Chains Read Online Free PDF Page A

him. He had gotten involved in something too big for him, something dangerous. I remembered the way he had flinched away from Harkson’s cocked fist, and I could almost taste his desperation, his fear. I knew those things, knew the way they dragged after us, coiled by circumstances like so much chain.
    But Sarn and I were not alike. If he ever did take over from Morlak he would rule Seventh Street with the same scorn for whatever did not put money in his pocket, the same unfeeling hardness, the same bland cruelty. You could see it in him now. All he lacked was the power to let it out.
    His nervous energy stilled as he stepped out to greet a black man in shirt-sleeves carrying a bucket in each hand. The man spoke to him, a wary greeting as between people who did not know each other, and then they were going into the tent, Sarn still moving his spiky head to and fro like a nervous animal.
    I frowned. The Seventh Street tent was a little bastion of the gang, and its privacy was fiercely protected, particularly by Sarn. That he would allow an outsider in, particularly one of the Mahweni, was mystifying.
    â€œOy!”
    The voice came from below, and it was charged with anger. Startled, my hands momentarily stiffened and I had to force myself to get a grip on the wet metal before I lost my balance. Then I looked down into the bullish face of Harkson, the foreman.
    â€œIs that supposed to be work?” he bellowed. “Get down here!”
    I came down slowly, carefully, feeling my anxiety making me unsteady in ways I was not used to.
    â€œSorry, sir,” I said, fumbling in my tool belt. “I left my wire brush up there earlier.”
    Harkson’s eyes narrowed.
    â€œDid you get it?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œThen get on with your job,” he said, “or I’ll be suggesting Sir William rethink some of his plans.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    I walked quickly away, eyes down so that he wouldn’t see the fear in my face, silently cursing that I did not know if the black man had left the Seventh Street tent or not.
    *   *   *
    An hour later, however, I looked down from my painting to see Sarn making his way up the ladder to work on the adjacent chain. I stopped what I was doing and made my way back to the scaffolding platform and down.
    â€œWhere do you think you’re going?” Sarn demanded, his black eyes hostile.
    â€œCall of nature,” I said.
    â€œGirls shouldn’t be up here,” he snapped, pulling a face. “Need to be able to hold it. All right. Go, but hurry up. I mean it, Sutonga. I’m watching you.”
    Likewise , I thought as I clambered down and scampered along the catwalk to the tent camp. In the interests of what the white bosses called decency, boys and girls had to be kept apart, but only nominally. A single sheet was hung across the Seventh Street tent for the sake of privacy. Some of the smaller boys would occasionally try to peer through the pinned seam, giggling, and I would warn them what I would do to them if they did it again. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if it was one of the older boys, but I slept with a mortar knife under my pillow. I was the only one on the girls’ side.
    The boys’ side of the tent smelled, but I had expected that. It wasn’t like the sheet hung around my corner kept it out. Sarn’s bedroll was not packed away like the others, but bunched up, so it was the first place I looked. It concealed the two metal pails I had seen the Mahweni carrying. Inside was the dull rust of distorted steel washers—factory-casted rejects. Probably they were meant for the smelter.
    But why had Sarn acquired them? I picked a handful out, feeling their weight, listening to the sound as they chinked together.
    *   *   *
    We finished painting the next day. The great suspension chains and all the girder work were now a slick, gleaming black. According to Sir William, it