July's People Read Online Free Page B

other life, his other self, and provided for those who could not follow him there. Not even in dreams; not even now, when she had seen his white people.

B am could help July mend such farming tools—scarcely to be called equipment—as he and his villagers owned. The span of yokes and traces they shared, taking turns to plough, was kept in a special hut where no one lived. The heavy chains trailed across the floor. Hoes hung from the roof. There was the musty, nutty smell of stored grain in baskets. Someone had been there, picking over beans on one of the mats used as table-tops or bowls: Maureen saw the arrangement as broken beads set aside from good ones, choices made by someone momentarily absent—the dioramas of primitive civilizations in a natural history museum contrive to produce tableaux like that.
    Bam was determined to rig up a water-tank, the round, corrugated tin kind, that had somehow been lugged that far into the bush but never installed. July laughed, and gave it a kick (as Victor had the bath).
    —No, I mean it. If we can get hold of a bag of cement, we can make a foundation. I saw some old piping lying somewhere…? You could have quite a decent rain-water supply all through the rainy months. It’s a waste. The women won’t need to go to the river. It’ll be much better to drink than river water.—
    There was no bag of cement; but they worked together more or less as they did when Bam expected July to help him with the occasional building or repair jobs that had to be done to maintain a seven-roomed house and swimming-pool. Bam made do with stones for a foundation. He kept the radio near and at the hours when news bulletins were read she would appear from wherever she might be. They stood and listened together. There were other radios in the community, bellowing, chattering, twanging pop music, the sprightly patter of commercials in a black language; the news reader’s gardening-talk voice spoke English only to the white pair, only for them. They didn’t comment and each watched the other’s face. But whatever each hoped to find there, of a sudden new decision made, or dreaded to find, of new grounds for fear, did not appear. There was fierce fighting round Jan Smuts Airport; the city centre, under martial law, had been quiet last night, but mortar fire was heard and confused reports had been received of heavy fighting in the eastern and northern suburbs. The Red Cross appealed for blood. The gasworks had been attacked and the explosion had started a fire that spread to suburban houses; Bam’s eyebrows flew up and exposed his gaze—only across the valley, the freeway, from the house they had chosen to build in a quiet suburb. U.S. Congress was debating the organization of a United States government airlift for American nationals. It was not known from where it would operate; Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth airports were closed, and their ports bombed and blockaded. Maureen looked away where a young boy wasemptying a basket head-load of stones as July directed; she had been for trying to get to the coast.
    Lucky to be alive. Neither could expect the other to say what would come next; what to do next; not yet. He arranged the stones brought from some other attempt to build something that had fallen into ruin. That was how people lived, here, rearranging their meagre resources around the bases of nature, letting the walls of mud sink back to mud and then using that mud for new walls, in another clearing, among other convenient rocks. No one remembered where the water-tank came from. July said he would ask the old woman but never did, although she sat outside the women’s hut most of the day, on the ground, making brooms out of some special grasses the women collected. The water-tank was from back there, like the Smales and their children; the white man was the one to make a place for it here.
    Beyond the clearing—the settlement of huts, livestock kraals, and the stumped and burned-off patches