Like so many others in search of the blinding truth behind a current news story, I had no success in making contact with anyone in Hertzogville who could give me more than vague details about the lengthy pre-burial afterlife of Oom Paul Meintjes. A few local residents were willing to talk about their feelings of shock and outrage at the incalculable harm the story has brought upon the Hertzogville Christian community. But getting to talk to anyone from Oom Paul’s close family was just not possible. In the face of all the publicity, as Edwin Naidu observed in the Sunday Independent, even the prophet who predicted the resurrection had gone to ground.
Which, of course, is more than anyone’s allowed Oom Paul to do. After dying of a stroke about eight weeks ago, Oom Paul was kept on ice at the local funeral parlour. Even without room service, the first 50 days had racked up a R12 000 ”storage” account. It seems the undertaker was afraid that if the prophet was right and that Oom Paul actually did suddenly come back to life, discard the large plastic bag he was being kept in and wander off into the Hertzogville central business district, it wouldn’t look good for business. Who wants to be the first undertaker in the world with a bilking corpse?
Getting to talk to the prophet who caused all the hoo-ha was utterly out of the question. For some weeks now, poor David Francis has been barricaded in his house, refusing to see anyone. It was he who assured the Meintjes family and friends that if they waited long enough and believed strongly enough, Oom Paul would rise from the dead. Francis even gave a date for this: July 29. But when that came and went without any signs of reanimation from Oom Paul, he said the family should just go on waiting. This they were doing. During the last week or so they’ve had Oom Paul back at home where he’d been dispatched in an economy class red coffin.
Unable to get any new information on the matter, I went to get some opinion from a renowned Boland oracle, Heraldus Bleskop, who, when he’s not envisioning and soothsaying, runs a small electrical appliances repair shop near Bot River. I began by asking him what he thought had gone wrong in Hertzogville.
”Just about everything,” he replied. ”When rank amateurs start getting involved in mantic and other dark arts this is typical of what can happen. When it is revealed to a professional seer that someone is about to rise from the dead, the very first thing he does is tell everyone else to keep quiet about it.”
”So asking the press to assist in calling Oom Paul back from the dead was a bad idea?”
”Not always. You’d be amazed how much a good Sunday Times story can help in the business of resurrection. But with this one it wasn’t a good idea. It’s too much like what happened on that farm in the Schweizer-Reneke district back in the Seventies. The one where that well-known Dopper prophet, Cyril Jungelson, had some amazing visions on how his sister-in-law was going to come back soon after she died of dropsy. That she would come back was a certainty. Five dead people in that family had come back. One of them did it three times. It was the local dominee who spilt the beans. When he’d done the same funeral service for the same 93- year-old widow three times over he got suspicious and wrote to the general synod. One of them tipped off a nephew in Huisgenoot and before you could say hallelujah there was a moer of a scandal.”
”When the sister-in-law died, did she come back?”
”No, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. They did everything possible. They laid her out on the farmhouse kitchen table, dressed her in a long pink candlewick dressing gown, put flowers around her head and all. They lit candles, sang hymns, prayed right round the clock. When that didn’t work they asked the local sangoma for his input. He sacrificed a goat right there in the kitchen, did some dancing and then made a fire and burned some secret herbs and animal things. He sprinkled the ashes on the body. Nothing.”
”She never rose but she certainly got high,” I remarked wittily.
”Not in the way they expected. It was much too warm in that kitchen. She not only rose, but on the 17th day she exploded. There was a terrible fuss from the agricultural health inspector and it even got a mention in the House of Assembly. It took years for the damage to die down.”
”What do you think they should do with Oom Paul now?” I asked.
”I see in the paper the police already came and arrested the body and that’s where things now stand.” He shrugged and plugged in a lifeless toaster he’d been working on. It crackled, emitted a thread of smoke and began to glow.
”See, it’s working again. Those Hertzogville people should have come to one of us professionals,” he said.