Free July's People by Nadine Gordimer

paraffin. Who can get the food for your children? Tell me?—
    She always took on the responsibility of assuming herself addressed; she was the one who understood him, the way he expressed himself.
    —Of course. I’ll bring them back to you.—
    —Tell me?—
    —Of course, yes of course.—
    He looked at her, looked away. —Tomorrow I’m go get medicine for Royce. That child he’s sick.—
    He turned around in the hut a moment as a man does when he forgets what he is there for. Falling in step with some pattern chanced upon he began to push about the small, crowded, darkened space, dragging and shaking things into a private order.
    They stood there while his obsession swirled about them. They looked neither at him nor at each other; at least they did not allow themselves to be driven out along with the fowls, the nuisance of whose droppings was equalized by the benefits of an assiduous scavenging for the insects who shared the hut.
    There was in his dark profile, the thrust of the whites of his eyes suddenly faced and away again, the painful set of his broad mouth under the broad moustache, a contempt and humiliation that came from their blood and his. The wonder and unease of an archetypal sensation between them, like the swelling resistance of a vein into which a hollow needle is surging a substance in counterflow to the life-blood coursing there; a feeling brutally shared, one alone cannot experience it, be punished by it, without the other. It did not exist before Pizarro deluded Atahualpa; it was there in Dingane and Piet Retief.
    A sudden leaping, punching broke the air outside.
    Victor and his gang of boys raced chattering upon the doorway.
    —Everybody’s taking water! They’ve found it comes out the tap! Everybody’s taking it! I told them they’re going to get hell, but they don’t understand. Come quick, dad!—
    The black faces of his companions were alight with the relish of excitement coming, the thrill of chastisement promised for others.
    —But it’s their water, Victor. It’s for everybody. That’s what I put the tank up for.—
    The child scratched his head, turned out his muddy bare feet and tottered round on the heels, clowning. —Ow, dad, it’s ours, it’s ours!—His friends were enchanted by the performance and began their own variations on it.
    —Who owns the rain?—The preachy reasonableness of his mother goaded him.
    —It’s ours, it’s ours.—
    July was instantly affectionate, playful, light and boastful with the boy. —You lucky, you know your father he’s very, very clever man. Is coming plenty rain, now everybody can be happy with that tank, is nice easy, isn’t it? You see, your father he make everyone-everyone to be pleased.—

Chapter 9
     
    Always a moody bastard.
    The term was not a strong one, in her observations to herself; there were times when she remarked her small daughter behaved to Victor and Royce ‘like a real little bitch’.
    She had indulged him, back there. She had been afraid—to lose him, the comforts he provided; to be inconsiderate of private sorrows he might have she might know nothing of, and that she could guess at only in the shape of circumstances into which he didn’t fit. Did he love the town woman? She thought of that, here. And did that mean he would have liked to bring the town woman here and live with her permanently?
    The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive) depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need? There was fear and danger in considering this emotional absolute as open in any way; the brain-weighers, the claimants of divine authority to distinguish powers of moral discernment from the degree of frizz in hair and conceptual ability from the relative thickness of lips—they were vigilant to