July's People Read Online Free PDF Page A

clearing—the settlement of huts, livestock kraals, and the stumped and burned-off patches which were the lands—the buttock-fold in the trees indicated the river and that was the end of measured distance. Like clouds, the savannah bush formed and re-formed under the changes of light, moved or gave the impression of being moved past by the travelling eye; silent and ashy green as mould spread and always spreading, rolling out under the sky before her. There were hundreds of tracks used since ancient migrations (never ended; her family’s was the latest), not seen. There were people, wavering circles of habitation marked by euphorbia and brush hedges, like this one, fungoid fairy rings on grass—not seen. There were cattle cracking through the undergrowth, and the stillness of wild animals—all not to be seen. Space; so confining in its immensity her children did not know it was there. Royce headed a delegation: —Can’t we go to a film today? Or tomorrow?—(The postponement an inkling, the confusion of time with that other dimension, proper to this place.) Even though Gina and Victor were old enough to know cinemas had been left behind, they did not stop him asking, and sulked and quarrelled afterwards on the car-seat beds in the hut, scratching flea-bites. Maureen could not walk out into the boundlessness. Not so far as to take the dog around the block or to the box to post a letter. She could go to the river but no farther, and not often. When she did go she did so believing it better not to go at all than risk being seen, now.
    July came to fetch her family’s clothes for the women to wash down there.
    —I can do it myself.—They had so few, they wore so little; the children had abandoned shoes, there was no question of a fresh pair of shorts and socks every day.
    But he stood in the manner of one who will not go away without what he has come for. —Then I must carry water for you, make it hot, everything.—
    She saw she could not expect to be indulged, here, in any ideas he knew nothing about.
    —Will your wife do it? I must pay.—
    It was women’s business, in his home. His short laugh tugged tight with his fingers at the ends of the loose bundle she had made. —I don’t know who or who. But you can pay.—
    —And soap?—She was cherishing a big cake of toilet soap, carefully drying it after each use and keeping it on top of the hut wall, out of reach of the children.
    —I bring soap.—
    Soap he had remembered to take from her store-cupboard? His clean clothes smelled of Lifebuoy she bought for them—the servants. He didn’t say; perhaps merely not to boast his foresight. She was going to ask—and quite saw she could not.
    —I’ll pay for it.—Bundles of notes were bits of paper, in this place; did not represent, to her, the refrigerator full of frozen meat and ice-cubes, the newspapers, water-borne sewage, bedside lamps money could not provide here. But its meaning was not dissociated, for July’s villagers. She saw how when she or Bam, who were completely dependent on these people, had nothing but bits of paper to give them, not even clothes—so prized by the poor—to spare, they secreted the paper money in tied rags and strange crumpled pouches about their persons. They were able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete. July—and others like him, all the able men went away to work—had been sending these bits of paper for so long and had been bringing, over fifteen years (that meant seven home-leaves), many things that bits of paper could be transformed into, from the bicycle Bam had got for him at a discount to the supermarket pink glass teacups.
    July’s wife’s hut, his own hut, the huts of three or four other families within the family, their goat-kraal, the chicken-coops made of twiggy dead branches staved into the earth in a rough criss-cross of hoops, the pig-pen enclosed by the fusion of organic and inorganic barriers—thorny aloes, battered hub-caps