THE MAKING OF DOC MEULEMANS
By Willem
Steenkamp
Jack Hansen's proudest boast in the evening of his life, after he had
married a widow and settled down to a respectable existence as a
boarding-house keeper in Cape Town, was that he was the man who helped Doc
Meulemans to become one of Namaqualand's most famous sons.
"Ja," he used to say, "when I first knew him he was as poor as a
church-mouse, sitting at Port Nolloth and trying to scratch a living by
doctoring the people there. But they didn't want to go to him, you know;
he was too young, and he didn't doctor them like the old doctor who was
there before him, who used to start you off with two tablespoonsful of
castor oil and then let you get better or die.
"Doc Meulemans was always coming up with something new, and they didn't
like that at all. So they used to doctor themselves as far as possible,
and then, when they'd doctored themselves half into the grave,
they'd go to him for the first time. So of course he lost a few of his
patients, and that made them even surer that his new-fangled things didn't
work, when all the time it was their own damned fault for not going to him
in the first place. But that's the way they were down there in the old
days.
"One family distrusted Doc Meulemans so much that when one of them got a
burst appendix, they tried to doctor him themselves, as usual, and when he
looked as if he was dying they loaded him in a car and took him all the
way to Springbok to the doctor there. The roads were pretty bad in those
days and they had a couple of burst tyres along the way, and so he got to
Springbok just in time to blow out his last breath. Well, they had to
blame someone for that, so they blamed Doc Meulemans.
"But then came the night of Klaas Bitterbos's leg, and from then on they
couldn't stay away from him. And look at him now! He's got a big house in
Cape Town, and he cuts open all the famous people, and they even asked him
once to stand for Parliament.
"But it hasn't gone to Doc Meulemans's head. He knows where he started and
how he started, and that was the night I got involved with him and Klaas
Bitterbos's leg."
All this might well have been true (not about Doc Meulemans being one of
Namaqualand's most famous sons, since everyone knows that) but about Jack
Hansen being responsible for it, because Jack Hansen was one of those men
who make legends - as opposed to making them up - more or
less as they go along.
Jack was one of a kind, which was just as well; I don't think the
North-West Cape could have taken the strain of two like him.
Everything about him was massive. Since he was a bit of a dandy who always
wore a well-tailored grey or white three-piece suit and snap-brim hat,
depending on the season, you didn't always realise just how big he really
was till he got fairly close up and you found yourself craning your neck
to keep his face in sight. Then you saw that he was as tall and broad as a
door, with feet the size of young coffins and enormous fists whose
knuckles were decorated with scars picked up while fighting in pubs from
Cape Town to Lourenco Marques.
Where he got snap-brim hats in his size was always a bit of mystery,
because his head was on the same scale as his body. Those hats were part
of Jack's psychological-warfare plan, because they tended to hide his
face, and Jack's face was the worst of his features if you happened to
have a bad conscience about him for some reason or another; which was not
all that difficult in those days, when every man and his wife seemed to be
involved in the odd bit of illegal diamond buying and selling.
It looked as if it had been chipped out of very hard granite with a very
blunt chisel (this was so even before he'd picked up companions to his
knuckle-scars), with two staring cold blue eyes and an enormous nose that
stuck out like a battering ram from below a shaggy single eye-brow that
ran east-to-west in an unbroken line except at one place where an unwary
Portuguese had once attempted to lay Jack out with a bottle in Beira.
"I heard something go `poof'," Jack used to say, leaning up against the
counter in the pub at Port Nolloth and fingering the bare patch of scar
tissue over his left eye, "and suddenly the bits of skin were standing up
on my knuckles and the Portugoose's teeth were lying on the floor like
pearls." Since teeth tended to behave that way when Jack was around,
no-one ever doubted the truth of the story.
Jack had a massive thirst, too. Perhaps it was that Viking blood in the
Hansens' veins; perhaps it was just that the North-West is a thirsty place
that breeds thirsty men. Whatever the case, Jack used to go on the toot
from time to time, and the results were always awful.
The sequence of events was always the same. First Jack would down enough
brandy to stun an ox and then he would go looking for a fight. "Looking
for" is perhaps not the right way of putting it. In his cups Jack was like
a stick of dynamite wired up to a trembler switch.
One well-brandied afternoon in the Port Nolloth pub, for example, he
demolished three copper miners on a fishing holiday from Okiep because one
of them grinned at him. "You bastard, why're you laughing at a drunk man?"
Jack roared and punched him across the room. The two other miners took
umbrage at seeing their mate trashed like this and piled in, and then it
was pearls-on-the-floor time again. There were bodies lying all over the
place and half the glasses and bottles were broken by the time Port
Nolloth's two policemen and about half a dozen volunteers had wrestled
Jack to the floor so that he could be handcuffed and dragged off to the
lock-up.
Next morning, Jack being sober, they let him out on his own cognizances,
and in due course he stood manfully in the dock at the Springbok
magistrate's court and pleaded guilty to half a dozen charges. When the
magistrate asked him if he had anything to say in mitigation Jack let
loose with a five-minute speech full of biblical quotations that actually
had a couple of women in the jam-packed public gallery (Jack had a large
personal following, scallywag though he was) sniffling into their
handkerchiefs.
The result was that the magistrate gave him a hefty fine and a suspended
sentence. Well, perhaps it was also a factor that the magistrate had a
soft spot for Jack, who had once saved him from an uncomfortable night
when his car broke down in the most godforsaken reaches of the
Richtersfeld. In point of fact Jack had been returning from one of his
murky IDB deals and had a lucrative "parcel" under the driver's seat of
his car, but the magistrate, who was no fool, had felt reluctant about
asking any searching questions, given the fact of Jack's lavish help and
hospitality.
Because this was an important thing about Jack. Considering what a bad hat
he was, he had very few real enemies. In between his drinking bouts he was
the saviour of the poor and distressed, and a man who was always ready to
do someone a favour.
I mention all this because it has a direct bearing on the story of how
Jack helped young Doc Meulemans to become a famous man.
At this time, it should be said, Doc Meulemans represented Port Nolloth's
entire scientific community. He was a local boy, born and bred in
Springbok, and he had just returned from Holland, where he had got his
medical degree at Leyden University.
He was a man of deceptive appearance. There was a sort of innocent
choir-boy look about him, because he was short and plump and went pink in
the sun, which didn't help him much in a part of the world where men
tended to be tall, tanned an indelible brown and as lean as springbok
biltong. To make it worse, his voice was a light tenor and because of his
plumpness he hadn't yet acquired the sun-wrinkles that most Namaqualanders
start cultivating at an early age.
The result was that people didn't always understand that he was actually a
fairly wily, very self-confident character who enjoyed a drink now and
again and had a liking for the company of exotic characters like Jack
Hansen and Tommy Cohen, who ran a small store and as a result frequently
rubbed shoulders with practitioners of the illegal diamond business. Tommy
admitted freely that not all his clients were honest crooks like Jack,
which was why he always carried a table-fork in his jacket's handkerchief
pocket in case he had to defend himself.
At the time of Klaas Bitterbos's leg, however, Doc Meulemans was on his
best behaviour because he was desperately in love with Hannie Cordier, the
local schoolmistress, a tall, grey-eyed girl with a lovely slim figure and
long dark hair. She was a considerable person, this Hannie. Everybody
loved her to some degree because she was marvellously cheerful and sweet,
a friend to everybody and someone you could generally depend on in a tight
spot; they say that while she was at Port Nolloth the children actually
looked forward to going to school, which of course is something of a
miracle.
This specific night of which I write (it was a Thursday in October of
1927, to be precise) Doc Meulemans was extra well-behaved because Hannie's
sister Ansie was visiting her from the family farm in the Kamiesberg, and
he was hell-bent on making a good impression on her, seeing that he
intended before long to make his way up the Kamiesberg Pass to ask Oom
Tobias Cordier for Hannie's hand in marriage.
So Doc Meulemans had taken extra pains with his clothes (it didn't help
much, since he was a bit slapdash about such things) and resisted all
temptations to go off to the pub for a drink. Hannie watched all this some
amusement, knowing exactly what was going on and knowing, too, that it
would not make a blind bit of difference.
Ansie, you see, was totally different from her sister, although they
looked pretty much alike. Where Hannie was a tower of strength in
emergencies, for example, Ansie tended to suffer fits of mild hysteria;
more to the point in this particular case, Hannie had her wits about her,
while Ansie was so innocent that she wouldn't have recognised the Devil if
he slapped her in the face with his forked tail. Oom Tobias Cordier loved
her, as he loved all his children, but he had more respect for his old
dog's sagacity than Ansie's.
Hannie was in a bit of a quandary. Doc Meulemans's efforts at impressing
her were as totally wasted as they were unnecessary, because she had a
very soft spot for him and didn't mind about things like baggy trousers
and the need to sling back a few brandies from time to time. But this
matter went beyond mere affection; Hannie was fairly sure that as soon as
Ansie had left for home Doc Meulemans would not be able to stop himself
from asking her to marry him, and she wasn't sure whether she should say
"yes". She came from a family of tall, dignified men and strong-minded
women, and she could not help but feel a little unsure about Doc
Meulemans's choir-boy looks. Did he really have what it took?
At this stage we meet the fourth actor in this story, old Klaas Bitterbos.
Klaas was a full-blooded Korana from far up the Orange River, near the
Katberg. Klaas had done all sorts of things in his life, most of them
illegal. He had fought against the Basutos in 1880, smuggled cattle across
the Bechuanaland border, been an ostrich-poacher, spent a year or two in
the ferocious Breakwater Prison in Cape Town, generally misspent his life
and finally washed up on Port Nolloth's shores, where he drew a small
government disability pension from his army days and did odd jobs for Doc
Meulemans, who could never resist befriending a likeable rogue.
Klaas's association with Doc Meulemans had brought him to a sad pitch, to
be truthful. Thanks to some minor mishap Klaas suffered a nasty cut on his
leg; in other times Klaas would have doctored the cut with herbs, as he
had been taught by his people in the Katberg, but having become accustomed
to better things by now, he asked Doc Meulemans to doctor him like the
white people. So Doc Meulemans disinfected the cut, sewed it up, bandaged
it and sent Klaas home with a warning to keep it dry and not to touch the
bandage.
Klaas thanked him, went off the little cluster of shacks where he lived
and promptly started removing the bandage and showing off the wound to all
his admiring friends. Needless to say (given Klaas's somewhat insanitary
living conditions), it was not all that long before he was back at Doc
Meulemans's surgery with a flourishing case of gangrene.
Doc Meulemans examined the horrible results of Klaas's braggadocio.
"Klaas," he said sadly, "this leg of yours is rotten. I'll have to cut it
off."
"Ai, ai!" Klaas wailed. "Cut off my leg! What will become of me?" He went
on like this for a while, with Ansie sniffing in sympathy, and then gave
Doc Meulemans a shrewd glance. "Kleindokter," he said, "will the
government give me a bigger pension?"
"I'll speak to them, Klaas," Doc Meulemans said, "and I'll tell them
you're half dead."
"Thank you, thank you, Kleindokter," Klaas said. "When does Kleindokter
want to cut my leg off?"
"Right after lunch," Doc Meulemans said. "If we don't do it now I'll have
to cut so much off that there won't be anything left of you but your
eyeballs." He made Klaas comfortable on the couch in his surgery and
retired to his office to eat a sandwich and bone up on amputation
techniques, just to make sure he was absolutely correct on the finer
points.
Thoughtfully Hannie watched him paging through the appropriate textbook
and then asked: "Have you ever cut someone's leg off?"
"No," Doc Meulemans said, "not a live person's leg, that is. But it's
simple enough, and there's a first time for everything. Of course, I'm
going to need some help. Will you be my anaesthetist?"
"Of course," Hannie said. Ansie gave a little shriek of admiration.
"Hannie," she said, "you're so brave! I could never do that."
"No, I've got something else for you to do, Ansie," said Doc Meulemans,
who was now so wrapped up in reviewing surgical procedures that he had
completely forgotten what a broken reed Ansie was, even at the best of
times. "I want you to hold Klaas's leg while I saw through the bone." To
his surprise Ansie turned as pale as death and fell into the nearest
chair.
"What's wrong with Ansie?" he asked in genuine surprise.
"She ... er ... can't stand the sight of blood," Hannie said.
"Well, she's not going see much blood, for Heaven's sake," Doc Meulemans
said in mild exasperation. "All she has to do is hold Klaas's leg while I
amputate it."
"Don't depend on Ansie," Hannie said, fighting back a grin. "You'll end up
doctoring her as well."
"Nonsense," said Doc Meulemans, who was so full of natural self-confidence
that he tended to ignore the fact that other people often were not.
"She'll soon get used to it."
"If you say so," Hannie said, and made sure that a basin of cold water, a
cloth and the smelling-salts were ready to hand.
And so after finishing the sandwich to the sound of Ansie's lamen-tations,
they stretched Klaas Bitterbos out on the surgery table. Doc Meulemans put
the nose-cone over his nose and Ansie started to drip chloroform on to it.
After a couple of muffled complaints about the terrible smell Klaas swore
loudly in Korana and drifted off to sleep.
While all this was happening, Jack Hansen was speeding towards Port
Nolloth in his new black Model A Ford, bought with the ill-gotten gains of
his latest IDB transaction. Jack had had a couple of dust-cutters from his
hip-flask and was in a happy mood, and so he sang.
It was an unhappy combination of circumstances, for what Jack liked to
sing when he was in his cups was love-songs, and when you sing love-songs
you sometimes close your eyes from the sheer emotion of it. The result was
that just around the corner from Port Nolloth Jack drove right off the
road, which was not much to speak of anyway, at the precise moment that it
happened to be crossing a culvert. Despite mighty wrenches at the wheel,
the Model A rolled down the side of the embankment and landed on its roof,
its wheels spinning uselessly, like an upturned beetle's legs waving.
Jack crawled out, distinctly the worse for wear. There was a cut along his
front hair-line, from which a copious flow of blood poured down the front
of his white linen three-piece, and his left sleeve was ripped half out of
its stitching.
"Bliksem," he said, looking at the wreck of his Model A. Then he looked
down at his ruined suit and decided the occasion merited something a
little stronger than "bliksem". So he swore for a couple of minutes to put
his mind at rest. That done, he realised that he needed medical help. The
hairline cut was still bleeding, his eyes were a little blurry, his left
arm did not feel too good and he could detect sundry lumps and bruises
rising on his body. Fortunately he was not too far from from Doc
Meulemans's combined home and surgery; he crammed his badly damaged Panama
on his head and set out.
In the meantime Doc Meulemans was experiencing some trouble in amputating
Klaas Bitterbos's leg. Technically, of course, it was not a difficult
operation for a graduate of the famed University of Leyden, but he was
having problems with both his patient and what one might call his theatre
staff.
Klaas Bitterbos was not taking gladly to the chloroform. Every minute or
two he would rear up with a grunt, pull the mask away from his face and
shout loudly in Korana before Hannie managed to wrestle the mask back on
to his face and press him down on the table again; this was not always
easy because Klaas Bitterbos was very strong in spite of his age and his
nose was so flat that the mask tended to slip off. The result was that
after the third or so interruption Hannie was shaking with slightly
hysterical laughter.
With Ansie Doc Meulemans's problem was a little different. She had
behaved herself well, considering the circumstances, till he had finished
resecting the meagre flesh of Klaas Bitterbos's leg and had commenced to
saw through the bone.
At the first rasping draw Ansie's eyes rolled over and she began to sway.
"Quick!" Doc Meulemans cried. "The smelling salts!" He dropped the saw on
Klaas Bitterbos's stomach and seized Ansie, while Hannie (still holding
the cone against Klaas Bitterbos's inconsiderable nose) stretched across
and held the smelling-salts under Ansie's. After some snorting and
sneezing Ansie recovered, Doc Meulemans picked up the saw and set to work
on Klaas Bitterbos's leg again. Three strokes later Ansie's eyes rolled
over again and they went through the same drop-and-grab procedure. So all
in all Klaas Bitterbos's amputation took rather longer than it should
have.
However, at last it was done. The lower part of Klaas Bitterbos's leg was
dumped in a bucket next to the table, the portion still attached to the
aged vagabond was stitched up, and he was wheeled away to recover next
door.
"Ladies," Doc Meulemans said, "thank you very much. Now I'm going to have
a stiff brandy."
"Me, too," Ansie said.
"Do you drink brandy, Ansie?" Hannie asked with considerable
astonishment, since she had never known Ansie to take anything stronger
than home-made lemonade.
"Today I do," Ansie said firmly, wiping her brow with a shaking hand.
At this stage the door crashed open to reveal Jack Hansen, looking as if
he had lately experienced the Almighty's wrath. Ansie took one look at the
bloody hulk of him and fainted in earnest this time.
"What the hell happened to you, Jack?" Doc Meulemans asked,
absent-mindedly slapping Ansie's face to bring her around.
"Rolled my bloody car," Jack said. "Sorry, Juffrou."
"Come over here and sit on the table, Jack," Doc Meulemans said. "Look out
for the blood - I've just cut off Klaas Bitterbos's leg."
"A little more blood isn't going to make any difference to this suit,"
Jack said, grinning ferociously through the gore that covered his face.
"That's what I like to hear," Doc Meulemans said. "Take off that jacket
and let me get at your head."
Jack stripped down to his shirtsleeves and sat on the end of the table,
which groaned in agony under his weight, and let Doc Meulemans stitch up
the cut on his head while Hannie tended to Ansie, who had woken up in the
meantime and gone into hysterics before fainting again. When Doc Meulemans
was finished Hannie sponged the worst of the dried blood off his face and
Jack got up and put on his jacket, stuffing the severed sleeve in his
side-pocket.
"Thanks, Dokkie," he said. "What do I owe you?" "It's on the
house, Jack," Doc Meulemans said.
Jack frowned; being an honourable crook, he did not like to leave unpaid
debts littering his trail. "Well, Dokkie, is there anything I can do for
you?"
"Not right now - " Doc Meulemans began to say. Then his eye fell on the
bucket in which Klaas Bitterbos's leg still stood upright with a sort of
ghastly dignity. "Tell you what, I'm a little busy right now; I've got to
bring Ansie back to life. Could you take Klaas's leg and bury it for me
somewhere?"
"It's a pleasure, Dokkie." Without further ado Jack tucked Klaas's leg
under his arm like a swagger-stick, courteously lifted his ruined Panama
to the women and walked out.
It was Jack's intention to go to his house and bury Klaas's leg in his
backyard, but half-way there he began to feel a little faint, what with
the loss of blood and the blow to the head. Perhaps, he thought, he needed
to stop off for a drink at the bar, which he happened to be passing at
that moment.
Jack never hesitated much between thought and deed, and without tarrying
further he walked through the batwing doors and headed straight for the
bar counter, completely unconscious of the effect his sudden entry had
created.
In his old age the barman, Charley Minto, liked to recall that moment.
"There were about seven or eight blokes leaning on the bar, and I was
leaning on it from the other side, and wishing they'd all bugger off so
that I could close up and go home. Then suddenly the batwings crashed open
and in came Jack Hansen, covered in blood, one sleeve missing from his
jacket and somebody's torn-off leg tucked under his arm. `Gimme a double
brandy, Charley,' he bellowed before he was two steps inside. `I've had a
hard day and I'm bloody thirsty.'
"I looked at the blokes and they looked at me, and we all came to the same
conclusion. Jack was out on the spree again, and this time it was
serious. Jack noticed them goggling at him and shouted: `What're you
bastards looking at?' and that was the signal. Jack was looking for a
fight - or maybe another fight, since he'd obviously torn one bloke to
pieces already. Suddenly you had eight blokes all trying to get through
the back door. Seeing it was a pretty small door and they were all pretty
big, they were just about trampling one another to death."
Jack ignored them, since he was feeling decidedly odd by now. He marched
up to the counter, laid Klaas Bitterbos's leg on it and grabbed the double
brandy Charley's quivering hand had poured him. He downed it, and another
one Charley instantly poured, and then noticed the struggle at the back
door.
"What the hell's the matter with them?" he asked.
"They ... er .... want a little fresh air," Charley explained, saying the
first thing that came into his mind.
"Bloody unhealthy, this time of day," Jack said. "That cold wind off the
sea can kill you if you go into it from a nice warm place like this." He
raised his voice. "Hey! You men want to die?"
Given the speaker and the circumstances, this wasn't exactly the most
tactful thing to say. The struggle at the door turned into a small
massacre, with everyone kicking and punching and clawing; by the time Jack
had downed his second double brandy they were all gone, except for one old
fisherman named Dirk Dirksen, who was on the floor, out cold from a kick
on the head and a good trampling.
"Poor old bloody Dirk," Jack said sadly, because Dirk had done him a lot
of favours, including lying to the police once when they were after him.
"I'd better get him to Doc Meulemans." He tucked Klaas Bitterbos's leg
under his left arm, and bent over Dirk.
"I think he's dead," Charley Minto quavered. And veritably, old Dirk
looked as far gone as the fish he was wont to land every day, except that
in his case there wasn't even a twitch left in him. Sadly Charley Minto
closed Dirk's staring eyes. "Poor old bugger," he said.
"Ja," Jack commiserated. "He told me once he knew the dirtiest joke in the
world, and promised that one day he'd tell it to me."
"Well, he'll never tell it to you now," Charley Minto said. "And in any
case, not that I want to speak ill of the dead, personally I think he was
lying."
"Dirk's not dead till Doc Meulemans says so," Jack said firmly. "Get that
wheelbarrow of yours, Charley - I'm not feeling so good."
In due course they set off down the street; a strange, not to say
awe-inspiring, sight to the fearfully gazing locals: Charley Minto, still
in his barman's apron; Jack Hansen, a staggering, blood-stained colossus,
Klaas Bitterbos's leg clenched under his good arm; and Dirk Dirksen
slumped in the wheelbarrow, his arms waggling limply on either side and
his heels scratching out two wavering trails in the dust.
"My God, Jack," Doc Meulemans said when he opened his surgery's door.
"What have you done now?"
"Nothing, Dokkie, nothing," Jack said, sitting down with a thud and
leaning his bandaged head against the door-jamb. "Old Dirk had an
accident." Knowing Jack's loose interpretation of "accident", Doc
Meulemans turned to Charley Minto. "True's God, Doc," Charley Minto said.
"Jack just ... dropped in for a drink. Joggie Pieterse did it. He trampled
old Dirk flat when they were going out the back door."
"And now poor old Dirk's dead," Jack said, a tear that was half brandy and
half shock trickling into the kloofs and valleys of his cheek. "Dead as
mutton ... But I said to Charley, if there's one man who can bring old
Dirk back from the dead, it's Doc Meulemans."
"That's what he said, Doc," Charley Minto affirmed, nodding vigorously.
"True's God."
"Mmm," Jack said. "That's what I said, all right." He was beginning to
sink into a strange trance-like state as the combination of his injuries
and Charley Minto's double brandies began to take hold of him.
"Bring him inside," Doc Meulemans said, feeling a little desperate but
deeply moved by this blind faith in him. "If he's dead, he's dead. But I
never give up without a fight."
He and Charley manhandled old Dirk into the surgery and laid him out on
the table, which was still splattered with Klaas Bitterbos's blood. Dirk
lay motionless, scrawny arms dangling down off the table, his remaining
teeth bared at the ceiling in the unmistakeable rictus of death.
"Go on, Dokkie," Jack urged. Doc Meulemans looked around, straight into
Jack's befuddled but trusting gaze, and dismay displaced what remained of
his self-confidence, which had been seeping away since the arrival of Dirk
Dirksen. Dirk looked dead, all right. In fact he looked deader than just
about anyone else Doc Meulemans had ever seen. He knew what a rare and
precious thing was the trust he saw in Jack's eyes. Any doctor would ...
well, not kill ... but certainly go a long way to engender that
sort of loyalty in his patients. And now he would have to say the cold
words that would destroy it.
Sudden rage at the unkindness of fate drove Doc Meulemans to blasphe-my,
something that he had always been taught to abjure at the peril of his
soul.
"God!" he cried, smashing his fist on the table. Too late he remembered
that the table was already occupied, and before he could stop himself his
fist drove into Dirk's bony chest. Doc Meulemans drew back, sickened and
horrified at this desecration of the dead, and turned to the others.
"Jack," he said, and stopped, not only because he did not know what else
to say but because Charley Minto was in the process of toppling over, his
eyes rolling back in his head.
"Charley - " he cried. Behind him someone choked; Jack, no doubt.
Automatically he started to reach out to Charley, who was listing
perilously by this time. Then Jack whispered - very loudly, since his
whisper was more like a fog-horn: "Doc, look!"
Doc Meulemans turned and nearly toppled over himself. Old Dirk's chest
gave a convulsive heave, culminating in another choking gurgle, and then
started to move rhythmically up and down. Behind them there was a thump as
Charley Minto hit the floor, but neither Doc Meulemans nor Jack heard it.
"You ... brought ... him ... back ... to ... life!" Jack said, still in
that fog-horn whisper. He leaned over the table at the precise moment that
Dirk's eyes opened. "Say something, Dirk!" he bellowed, forgetting to
whisper.
Dirk's eyes widened in terror; he had died and was floating away on a
beautiful rosy cloud, he explained many years later, and then suddenly he
was on earth again and all he could see was Jack's blood-spattered face,
and he realised that the Devil had reeled him back like a fish from the
very threshold of Heaven's gates so that Jack could kill him all over
again. So Dirk did what any sensible man does when he is about to be
killed for the second time: He screamed like a train-whistle and swore
never to drink another drop, or look at Joggie Pieterse's wife's bosom
ever again.
He might as well have saved his newly-recovered breath. Jack was down on
his knees, praying fit to shatter the window-panes, Doc Meulemans was
trying to light a cigarette with a hand that persisted in jumping all over
the place, and Charley Minto was still flat on his back and dead to the
world.
At this moment Hannie Cordier, who had been repairing one of Doc
Meulemans's shirts next door, burst into the surgery with Ansie close on
her heels. "What's going on?" she cried in understandable confusion.
"It's a miracle!" Jack cried, remembered he was in the middle of a prayer,
hastily shouted: "Amen!" and explained: "Old Dirk was dead, but Dokkie
brought him back to life again! Hallelujah!"
"Hallelujah!" Ansie echoed and burst into tears.
Hannie turned to Doc Meulemans, who had given up trying to light his
cigarette by now, and there was a light in her lovely grey eyes that had
not been there before.
"Hallelujah," Doc Meulemans whispered. He knew that in an instant
everything in his life had changed. He would become a household name now,
not only here in Port Nolloth but in the entire North-West Cape, perhaps
even all over South Africa, and Hannie would be at his side to share in
his fame. He threw away his cigarette and stepped over Charley's body, and
it was as if he had suddenly grown six inches taller. He knew just what
he was going to say; the right words were in his mouth as if they had been
lying there all this time, just waiting to be spoken. And so he spoke
them:
"Hannie," he said, in a voice that was at least five tones deeper than
normal, "will you marry me?"
Author’s footnote:
Is there any factual basis to this well-nigh incredible tale? Well, yes.
Doc Meulemans was inspired by my father, who actually practised at Port
Nolloth in 1927. He really did cut the leg off Klaas Bitterbos (although
this is not Bitterbos’s real name). Jack Hansen really existed, although
not under this name, and what I tell about him is pretty much the truth,
including the car accident, his offer to dispose of Bitterbos’s leg and
the panic this caused in the pub. Hannie Cordier was my mother and her
sister Ansie was my Auntie Toenie, and the story of how they operated on
Bitterbos is almost exactly how it happened. But in all fairness my father
proposed elsewhere and under less dramatic circumstances.
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