Pioneer Days: Pop

Pioneer Days: Pop

Pop is a blacksmith. Us kids call him ‘Pop’ because he is tough as Popeye. He keeps his old cinder forge under the lemon tree near the kitchen. It stands on three iron legs. He fills the cinder pan with live coals, fans them with his kudu[1] hide bellows. Then he heats up iron rods until they are red hot. With his ugly hammer he beats them flat on the anvil, tap taps at the knobs and the lumps, then he bends and twists them in a big black vise.

I always have the same dream about Pop. He is at the forge, stirring the cinder box, making the last coals wink their red eyes, shaking out the ashes.

A crocodile slithers up behind him. I yell, Pop, Pop, but he cannot hear me. Pop, Pop. The crocodile opens its scissor jaws. I see its huge yellow teeth.

Pop, Pop––I wake up calling Pop, Pop.

Pop has a rugged, plain face with beetle brows and a big nose. A friendly face except when it is covered in bee stings, then he looks like the boogeyman, two puffballs for eyes, bumps everywhere, bumps on his neck and all over his thick hands with ropey blue veins. Bumps even in his whitish hair making it stick out at all angles.

He keeps his bees back of Gran’s store out Shiloh way. He won’t wear a net or gloves or gogs so he gets stung. He doesn’t care. When he comes back with a bucket of sweet dark honey his eyes have already swelled over. But he doesn’t care. He offers Gran the dark combs studded with drowned bees. His mouth tries to smile.

‘Hat, Lottie, look what I have got for you, my girl.’

Pop still calls Gran ‘my girl’ which she isn’t; she is ancient, grey hair, wrinkly face, pretty but ancient. She always wears the same old dress, black with white spots all over.

Gran does not allow Pop to swear, not even a damn or a darn. She has trained him to say, “my hat” or “my foot” or just “hat” or “foot” — which he does to please her.

Gran likes me and my brother Brian to go with Pop when he visits the Charlotte mine. ‘If Pop goes to sleep, give him a shout,’ Gran says, ‘and don’t let him drive fast. Hear that, Ted? No driving fast. You’ve got the kids with you.’

‘Yes, Lottie, Yes, Gran.’ We all promise.

Charlotte is a long way from town, maybe 60 or 70 miles. Brian and me sit in the back of the old Ford pick-up, bounce about on bags of mealie meal and supplies for Esau, the mdala[2], the old man who takes care of the mine in Pop’s absence. We jump up from time to time to look at Pop through the small cab window. It’s hard to tell if he’s asleep because his head never slackens or falls back like it does when he snoozes at home.

If he veers off into the bush we are supposed to bang on the cab roof. We never do this—not right away; we wait to hurtle off the road into the scrubby veld, dust rising, bump, crash, small bushes flattening, bump, clank, a guinea fowl with chicks, squawking, flapping for safety. If it looks like he’s going to hit a tree or roll into a deep donga we drum our fists on the cab roof.

‘Pop, Pop! Wake up Pop — ditch ahead!’ or ‘Tree to starboard!’

And he swerves wildly, back to the tarmac strips not even slowing down. Through the cab window we see him cursing, ‘Bloody, bloody, buggerit!’

‘Don’t tell Lottie,’ Pop begs us after every trip.

Sure, Pop. Sure.

We get to Charlotte and Esau, the mdala greets us; he hops about under the hot sun like an antic Rumpelstiltskin. He wears a holey pair of shorts, fly held together with safety pins, string for a belt. Most bizarre of all he wears a woman’s sunbonnet on his grizzled head; the tie-up strings hang down on either side of his goblin face.

Gwaii,” he says, grinning and toothless. He wants his cigarettes. “Gwaii.” Pop gives him a carton of Tom Tom and he takes it in both hands. “Tenk you.”

No shoes, Esau never wears shoes and we envy him. We reckon he must be more than a hundred years old. When we ask he just cackles and shakes his old head with the sunbonnet on it.

Old Esau winds Pop into the shaft.

Down he goes: one foot in the bucket, the other hangs free; one hand holds the rope the other carries a spare bucket and a shovel. In the bucket are a trowel, a screwdriver, and a paintbrush.

‘Stay clear of the edge.’ Pop yells up at us like he just thought of it. Brian and me lie on our stomachs and peer over the stony lip: into the deep, dangerous underworld he sinks and vanishes; the drum stops creaking, the rope slackens.

The smell of dank gunpowder rises. We listen: echoey bloody, bloody buggerits ricochet off the walls as he scratches and scrapes like the Count of Monte Christo in his dungeon.

‘Woza Esau!’ The rope jumps and Esau winds up a bucket of stones and piles them into a wheelbarrow. The bucket clangs down again. ‘Bamba ena!’

Pop sends up bucket after bucket of stones until he is satisfied. Then Esau and a bunch of lads who are probably Esau’s sons and grandsons crank and wind Pop up to the surface. It’s slow going; Pop is pretty heavy. He surfaces, his shirt tied around his head like a camel driver, his clumpy mottled torso streaked with dirt.

‘Stamp him now, boss?’ Esau asks, sweating red dust into his grizzled beard, his leathery hands sorting the stones. Pop grunts. The mill pistons racket into life and spill stones onto one of the tables to get washed.

The two old men start panning. They sit on low stools, legs stretched out; they pound the mortars in front of them grinding pebbles to sand. They shake the sand in a fine mesh sieve and pump water into a trough. Wash and sift, wash and sift . . . Then into the gold pans. Pop has fashioned his pans in his old cinder forge; they are as big as dustbin lids.

As the sun starts to sink and the birds begin their end-of-day ruckus. Pop shows Brian and me a thin yellow line of gold in the pan. He chuckles, gets out his tweezers, saves the gold in a small medicine bottle to take back to Gran.

‘Look, Lottie, my girl. Look what I’ve got for you.’

‘My hat, Ted.’ She smiles at him. ‘We’ll be millionaires yet.’

‘Hey, Pop, there goes a fine pair of ankles!’

Whenever we drive down Main Street with Pop in in the old Ford truck we watch out for ladies in sun hats, window-shopping.

‘Look, Pop, over there.’ As we pass Meikles and Haddon & Sly on Abercorn Street.

‘Ankles, Pop!’ As we drive down Selbourne and around City Hall where the Christmas beetles buzz like crazy in the Monkey Puzzle trees.

‘Over there, Pop. Look.’

Pop looks because he likes women’s ankles. He goes through red lights, looking; he misses stop signs, looking, he drives up curbs, looking, swerves into storm drains, looking. We love it. Once he stops two inches away from the Johnny Walker billboard––a marching gent with cane and topper, dressed like Mr. Pickwick. Underneath him a message: ‘BORN 1820 & STILL GOING STRONG.’

Pop comes from Poland, from the old days when women wore long dresses and all you could see was their feet––that’s what our dad told us.

Pop loves Gran a lot.

When she goes away to visit some relative down in South Africa, he cries, not sobs or anything like that; tears trickle out of his faded blue eyes and he says to Brian and me,

‘Hat, I wish she would come home. What’s she doing down there?’

 ‘Hey, Pop, do you think Gran has met another bloke?’

‘WHAT!’ He cannot take a joke. ‘Who? Who?’

‘No-one, Pop, we’re pulling your leg.’

Pop clenches his giant, blacksmith fists––

‘Lottie wouldn’t do that,’ he says. More tears meander down his cheeks.

We feel bad. ‘Course not, Pop. Only teasing.’

Pop died in his sleep. That’s what Gran tells us. An ambulance took him away early in the morning when we were still asleep. What will happen to him now? Brian wants to know. He and me are sad about not seeing him any more.

He’s become spirit, says Gran.

You mean like a spook?

Not exactly, says Gran. She goes to spirit meetings and reads Marie Corelli books. She is not scared of spooks.

That night I had the old dream again. This time the old cinder forge stands alone under the mulberry tree. The toppies chirp away in the tree like they are waiting for something to happen.

At last the crocodile slithers in from nowhere like always and instead of waking up, I watch it. The crocodile watches me too. Suddenly it rolls over on its back and wriggles happily the way a cat or dog does on a sunny stoep. It changes into Pop, smiling and much younger than I remember him.

Tell Lottie I’m here, he says and then I wake up crying a little.

When I tell Gran the dream Gran cries a little too.

Will we ever see Pop again? Brian asks.

I expect so, says Gran.

Can he see us from where he is?

Certainly. He’s just a shade away.

After the talk with Gran I spend much of my time peering into shadows, or standing still in the shade of big quiet trees. It’s like okay; it’s nice. Sometimes I chat to Pop about this and that and I have this feeling that he is listening.

The funny thing is, Pop seems to be my age and to understand everything I tell him — which he never did when he was just ’old Pop’.

[1] Kudu: Large African antelope

[2] Mdala: old man