Then one Wednesday morning from the moment I stepped into the street to carry out some errands for the house I found this feeling of uneasiness subtly augmented. The manner in which I was greeted by the village, the looks I received, the words spoken, seemed to carry some new content of climax whose existence I could no longer deny. In the afternoon I was sent with my brother to take some horses to the blacksmith who lived a little distance outside the village. The village itself was very silent, half-asleep in the summer heat. The streets were empty and our horses’ hooves echoed loudly from the walls of the white-faced houses. In the main grocer’s window between the drawn blind and the panes, a large orange tabby cat lay fast asleep in the sun. As we passed, the edge of the blind was suddenly drawn back and the red head of the grocer’s boy appeared, no doubt curious to see who rode out so loudly at so somnolent an hour of the day. He recognized us, and at once vanished so quickly that the blind whipping back into position flicked the sleeping cat smartly on the flank and sent it vanishing in a prodigious leap from the window shelf. Soon the hatless red-head emerged from the shop door, jumped the steps and came running after us.
‘Hey!’ he called out, and then when he caught up with us: ‘Off to the farm already?’ he asked breathlessly.
Everybody asked everybody their business in our world and the question appeared to me no more than routine curiosity.
‘Only taking the horses over to the blacksmith,’ I replied.
He stood there for a moment, repeating the words over and over to himself. Then he gave my brother a sly glance, broke off hurriedly, ‘Well, I must be off – Totsiens,’fn3 and disappeared in a golden blur of dust down the street.
Again I felt uneasy but merely shrugged my shoulders. What did it all mean?
I had been told to leave the horses at the blacksmith’s and at once return home with my brother because some cousins were coming that afternoon to call on us. But when the moment came I felt myself oddly reluctant to return. The smithy stood on the main cross-road at the edge of the bush-veld about a mile from the village. Leaning, hesitant, in the open gateway outside the smithy I saw that the country between us and the village was empty of people. Only a donkey and a cow with its calf were moving slowly about in a dream of after-dinner sleep, while an unfed grey falcon, suspended in a trance of blinding blue, trembled over their heads. It was all so silent and still that I stood on to let the familiar scene repulse my strange uneasiness. Then, distinctly, through the vibrations of light a cock crowed on the marches of our village. It has never been my favourite sound. In the indeterminate dawn hour between sleeping and waking it is bad enough. But breaking out suddenly as this crowing did, reminding me that yet another uncomprehended afternoon was about to plunge steeply into fathomless night, I found it almost more than I could endure. The crucified sound coming straight out of the heart of unrealized animal-being seemed appropriately a prelude to some inevitability of suffering. I looked up to the top of the spire of our village church which flaunted a cock rampant with a comb of stainless steel on its head, and for some reason I felt myself both reproached and warned by the sight.
I stirred. I couldn’t go on standing there all day, but I turned to give a last glance at the smithy behind me. The smith was drawing a shoe, made magic in fire, from the forge. Placing its eager gold on to the black anvil he began expertly to batter it into shape for a horse stamping in the shade outside. Leaning on the bar of the bellows, a black apprentice flashed a smile at me. My brother too was watching and had the excitement of the fire glowing in his eyes.
I beckoned to him and turning we took the road to the village. Just before you enter our village the road dips steeply to disappear in a dry river bed emerging a hundred yards or so further on almost at the beginning of the main street. As we were walking I noticed in the distance dark figures hurriedly coming out of the village in clusters of three or four and taking the road down into the river bed. I thought nothing of it until I realized that none of the figures emerged on our side of the river bed.
I stopped short in my tracks and turned to my brother. Looking down, I saw that his face had gone suddenly white under its olive shadow. His eyes were wide open and the anguish of an unknown fear walked naked in them.
‘Have you seen what I’ve seen?’ I asked, my lips oddly dry.
He nodded.
‘Any idea what it means?’ I asked curtly.
‘Yes, Ouboet. They’re after me.’ His voice was still with certainty as water is still with depth.
‘What?’ I exclaimed, feeling my own uneasiness of the past few days rush in fast to confirm his reply.
Then in the same breath I asked, ‘But why?’
‘Because of Sunday,’ he answered slowly. ‘I laughed at them in church on Sunday. They say I’ve insulted them and they must teach me a lesson.’
‘Nonsense,’ I protested. ‘What about me? I sniggered too.’
‘It’s me they’re after, not you,’ he said darkly. ‘They like you, but they don’t like me. Two of the sons stopped me in the village on Monday and asked me what the great joke on Sunday had been about. When I told them they got so angry.’
‘You told them?’ I exclaimed, hardly believing my own ears.
He seemed genuinely surprised at the hardening tone of my voice. ‘I just told them what had happened,’ he explained. ‘And that I couldn’t help laughing. Of course I said I was sorry if – if I hurt them – but it – it had sounded so funny –’
He broke off but, despairing of his want of tact I prodded him: ‘What did they say to that?’
‘They said so much and so fast I can hardly remember, Ouboet,’ he answered miserably. ‘They said I was a liar and dared me to repeat what I’d said. They asked if I thought I knew more about singing then their parents did . . . and when I said that honestly they’d all been –’
‘I see,’ I interrupted. There was no need to know more. ‘And now they’re all waiting down there in the river bed to teach you, or both of us, a lesson, eh?’
He nodded his head sombrely. Then added, ‘Not both of us, Ouboet, only me. They like you, I tell you, but they don’t like me. The singing is just an excuse really –’ He faltered. ‘They don’t even want to beat me – they want to . . .’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘To pull the clothes off my back and make fun of . . . you know.’
‘No! No!’ I protested appalled, for after all the same ghost had burrowed for so long in the foundations of both our minds. For a moment I thought of retreating on the smithy, waiting for our horses and then riding back fast through the crowd of young lads that had collected for the sort of brawl that was one of their favourite sports. I thought also of taking some roundabout path and thereby avoiding the dry river crossing between us and our home. But just at that very instant, as if Fate had commanded it, one of the older boys came out of the river bed, climbed on to a boulder sparkling like a fabulous garnet in the sun, saw us, put his hands to his mouth and called out loudly and provocatively in unmistakable challenge.