Benang

by Kim Scott

  Even in my youth, after I had gained some idea of who I was and when I had my grandfather under my care I had moments of ... hesitation. Moments when, perhaps, I almost admired him. After all, he took Kathleen as his wife, which was more than many would have done.

  Ern arrived from nowhere, knew no one; and so he had pluck, you might say. Well, I could respect that, and even—to a degree—his opportunism.

  I was very aware that the organisation of his ‘local and family history’, and the documentation of his social engineering, were so much better than my own feeble efforts. He was a very rigorous and well-organised man; consider how he shaped my life, recaptured me after my car accident, and then took charge again.

  He pushed me back to physical health, and gave me a plan. He moved us to this little isolated place on the coast, this property. He gave renovation instructions, prices, contact numbers for tradesmen. Said what to do with the garden.

  This tree by my window, where the children climb, once again casts cool shade and lets the wind whisper in its leaves. It is a tall and pale gum. One of those whose bark peels and falls in strips. It towers over the house, and Grandad believed its roots threatened the foundations. He was right in that, they have cracked one wall.

  Grandad wrote: Cut down the tree. Burn it, dig out its roots. He might also have written: Displace, disperse, dismiss ... My friends, you recognise the language.

  He gave me the instructions on the day of his stroke, and long after that—but before my uncles came to save us—I trimmed the branches which grew close to the window. I was pleased to see Grandad’s grateful smile when he peered through the window frame and saw no hint of tree.

  I was even more pleased to see his reaction when I carried him outside, and he realised I had trimmed only those limbs which could be seen from the window, and left others intact. The tree still lived; it would grow again. I lifted him from the ground, nestled his neck and chin in the fork of two truncated limbs, and let him feel the burden of his own weight. It was still a tree you could hang from, or hang some other from.

  Which—of course—I didn’t do. I don’t know, perhaps his vulnerability softened me. But it was only the strength I gained after Uncle Jack Chatalong and Uncle Will Coolman came to live with us that allowed me to feel anything like sympathy for poor silly old Ernest.

  I used to look at how the heavy stones of the house fitted against one another, the small pebbles and dust which collected where they touched. The stones were roughly rectangular and between each one, where I had picked out the mortar, the darkness crept in. Cold air moved about me, and I sat within a stone grid, oozing light.

  Not a fire. Not a family. I rubbed at the words I’d written so fastidiously. The pale, thin stuff felt cold and damp beneath my fingers. Mine and my grandfather’s skin, my only kin, these pieces of paper.

  The walls were strong, despite my continued picking and probing. The timbers of the ceiling sat strong upon them. I had peeled back the roof above some of the rooms, and there the joists showed like ribs against the stars.

  Nyoongar language. Culture ... I thought of all the things I did not have. Unsettled, not belonging—the first white man born—I let myself drift. I gave up, and drifted...

  As far as the joists. I hooked my toes beneath one, and stayed. I thought I was the only one. I thought it was just me—a solitary full stop.

  Or a seed. I know now there are many of us, rising. Like seeds, we move across and dot the daytime sky. More and more of us, like stars we make the night sky complete.

  But back then I felt only the silence, and saw how the roof joists made yet another grid.

  They told me afterwards. Uncle Jack and Uncle Will had stood together (at least I achieved that!) below the old house on the hill. They saw how rectangles of thin yellow lines described each stone, the light showing through the gaps where there had been mortar. There were stars in the space which had once been roof. They saw a dark silhouette drifting across the windows, loudly declaiming some nonsense, rising and falling. Rising.

  A big yellow moon rising behind the house showed the figure in silhouette as it rose, and paused, and seemed to stand within the roof.

  A thumping at the door. Uncle Jack pushed in. ‘What the fuck, Harley! What you done around here? You practising for the circus or what? Gunna run away?’ I saw him look at Ernest, huddled and scarred in the corner. I rose a little further toward the cold and glittering stars, but the moon was warm and low and reassured me. I saw Uncle Jack crouching beside Ernest, patting him on the shoulder as the old man wept and blubbered. I saw—just over the wall, just outside of the house—Uncle Will, looking up at me.

  ‘Harley,’ he said, so softly, but the voice carried. ‘We’re all sorry. But, think of us. Your people. Your kids. I’m the one was wrong.’

  I didn’t take in the words, heard only their intent. I kept my feet hooked beneath a roof joist. He would have seen me silhouetted against the fat moon, and I, in turn, looked at that same moon, and the path its light made across the sea to where the island was a patch of coagulated darkness, at one end of which was a continually flickering, a continually growing and shrinking, a small and continually reforming white blossom. That white and visual pulse.

  And so then there were the four of us, all men. Sort of.

  I had almost destroyed the house. The wind whistled between the stones, the floorboards were gone from most of the rooms, and so was the roof. I had hacked at the trees, leaving only a large limb out from each to support a rope and a heavy weight. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know that I was thinking.

  Stupid, they said. But they were gentle in saying it.

  No point doing this, they said. They kept looking at me, with curiosity, with sympathy. With some sort of respect even, for the strange way I sometimes drifted, and the way I shimmered and trembled and sang in the evenings.

  ‘You wanting to find out?’ said Uncle Jack, and I told him something of what I knew. ‘Old Ern, eh? Yeah, he’s a bastard. He’s a bastard all right. But, you know ... You’re not like him, eh?’

  Uncle Jack put an arm around Ern’s shoulder, squeezed him roughly. He observed me for a moment. ‘You look a bit like him but.’

  It was the last thing your sulky narrator wanted to hear, and I saw that he regretted saying it. He held his tongue between his teeth, and looked away.

  I showed them the photos, and Uncle Jack was angry. ‘Yeah, well this is just to make you sad, reading and looking at things like this. It’s just a wadjela way of thinking, this is. You should just relax, feel it. You gotta go right back, ask your spirits for help.’

  Despite those words there was something like gratitude in Ern’s expression. And perhaps, after the way I’d treated him, it was understandable. Now I reached over and wiped his nose.

  Uncle Will seemed to always be a little further away, to hold himself back. I would look over Uncle Jack’s shoulder, and see Will running his finger along the gaps between the stones, or staring up at the ruined roof, or—at a distance from us—standing with one hand on the car door as if considering whether to get in and drive away. He was a very thin man, something particularly evident when you saw him standing in that way he had, with one knee bent and his hands pushing into the small of his back.

  They continued to speak of Ern. I remember that, initially, Jack did most of the talking, and Will would nod, add a word here or there. Our heads tilted to Ern at intervals, and he would drop his head, look up beseechingly, and drop his head again with shame. He was silent, knowing there was nothing he could even try to say.

  Uncle Will, Uncle Jack, they understood. But I know best. And I also know I have to work right through this white way of thinking, it is the only way to be sure.

  When the girl was born Ern had said, ‘I don’t want her going into the sun.’

  Harriette looked at this man, who had not yet picked up his child. Kathleen sat propped up with pillows, the baby in her arms. Dark wooden furniture, a white lace doily bene
ath a clock. It seemed to Harriette that Kathleen, after all the lonely effort of the birth, had moved away from her. But then, herself borne along on a current of regret, she realised that Kathleen was imprisoned by this tight-lipped man who stood by the door. She understood it was not his child, but did he? Harriette remembered bitterly what her own father had promised. The best of all worlds.

  It was easy, after all, for Kathleen to keep the child indoors, since Ern refused to let her leave the house, except to hang out washing or some such thing. He allowed her a small garden which she and Topsy tended in the early morning and evenings.

  Vegetables, Ern advised. He gave Kathleen gloves to wear, and her fingertips flapped as she handled the pegs, and kept her from the soil.

  She dressed carefully to place orders at the shops. Had the floor shining when the food was delivered.

  As soon as it was possible to do so Ern bundled the mother into his truck. Kathleen looked across the bonnet at him as he swung into the crank. It was a novel experience, she found herself thinking, being out with him. And in daylight even, although it was not quite that yet. And he was the one cranking the motor, rather than it being her out there pulling her arm away to save it from being broken when the motor suddenly fired. She turned to wave goodbye to Topsy. The young girl’s face was touchingly serious.

  It was a long drive. Ern parked off the main street. He knew the registrar here. ‘We can’t be too careful,’ he said. For the future.

  When they had completed the details (And this is the mother? Beautiful handwriting, the man said to Ern) they returned to the car.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said to Kathleen, and he took the child from her.

  Kathleen watched him walk away. She stared at the point where he had disappeared, the corner of the building. Men appeared there. They were red-faced, loud, stumbling. She saw them glance, then gaze more openly. They called out to her that they were going out to the reserve, but could she save them the trouble? Perhaps it was the car that kept them away.

  ‘Photographs,’ Ern said. ‘I had some photographs taken.’ He had also bought a small camera.

  I once put it to Ern that he married Kathleen, and tried to keep Harriette, as some sort of display. His watery eyes goggled at me, and I heard Uncle Will coming so I did not pressure him any further. He wished to keep her as a display, as a domestic, as a tamed tribute to himself, but Harriette was too accustomed to independence and was known as Daniel’s widow. She came and went as she chose.

  Ern insisted that Topsy, like Kathleen, did not leave the confines of his yard except to go to school.

  Ern knew that Harriette would not be allowed in most towns. But here, she, Kathleen, Will and Topsy ... Ernest expounded his progressive views to some of the individuals in the wary town. The mother, the little girls; they are not like those others. See how Topsy does at school. It’s the white blood. Such a shame about the measles, the weak constitutions, such a shame that more of their descendants had not survived. But there were never many here anyway. He sighed, and was gathering a reputation as something of a soft-hearted expert.

  At home, sometimes, noticing the baby, Ern worried that perhaps he had been too ambitious, perhaps he should have married someone lighter, some other quadroon. Look at Harriette’s son, Will. You wouldn’t hardly know. Not when you saw him dressed up, at places where you would not expect any native to be. He spoke like a young gentleman, almost.

  But, as Ern soon had to admit, his child may as well have been born in police uniform. Yes, of course it was a girl but there was Hall’s jug ears, the same hair and the freckles. He believed each peal of laughter he heard was directed at him.

  Poor Ernest. Yes, although it came as a surprise to him there is no need to delay the truth any longer. He had been cuckolded by the cop. He did not mention his realisation to Kathleen, and tried to dismiss it from his mind. But once, trying to help his wife, the child slipped from his arms and cracked her head heavily on the stone steps.

  Harriette and Kathleen carried the child around for days. She became flushed and listless, and her limbs moved loosely, like a rag doll’s. Ern saw that they could do no good for her, it was something beyond their resources. He reasoned that it was not his child anyway, and that she was better off in professional care. Ern drove her to a hospital in another town, at the terminus of the rail network, and abandoned her with a note explaining her condition and that the father was a policeman. He gave no name, and no address.

  It toughened him. He thought, you can’t trust people, whatever they may seem to be. Sergeant Hall! He studied Topsy, observed her, looking for resemblances to a father.

  After he had disposed of the child, Ern told himself again that it was up to him to make his life the way he wanted it, and he could not include someone else’s sick child in his plans. Ern would make a mark; he would leave something of himself. Of himself only. He had property already. A business. The railway and the wheat farms were almost here. Soon. He would sit tight, and hold on to what he had.

  Ern set about preparing himself for when things picked up a bit. Ernest Solomon Scat; he wanted to make his mark, and that was that.

  He had Kathleen’s young cousin Will working on the sanitation cart. The boy needed a job, and it would be good training for him. Ern was pleased to help his wife’s family in this way.

  The publican advised him, and—with all that timber he’d inherited—Ern was getting enough work as a carpenter. Usually it was in nearby towns. As soon as he was able, he bought himself a motor truck.

  He slept in the truck, in a room if offered, spent his evenings cannily nursing a beer. He liked to return to Gebalup, where he lived cheaply, so that he might survey his assets. A yard next to the police station, he thought. Couldn’t be better.

  Except—if he thought about it—for the wife. And the mother-in-law. Topsy. Will. The whole bloody family. He would have to be careful. He explained to Kathleen that she—and Topsy—were to care only for him now, to only look after him, no others. Her family could stay, but they were his guests. If he threw them out, they’d have no one. He spoke of missions, settlements, of the friends he had and what legislation could do with Aboriginal people. They might end up anywhere, with anyone, and hounded from fence to fence.

  But Ern found himself having to travel farther and farther to get work.

  Dry winds, sun, no water. Ern rattled across a land rapidly becoming desert. Cleared of trees, its skin blew away in a searing wind. The land’s fluids rose to the raw surface, and they were thick and salty.

  Farmers turned their backs on the dying and wounded, because suddenly no one wanted the little they grew there.

  The miners had left, the farmers left ... Were they leaving him? Ern, alone, bounced along rough and sandy roads at a speed which forced him to focus on the narrow track ahead and nothing else, and he understood that he was going backwards. The farms and farmers; receding. The railway line; shrivelling back to some centre. He was surrounded by cleared land, by sand; but there was always, somewhere, some tight and curling bush, and still-secret waterholes.

  He had a native wife. A native family, back in Gebalup, pulling him back.

  Gebalup, the town there, was dying. With no new people arriving and hungry to impose themselves upon this country; with no railway, no telegraph, and with only shifting, sandy roads to connect it to the rest of the new nation, the town seemed about to dissolve, to sink back into the sand.

  Ern held to his vision, even as it shimmered and shifted. He blinked. A temporary setback. Be patient, he told himself, because when the railway reaches this far! The rainfall is sufficient, there is land here. He dreamt of railway lines retracting as he pursued them, leaving him stranded just beyond their reach. Even with such dreams Ern kept to his plans, still believed.

  At least the shrinking town kept Constable Blake—a young fellow who Ern had cultivated, but whose Occurrence Books bored me in my research—free of the pressure that towns elsewhere were feeling. The native camps at their e
dges always threatened to spill over their boundaries. Threatened to unsettle, to intrude. But Gebalup, for some reason, had so few natives.

  These people of the land, said citizens everywhere, they are like the land, they are treacherous. Something to be tamed, subdued, harnessed, made to work. Something to be improved, in order to fit our ways. But in those towns, in all the towns, crops failed. And the citizens’ faraway markets failed them also. Citizens had made sacrifices, had worked themselves to exhaustion. Now, facing failure, they saw some of us looking in from the edge of the town, at corners, crossing streets within the very town. They measured themselves against these original inhabitants, and consequently wanted them pushed further down. Controlled.

  Ern found himself needing advice, reassurance, further security. He returned to the city, for a few short weeks, and did a little work for that good friend of the family, Auber Neville.

  When, reassured, Ern returned to Gebalup he was surprised—amused even—by young Will, who, in what Ernest thought a disturbing lapse from his usual gentlemanly demeanour, told Ern he could stick the whole shit-cart right up his tight arse.

  Public sanitation, collecting nightsoil ... the goona cart became the mainstay of Ern’s business. After all, even in an economic depression, even in a dwindling town...

  Ernest crouched behind the white bums of the town and took what they left behind.

  For Uncle Will it was a matter of pride, see. Of self-respect. He had done a lot of work, alongside the Starrs, delivering horses, carting sandalwood, clearing, doing all sorts of general farm work. He was an enterprising young man. His fair skin, his education, his isolation made it easier for him. He knew he was as good as anyone.

  Young as he was his ambition was to buy himself a block of land in the town. It was what Mr Starr had advised. But, having turned his back on Ern and the town’s sanitation, he found—suddenly, the same as so many others—that there was no work. Same as everybody, he went to apply for the ‘Susso’. The clerk hardly looked up from his sheet of paper. There was a queue of men behind young Will.