Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 50

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The moon was hpping the horizon, putting the stars to pale shame. It was still a few days short of full, but on the stoep of Zouga's cottage it was light enough to read the headlines of a crumpled copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser that lay beside Zouga's empty riempie chair.

The only sounds were the distant baying of a mooncrazy hound, and the flirt of bats" wings as they spun high parabolas in the moonlight or came fluttering in under the overhang of the verandah roof to pick a moth from the air. The front door was stopped wide open to allow the night's cool to penetrate the inner rooms of the cottage. Jordan crept through it timidly.

He was bare-footed, and the old flannel shirt he wore as a nightdress was one of Zouga's cast-offs. The tails flapped around his bare knees as he moved down the verandah and stopped before the tall falcon-headed carving that stood on its pedestal at the end of the covered stoep.

The slanting moonlight lit the graven bird image from the side, leaving half of it in black mysterious shadow.

Jordan stopped before the image. The clay floor was cold on his bare soles, and he shivered not entirely from the cold, and looked about him surreptitiously.

Zouga's camp slept, that deep pre-dawn sleep.

Jordan's curls, bushed wildly from the pillow, sparkled like a halo in the moonlight, and his eyes were in shadow, dark holes like those of a skull. All night he had lain rigid in his narrow bed and listened to his brother's heavy breathing through his swollen nose.

Lack of sleep made Jordan feel light-headed and fey.

He opened the little twist of newspaper which he had hidden under his pillow when he went to bed.

it contained half a handful of rice and a thin slice of cold roasted lamb. He laid it at the foot of the soapstone column, and stepped back.

Once more he looked about him to make sure that he was alone and unobserved. Then he sank down to his bare knees with the book held against his chest, and bowed his head.

The book was bound in blue leather with gold leaf titling on its spine: Religions of the American Indians.

"I greet you, Panes," Jordan whispered, his swollen eyelids tightly closed.

"The Indians of California, the Acagchemem tribe adore the great buzzard Panes." The book Jordan held to his breast had become far and away the most precious of all his possessions. He did not like to remember how he had obtained it. It was the only thing he had ever stolen in his life, but he had been forgiven for that sin.

He had prayed to the goddess and been forgiven.

"The Panes was a woman, a young and beautiful woman, who had run off into the mountains and been changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich."

Jordan knew with all his being whom this description depicted. His mother had been young and beautiful, and she had run away to the black mountain of Death without him.

Now he opened the book and bowed his head over it.

It was not light enough to read the fine print of the text, but Jordan knew the invocation to the goddess by heart.

"Why did you run away?" he whispered. "You would have been better with us. Are we not the ones who love you? "It was better that you stayed, for now you are Panes. If we make you a sacrifice of rice and meat, will you not come back to us? See the sacrifice we set for you, great Panes."

The morning wind stirred, and Jordan heard the branch of the camel-thorn scrape upon the roof before the wind touched him. It was a warm, soft wind, and it ruffled his hair.

Jordan clenched his eyes even tighter, and the little insects of awe crawled upon his skin. The goddess had many ways of showing her presence. This was the first time she had come as a soft warm wind.

"Oh great Panes, I don't want to wallow in filth like Ralph. I don't ever want to smell the trough where a thousand pigs have wallowed. I don't want to go mad, and have my teeth rot out of my mouth." He whispered softly but ardently, and then the tears began to squeeze out from between his lids.

"Please save me, great Panes." He poured out all his horror and disgust to the sacred bird-woman. "They were hitting each other. They were hating each other, and the blood, oh the blood At last he was silent, head bowed, shivering, and then he rose to his bare feet, and for the first time looked at the image.

The bird stared back at him stonily, but Jordan cocked his lovely golden head as though he were listening, and the moonlight silvered his skin.

He turned, still clutching the book, and crept back along the verandah. As he turned the far corner there was a furry rush of dark bodies out of the shadows, and the soft squeals of the bush rats as they squabbled over the sacrifice.

Jordan pushed open the door of the kitchen and it smelled of woodsmoke and curry powder and carbolic soap.

He stooped to the ashbox of the black iron stove, and when he blew lightly through the grating the ashes glowed.

He pushed a long wax taper through the bars and blew again and a little blue flame popped into life. He carried it carefully across the kitchen, sheltering it with his cupped hand, and transferred the flame to the stump of candle in the neck of the dark green champagne bottle.

Then he blew out the taper and placed the bottle on the scrubbed yellow deal table and stepped back.

For a few seconds longer he hesitated, then he took the skirts of the faded and patched nightshirt, lifted them as high as his shoulders and looked down at his body.

The puppy fat had disappeared from his belly and hips.

His navel was a dark eye in the flat clean plain of his trunk, and his legs were gracefully shaped. His buttocks lean and tight, like immature fruit.

His body was smooth and hairless except for the golden wisps at the juncture of his legs. It was not yet thick enough to curl, and was sparse and fine as silk thread freshly spun upon the cocoon.

From the centre of this cloudy web his penis hung down limply. It had grown alarmingly in the last few months, and in Jordan's horrified imagination, he foresaw the day when it would be thick and heavy as his arm, a huge shameful burden to carry through life.

At this moment it looked so soft and white and innocent, but when he woke in the mornings it was hard as bone, hot and throbbing with a sinfully pleasurable ache.

That was bad, but in these last weeks that terrible swelling and stiffening had come upon him at the most unexpected times: at the dinner table with his father seated opposite him, in the schoolroom when the new schoolmistress had leaned over him to correct his spelling, seated at the sorting-table beside Jan Cheroot, on the gelding's back when the friction of the saddle had triggered it, and that awful stiff thing had thrust out the front of his breeches.

He took it in his hand now and it seemed helpless and soft as a newborn kitten, but he was not deceived. He stroked it softly back and forth and instantly he felt it change shape between his fingers. He released it quickly.

The joint of mutton that the family had dined off the previous evening stood on the deal table, under a steel mesh fly-cover. Jordan lifted the cover, and the leg was hacked down to the bone.

His father's hunting knife lay beside the cold joint.

The handle was stag-horn and the blade was nine inches long, sweeping up to a dagger point, and the white mutton fat had congealed upon the blade.

Jordan picked up the knife in his right hand.

The previous evening he had watched his father flicking the edge of the blade across the long steel. It always fascinated him, because Zouga held the razor edge towards his own fingers as he worked.

The proof of his father's expertise with the steel was the way in which the heavy knife seemed to glide effortlessly through the meat of the joint. It was wickedly sharp.

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