Walking Stick 2:
THE HAUNTED STICK
The stick was probably man’s first real weapon. When he could no longer use it on enemy, wife or food, the stick helped him stay upright and walk.
Over the centuries it became a symbol of power: the sceptre. Show me the king crumbling in his grave without his sceptre encrusted with jewels, and I will wager you his subjects were thieves going after those sceptre jewels.
I collect walking sticks, beautiful as well as ugly. A small forest of sticks stands in a seriously old milk container that always travels with me. They tend to brag, my sticks, because they have been to England, Scotland, France, Holland, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Japan and other places on the world map. Some of them have a story to tell, but not all. I will only share the stories I feel are worthwhile, and in the order I remember them, unfortunately my memory doesn’t work chronologically.
My grandfather Jan Abraham’s ashwood stick loves going out for a spin with me. He’s a male stick. When I have to pick the walking stick of the day, he always tries to look brighter than the other sticks. No, don’t tell me I imagine things, I’m telling this story, okay?
The ashwood stick actually started my collection, after Grandpa’s quiet and gentle death at 94. I was 14 at the time. He obviously thought I would value a walking stick more than money, more than his lovingly preserved pushbike with that silver swishing sound it made racing through rain puddles and that beautiful and clever handlebar lamp shining brighter the faster you pedalled. Grandpa’s will gave my cousin Willie the bike. I congratulated Willie in a short but very nice letter. I swear, if that letter doesn’t get me into heaven…
I think Grandpa Jan Abraham hoped I would remember the story he once told me about his ashwood stick. He was right. How could anyone forget such a strange ghost story?
The ash tree grows just about everywhere. His hard wood made him the father figure of trees: he protects children, and he’s immortal. The one next to the railway track outside Magaliesburg in the old Transvaal probably struggled to survive, steam-train smoke and coal dust must have been fierce. Grandpa knew the tree well, his father used to be the railway station master of Magaliesburg. Jan Abraham and his school companions often climbed the tree and in the cool shade of its rounded crown chose branches to carve their sticks, bows and catapults from.
Uncle Jos was one of the carvers. Full name, Joshua Keyser. At first I thought of him as my grandfather’s brother or cousin. But after Uncle Jos passed away, when I was old enough to know girls weren’t just there to tease and throw mud at, I found out he was actually the Hideous Hittite who wanted to marry Grandpa’s sister Ralie. His love for her was true madness, he wasted loads of shillings on gifts, and he gave her a stunning ashwood stick he carved from the tree by the railroad track. Meanwhile my family prayed their knees bloody, and thank heavens a marital disaster between a Jew and their precious Ralie was averted by the outbreak of another war against the English.
Uncle Jos and Grandpa decided they would rather ride than walk through the war, so they tried to join the Transvaal Scouting Corps but found it in the hands of a weird Capetonian who preferred pushbikes to horses, Danie Theron. So they went on commando with a Commandant whose name time has mercifully erased from the history books. Grandpa always referred to the Commandant as a fine god-fearing leader, but then Grandpa rarely admitted making a mistake. He believed until his death the earth was flat and it stood on four mighty pillars. I believe he would have loved Terry Pratchett’s Discworld travelling on the backs of four mighty elephants. Naturally he would have ignored the great space-cruising turtle carrying the four mighty elephants: there were books of the Bible, especially John’s trippy Revelation, Grandpa Jan Abraham hardly ever mentioned in his many heartfelt and long biblical discourses.
But I remember the old bugger with warmth. He could spit and nearly always hit a passing dog or chicken, and he could shake with laughter until the tears ran down his face. His white hair hung right down to his shoulders, just like Kit Carson in the cowboy comics, but no-one would tell me why. I knew why when I went and looked at him in his coffin outside the church.
The Commandant, who was such a fine god-fearing leader, surrendered after his commando’s third clash with the English. The date was December 24, 1899; what a lovely Christmas gift for the English king. Grandpa, Uncle Jos and other Boer survivors of the battle were sent to, in Grandpa’s words, “a godforsaken rock in a cold sea”. The island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. You’re right, yes, the very place where Napoleon Bonaparte lived and died in exile.
That was when the family stopped calling Uncle Jos the Hideous Hittite. He became the Dapper Boerejood, the Brave Jewish Boer, who sat on a cold godforsaken rock and wrote fine letters in the name of freedom. Grandpa, unfortunately, could only write his name and extremely short messages with great difficulty, and the family craved news.
Uncle Jos was especially brave in one respect. In total secrecy, not even his best friend Jan Abraham knew, he continued writing love letters to precious Ralie. And she answered with love from the concentration camp in which her father, the station master of Magaliesburg, and his family were being held. Grandpa would later claim, with a sad smile, that he could never understand why uncle Jos kissed certain letters before destroying them.
Then Ralie stopped writing. Why? Did she decide their letters were getting too intimate? Could there be a shortage of writing paper in the concentration camp? Uncle Jos kept on writing to her, desperate to know why Ralie had stopped writing.
A letter arrived for Grandpa. Uncle Jos had to read it out loud. The letter was from Grandpa’s middle sister Sanna. She and Ralie were the ones who could write, had some schooling. Sanna wrote she hoped her writing found her brother Jan Abraham in good health, she wished she could say the same about their father, mother and sister Ralie, all of whom were now resting in the loving arms of their Heavenly Father.
The terrible news broke Grandpa’s heart, but he spent more time comforting his friend than receiving comfort; for some reason Uncle Jos cried louder and longer than he did.
So what did Uncle Jos do then? He not only wrote to sister Sanna on behalf of her brother Jan Abraham, he also wrote to her himself and again in secret. This partly explains how the Keyser family evaded the Nazis in Germany and later Jewish haters in South Africa: Uncle Jos believed, deep in his blood, that you just have to keep secrets or you’re bound to see your behind.
Sanna not only wrote back, she actually fell in love with Uncle Jos. She was 14 back then, I only knew her as a toothless laughing aunt, but I try to see her young and mourning by the graves of her family: little Sanna alone and lost, wishing and praying someone would just hold her.
Over time the letters between the concentration camp outside Magaliesburg and the prisoner-of-war camp on Saint Helena grew quite friendly. And then, suddenly, Uncle Jos received a short letter from Sanna: She hopes her writing finds Jos in good health, she is also in good health, may the Heavenly Father give them good health for a long time, she would like to marry him, love, Sanna.
Uncle Joos brooded over it for an entire night, then decided he couldn’t keep this secret any longer, he had to tell his friend about Sanna’s letters. According to family lore Grandpa threw Uncle Jos through a camp tent and almost through a tree on the other side, but their friendship managed to survive. Then the two concocted a plan, how to save the poor foolish girl from her dreams of marriage.
Phase one of the plan: Continue the exchange of letters generously, avoiding words like marriage. Phase two: Survive Saint Helena so they can sail back to Sanna and show her how ancient and ugly Uncle Jos had become.
Then the Peace of Unification happened, May 31, 1902. The war was over.
The day was ending when Grandpa and Uncle Jos stepped from the train at Magaliesburg. They had grown ancient and ugly in captivity, but were still only in their late thirties. Grandpa had kept his hair long through it all. How on earth did he manage it? And why?
At the station a single horse-drawn carriage and message awaited them: Would they please drive themselves out to some farm where Sanna and other orphans of war were being cared for. They quickly released the messenger and took command of the carriage, now really desperate to see Sanna. Uncle Jos probably thought she must be a ripe 16 now. Grandpa probably fretted she had never, in her many letters, given up on her wedding plans.
The stars came out when they left the station, but the night turned cloudy as they continued on the sandy road out to the farm. After the third gate it was so dark they could no longer see the whole horse pulling the carriage, only her arse.
I believe Grandpa would have been the one holding the reins. He hated sitting next to the driver or in the back of a car.
It could have been the immense darkness surrounding them; the mare was getting nervous and restless. They could see the skin of her behind shiver and twitch. They talked softly to her, but she refused to calm down and eventually just stopped moving.
The carriage stopped creaking.
Now the dark night stopped making sounds as well, the hoot of owls stopped, the whisper of bats in flight stopped, they could almost taste the silence. Not even a wink of starlight showed through the heavy cloud overhead, they had to really look closely to be sure the horse was still standing in front of them.
I am writing about two men who had faced a quick death in war and a cold lingering one in captivity, they were certainly not cowards, so I will not use the words Grandpa later used when he was telling the story.
“Shit scared,” were the words grandfather Jan Abraham used, “we could sense that something unnatural was happening here and understood we should be shit scared of it.”
According to Grandpa, he neither saw nor heard when someone started climbing aboard the carriage, he could only feel it. “The little step on your uncle’s side started to go down, not much, just a little bit. The person climbing aboard was definitely not big and heavy.”
As Uncle Jos later told Grandpa, he could make out a bare foot on the step. A woman’s foot. Then a hand appeared before him, a woman’s hand, holding a stick, and Uncle Jos immediately knew it was the walking stick he had given precious Ralie.
Uncle Jos tried to take the stick, but it wasn’t really there.
And then they both heard it, softly, like a breeze sliding over them: “Sssssanna.”
The woman’s hand and bare foot disappeared, the little step rose with a soft creaking sound. And the mare suddenly started pulling the carriage again, stepping out quickly as if nothing unusual had happened.
Grandpa never forgot that moment. “Your uncle was in tears. He firmly believed it was Ralie, trying to tell him something from the underworld. She wanted to give Sanna to him as he had given her the stick, with love.”
Sanna, going on 16 and as thin as a reed, gave Uncle Jos the real stick that same evening. She said dying Ralie made her promise she would.
Grandpa was best man at the wedding. After Uncle Jos died, his widow Sanna gave the stick to Grandpa. And so it became my ashwood stick.
Grandpa looked small in his coffin. A war hero, according to the report my mother clipped from a newspaper. A survivor of the cold and hunger of Saint Helena. Someone at the mortuary had cut off his long hair. In place of a normal right ear there was only a tiny, crumpled piece of skin. My mother told me he was born that way.