by H. E. Bates
‘You’re frightened,’ he accused her softly.
‘A bit,’ she said.
Rustling her hand in the grass she found one of his and held it. Her fingers were hot and quivering.
‘Alexander,’ she began.
But at that moment he became aware of a calamity. He, an Indian, had left his bow and arrows in their secret hiding-place by the cart-springs; and since the men were his enemies and the barley-sheaves the enemy tents he must recover them. Without heeding the girl, except to silence her with a soft ‘sssh!’ he squirmed up from the ditch and began to draw himself along the sun-baked stubble towards the cart, scratching his bare flesh on the stubble and thistles and the harsh dock-stems without heeding the pain. Now and then he would squirm and swerve in his course and slip snaking back into the ditch, the girl following him all the time as surely as though she were obeying his commands. Out on the stubble, in the radiance of the high moon, the faces of the two men loading the last sheaves were as clear as though it were a midsummer day. Whenever the cart and the men halted, the field was hushed and the boy lay motionless in these silent pauses, not even breathing.
At last only two shocks remained to be loaded, and the boy, unseen, had crept level with the cart, with the girl close behind him. In another moment, as soon as the sheaves had been loaded and the cart was going up the field, he would break from hiding and capture the bow and arrows and the wagon and be triumphant.
‘Alexander,’ the girl entreated in a loud whisper. Her hand was trembling more than ever as she touched him and her face was so warm and soft as she pressed it to his that he felt impatient and embarrassed.
‘We’re Indians,’ he reminded her savagely.
‘I don’t want to be an Indian,’ she said.
He silenced her with a whisper of abrupt scorn. He was an Indian, a man, powerful. Why couldn’t she keep quiet? Why was she trembling all the time?
‘You’re only a squaw,’ he said. ‘Keep quiet.’
With that devastating flash of scorn he dismissed her and in another moment forgot her. Out on the prairie, in the moonlight, his enemies had taken up their tents. It was the critical moment. He crouched on his toes and on one knee, like a runner. He saw the load-rope tossed high and wriggle like a stricken snake above the cart in the moonlight. Then he heard the tinkle of hooks as the rope was fastened and the men’s repeated ‘Get up, get up’ to the mare and at last the clack of wheels as the cart moved off across the empty field.
It was his moment. ‘Alexander,’ the girl was saying. ‘Don’t let’s be Indians.’ Her hand was softly warm and quivering on his neck and she was leaning her face to his as though to be kissed.
He shook her off with a gesture and a growl of impatience. A moment later he was fleeing across the stubble at a stooping run, an Indian. The two men, his enemies, were walking by the mare’s head, oblivious of him. But he hardly heeded them and he forgot the girl in his excitement at reaching the cart and finding his bow and arrows in the secrecy of its black shadow.
He rested his arrow on his bow-string in readiness to shoot. Then he had another thought. The load, being the last, was only half a load. He would climb up and lie there, on top of it, invincible and unseen.
Tucking his arrows in his shirt and holding his bow in his teeth and catching the load-rope, he pulled himself up, the barley-stubs jabbing and scratching at his face, and in a second or two he lay triumphant on the white sheaves in the white moonlight.
Fixing an arrow again, he looked back down the field. Cathy was walking up the stubble, ten yards behind the cart. He had forgotten her. And now, with his face pressed close over a sheaf edge, he called to her in a whisper, an Indian whisper, of excited entreaty:
‘Come on, come on!’
But she walked as though she saw neither him nor the cart, her face tense with distant pride.
‘Come on,’ he insisted. ‘You’re my squaw. Come on.’
But now she was rustling her feet in the stubble and staring down at them with intent indifference. Why did she look like that? What was the matter with her? He called again, ‘Cathy, Cathy, come on.’ Couldn’t she hear him? ‘It’s grand up here,’ he called softly. ‘It’s grand. Come on.’
In the bright moonlight he could see the set stillness of proud indifference on her face grow more intense. He couldn’t understand it. He thought again that perhaps she couldn’t hear. And he gave one more whisper of entreaty and then, half-lying on his back, shot a straw arrow in the air towards her, hoping it would curve short and drop at her feet and make her understand.
Sitting up, he saw the arrow, pale yellow, dropping towards the girl in the moonlight. It fell very near her, but she neither looked nor paused and the look of injury and pride on her face seemed to have turned to anger.
He lay back on the sheaves, his body flat and his head in a rough sweet nest of barley-ears. Pulling the bow hard he shot an arrow straight into the moonlight, and then another and another, watching them soar and curve and fall like lightless rockets.
At last he lay and listened. Nothing had happened. There was no sound. He listened for the girl, but she did not come. He gave it up. It was beyond him. And almost arrogantly he freed another arrow into the sky and watched and listened for its fall, shrugging his shoulders a little when nothing happened. In another moment, forgetting the girl and half-forgetting he was an Indian, he lay back in the fragrant barley with a sense of great elation, very happy.
Far above him the sky seemed to be travelling backwards into space and the moon was so bright that it outshone the stars.
The Pink Cart
Across the stubble rain was spitting in the wind from the north-east, thin and icy, the drops hissing in the hot white ashes of the bushfires we had been feeding since morning. The afternoon was darkening early and we were raking the last half-burnt twigs of haws and blackberry together. The black fire-dried twigs would spurtle up with little running yellow flames with a sound like the hiss of the rain spitting on the hot ashes, and the smoke, bluish-white, would soar up in quick spirals and dart away and poise itself in wreaths and dart off again and vanish wildly. The wind was freezing; it drove the heat of the fire away and snarled out the flames and herded the dead leaves together in the hedge-bottom with the wild sound of driving hail.
Walking across the stackyard to fetch a handful of potatoes from the copper-house to roast in the hot embers I was out of it for a moment, but coming back, the wind struck across the bare field furiously, lashing my face with the ice-rain. Down the fields and across the flooded valley ragged flocks of seagulls driven down from the coast by winter weather were drifting and struggling in the gale or resting on the darkening fields and the wind-whitened floods about the river.
My grandfather, leaning on his fork, was staring at something far down the road when I came back to the fires.
‘What’s that a-coming up the hill?’ he said to me.
It was the sort of question that does not need an answer. He was long-sighted and must have seen as clearly as I did every detail of the green and scarlet caravan and the black horse with flecks of cream on its nose and fetlocks struggling up the hill against the storm.
With the fork across his shoulder he went slowly to the gate of the field and leaning on it stared at the approaching caravan. His hair, wind-ruffled like a hen’s feathers, shone frozen-white in the gloomy air.
‘I reckon it’s Joe,’ he called to me.
Before I had put the last of the potatoes into the fire he was out on the road, waiting for the caravan to come up. I followed him, and when the van drew up at the gate I could see the green and crimson paint glistening as though frosted with the fine wind-driven rain. A woman was driving the horse, and a low cart, painted bright pink, was hitched on behind the van itself. The woman was thin and dark, with melancholy black eyes and a yellowish wrinkled face, and she was dressed in a maroon-coloured skirt and a faded yellow blouse and a man’s old brown buttonless overcoat. She had long green pear-shaped earrin
gs that swung heavily against her neck when she moved. Crouching back half inside the van, she was driving with one hand, out of the rain.
‘Goin’ let us leave the little cart?’ she began to recite. ‘Goin’ let us leave it, ain’t you?’ She spoke in the low half-whining melancholy gipsy sing-song.
‘Ain’t Joe there?’ said my grandfather. ‘How long d’ye want to leave it?’
‘Don’ know, don’ know,’ she half-chanted. ‘All winter, ver’ like, all winter.’
‘Ain’t Joe there?’
‘He’s here; yes, Joe’s here.’
‘I want to see him. Tell him I want to see him.’
The woman hooked the reins to the brass door-handle and disappeared into the van. The wind seemed more bitter than ever as we waited. It shook the van with great gusts and tore wildly at the horse’s mane. There were voices in the van, and at last the woman appeared again.
‘Joe’s coming,’ she said.
The wind half-gusted away the words. She stood back into the shelter of the van again, and out of the caravan, dwarfing her with his great height, stooped a giant of a gipsy dressed in snuff-brown corduroys with a black muffler tied in a loose bow about his neck and little gold earrings grown stiff into the flesh of his black-haired ears. Staring with curious dark vacancy he groped his way down the steps of the van like a man coming out of long darkness into naked sunlight. He stumbled a little as his feet touched the ground, and walking towards us he held his hands out before him, his head uplifted a fraction, his eyes black and dead.
The thumb of my grandfather’s left hand was double. He had been born with it, and after sixty years it was earth-roughened and seamed as the knobbed end of an old stick. As the gipsy came forward he held out the double thumb for the groping hands to grasp.
‘Know who ’tis?’ he said. ‘Know who ’tis now? Know th’ old thumb, eh? You know?’
The gipsy fondled the thumb blindly in his hands and cried out:
‘It’s Lukey, it’s Lukey! I knewed yer, Lukey. I knewed th’ old thumb. Bless yer, Lukey, bless yer, Lukey boy, know y’are, Lukey. Goin’ let us leave the little cart ain’t yer? I know y’are, Lukey, bless yer, I know y’are.’
‘Wheer you winterin’?’ said my grandfather.
‘Up north, Lukey, t’other side o’ nowhere. An’ we’re late goin’. Oughta been there a month ago, Lukey.’
‘We oughta be pushing on,’ droned the woman. ‘We’ll never get nowhere.’
‘Why ain’t you winterin’ here?’ said my grandfather.
‘Goin’ up north to take the gal, Lukey. She’s been bad – bad, bless yer, Lukey. Goin’ back to Drusilla’s people – more call for the baskets up there, Lukey boy, and better for the gal, but we’ll be this way in the spring, bless yer. Goin’ let us leave the little cart till then, ain’t yer, Lukey, ain’t yer?’
‘You know you can leave it.’
‘Good, Lukey, good.’ The dark blind eyes were suddenly restless. ‘Who’s here, Lukey? Who is it beside yer? I can feel ’em, Lukey. Who is it?’
‘It’s only the boy, Joe.’
‘Bless yer, boy, bless yer. I could feel yer there. Can y’ onhook the cart, Lukey?’
From the door of the caravan came the woman’s sad recital:
‘We ought to be pushin’ on. We’ll never get nowhere, never.’
Going to the rear of the van my grandfather and I unhitched the cart, and with him in the shafts, pulling, and I pushing the tail-board, we ran it over the grass and through the gate and across the stackyard to the bush-hovel by the stable. The gipsy followed us for a yard or two, saying:
‘Good, Lukey, bless yer. We’ll stop a minute with yer.’
As we were pushing the pink cart under the hovel I heard him calling to the woman to get down from the van and then her droning melancholy answer:
‘We’ll never get nowhere, never. We ought …’
But the low muttering of her voice became mixed and carried away by the whine of the wind.
A moment or two later, looking up towards the gate, I saw her leading the gipsy into the yard. She was muttering dismally about the delay, her head bent low against the rain. Behind her came an unexpected figure, a girl of my own age, about fourteen or fifteen, with a thin yellow shawl draped round her shoulders. She came across the muddy yard slowly, the wind seizing the shawl and half-hurling it from her grasp and making her stagger. She was thin and delicate and there was something more than the mere gipsy sallowness in the pallor of her face. Coming into the shelter of the stacks she stopped a moment, her mouth parted a little, her body fighting in agitation for breath, her face turned weakly away from the wind. Presently she came towards the hovel where we had put the cart and where we were standing, my grandfather, the blind gipsy, the woman and I, in shelter from the storm. Only I watched her come: the woman was moaning about the delay and my grandfather was absorbed in talking to the gipsy who could not see.
‘Lukey boy, same as for the horse last time,’ the gipsy was saying. ‘You keep it, won’t yer, Lukey, and if we don’t come back it’s yourn for keeps, but if we do come back I’ll pay yer, Lukey – pay yer, Lukey, boy, I will. You know that, Lukey, don’t you?’
The girl came into the hovel silently and sat down on an orange box in a corner. She sat down as though she were ready to die at that moment, the shawl slipping from her shoulders and rippling into a yellow heap on the dry earth floor. She was too weak to stoop and pick it up. There was death in her face. I sat watching her until the voice of my grandfather disturbed me:
‘Better look at yer taters, boy. And bring us one if they’re done.’
Going across the yard and along by the hedge to the fires I was haunted and moved by the look on her face. The potatoes were baked, the skins blackened, and I rolled them into my handkerchief and went back to the yard.
‘Gie one to Joe,’ said my grandfather. ‘Roast taters!’ he half-shouted to Joe.
There were six potatoes and I gave one each to the blind gipsy and the woman and my grandfather. Seizing hers with ravenous fingers the woman split the skin hastily so that the white snowy flesh spilled over her fingers and down her dress. Afterwards she sucked the crumbs off her fingers and picked them off her dress and then crammed the black skin of the potato into her mouth, smacking her lips and staring at me with wild hunger until I gave her another.
‘Lukey, boy; Lukey, boy,’ the gipsy was saying, ‘they’re good, the taters, Lukey. Got another for us, I’ll bet, Lukey, ain’t yer?’
‘Gie Joe another,’ said my grandfather.
‘Good boy, good boy,’ said the gipsy. ‘Bless yer. You’ll be lucky. I know you will. Bless yer.’
The woman watched me desperately as I took the other potato across to the girl in the corner. The girl had picked up her shawl and her body was at last tranquil, though her hands as they held the shawl were knotted tight across her breast.
‘Starlina don’ want no potato, boy,’ the woman began. ‘Starlina, you don’ want no potato, do you? Give it to me, boy, I’ll eat it. Give it to me. Starlina wouldn’t eat it if you gave it to her. It’s a waste to give it her I tell you, I tell you.’
The words were muttered in a low recital, in the flowing half-soliloquizing gipsy sing-song, and they broke off as I gave the last potato to the girl, who took it in both hands and said nothing. Leaning against the wall of the hovel I watched her warming her hands on the hot potato, never troubling to eat it, and gradually the warmth of the potato seemed to find its way into her blood, putting life into her face, banishing the old deathly look completely, and leaving only a kind of fragile quietness in her body and a deep tranquillity in her eyes as they rested softly on the rainy fields and the wind-driven gulls flashing white in the afternoon darkness. Presently the old grey she-cat came across the stackyard and into the hovel out of the rain, and the girl called to her in a whisper and the cat leapt up and sat in her lap. ‘Starlina, if you don’ want the potato, don’ have it. Don’ you want it?’ recited the woman;
but the girl, absorbed in running her fingers softly down the back of the cat, took no notice. I could see the pleasure the cat gave to her in the way she smoothed it with a slow prolonged caress from its head to the curling tip of its tail, and I could hear the pleasure in her voice as she kept saying: ‘You’re lovely, you’re lovely,’ with her head lowered to speak.
Sitting there, at rest, comforting herself with the slow rhythm of stroking the cat, she also looked lovely. Sometimes as she glanced up from the cat and over the fields at the seagulls again the tired, languid grace of her uplifted head was painful in its loveliness. Turning her head from the fields to the cat again she caught me looking full at her once, and we looked at each other for a second or two without moving. Her black gipsy eyes shone with sick brilliance that was like the light of a restless passion.
The woman went on muttering about the potato and the cold and the delay, her voice a mournful accompaniment to the voice of the blind gipsy telling my grandfather a long tale about a horse. ‘A white horse, Lukey boy, white as milk. We had him in the little cart, we did, in this ’ere same cart as you’re a keeping, Lukey, and we painted the cart pink, colour as the gal wanted it, Lukey, we did. She loves that little cart. It’s hers by right, Lukey, an’ all.’ My grandfather also broke in with a tale about a white horse he had once had, and the two stories about white horses became intermingled with the moaning voice of the woman and the freezing whine of the wind.
The girl and I alone sat silent. We looked across at each other sometimes and then at the seagulls and then at each other again as though we wanted to speak, but we never did. All the time she stroked the cat, and I could see the blissful pleasure in her face as the cat curled its tail in her slow hand. Sometimes as she bent over the cat her hair fell down in black tangles over her face and in the sudden jerks of her head as she tossed it back again, and in the gold flash of her earrings I would catch for an instant the flash of her own spirit and the spirit of her race before sickness and poverty had degraded them, wild, careless, proud, passionate-blooded.
