A beloved walking stick can’t have just one story. You walk with a friend more than once. It becomes part of your life. How many times, in crisis, did I grab a kierie and go for a walk to clear my head? And how many stories did I come up with on such a walk? Must be hundreds of them, from short stories to novels and long, complicated television series. A walking stick was always part of the picture.
Especially the apple kierie after Dalene and I moved from England to the small desert town of Hanover, South Africa. With its comfortable length and flexible grip, the apple became the stick I walked with most over that hard land and between the rocky Karoo hills, even chased off a Cape cobra with it once. I’m not saying my other sticks never went for a spin, but to this day my wild apple lady remains the one my hand reaches for first.
I convince myself that, when I walk with her, my feet seem to kiss the ground. Some of my other sticks, especially the ones I bought only for their interesting look, make me walk as if I’m looking for a place to pee.
I remember my apple kierie the day my helpers and I buried Dalene. My apple rode with the pick-axes and shovels to the patch of Karoo by the rock-strewn hill shaped like a crescent. Dalene had chosen the place herself, as well as the simple wooden coffin with its handles of rough rope. She wanted no display, no mourners, no tea and cake after the funeral..
I remember walking with my apple when the pretty girl and I went to see if Dalene’s grave had been flooded by the rainstorm. Dalene knew the girl as the daughter of the caregiver who helped me through the last cancer nightmare. A friend of mine said Dalene sent me the laughing girl. Who knows? The girl and my apple kierie had something in common: they glowed in the sun.
Her name is Sarie-Elana. It sings. Everyone calls her Saarkie.
I remember the apple kierie had to stay home on our wedding day; I already looked ancient next to Saarkie, didn’t want to underline the age difference with a walking stick. I remember my words to her, “I know I’m too old for you, but if it only lasts two years between us I will still be happy.” I suspect my bride wished she had my apple kierie when male wedding guests carried chairs onto the dance floor to watch test rugby on the TV. My bride’s vocabulary can be breathtaking when it comes to swearing..
I can still feel the apple stick in my hand when we first walked on Jeffreys Bay’s beach and decided the Karoo belongs to the past, we want to set up home here and start a family. As a father of five daughters and grandfather of nine grandchildren, I felt we had to start as in immediately, I didn’t want our first born to call me grandfather.
It didn’t work. Either my little swimmers are still swimming or committed kamikaze on the target. Saarkie did not “take”, as the old women would say. We then asked smart and expensive doctors to help us. And over that long and awkward period of fertility treatment I will gently draw a veil of silence.
Adoption, we decided, was the only route left to us. Welfare wanted to know if my bloodline started with Adam and Eve and if some of my ancestors went to hell for child abuse. I wanted to know if we could adopt a normal, healthy baby boy without taking out a mortgage on the house.
At last, the good news: A welfare angel informs us there is a boy available. But we have to wait until he’s three months old. That is the law, in case his biological mom should change her mind about giving him up.
The wait drives us round the bend, we fight over everything, especially names. My third wife likes Adriaan and I admit it’s a musical and strong name for a boy. The wait makes us superstitious, we say we don’t want to wonder what he looks like, because then he might look like an octopus. A cute octopus, surely, but how do you put a diaper on all those legs? And we laugh like idiots..
And then, at last, The Day. We can go and get him. I try to be funny and wonder if we should just leave it at that, can’t get better than this, we don’t really have to jump in the car and go. Saarkie threatens me with something worse than death. On the way to Port Elizabeth we get so nervous we stop speaking.
The angel of welfare invites us in, a tall shining lady, our nerves are shot but we feel we love her. She gives us a sweet pep talk, then leads us to a sunny room with a sofa. He is sitting in a fresh nappy and new baby outfit against a huge white cushion on the sofa; the cushion probably looks big because he is so small and fragile. Sunlight glows all around him. His skin, the color of soft caramel, shines as if polished. His brown eyes stare into mine and they are so large I see myself reflected in them. I’m suddenly terrified. What if the angel says it’s the one you could have had, but he’s already taken, sorry. I look at Saarkie and she’s in tears.
We call him Ruhan. A name from the East, it means light. Later we add Adriaan. Ruhan Adriaan Venter. The light of our life.
And he’s the extraordinary, interesting tip of an iceberg: What we see is not what lies beneath the surface in Ruhan’s genes. Barely two years old and he starts dancing to the beat of If I could turn back time by Cher, and I mean dancing, not just rocking like a baby. Saarkie is better at it than me, but we are not really dancers. And less than a year later, he’s imitating Michael Jackson in front of the TV, move for move, fingers clicking, doesn’t miss a beat. What is this? Are his biological parents professional dancers? A ballroom duo?
He’s obviously very happy with his new mom. I can be making a complete fool of myself to get him laughing and he’ll maybe offer me a quiet smile, probably because he’s feeling sorry for the old idiot, then.Saarkie enters and suddenly the child is ecstatic. I know he’s extremely fortunate to have her for a mom. Saarkie has clever hands, can fix things that shock and spark without burning down the house, can build a braai without a plan and fix a stubborn computer. Ruhan could probably have done better than his new papa, that I must confess. If I have to replace a simple wall plug, if I am really forced to, I will blow out all the lights in the house and probably the neighborhood as well. You can show me five times how to start a generator and I’ll still forget about the choke. My father, a transport business owner, carefully showed his four sons how to assemble a truck engine. Three of the four ended up doing it perfectly. After my very best effort, which left me covered in grease, the darling man gave me a gentle hug and kind advice: “You better stay with the books, son.”
Of course I do know how to tell Ruhan stories. And I carry him around everywhere. There’s a picture where I’m eating breakfast with one hand and with the other hand I’m keeping him from falling off my neck. By the time he could speak properly, he would only listen for a short while when I told him a story and then take over, making up the rest of the story himself. At least I suspect that comes from me, not necessarily from a biological parent .
The darling sits on my lap when we watch television, raves about Star Wars, dinosaurs and superheroes. I’m Batman and he’s Robin, my sidekick. We speak Afrikaans in the house, he speaks English instead. By choice. How is that possible? Are his biological parents English speaking?
When he starts walking strongly, Ruhan heads directly for the old milk pail full of walking sticks. We play the kieries are light sabres, I’m Darth Vader, he’s Luke Skywalker. He regularly impales or beheads me.I make sure I pick the sticks thus employed and we only use the ones I’m not too crazy about. Our duels often develop into a war starting on the front porch and ending in my writing room on the other side of the house.
Yes, it was bound to happen. I was off doing something, Saarkie was busy typing a story I wrote by hand, her mom was probably feeding the dogs or improving her garden. What really happened, only Ruhan knows.
I only know this: When I got home, my beloved apple lady, my irreplaceable stick bought in North Yorkshire, lay on the floor next to the old milk jug and she was broken in two.