It isn't always the Wolf in Sheep's clothing you should be worrying about..

My neighbour Jaap has passed on, bless his soul. He was a kind man and helped me and my daughters on several occasions, fighting fires and changing tyres. I know how to change a tyre, of course I do; but sometimes the nuts were so tight I couldn’t get the things off by myself to even begin! He was also the first one here the night my daughter Caitlin, then only seventeen, and I, were held up by three men with AK47’s. I’ve never been so pleased to see anyone in my life. But that is another story.

Well, he’s gone now, and Leonora has sold their plot. I can’t look at those Lucerne fields to the south and east of my plot without seeing him chugging away on his tractor, a man finally free of his career as a research chemist to pursue his dream of farming.

Now someone new will be living there.

Life goes on, and a new chapter in the history of that piece of land is opening. But I can remember the man who owned that place before Jaap and Leonora, about thirty-five years ago. His name, if I remember correctly, was Frans. He lived in his servant’s quarters and rented out the main house for extra income to boost his disability allowance.

My father met him in the bar of the old Swartspruit Hotel, and brought him home to have dinner with us one evening, and it was the start of many such visits. Frans was in a wheelchair, and his story was a sad one, of human folly and love and betrayal, as all the best stories are. All the protagonists in this tale are dead now, so no harm can come from the telling of it.

He had been an athlete in his youth, and was often out running and training for the next marathon. He had several medals to prove it. He even gave my father one of them from the Comrades I think, as a token of gratitude for his kindness.

He had married his childhood sweetheart, and they had been happily married for some years. Or so he thought.  But his passion for running took him away from home a lot. His young wife grew lonely and took a lover, as young wives will when left unattended for too long. And of course, the inevitable eventually happened – they grew careless and he walked in unexpectedly one night and surprised them in the act.

As it happened, he was the one who was surprised.

Even way back then there was an element of risk in a woman being alone on a plot at night, and he had bought her a handgun, which she kept in her bedside drawer. So on that fateful night, it was right there beside her. While he was still taking in the scene before him, she whipped out her pistol and shot him. The bullet lodged in his spine and in that instant, his life, as he knew it, ended. No more running, no more walking, no more work, and (understandably) no more marriage..

He found himself alone, impoverished and confined forever to the wheelchair that was to become both his friend and his worst enemy. Never having been one for drinking before, he discovered that a few drinks eased not only his physical pain, but also the soul-pain that that night had left him with. To add to his misery, he kept having to go to hospital for further operations. Because he was alone with no one to care for him, he developed terrible bedsores that he wasn’t even aware of until they needed surgery. My father took pity on him, and while he was in hospital, bought him a sheepskin to sit on to help prevent these from developing again. Frans was in hospital nearly the whole of winter, and the sheepskin lay rolled up in the little jammerkamertjie off the main bedroom of our house.

My father visited him regularly in hospital. Frans’ family lived in Jo’burg, and couldn’t come to see him very often. When he was finally released, it was on condition that he stayed with his family so that they could help look after him while he recuperated. So my father put the rolled up sheepskin on the backseat, in case Frans wanted to sit on it, and set off to the hospital to fetch Frans. Frans didn’t need it, so it stayed where it was while the wheelchair and the bit of luggage went into  the capacious boot of the Caprice, and off they went to Jo’burg.

His sister had a flat above Joubert Park, which was still fairly respectable in those days. It was on the third floor – luckily there was a lift. My father duly dropped him off there to a warm welcome from his sister and her husband and some of their neighbours, had a drink or two with them and departed, glowing with a sense of having done his good deed for the day.

Getting Frans settled in, exchanging news, and unpacking, the sister came across my father’s gift of the sheepskin. She was delighted and decided to apply it at once. She and her husband lifted Frans out of his wheelchair and set him in an armchair. Then they picked up the sheepskin and unrolled it, to put it on the seat for him. As they unrolled it, a metre long snake emerged. It had obviously been there for a while, and was understandably irritated at being disturbed. Pandemonium broke out, with everyone screaming and rushing for the door at once, screaming “Slang, slang!!” and forgetting poor old Frans stuck on the sofa, unable to move.

From what we heard afterwards, everyone on that floor and the next ran out of the building panic-stricken, and someone called the fire brigade. After all, people in flats in the middle of Jo’burg aren’t really used to having to deal with all the creepy crawlies we plot-people deal with on a daily basis. Living in the city, particularly on the third floor, one has a right to expect to get through life snake-free. As it turned out, to everyone’s relief, the snake was harmless. The firemen removed it, everyone calmed down and for all I know its descendants are still living in Jo’burg Zoo.

My father never tired of telling this story. He and Frans would laugh until they cried. The thing is, my father was terrified of snakes. He never got over the fact that it had been nesting in the room next to him, and that he had held it in his arms, and driven with it all the way to Jo’burg….