The Man Who Sets Up the Chairs

How it started with a borrowed gazebo

I never planned to be the chair man. In our part of the North West, near Rustenburg, you become the thing the town needs before you ever decide to be it. It began the Saturday my cousin got married and the company he booked simply did not arrive. No tent, no tables, nothing. Just a groom in a shiny grey suit standing in a dusty yard, sweating through the jacket, and forty aunties looking at him like it was his fault the sky was open.

I had one gazebo at the time. One. A white three by three that I used for selling cold drinks at soccer on Sundays. I drove home, threw it in the back of my old Nissan bakkie, and put it up over the food table so at least the salads would not cook in the sun. That was the whole contribution. But my auntie held my face in both her hands afterward and said, you saved us, my boy. And something in me went, hmm. There is a need here.

The next Monday I counted my money. It was not much. But it was enough to start being useful.

Buying the first real load

The first big purchase felt like jumping off a roof. I had been saving in a Postbank account and adding the little bits I made from the cold drinks, and I decided I would rather own the stock than keep watching people down here get let down by companies from the city who cancel at the last minute.

I bought a proper stretch tent secondhand from a man in Brits who was retiring, two trestle tables to start, and then the chairs. The chairs were the real decision. I sat one night at my kitchen table with my phone, comparing prices, and I found a supplier listing plastic chairs for sale that would not eat my whole budget in one bite. I started with fifty. Fifty white moulded chairs, stacked so high on the bakkie that my neighbour Thabo laughed and said I looked like I was moving a church.

That first fifty taught me everything. How they stack. How the bottom ones scratch if you drag instead of lift. How rain gets into the seat wells and you must tip each one before you load or you carry an extra litre of water home in every chair.

The weight of it

People think this is an easy business. You just put out chairs, they say. Come and carry with me one Saturday and then tell me it is easy.

A single stack of ten chairs is not heavy. But you are not carrying one stack. You are carrying that stack across a field, over a storm drain, up three steps into a community hall, and then you turn around and do it again nineteen more times. By the fourth trip your forearms are shaking and the plastic edges have left red lines across your palms. My back went once, badly, in the winter of my second year. I offloaded a full tent alone in the cold because my helper did not pitch up, and the next morning I could not tie my own shoes. My wife had to do it, kneeling in front of me while I held the door frame. She did not say I told you so, but her face said it for both of us.

Now I stretch first. I warm up like the soccer boys do. I bend at the knees. I hired two youngsters from down the road, Sipho and a quiet boy we all just call Bafana, and I pay them fairly and on time because I know exactly what their shoulders are doing out there.

The wedding I will not forget

There was a wedding last spring that lives in me. A young couple, both teachers, not much money between them, doing the whole thing in the bride's mother's yard. The mother wanted it to look like the weddings in the magazines. She showed me a picture on her cracked phone screen of a hall full of those elegant clear ghost chairs, the see through ones, and she asked me softly if I had anything like that.

I did not, not then. But I had been eyeing exactly that. A few weeks before I had put down a deposit on a set of Tiffany chairs, the pretty ones with the slim frames that people book for the fancy events, and they had just arrived at my yard still wrapped. I told her yes. I told her I had them. Then I drove home and unwrapped forty of them at ten at night, checking each one under the security light, wiping them down, praying none were cracked.

The morning of that wedding the light came in gold and low. We set the chairs in two curved rows facing an arch Sipho had built from bluegum branches and white cloth. When the bride came out and saw it, she put her hand over her mouth and just stood. Her mother cried. I stood at the back near the bakkie, dusty, my shirt already stuck to me, and I felt a kind of full feeling in the chest that money does not give you. I made those rows. Those were my chairs holding up her whole family while they watched her say yes.

The other side of the work

It is not all weddings. A hire business in a small town means you serve the funerals too, and there are more of those than anyone wants to count.

Funerals are a different kind of setup. Quiet. You arrive early, before the family is awake, and you work without talking much. You put the tent over the yard where the tears will happen and you set the chairs in long straight rows and you make sure the front row, where the widow will sit, has the steadiest ones. There is no arch, no gold light, no photographer. Just a plastic chair standing ready to hold someone on the worst day they will ever have. I have learned to wipe those ones down twice. It matters, even if nobody sees. You do not want a grieving woman to sit and feel a wet seat.

I have set up for a grandmother on Saturday and her granddaughter's twenty first on the same lawn the very next weekend, same chairs, different tears. That is the strange rhythm of it. The same white frames carry joy and grief through the same gate, and I carry them.

What I am actually building

My yard now has a proper storeroom. Stacks to the roof. A second bakkie, newer, a white Isuzu with the tailgate that does not fight me anymore. I keep a little notebook of every booking because I am old fashioned like that, and when I page back through it I can see the town's whole life in my own handwriting. Weddings, birthdays, church anniversaries, umgidi ceremonies, funerals, a matric farewell, a thanksgiving for a boy who came home safe from the mines.

Sometimes late in the day, when the last stack is loaded and the light is going flat and orange over the koppies, I sit on the tailgate with a cold drink and just look at the empty field where a hundred people were laughing an hour ago. Every chair I own was once a decision I was scared to make, a single plastic chair I was not sure I could afford, stacked now into a business that feeds my family and puts my daughter through school.

I am the man who sets up the chairs. I carry the town on my back, one folded frame at a time, and I would not trade the ache in my shoulders for any easier work in the world.