A Dove of the East Read Online Free PDF

to learn cattle. He put every penny, every quattie of what we had, into a small herd, and a prize black bull that came from Corpus Christi in October and was lowered from the freighter to the dock, hung from a bright yellow sling. When the yellow sash was dropped away and we could see the bull’s blackness and the rotations of green that were its eyes, my father was a proud man. The bull looked up and snorted, its eyes fixed on the mountain, and Pappy said with a hideous gentle smile that it smelled the herd, and that the sea voyage had done it no good.
    Our house had red tiles on the roof. They glowed vermilion in the sun. We heard drums on Friday and Saturday nights; drifting up from the town, the sound was marvelous and frightening. When my father was troubled he walked down the mountain on the winding road, and stayed for a long time on the wall overlooking the sea. It was terribly hot and still in the morning. Everyone wore white. I was often aware of carrion rotting unseen in some soft place.
    I was quite surprised when, a week after we took the bull off the ship, Pappy ran onto the terrace and turning his straw hat rapidly in his hands announced that the bull had gone wild and was killing the other animals. My father got up slowly and put down the
Gleaner.
He was in white pants and a white shirt, and he was stained beautifully with colors, for he had been painting a picture; he had been painting fish and fruit. I followed him to his room where I watched him load a .30-06, pushing in the dull brass cartridges one by one. He seemed to be angry and perhaps a little frightened. I was frightened for him.
    We started at a walk down the hill but then we began to run. At the bend Hamid was waiting for us with two horses, a beautiful black one for my father and the nice brown one called Kerry for Pappy. My father pulled me up behind him and we flew down the hill with the Trades whipping our hair and flinging Pappy’s hat onto his back where it hung by a cord. The rifle bumped against my face and I had trouble hanging on but we reached the field, which was streaked with the blood of cows as if some Japanese had been flying kites with long red ribbons which when the wind died were left parallel on the grass. The blood steamed, especially near the places where cows had fallen. Some of them groaned but most were just breathing deeply as if they hoped to get better.
    The bull was at the end of the field and his head was covered and clotted with blood; it made thick cakes which clung to his hair. He was stained with red.
    My father told me to hang on tightly, and I made my thin arms a tourniquet around his waist. I was very much afraid of falling off the horse. I could smell the paint on my father’s shirt and the sun made me blink. He put the rifle in a sling position, so he could hold it in one hand and the reins in another. He did it quickly and well; it must have been one of the things he learned in North Africa. He spurred the horse and it started to prance, foaming, toward the bull. Silent Jamaicans pressed against the fences. They were watching us on the wet black horse.
    The horse danced sideways at the bull, elegantly, as if we were not in a green palm ring on a cliff above the sea but in a London riding academy.
    The bull stomped the ground. My father cocked the rifle. The horse, rocking and edging, had spasms of fright. That black horse was a good horse. He was frightened but he risked his life for what as far as he knew was my father’s whim. My father said that if he could be as good a man as that horse was a horse, he would be happy and ready to rest. Pappy called the black horse an astronomer, because at night he looked long into the air at the stars, sometimes for hours.
    The bull charged us and I felt my father’s muscles tense as he aimed quickly and fired. I did not see the bull fall because I had turned my head away. But I saw the waves of our action in the faces of the people at the fences, who