July's People by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

other day.—
    There was nothing to be remarked or reproached, in that, between them. He had been in charge on the journey, they were on his ground, here. He knew what was best. —It wasn’t only his stuff. He says we ought to keep the vehicle locked because of the tools, too.—July apparently knew his relatives; when the vehicle’s tools had been used to mend the old harrow, there were people who expected to borrow them but July didn’t trust that they would be returned.
    She knew only where to place her feet, precariously on the solid ground of footholds. She had steadied from the position where she almost had been knocked off balance. She sat on a car seat picking burrs from a child’s jersey and making them into a careful pile so no bare foot would be hurt, accidentally treading on one.
    When July was not about—only the two of them. He felt humbled, towards Maureen, but saw she did not share this—she was frightened into sulks?
    But she got up and gathered the burrs and went to throw them in the embers of their cooking-fire outside, making sure, with a strange precision, that they took the flame properly. She was someone handling her being like an electrical applicance she has discovered can fling one apart at a wrong touch. Not fear, but knowledge that the shock, the drop beneath the feet, happens to the self alone, and can be avoided only alone.
    He wanted to call the children into the hut but did not know how to explain the necessity he felt, or if she shared it. If she said ‘Why?’, what would he say? He had a gun; he had brought his twelve-bore shot-gun as she had remembered toilet paper. It was hidden thrust up into the thatch, there above their heads as they stood in this hut where there was no room to hide anything from one another. What place was there for a white man’s gun among these people who had taken them in without asking why they should expect to be sheltered, fed, hidden?
    If he took it out and killed, could that be a defence against what might come, once outside July’s protection? I am a boy with a pea-shooter; he wanted to say it aloud.
    The real little boys wandered back to the hut of their own accord. They were hungry. She went up to Bam and fished, without a word, for the knife with tin-opener attachment he kept in his pocket. He noticed she gave them the last of the pork sausages, coming from the tin like plugs of wet pink cork. They snatched and quarrelled over the sharing-out. Gina was called but paid no attention; finally she walked in with the old woman’s sciatic gait of black children who carry brothers and sisters almost as big as they are. She had a baby on her small back and wore an expression of importance. She sat down with her legs folded sideways under her and hitched at the dirty towel that tied the baby to her, knotted over her breastless rib-cage. She was offered a sausage; shook her head, dumb with dreamy responsibility or make-believe. No doubt his daughter was full of pap anyway. He and Maureen were both fascinated by her. Her eyes were crudely blue in the mask of a dirty face. Red earth engraved the joints and knuckle-lines of her little claws and toes and ash furred the invisible white fluff on her blond legs. Dirt didn’t show nearly so badly on black children.
    —The baby ought to go back to its mother, now.
    —She countered her mother’s careful reasonableness with some of her own. —Why?—
    —Because babies don’t like to be away from their mothers too long.—
    —He likes it.—
    —Where does he belong? Which hut?—
    —Gina, which hut?—
    —I don’t know.—
    Licking the dirt off their fingers along with the sausage grease, the boys watched the conflict with detached interest. They saw their parents closing in on one of their own kind: their father going with inescapable intention over to their sister. —Come, let’s take him home.—She swivelled, zigzagging elbows out of his reach where he wanted to make her rise. There were yells, raised