The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

THE FIRST CHILDREN who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching
through the sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it
had no flags or masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed
up on the beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish
tentacles, and the remains of fish and flotsam, and only then did they see
that it was a drowned man.
They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and
digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the
alarm in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed
that he weighed more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as
much as a horse, and they said to each other that maybe he'd been floating
too long and the water had got into his bones. When they laid him on the
floor they said he'd been taller than all other men because there was barely
enough room for him in the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to
keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men.
He had the smell of the sea about him and only his shape gave one to
suppose that it was the corpse of a human being, because the skin was
covered with a crust of mud and scales.

They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man
was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses
that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on
the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always
went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the
few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the
cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven
boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one
another to see that they were all there.

That night they did not go out to work at sea. While the men went to find
out if anyone was missing in neighboring villages, the women stayed behind
to care for the drowned man. They took the mud off with grass swabs, they
removed the underwater stones entangled in his hair, and they scraped the
crust off with tools used for scaling fish. As they were doing that they noticed

that the vegetation on him came from faraway oceans and deep water and
that his clothes were in tatters, as if he had sailed through labyrinths of coral.
They noticed too that he bore his death with pride, for he did not have the
lonely look of other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard,
needy look of men who drowned in rivers. But only when they finished
cleaning him off did they become aware of the kind of man he was and it left
them breathless. Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best
built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him
there was no room for him in their imagination.

They could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was
there a table solid enough to use for his wake. The tallest men's holiday pants
would not fit him, nor the fattest ones' Sunday shirts, nor the shoes of the
one with the biggest feet. Fascinated by his huge size and his beauty, the
women then decided to make him some pants from a large piece of sail and a
shirt from some bridal brabant linen so that he could continue through his
death with dignity. As they sewed, sitting in a circle and gazing at the corpse
between stitches, it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady
nor the sea so restless as on that night and they supposed that the change
had something to do with the dead man. They thought that if that
magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the
widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would
have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his
wife would have been the happiest woman. They thought that he would have
had so much authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea simply by
calling their names and that he would have put so much work into his land
that springs would have burst forth from among the rocks so that he would
have been able to plant flowers on the cliffs. They secretly compared him to
their own men, thinking that for all their lives theirs were incapable of doing
what he could do in one night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in
their hearts as the weakest, meanest and most useless creatures on earth.
They were wandering through that maze of fantasy when the oldest woman,
who as the oldest had looked upon the drowned man with more compassion
than passion, sighed: 'He has the face of someone called Esteban.'

It was true. Most of them had only to take another look at him to see that
he could not have any other name. The more stubborn among them, who
were the youngest, still lived for a few hours with the illusion that when they
put his clothes on and he lay among the flowers in patent leather shoes his
name might be Lautaro. But it was a vain illusion. There had not been enough
canvas, the poorly cut and worse sewn pants were too tight, and the hidden

strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt. After midnight the
whistling of the wind died down and the sea fell into its Wednesday
drowsiness. The silence put an end to any last doubts: he was Esteban. The
women who had dressed him, who had combed his hair, had cut his nails and
shaved him were unable to hold back a shudder of pity when they had to
resign themselves to his being dragged along the ground. It was then that
they understood how unhappy he must have been with that huge body since
it bothered him even after death. They could see him in life, condemned to
going through doors sideways, cracking his head on crossbeams, remaining
on his feet during visits, not knowing what to do with his soft, pink, sea lion
hands while the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and
begged him, frightened to death, sit here, Esteban, please, and he, leaning
against the wall, smiling, don't bother, ma'am, I'm fine where I am, his heels
raw and his back roasted from having done the same thing so many times
whenever he paid a visit, don't bother, ma'am, I'm fine where I am, just to
avoid the embarrassment of breaking up the chair, and never knowing
perhaps that the ones who said don't go, Esteban, at least wait till the
coffee's ready, were the ones who later on would whisper the big boob finally
left, how nice, the handsome fool has gone. That was what the women were
thinking beside the body a little before dawn. Later, when they covered his
face with a handkerchief so that the light would not bother him, he looked so
forever dead, so defenseless, so much like their men that the first furrows of
tears opened in their hearts. It was one of the younger ones who began the
weeping. The others, coming to, went from sighs to wails, and the more they
sobbed the more they felt like weeping, because the drowned man was
becoming all the more Esteban for them, and so they wept so much, for he
was the more destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth, poor
Esteban. So when the men returned with the news that the drowned man was
not from the neighboring villages either, the women felt an opening of
jubilation in the midst of their tears.
'Praise the Lord,' they sighed, 'he's ours!'

The men thought the fuss was only womanish frivolity. Fatigued because of
the difficult nighttime inquiries, all they wanted was to get rid of the bother of
the newcomer once and for all before the sun grew strong on that arid,
windless day. They improvised a litter with the remains of foremasts and
gaffs, tying it together with rigging so that it would bear the weight of the
body until they reached the cliffs. They wanted to tie the anchor from a cargo
ship to him so that he would sink easily into the deepest waves, where fish
are blind and divers die of nostalgia, and bad currents would not bring him
back to shore, as had happened with other bodies. But the more they hurried,
the more the women thought of ways to waste time. They walked about like

startled hens, pecking with the sea charms on their breasts, some interfering
on one side to put a scapular of the good wind on the drowned man, some on
the other side to put a wrist compass on him , and after a great deal of get
away from there, woman, stay out of the way, look, you almost made me fall
on top of the dead man, the men began to feel mistrust in their livers and
started grumbling about why so many main-altar decorations for a stranger,
because no matter how many nails and holy-water jars he had on him, the
sharks would chew him all the same, but the women kept piling on their junk
relics, running back and forth, stumbling, while they released in sighs what
they did not in tears, so that the men finally exploded with since when has
there ever been such a fuss over a drifting corpse, a drowned nobody, a piece
of cold Wednesday meat. One of the women, mortified by so much lack of
care, then removed the handkerchief from the dead man's face and the men
were left breathless too.

He was Esteban. It was not necessary to repeat it for them to recognize

him. If they had been told Sir Walter Raleigh, even they might have been
impressed with his gringo accent, the macaw on his shoulder, his cannibalkilling blunderbuss, but there could be only one Esteban in the world and
there he was, stretched out like a sperm whale, shoeless, wearing the pants
of an undersized child, and with those stony nails that had to be cut with a
knife. They only had to take the handkerchief off his face to see that he was
ashamed, that it was not his fault that he was so big or so heavy or so
handsome, and if he had known that this was going to happen, he would
have looked for a more discreet place to drown in, seriously, I even would
have tied the anchor off a galleon around my nick and staggered off a cliff
like someone who doesn't like things in order not to be upsetting people now
with this Wednesday dead body, as you people say, in order not to be
bothering anyone with this filthy piece of cold meat that doesn't have
anything to do with me. There was so much truth in his manner that even the
most mistrustful men, the ones who felt the bitterness of endless nights at
sea fearing that their women would tire of dreaming about them and begin to
dream of drowned men, even they and others who were harder still
shuddered in the marrow of their bones at Esteban's sincerity.

That was how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could ever
conceive of for an abandoned drowned man. Some women who had gone to
get flowers in the neighboring villages returned with other women who could
not believe what they had been told, and those women went back for more
flowers when they saw the dead man, and they brought more and more until
there were so many flowers and so many people that it was hard to walk

about. At the final moment it pained them to return him to the waters as an
orphan and they chose a father and mother from among the best people, and
aunts and uncles and cousins, so that through him all the inhabitants of the
village became kinsmen. Some sailors who heard the weeping from a
distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the
mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens. While they fought for
the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment
by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the
desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of
their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man.
They let him go without an anchor so that he could come back if he wished
and whenever he wished, and they all held their breath for the fraction of
centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did not need to look at
one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would
never be. But they also knew that everything would be different from then on,
that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors
so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams
and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob finally died,
too bad, the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going to paint
their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban's memory eternal and they
were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and
planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers
on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high
seas, and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress
uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and,
pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen
languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it's gone to
sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun's so bright that the
sunflowers don't know which way to turn, yes, over there, that's Esteban's
village.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that

Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea,
because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it
was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky
were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March
nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten
shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to
the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it
was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go
very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in
the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldnt get up, impeded by
his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was
putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the
courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was
dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald
skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched
great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His
huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the
mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very
soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they
dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a
strong sailors voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of
the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway
from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a
neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and
all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

Hes an angel, she told them. He must have been coming for the child, but
the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held
captive in Pelayos house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman,
for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial
conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched
over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiffs club, and
before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with
the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain
stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward
the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt

magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and
provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when
they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the
whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel,
without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the
openings in the wire as if he werent a supernatural creature but a circus
animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven oclock, alarmed at the strange news.
By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived
and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captives
future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of
the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank
of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he
could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men
who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming
a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his
catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could
take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen
among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open
wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the
early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only
lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when
Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in
Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw
that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His
ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he
had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was
strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by
terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of
angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned
the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the
devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse
the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in
determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even
less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a
letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter
would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the
highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with

such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a
marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the
mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted
from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in
the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying
acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any
attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather,
those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in
search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her
heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldnt
sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up
at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with
less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the
earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a
week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims
waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his
time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish
heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along
the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according
to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for
angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches
that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was
because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate
nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be
patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him,
searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the
cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the
most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see
him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they
burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless
for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start,
ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped
his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung
and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world.
Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of
pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority
understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that

of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowds frivolity with formulas of maidservant
inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the
captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent
their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any
connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin,
or whether he wasnt just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters
might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had
not put and end to the priests tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival

attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who
had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The
admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel,
but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her
absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever
doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram
and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however,
was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she
recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had
sneaked out of her parents house to go to a dance, and while she was
coming back through the woods after having danced all night without
permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack
came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only
nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into
her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a
fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty
angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles
attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man
who didnt recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who
didnt get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores
sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like
mocking fun, had already ruined the angels reputation when the woman who
had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how
Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayos courtyard
went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days
and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they

saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high
netting so that crabs wouldnt get in during the winter, and with iron bars on
the windows so that angels wouldnt get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren
close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought
some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the
kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The
chicken coop was the only thing that didnt receive any attention. If they
washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so
often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap
stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house
into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that
he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their
fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth
hed gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart.
The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but
he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had
no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time.
The doctor who took care of the child couldnt resist the temptation to listen
to the angels heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so
many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive.
What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed
so natural on that completely human organism that he couldnt understand
why other men didnt have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain
had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging
himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him
out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen.
He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think
that hed be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the
house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful
living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes
had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had
left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over
him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only
then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious
with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times
they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the
wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead
angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the
first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest
corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of
December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers
of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude.
But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite
careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea
chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was
cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come
from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and
caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his
fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of
knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light
and couldnt get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude.
Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched
him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky
flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was
through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer
possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in
her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

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T hat night our mother went to the shop and she didnt come back.
Ever. What happened? I dont know. My father also had gone
away one day and never come back; but he was fighting in the
war. We were in the war, too, but we were children, we were like our
grandmother and grandfather, we didnt have guns. The people my

father was fighting the bandits, they are called by our government
ran all over the place and we ran away from them like chickens chased
by dogs. We didnt know where to go. Our mother went to the shop
because someone said you could get some oil for cooking. We were
happy because we hadnt tasted oil for a long time; perhaps she got the
oil and someone knocked her down in the dark and took that oil from
her. Perhaps she met the bandits. If you meet them, they will kill you.
Twice they came to our village and we ran and hid in the bush and
when theyd gone we came back and found they had taken everything;
but the third time they came back there was nothing to take, no oil, no
food, so they burned the thatch and the roofs of our houses fell in. My
mother found some pieces of tin and we put those up over part of the
house. We were waiting there for her that night she never came back.
We were frightened to go out, even to do our business, because
the bandits did come. Not into our house without a roof it must have
looked as if there was no one in it, everything gone but all through
the village. We heard people screaming and running. We were afraid
even to run, without our mother to tell us where. I am the middle one, 12
10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing
the girl, and my little brother clung against my stomach with his arms
round my neck and his legs round my waist like a baby monkey to its
mother. All night my first-born brother kept in his hand a broken piece
of wood from one of our burnt house-poles. It was to save himself if
the bandits found him.
We stayed there all day. Waiting for her. I dont know what day it
was; there was no school, no church any more in our village, so you

didnt know whether it was a Sunday or a Monday.

When the sun was going down, our grandmother and grandfather
came. Someone from our village had told them we children were
alone, our mother had not come back. I say grandmother before
grandfather because its like that: our grandmother is big and strong,
not yet old, and our grandfather is small, you dont know where he is,
in his loose trousers, he smiles but he hasnt heard what youre saying,
and his hair looks as if hes left it full of soap suds. Our grandmother
took us me, the baby, my first-born brother, our grandfather back
to her house and we were all afraid (except the baby, asleep on our
grandmothers back) of meeting the bandits on the way. We waited
a long time at our grandmothers place. Perhaps it was a month.
We were hungry. Our mother never came. While we were waiting
for her to fetch us our grandmother had no food for us, no food for
our grandfather and herself. A woman with milk in her breasts gave
us some for my little brother, although at our house he used to eat
porridge, same as we did. Our grandmother took us to look for wild
spinach but everyone else in her village did the same and there wasnt
a leaf left.
Our grandfather, walking a little behind some young men, went
to look for our mother but didnt find her. Our grandmother cried
with other women and I sang the hymns with them. They brought a
little food some beans but after two days there was nothing again.
Our grandfather used to have three sheep and a cow and a vegetable
garden but the bandits had long ago taken the sheep and the cow,
because they were hungry, too; and when planting time came our

grandfather had no seed to plant.

So they decided our grandmother did; our grandfather made
little noises and rocked from side to side, but she took no notice we
would go away. We children were pleased. We wanted to go away from
where our mother wasnt and where we were hungry. We wanted to
go where there were no bandits and there was food. We were glad to 13
The Ultimate Safari
think there must be such a place; away.
Our grandmother gave her church clothes to someone in exchange
for some dried mealies and she boiled them and tied them in a rag.
We took them with us when we went and she thought we would get
water from the rivers but we didnt come to any river and we got so
thirsty we had to turn back. Not all the way to our grandparents place
but to a village where there was a pump. She opened the basket where
she carried some clothes and the mealies and she sold her shoes to
buy a big plastic container for water. I said, Gogo, how will you go to
church now even without shoes, but she said we had a long journey
and too much to carry. At that village we met other people who were
also going away. We joined them because they seemed to know where
that was better than we did.
To get there we had to go through the Kruger Park. We knew about
the Kruger Park. A kind of whole country of animals elephants,
lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles, all kinds of animals. We
had some of them in our own country, before the war (our grandfather
remembers; we children werent born yet) but the bandits kill the
elephants and sell their tusks, and the bandits and our soldiers have

eaten all the buck. There was a man in our village without legs a
crocodile took them off, in our river; but all the same our country
is a country of people, not animals. We knew about the Kruger Park
because some of our men used to leave home to work there in the
places where white people come to stay and look at the animals.
So we started to go away again. There were women and other
children like me who had to carry the small ones on their backs when
the women got tired. A man led us into the Kruger Park; are we there
yet, are we there yet, I kept asking our grandmother. Not yet, the man
said, when she asked him for me. He told us we had to take a long
way to get round the fence, which he explained would kill you, roast
off your skin the moment you touched it, like the wires high up on
poles that give electric light in our towns. Ive seen that sign of a head
without eyes or skin or hair on an iron box at the mission hospital we
used to have before it was blown up.
When I asked the next time, they said wed been walking in the
Kruger Park for an hour. But it looked just like the bush wed been
walking through all day, and we hadnt seen any animals except the
monkeys and birds which live around us at home, and a tortoise that, of
course, couldnt get away from us. My first-born brother and the other 14
10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing
boys brought it to the man so it could be killed and we could cook and
eat it. He let it go because he told us we could not make a fire; all the
time we were in the Park we must not make a fire because the smoke
would show we were there. Police, wardens, would come and send us
back where we came from. He said we must move like animals among

the animals, away from the roads, away from the white peoples camps.
And at that moment I heard Im sure I was the first to hear cracking
branches and the sound of something parting grasses and I almost
squealed because I thought it was the police, wardens the people he
was telling us to look out for who had found us already. And it was an
elephant, and another elephant, and more elephants, big blots of dark
moved wherever you looked between the trees. They were curling their
trunks round the red leaves of the Mopane trees and stuffing them
into their mouths. The babies leant against their mothers. The almost
grown-up ones wrestled like my first-born brother with his friends
only they used trunks instead of arms. I was so interested I forgot to be
afraid. The man said we should just stand still and be quiet while the
elephants passed. They passed very slowly because elephants are too
big to need to run from anyone.
The buck ran from us. They jumped so high they seemed to fly.
The warthogs stopped dead, when they heard us, and swerved off the
way a boy in our village used to zigzag on the bicycle his father had
brought back from the mines. We followed the animals to where they
drank. When they had gone, we went to their water-holes. We were
never thirsty without finding water, but the animals ate, ate all the
time. Whenever you saw them they were eating, grass, trees, roots.
And there was nothing for us. The mealies were finished. The only
food we could eat was what the baboons ate, dry little figs full of ants
that grow along the branches of the trees at the rivers. It was hard to
be like the animals.
When it was very hot during the day we would find lions lying

asleep. They were the colour of the grass and we didnt see them at
first but the man did, and he led us back and a long way round where
they slept. I wanted to lie down like the lions. My little brother was
getting thin but he was very heavy. When our grandmother looked
for me, to put him on my back, I tried not to see. My first-born brother
stopped talking; and when we rested he had to be shaken to get up
again, as if he was just like our grandfather, he couldnt hear. I saw
flies crawling on our grandmothers face and she didnt brush them 15
The Ultimate Safari
off; I was frightened. I picked a palm leaf and chased them.
We walked at night as well as by day. We could see the fires where
the white people were cooking in the camps and we could smell the
smoke and the meat. We watched the hyenas with their backs that
slope as if theyre ashamed, slipping through the bush after the smell.
If one turned its head, you saw it had big brown shining eyes like our
own, when we looked at each other in the dark. The wind brought
voices in our own language from the compounds where the people
who work in the camps live. A woman among us wanted to go to them
at night and ask them to help us. They can give us the food from the
dustbins, she said, she started wailing and our grandmother had to
grab her and put a hand over her mouth. The man who led us had told
us that we must keep out of the way of our people who worked at the
Kruger Park; if they helped us they would lose their work. If they saw
us, all they could do was pretend we were not there; they had seen
only animals.
Sometimes we stopped to sleep for a little while at night. We slept

close together. I dont know which night it was because we were

walking, walking, any time, all the time we heard the lions very
near. Not groaning loudly the way they did far off. Panting, like we
do when we run, but its a different kind of panting: you can hear
theyre not running, theyre waiting, somewhere near. We all rolled
closer together, on top of each other, the ones on the edge fighting
to get into the middle. I was squashed against a woman who smelled
bad because she was afraid but I was glad to hold tight on to her. I
prayed to God to make the lions take someone on the edge and go. I
shut my eyes not to see the tree from which a lion might jump right
into the middle of us, where I was. The man who led us jumped up
instead, and beat on the tree with a dead branch. He had taught us
never to make a sound but he shouted. He shouted at the lions like a
drunk man shouting at nobody, in our village. The lions went away.
We heard them groaning, shouting back at him from far off.
We were tired, so tired. My first-born brother and the man had
to lift our grandfather from stone to stone where we found places to
cross the rivers. Our grandmother is strong but her feet were bleeding.
We could not carry the basket on our heads any longer, we couldnt
carry anything except my little brother. We left our things under a
bush. As long as our bodies get there, our grandmother said. Then
we ate some wild fruit we didnt know from home and our stomachs 16
10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing
ran. We were in the grass called elephant grass because it is nearly as
tall as an elephant, that day we had those pains, and our grandfather
couldnt just get down in front of people like my little brother, he went

off into the grass to be on his own. We had to keep up, the man who
led us always kept telling us, we must catch up, but we asked him to
wait for our grandfather.
So everyone waited for our grandfather to catch up. But he didnt.
It was the middle of the day; insects were singing in our ears and we
couldnt hear him moving through the grass. We couldnt see him
because the grass was so high and he was so small. But he must have
been somewhere there inside his loose trousers and his shirt that was
torn and our grandmother couldnt sew because she had no cotton.
We knew he couldnt have gone far because he was weak and slow.
We all went to look for him, but in groups, so we too wouldnt be
hidden from each other in that grass. It got into our eyes and noses;
we called him softly but the noise of the insects must have filled the
little space left for hearing in his ears. We looked and looked but we
couldnt find him. We stayed in that long grass all night. In my sleep I
found him curled round in a place he had tramped down for himself,
like the places wed seen where the buck hide their babies.
When I woke up he still wasnt anywhere. So we looked again,
and by now there were paths wed made by going through the grass
many times, it would be easy for him to find us if we couldnt find
him. All that day we just sat and waited. Everything is very quiet when
the sun is on your head, inside your head, even if you lie, like the
animals, under the trees. I lay on my back and saw those ugly birds
with hooked beaks and plucked necks flying round and round above
us. We had passed them often where they were feeding on the bones
of dead animals, nothing was ever left there for us to eat. Round and

round, high up and then lower down and then high again. I saw their
necks poking to this side and that. Flying round and round. I saw our
grandmother, who sat up all the time with my little brother on her lap,
was seeing them, too.
In the afternoon the man who led us came to our grandmother
and told her the other people must move on. He said, If their children
dont eat soon they will die.
Our grandmother said nothing.
Ill bring you water before we go, he told her.
Our grandmother looked at us, me, my first-born brother, and my 17
The Ultimate Safari
little brother on her lap. We watched the other people getting up to
leave. I didnt believe the grass would be empty, all around us, where
they had been. That we would be alone in this place, the Kruger Park,
the police or the animals would find us. Tears came out of my eyes
and nose onto my hands but our grandmother took no notice. She got
up, with her feet apart the way she puts them when she is going to
lift firewood, at home in our village, she swung my little brother onto
her back, tied him in her cloth the top of her dress was torn and her
big breasts were showing but there was nothing in them for him. She
said, Come.
So we left the place with the long grass. Left behind. We went with
the others and the man who led us. We started to go away, again.
Theres a very big tent, bigger than a church or a school, tied down
to the ground. I didnt understand that was what it would be, when
we got there, away. I saw a thing like that the time our mother took

us to the town because she heard our soldiers were there and she
wanted to ask them if they knew where our father was. In that tent,
people were praying and singing. This one is blue and white like that
one but its not for praying and singing, we live in it with other people
whove come from our country. Sister from the clinic says were two
hundred without counting the babies, and we have new babies, some
were born on the way through the Kruger Park.
Inside, even when the sun is bright its dark and theres a kind of
whole village in there. Instead of houses each family has a little place
closed off with sacks or cardboard from boxes whatever we can
find to show the other families its yours and they shouldnt come in
even though theres no door and no windows and no thatch, so that
if youre standing up and youre not a small child you can see into
everybodys house. Some people have even made paint from ground
rocks and drawn designs on the sacks.
Of course, there really is a roof the tent is the roof, far, high
up. Its like a sky. Its like a mountain and were inside it; through the
cracks paths of dust lead down, so thick you think you could climb
them. The tent keeps off the rain overhead but the water comes in
at the sides and in the little streets between our places you can
only move along then one person at a time the small kids like my
little brother play in the mud. You have to step over them. My little
brother doesnt play. Our grandmother takes him to the clinic when 18
10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing
the doctor comes on Mondays. Sister says there's something wrong
with his head, she thinks it's because we didnt have enough food at

home. Because of the war. Because our father wasnt there. And then
because he was so hungry in the Kruger Park. He likes just to lie about
on our grandmother all day, on her lap or against her somewhere,
and he looks at us and looks at us. He wants to ask something but you
can see he cant. If I tickle him he may just smile. The clinic gives us
special powder to make into porridge for him and perhaps one day
hell be all right.
When we arrived we were like him my first-born brother and
I. I can hardly remember. The people who live in the village near the
tent took us to the clinic, its where you have to sign that youve come
away, through the Kruger Park. We sat on the grass and everything
was muddled. One Sister was pretty with her hair straightened and
beautiful high-heeled shoes and she brought us the special powder.
She said we must mix it with water and drink it slowly. We tore the
packets open with our teeth and licked it all up, it stuck round my
mouth and I sucked it from my lips and fingers. Some other children
who had walked with us vomited. But I only felt everything in my
belly moving, the stuff going down and around like a snake, and
hiccups hurt me. Another Sister called us to stand in line on the
verandah of the clinic but we couldnt. We sat all over the place there,
falling against each other; the Sisters helped each of us up by the arm
and then stuck a needle in it. Other needles drew our blood into tiny
bottles. This was against sickness, but I didnt understand, every time
my eyes dropped closed I thought I was walking, the grass was long, I
saw the elephants, I didnt know we were away.
But our grandmother was still strong, she could still stand up, she

knows how to write and she signed for us. Our grandmother got us
this place in the tent against one of the sides, its the best kind of place
there because although the rain comes in, we can lift the flap when
the weather is good and then the sun shines on us, the smells in the
tent go out. Our grandmother knows a woman here who showed her
where there is good grass for sleeping mats, and our grandmother
made some for us. Once every month the food truck comes to the
clinic. Our grandmother takes along one of the cards she signed and
when it has been punched we get a sack of mealie meal. There are
wheelbarrows to take it back to the tent; my first-born brother does
this for her and then he and the other boys have races, steering the 19
The Ultimate Safari
empty wheelbarrows back to the clinic. Sometimes hes lucky and a
man whos bought beer in the village gives him money to deliver it
though thats not allowed, youre supposed to take that wheelbarrow
straight back to the Sisters. He buys a cold drink and shares it with me
if I catch him. On another day, every month, the church leaves a pile
of old clothes in the clinic yard. Our grandmother has another card to
get punched, and then we can choose something: I have two dresses,
two pants and a jersey, so I can go to school.
The people in the village have let us join their school. I was
surprised to find they speak our language; our grandmother told me,
Thats why they allow us to stay on their land. Long ago, in the time
of our fathers, there was no fence that kills you, there was no Kruger
Park between them and us, we were the same people under our own
king, right from our village we left to this place weve come to.

Now that weve been in the tent so long I have turned eleven and
my little brother is nearly three although he is so small, only his head
is big, hes not come right in it yet some people have dug up the bare
ground around the tent and planted beans and mealies and cabbage.
The old men weave branches to put up fences round their gardens. No
one is allowed to look for work in the towns but some of the women
have found work in the village and can buy things. Our grandmother,
because shes still strong, finds work where people are building
houses in this village the people build nice houses with bricks and
cement, not mud like we used to have at our home. Our grandmother
carries bricks for these people and fetches baskets of stones on her
head. And so she has money to buy sugar and tea and milk and soap.
The store gave her a calendar she has hung up on our flap of the
tent. I am clever at school and she collected advertising paper people
throw away outside the store and covered my schoolbooks with it.
She makes my first-born brother and me do our homework every
afternoon before it gets dark because there is no room except to lie
down, close together, just as we did in the Kruger Park, in our place
in the tent, and candles are expensive. Our grandmother hasnt been
able to buy herself a pair of shoes for church yet, but she has bought
black school shoes and polish to clean them with for my first-born
brother and me. Every morning, when people are getting up in the
tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps
outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge
off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean 20
10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing

our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs
straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we
have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school
shoes. When we three look at them its as if we are in a real house
again, with no war, no away.
Some white people came to take photographs of our people living
in the tent they said they were making a film, Ive never seen what
that is though I know about it. A white woman squeezed into our
space and asked our grandmother questions which were told to us in
our language by someone who understands the white womans.
How long have you been living like this?
She means here? our grandmother said. In this tent, two years
and one month.
And what do you hope for the future?
Nothing. Im here.
But for your children?
I want them to learn so that they can get good jobs and money.
Do you hope to go back to Mozambique to your own country?
I will not go back.
But when the war is over you wont be allowed to stay here?
Dont you want to go home?
I didnt think our grandmother wanted to speak again. I didnt
think she was going to answer the white woman. The white woman
put her head on one side and smiled at us.
Our grandmother looked away from her and spoke There is
nothing. No home.

Why does our grandmother say that? Why? Ill go back. Ill go
back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits
any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left
our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow,
slowly, through the Kruger Park, and hell be there. Theyll be home,
and Ill remember them.
Nadine Gordimer is a South African who won the 1974 Booker Prize for her
novel The Conservationist. She has published 14 novels and 17 volumes of
short
stories. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. The Ultimate
Safari was originally published in Jump, Bloomsbury, London 1991, and is
reprinted with permission of A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Felix Licensing BV.

Loot
Once upon our time, there was an earthquake: but this one is the most
powerful ever recorded since the invention of the Richter scale made possible
for us to measure apocalyptic warnings.

It tipped a continental shelf. These tremblings often cause floods; this

colossus did the reverse, drew back the ocean as a vast breath taken. The
most secret level of our world lay revealed: the sea-bedded - wrecked ships,
facades of houses, ballroom candelabra, toilet bowl, pirate chest, TV screen,
mail-coach, aircraft fuselage, canon, marble torso, Kalashnikov, metal
carapace of a tourist bus-load, baptismal font, automatic dishwasher,
computer, swords sheathed in barnacles, coins turned to stone. The
astounded gaze raced among these things; the population who had fled from
their toppling houses to the martime hills, ran down. Where terrestrial crash
and bellow had terrified them, there was naked silence. The saliva of the sea
glistened upon these objects; it is given that time does not, never did, exist
down there where the materiality of the past and the present as they lie has
no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing - or all is possessible at once.

People rushed to take; take, take. This was - when, anytime, sometime valuable, that might be useful, what was this, well someone will know, that
must have belonged to the rich, it's mine now, if you don't grab what's over
there someone else will, feet slipped and slithered on seaweed and sank in
soggy sand, gasping sea-plants gaped at them, no-one remarked there were
no fish, the living inhabitants of this unearth had been swept up and away
with the water. The ordinary opportunity of looting shops which was routine to
people during the political uprisings was no comparison. Orgiastic joy gave
men, women and their children strength to heave out of the slime and sand
what they did not know they wanted, quickened their staggering gait as they
ranged, and this was more than profiting by happenstance, it was robbing the
power of nature before which they had fled helpless. Take, take; while
grabbing they were able to forget the wreck of their houses and the loss of
time-bound possessions there. They had tattered the silence with their shouts
to one another and under these cries like the cries of the absent seagulls
they did not hear a distant approach of sound rising as a great wind does.
And then the sea came back, engulfed them to add to its treasury.

That is what is known; in television coverage that really had nothing to show
but the pewter skin of the depths, in radio interviews with those few infirm,
timid or prudent who had not come down from the hills, and in newspaper
accounts of bodies that for some reason the sea rejected, washed up down
the coast somewhere.

But the writer knows something no-one else knows; the sea-change of the
imagination.

Now listen, there's a man who has wanted a certain object (what) all his life.
He has a lot of - things - some of which his eye falls upon often, so he must
be fond of, some of which he doesn't notice, deliberately, that he probably
shouldn't have acquired but cannot cast off, there's an art noveau lamp he
reads by, and above his bed-head a Japanese print, a Hokusai, 'The Great
Wave', he doesn't really collect oriental stuff, although if it had been on the
wall facing him it might have been more than part of the furnishings, it's been
out of sight behind his head for years. All these - things - but not the one.

He's a retired man, long divorced, chosen an old but well-appointed villa in
the maritime hills as the site from which to turn his back on the assault of the
city. A woman from the village cooks and cleans and doesn't bother him with
any other communication. It is a life blessedly freed of excitement, he's had
enough of that kind of disturbance, pleasurable or not, but the sight from his
lookout of what could never have happened, never ever have been
vouchsafed, is a kind of command. He is one of those who are racing out over
the glistening sea-bed, the past - detritus-treasure, one and the same stripped bare.

Like all the other looters with whom he doesn't mix, has nothing in common,
he races from object to object, turning over the shards of painted china, the
sculptures created by destruction, abandonment and rust, the brine-vintaged
wine casks, a plunged racing motorcycle, a dentist's chair, his stride landing
on disintegrated human ribs and mettarsals he does not identify. But unlike
the others, he takes nothing - until: there, ornate with tresses of orangebrown seaweed, stuck-fast with nacreous shells and crenellations of red coral,
is the object. (A mirror?) It's as if the impossible is true; he knew that was
where it was, beneath the sea, that's why he didn't know what it was, could
never find it before. It could be revealed only by something that had never
happened, the greatest paroxysm of our earth ever measured on the Richter
scale.

He takes it up, the object, the mirror, the sand pours off it, the water that was
the only bright glance left to it streams from it, he is taking it back with him,
taking possession at last.

And the great wave comes from behind his bed-head and takes him.

His name well-known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among
the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with
the ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes
during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would
never be found. Who recognized them, that day, where they lie?

No carnation or rose floats.

Full fathom five.

Copyright Nadine Gordimer 1999. All rights reserved.

GRANTA 6 | NADINE GORDIMER

City of the Dead, City of the Living
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You only count the days if you are waiting to have a baby or you are in prison.
Ive had my child but Im counting the days since hes been in this house.

The street delves down between two rows of houses like the abandoned bed
of a river that has changed course. The shebeen-keeper who lives opposite
has a car that sways and churns its way to her fancy wrought-iron gate.
Everyone else, including shebeen customers, walks over the stones, sand and
gullies, home from the bus station. Its too far to bicycle to work in town.

The house provides the sub-economic township planners usual two rooms
and kitchen with a little yard at the back, into which his maquette figures of
the ideal family unit of four fitted neatly. Like most of the houses in the street,
it has been arranged inside and out to hold the number of people the
ingenuity of necessity provides for. The garage is the home of sub-tenants.
(The shebeen-keeper, who knows everything about everybody, might
remember how the house came to have a garage perhaps a taxi owner
once lived there.) The front door of the house itself opens into a room that
has been subdivided by greenish brocade curtains whose colour had faded
and embossed pattern worn off before they were discarded in another kind of
house. On one side of the curtains is a living room with just space enough to
crate a plastic-covered sofa and two chairs, a coffee table with crocheted
cover, vase of dyed feather flowers and oil lamp, and a radio-and-cassetteplayer combination with home-built speakers. There is a large varnished print
of a horse with wild orange mane and flaring nostrils on the wall. The floor is
cement, shined with black polish. On the other side of the curtains is a bed, a
burglar-proofed window, a small table with candle, bottle of anti-acid tablets
and alarm clock. During the day a frilly nylon night-gown is laid out on the
blankets. A womans clothes are in a box under the bed. In the dry-cleaners
plastic sheath, a mans suit hangs from a nail.

A door, never closed, leads from the living room to the kitchen. There is a
sink, which is also the bathroom of the house, a coal-burning stove finned
with chrome like a 1940s car, a pearly blue formica dresser with glass doors
that dont slide easily, a table and plastic chairs. The smell of cooking never
varies: mealie-meal burning, curry overpowering the sweet reek of offal, sour
porridge, onions. A small refrigerator, not connected, is used to store
margarine, condensed milk, tinned pilchards; there is no electricity.

Another door, with a pebbled glass pane in its upper half, is always kept
closed. It opens off the kitchen. Net curtains reinforce the privacy of the
pebbled glass; the privacy of the tenant of the house, Samson Moreke, whose
room is behind there, shared with his wife and baby and whichever of their
older children spends time away from other relatives who take care of them
in country villages. When all the children are in their parents home at once,
the sofa is a bed for two; others sleep on the floor in the kitchen. Sometimes
the sofa is not available, since adult relatives who find jobs in the city need
somewhere to live. Number 1907 Block C holds has held eleven people;
how many it could hold is a matter of who else has nowhere to go. This
reckoning includes the woman lodger and her respectable succession of
lovers behind the green brocade curtain, but not the family lodging in the
garage.

In the backyard, Samson Moreke, in whose name tenancy of Number 1907

Block C is registered by the authorities, has put up poles and chicken wire
and planted Catawba grapevines that make a pleasant green arbour in
summer. Underneath are three metal chairs and matching table, bearing
traces of white paint, which like the green brocade curtains, the picture of
the horse with orange mane, the poles, chicken wire and vines have been
discarded by the various employers for whom Moreke works in the city as an
itinerant gardener. The arbour is between the garage and the lavatory, which
is shared by everyone on the property, both tenants and lodgers.

On Sundays Moreke sits under his grapevine and drinks a bottle of beer
brought from the shebeen across the road. Even in winter he sits there; it is
warmer out in the midday winter sun than in the house, the shadow of the
vine merely a twisted rope grapes eaten, roof of leaves fallen. Although the
yard is behind the house and there is a yellow dog on guard tied to a packingcase shelter, there is not much privacy. A large portion of the space of the

family living in the garage is taken up by a paraffin-powered refrigerator filled

with soft-drink cans and pots of flavoured yogurt: a useful little business that
serves the community and supplements the earnings of the breadwinner, a
cleaner at the city slaughterhouse. The sliding metal shutter meant for the
egress of a car from the garage is permanently bolted down. All day Sunday
children come on errands to buy, knocking at the old kitchen door, salvaged
from the city, that Moreke has set into the wall of the garage.

A street where there is a shebeen, a house opposite a shebeen cannot be

private, anyway. All weekend drunks wander over the ruts that make the gait
even of the sober seem drunken. The children playing in the street take no
notice of men fuddled between song and argument, who talk to people who
are not there.

As well as friends and relatives, acquaintances of Moreke who have got to

know where he lives through travelling with him on the buses to work walk
over from the shebeen and appear in the yard. Moreke is a man who always
puts aside money to buy the Sunday newspaper; he has to fold away the
paper and talk instead. The guests usually bring a cold quart or two with
them (the shebeen, too, has a paraffin refrigerator, restaurant-size). Talk and
laughter make the dog bark. Someone plays a transistor radio. The chairs are
filled, and some comers stretch on the bit of tough grass. Most of the Sunday
visitors are men but there are women, particularly young ones, who have
gone with them to the shebeen or taken up with them there; these women
are polite and deferent to Morekes wife, Nanike, when she has time to join
the gathering. Often they will hold her latest fifth living baby while she
goes back into the kitchen to cook or hangs her washing on the fence. She
takes a beer or two herself, but although she is in her early thirties and knows
she is still pretty except for a missing front tooth she does not giggle or
get flirtatious. She is content to sit with the new baby on her lap, in the sun,
among men and women like herself, while her husband tells anecdotes which
make them laugh or challenge him. He learns a lot from the newspapers.

Nanike was sitting in the yard with him and his friends the Sunday a cousin
arrived with a couple of hangers-on. They didnt bring beer, but were given
some. There were greetings, but who really hears names? One of the
hangers-on fell asleep on the grass, a boy with a body like a baggy suit. The
other had a yellow face, lighter than anyone else present, narrow as a trowel,
and the irregular pockmarks of the pitted skin were flocked, round the area
where men grow hair, with sparse tufts of black. She noticed he wore a gold

earring in one ear. He had nothing to say but later took up a guitar belonging
to someone else and played to himself. One of the people living in the
garage, crossing the path of the group under the arbour on his way to the
lavatory with his roll of toilet paper, paused to look or listen, but everyone
else was talking too loudly to hear the soft plang-plang, and the after-buzz
when the players palm stilled the instruments vibration.

Moreke went off with his friends when they left, and came back, not late. His
wife had gone to bed. She was sleepy, feeding the baby. Because he stood
there, at the foot of the bed, did not begin to undress, she understood
someone must be with him.

Mtembus friend. Her husbands head indicated the other side of the glasspaned door.

What does he want here now?

I brought him. Mtembu asked.

What for?

Moreke sat down on the bed. He spoke softly, mouthing at her face. He
needs somewhere to stay.

Where was he before, then?

Moreke lifted and dropped his elbows limply at a question not to be asked.

The baby lost the nipple and nuzzled furiously at air. She guided its mouth.
Why cant he stay with Mtembu? You could have told Mtembu no.

Hes your cousin.

Well, I will tell him no. If Mtembu needs somewhere to stay, I have to take
him. But not anyone he brings from the street.

Her husband yawned, straining every muscle in his face. Suddenly he

stopped and began putting together the sheets of his Sunday paper that were
scattered on the floor. He folded them more or less in order, slapping and
smoothing the creases.

Well?

He said nothing, walked out. She heard the voices in the kitchen, but not
what was being said.

He opened their door again and shut it behind him. Its not a business of
cousins. This one is in trouble. You dont read the papers...the blowing up of
that police station...you know, last month? They didnt catch them all... It isnt
safe for Mtembu to keep him any longer. He must keep moving.

Her soft jowls stiffened.

Her husband assured her awkwardly. A few days. Only for a couple of days.
Then a gesture out of the country.

He never takes off the gold earring, even when he sleeps. He sleeps on the
sofa. He didnt bring a blanket, a towel, nothing uses our things. I dont
know what the earring means; when I was a child there were men who came
to work on the mines who had earrings, but in both ears country people.
Hes a town person; another one who reads newspapers. He tidies away the
blankets I gave him and then he reads newspapers the whole day. He cant go
out.

The others at Number 1907 Block C were told the man was Nanike Morekes
cousin, had come to look for work, and had nowhere to stay. There are people
in that position in every house. No one with a roof over his head can say no
to one of the same blood everyone knows that; Morekes wife had not
denied that. But she wanted to know what to say if someone asked the mans
name. He himself answered at once, his strong thin hand twisting the gold
hoop in his ear like a girl. Shisonka. Tell them Shisonka.

And the other name?

Her husband answered. That name is enough.

Moreke and his wife didnt use the name among themselves. They referred to
the man as he and him. Moreke addressed him as Mfo, brother; she called
him simply you. Moreke answered questions nobody asked. He said to his
wife, in front of the man, What is the same blood? Here in this place? If you
are not white, you are all the same blood, here. She looked at her husband
respectfully, as she did when he read to her out of his newspaper.

The woman lodger worked in the kitchen at a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop in
the city, and like Moreke was out at work all day; at weekends she slept at
her mothers place, where her children lived, so she did not know the man
Shisonka never left the house to look for work or for any other reason. Her
lover came to her room only to share the bed, creeping late past whatever
sleeping form might be on the sofa, and leaving before first light to get to a
factory in the white industrial area. The only problem was the family who
lived in the garage. The man had to cross the yard to use the lavatory. The
slaughterhouse cleaners mother and wife would notice he was there, in the
house; that he never went out. It was Morekes wife who thought of this, and
told the woman in the garage her cousin was sick; he had just been
discharged from hospital. And indeed, they took care of him as if he had been
Moreke and his wife, Nanike. They did not have the money to eat meat
often but on Tuesday Moreke bought a pluck from the butchery near the bus
station in the city; the man sat down to eat with them. Moreke brought
cigarettes home the man paid him it was clear he must have cigarettes,
needed cigarettes more than food. And dont let him go out, dont ever let
him go to the shop for cigarettes, or over to Ma Radebe for drink, Moreke told

his wife; you go, if he needs anything, you just leave everything, shut the
house go.

I wash his clothes with our things. His shirt and pullover have labels in
another language, come from some other country. Even the letters are
different. I give him food in the middle of the day. I myself eat in the yard,
with the baby. I told him he should play the music, in there, if he wants to. He
listens to Samsons tapes. How could I keep my own sister out of the house?
When she saw him I said he was a friend of Samson a new friend. She likes
light-skinned. But it means people notice you. It must be very hard to hide.
He doesnt say so. He doesnt look afraid. The beard will hide him; but how
long does it take for a beard to grow, how long, how long before he goes
away?

Every night that week the two men talked. Not in the room with the sofa and
radio-and-cassette-player, if the woman lodger was at home on the other side
of the curtains, but in the room where the Morekes slept. The man had a
kitchen chair Moreke brought in; there was just room for it between the big
bed and the wardrobe. Moreke lay on the bed with a pillow stuffed under his
nape. Sometimes his wife stayed in the kitchen, at other times she came in
and sat with the baby on the bed. She could see Morekes face and the back
of the mans head in the panel mirror of the wardrobe while they talked. The
shape of the head swelled up from the thin neck, a puffball of black kapok.
Deep in, there was a small patch without hair, a skin infection or a healed
wound. His front aspecta narrow yellow face keenly attentive, cigarette
wagging like a finger from the corner of his lips, loop of gold round the lobe of
one of the alert pointed ears seemed unaware of the blemish, something
that attacked him unnoticed from behind.

They talked about the things that interested Moreke; the political meetings
disguised as church services of which he read reports but did not attend. The
man laughed, and argued with Moreke patiently. Whats the use, man? If you
dont stand there? Stand with your feet as well as agree with your head... Yes,
go and get that head knocked if the dogs and the kerries come. Since 76, the
kidsve shown you how... You know now.

Moreke wanted to tell the man what he thought of the Urban Councils the
authorities wanted to set up, and the Committees people themselves had

formed in opposition. As, when he found himself in the company of a sports

promoter, he wanted to give his opinion of the state of soccer today. Those
Council men are nothing to me. You understand? They only want big jobs and
smart cars for themselves. Im a poor man, Ill never have a car. But they say
theyre going to make this place like a white Joburg. Maybe the government
listens to them... They say they can do it. The Committees eh? they say
like I do, those Council men are nothing but they themselves, what can
they do? They know everything is no good here. They talk; they tell us about
it; they go to jail. So whats the use? What can you do?

The man did not tell what he had done. The police station was there, ready
in their minds, ready to their tongues; not spoken.

The man was smiling at Moreke, at something he had heard many times
before and might be leaving behind for good, now. Your Council. Those
dummies. You see this donga called a street, outside? This place without even
electric light in the rooms? You dig beautiful gardens, the flowers smell
nice...and how many people must shit in that stinking hovel in your yard?
How much do you get for digging the ground white people own? You told me
what you get. Top wages: ten rand a day. Just enough for the rent in this
place, and not even the shit-house belongs to you, not even the mud you
bring in from the yard on your shoes...

Moreke became released, excited. The bus fares went up last week. They say
the rent is going up...

Those dummies, thats what they do for you. You see? But the Committee
tells you they dont pay the rent, because you arent paid enough to live in
the beautiful city the dummies promise you. Isnt that the truth? Isnt the
truth what you know? Dont you listen to the ones who speak the truth?

Morekes wife had had, for a few minutes, the expression of one waiting to
interrupt. Ill go to Radebe and get a bottle of beer, if you want.

The two men gave a flitting nod to one another in approval.

Moreke counted out the money. Dont let anybody come back with you.

His wife took the coins without looking up. Im not a fool. The baby was
asleep on the bed. She closed the door quietly behind her. The two men lost
the thread of their talk for a moment; Moreke filled it: A good woman.

We are alone together. The baby likes him. I dont give the breast every time,
now; yesterday when I was fetching the coal he fed the bottle to her. I ask
him what children he has? He only smiles, shakes his head. I dont know if
this means it was silly to ask, because everyone has children.

Perhaps it meant he doesnt know, pretends he doesnt know thinks a lot of

himself, smart young man with a gold ring in his ear has plenty of girlfriends
to get babies with him.

The police station was never mentioned, but one of the nights the man spent
describing to the Moreke couple foreign places he had been to that must
have been before the police station happened. He told about the oldest city
on the African continent, so old it had a city of the dead as well as a city of
the living a whole city of tombs like houses. The religion there was the
same as the religion of the Indian shopkeepers, here at home. Then he had
lived in another kind of country, where there was snow for half the year or
more. It was dark until ten in the morning and again from three oclock in the
afternoon. He described the clothes he had been given to protect him against
the cold. Such people, I can tell you. You cant believe such white people
exist. If our people turn up there...you get everything you need, they just give
it... And theres a museum its out in the country they have ships there
their people sailed all over the world more than 2,000 years ago. They may
even have come here... This pullover is still from them...full of holes now...

Look at that, hai! Moreke admired the intricately worked bands of coloured
wools in a design based upon natural features he did not recognize dark
frozen forms of fir forests and the molecular pattern of snow crystals. Shell
mend it for you.

His wife was willing but apprehensive. Ill try and get the same colours. I
dont know if I can find them here.

The man smiled at the kindness of his own people. She shouldnt take a lot
of trouble. I wont need it, anyway.

No one asked where it was that the pullover wouldnt be needed; what kind of
place, what continent he would be going to when he got away.

After the man had retired to his sofa that night Moreke read the morning
paper he had brought from an employers kitchen in the city. He kept
lowering the sheets slowly and looking around at the room, then returning to
his reading. The baby was restless; but it was not that he commented on.

Its better not to know too much about him.

His wife turned the child on to its belly. Why?

Her face was innocently before his like a mirror he didnt want to look into. He
had kept encouraging the man to go on with his talk of living in foreign
places.

The shadows thrown by the candle capered through the room, bending
furniture and bodies, flying over the ceiling, quieting the baby with wonder.
Because then...if they question us, we wont have anything to tell.

He did bring something. A gun.

He comes into the kitchen, now, and helps me when Im washing up. He
came in, this morning, and put his hands in the soapy water, didnt say
anything, started cleaning up. Our hands were in the grease and soap. I

couldnt see his fingers but sometimes I felt them when they bumped mine.
He scraped the pot and dried everything. I didnt say thanks. To say thank
you to a man its not mans work, he might feel ashamed.

He stays in the kitchen we stay in the kitchen with the baby most of the
day. He doesnt sit in there, anymore, listening to the tapes. I go in and turn
on the machine loud enough for us to hear it well in the kitchen.

By Thursday the tufts of beard were thickening and knitting together on the
mans face. Samson Moreke tried to find Mtembu to hear what plans had
been made but Mtembu did not come in response to messages and was not
anywhere Moreke looked for him. Moreke took the opportunity, while the
woman in whose garden he worked on Thursdays was out, to telephone
Mtembus place of work from her house, but was told that workshop
employees were not allowed to receive calls.

He brought home chicken feet for soup and a piece of beef shank. Figs had
ripened in the Thursday garden and hed been given some in a newspaper
poke. He asked, When do you expect to hear from Mtembu?

The man was reading the sheet of paper stained with milky sap from the
stems of figs. Samson Moreke had never really been in jail himself only the
usual short-term stays for pass offences but he knew from people who had
been inside a long time that there was this need to read every scrap of paper
that might come your way from the outside world.

Well, it doesnt matter. Youre all right here. We can just carry on. I suppose
Mtembu will turn up this weekend.

As if he heard in this resignation Morekes anticipation of the usual Sunday

beer in the yard, the man suddenly took charge of Moreke and his wife,
crumpling the dirty newspaper and rubbing his palms together to rid them of
stickiness. His narrow yellow face was set clear-cut in black hair all round
now, like the framed face of the king in Morekes pack of worn cards. The
black eyes and earring were the same liquid-bright. The perfectly-ironed shirt
he wore was open at the breast in the manner of all attractive young men of

his age. Look, nobody must come here. Saturday, Sunday. None of your
friends. You must shut up this place. Keep them all away. Nobody walking into
the yard from the shebeen. Thats out.

Moreke looked from the man to his wife; back to the man again. Moreke halfcoughed, half-laughed. But how do I do that, man? How do I stop them? I
cant put bars on my gate. Therere the other people, in the garage. They sell
things.

You stay inside. Here in this house, with the doors locked. There are too
many people around at the weekend. Let them think youve gone away.
Moreke still smiled, amazed, helpless. And the one in there, with her boyfriend? Whats she going to think?

Morekes wife spoke swiftly. Shell be at her mothers house.

And now the plan of action fell efficiently into place; each knew his part
within it. Oh yes. Thank the Lord for that. Maybe Ill go over to Radebes
tonight and just say Im hot going to be here Sunday. And Saturday Ill say Im
going to the soccer.

His wife shook her head. Not the soccer. Your friends will want to come and
talk about it afterwards.

Hai, mama! All right, a funeral, far away.... Moreke laughed, and stopped
himself with an embarrassed drawing of mucus back through the nose.

While Im ironing, he cleans the gun.

I saw he needed another rag and I gave it to him.

He asked for oil, and I took cooking oil out of the cupboard, but then I saw in
his face that was not what he wanted. I went to the garage and borrowed
Three-in-One from Nchabas wife.

He never takes out the gun when Samsons here. He knows only he and I
know about it.

I said, what happened there, on your head at the backthat sore? His hand
went to it, under the hair, he doesnt think it shows. Ill get him something for
it, some ointment. If hes still here on Monday.

Perhaps he is cross because I spoke about it.

Then when I came back with the oil, he sat at the kitchen table laughing at
me, smiling, as if I was a young girl. I forgotI felt I was a girl. But I dont
really like that kind of face, his facelight-skinned. You can never forget a face
like that. If you are questioned, you can never say you dont remember what
someone like that looks like.

He picks up the baby as if it belongs to him. To him as well, while we are in

the kitchen together.

That night the two men didnt talk. They seemed to have nothing to say. Like
prisoners who get their last mealie-pap of the day before being locked up for
the night, Morekes wife gave them their meal before dark. Then all three
went from the kitchen to the Morekes room, where any light that might shine
from behind the curtains and give away a presence was directed only towards
a blind: a high corrugated tin fence in a lane full of breast-high khakiweed.
Moreke shared his newspaper. When the man had read it, he tossed through
the third-hand adventure comics and sales promotion pamphlets given away
in city super-markets Nanike Moreke kept; he read the manual Teach Yourself
How to Sell Insurance in which, at some stage, Samson Moreke had been
carefully written on the fly-leaf.

There was no beer. Morekes wife knew her way about her kitchen in the dark;
she fetched the litre bottle of coke that was on the kitchen table and poured
herself a glass. Her husband stayed the offer with a raised hand; the other
mans inertia over the manual was overcome just enough to move his head in
refusal. She had taken up again the cover for the bed she had begun when
she had had some free time, waiting for this fifth child to be born. Crocheted
roses, each caught in a squared web of a looser pattern, were worked
separately and then joined to the whole they slowly extended. The tiny flash
of her steel hook and the hair-thin gold in his ear signalled in candle-light. At
about ten oclock there was a knock at the front door. The internal walls of
these houses are planned at minimum specification for cheapness and a blow
on any part of the house reverberates through every room. The black-framed,
bone-yellow face raised and held, absolutely still, above the manual. Moreke
opened his mouth and, swinging his legs over the side, lifted himself from the
bed. But his wifes hand on his shoulder made him subside again; only the
bed creaked slightly. The slenderness of her body from the waist up was
merely rooted in heavy maternal hips and thighs; with a movement soft as
the breath she expelled, she leant and blew out the candles.

A sensible precaution; someone might follow round the walls of the house
looking for some sign of life. They sat in the dark. There was no bark from the
dog in the yard. The knocking stopped. Moreke thought he heard laughter,
and the gate twang. But the shebeen is noisy on a Friday; the sounds could
have come from anywhere. Just someone whos had a few drinks. It often
happens. Sometimes we dont even wake up, I suppose, ay, Nanike. Morekes
hoarse whisper, strangely, woke the baby, who let out the thin wail that
meets the spectre in a bad dream, breaks through into consciousness a
response to a threat that cant be defeated in the conscious world. In the
dark, they all went to bed.

A city of the dead, a city of the living. It was better when Samson got him to
talk about things like that. Things far away cant do any harm. Well never
have a car, like the Councillors, and well never have to run away to those far
places, like him. Lucky to have this house; many, many people are jealous of
that. I never knew, until this house was so quiet, how much noise people
make at the weekend, I didnt hear the laughing, the talking in the street,
Radebes music going, the terrible screams of people fighting.

On Saturday Moreke took his blue ruled pad and an envelope to the kitchen
table. But his wife was peeling pumpkin and slicing onions; there was no

space, so he went back to the room where the sofa was, and his radio-andcassette player. First he addressed the envelope to their twelve-year-old boy
at mission school. It took him the whole morning to write a letter, although he
could read so well. Once or twice he asked the man how to spell a word in
English.

He lay smoking on his bed, the sofa. Why in English?

Rapula knows English very well.... It helps him to get letters....

You shouldnt send him away from here, baba. You think its safer, but you
are wrong. Its like you and the meetings. The more you try to be safe, the
worse it will be for your children. He stared quietly at Moreke. And look, now
Im here.

Yes.

And you look after me.

Yes.

And youre not afraid.

Yes, were afraid...but of many things .... When I come home with
money...three times tsotsis have hit me, taken everything. You see here
where I was cut on the cheek. This arm was broken. I couldnt work. Not even
push the lawn-mower. I had to pay some young one to hold my jobs for me.

The man smoked and smiled. I dont understand you. You see? I dont
understand you. Bring your children home, man. Were shut up in the ghetto
to kill each other. Thats what they want, in their white city. So you send the

children away; thats what they want, too. To get rid of us. We must all stick
together. Thats the only way to fight our way out.

That night he asked if Moreke had a chess set.

Moreke giggled, gave clucks of embarrassment. That board with the little
dolls? Im not an educated man! I dont know those games!

They played together the game that everybody knows, that is, played on the
pavements outside shops and in factory yards, with the board drawn on
concrete or in dust, and bottle-tops for counters. This time a handful of dried
beans from the kitchen served, and a board drawn by Moreke on a box-lid. He
won game after game from the man. His wife had the Primus stove in the
room, now, and she made tea. The game was not resumed. She had added
three completed squares to her bed-cover in two nights; after the tea, she did
not take it up again. They sat listening to Saturday night, all round them,
pressing in upon the hollow cement units of which the house was built. Often
trampling steps seemed just about to halt at the front or back door. The
splintering of wood under a truncheon or the shatter of the window-panes,
thin ice under the weight of the roving dark outside, waited upon every
second. The womans eyelids slid down, fragile and faintly greasy, outlining
intimately the aspect of the orbs beneath, in sleep. Her face became
unguarded as the babys. Every now and then she would start, come to
herself again. But her husband and the man made no move to go to bed. The
man picked up and ran the fine head of her crochet hook under the rind of
each fingernail, again and again, until the tool had done the cleaning job to
satisfaction.

When the man went to bed at last, by the light of the cigarette lighter he
shielded in his hand to see his way to the sofa, he found she had put a plastic
chamber-pot on the floor. Probably the husband had thought of it.

All Sunday morning the two men worked together on a fault in Morekes tape
player, though they were unable to test it with the volume switched on.
Moreke could not afford to take the player to a repair shop. The man seemed
to think the fault a simple matter; like any other city youngster, he had grown
up with such machines. Morekes wife cooked mealie-rice and made a curry

gravy for the Sunday meal. Should I go to Radebe and get beer? She had
followed her husband into their room to ask him alone.

You want to advertise we are here? You know what he said.

Ask him if it matters, if I go a woman.

Im not going to ask. Did he say he wants beer? Did I?

But in the afternoon she did ask something. She went straight to the man, not
Moreke. I have to go out to the shop. It was very hot in the closed house; the
smell of curry mixed with the smell of the baby in the fug of its own warmth
and wrappings. He wrinkled his face, exposed clenched teeth in a suppressed
yawn; what shopshad she forgotten it was Sunday? She understood his
reaction. But there were corner shops that sold essentials even on Sundays;
he must know that. I have to get milk. Milk for the baby.

She stood there, in her over-trodden slippers, her old skirt and cheap blouse
a woman not to be noticed among every other woman in the streets. He
didnt refuse her. No need. Not after all this past week. Not for the baby. She
was not like her husband, big-mouth, friendly with everyone. He nodded; it
was a humble errand that wouldnt concern him.

She went out of the house just as she was, her money in her hand. Moreke
and the baby were asleep in their room. The street looked new, bright,
refreshing, after the dim house. A small boy with a toy machine-gun covered
her in his fire, chattering his little white teeth with rat-a-tat-tttt. Ma Radebe,
the shebeen-keeper, her hair plaited with blue and red beads, her beautiful
long red nails resting on the steering wheel, was backing her car out of her
gateway. She braked to let her neighbour pass and leaned from the car
window. My dear in English I was supposed to be gone from this place
two hours ago. Im due at a big wedding that will already be over .... How are
you? Didnt see your husband for a few days... nothing wrong across the
road?

Morekes wife stood and shook her head. Radebe was not one who expected
or waited for answers when she greeted anyone. When the car had driven off
Morekes wife went on down the street and down the next one, past the shop
where young boys were gathered scuffling and dancing to the shop-keepers
radio, and on to the purplish brick building with the security fence round it
and a flag flying. One of her own people was on guard outside leaning on a
hand machine-gun. She went up the steps and into the office, where there
were more of her own people in uniform, but one of them in charge. She
spoke in her own language to her own kind, but they seemed disbelieving.
They repeated the name of that other police station, that was blown up, and
asked her if she was sure? She said she was quite sure. Then they took her to
the white officer and she told in English There, in my house, 1907 Block C.
He has been there a week. He has a gun.

I dont know why I did it. I get ready to say that to anyone who is going to ask
me, but nobody in this house asks. The baby laughs at me while I wash him,
stares up while were alone in the house and hes feeding at the breast, and
to him I say out loud: I dont know why.

A week after the man was taken away that Sunday by the security police, Ma
Radebe again met Morekes wife in their street. The shebeen-keeper gazed at
her for a moment, and spat.

ALICE MUNRO
"Boys And Girls"
My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in
the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and
skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the
Montreal Fur Traders. These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to
hang, one on each side of the kitchen door. Against a background of cold blue
sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers, plumed
adventures planted the flags of England and or of France; magnificent
savages bent their backs to the portage.
For several weeks before Christmas, my father worked after supper in the
cellar of our house. the cellar was whitewashed , and lit by a hundred-watt
bulb over the worktable. My brother Laird and I sat on the top step and
watched. My father removed the pelt inside-out from the body of the fox,
which looked surprisingly small, mean, and rat-like, deprived of its arrogant

weight of fur. The naked, slippery bodies were collected in a sack and buried
in the dump. One time the hired man, Henry Bailey, had taken a swipe at me
with this sack, saying, "Christmas present!" My mother thought that was not
funny. In fact she disliked the whole pelting operation--that was what the
killing, skinning, and preparation of the furs was called and wished it did not
have to take place in the house. There was the smell. After the pelt had been
stretched inside-out on a long board my father scraped away delicately,
removing the little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat; the smell
of blood and animal fat, which the strong primitive odor of the fox itself,
penetrated all parts of the house. I found it reassuringly seasonal, like the
smell of oranges and pine needles.
Henry Bailey suffered from bronchial troubles. He would cough and cough
until his narrow face turned scarlet, and his light blue, derisive eyes filled up
with tears; then he took the lid off the stove, and, standing well back, shot
out a great clot of phlegm hss straight into the heart of the flames. We
admired his for this performance and for his ability to make his stomach
growl at will, and for his laughter, which was full of high whistlings and
gurglings and involved the whole faulty machinery of his chest. It was
sometimes hard to tell what he was laughing at, and always possible that it
might be us.
After we had sent to be we could still smell fox and still hear Henry's laugh,
but these things reminders of the warm, safe, brightly lit downstairs world,
seemed lost and diminished, floating on the stale cold air upstairs. We were
afraid at nigh in the winter. We were not afraid of outside though this was the
time of year when snowdrifts curled around our house like sleeping whales
and the wind harassed us all night, coming up from the buried fields, the
frozen swamp, with its old bugbear chorus of threats and misery. We were
afraid of inside, the room where we slept. At this time upstairs of our house
was not finished. A brick chimney went up on wall. In the middle of the floor
was a square hole, with a wooden railing around it; that was where the stairs
came up. On the other side of the stairwell wee the things that nobody had
any use for anymore a soldiery roll of linoleum, standing on end, a wicker
bay carriage, a fern basket, china jugs and basins with cracks in them, a
picture of the Battle of Balaclava, very sad to look at. I had told Laird, as soon
as he was old enough to understand such things, that bats and skeletons
lived over there; whenever a man escaped from the county jail, twenty miles
away, I imagined that he had somehow let himself in the window and was
hiding behind the linoleum. But we had rules to keep us safe. When the light
was on, we were safe as long as we did not step off the square of worn carpet
which defined our bedroom-space; when the light was off no place was safe
but the beds themselves. I had to turn out the light kneeling on the end of my
bed, and stretching as far as I could to reach the cord.

In the dark we lay on our beds, our narrow life rafts, and fixed our eyes on
the faint light coming up the stairwell, and sang songs. Laird sang "Jingle
Bells", which he would sing any time, whether it was Christmas or not, and I
sang "Danny Boy". I loved the sound of my own voice, frail and supplicating,
rising in the dark. We could make out the tall frosted shapes of the windows
now, gloomy and white. When I came to the part, y the cold sheets but by
pleasurable emotions almost silenced me. You'll kneel and say an Ave there
above me What was an Ave? Every day I forgot to find out.
Laird went straight from singing to sleep, I could hear his long, satisfied,
bubbly breaths. Now for the time that remained to me, the most perfectly
private and perhaps the best time of the whole day, I arranged myself tightly
under the covers and went on with one of the stories I was telling myself from
night to night. These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little
older; they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that
presented opportunities for courage, boldness, and self-sacrifice, as mine
never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that
the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves
who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my
back). Rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee,
acknowledging the townspeoples gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out
piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the
Orangemens Day parade). There was always riding and shooting in these
stories, though I had only been on a horse twice the first because we did
not own a saddle and the second time I had slid right around and dropped
under the horse's feet; it had stepped placidly over me. I really was learning
to shoot, but could not hit anything yet, not even tin cans on fence posts.
Alive, the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them. It was
surrounded by a high guard fence, like a medieval town, with a gate that was
padlocked at night. Along the streets of this town were ranged large, sturdy
pens. Each of them had a real door that a man could go through, a wooden
ramp along the wire, for the foxes to run up and down on, and a kennel
sometimes like a clothes chest with airholes where they slept where they
slept and stayed in winter and had their young. There were feeding and
watering dishes attached to the wire in such a way that they could be
emptied and cleaned from the outside. The dishes were made of old tin cans,
and the ramps and kennels of odds and ends of old lumber. Everything was
tidy and ingenious; my father was tirelessly inventive and his favorite book in
the world was Robinson Crusoe. He had fitted a tin drum on a wheelbarrow,
for bringing water down to the pens. This was my job in the summer, when
the foxes had to have water twice a day. Between nine and ten o'clock in the
morning, and again after supper. I filled the drum at the pump and trundled it
down through the barnyard to the pens, where I parked it, and filled my

watering can and went along the streets. Laird came too, with his little cream
and green gardening can, filled too full and knocking against his legs and
slopping water on his canvas shoes. I had the real watering can, my father's,
though I could only carry it three-quarters full.
The foxes all had names, which were printed on a tin plate and hung
beside their doors. They were not named when they were born, but when
they survived the first years pelting and were added to the breeding stock.
Those my father had named were called names like Prince, Bob, Wally, and
Betty. Those I had named were called Star or Turk, or Maureen or Diana. Laird
named one Maude after a hired girl we had when he was little, one Harold
after a boy at school, and one Mexico, he did not say why.
Naming them did not make pets out of them, or anything like it. Nobody
but my father ever went into the pens, and he had twice had blood-poisoning
from bites. When I was bringing them their water they prowled up and down
on the paths they had made inside their pens, barking seldom they saved
that for nighttime, when they might get up a chorus of community frenzy--but
always watching me, their eyes burning, clear gold, in their pointed,
malevolent faces. They were beautiful for their delicate legs and heavy,
aristocratic tails and the bright fur sprinkled on dark down their back which
gave them their name but especially for their faces, drawn exquisitely
sharp in pure hostility, and their golden eyes.
Besides carrying water I helped my father when he cut the long grass, and
the lamb's quarter and flowering money-musk, that grew between the pens.
He cut with they scythe and I raked into piles. Then he took a pitchfork and
threw fresh-cut grass all over the top of the pens to keep the foxes cooler and
shade their coats, which were browned by too much sun. My father did not
talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. In this he was quite
different from my mother, who, if she was feeling cheerful, would tell me all
sorts of things the name of a dog she had had when she was a little girl, the
names of boys she had gone out with later on when she was grown up, and
what certain dresses of hers had looked like she could not imagine now
what had become of them. Whatever thoughts and stories my father had
were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions.
Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride.
One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my
father said, "Like to have you meet my new hired hand." I turned away and
raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure.
"Could of fooled me." said the salesman. "I thought it was only a girl."
After the grass was cut, it seemed suddenly much later in the year. I
walked on stubble in the earlier evening aware of the reddening skies, on

entering silence of fall. When I wheeled the tank out of the gates and put
padlocks on. It was almost dark. One night at this time I saw my mother and
father standing talking on the little rise of ground we called the gangway, in
front of the barn. My father had just come from the meathouse; he had his
stiff bloody apron on, and a pail of cut-up meat in his hand.
It was an odd thing to see my mother down at the barn. She did not often
come out of the house unless it was to do something hang out the wash or
dig potatoes in the garden. She looked out of place, with her bare lumpy legs,
not touched by the sun, her apron still on and damp across the stomach from
the supper dishes. Her hair was tied up in a kerchief, wisps of it falling out.
She would tie her hair up like this in the morning, saying she did not have
time to do it properly, and it would stay tied up all day. It was true, too; she
really did not have time. These days our back porch was piled with baskets
of peaches and grapes and pears, bought in town, and onions an tomatoes
and cucumbers grown at home, all waiting to be made into jelly and jam and
preserves, pickles and chili sauce. In the kitchen there was a fire in the stove
all day, jars clinked in boiling water, sometimes a cheesecloth bag was strung
on a pole between two chairs straining blue-back grape pulp for jelly. I was
given jobs to do and I would sit at the table peeling peaches that had been
soaked in hot water, or cutting up onions, my eyes smarting and streaming.
As soon as I was done I ran out of the house, trying to get out of earshot
before my mother thought of what she wanted me to do next. I hated the hot
dark kitchen in summer, the green blinds and the flypapers, the same old
oilcloth table and wavy mirror and bumpy linoleum. My mother was too tired
and preoccupied to talk to me, she had no heart to tell about the Normal
School Graduation Dance; sweat trickled over her face and she was always
counting under breath, pointing at jars, dumping cups of sugar. It seemed to
me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing;
work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically
important.
I wheeled the tank up tot he barn, where it was kept, and I heard my
mother saying, "Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you'll have a real
help."
What my father said I did not hear. I was pleased by the way he stood
listening, politely as he would to a salesman or a stranger, but with an air of
wanting to get on with his real work. I felt my mother had no business down
here and I wanted him to feel the same way. What did she mean about Laird?
He was no help to anybody. Where was he now? Swinging himself sick on the
swing, going around in circles, or trying to catch caterpillars. He never once
stayed with me till I was finished.
"And then I can use her more in the house," I heard my mother say. She

had a dead-quiet regretful way of talking about me that always made me

uneasy. "I just get my back turned and she runs off. It's not like I had a girl in
the family at all."
I went and sat on a feed bag in the corner of the barn, not wanting to
appear when this conversation was going on. My mother, I felt, was not to be
trusted. She was kinder than my father and more easily fooled, but you could
not depend on her, and the real reasons for the things she said and did were
not to be known. She loved me, and she sat up late at night making a dress
of the difficult style I wanted, for me to wear when school started, but she
was also my enemy. She was always plotting. She was plotting now to get me
to stay in the house more, although she knew I hated it (because she knew I
hated it) and keep me from working for my father. It seemed to me she would
do this simply out of perversity, and to try her power. It did not occur to me
that she could be lonely, or jealous. No grown-up could be; they were too
fortunate. I sat and kicked my heels monotonously against a feed bag, raising
dust, and did not come out till she was gone.
At any rate, I did not expect my father to pay any attention to what she
said. Who could imagine Laird doing my work Laird remembering the
padlock and cleaning out the watering dishes with a leaf on the end of a stick,
or even wheeling the tank without it tumbling over? It showed how little my
mother knew about the way things really were.
I had forgotten to say what the foxes were fed. My father's bloody apron
reminded me. They were fed horsemeat. At this time most farmers still kept
horses, and when a horse got too old to work, or broke a leg or got down and
would not get up, as they sometimes did , the owner would call my father,
and he and Henry went out to the farm in the truck. Usually they shot and
butchered the horse there, paying the farmer from five to twelve dollars. If
they had already too much meat on hand, they would bring the horse back
alive, and keep it for a few days or weeks in our stable, until the meat was
needed. After the war the farmers were buying tractors and gradually getting
rid of horses, that there was just no use for any more. If this happened in the
winter we might keep the horse in our stable till spring, for we had plenty of
hay and if there was a lot of snow and the plow did not always get our roads
cleared it was convenient to be able to go to town with a horse and cutter.
The winter I was eleven years old we had two horses in the stable. We did
not know what names they had had before, so we called them Mack and
Flora. Mack was an old black workhorse, sooty and indifferent. Flora was a
sorrel mare, a driver. We took them both out in the cutter. Mack was slow and
easy to handle. Flora was given to fits of violent alarm, veering at cars and
even at other horses, but we loved her speed and high-stepping, her general
air of gallantry and abandon. On Saturdays we wen down to the stable and as

soon as we opened the door on its cozy, animal-smelling darkness Flora

threw up her head, rolled here eyes, whinnied despairingly, and pulled herself
through a crisis of nerves on the spot. It was not safe to go into her stall, she
would kick.
This winter also I began to hear a great deal more on the theme my
mother had sounded when she had been talking in front of the barn. I no
longer felt safe. It seemed that in the minds of the people around me there
was a steady undercurrent of thought, not to be deflected, on this one
subject. The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened
like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not,
as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a
definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment.
Also it was a joke on me. Once Laird and I were fighting, and for the first time
ever I had to use all my strength against him; even so, he caught and pinned
my arm for a moment, really hurting me. Henry saw this, and laughed,
saying, "Oh, that there Lairds gonna show you, one of these days!" Laird was
getting a lot bigger. But I was getting bigger too.
My grandmother came to stay with us for a few weeks and I heard other
things. "Girls don't slam doors like that." "Girls keep their knees together
when they sit down." And worse still, when I asked some questions, "That's
none of girls business." I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly
as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free.
When spring came, the horses were let out in the barnyard. Mack stood
against the barn wall trying to scratch his neck and haunches, but Flora
trotted up and down and reared at the fences, clattering her hooves against
the rails. Snow drifts dwindled quickly, revealing the hard gray and brown
earth, the familiar rise and fall of the ground, plain and bare after the
fantastic landscape of winter. There was a great feeling of opening-out, of
release. We just wore rubbers now, over our shoes; our feet felt ridiculously
light. One Saturday we went out to the stable and found all the doors open,
letting in the unaccustomed sunlight and fresh air. Henry was there, just
idling around looking at his collection of calendars which were tacked up
behind the stalls in a part of the stable my mother probably had never seen.
"Come say goodbye to your old friend Mack?" Henry said. "Here, you give
him a taste of oats." He poured some oats into Lairds cupped hands and
Laird went to feed Mack. Mack's teeth were in bad shape. He ate very slowly,
patiently shifting the oats around in his mouth, trying to find a stump of a
molar to grind it on. "Poor old Mack, said Henry mournfully. "When a horse's
teethes gone, he's gone. That's about the way.
"Are you going to shoot him today?" I said. Mack and Flora had been in the

stables so long I had almost forgotten they were going to be shot.

Henry didn't answer me. Instead he started to sing in a high, trembly,
mocking-sorrowful voice. Oh, there's no more work, for poor Uncle Ned, he's
gone where the good darkies go. Mack's thick, blackish tongue worked
diligently at Lairds hand. I went out before the song was ended and sat down
on the gangway.
I had never seen them shot a horse, but I knew where it was done. Last
summer Laird and I had come upon a horse's entrails before they were
buried. We had thought it was a big black snake, coiled up in the sun. That
was around in the field that ran up beside the barn. I thought that if we went
inside the barn, and found a wide crack or a knothole to look through, we
would be able to see them do it. It was not something I wanted to see; just
the same, if a thing really happened it was better to see, and know.
My father came down from the house, carrying a gun.
"What are you doing here?" he said.
"Nothing."
"Go on up and play around the house."
He sent Laird out of the stable. I said to Laird, "Do you want to see them
shoot Mack?" and without waiting for an answer led him around to the front
door of the barn, opened it carefully, and went in. "Be quiet or they'll hear
us," I said. We could hear Henry and my father talking in the stable; then the
heavy shuffling steps of Mack being backed out of his stall.
In the loft it was cold and dark. Thin crisscrossed beams of sunlight fell
through the cracks. The hay was low. It was rolling country, hills and hollows,
slipping under our feet. About four feet up was a beam going around the
walls, We piled hay up in one corned and I boosted Laird up and hoisted
myself. The beam was not very wide; we crept along it with our hands flat on
the barn walls. There were plenty of knotholes, and I found one that gave me
the view I wanted a corner of the barnyard, the gate, part of the field. Laird
did not have a knothole and began to complain.
I showed him a widened crack between two boards. "Be quiet and wait. If
they hear you you'll get us in trouble."
My father came in sight carrying the gun. Henry was leading Mack by the
halter. He dropped it and took out his cigarette papers and tobacco; he rolled
cigarettes for my father and himself. While this was going on Mack nosed
around in the old, dead grass along the fence. Then my father opened the
gate and they took Mack through. Henry led Mack away from the path to a

patch of ground and they talked together, not loud enough for us to hear.
Mack again began to searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not
found. My father walked away in a straight line, and stopped short at a
distance which seemed to suit him. Henry was walking away from Mack too,
but sideways, still negligently holding on to the halter. My father raised the
gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot
him.
Mack did not collapse at once but swayed, lurched sideways, and fell, first
on his side; then he rolled over on his back and, amazingly, kicked his legs for
a few seconds in the air. At this Henry laughed, as if Mack had done a trick for
him. Laird, who had drawn a long, groaning breath of surprise when the shot
was fired, said out loud, "He's not dead." And it seemed to me it might be
true. But his legs stopped, he rolled on his side again, his muscles quivered
and sank. The two men walked over and looked at him in a businesslike way;
they bent down and examined his forehead where the bullet had gone in, and
now I saw his blood on the brown grass.
"Now they just skin him and cut him up," I said. "Let's go." My legs were a
little shaky and I jumped gratefully down into the hay. "Now you've seen how
they shoot a horse," I said in a congratulatory way, as if I had seen it many
times before. "Let's see if any barn cats had kittens in the hay." Laird
jumped. He seemed young and obedient again. Suddenly I remembered how,
when he was little, I had brought him into the barn and told him to climb the
ladder to the top beam. That was in the spring, too, when the hay was low. I
had done it out of a need for excitement, a desire for something to happen so
that I could tell about it. He was wearing a little bulky brown and white
checked coat, made down from one of mine. He went all the way up just as I
told him, and sat down from one of the beam with the hay far below him on
one side, and the barn floor and some old machinery on the other. Then I ran
screaming to my father. "Lairds up on the top beam!" My father came, my
mother came, my father went up the ladder talking very quietly and brought
Laird down under his arm, at which my mother leaned against the ladder and
began to cry. They said to me, "Why weren't you watching him?" but nobody
ever knew the truth. Laird did not know enough to tell. But whenever I saw
the brown and white checked coat hanging in the closet , or at the bottom of
the rag bag, which was where it ended up, I felt a weight in my stomach, the
sadness of unexorcised guilt.
I looked at Laird, who did not even remember this, and I did not like the
look on this thing, winter-paled face. His expression was not frightened or
upset, but remote, concentrating. "Listen," I said in an unusually bright and
friendly voice, "you aren't going to tell, are you?"
"No," he said absently.

"Promise."
"Promise," he said. I grabbed the hand behind his back to make sure he
was not crossing his fingers. Even so, he might have a nightmare; it might
come out that way. I decided I had better work hard to get all thoughts of
what he had seen out of his mind which, it seemed to m, could not hold
very many things at a time. I got some money I had saved and that afternoon
we went into Jubilee and saw a show, with Judy Canova, at which we both
laughed a great deal. After that I thought it would be all right.
Two weeks later I knew they were going to shoot Flora. I knew from the
night before, when I heard my mother ask if the hay was holding out all right,
and my father said, "Well, after tomorrow there'll just be the cow, and we
should be able to put her out to grass in another week." So I knew it was
Flora's turn in the morning.
This time I didn't think of watching it. That was something to see just one
time. I had not thought about it very often since, but sometimes when I was
busy, working at school, or standing in front of the mirror combing my hair
and wondering if I would be pretty when I grew up, the whole seen would
flash into my mind: I would see the easy, practiced way my father raised the
gun, and hear Henry laughing when Mack kicked his legs in the air. I did not
have any great feelings of horror and opposition, such as a city child might
have had; I was too used to seeing the death of animals as a necessity by
which we lived. Yet I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new wariness, a
sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work.
It was a fine day, and we were going around the yard picking up tree
branches that had been torn off in winter storms. This was something we had
been told to do, and also we wanted to use them to make a teepee. We hard
Flora whinny, and then my father's voice and Henry's shouting, and we ran
down to the barnyard to see what was going on.
The stable door was open. Henry had just brought Flora out, and she had
broken away from him. She was running free in the barnyard, from one end to
the other. We climbed on the fence. It was exciting to see her running,
whinnying, going up on her hind legs, prancing and threatening like a horse in
a Western movie, an unbroken ranch horse, though she was just an old driver,
an old sorrel mare. My father and Henry ran after her and tried to grab the
dangling halter. They tried to work her into a corner, and they had almost
succeeded when she made a run between them, wild-eyed, and disappeared
round the corner of the barn. We heard the rails clatter down as she got over
the fence, and Henry yelled. "She's into the field now!"
That meant she was in the long L-shaped field that ran up by the house. If
she got around the center, heading towards the lane, the gate was open; the

truck had been driven into the filed this morning. My father shouted to me,
because I was on the other side of the fence, nearest the lane, "Go shut the
gate!"
I could run very fast. I ran across the garden, past the tree where our swing
was hung, and jumped across a ditch into the lane. There was the open gate.
She had not got out, I could not see her up on the road; she must have run to
the other end of the field,. There gate was heavy. I lifted it out of the gravel
and carried it across the roadway. I had it half way across when she came in
sight, galloping straight toward me. There was just time to get the chain on.
Laird came scrambling though the ditch to help me.
Instead of shutting the gate, I opened it as wide as I could. I did not make
any decision to do this, it was just what I did. Flora never slowed down; she
galloped straight past me, and Laird jumped up and down, yelling, "Shut it,
shut it!" even after it was too late. My father and Henry appeared in the field
a moment too late to see what I had done. They only saw Flora heading for
the township road. They would think I had not got there in time.
They did not waste any time asking about it. They went back to the barn
and got the gun and the knives they used, and put these in the truck; then
they turned the truck around and came bounding up the field toward us. Laird
called to them, "Let me got too, let me go too!" and Henry stopped the truck
and they took him in. I shut the gate after they were all gone.
I supposed Laird would tell. I wondered what would happen to me. I had
never disobeyed my father before, and I could not understand why I had done
it. I had done it. Flora would not really get away. They would catch up with
her in the truck. Or if they did not catch her this morning somebody would
see her and telephone us this afternoon or tomorrow. There was no wild
country here for her, we needed the meat to feed the foxes, we needed the
foxes to make our living. All I had done was make more work for my father
who worked hard enough already. And when my father found out about it he
was not going to trust me any more; he would know that I was not entirely on
his side. I was on Flora's side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even
to her. Just the same, I did not regret it; when she came running at me I held
the gate open, that was the only thing I could do.
I went back to the house, and my mother said, "What's all the
commotion?" I told her that Flora had kicked down the fence and got away.
"Your poor father," she said, "now he'll have to go chasing over the
countryside. Well, there isn't any use planning dinner before one." She put up
the ironing board. I wanted to tell her, but thought better of it and went
upstairs and sat on my bed.
Lately I had been trying to make my part of the room fancy, spreading the

bed with old lace curtains, and fixing myself a dressing table with some
leftovers of cretonne for a skirt. I planned to put up some kind of barricade
between my bed and Lairds, to keep my section separate from his. In the
sunlight, the lace curtains were just dusty rags. We did not sing at night any
more. One night when I was singing Laird said, "You sound silly," and I went
right on but the next night I did not start. There was not so much need to
anyway, we were no longer afraid. We knew it was just old furniture over
there, old jumble and confusion. We did not keep to the rules. I still stayed
away after Laird was asleep and told myself stories, but even in these stories
something different was happening, mysterious alterations took place. A
story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild
animals, and for a while I might rescue people; then things would change
around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me. It might be a boy from
our class at school, or even Mr. Campbell, our teacher, who tickled girls under
the arms. And at this point the story concerned itself at great length with
what I looked like how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on; by
the time I had these details worked out the real excitement of the story was
lost.
It was later than one o'clock when the truck came back. The tarpaulin was
over the back, which meant there was meat in it. My mother had to heat
dinner up all over again. Henry and my father had changed from their bloody
overalls into ordinary working overalls in the barn, and they washed arms and
necks and faces at the sink, and splashed water on their hair and combed it.
Laird lifted his arm to show off a streak of blood. "We shot old Flora," he said,
"and cut her up in fifty pieces."
"Well I don't want to hear about it," my mother said. "And don't come to
my table like that."
My father made him go was the blood off.
We sat down and my father said grace and Henry pasted his chewing gum
on the end of his fork, the way he always did; when he took it off he would
have us admire the pattern. We began to pass the bowls of steaming,
overcooked vegetables. Laird looked across the table at me and said proudly
distinctly, "Anyway it was her fault Flora got away."
"What?" my father aid.
"She could of shut the gate and she didn't. She just open it up and Flora
ran out."
"Is that right?" m father said.
Everybody at the table was looking at me. I nodded, swallowing food with

great difficulty. To my shame, tears flooded my eyes.

My father made a curt sound of disgust. "What did you do that for?"
I didn't answer. I put down my fork and waited to be sent from the table, still
not looking up.
But this did not happen. For some time nobody said anything, then Laird
said matter-of-factly, "She's crying."
"Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humor
the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he
said
I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.
[1968]