Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the whittled remains of Colesberg kopje had grown up a miniature range of man-made hillocks. These were the tailings from the diamond cradles, dumped haphazardly on the open ground beyond the settlement.

Some of these artificial hills were already twenty feet high, and they formed a wasteland where no tree nor blade of grass grew. A maze of narrow footpaths laced the area, made by the daily pilgrimage of hundreds of black workers to the pit.

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

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

one of the twins stood silhouetted against the pale blue noon sky.

His thumbs hooked into his braces, his shaven head thrust forward, his eyes with their thin colourless lashes as vicious as those of a ferret.

"You told, Jordie-girlie," the twin accused flatly.

"I never told," Jordan denied, his voice squeaking uncertainly.

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

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

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

jordie-dear," called one twin.

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

"Little girls shouldn't tell tales."

"I'm not a girl," whispered Jordan, backing away from him.

"Then you shouldn't have curls; only girls have curls."

Douglas groped in his pocket and brought out a bonehandled clasp knife. He opened the blade with his teeth.

"We are going to turn you into a boy, jordie-girl."

"Then we are going to teach you not to tell tales."

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

Jordan's gaze fastened on the branch with sickened fascination. It was twice as thick as a man's thumb, more a club than a cane, and the thorns were half an inch long, each on a little raised knob of rough black bark.

Henry swung it in an experimental cut and it hissed like an adder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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