“Yes, massa. Donaldson came.”
Roche let the subject drop. He said, “All right. Let’s go and see what you’ve been doing about the septic tank.”
The two men went out into the sunlight. Jane stayed behind. She felt the eyes of the boys on her now, and she looked at the duplicated sheets in her hand.
All revolutions begin with the land. Men are born on the earth, every man has his one spot, it is his birthright, and men must claim their portion of the earth in brotherhood and harmony. In this spirit we came an intrepid band to virgin forest, it is the life style and philosophy of Thrushcross Grange.
That was how the communiqué began. But Jane, reading on, found that it soon became what Roche had said: a fairy story, a school composition, ungrammatical and confused, about life in the forest, about the anxieties, dangers, and needs of isolated men, about the absence of water, electricity, and transportation. And then it was full of complaints, about people and firms who had made promises they hadn’t then kept, about gift equipment that had turned out to be defective.
Jane, looking up from the duplicated sheets, caught the eyes of one of the boys. On the wall above his bed she saw a poster: a pen drawing of Jimmy Ahmed that made him all hair, eyes and mustache, and more Negroid than he was, with roughly lettered words below: I’m Nobody’s Slave or Stallion, I’m a Warrior and Torch Bearer — Haji James Ahmed.
The oblong windows showed a colorless sky. But Jane had a sense now of more than heat; she had a sense of desolation. Later, on the Ridge, in London, this visit to Thrushcross Grange might be a story. But now, in that hut, with the junked office equipment on the table, the posters and black pinups from newspapers on the walls, with the boys on the metal beds, with the light and the emptiness outside and the encircling forest, she felt she had entered another, complete world.
She heard a hiss. It was one of the street noises she had grown to recognize on the island. It was how a man called to someone far away: this hiss could penetrate the sound of traffic on a busy road. The hiss came from a boy on one of the beds. She knew it was meant for her, but she paid no attention and tried to go on reading.
“Sister.”
She didn’t look up.
“White lady.”
She looked up. She took a step toward the beds. Then, made bold by this movement, she walked between the beds, looking for the boy who had spoken.
Only Mannie was sitting up; all the other boys were lying down. One boy seemed to stare through her as she passed his bed. But then she heard him say softly, as though he was speaking to himself, “So you know your name.” And the boy on the next bed said more loudly, and in an abrupt tone, not looking at her, his shining face resting on one side on his thin pillow, his close-set bloodshot eyes fixed on the back doorway: “Give me a dollar.”
His face was oddly narrow, and twisted on one side, as though he had been damaged at birth. The eye on the twisted side was half-closed; the bumps on his forehead and his cheekbones were prominent and shining. His hair was done in little pigtails: a Medusa’s head.
She took out a purse from her shoulder bag and offered a red dollar note, folded in four. Raising his arm, but not changing his position on the bed, still not looking at her, he took the note, let his hand fall on the bed, and said, “Thank you, white lady.” And then there was nothing more to do or say. She walked back past the beds, feeling the silence behind her, and went out into the sunlight, stepping from the concrete floor of the hut onto red, hot clay.
She considered the forest palms, their straight trunks hazy with black needles, their living, rotting hearts bandaged, it seemed, with tattered sacking. The land was shaved and bare and bright all the way down to the road and up to the forest wall. But the land at the back of the long hut already seemed derelict and half abandoned. She saw empty chicken-coops, roughly knocked together with old boards and with sagging walls of soft wire netting, like the chicken-coops in the open yards of the redevelopment project in the city, so that already, in the midst of bush, the effect was of urban slum. She saw piles of old scantlings and corrugated-iron sheets, rolls of old wire, drums: back yard junk. She saw a pit of some sort: dried-up mounds of clay, a heap of concrete blocks. At the edge of the clearing there was a corrugated-iron latrine on a high concrete base. It was silver in the hard light, and the door was open. A thatched roof had been fixed to the back wall of the concrete hut, at the far end. It began halfway up the wall and sloped down almost to the ground. In the black shade of the thatch, on a wash stand made of trimmed branches, there were unwashed enamel bowls and plates and basins; the ground below was dark and scummy. Desolation: she had the urge now to get away.
When she saw Roche and Jimmy Ahmed coming to where she was, she could tell, from the melancholy and irritation in Roche’s face, that he had been quarreling with Jimmy. But Jimmy was as expressionless as before, his mouth as seemingly clamped shut below his mustache.
Roche said, “You’re going to have an epidemic on your hands one of these days.”
Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”
Roche smiled at Jane. His irritation was like her own; but his smile depressed her. That smile of his, which had once seemed so full of melancholy and irony, issuing out of the largest vision of the world, now seemed to hold only a fixed, meaningless irony. And less than that: it held sarcasm, frustration, pettishness.
They walked to the car to drive to the field. Jane sat with Roche; Jimmy sat in the back. Too soon for Jane, who would have preferred to consider the visit over, they got out, to the renewed shock of heat and glare, and crossed from the road to the path at the edge of the leveled field, beside the wall of forest. They walked one behind the other: Roche, Jane, Jimmy. Roche was still irritable. Jimmy’s impassivity had turned to something like calm. To Jane he was even considerate: she was immediately aware of that.
He said, in his light voice, “How did you get on with the boys?”
“We didn’t say very much.”
Roche said without turning round, “They don’t have too much to talk about.”
Jimmy gave his grunt. “Hmm.”
The sun was full on them and full on the forest wall, less green, drier, and more pierced than it appeared from a distance. There was no play of air. The path was hard and bumpy and they kicked up dust as they walked. Jane was sweating; dust stuck to her skin.
Roche said, “Did they ask you for money?”
“One of them asked me for a dollar.”
Jimmy said, “That was Bryant.”
“A boy with pigtails. Very black.”
“Bryant,” Jimmy said.
Roche said, “Did you give him a dollar?”
“No.”
Jimmy said, “Hmm.”
They walked between the forest and the dry field, past the furrows where shiny green weeds grew out of the caked earth; past the abandoned red tractor marked Sablich’s; past the crumbling thatched shed where long-stalked tomato seedlings yellowed in shallow boxes of dried earth; past human excrement laid in two places on the path itself. They went silent after stepping over the excrement.
Then Jane said, thinking of shade, and thinking at the same time of something that Jimmy and his boys might find easier to do, “Are you planting any fruit trees?”
Jimmy said, “That’s long-term. In this phase of the project we need cash and we are concentrating on cash crops.”
They came to the end of the field, where four boys in jeans and rubber boots stood in weed-choked furrows and straddled four dry ridges. As if in parody of nineteenth-century plantation prints, which local people had begun to collect, the boys, with sullen downcast eyes, as though performing an unpleasant duty, were planting tomato seedlings which, as fast as they were set in their dusty little holes, quailed and drooped.