The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online

out of his tent and watch their ink-dark shapes pass before him, and how he’d follow in their giant footsteps, walking with them to the secret place where he would take one last look at the veld stars before lying down with them. To end. To disintegrate and subside into the country which had for so long been calling out for his body, which had for so long craved this union. Dust to dust, bone to stone, his blood seeping into the soil.
    As he stood there, waiting, the bishop absent-mindedly flexed his right hand, and rubbed it with his left where it still ached and blushed across the knuckles. A punch. An upper cut, yesterday, clean between the man’s arms, cracking on his chin. A hard chin, he thought now, as he opened and closed his hand and felt the soreness of the bone under the skin. He hadn’t wanted to hit the man, but as was so often the case in this country, it happened almost naturally, violence evolving like a strange flower out of the barest of provocations. Like yesterday. A hot, cramped train shunting along, stopping for long moments of time under the midday heat. Flies in the carriage, the boring veld outside. And inside, a furnace, where he sat, sharing his hard seat with a bunch of railway workers, Irish navvies, work-dirtied hands and week-old stubble darkening their faces. The close space was filled with their smell, stale and new sweat pungent on their clothes. They were eating and drinking, swigging beer from the large brown bottles favoured by the working men. He didn’t mind this, the drinking. That was something else that happened here, and he understood why it did. But their language, he minded. It was coarse and blasphemous. The Bishop liked language, he liked words, and to hear them denied was for him like watching someone take a sledgehammer to a beautiful gold watch. Sitting there, his eyes glancing off the dull yellow and browns of the view, it got to him, the insult on his ear. So he asked them to stop. Once politely, then, when they did not, a second time more forcefully, hoping his clerical dress might at least induce a sense of propriety in them. It did not, and the loudest of them let him know this. A fat man, his shirt open to his navel, revealing whorls of matted hair across his chest and overblown stomach. He leaned over to the Bishop and spoke close to his face.
    ‘If yooze weren’t a fecking sky-pilot I’d knock you down for that. We’ll talk haws we want, won’we, lads?’
    The smell of the beer, sweet on his tongue, his friends’ drunken agreement. The Bishop felt his anger rise and the adrenalin rush in his body, making his hands sweat and his balls tingle. He stood up, to the inevitable response.
    ‘Jeezez Christ, e’s a bloody dwarf!’
    ‘Are yooze still sitting there, Father?’
    ‘Feck me if it isn’t a pigmy we’ve got here!’
    The man stood up opposite him, again to the laughter of his mates. He looked down on the Bishop, enjoying the height difference. The Bishop, however, held his stare while he removed his collar and drill apron, throwing them on the seat behind him. His heart beat fast, pumping his anger around his body, but his mind was calm. Still.
    ‘There lies Bishop William Gaul of Mashonaland. Here stands’—more laughter—‘Billy Gaul.’
    The veld rubbing by outside, the sun, brash through the open window.
    ‘Now you can knock me down.’
    An awkward pause, in which the man put down his beer bottle on the bench behind him, then turned slowly to the others, who were all looking at him, quiet with expectation. He met their gaze, then a smile opened across his tobacco-stained teeth. He laughed, and they responded. That laughter pulled at the Bishop’s nerves, tugged them tight, and it was as the man was turning back to him, still smiling, as he was raising his hands, clenched, that he hit him. Clean on the chin. And he went down. With the weight of a shot horse, he went down, and with him went the Bishop’s heart, sinking at the sight of this