work, they’re stinking creatures that live in mud and their own shit that gets squished up together to make a fearful greeny-black mud paste that stinks so much that you have to hold your nose as you approach. Even an orphan boy couldn’t be expected to work in the pigsty, which is why we had a pig boy. Although I must say, I got used to the pigs’ smell and didn’t mind it. Mattress said that if humans lay around in their own shit they’d smell just as bad as the sow.
    Mattress moved over to the sow, the greenish black stink-mud squelching between his toes. He had very large feet because he was a very big man and they were almost worn out. If they’d been shoes they would have needed to be thrown away long ago. The soles of his feet were about an inch thick and were splayed out with deep cracks running down the sides. It was as if he walked on an old pair of really thick leather soles about an inch and a half wider than the top part of his foot. This callused platform of hard, rough skin looked like it was glued to the underpart of his feet. He’d once explained this had happened from his having been a herd boy in the mountains when he was about my age.
    â€˜ Kleinbaas , I was a herd boy in the mountains of Zululand and the small boys looked after the village goats. Goats like to be on the high slopes and on the rocks and they’ve got you jumping from rock to rock and running and slipping and sliding down the razor-sharp shale. Soon you’re bleeding and sore and when you get back limping to the kraal at night the old men sitting under the marula trees laugh and say, “ Umfaan , you are not a herd boy’s arsehole until the bleeding stops and the hard skin comes”.’ Mattress laughed at the memory. ‘Slowly, slowly, the soles of your feet grow hard.’ He pointed proudly to his feet. ‘And then when they get like this you know you have beaten the mountains and the rocks and the wicked whitethorns and the shale that cuts like a knife.’
    Mattress made me see that having feet like his could be a very big advantage in life because you didn’t need boots and could go anywhere you liked.
    As he walked over to the sow she looked at him with a suspicious eye and grunted a warning a bit louder than usual but otherwise didn’t move. Pigs can be dangerous and a sow protecting her young is not to be trifled with. She must have known Mattress because she didn’t seem to mind when he picked up four piglets by the tail, two in each hand, and walked over and dumped them over the short stone wall into a vacant pigsty next door. Boy! You should’ve heard the squealing going on! This left two teats vacant. He turned, walked over to me and reached over the wall and took Tinker from me. The tiny, sightless puppy seemed to disappear within his large hands. With each piglet having a teat to itself the remaining piglets were going at it hell for leather and didn’t even see Mattress placing Tinker next to a vacant teat. I waited anxiously as Tinker’s nose bounced against the huge teat that was bigger than her nose. At first she didn’t seem to know what to do but Mattress held her against the pig’s great pink teat and sort of rubbed her nose on it and a small drop of yellowish milk came out. Tinker was on it like a shot. Her tiny mouth opened and I don’t know how she got that big sow’s teat into her mouth but she did, and then she hung