Jamie

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Jamie

JACK BENNETT

Jamie was originally published in 1963 by Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

Prologue 6

1 8

2 13

3 15

4 19

5 21

6 24

7 26

8 29

9 32

10 34

11 38

12 43

13 47

14 50

15 55

16 58

17 63

18 67

19 73

20 78

21 82

22 84

23 86

24 90

25 96

26 99

27 102

28 106

29 111

30 113

31 115

32 118

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 120

Prologue

A flight of shrieking mousebirds tore the noonday hush of the bush as the small party halted in the shallow valley below the house.

There were four of them: two men, one white, one black; and two boys, one white, one black. The white boy lay on his back on a makeshift stretcher of saplings and grain bags which the men now laid carefully on the ground between them. Dust settled around them and the boy on the stretcher sneezed.

They rested for a few minutes without speaking, rubbing the sweat from their faces with their forearms. Then they picked up the stretcher again and began trudging up the shoulder of the valley towards the house.

The boy was small and slight, freckled, with sun-bleached hair like unraveled rope, and sharp green eyes. He lay with his fingers splayed over the sides of the stretcher, straining at the coarse hessian. His upper lip was full and swollen with emotion, the lower lip caught by small white teeth.

They came slowly back onto the road — they had taken a shortcut through the valley — a small cloud of dust lifting about their dragging feet and drifting with them. Overhead, the sky was a hard, washed-out blue, almost white on the horizon.

They neared the house, up the avenue of wilted blue-gum trees, past the wagon shed with its sun-warped planks and doors sagging on rusty hinges.

The boy, trying to distract his mind from the pain, found he had a peculiarity of memory: he could recall the touch, taste, smell, sound of things, but not how they had looked. The fruity popping of the fleshy prickly-pear leaves as a man crashed through them; the harsh, complaining cry of the hadedah birds; the electric buzz of Christmas beetles; mouth-drying taste of spekboom leaves; acridity of a newly fired cartridge. All these things he could feel and hear and taste now, in his fingers, his ears, his tongue, but he could not recall the scenes themselves.

His memory fogged, blurred, wavered, and he was left with a shifting picture punched through with holes of forgetfulness, like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

The house was cool and dark, with its windows open behind fly-screens and its curtains pulled to keep out the glare. A woman came out onto the verandah and screwed up her face at the transition from shade to aching brightness. She hooded her eyes with her hand and looked at the party coming up the road.

She was a big woman, but not fat: just big-boned and strong, with big, square hands. She stood, looking, for several seconds; then she went down the steps and pulled open the chicken netting gate and started running towards the men with the stretcher.

Oh, God.

She sobbed as she ran, clutching her cheap black dress about her thighs, stumbling awkwardly on the hard clay.

Oh, God, Oh, God, Jamie, Jamie.

1

The name of the farm which lay in the elbow of the low hills on the western rim of the flats called Buffelsvlakte was De Goede Hoop, which is High Dutch for The Good Hope. It was in some ways an inappropriate name, or at least the language of it was, because Jamie’s people were of pure English settler stock, proud of the 1820 tradition, proud of the tough, straitlaced band who had landed on the desolate shores of windy Algoa Bay to hack a living out of the harsh scrubland; proud, too, almost pathetically, of the far-off land they still referred to as Home, although no Carson had ever left South Africa. People said that the farm had once belonged to a Dutch farmer, and that old Roderick Carson had bought him out after a bad drought, and that he had retained the Dutch name to placate his Boer neighbors, who had resented a rooinek being able to buy himself into their community.

But all that was years before. Old Roderick Carson was long dead, lying with his family in the weed-grown cemetery beneath the drooping pepper trees; the Dutch neighbors had become Afrikaners, and the animosity was gone. Jamie would often lean over the rusting fence surrounding the graveyard on quiet summer afternoons, when the bees were buzzing around the pepper trees, and struggle to decipher the eroded, moss-grown inscriptions on the headstones. Amelia, and Arabella, and Stephen; Thomas, called away, aged seven years; Richard, taken by the Lord, aged three; James, fell asleep, aged only thirty. They seemed to Jamie very young ages at which to die.

Jamie’s father, Edward Rutherford Carson, farmed his three thousand morgen well, knowing just how much he could take from the land, and how much he must put back. He never overstocked, never ran wild when the grass was good and green and water plentiful, so that when the dry days came again the land was denuded of vegetation, the dams low, the much-walked stock paths red gashes in the parched earth. No, he nursed his land, took what it gave him, gratefully, and gave it back enough so that it could give again. He was a stooped, quiet man with a drooping moustache, an insignificant man to those who did not know him. At the Sunday church meetings he would stand quietly beside the car talking to the preacher while his wife talked to the other wives. It was a Sunday ritual. The preacher would wait at the door of the small church until the last worshippers had left, then he would cross the yard, picking up his cassock to stop its dragging in the dust, to where Edward Carson stood beside the battered Ford V-8, and say: Good morning, Edward.

People always called his father Edward, or Mr. Carson, never Ed or Eddie. Among the Afrikaners he was called Oom Edward, with affection, or Slim Edward with admiration, when he had proved again what a consummately intelligent farmer he was.

Jamie never knew what his father and the preacher discussed on Sunday mornings. He was a little afraid of the preacher; he had such a deep voice, and his sermons usually made Jamie feel thoroughly guilty. With the other boys, uncomfortable in their city-bought suits, he would kick stones or swing on the gates to the churchyard until the time came to go. There were a great many fat doves in the graveyard next to the church, and Jamie was often tempted to bring his catapult. But it was a standing rule in the Carson household that no hunting was done on Sundays. Jamie would probably have broken this edict; he could have shot a dove, unknown to his father, and given it to the church gardener’s sons to eat. No, it was not filial obedience which stopped him; but he felt certain that to shoot anything in a churchyard must be a terrible sin. If he did shoot one of the graveyard doves, he felt sure the preacher would, in some mysterious way, know about it immediately and drive out to the farm to confront him with his guilt. And then, Jamie knew, it would be the quince stick from his father.

His mother seemed to know instinctively when Edward wanted to leave. She would withdraw herself from the circle of wives and young children and join Edward with the preacher; after a few minutes they would all shake hands, the Carsons would get into the Ford, and a short tap on the horn would bring Jamie running. It was always the same, even the reprimand he received every Sunday for his scuffed shoes and rumpled suit.

I hope church does more good to your soul than it does to your outside, Jamie, said his father once. Because you look better before than you do afterwards. That was the nearest his father ever came to humor.

The orchard was bearing well that year, Jamie’s ninth, and Edward Carson had detailed a young Native boy to frighten the birds away by banging on an empty oil can with a stick. It worked for the first few days, and then the birds became used to the noise and scarcely fluttered when the sweating picannin pounded beneath the trees, while a steady hail of half-eaten apricots and apples carpeted the orchard floor.

This Sunday, Edward stopped the car at the orchard and blew a blast on the horn to attract his scarecrow. The unusual noise raised a cloud of birds: shrieking mousebirds, bulbuls with their cocky black crests and yellow vents, vociferous weaver birds, big-beaked barbets.

The picannin, listlessly clanging his can, appeared from the trees.

No good, my baas, he said. No good. He made a gesture of helplessness which encompassed the orchard.

Edward opened the car door and got out.

Come, he said to Jamie. They walked on the soft earth under the fruit trees, followed by the picannin, and Edward Carson looked at the ruined fruit and shook his head.

I’ll come here and shoot them, Father, said Jamie. His father looked at him and smiled.

With your catapult? They’d laugh at you.

They walked back to the car in silence. As they drove away the picannin started clanging again.

After lunch that afternoon Jamie’s father called him out onto the front porch.

Jamie, he said, puffing his pipe and trying to sound casual, which he always did before making a big announcement like telling them he was going to the city or that a heifer had had twins. Jamie, you are eight now, not so?

Yes, Father.

Go and get the B.S.A. You know which one it is?

Yes, Father. I know. He ran into the cool dark of the house, to the gun rack at the foot of the stairs. He almost laughed at the thought of his father wondering if he knew which was the B.S.A. He knew them all, every one. How often had he sat on the bottom stairs and fingered the cool steel of their barrels and the velvet-smooth oiled stocks, imagining himself cuddling them to his cheek, sighting down the long avenue of the barrel, notching the bead into the vee, between the eyes of a charging lion...boom! He knew them all — the heavy single 12-bore, the long-barreled double 20-bore with its big hammers, the light .410, the long lean Mauser 9 millimeter, the heavy army Lee-Enfield, the short, wicked little Walther, and the long, heavy B.S.A. air rifle with its lever loading action and long butt with the pistol grip.

Reverently he stroked his hand across them. Carefully he lifted the heavy B.S.A. from its rack and carried it out to his father. His father took the rifle and stood up.

This was going to be Fred’s, he said. Jamie nodded. He had never known his elder brother. Fred had died in one of the influenza epidemics. He was only six when he died, but already Edward Carson had bought him a gun and a saddle. The saddle had long since rotted away in the old stable under the blue-gum trees, but the gun had stood, oiled and ready, until Jamie was old enough. And now he was. He trembled again with a mixture of excitement and pride; and suddenly Fred became more than the shadow he had been all these years, represented by the long gun in the dark hall. He became Jamie’s brother.

His father went into his room and came back with a handful of pellets. He put them on the stoep railing and cocked the gun, flicked back the loading gate and pushed in a pellet.

Now, he said to Jamie, come here. Jamie took the gun and rested the barrel on the railing. His father showed him the sights and explained how to aim.

Squeeze the trigger. Don’t jerk it, or you make the gun jump. He pointed down the garden to an aloe with a vivid red flower, the species called red-hot poker. See if you can hit that.

Jamie straddled his legs on the concrete and squinted down the grey steel. His first five shots missed, but the sixth knocked red petals from the flower, and the next cut the stem. His father was pleased — that Jamie could see. His mother had come out to watch, and stood quietly behind them in the hall doorway.

Her eyes opened a little when she saw the gun he was using, but she made no comment. Edward said, half apologetic: It was doing no good there, Hannah, and his mother smiled and nodded. No good at all, Edward.

His father scooped up the remaining pellets and gave them to him. Go and practice by the dam, Jamie. But remember, it’s Sunday.

He felt very adult as he lugged the gun down the path between the aloe bushes. At the garden gate he turned and waved. His parents were standing arm in arm. They waved back and he went up to the dam.

After that he became the terror of the mousebirds which raided the orchard. The gun was still too heavy for him to hold on his shoulder for more than a few seconds, and unless he could find a convenient branch to rest the barrel on he missed a good many shots, but nevertheless he made inroads into the ranks of the fruit-eaters.

It was a maxim of his