The Church Kombi Coughed Once on the Hill and Then Said Nothing

The Hill Outside Bethlehem

It happened on the rise just past the grain silos, on the road back from a funeral in Clarens. I had eleven people in the Kombi. Six of them were over seventy, three were girls from the youth choir still in their white blouses, and one was Oom Gerrit, who sat in the front seat because he always sat in the front seat and nobody in nineteen years had found the courage to suggest otherwise.

The engine coughed once. It was not a loud cough, more the polite sound a man makes before he says something you will not like. Then the temperature needle went into the red, the oil light came on like an accusation, and the whole vehicle simply stopped speaking. We rolled backwards a few metres before I got the handbrake up. Somebody in the back said "Here, Here" under their breath, which in our congregation can be either a prayer or a complaint, depending on the tone.

I have been the minister of a small church on the edge of Bethlehem for fourteen years. That Kombi had been with us for eleven of them. It was donated by a farming family who had moved to the Western Cape, and it carried our elderly members to services, our choir to competitions, and our sick to clinics in town. It was not just a vehicle. It was, in a way I had never said out loud, the thing that held my little parish together across distances that are short in kilometres and long when you are eighty and your knees have given up.

Standing on the Shoulder in a Black Suit

We waited on the shoulder for almost two hours. The girls sang to keep the old people cheerful, mostly hymns and then, when they thought I was not listening, a song from the radio that I pretended not to know. Mrs Mokoena shared a packet of Marie biscuits she seemed to have been carrying since the previous decade. Oom Gerrit told me, four separate times, that he had warned the church council about the oil.

He had. I had heard him, and I had not acted, because the council's account had four thousand rand in it and a roof that leaked over the vestry. I had decided, quietly and on my own, that the Kombi could hold on until after the harvest offering. That decision was now sitting on the side of the R712 with steam leaking out of its back end.

A farmer with a cattle truck eventually stopped. Between his bakkie and two trips by my wife in our own small car, we got everyone home. The Kombi was towed to a workshop in town, and three days later a young man in clean overalls told me, kindly, that the engine had seized. He quoted a figure for a reconditioned replacement that was more than our congregation gives in half a year.

The Sermon I Could Not Write

That Sunday I was supposed to preach on the loaves and the fishes. I had the notes ready. I stood in the pulpit, looked at the empty seats where the people who depended on that Kombi should have been, and found I could not say a single honest word about abundance.

So I did something I had never done in fourteen years. I told them the truth. I said the Kombi was dead, that I had been warned, that I had chosen the vestry roof instead, and that I did not know what to do. Then I sat down, which is not how sermons are supposed to end, and there was a silence long enough that I could hear the wind rattling the loose corrugated sheet I had been trying to save money on.

I have always believed a minister should carry the weight so the congregation does not have to. Pride dresses itself up as service very easily. I see that now.

Oom Danie and His Notebook

After the service a man named Danie Pretorius waited by the door until everyone else had gone. He is a quiet man, a widower, who sits at the back and leaves before the tea. I knew he had worked on trucks for the railways for most of his life, but I had never once thought to ask him for anything. I think, if I am honest, I had filed him away as someone the church looks after, not someone who looks after the church.

He took a small spiral notebook out of his jacket pocket. In it, in neat capital letters, he had already written the Kombi's engine code, which he had apparently gone to the workshop to read off the block himself on Friday afternoon. Below it he had written a list of places.

"Dominee," he said, "you do not need a new engine. You need the right old one."

He explained it to me as if I were a slow but promising apprentice. Vehicles like ours had been on South African roads for decades. Thousands of them had ended their lives in accidents or simple old age with perfectly good engines still inside them. Somewhere, he said, there was a donor that had been looked after by somebody, and our job was to find it.

The Day at the Yard

The following Tuesday we drove out together in his old Toyota, Danie with a flask of rooibos between his knees and me in jeans for the first time in what my wife says was years. On the way he scrolled with one thick finger through listings on his phone, reading out Engines for sale in a voice that was half commentary and half sermon. This one too high mileage. This one no history. This one, maybe.

I had never been inside a proper Scrap Yard before. I expected a mess. What I found was rows of vehicles stripped down with a kind of order to it, doors stacked against doors, seats piled in one place and bonnets in another, and men who moved through it with the confidence of people who know where everything is. Danie walked up and down the rows with his hands behind his back like a general reviewing troops. He crouched, he listened, he asked questions I did not understand about compression and oil and where a vehicle had come from. I stood beside him holding the flask and feeling more useful than I had in a month.

He was not looking for the cheapest option. He was looking for an honest one. I learned that day that buying used Engines is less about the engine and more about the questions you ask, and about bringing somebody who has spent forty years learning which answers to believe.

What It Cost and What It Gave

The engine Danie chose cost a fraction of the reconditioned quote. He fitted it himself over three Saturdays in the church yard, with two of the youth choir boys handing him spanners and learning more in those afternoons than any youth camp I ever organised. The women of the congregation brought food. Oom Gerrit brought advice, which nobody followed. Mrs Mokoena brought another packet of Marie biscuits, possibly the same one.

The first time the Kombi started again, the boys cheered so loudly that a neighbour came over the fence to see if something was wrong. Danie wiped his hands on a rag and did not say anything at all, but I saw him look at that engine the way I imagine he once looked at his own children.

The Lesson I Keep Relearning

The Kombi is still running. Danie now checks the oil every second Sunday after the service, and he stays for tea. He sits next to Oom Gerrit, and they argue about engines in a way that seems to make them both younger.

I think often about that silence after my unfinished sermon. I had spent fourteen years believing that my job was to have answers. It turned out that the answer had been sitting in the back pew all along, quietly writing engine codes in a spiral notebook, waiting for me to admit I needed it.

I preached on the loaves and fishes again a few months later. This time I could say it honestly. Abundance, I told them, is not always more. Sometimes it is the right old thing, found by the right person, who was there all along.