The Farmer Paid Me in Gold for a Sunday Callout in 1992

The Phone Call on a Sunday

In March 1992 I was twenty-six and working for a tractor dealership outside Bethlehem in the Free State. I had my own bakkie, a toolbox I was still paying off, and a reputation, which I was quite proud of, as the young one who would come out on a weekend if you asked nicely.

Oom Hennie Pretorius did not ask nicely. He phoned the owner's house at seven on a Sunday morning and shouted that his tractor had died in the middle of his maize, his harvest crew was standing around, and rain was coming. The owner phoned me. I was in church clothes. I changed in the bakkie on the side of the road.

The Problem in the Mud

The tractor was an old Fiat, older than me, sitting in a wet corner of the land with its nose pointing down a slope. The fuel lift pump had failed, and when I got it apart I found the filter so full of sludge it looked like it had been packed with porridge. Oom Hennie stood over me the whole time with his arms folded, telling me how his father would have fixed it with wire.

It took me about four hours. I had to drive back to the dealership for a part, which meant getting the owner out of his Sunday lunch to unlock the store. When the engine finally caught, it coughed black smoke over the whole crew and they cheered like it was a rugby try. Oom Hennie did not cheer. He just nodded once and climbed up into the seat.

The Coin

When I was packing my tools, he came over and pressed something into my hand. It was heavy and cold and wrapped in a piece of brown paper torn from a feed bag.

"Vir jou Sondag," he said. For your Sunday.

I unwrapped it in the bakkie. It was a Krugerrand. A full ounce, with the springbok on one side and Paul Kruger's beard on the other. I had never held one. I sat there in the cab with the rain starting on the windscreen and turned it over and over like a boy with a marble.

I found out later that Oom Hennie paid a lot of people in strange ways. Sheep, firewood, a crate of peaches. Gold, apparently, was what you got if you missed church for him.

Thirty-Three Years in a Film Canister

I did not know what to do with it, so I did nothing. I put it in an old black plastic film canister from my mother's camera, and I put the canister in the bottom drawer of my toolbox, under the feeler gauges, where nobody would ever look.

It stayed there through two dealerships, a move to Harrismith, marriage, three children, a divorce, a second marriage, and every toolbox I ever owned, because each time I moved my tools the canister moved with them. I opened it maybe once every few years, usually after a bad week, just to hold it. It reminded me of being twenty-six and changing out of my church clothes on the side of the road. It reminded me I used to be the one who came out on a Sunday.

I never once looked up what it was worth. I think part of me did not want to know, because then it would stop being Oom Hennie's coin and start being a number.

Mpho Picks Up a Spanner

My youngest, Mpho, was the child who was always in the workshop. Her brothers wanted nothing to do with diesel and grease. She was handing me sockets before she could read the sizes on them. At fourteen she could bleed a fuel system. At sixteen she rebuilt the starter motor on my wife's car, and did it better than I would have, which I told her only after she had gone to bed.

When she finished school she went into an apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic. Three and a half years. I watched her come home with burned forearms and cut knuckles and the same tired, satisfied face I must have had at her age. Some of the older men at her workshop were not kind to her at first. She did not complain to me about it. She just got better than them.

Last year she passed her trade test. She phoned me from the car park of the test centre and could not speak for the first few seconds.

The Toolbox Problem

Anyone who has been in this trade knows that a qualified mechanic is only as good as their tools, and good tools are expensive. Mpho had been using the workshop's tools and a small set she had collected over the years, half of them old ones of mine. She was about to start a new job at a mining contractor near Witbank, and she would need her own proper kit. Roller cabinet, socket sets, torque wrenches, diagnostic tools. The quote she showed me made me sit down.

I did not have that money spare. We had just paid for her brother's wedding. I lay awake for a few nights doing sums in my head, and somewhere around two in the morning I thought about the film canister.

Finally Looking It Up

I am not a financial man. My idea of investing is buying a good set of spanners. So the next morning I sat at the kitchen table with my reading glasses and my wife's laptop and searched for the Krugerrand price, half expecting it to be worth about what Oom Hennie would have paid for a few sheep in 1992.

I had to read the number three times. My wife came and looked over my shoulder and said a word I will not write here.

I learned a lot that week. I learned the price moves every day with the gold price and the rand. I learned that condition matters, and that you should know roughly what yours is worth before you walk into anywhere. I learned that there are a lot of people who would be very happy to buy a coin from an old mechanic who does not know what he has, which is a good reason to read up first.

The Hardest Part

The truth is, the selling was not the hard part. The hard part was the evening before. I took the canister out of the bottom drawer, under the feeler gauges, and I sat in the workshop with it for a long time.

I thought about Oom Hennie, who died in 2008. I thought about the smoke over his maize crew. I thought about what he would say if he knew his Sunday coin had become a toolbox for a girl. I think he would have folded his arms and told me his father would have used wire. Then I think he would have nodded once.

I spent an evening reading about how to Sell Krugerrands properly, what paperwork I needed, and what questions to ask. Then I went and did it, and I was in and out in less time than it took me to fix that fuel pump.

The Red Cabinet

We bought Mpho's roller cabinet together on a Saturday. Red, with seven drawers. She chose every socket set herself, holding them up to the light the way I used to, checking the finish, arguing with the salesman about torque ranges. I stood back and let her.

When we got home I gave her one more thing. An old black film canister, empty now, with a strip of masking tape on the lid where I had written in marker: VIR JOU SONDAG.

She put it in the bottom drawer, under the feeler gauges. She did not ask why. She already knew.