by Bruce Pascoe
The bird glided by me on flat wings as mysterious as the best of ghosts, dipping and curving and clipping evening insects from the air.
Soon it was too dark to see if the mullet were still feeding, and the only indications that the eel was present were the sudden nudges and bunts of the fish’s body.
I left the river reluctantly and was soon absorbed in the smell of cooking and the greetings of happy dogs and the final chorus of the kookaburra. When we turn from the magic, the prosaic insists on return.
So, uncle, I write this for you because when we sat in that distant country, brought together by the intuition of your countrywoman, we talked about the land and our responsibility to love her, we talked about how in the country we were then visiting, people seemed careless of the insults they were offering to the land, their heedless abuse of the body of their mother, their arrogant teeming around her bed, the chaos of their number and the carnage of their waste.
I noticed your eyes, like clear grey lamps, and they penetrated my soul, their beautiful pearl-grey light illuminating the last secret.
Wanjiku told me you were a seer and I wondered about that, having met people who bore such a title only to find that their sagacity was largely confined to the accumulation of wealth and power.
I watched the edge of your long fingernail etch a line down the tablecloth and was brought close to tears remembering how my mother told stories with just the same illustrative tool. I was back with her, beside her final bed, as she pondered a puzzle with me. The nurses had told me she was dying, but it was hard to believe that one so active in her search for understanding could be so close to disappearance.
‘Why is that black woman standing in the doorway?’
I could see no one in the doorway and assumed it was an old blind lady’s dream, but she insisted that the black woman was often there and sometimes came to her bedside to straighten a blanket or smooth my mother’s hair, teasing the fever from her silver crown.
Again she asked, ‘Why is that black woman there? She is beautiful and kind, but I’ve never seen her before these last few weeks.’
But I was too busy with my own soothing benedictions: getting the washing done, holding the straw so she could drink, wiping her face with the cooling cloth, reading to her something she wanted to hear just once more.
I remember recording my own novels for her after she became blind. I built a deck on the roof of my house and recorded each manuscript onto a crumby little tape recorder. One day a shadow passed across the page, but clouds and birds often did that, so I kept reading and sometime later I took a break and looked up. There was a black-shouldered kite sitting on the television mast, barely two metres from my head. He must have been there ever since I noticed the shadow pass across the page. We stared at each other, the Wathaurong spirit bird and I, and we said nothing, but I was conscious that he had heard everything I’d written about his cousin, Bunjil, the eagle.
My mother and father had never mentioned their Aboriginality, and when I investigated the obvious discrepancies in the family history they were hardly shocked by the revelations. I wondered about their lack of surprise, but it was in her final months that my mother began seeing black women through her blind eyes.
I was distracted by the need to lace myself up against grief, so I avoided the strange woman’s presence, saving my attention for the old frail woman I loved so much, the woman whose conversation I still crave.
On her last afternoon the nurses were worried and tried to prepare me for the worst. My mother was sat up in her bed and entertained her remaining sisters and the friends gathered to grieve for this woman of frightening intellect and relentless compassion. They came to mourn a woman who had held them up, kept them from stumbling in their darkest hours, but she refused to let them mourn; she told jokes, and invoked gorgeous flowers grown in her garden before she’d become blind and those she had smelt and touched since. She argued that she could still see them simply by allowing her finger to trace their petals with that long storytelling fingernail, a crooked blade that had become yellow and horny, the colour of a cicada husk, a brittle, cloudy amber.
I had to leave the bedside because there were too many others pressing around her. There was not one square foot where another person could stand. Nurses hovered briefly in the doorway before giving up and leaving. Nothing they could do was more important than to leave those final words uninterrupted. They too had come to love this fragile old seer.
I left the door open and watered the pot plants she’d asked me to bring so that she could ‘see’ them from her bed. Her voice carolled in the room and people laughed and she stoked their laughter with her undiminished understanding of how to warm and coddle the heart of another.
When they’d all gone and the sun was almost finished, she asked, ‘Did the robin come today?’
‘No, Mum, the robin didn’t come. I think she was jealous.’
‘That’s a pity,’ she said, but then raised herself a little and looked past me. ‘Hullo,’ she murmured, and turned briefly to me, adding, ‘The black woman is here,’ by way of explanation for one who was clearly not sufficiently perceptive to realise the woman had arrived.
My mother continued to stare as if in silent communication with her last visitor and then slowly lowered herself to the pillow, and her open eyes saw the ceiling. ‘I wonder who she is.’
They were almost the last words she spoke. The evening became a watchful solace and the forehead-mopping and hair-smoothing metronomic but increasingly edged with agitation.
Who was the woman by the door?
Well, uncle, of all the people I’ve met, I believe it was Wanjiku. Perhaps it is my desperation to want the ghostly woman to have been the equal of my mother, someone with her fierce intelligence and towering grace. Perhaps I’m wishing for my mother a companion on the journey whom she could ask the questions I was too dim and fretful to answer.
My mother’s death seemed an incredible waste. Her mind was still edged like a scalpel, her back strong, her legs capable of pacing the corridor, and yet other unseen elements expired. The air was suddenly empty of meaning. It made me remember fishing on the great elbow of the Jinoor River from which I could see the hooked peak of the mountain. I was drifting downstream with fishing rods mildly resting on the stern when a feather wafted by my face. A moment before I had heard a quiet thwackas, as if someone had hit a tea towel with a pencil. I looked up and there were several more feathers floating towards my face. I was transfixed, but in the presence of the mountain and the fecund smell of salt on the river, I was often taken by this mood, and turned my gaze back to the rods and stared at the bank where bream spines flared as a fish wrenched mussels from the submerged rocks.
Someone hit the cloth with a pencil again and this time I was aware of the blur above me as the peregrine warped and the feathers again drifted about me; the feathers of a swallow. I held my palm upwards so one could land there, the midnight blue sheen tinged with the red of a sunset cliff. I stared at the feather in thrall, my witness to one small horror in the world’s daily turn.
That’s how I felt in my mother’s empty room.
Uncle, I hope you don’t think it presumptuous of me to dare tell you a story, but my mother made me, and by the time I saw your fingernail and eyes, time had diluted my memory of that last day. Well, as you can see, I’ve forgotten very little, but it has become like a stone above the searching lips of the tide to which a light rain or dawn dew restores colour, brightens and glosses what has become dull and dry.
It is like watching the feather settle in the palm of my hand.
So thank you, uncle, and thank you, Wanjiku.
I’m not sure I can explain the parable of the stingray and the eel except perhaps to guess that it’s the glorious inevitability that follows the drawing of breath.
In my culture, having listened to your story and told one in return, I have become obliged to you and your kin. I would do whatever I could in your defence or for your comfort. Ev
en if it was just to stand in your doorway.
PRIMARY COLOURS
You never expect it. It’s like being eaten by a shark. It does happen, and people shed their redness on the waves, but it will never be from your waist that the shark snaps a morsel of kidney fat.
So here’s Jackson, digging a row of fence post holes a mile long. The notch on the spade handle tells him when to stop digging. The string line and divot tell him where to start. Pleasantly hard work. Unpleasant oceans of mind-free time.
He looks out over the waving spring grass of the paddock and admires the lush growth of rye, clovers, paspalum and fescue. He helped the earth yield this fine pasture, and in the middle of the paddock are the follies. The grove of banksias he couldn’t cut down. The tuft of scrub around the wombat-hole and several thickets for the resting place of travelling birds. And everywhere, single, fine, clean trunks of white gums, right down to the forest by the creek. Jackson’s Folly. The hardest paddock to plough in East Gippsland, but the only one with resident kingfishers, eagles, emus, nightjars, bandicoots, snipe and ducks.
His heart takes in the flight of the cuckoo-shrike, the sweep of the swallow and the tracks of kangaroo, snake and dingo. This is his heart’s place, and here at his feet is his heart’s blood.
His daughter. He can see her red hair hidden in the dark green clover, and the kelpie’s tail waves above the grass uncertainly. They are stalking each other. Suddenly they leap out, and she shrieks. The dog carouses, with short barks, and they tumble in the grass, delighting in a long deliberate roll to the bottom of the hill. They’re both mad, both mates.
They play like this every day while Jackson slams the crowbar into clay. Each morning when they arrive, the dog courses the playing field, checking for black snakes. There are none anymore; their smells have staked out the place.
His back has had it. He could split a hundred posts a day and dig sixty holes. Feel like an Anzac. Fall the tree, billet the log, bark the billets, split the posts, dig the holes, tamp the post, run the wire, hang the gate on corner posts the tractor can’t lift. And now? All for nothing. It’s over. The selection, the vow – down the drain. Mistakes.
The shadow of his favourite white gum tells him it’s half an hour past lunch, and he calls to the two ginger pelts. The dog leaps through the grass with her back curved like a whippet, the tongue everywhere, the eyes ecstatic. The girl comes tumbling after, shouting, screaming with joy, the hair a nest of lovely copper, the arms flinging with the delicious energy of a young animal.
Jackson’s mood is set by the plunge of the bar, the gouge of the spade, the lift and tip of the earth, and the wound of his thoughts. The metronome is invaded by the two rampant beasts who tumble and screech, upsetting sandwiches and themselves.
She loves this. She doles out the food and drinks. Jackson gets his own coffee because she can’t lift the steel thermos, but she pours her cordial and hands out the dog’s biscuits, which the kelpie eats like a ‘good dog’, enjoying the ceremony as much as the girl.
Jackson sits with his back to the old white gum, girl and dog draped on him, the remnants of lunch in disorder around them. He watches the movement in the grass as wood ducks waddle down to the creek, and he sees Van Gogh’s waving grasses, the wind making patterns on the nap of green plush while the kingfisher sings at the nest. God is surely in His heaven, but this man struggles to cap off his tear ducts.
‘Rain, Dad! It’s gunna rain.’ Dog and daughter are up, searching the perfect blue sky. He mumbles about the ducks shaking water off their feathers as they fly by, but it doesn’t matter – lunch is over, the frolic has begun.
There are the beautiful primary colours. Absolute azure in the sky, the rich green of the grass and the red of dog’s tail and child’s hair. His heart surges with the beauty.
The crowbar wavers, the spade stops shovelling. Jackson packs up the tools and calls to the gambollers in the grass. They collect a few stones, shout out down the wombat burrow a few times, look for four-leaf clovers, collect petrified wood from up by the tractor and play in the grass. A formula for daily bliss.
They bound after him through the grass. Down at Duck Hole the blackies quack and ogle and paddle off to the further end, and father and daughter strip off, watched by the dog, who isn’t so keen on the swimming bit.
Daughter sits on the little jetty while Jackson swims a slow length in the icy water. He glides with his head just above the surface, and the ducks allow him to come among them, ogling with stupid alarm. Goodness, goodness, look at that!
The girl has the big tractor tube ready when he swims back, and together they paddle about the pond while the kelpie is frantic on the bank.
Apricot glows above the trees, and more ducks and cormorants fly in while they dress.
Walking up the hill, the evening settles like the murmur of a woman’s voice, and yellow robins sing the end of the day. The lyrebird clicks in the scrub as they plod on to home.
Home.
Smoke straggles away from the chimney, the generator chugs, they can even smell things cooking. Daughter dashes in, tugging stones and cicada shells out of her pockets as she goes.
The kelpie and Jackson bring in the cow to the little bark-roofed bail. The jersey chomps away at the oats and rolls her huge dark eyes. Those eyes, with their long lover’s lashes. Jackson presses his face into her side and the cow takes a step to spread her weight. Milk drills into the tin bucket and in the rhythm of this lovely flesh-flesh movement, both are content. Ease for her, milk for him. He breathes in her lovely cow smell and watches the sky flooding with vermilion behind the trees. The yellow robin is piping its last message, the cormorant plops into the dam, and the world closes its day with such careless grandeur. Ten million such symphonies, and each time such sad, beautiful, perfect joy.
Jackson stands with the bucket and releases the jersey. She presses her oaty muzzle against his leg as she ambles off to her calf. The man looks up to the house on the hill, lights aglow in the window, smoke a mauve smudge from the chimney and a full bucket of milk. What could be more perfect? Perfect.
PITTOSPORUM
Sometimes there is violence.
I could blame the pittosporum, but that wouldn’t be right, although it was the end of summer and the air was thick with it. But it wasn’t that, because pittosporum induces a dolorous lassitude, a luxurious and passive ease.
I remember one night at a party I smelt it in a room, above the smoke and powder and spilt drinks, people’s clammy shirts, smoked oysters trodden into the carpet. I searched the room expecting perhaps a vase on the mantelpiece or a Vegemite jar on the fridge, but no, it was in a woman’s hair. She was beautiful enough. Well built, those summery Australian shoulders; you could imagine your lips grazing the clavicle. But I just reached up and took a lungful of the flower. Took her by the shoulders and turned her head towards me. Bit abrupt, you might say, but hardly violence.
‘Why the flower?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, I passed a tree and thought how pretty it was.’
I nodded. I could imagine her in the street, graceful with summer’s langour, lifting a lovely arm to pluck a stem of warm liquor.
Now, for a man with not one decent line of introduction, you’d think I’d stumbled on the great opening gambit. I mean, she was surprised, but she hadn’t turned away, and her lips were parted waiting for me to explain an interest in flowers … and why I still had my hands on her shoulders.
But she had the voice of a woman whose mind had difficulty distinguishing amour from Armani. One mention of the seduction of pittosporum and she’d giggle. I smelt the flower once more, released her shoulders and left. Of course, half the room looked on me as a man from whom you’d expect violence, so I stumbled from the house and straight into the embrace of the pittosporum night. It makes you drunk, I’m sure. The backbone goes as soft as a fresh stem of tulip, the mind unaccountably blurred.
But you can’t blame the pittosporum.
The Yarra River at Fairfield
is very beautiful, and in one spot it has cut the shape of a huge horseshoe, a natural amphitheatre where in more innocent days they’d built boatsheds, tearooms and a wonky old swimming pool in the shade of the willows. My father learnt to swim there, and later I swam in this pool with my cousins. You can see why I’m well disposed to the place, but when the woman I loved got the job as producer of Medea and Lysistrata to be staged by the river, I was ambivalent. You could see straightaway it would be an outrageous success. You knew it wouldn’t rain, you knew the Greek chorus would be drowned out by cicadas, and the natural inclination of people to breathe in the fragrant air would glaze them over with thoughts of love. People would never forget the time they saw Medea and Lysistrata at Fairfield even though they’d heard maybe a dozen words all evening. Well, how many words of Lysistrata do you need? Have you ever read it? It depends on an audience clubbed into equanimity by retsina – or flowers.
So, when I was asked to do the backstage, I was hesitant. I hated seeing the bleachers bolted down onto a glade of family memory, but then my love had asked me and I was drowned in the pools of her eyes, enmeshed in the blonde skeins of her hair, so I said yes. I knew it would be a success and I knew it would be a magic few summers’ nights that could be spent in a childhood haunt near the one I loved.
On the night in question, the opening night, I stood on the hill as the people began to arrive, ambling down the terraces, tossing their heads when they laughed, their teeth flashing in moonlight and footlights. The warm air, the lazy U-bend of the dark river and, of course, the pittosporum had fucked them all. Women could feel it between their thighs; men had an inclination to yawn and nuzzle their girlfriends. The whole night conspired for romance, women’s arms seeming always on the point of lifting to rest on a shoulder, fingers to idly curl a strand of hair, so men noticed the tug on their scalp, and eyes would meet and you’d know – ah, yes, pittosporum. It was like a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play within a play, the audience behaving as if the drama was all theirs, they’d thought of the jokes spontaneously, that very moment, each idle gesture to be remarked upon by a theatre critic next morning.