But Miss Marriot and her weeds. Well, he’d had her this morning again. This way, that way, too much, too little, Naughty Boy, why don’t you listen, when will you learn… and all the time standing on two legs as thin as broomsticks in those strange black shoes.

Isaiah first noticed the man at teatime: Miss Marriot had called his name three times in a shrill, surprizingly loud voice, so he took his tin around to the office and she filled it with tea for him. There was one tree on the holy church grounds—a crooked bluegum near the big gate for motor cars—and in its shade Isaiah always drank his tea.

He noticed the man because he looked tired. The largest part of Isaiah’s long life had been spent in hard work and he knew from personal experience the attitudes and angles of really deep exhaustion, when the body can no longer even carry its own weight. He saw it immediately in the way the young man was sitting on the pavement, and half leaning against the lamp-post, and it reminded him straight away of the terrible time he’d once spent as a labourer on a potato farm. He saw again the terrible, unspeaking postures of his fellow workers, slumped around the walls of the hut where they were herded at night after twelve hours in the fields. From the memory Isaiah might have wandered off into another reverie and forgotten the man opposite him, were it not for the inconsistency of that man’s being tired. He was the tsotsi-type, the no-good loafers of the street corners and shebeens, the ones you avoided at night, the scum who killed for pennies or tickeys or no reason at all and who never did a day’s work in their wicked lives. Yet this one was tired. Isaiah didn’t even have to put it as a question. It was there before his eyes. A man tired in a way that he had thought beyond even the hardest worker in the city.

Isaiah knew the warnings. Ignore him. Look the other way. Go about your business as if you have never seen him. But now in his old age life had more than ever before become meaningful in terms of what he could recognize or remember, what he knew or what he had been through himself. So sitting under his tree he swallowed a mouthful of tea and then sighed and said aloud: ‘Too much for one man. Shall I throw it away?’

He looked at Tsotsi. ‘Somebody else might like some warm tea. What about you?’

The young man sat up and looked at Isaiah, who offered him the tin.

For a moment it looked as if he was going to refuse the tea. Then he got to his feet and came and sat down beside Isaiah. He took the tin with a murmur of thanks and drank. From time to time he looked up and examined the church, seemed to think for a few seconds and then
drink again.