Tommo & Hawk by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online

me.

    'Mama, please, I beg you,' I try once more. 'Let me tell Tommo about Ikey's money. Perhaps he'll stay, if I tell him about the threat you face from Hannah and David. Perhaps that will be the difference to make him stay on.'

    'No!' Mary shouts. 'No! No!' She bangs her fists hard against the kitchen wall, then turns to me again. 'You'll not dare tell him about the money!'

    I can barely move my hands to talk for the pain in my chest. 'Then I must go with him, Mama,' I sign to her. 'I can't let him be parted from me again!'

    Something snaps inside of her. I can see it, a dark thing that bursts out of her. I've seen Mary angry, her temper is well known, but I've never seen her like this. Her whole body begins to tremble. There is fire in her green eyes. Suddenly she charges at me, pushing me in the belly. She's screaming and hammering her fists against my chest. 'Go! Go! Go to hell, the both of you!'

    These are words I've never heard from her and they break my heart. 'Mama, please?' I clasp her wrists. 'Mama! Mama!'

    She pulls away, but I hold onto her wrists and she spits in my face. 'Lemme go, you black bastard!'

    So I let go of her and cover my face, weeping. She's beating against me again. 'And don't you call me Mama! You both come from a whore's cunt, a nigger and a drunken runt, you ain't no part of me! You ain't no sons of Mary Abacus!'

    I hold out my hands to her, pleading, sobbing.

    Mary pulls back suddenly and grabs at the medal hanging from its chain around her neck and holds it in her fist in front of her furious face. 'I been on me own before! It ain't nothin' new!' Her skin is ashen and her voice grown cold. She is breathing hard, talking in short bursts, hissing out the words, her chest heaving. 'You hear me, Hawk! If you go with your brother the two of you will not be back! Not never again! Not to this house. You'll not get what's mine. I swear it!' She pauses a moment and shakes the fist holding the Waterloo medal. 'What's swore on this can't be took back, you hear me? Now fuck orf! Get out o' my 'ouse, pack your bag and get out! I don't want to see neither of you never again!'

    I am weeping again, though it is not for Tommo and me that I cry, but for our mama. I know on the morrow or the day after, Mary will beg our forgiveness. She loves us with all her heart and mind and soul. But, like Tommo, what's happened in her life can't be banished despite what she's always said. All her own hurt comes flooding back when she's backed into a corner, and she knows only how to snarl and claw her way out to safety or perdition. She's the small brat who's never been loved. She's on her own and, to her own mind, when she's crossed, all she's got is herself to depend on.

    In her heart of hearts I know Mary's lost hope in Tommo and doesn't think he'll ever come good. But she won't come out and say it, she can't say it of her own son. If she does, she'll be admitting she loves me more than him, when before we were taken it was always slightly the other way. When we were brats, Tommo always made Mary laugh, he was just about the only one who could. Mary has always blamed herself for not finding him, not rescuing him as she did me.

    And now he's come back, she's once again lost what she wants most to love. To realise Tommo doesn't want her, has no place for her in his life, must be more than she can bear. And so she fights and orders us away.

    She has made me choose between her and Tommo. Either I go with Tommo, for he will not stay here with me, or I lose him forever, and that I cannot do.

    I rise slowly from the chair and without signalling another word to our beloved mama, I leave the kitchen, not sure if I shall ever return but knowing that I will ever love her.

     

Chapter Three

    TOMMO

     

    The Pacific Ocean

    November 1856

     

    We's been at sea for three and a half months, sailin' North on the Yankee whaling ship, Nankin Maiden, what be out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The master is Captain