by Gregory Day
With pockets full of biscuits I followed the directions to the well, wary after the encounter.
At the well I washed my face and neck, alone but for a curious and bell-less goat who repeatedly butted my gear as if there was something inside he wanted. Perhaps it was the smell of native brethren he was trying to get at, the smell of my panic, the residue of a coward’s donkey meat. Whatever it was, he was persistent.
I headed south out of the village then, along a reasonable kalderini, keeping the sun ahead of me. By late in the day I’d passed the outskirts of two smaller villages, in one of which I managed to order some bread in an empty kaphenoi. As I sat outside, chewing the meal on the deserted lane, I had a sense of mountains turning into hinterland, of life beginning perhaps to be influenced by the prospect of the sea. I’d come down off the ranges a little way and, although you couldn’t see the water from where I sat, the world now seemed to exist somehow in relation to it. Or at least that’s what I fancied as I sat eating the bread.
The uneventful hours of wandering after this lunch I can hardly recall but what happened afterwards, in the monastery of Agio Dormiton, I will never forget.
Before nightfall, waylaid finally by weary legs and the stinging cold, I sat with brow in hand by a path beside a flat and uncultivated field, with a white building at its southernmost end. I raised my head to sniff for salt in the air but felt only the windless chill of diminishing returns. The well-fed hopes of earlier in the day were stripped away by the lowering light.
Gradually, with a slow ghostly sibilance, it began to snow.
More from weariness than anything else I stayed right where I was, watching the field turn slowly white. I once saw snow falling on the hills above Lorne when I was a child but that was more like sleet really, the pale grey of heron feathers. This was pure and falling white like it had during our shemozzle at Vevi. Twisting round to look back up at the way I’d come off the highest peaks of the massif I saw the sky above me had turned to a shifting, purplish mass. And now a wind scoured down off the slopes.
I set my eyes back on the field. Gradually the fall of the snow became mesmeric, the way each flake fell independent but connected to those around it. The brief wind died off and the rhythm of a visual puzzle set in, each white piece falling seemingly at the same speed but landing before or after its neighbour. My limbs grew heavy and my mind drowsy. Then a hare shot across my vision, its long body scampering low over the bleached flat of the clearing, its ears standing on high alert between the falling flakes. I watched it go, my soul suddenly alert to some wilder dignity, until it appeared to vanish into the building at the field’s far end.
Unthinking now, and sodden too, I gathered up my things and set off after it.
From the path to where the hare disappeared would only have been the depth of perhaps two footy fields but that simple journey seemed to take forever. I was disoriented in the whiteness and, unused to such conditions, with the soles of my boots now as smooth as kelp, I began slipping about. I crossed the field as if on eggshells, as they say. Still I stumbled on, squinting through flurries towards the building at the far end, which now seemed to have vanished as if into the sky.
After I don’t know how long of ginger-stepping through the field I reached the other end but still for the life of me could not make out the building. I peered about, afraid, as the darkness began to come on in blurry consort with the snow. Then, as the white flakes seemed to dwindle off and stars emerged in the sky above, I heard the tolling of a bell.
In shock and relief, I listened intently. The bell rang out again. Not fifty yards ahead of me. Was it being rung by the hare?
I stepped forward until, unannounced, the ground changed under my feet. I’d come off the field onto what I later discovered was the courtyard of the Monastery of Agio Dormiton. And with the lack of give in the flagstones, and the fresh snow on top, I immediately went arse over tit, arms outspread across the surface. The bell stopped. I lay there stunned amidst the lingering peal, drenched to the bone.
XXIII
My writings to Leonie may well have been filled with the darkness of my world but her reply, despite its implication that something might go awry with the pages on her father’s farm, had focused only on her own ‘happy memories’ with regard to the ink. She was being gentle with me, I think I understood that. But when I encountered Uncle True not long after this – we were both making our way into Currie for supplies, he coming at a shambolic angle around the racetrack from the northwest, me pedalling out of the east to merge at his side along the town road – and he said if I needed a bob then he needed a hand for a day or two’s gurrying, I had no need of money but even so I couldn’t resist. Yeah gurrying, he said again, sieving the local word through his own inherited whaler’s burr. I had not the faintest idea what the word meant or what I was in for, only that I needed to take the risk.
When I arrived the following day he was in the grass yard behind the house, the onshore was uncharacteristically light for the west coast, and even lighter behind the protection of the house. I remember sighting the lenticular as I arrived: a single reef of jagged white cloud, seemingly fixed in place with guy-ropes high above our heads.
Uncle True had three timber barrows tumbled off to one side of the clearing with half a dozen or so saucers of methylated spirits sitting at various angles on top of them. These saucers, along with dry sheaves of gum branches laid out on the clover all around the yard, were to keep the blasted flies away from the big pile of two or three hundred muttonbirds which sat in an unruly heap right in the middle. Alongside the birds were three forty-four gallon drums, empty, waiting patiently, as I would find out, for the gurry. Next to the barrels was a wooden workbench, with the scratch and wear of the ages, and also with Uncle True’s tobacco tin and bottle of rum and cloves on top.
When he noticed me pedal in he was quick to smile. Then he began briefly to hop about and look busy. Incapable of small talk, he took me straightaway through the process in which I was required to handle, squeeze, and twist each bird in the pile over an empty barrel until every last drip of oil had trickled out of their guts. Taking up a dead bird in his hands, he demonstrated this and a thick grey-brown syrup oozed out into the barrel under True’s experienced squeeze and twist. ‘Then,’ he said, in the faint American accent leftover from his father, ‘you’ll hand ’em to me and I’ll scald ’em and pluck ’em. Should take us all day, even with Leonie. She’ll be here mid-mornin’.’
Uncle True then promptly went over to his bench, flicked his tobacco tin open with a thumbnail and began to roll himself a smoke. He offered the tin to me, took a slug on the neck of his rum and cloves, and started to yack about the wherewithal and pros and cons of this muttonbird consignment.
I was content enough to listen, knowing now that my punt had indeed paid off, that Leonie was prepared to show knowing full well I’d be there. I noticed again, as I had on the day I’d bumped into him pumping worms on the beach at Yellow Rock, that despite the fact he was a pretty ugly bugger Uncle True and Leonie were nevertheless alike, in colouring certainly, with those driftwood cheekbones that made a habit of catching the light of the strait. His hair was ash-white with the years of salt, and his Fermoy-blue eyes had turned the same cloudy, coppery green they’d been that day when he was sandworming on the beach, though I now noticed how the whites around the irises were stained almost the colour of the gurry, from his hard living no doubt, and, as Lascelles might reflect, from god knows what other incidents lingering in his body.
As it turned out, having Leonie on the way and myself already there, Uncle True was in no hurry to get on with what looked to me like a large amount of very dirty work, preferring instead to yarn and question, and to complain about a bloke called Vince Moynihan, who was to pick up the processed birds in his Cessna the next morning. I found his procrastinations odd, but in a world gone wrong Uncle True’s way of living made as much, if not more sense to me t
han any other. He seemed to live by the belief that there was no point rushing straight into the maw of human work, and even though he didn’t technically own the family house and paddocks, his brother Nat was quite content for him to camp there, as he had for the fifteen years since their father, Old Nat, the ‘Pop’ of Leonie’s letter, had died. Though they had hardly spoken about it, the brothers had somehow come to this arrangement, and having no rent, few overheads, and even less ambition, Uncle True was free to continue his interrogations of tobacco and rum and cloves for as long as his body, and in this case my patience, held out. Occasionally a business deal like this one would come his way, usually over the bar in the hotel, and Vince Moynihan was set to fly the muttonbirds illegally back to Moorabbin on the mainland where they’d be tinned as ‘squab in aspic’ and exported to the Yanks. But True’s chat now was more in keeping with the majority of his days, where he’d gather his food off the beaches and, by the look of the material I saw later that day inside the house, hole up in the west coast weather reading adventure stories and books on spies and espionage.
‘I’ve been wonderin’,’ True said eventually, having exhausted his assassinations of Vince Moynihan, ‘whether or not you ain’t signin’ on for a settler block because there’s something you’re not right about. I mean, quite apart from not acceptin’ charity and that. More so somethin’ . . . that you ain’t happy with.’
I said nothing. Given our first meeting, I shouldn’t have been surprised by his frankness, but I was.
Uncle True puffed at his smoke and leaned a bony hip into the bench. ‘Like I know what I’m talking about, when it comes to these things, being ya champion bludger and that. Anyone’ll tell. Never bought my land, never work, the yard and shed here full of the sea’s charities. Truthfully though, only thing I hand over coin for is the rum. And sugar for my tea, and this and that. Cartridges for me guns. Well, a man’s gotta eat.
‘Anyway, as I told ya before it’s one thing to go mendin’ your own snares but it’s a gift to know how to receive, ya know that? There’s always things lurkin’. And when you don’t know the history of a thing, of a fella, well, he’s a stranger, ain’t he, and somehow seems to lurk all the more. Like a shark under the boat.’
He was looking beyond me now, out over the yard to the sky above the sea. But then he turned and bored his gaze right into me.
‘Take my brother upstanding, my brother Nat. Irons his money. Never leant on anyone since the day Tuck White gave him a leg-up with the cattle. But he’s my brother, see, and so I know why. It ain’t coz he’s any more decent than me or any other bludger. Well, perhaps he was born a touch narrowed in our ol’ Patsy’s womb but he ain’t that naturally obsessed with his cattle, that’s not the meat of it. There’s a reason, a thing behind. If you think you got holes, and you don’t mend ’em, you won’t hold out your glass to be filled.’
Despite what I’d been writing to Leonie I wasn’t, you might say, used to such conversations at that time, and I looked off into the sky myself now, uncomfortable. Confronted by the truth in what he’d brought up out of the blue, I was equally uneasy about the deeper level of his talk.
‘Well, no one’s perfect,’ I ventured.
‘Perfection’s got nothin’ at all to do with it,’ he said, quickly. ‘I’m talking about degrees of rust, there’s no clean tin round ’ere.’
I looked around the yard, following the sweep of his arm. He was right, of course, every surface you looked at: shed, troughs, barrels, bikes, ploughshares, metal craypots and other traps and snares, were in varying stages of being chewed by salt.
‘For instance,’ he went on, ‘you’d think no one on this island is as right as my niece but still it’s all wrong, you see.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well I’m as lonely as the next codger,’ said Uncle True, ‘but she’s not, she’s . . .’
He stopped, readjusted his boot where he leant it on a bent metal crate beside the bench, took a sip of his rum, another puff on his smoke.
‘Well, seein’ ya want to know, my brother was plain knocked out when she was born. She came straight on, like a child of the island, right out of the barrel of a filthy storm. But he wasn’t knocked out by her, not by the gift of her, but by him losin’ his Alma in the birthing. Leonie’s mammy. It was a shock to us all. But do you think he just went away and wept on the rocks, untangled his lines, pulled himself together, and loved the girl double after that, once the storm died out and the shock went east? Nah, he did nothin’ of the kind. He was as sock-headed, as selfish and tight-knotted a bastard of a man as could ever be and that was the house she grew in over there at Tuck White’s. Rose Robinson fed her, pedalled through the after-blow to the horror and joy of it on one of Doc Ray’s bicycles, and that set the line. By the time the girl was three and properly had her legs she’d run off twice, maybe three times a week from Nat, off over the heath and sedge, through the boxthorn on the Haines Road, never mind the sleet in winter or the summer snakes, with that beatin’ heart of hers set for Brian and Rose’s. Of course, she had a child’s idea of just how close or distant a love like theirs could be, and that’s a natural enough fact I s’pose.
‘He lost her over and over. Glyn Shakespeare down in the swales on the next farm south’d find her steppin’ through the lambs in his paddocks and bring her back to a whippin’ from Nat, but the pain of the belt never cured it. She kept going, so in the end, when she was gettin’ on for school age, he locked her up.
‘Brian and Rose went to Bob Balme, the cop, but he was new, a timid bloke too, reluctant. I went in with my fists and got bloodied up by my own brother and right in front of the girl. None of that did any good at all actually and the upshot, I’m sorry to say, was that we left her with him. Now then, he never punished her beyond the belt for her runnings-off but they were that frequent anyway and he never loved her outright either. Though she might disagree.
‘Anyways, by the time the first war finally blew itself out it’s like she’d fought one herself. She was about eight and pretty much wild on the island. He couldn’t hold her in the house and so let her go. Sometimes she’d make it barefoot to school in Yambacoona, which she liked, sometimes she crossed the Sea Elephant to Brian and Rose, sometimes over here to me and we’d have a fine ol’ time as a rule, she got into all my books on the shelves, but there was no schedule to it. Sometimes she wouldn’t show for weeks. Except no matter where she’d been by day, every night she’d always make it back to sleep at Nat’s.
‘And that was all well and good, and in the end we surrendered to it, like somethin’ in the sea, ya know, something bigger than us and brutal we didn’t see coming, something steep from five or six thousand mile off that felt a helluva lot more powerful, somethin’ strong holdin’ us in place, the ocean powers we learnt how to live with, even to enjoy: the sight of her on the roads, coming along so small but knowledgeable under the big paperbarks, her strength and boy’s trousers and face deadset, and her drop-ins for a chat or to go birdin’.
‘Until she started spendin’ time hangin’ round on the junction just west of Shakespeare’s farm. This bloke, Rickie Keith he was known as, on account of I dunno why, had propped in an old Hickmott wagon he’d converted on a tiny piece of shit land given to him as a settler block when he’d got back from the war. He’s long gone now, but he was well enough liked, Rickie. Soft spoken, easy to smile. Always had a patch of spuds and beet and whatnot he used to spend time in next to his wagon. He took a liking to Leonie as she’d come by, and she to him, and before long she was spendin’ time under the awning he’d rigged up, and in the wagon with him, playing cards she always said, and listening to his stories of the war, and eating pancakes. Nat, not surprisingly, had warned her off the bloke, told her he could be dangerous, having washed up from the Somme or wherever he’d been, but as usual she took no heed, probably reasonin’ he couldn’t be any more dangerous than her old man himself, all his grim
beltings.
‘Till one night a sou’westerly came in almost as bad as the one she’d first breathed in, I remember the colour of it to this day, the eerie green of cold coming high above the purple through the big windows from inside the house. Leonie was nine years old at the time and she got stuck in the wagon with Rickie Keith and never made it home.
‘Well, come dawn, Nat was straight over there in the sholtie and cart with his carbine and callin’ her out and Rickie Keith too. When no one came he fired shots into the air and then through the wheels of the wagon until the door Rickie Keith had rigged up finally opened. Nat ordered Leonie up onto the box of the cart and bailed the poor digger up against the wagon like a bushranger with the carbine. Then he told the girl to take the sholtie to fetch Bob Balme, which she did on the storm-swiped roads, purely terrified as she was by the shots he’d fired. When Balme came back on Nat’s own cart – with Leonie still at the helm I might add, yes, a nine-year-old girl clickin’ the sholtie for the walloper to the scene of a crime – Nat claimed that the friendly soldier had molested his daughter, had kidnapped her in his wagon, and that if it wasn’t for him taking matters into his own hands at dawn with the carbine, she’d still be in there, his only soul on the earth and lucky to be alive.