Following is the fourth in a series of seven excerpts from Carol A.N. Dunn's novel, The Mountain of Inheritance, a gold medal-winning book in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission Writing Competition. The series continues tomorrow.

IT WAS early one evening in June 1959. Alan had fallen asleep on his back under a tree in a pasture and was awoken unceremoniously by a ticklish feeling in his right ear. His eyes opened and he saw a woman kneeling over him. She laughed hoarsely and when she drew her hand away he caught a glimpse of a threadlike stalk.

Stared at her

"What the Devil," said Alan, still somewhat disoriented.

"'What the Devil'," the woman mimicked him in a shrill voice.

Alan sat up and stared at her.

"What a big man like you doing sleeping them time o' day?" she asked derisively, as she sat down beside him.

"I wasn't sleeping; I was just taking a little rest." Alan said, more than a bit peeved.

"What happen? You don't have bed at you yard?"

"Of course I do."

"Is you reading all them book?" The woman leaned over and picked up one. "No wonder you can't keep you eyes open. What you studying for?"

"To be a minister."

"You mean like a MP?"

"No. A minister of religion."

"You don't say! I never know you had to study to turn preacher. What you need to know other than the Bible?"

Alan laughed at the young woman's lack of sophistication and tried to explain that the profession was not as simple as it seemed, and that there was a distinction between an ordinary pastor and one who was ordained. He then told her that he was a second-year student at the seminary.

"You mean that place 'cross the road?"

"Yes."

Removed her shoes

Alan introduced himself and asked the woman her name.

"Betty Simpson," she said, removing her shoes and rubbing her feet in the grass.

This gesture was the first thing that unnerved him. Her legs were smooth and shapely. In answer to his query, she told him she worked as a cashier in a nearby restaurant and had been taking a short cut home across the common after her shift had ended, when she saw him lying there.

Alan looked at her longer and harder than he had at any woman in a while. She was wearing a dress that was a little tight in the front and her bosom strained at the soft fabric. Otherwise she was slender, with sharp, pretty eyes and bold lips, the kind that weren't used to holding back anything - and they didn't now.

Dumbstruck

"So you like what you see?"

Alan was dumbstruck. In his circles, a woman who noticed a man observing her would have pretended not to be aware of it. Betty's forwardness intrigued him. Looking back, he could see how her absence of finesse had been the deciding factor. In those 30 or so minutes of conversation that followed, Alan forgot who he was. There were no labels of 'Christian' or 'ministry candidate' to contend with. He had no past. He was simply Alan Harrison, a 25-year-old man talking with a woman of twenty and two years who did not care who he was or what he did. He had no expectations to live up to. In a world in which he had become accustomed to playing the role that life had written for him, Betty was a breath of fresh air.

That afternoon, he accompanied her to the place she called home - a tiny room in a concrete and steel building which housed perhaps forty more like it. He admired her for her lack of self-consciousness, like another woman might have had, about the bareness of the accommodation. He went back to look for her because he truly enjoyed the uncomplicated nature of their conversations, although if he had been honest with himself, he would have admitted that the appeal was not in the least bit platonic.

Fourth visit

It was on his fourth visit there when the tempo changed. Alan had been looking at her in a particular way for several minutes, but was not sure of what to do. He was still not completely used to being in the company of women like her, the kind to whom men did not make unwanted advances and get away with it. And he did not want her to think that he had been coming around solely with this in mind.

When he started to caress her neck, therefore, he did so cautiously, giving her time and opportunity to reject his overtures. But Betty made it easier by directing his hand to the back of her dress so he could undo the buttons himself.

Tomorrow: Pride of the prude