July's People

Chapter 19

If he hadn’t been with them watching the installation of the gumba-gumba they would have thought it was Victor. Quite possible he would boast that he was allowed to handle his father’s gun; would have somehow climbed up and taken it from its place in the roof.

The boxes of cartridges had gone, too.

Bam was just as he was when the car keys were lost back there. But his hands shook, actually shook — she saw it as she had often pretended not to know when someone was crying. There were so few places to search, in a hut, and where could the gun be, if it were not in its place and had not been moved by him? Who would move it?

He seemed suddenly unsure he might not have moved it himself. After coming back from the chief. She had always been asked to check whether her passport was really in her travel wallet, when they travelled together. She had done this with exaggerated precision, holding it up to him in her way between thumb and first finger, putting it back where it had been and she had been sure it had been, all the time.

She looked under the coverings they used as bedclothes and pitched their few crumpled clothes out of the suitcase.

He even took the knob-kerrie he had been given by an old man in exchange for fish and poked in the thatch that was piled up outside, lifted the bundles one by one and flung them aside. Victor and Royce rummaged, talking too much. — What if someone’s buried it? C’mon, let’s dig, Vic? Shall we dig? — When checked in one activity, they dashed to another. They forgot what they were supposed to be searching for; turning over ashes became a contest of kicking the grey powder at one another. Gina had run off to skip with Nyiko, who had an old dressing-gown cord for a rope.

— You’re quite sure you didn’t play with it? At any time?—

— No, daddy — man! I promise. — Victor was offended at being suspected of what he knew he might very well have done.

The younger one indemnified, innocent of everything, for all time: —We never. Cross my heart.—

— Because no one else knew it was there. — Their father’s look held. He breathed as if he had been running; even as they did when they were about to cry.

The boys stood waiting for whatever it was grownups might decide to do. Neither would dare risk telling their father everybody knew it was there, every chicken that scratched, every child whose eyes went round the interior of the hut, mhani Tsatsawani’s hut, where the white people stayed. — Gina knows. — Royce told tales, but the father didn’t understand the implication. And Victor, his hand out of sight where he stood close up beside his young brother, took the flap of the little boy’s skinny thigh and pinched it with steadily maintained pressure for a few seconds, enforcing a code of loyalty that extended even to their sister in time of real trouble.

— You c’n tell the police, dad.—

Bam looked behind, around him; sat down on the bed. He nodded a long time.

She saw that he wouldn’t answer the child; but he was back there: if he couldn’t pick up the phone and call the police whom he and she had despised for their brutality and thuggery in the life lived back there, he did not know what else to do.

He heaved himself up. Some surge of adrenalin summoned, sending him striding out, ducking his big head under the doorway. But he walked immediately into their gaze again. He lay down on his back, on that bed, the way he habitually did; and at once suddenly rolled over onto his face, as the father had never done before his sons.

They looked to their mother but her expression was closed to them. Even her body — so familiar in the jeans as worn as the covering of a shabby stuffed toy, the T-shirt stretched over the flat small breasts that were soft to lie against — they knew, as they had learnt when a dog or cat was going to repulse them, that to touch was forbidden them.

She looked down on this man who had nothing, now.

There was before these children something much worse than the sight of the women’s broad backsides, squatting.

The moon in the sky was a circle of gauze pasted up on the afternoon blue. Maureen Smales — the name, the authority that signed his pass every month — came back to the gumba-gumba gathering to look for July. For Mwawate. He was not there; they were used to her, they took no more notice of her than of the dogs and children who hung around the drinkers’ mysterious animation, quarrelsome happiness and resentful sadness.

She went to his hut — not his private quarters, but the home of his women. Martha was bathing the baby boy in a basin set on a box. Flashing tears of pure anger he appealed to the one — anyone — who had arrived to rescue him from soap and water. These black women were tranquil through their children’s tantrums; Martha did not seem to hear the screams and considering a moment, looking no higher than at the white woman’s feet, in servility, as if they had not walked and worked in the fields together, indicated she didn’t know where July was. Somewhere about. His mother sat under her skirts beside the hearth ashes. When she was not actively working she was very old and still; she leaned with a twig in her hand and blew a faint glow in the grey as if it were her own life she was keeping just alight.

There was a moment when Maureen could have got on her hunkers beside Martha and helped hold the baby’s head while its hair was washed.

Martha asked her nothing; July had to do what he was told by this woman when he worked in town, she claimed the right to know where he was, even here at his home.

She couldn’t tell Martha why she wanted July; it was not a matter of language, they had communicated before. She couldn’t tell Martha what she herself felt herself to be, what had happened to her. She saw Martha securely petrified, madonna drawing snuff into one nostril above a baby’s head, pietà with a machine-gunned son across her lap. Martha had laughed at veined white legs. At one time (the longings of Maureen Smales from back there) it seemed a beginning. Something might have come of it. But not much.

She left the women and their hearth and jogged down into the grass below the village. The habit of the pace came from spare-time attention given to many things, back there: your health, your sense of injustice done, your realization of living a life that was already over — these were the dutiful half-hour recognitions that did not affect normal daily abuse. When the Smales couple ran round the suburban blocks under the jacarandas they didn’t know what they were running from. She was following in reverse, as if with a finger on a map, the way the gumba-gumba man had come towards her. The grass shushed past her knees, her passage scything it folded back on either side. Orange-polka-dotted blackbeetles that weighed the stalks were transferred from their feeding-ground to her bare calves and her clothes. Rough seeds burred together the rolled-up legs of her jeans. The vegetation fingered and touched; there were minute ticks that waited a whole season for the passing of an animal or human host. That was the intimate nature of the inert bush dissolving distance.

She did not expect to find him at the river but it was where the invisible route traced by the red box was taking her. She had not gone often to the river except on very private errands, and then not to the place where the children swam, where it was forded. Even here, when there was nobody, there was little sign that there was ever anybody. The people had nothing superfluous with which to litter; the shallows sank into the depressions made in mud by their feet and mingled them with the kneading of cattle hooves. Muslin scraps of butterflies settled on turds. She could name the variety of thorn-tree—Dichrostachys cinserea, sekelbos — with its yellow tassels dangling from downy pink and mauve pompoms, both colours appearing on the same branch. Roberts’ bird book and standard works on indigenous trees and shrubs were the Smales’ accommodation of the wilderness to themselves when they used to visit places like this, camping out. At the end of the holiday you packed up and went back to town.

There was the stillness of unregarded trees and ceaseless water. On the huge pale trunks wild figs bristled like bunches of hat-pins. The earth was sour with fallen fruit; between the giant trees a tan fly-catcher swooped, landing to hover on the invisible branches of a great tree of air. Again, she had the feeling of not being there, that she had had while the man with the red box was climbing into her vision. The slight rise and fall of her breathing produced no ripple of her counter-existence in the heavy peace. The systole and diastole needed only to cease, and she would be ingested, disappeared in this state of being that needed no witnesses. She was unrecorded in any taxonomy but that of Maureen Hetherington on her points to applause in the Mine Recreation Hall.

She withdraw, every twig a trap sprung by her weight. She took the old way to him, joining the single-file path he and Daniel had made, tending the vehicle, from the village. Their club, their retreat, meeting-place … She and Bam had talked of converting the garage into a room where July could sit with his friends, putting an old sofa there, but both knew that since he would be the only servant in the suburb with such a privilege, there would be too many friends in and out the backyard, too much noise.

She found him there sitting on one of their homemade stools at the left side of the vehicle — probably because of the shade it had cast; the sun was low enough now for that to be unnecessary. Neither cleaning nor repairing the vehicle; but the gumba-gumba and the beer were not for him despite his show of participation. He was writing with an old short lead pencil in a note-book, calculating something as he used to keep his gambling accounts. The note-book was one of the desk-top promotions sent by building-supply firms to architects each Christmas. It was stained with red earth and the corners had curled with handling. He saw she recognized it. It seemed they were about to exchange some reminiscence.

— You’ve got to get that gun back.—

He screwed up his face irritably, jerked his chest: what was this?

— The gun’s gone. It was kept in the roof.—

She saw that he had not known. But he was not surprised. He sucked at his cheeks and closed the note-book with the pencil between the pages. — When someone’s take it?—

— I don’t know when. It wasn’t there any more when we came back from going to see them put up that thing for the music.—

He accused her. — How someone’s can take it?—

She flung back at him his uprightness, his moralizing — whatever the rigmarole of form he had always insisted on establishing between them. — Why not, July? Why not? Just walk into the hut when we’re not there and take it. Steal it.—

— Now-now?—

— Bam discovered it now. But it might not have been this afternoon. It could have been any time.—

— When he’s see it last time?—

— Doesn’t seem to know himself. But it was still there when we came back from the chief’s. We talked about it. I saw it.—

— You sure the gun it’s there before this afternoon? Because everybody he’s there at the music. You see everybody was there, hey? Nobody can come to the house that time.—

— How do I know if it was still there then? I told you. I know everyone was at the music.—

— Night-time. — He let the two of them visualize it. — Night-time, you all sleeping, you all in the house. Who can come.—

— It’s not Victor. — July knew that possibility as well as anyone. — You can forget about Victor.—

— No, no, Victor he’s so nice. Naughty boy sometime but so nice. And if he’s take, he’s show his friend, he’s put back, isn’t it. Not Victor. Well, everybody here so nice at the music today, everybody know that gun it’s your gun—

— Where’s Daniel?—

She was distracted by something misplaced. What would appear for her from beneath the vehicle, from the ruined huts, so often a silent presence while not yet noticed: now he surely would come forward to July’s call with his young man’s easy stroll.

— Daniel wasn’t there — Her voice alight; at the same time, some kind of fear and amazement came like a sack thrown dark over her head. — Where’s Daniel?—

— Daniel he’s not come any more. — A hand lifted, at large a moment, slid under the neck of the shirt. The gauze round of moon had become opaque and polished with the light of the vanished sun; it began gently to reflect, a mirror being adjusted. The shadow of the vehicle fell upon them and reached out in its blown-up detail, roof-rack and spare tyre, over the bright, watery lacings of sunset in grass and bushes. — One, two day now he’s going.—

— But you know where he is. He told you where he was going?—

He spoke of these young ones. — They not asking anyone, anyone. Not even the father.—

— But he told you, he discussed it with you, he must have talked to you. You and he are together all the time. You were like his father, weren’t you. You can’t say to me he didn’t tell you? — Two gnats she had swatted against her face stuck drowned in sweat on her cheek.

— Don’t tell me what Daniel he tell me. Me, I know if he’s say or he’s not say nothing. Is not my business, isn’t it?—

She sat down on the mud wall that was warmed to life all through the heat of the day and whose colour had risen, amber, blood-purple out of terra-cotta in the thick layer of last light suspended at a man’s height across the earth.

— You’ve got to get it back. — She knew those widened nostrils. Go, he willed, go up the hill to the hut; as he would to his wife.

He could smell her cold cat-smell she had when she sweated. The only way to get away from her was to walk off and leave her, give up to her this place that was his own, the place he had found to hide the yellow bakkie and keep it safe.

He stuffed the note-book into his shirt-pocket torn and neatly sewn back with unmatched thread by Ellen. — How I must get that gun? Where I’m going find it? You know where is it? You know? Then if you know why you yourself, your husband, you don’t fetch it?—

— The gun’s gone, Daniel’s gone. He handled it, he was allowed to fire a shot with it … Bam’s nonsense. He was at the chief’s listening to all that talk about guns. He fancied it for himself. Didn’t he? Thinks he’ll kill some meat. Or he’s got a customer for it. — Her lids blinked sharply at him. — Perhaps the chief. You must know where to look for him, he’s with you (a gesture towards the bakkie) every day.—

He was feeling up round his neck and over his chest under the shirt while she talked at him. The hand came out swiftly and stiff fingers tapped at the centre of his being, there on the plate with its little shining black cups of hollow where the breast-muscles joined the bone. — Me? I must know who is stealing your things? Same like always. You make too much trouble for me. Here in my home too. Daniel, the chief, my-mother-my-wife with the house. Trouble, trouble from you. I don’t want it any more. You see? — His hands flung out away from himself.

— You’ve got to get it back.—

— No no. No no. — Hysterically smiling, repeating. — I don’t know Daniel he’s stealing your gun. How I’m know? You, you say you know, but me I’m not see any gun, I’m not see Daniel, Daniel he’s go — well what I can do—

She was stampeded by a wild rush of need to destroy everything between them, she wanted to erase it beneath her heels as snails broke and slithered like the shell and slime of rotten eggs under her foot in the suburban garden. — You stole small things. Why? I wouldn’t tell you then but I tell you now. My scissors like a bird, my old mother’s knife-grinder.—

— Always you give me those thing!—

— Oh no, I gave you … but not those.—

— I don’t want your rubbish.—

— Why did you take rubbish? … I said nothing because I was ashamed to think you would do it.—

— You — He spread his knees and put an open hand on each. Suddenly he began to talk at her in his own language, his face flickering powerfully. The heavy cadences surrounded her; the earth was fading and a thin, far radiance from the moon was faintly pinkening parachute-silk hazes stretched over the sky. She understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself — to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people. He spoke in English what belonged in English: —Daniel he’s go with those ones like in town. He’s join. — The verb, unqualified, did for every kind of commitment: to a burial society, a hire purchase agreement, their thumbprints put to a labour contract for the mines or sugar plantations — I don’t know — maybe he’s need the gun for that. — He leaned back, done with her.

— I know. — Daniel’s raised first in greeting had seemed a matter of being fashionable, for the young milkman returned to his backward village from town, just as dropping to the knees before the chief was surely no more than a rural convention for him and July. — I know. — ‘Cubas’: it was he who had supplied the identification when the chief could not name the foreigners he feared. — So he’s gone to fight. Little bastard. He only took what he had a right to.—

July might not have understood the claim granted, or was not going to be obliged to speak. His familiar head, newly shaved by a villager who barbered under a tree, his broad soft mouth under the moustache, his eyes white against the dark of the face blurred by the dimness, now, of all things at the earth’s level under the high light of the sky, faced her. Together in this place of ruin that was the habitation of no living being, only a piece of machinery, their words sank into the broken clay walls like spilt blood. Would be buried here. The skin of her body was creeping with an ecstatic fever of relief, splendid and despicable to her. She told him the truth, which is always disloyal. — You’ll profit by the others’ fighting. Steal a bakkie. You want that, now. You don’t know what might have happened to Ellen. She washed your clothes and slept with you. You want the bakkie, to drive around in like a gangster, imagining yourself a big man, important, until you don’t have any money for petrol, there isn’t any petrol to buy, and it’ll lie there, July, under the trees, in this place among the old huts, and it’ll fall to pieces while the children play in it. Useless. Another wreck like all the others. Another bit of rubbish.—

The incredible tenderness of the evening surrounded them as if mistaking them for lovers. She lurched over and posed herself, a grotesque, against the vehicle’s hood, her shrunken jeans poked at the knees, sweat-coarsened forehead touched by the moonlight, neglected hair standing out wispy and rough. The death’s harpy image she made of herself meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls. She laughed and slapped the mudguard vulgarly, as he had done to frighten a beast out of the way. The sharp sound flew back to them from the settlement. A little homely fire, the first of those for the evening meal, began to show over there as a match flame grows cupped in a palm.

Bam was giving the children food. He dug off lumps of mealie-meal he had cooked and they took it with their fingers. They were chattering and said nothing to her when she appeared, as if they thought she had been there all the time. He did not ask her where she had been; he ate with the children, using the tin spoon to which tatters of pap clung. She ate nothing and went into the dark hut, finding the water-bottle by feel. In there she drank the whole bottle in a series of sucking gulps broken by long pauses, like an alcoholic who hides away to indulge secret addiction. And like the family of the addict that does not know how to deal with her, they pretended not to know, or did not know.

The gumba-gumba had started up again with one of the same four or five records. Baby, baby come duze — duze — duze in close harmony, broken by the jet of a high-voiced refrain playing above it, went out into the bush over the huts and under the haze. There were no stars. Baby, baby, du-ze, du-ze … If there were a roving band of freedom fighters out there, they would be able to hear it, far away, the old music of Soweto, Daveyton, Tembisa, Marabastad, the town places they had burst and spread from.

When he saw her getting into what was her bed, he made the approach of remarking that her feet were awfully dirty. She got up and from July’s oil-drum kept full of river water washed them with soap supplied by July. She spoke from beyond the light of the paraffin lamp. — Was it like this for him? — It was never necessary to say ‘July’; he was there in their minds, there was no one else.

She was understood: but that would be too easy an equation. A hand scratched the back fringe of blond hair, felt carefully where there was none.

She matched the remembered total dependency with this one. — Used to come to ask for everything. An aspirin. Can I use the telephone. Nothing in that house was his.—

— Well … he wasn’t kept short of anything. Anything we had to give.—

— I wonder what would have become of him.—

The paraffin lamp was still burning but the blue eyes were closed. — Would have got old with us and been pensioned off.—

Daniel has the gun. Taken it for himself.

Her lips moved with the words formed but not spoken. She looked a long time at the closed eyelids.