Men of Men Page 8

  Zouga had found a woman to give both Ralph and Jordan their lessons. The wife of a Lutheran preacher, she was a plump-breasted, sweet-faced woman with iron-grey hair swept up into an enormous bun at the back of her head. Mrs Gander was the only schoolmistress within five hundred miles, and for a few hours each morning she gave a small group of diggers’ children their reading, writing and arithmetic in the little galvanized-iron church at the back of Market Square.

  It was a daily ritual to which Ralph had to be driven by his father’s threats, and to which Jordan hurried with the same enthusiasm as he did to the sorting-table after school was out. With his angelic looks, and the intense interest in the written word that Aletta had germinated in him, Jordan was instantly Mrs Gander’s darling.

  She made no effort to conceal her preference. She called him ‘Jordie-dear’ and gave to him the task of wiping clean the blackboard, which immediately made it an honour for which the dozen other children in the class would have scratched out his lovely densely-lashed angel eyes.

  There was a pair of twins in Mrs Gander’s class. The tough sons of a tough out-of-luck digger from the Australian opal fields, they were a matched pair, with shaven heads to inhibit the breeding of lice, bare-footed, for their father was working a poor claim on the eastern edge of the diggings, their braces supporting patched canvas breeches over faded and frayed shirts. Henry and Douglas Stewart made a formidable pair, acting in complete concert, quick with a cruel jibe too soft for Mrs Gander to hear or a crafty jab with the elbow or a tug of the hair too quick for her to see.

  Jordan was natural prey. ‘Jordie-girl’ they christened him, and his soft curls felt good between their fingers, and his tears were enormously satisfying – especially when they realized that Jordan for some strange reason of pride would not appeal to his big brother for protection.

  ‘You tell Goosie-Gander that I’ve a belly ache,’ Ralph instructed Jordan. ‘And that Papa says I am too sick to come to class.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Jordan demanded. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to the nest – I think the chicks may be ready.’ Ralph had discovered a lanner falcon’s nest on the top ledge of a rocky kopje five miles out on the Cape road. He was planning to take the chicks and train them as hunting falcons. Ralph always had exciting plans; it was one of the many reasons why Jordan adored him.

  ‘Oh, let me come with you. Please, Ralph.’

  ‘You’re still just a baby, Jordie.’

  ‘I’m nearly eleven.’

  ‘You’re only just ten,’ Ralph corrected him loftily, and from experience Jordan knew there was no profit in arguing.

  Jordan delivered Ralph’s lie for him in such sweet piping tones and with such a guileless flutter of the long lashes, that it never occurred to Mrs Gander to doubt it, and the Stewart twins exchanged a quick glance of complete accord.

  There was a latrine at the back of the church, a sentry box of corrugated iron, a boxwood seat with an oval cut from it suspended over a galvanized steel bucket. The heat in the tiny room was ovenlike and the contents of the bucket ripened swiftly. The twins trapped Jordan there in the mid-morning break.

  They had hold of an ankle each and were standing on the wooden seat, the hole between them, and Jordan was dangling upside down, clinging desperately to the boxwood seat as they tried to force his head and shoulders through the opening and into the brimming bucket.

  ‘Stamp on his fingers,’ Douglas panted. Jordan had offered unexpected opposition. Douglas had a red scratch down his neck, and they had had to pry Jordan’s jaws open to release their grip on Henry’s thumb. The injuries had changed the mood of the twins. They had started out with laughter, spiteful laughter, but laughter all the same; now they were angry and vicious, their self-esteem smarting as much as their injuries.

  ‘Shut up, you little sissy,’ blurted Henry, as he obeyed his brother and brought down his horny heel on Jordan’s white knuckles. Jordan’s shrieks of agony and horror and terror reverberated in the tiny iron shed as he kicked and fought.

  Against their combined strength, Jordan’s wildest efforts were ineffectual. His fingernails scratched white splinters from the wooden seat, and his shrieks mounted hysterically, but his head was forced down. The stench was suffocating, the disgust choked his throat and strangled his cries.

  At the moment that he felt the cold wet filth soaking into his golden curls the door of the shed was wrenched open and Mrs Gander’s motherly bulk filled the opening.

  For a moment she stared incredulously, and then she began to swell with outrage. Her right arm, muscled from kneading bread and pounding wet washing, flew out in a round open-handed blow that knocked both twins flying into a corner of the latrine – and she gathered Jordan up, holding him at arms’ length. With her flushed face wrinkling at the smell of his soaked curls, she rushed out with him, shouting to her husband to bring a bucket of precious water and a bar of the yellow and blue mottled soap.

  Half an hour later Jordan reeked of carbolic soap and his curls were fluffing out again as the sun dried them into a shining halo, and from behind the closed doors of the vestry the yells of pain emitted by the twins were punctuated by the clap of the Reverend Gander’s Malacca cane walking stick as his wife urged him on to greater endeavour.

  Around the whittled remains of Colesberg kopje had grown up a miniature range of man-made hillocks. These were the tailings from the diamond cradles, dumped haphazardly on the open ground beyond the settlement. Some of these artificial hills were already twenty feet high, and they formed a wasteland where no tree nor blade of grass grew. A maze of narrow footpaths laced the area, made by the daily pilgrimage of hundreds of black workers to the pit.

  The shortcut between the Lutheran church and Zouga’s camp followed one of these footpaths, and in the heat-hushed hour of noon, the labourers were still in the workings and the hills were deserted. The sun directly overhead threw only narrow black strips of shade below the mounds of loose gravel as Jordan hurried along the dusty path, his eyes still red-rimmed with weeping the tears of humiliation and stinging from the foam of carbolic soap.

  ‘Hello Jordie-girl.’ Jordan recognized the voice instantly, and it stopped him dead, blinking his swimming eyes in the sunlight, peering up at the summit of one of the gravel mounds beside the path.

  One of the twins stood silhouetted against the pale blue noon sky. His thumbs hooked into his braces, his shaven head thrust forward, his eyes with their thin colourless lashes as vicious as those of a ferret.

  ‘You told, Jordie-girlie,’ the twin accused flatly.

  ‘I never told,’ Jordan denied, his voice squeaking uncertainly.

  ‘You screamed. That’s the same as telling – and now you are going to scream again, but this time there isn’t going to be anyone to hear you, Jordie-girl.’

  Jordan spun around, and in the same movement he was running with all the desperation and speed of a gazelle pursued by a hunting cheetah; but he had not gone a dozen frantic paces when the second twin slid down the sloping bank, the gravel hissing around his bare feet, full into the narrow pathway ahead of Jordan, his arms spread in welcome, his mouth twisted into a grin of anticipation.

  They had laid the trap with care. They had caught him in a narrow place, where the gravel banks were highest, and behind him the first twin slid adroitly down to block the path, keeping his balance on the little avalanche of rolling gravel under his bare feet until he hit the level pathway.

  ‘Jordie-dear,’ called one twin.

  ‘Jordie-girl,’ echoed the other, and they closed from each side, slowly, tantalizing themselves, so that Henry giggled almost breathlessly.

  ‘Little girls shouldn’t tell tales.’

  ‘I’m not a girl,’ whispered Jordan, backing away from him.

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have curls; only girls have curls.’ Douglas groped in his pocket and brought out a bone-handled clasp knife. He opened the blade with his teeth.

  ‘We are going
to turn you into a boy, Jordie-girl.’

  ‘Then we are going to teach you not to tell tales.’ Henry brought out his hand from behind his back. He had cut a camel-thorn branch, and stripped the bunches of lacy leaves, but not the thorns. ‘We are going to do the same to you as old Goosey-Gander did to us. Fifteen cuts each. That’s thirty for you, Jordie-girl.’

  Jordan’s gaze fastened on the branch with sickened fascination. It was twice as thick as a man’s thumb, more a club than a cane, and the thorns were half an inch long, each on a little raised knob of rough black bark. Henry swung it in an experimental cut and it hissed like an adder.

  The sound galvanized Jordan, he whirled and flew at the high bank of gravel beside him; it slid treacherously under his feet so that he had to use his hands to claw his way towards the summit.

  Behind him the twins yipped with excitement, like the hunting call of a pack of wild dogs, and they raced after him, scrambling up the soft collapsing bank.

  Their weight buried them at each pace above the ankles, so that Jordan, lighter and buoyant with terror, reached the top of the bank ahead of them, and he raced silent and white-faced across the flattened table of the summit, opening the gap further.

  Henry snatched up a stone as he ran, a lump of quartz as big as his own fist, and he used his own momentum to hurl it. It flew an inch past Jordan’s ear, and he flinched and whimpered, losing his balance, stumbled at the far edge of the dump, and went tumbling down the steep slope.

  ‘Stop him,’ yipped Douglas, and launched himself over the edge.

  At the bottom Jordan rolled to his feet, dusty and wildly dishevelled, his curls bushed out and dangling in his eyes. He wasted a second, glancing about desperately, and then darted away along the narrow footpath through the gut of the pass between the gravel dumps.

  ‘Catch him. Don’t let him get away.’ The twins yelled at each other, panting with laughter, like two cats with a mouse, and here on the flat their longer legs quickly narrowed Jordan’s lead.

  He heard their bare feet slapping on hard earth in a broken rhythm close behind him, and he twisted his head back over his shoulder, almost blinded with his own sweat and dancing curls, his breath sobbing, his skin white as bone china and his huge brimming eyes seeming to fill his whole face.

  Henry steadied himself, poised with his right arm held back at full stretch and then he threw the thorn stick, cartwheeling it low over the ground so that it slammed into the back of Jordan’s knees, the thorns ripping the soft bare skin, raising deep parallel scratches as though from the slash of a cat’s claws.

  Jordan’s legs folded under him and he went down, sliding on his belly, the wind driven from his lungs as he hit the baked earth of the pathway. Before he could raise himself, Douglas landed with all his weight between Jordan’s shoulder blades and shoved his face, cheek down, against the ground, while Henry snatched up the thorn branch and danced about them, looking for an opening, the branch held in both hands above his head.

  ‘His hair first,’ gasped Douglas, choking with laughter and his own excitement. ‘Hold his head.’

  Henry dropped the cane and stooped over Jordan, grabbing a double handful of the fine curls and leaning back against it with all his weight so that Jordan’s neck was stretched out. Douglas was still perched between Jordan’s shoulder blades. Pinning him against the earth and brandishing the open clasp knife, he told his twin, ‘Hold him still.’ The fine golden hair was stretched like the strings of a violin and Douglas hacked at it.

  It came away in tufts in Henry’s fists, some of it cut through, some of it torn out at the roots, like feathers from the carcass of a slaughtered chicken, and he threw it high in the air, shouting with laughter as it sparkled in the sunlight.

  ‘Now you will be a boy!’

  All the resistance went out of Jordan. He lay crushed against the earth, shaken only by his own sobs, and Henry grabbed another handful of his curls.

  ‘Cut closer,’ he ordered his twin, and then shrieked with shock and pain.

  The thin tapered end of a rhinoceros-hide riding whip curled with a snap around the seat of Henry’s breeches, over the fresh bruises raised by the Reverend Gander’s Malacca cane, and Henry shot erect clutching at his own buttocks with both hands and hopping up and down on the same spot.

  A hand closed on the collar of his shirt and he was yanked into the air and held suspended, kicking, a foot above the ground, still clutching the seat of his breeches that felt as though they were filled with live coals.

  His brother looked up from his seat on Jordan’s back. In the excitement of tormenting the smaller boy, neither of the twins had heard or seen the horseman. He had walked his horse around the bend in the footpath between the gravel heaps and come across the squirming yelling knot of small bodies in the middle of the path. He recognized the twins immediately; they had earned quick notoriety on the diggings, and it had taken only another second to guess the cause of the commotion, to understand who were the attackers and who the victim.

  Douglas was quick to realize the changed circumstances as he looked up at his twin, dangling like a man on the gallows from the horseman’s fist. He scrambled to his feet and darted away, but the horseman turned his mount with his heels and, like a polo player, cut backhanded with the long rhino-hide sjambok, and the agony of it paralysed Douglas. But for the thick canvas breeches it would have opened his skin.

  Before he could begin to run again the horseman stooped in the saddle, seized his upper arm and lifted him easily. On each side of the horse, the twins wriggled and whimpered with the sting of the lash and the rider looked down at them thoughtfully.

  ‘I know you two,’ he told them quietly. ‘You are the Stewart brats, the ones who drove old Jacob’s mule into the barbed wire.’

  ‘Please, sir, please,’ blubbered Douglas.

  ‘Keep quiet, boy,’ said the rider evenly. ‘You are the ones that cut the reins on De Kock’s wagon. That cost your daddy a penny, and the Diggers’ Committee would like to know who set fire to Carlo’s tent then—’

  ‘It weren’t us, Mister,’ Henry pleaded. It was clear they both knew who their captor was, and that they were truly afraid of him.

  Jordan crawled to his knees and peered up at his rescuer. He must be somebody very important – perhaps even a member of the committee he had mentioned. Even in his distress Jordan was awed by that possibility. Ralph had explained to him that a committee member was something between a policeman, a prince and the ogre of the fairy tales which their mother used to read to them.

  Now this fabulous being looked down at Jordan as he knelt in the pathway, with his cheek smeared with dust and tears, his shirt torn and the buttons dangling on their threads, while the backs of his knees were criss-crossed with bloody welts.

  ‘This little one is half your size,’ the horseman said. His eyes were blue, a strange electric blue – the eyes of a poet – or of a fanatic.

  ‘It was just a game, sir,’ mumbled Henry; the collar of his shirt was twisted up under his ear.

  ‘We didn’t mean nothing, Mister.’

  The horseman transferred that glowing blue gaze from Jordan to the two wriggling bodies in his hands.

  ‘A game, was it?’ he asked. ‘Well, next time I catch you playing your games, you and your father had better have a story for the committee, do you hear me?’

  He shook them roughly. ‘Do you understand me clearly?’

  ‘Yes, sir—’

  ‘So you enjoy games, do you? Well then, here is a new one, and we shall play it every time you so much as lay a finger on a child smaller than you are.’

  He dropped them unexpectedly to earth, and before the twins could recover their balance had cut left and right with the sjambok, starting them away at a run, and then he cantered easily along behind them for a hundred yards or so, leaning from the saddle to flick the whip at the back of their legs to keep them at their best speed. Then abruptly he let them go and wheeled the horse, cantering back to where Jordan stood tre
mbling and pale in the pathway.

  ‘If you are going to fight, then one at a time is the best policy, young man,’ said the rider and stepped down easily from the stirrup and threw the reins over his shoulder as he squatted on his haunches facing Jordan.

  ‘Now where does it hurt most?’ he asked.

  It was suddenly terribly important to Jordan that he did not appear a baby. He gulped noisily as he fought his tears, and the man seemed to understand.

  ‘Good fellow,’ he nodded. ‘That’s the spirit.’ And he drew a cotton handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the muddy tears.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Jordie – Jordan,’ he corrected himself and sniffed noisily.

  ‘How old are you, Jordan?’

  ‘Almost eleven, sir.’

  The sting of his injuries and of his humiliation began to recede, to be replaced by a warm flood of gratitude towards his rescuer.

  ‘Spit!’ ordered the horseman, proffering the handkerchief, and Jordan obeyed, dampening a corner of the cloth with his saliva.

  The man turned him with a hand on his shoulder, and with the handkerchief cleaned the bloody lines on his legs. It was perfunctory treatment, and the man’s touch was masculine and ungentle, but Jordan was powerfully reminded of his mother by the attention, and that empty place inside him ached so that he almost began weeping again. He held back the tears, and twisted his neck to watch the man work on his injured legs.

  The fingers were square and powerful, but a little uncoordinated. The nails were big and strong and even, cut short, with a pearly translucent lustre. The back of his hands were covered with fine golden hairs that caught the sun.

  The man glanced up from his task at Jordan. His face was fair, the skin was smooth-shaven and unblemished except for the small fine moustache. His lips were full, high-coloured, sensual. His nose was large, but not too large for the big round head and the thick waves of light-brown hair.