Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [247]
A number of hands were raised immediately.
‘Ya, Sammy?’
‘Oose want git up top.’
The simplicity of this answer occasioned some mirth. Sammy glanced round him smiling, then slowly allowed his head to sink forward on to his hands.
‘Very good, my pikin, very good,’ Jimmy said. ‘Never mind dem sniggin’ ones. Easy to laff. Dey laff diffrent baimbai. You. answer hunnerd per cent right. You only four but you a thinker. But dere anadder reason come behind dat one. Ya, Tekka?’
Tekka was a strong, sardonic boy of nine, deep black in colour, with prominent cheekbones and bright, intrepid eyes. There was always a high shine on his face, as if it were kept polished. ‘Mebbe black bear chase Oose up de tree,’ he said. ‘Mebbe black bear come after him an’ Oose fraid lose him arse.’
There was some laughter at this, spiced with the sense of sacrilege. It was the ambition of all the children to add in some way to the body of the story, and Jimmy sometimes admitted new material. But this attempt of Tekka’s failed altogether.
‘No black bear.’ Jimmy shook his head more in sorrow than in anger. ‘No arse or any portion Oose ’natomy.’ To assert authority, or deal with subversion, he found it effective sometimes to use words outside the range of the children’s pidgin. Besides, he enjoyed the sound of them in his mouth. ‘Dat not in de story,’ he said. ‘Ya, Lamina?’
Lamina, who was a little older than Sammy, had a mouth whose upper and lower lips were full and exactly symmetrical, forming the perfect shape of a flower. She always hesitated long over her answer, however eagerly she had thrust up her hand. ‘Oose want git up dere for lookout,’ she said at last.
‘Dat right, my pikin. An’ when he git up dere, what he see?’
And so it would go on, from question to answer, both questions and answers known by heart, until Jimmy settled into the story in real earnest and then it was just his voice rising and falling, a sound that belonged there, like the hiss and crackle of evening fires or the dry rustle of wind in the cabbage palms, while the children sat silently listening, all shades from ebony to dark sand, in the shade of the long fronds.
‘Oose he see like snippy bit colour, mebbe dey was colour, mebbe dey was shine a white man face …’
The climber hero, from his eminence there in the close-growing hummock, had found himself able to look down over a narrow valley, or canyon rather, a long strip where the rock rose near the surface, giving lodgement only to low growths, palmetto and bush willow. Beyond this, mangroves marked the course of a creek which wound through swampland, taking its rise from the flooded saw-grass plain. In the distance Hughes could see the winking rim of this vast lake.
Through the lower leaves of the mangroves, in the long shaft of sunlight that lay along the defile before him, he glimpsed a flash of red, saw light reflected from broken water. He trained the ship’s telescope, which had belonged once to Thurso and was now common property, over the belt of barer ground to where the creek water glinted behind the screen of mangroves. He waited. Then, for a space of perhaps fifteen seconds, before it was again hidden by denser foliage, he saw a long canoe pass downstream, a white man paddling at the prow in a ragged straw hat, with a musket slung across his back. Behind him, huddled together on the centre thwarts, were three Indians with faces painted or tattooed – he could not determine which, in this brief space of time. They sat with heads hanging, roped together, their arms bound behind them. Three more men, two of them negroes, all armed with muskets, sat in the stern. One of the negroes had a red kerchief tied round his head – it was this that Hughes had glimpsed through the screen of trees.
This was the tale he had come back with. The long canoe, the armed men, the bound Indians. They were going