Free Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones Page B

kids to know what she knew, but she didn’t know how to plant it in our heads. She thought she could bully us into knowing what she did. Did she notice that whenever she got onto God and the devil, every kid’s face dropped? We preferred hearing about dogs drunk on jungle juice.
    The moment she left, Mr. Watts knew what to do. He picked up
Great Expectations,
and as he began to read we picked our faces up off our desk lids.

    CHRISTMAS DAY. It rained, then the sun burst down on the new puddles. We listened to the croaking of frogs. I saw Celia’s little brother Virgil walk by with a frog on the end of a stick. Once I would have asked him to get me a frog. But those things didn’t interest me anymore.
    There was no school that day, so there was no update on Pip. And there was no feast. That day, of all days, our parents had decided it was too risky to cook. The smoke would give away our position. As if it didn’t on any other day. And really, what difference did it make? The redskins knew where we were. So did the rambos, which was the new name for the barefoot rebels who wore bandannas. By now nearly all the young men in the village had joined the rebels, so them we did not fear. But we could tell by the nervous and strained faces of our parents that things were changing, and for us they might change at any moment.
    We did not live with quite the same easiness of before. Our heads turned for any unexpected sound. Whenever I heard one of the helicopters I knew what it was to feel your heart stop along with your breath.
    There were old people who knew about magic. Some asked for potions to make them invisible for when the redskins came. Others, my mum and most of the mums of the kids in Mr. Watts’ class, turned to prayer.
    In the tree above the praying women were hundreds of bats hanging upside down. They looked as if they were holding tiny prayerbooks between their wings. It was during one of these prayer meetings, just on dark, that Victoria’s older brother Sam staggered out of the jungle. He wore the rebels’ bandanna. He carried an old rifle in his hand. He was barefoot and his clothes were ripped. He dragged a wounded leg behind him.
    As the prayer group looked up, Sam seemed to realize he was home and allowed himself to fall over. One of us was sent off to fetch Mr. Watts. I wonder if he understood the problem, because he arrived eating a banana.
    Once he saw Sam he handed the rest of the banana to me, and he knelt down by him. He gave Sam a drink from a small flask (I heard later it was alcohol), then he rested Sam’s head back and fit a piece of wood into his mouth and nodded at Gilbert’s father to start hacking. He used a fish knife to dig three redskin bullets out of Sam’s leg. He laid the bullets on the grass and we formed a circle around them and stared at them the way we did at a catch of fish laid out on the sand. The bullets were misshapen and a runny color of red.
    We didn’t like Victoria’s brother being here. We were scared the redskins would discover him, which would make us a rebel village. We knew what happened to rebel villages. They were burned down, and had other things done to them that were not spoken aloud around young ears. That was the last time I saw Sam before he was taken into the bush. His mother sat with him day and night, feeding him special roots and water.
    Two weeks after Gilbert’s father dug the bullets out he took Sam out to sea in his boat. It was nighttime and in the black stillness we could hear the slapping of the oars on the water. Gilbert’s father’s boat had an outboard, but he didn’t want to use the last of his fuel; he was saving that. He was gone for two days. We were asleep when he dragged his boat up on the third night. And when I saw him the next day he did not look the same.
    We never saw Sam again.
    T HE DISTANCE FROM PIP’S HOUSE IN THE marshes to the “metropolis” of London was about