July's People (9 page)
He shuddered in affront and temptation; she saw the convulsion in his neck and understood he would never forgive her the moment. Her victory burned in her as a flame blackens within a hollow tree.
A servant replied uninterestedly to a dutiful enquiry on the part of the good madam who knows better than to expose herself to an answer from the real facts of his life: —I think Ellen she’s go home to her auntie there in Botswana. Small small village. Like my home. Is quiet there for black people.—
He put the keys in his pocket and walked away. His head moved from side to side like a foreman’s inspecting his work-shop or a farmer’s noting work to be done on the lands. He yelled out an instruction to a woman, here, questioned a man mending a bicycle tyre, there, hallooed across the valley to the young man approaching who was his driving instructor, and who was almost always with him, now, in a city youth’s jeans, silent as a bodyguard, with a string of beads resting girlishly round the base of his slender neck.
The white man had watched the wart-hog family shifting through the grasses, appearing as the aerials of raised tails, then cropping nearer and nearer each afternoon as they fed, the adults’ coarse hairy backs gleaming with glistens of mud from the wallow. It was a sight for tourists in a game reserve; drink in hand, legs crossed at the picture window of an air-conditioned bungalow.
There were five young, two grown females and the big male with his cow-catcher tusks on a snout that was, in fact, shaped rather like an old steam railway-engine. The blacks had no guns and feared the tusks; the pigs concentrated on feeding and showed no more than the usual deep, general distrust of beasts for humans, following whatever it was, plant or grass, that attracted, nearer and nearer to the huts, and then, at the lift of a head (one of the sows or the boar) running up the pennant of tail and turning about to trot off swiftly. Their heavy bodies bounded like corseted women. At that, the tourists laugh; the ugliness clowns the dignity, the dainty trot the overweight—these are ‘adorable’ creatures.
Bam pulled the gun out of the rotten thatch and appeared with it before July’s villagers. He did not know everyone knew he had the gun; that the children who made free of every hut as the cockroaches, knew everything and chattered all. He walked among them harmlessly; look, he and his gun were theirs. Some of the women smiled, most ignored him. There was a trail of children led by his own son Victor, beating sticks and boasting. July had always kept superstitiously clear of shot-guns; unpacking the hunting gear in the back-yard after his employer returned from a trip, he would put the gun-cases straight into the hands of Bam with the slow, gingerly movements of finger-tips singed by fear. All to the good, that way he didn’t throw them about and damage them. But his friend wearing a necklace showed the interest that claims some technical knowledge. He wanted to hold the gun; Bam showed him how to aim at a moving target and explained the loading mechanism.—Have you ever fired a shot?—
The young man shook his head and others laughed at white ignorance. —I read about it.—In the present tense. So he could speak a little English, the ex-milkman. Whether he read gangster comics or had read some crude clandestine sheet on handling firearms …? Such sheets had been circulating in the most unexpected, remote areas of the country over the past ten years—at every political trial of blacks the State produced them in evidence of subversion. But with the sweetness and freedom that came from powerlessness (for the time being, until they got out of here) Bam was almost flippant. —I’ll let you try sometime. What’s your name?—
—Daniel.—He pointed towards himself the gun that was back in Bam’s hands until the barrels were looking him right in the eyes, two blue-steel tunnels with an immaculate burnish, a precision of echoing roundness spinning away with the light that whirled along them—something more perfect than any object in the settlement or that he had ever seen, anywhere. He concentrated a long moment, imposing respect against frivolous interruption. Then he released himself with a small sound, inconclusive, disbelieving. Perhaps he didn’t credit death could be so clean; thought he had looked it back in the eye; perhaps he was too young to believe it existed.
Bam waited hidden near the hog wallow. He had with him one youngster of about fourteen he had appointed. He had had to cast about in his mind for something to threaten or promise that would keep Victor behind at the settlement—his kind did not strike their children and it was difficult to deprive the child of some treat or privilege here, in penalty for disobedience, as so easily could be done at home. —I promise you I’ll let you have the skin. We’ll get one of July’s relations to teach us how to preserve the skin.—
—And if you don’t get anything?—The boy yelled after him. —What’ll you give me if you don’t get anything?—
The father did not look up. Pushing through tongues of wet grasses with his gun, with a youth metamorphosed into the quickness and hesitancy of a buck, beside him—half in the familiar experience of his weekend pleasures from back there, half in the jarring alertness of these days broken from the string of his life’s continuity and range,
minute to minute
, his legs taking him where a patrol or roving band might come upon him, the shots he was going to fire risking to give away the presence of a whole family of whites, hidden in those huts—disjointed by these contrasting perceptions of habit and strangeness, he had a foretaste of the cold resentment that he would feel towards his son sometime when he was a man; a presentiment of the expulsion from a paradise, not of childhood but of parenthood.
He waited in the reeds with the young black face frowning in wretched endurance of the mosquitoes. The wart-hogs came and he fired at the nearest piglet when they were in the position from which they would have the least chance of getting away. A rifle, not a shot-gun, was the weapon for these beasts; all he could do was use buckshot and hope it would be heavy enough to penetrate their hide. All the old games, the titillation with killing-and-not-killing, the honour of shooting only on the wing, the pretence of hide-and-seek invented to make killing a pleasure, were in another kind of childhood he had been living in to the age of forty, back there. The first piglet dropped and he got another, seconds slow to disappear after the adults into the bush. The boy who had been a buck became a predator, leaping onto the first piglet; then a hunter, tying its legs together with one of the bits of string, used over and over, that were treasured in every hut. The animal was quite still, already, dying fast with the settling of sight in its eyes on some point that wasn’t there. The other piglet was hit in the body and lying kicking in a tantrum of pain; or thought its waving legs were carrying it after the big safe bodies of the adults. The black boy, with the first beast neatly trussed to his hand, squatted to wait for the other to die. Bam waved him aside and shot it through the head. Its young bones were so light that the snout smashed. It was horrible, the bloodied pig-face weeping blood and trailing blood-snot; the clean death from the chromed barrels that smelled aseptically of gun-oil. Game-birds (his usual prey) had no faces, really; thin aesthete’s bony structure with its bloodless beak and no flesh, a scrap of horny skin, wrinkled paper eyelids—a guinea-fowl head doesn’t look much different, dead, from alive. The shattered pig-face hung to the ground, dripping a trail all the way back to the huts, where his function as a provider of meat settled upon him as a status.
He was aware she might remark upon or sympathize with the necessity. He put up an off-hand taciturnity against this. He understood, for the first time, that he was a killer. A butcher like any other in rubber boots among the slush of guts, urine and blood at the abattoir, although July and his kin would do the skinning and quartering. The acceptance was a kind of relief he didn’t want to communicate or discuss.
But Maureen stood by with her hands on her hips. Her calves and feet, below rolled-up jeans, were dirty as a hobo’s. —Give them the bigger one.—
He didn’t need advice on justice or the protocol of survival.
She murmured for his ear alone. —The small one will be more tender.—
He took only a side of the smaller pig, and the skin for Victor, neatly headless. A man whose oedematous flesh kept him immobile, standing shaped like a black snowman (he always wore a dirty muffler against a bubbling chest ailment) or propped on an old chair, an effigy of straw stuffed in old clothes, had come to life and chopped off the broken head. He looked around jealously and carried it away to hands that received it into the darkness of a doorway, his great soft thighs shuffling as the breasts of the women did while they pounded mealies.
Bam rigged up a spit. Lacking herbs, onion or pepper—only the salt Maureen massaged over the firm skin—the meat was a feast never tasted before. They and their children had not eaten wart-hog, and they had never before gone two weeks without meat. The incense of roasting flesh—there was not much fat, only the domestic swine runs to that—rose from every cooking-fire. There were dog-fights roused by the mere smell of it. The half-wild, half-craven cats clamoured incessantly on the periphery of Maureen’s preparations. She squatted, carefully basting the carcass with the juices it gave off into an old powdered-milk tin she held, a stick’s length away from her, among the flames. Sweat and smoke swam across her vision and now and then she staggered up for a respite, laughing at herself, while Bam took over.
They had not known that meat can be intoxicating. Eating animated them in the way they attributed to wine, among friends, around a table. Bam sang a comic song in Afrikaans for Royce. —Again! Again!—Gina wavered through a lullaby she had learnt from her companions, in their language. Victor became a raconteur, past, present and distance resolved in the best tradition of anecdote: —You know what we do at school? On Friday when the big boys go to cadets, and they’re not there to boss us around in the playground—
There were drunken, giggling accusations of boasting, lying; and swaggering denials. The children made the grown-ups laugh. Royce hummed and sucked on the pipe-stem of a rib-bone; was almost asleep. Carried off in a state of unprotesting confusion to be bedded-down, he mumbled with content. —There’s no school tomorrow, is there?—It was what he would ask, sometimes, on a Friday evening, when he was allowed to stay up late.
They had not made love since the vehicle had taken them away. Unthinkable, living and sleeping with the three children there in the hut. A place with a piece of sacking for a door. Lack of privacy killed desire; if there had been any to feel—but the preoccupation with daily survival, so strange to them, probably had crowded that out anyway. Tension between them took the form of the expectation of hearing a burst of martial music when they turned on the radio. It subdued into the awkward sense of disbelief, foreboding, and immediate salvation (lucky to be alive; even here) that came from the announcement of the battle for the city that was continuing, back there.
They were conscious of the smell of grease and meat clinging to their fingers. It was difficult to balance, in the space each kept to of the car seats they shared, without folding elbows and resting hands near one’s face. They made love, wrestling together with deep resonance coming to each through the other’s body, in the presence of their children breathing close round them and the nightly intimacy of cockroaches, crickets and mice feeling-out the darkness of the hut; of the sleeping settlement; of the bush.
In the morning he had a moment of hallucinatory horror when he saw the blood of the pig on his penis—then understood it was hers.
Good meat,
mhani?—
The old woman was at an age when people pretend not to enjoy anything, any more, as a constant reproach to those who are going to live on after them.
—When was the last time you had such good meat?—
She twitched away from a subject not worth her attention. —Meat is quickly gone. You eat it, there’s nothing again tomorrow. My house has to have a new roof, the rain comes in. And in the winter it’ll be cold. I was going to put on new grass …—
—You’ll put on your new grass.—
She made a face of calculatedly reasonable questioning, to her son.
—You’ll have your house, your new grass.—
—With them living in it.—His wife Martha was scouring with ashes an enamel pot that came packed in his luggage the leave-before-the-last. —Heyi,
mhani!—
—I’ll build you a new house. You see? You worry about this business—but I’ll build you a new one.—
—They will bring trouble. I don’t mind those people—what do they matter to me? But white people bring trouble.—The woman drew a husky song from the pot, rubbing away at it, not looking at him so that she would not attract his annoyance.
He drummed out what he was always having to repeat. —What trouble? From where?—
She knew she could not say to him as she had said before: trouble with the police, the government.
He half-laughed, half-grunted; made as if to leave the two women to their goading ignorance, then turned, glancing thoughts off them like stones skimming water. —If I say go, they must go. If I say they can stay … so they stay.—
His wife persisted, as her fingers did with the daily tasks—hesitating, picking over dried beans, working the paste of ash over the pot—putting together the past from the broken pieces brought before her by the yellow bakkie. Her voice took the tone of simple curiosity. —There in town, the white woman—did she say to you you must cook this or clean that—
—Nobody else can tell me. If I say—
She was shaking her head, down, to herself; it was as if he were not there. It was habitual to address him when he was not there, he had been gone so long, her conversations with him provided question and response out of her own broodings. Sometimes he disappeared completely; she was not aware of his existence, anywhere. It was then she dictated letters to him through someone who could write better than she could (although she could read his, written in their own language, she had not had much other need to write since her three years at school and the ball-point she kept for this purpose formed words that staggered across the ruled pad):
My dear husband, I think all the time of the days you were here and when you will come again.
Most of the women of child-bearing age had husbands who spent their lives in those cities the women had never seen. There was a set of conventions for talking about this. The man had written or had not written, the money had arrived or was late this month, he had changed his job, he was working in ‘another place’. Was there anyone, some other woman whose man had perhaps worked there, someone to whom the name of yet another town none of the women had ever seen, was familiar? It did not so much as occur to her that it could have been possible to talk to other women about what was asked in the conversations with her husband that never took place. Not even to her man’s mother, who was old and had that in her face which showed she would know the answers; she had had a man thirty years on the mines.