Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  They had passed the horses in their little yard. Eyeing him sharply, she said, ‘I come too.’

  But the intensity of the grey stare was too much for her. When he repeated, shortly, ‘You go on up,’ she obeyed, sulkily.

  Indeed he went to the yard, but only to skirt it and come back to the rock on the other side. As he came up, a spider grey figure emerged from the web of grey roots. A soft cackle answered his subdued cry of joy. They rushed to embrace.

  Bobwirridirridi, smoothing his Mekullikulli, talked swiftly in the mixture of lingo, Murringlitch, and signs, evidently with the aeroplane as chief topic: ‘Haeroplane ngaiya koregoro . . . Misminara long o’ haeroplane . . . minara minara haeroplane . . . Nigari Haeroplane Man.’

  Prindy nodded gravely and made signs in answer. At length the old man cackled, indicating his stark nakedness with a wave of a claw, ‘Nogoro ngeinyima Mullaka trowjis.’

  Nodding as gravely as before, Prindy turned away and headed for the camp, going round the rock, so that he came closer to those above without being seen. He paused to listen to what was being said. Evidently the subject was Alfie, no doubt reported on by Savitra. Fergus was saying, ‘She flies off at anything . . . bundle of nerves.’

  Rifkah commented: ‘Poor zing! I know vot ve do . . . ve pack up dinner and tek to eat at aeroplane vit’ her . . . yes?’

  Prindy made his appearance. Jeremy asked if the horses were all right. Nodding, Prindy went to the water-bag to drink, staying there till he caught Jeremy’s eye. Jeremy asked, ‘What is it, son?’

  The boy’s grey eyes held his grandfather’s for a moment before he answered, with a jerk of lips hindward, ‘Pookarakka there.’

  Jeremy blinked, nodded, then said, ‘Tell him to come on up . . . tell him I’ve got some brandy for him.’

  ‘He can’t come yet.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  Still grave, Prindy replied, ‘He got no trousers.’

  Jeremy blinked again, reddened, pursed his lips before saying, ‘Well, come and we’ll get him some.’ Turning, he gave the others sitting under the shelter what could only be taken as a warning glance. Fergus looked ready to crack a joke. Rifkah had merriment in her eyes. He said to Rifkah, ‘Could you make a big egg-flip, dear?’

  Soon Prindy was hurrying down with a neat fold of khakis, topped with a red bandana. Jeremy grinned at the others. They had their chuckle. Jeremy remarked to Fergus, ‘It’s marvellous how that old fellow can get about. Last heard of him was on that train they came down on with Pat Hannaford . . . just dropped off somewhere, to go on a great walkabout.’

  Rifkah said with a smile, ‘Zey reckon he can fly.’

  Fergus said, ‘If only he could . . . we could get him to make a rekky of the Mission.

  ‘If you could get him to go with you to the coast you should make good use of him’ said Jeremy. ‘He has a remarkable faculty for getting about unseen . . . makes himself invisible, they say. The trouble would be to get him into the plane . . . unless the fact of Prindy s going might induce him.’

  There were the two khaki figures coming up, the taller one looking very odd with its topknot of ochred hair and plaited goatee. Also, Bobwirridirridi wore the bandana tied round his right leg above the knee, as a bush blackfellow might some decoration made of woven material and feathers, which could serve also for carrying something.

  Jeremy went to meet the pair, grasped the old man’s hand, said it was good to see him again, asked him where he had been. Bobwirridirridi only cackled in reply, and spoke but one word, which was in appreciation of the appointments of the camp: ‘Prop-er-lee!’ Being told that brandy with egg and milk awaited him, he expressed his appreciation with a smack of the lips and a deep sigh.

  Bringing him up to the shade, where the others all stood to receive him, Jeremy said, ‘You savvy all this lot, eh?’

  The Pookarakka nodded, but looked only at Fergus, whose extended hand he took. When Fergus asked him if he remembered their brief association during the old fellow’s trial, Bobwirridirridi answered, ‘I savvy you plenty time you hon top dere long o’ haeroplane.’

  ‘Flying over the Jail, eh? Yes, I often did that. But you must have pretty good eyes to know it was me.’

  The few teeth showed in a grin. ‘You learn him me dat haeroplane, all-same you been learn him my-boy?’ A nod towards Prindy.

  Fergus looked surprised, but answered readily, ‘Sure. We go salt water. You come?’

  ‘Yu-ai.’ But now the attention of the cavernous eyes was on the enamel bowl of brandy-flip, and the wide nostrils flared in sniffing. Jeremy got the bowl from the table. The old man took it in both hands, sniffed at it deeply, then as if the others had ceased to exist, turned from them, to go to the fireplace. He dropped into blackfellow sitting posture, sipped, smacked. He swigged, belched. Then with a deep sigh he settled down to enjoyment. The others left him alone, the men to sit again, while the women and Prindy saw to the packing of the stuff to go to the Junkers.

  When the bowl was empty and the death’s head turned, Jeremy asked if the Pookarakka wanted more. The topknot shook, and the head turned back towards the antbed stove with nostrils flaring again. The cracked voice cried, ‘Tchoop!’

  A saddle-pot stood giving off a sweet savour. Jeremy looked at Rifkah, who nodded and got another bowl and a spoon and came to the fireplace. As she stirred the giblet soup the scraggy old throat jerked convulsively. She filled the bowl, handed it over. But again the topknot swung towards the table. Jeremy rose and came and took the bowl and passed it on. As the old man took it from him he said, ‘Brett.’

  Rifkah came with a wedge cut from the semi-circle of camp-oven baked bread about to be packed. Jeremy gave it into the claws, which tore it up and dropped it in the soup, then fished it out again. A deep sniff to savour it, then down that wide hatch. How he smacked and slobbered! When he had tongue for it he cried, ‘Number one . . . number one!’

  Bobwirridirridi cleaned it up to the last finger-lick. Then with a great belch he rose, set off whence he’d come, vanished. The others returned to their packing. When after about half an hour they all went down to the horse-yard, they found him awaiting them, still decently attired, but otherwise equipped for the bush with dilly-bags and weapons. When they were ready to set out, he handed all of his equipment to Prindy, except one spear and the womera. Prindy took them readily, and deferentially fell into line behind his Master and his grandfather as they walked together. Fergus and Rifkah led the way, with Savitra behind them, casting an eye back now and again longingly at her man, apparently not daring to walk with him in the circumstances.

  Also with evident deference to the Master, Jeremy questioned him concerning his recent peregrinations. Bobwirridirridi, with a backward roll of the topknot to take in just about everywhere but the country ahead, answered with equally vague and sweeping assertion of his power to get about, ‘All-away.’ However, through Jeremy’s gentle persistence, he named one locality — Beatrice township, or rather encampment, as now more properly it might be called. This came out through Jeremy’s carefully asking, ‘You reckon kuttabah finish this country now?’

  The old man sucked in parchment cheeks till they seemed to touch and considered it. Then he replied, ‘Dat old lot bee-fore, him finish now. New lot come behind. Him dere now . . . long o’ Beatritch.’

  ‘Wha’ name new lot?’

  ‘What-you-call-him Yengis.’

  ‘Yankees?’

  The old man said deliberately, ‘Yengis.’ He went on: ‘Big mob dere. He been bring him ’nother kind blackman wukk long o’ him.’

  ‘What about countryman . . . him altogether go bush, eh?’

  Now the cheeks blew out to express contempt: ‘Him dere . . . wukk all-same long o’ jail . . . cuttin’ woot, breakin’ shtone . . . lock him up night-time.’

  The old man then got onto the subject of aeroplanes and the attack on Palmeston, obviously excited by the destructive power of what he must see as a magical contrivance. ‘Boom, bam, burrup!�
�� he kept exclaiming as he gave an almost incoherent description of the air-raid, using as much lingo as Murringlitch, talking rather to himself, it seemed. By his expression, Jeremy soon gave up trying to follow him. At length it became evident that he had finished his air-war and was talking about the Junkers, which he had found in her hiding place and looked over. It might be assumed that he believed she was here for his convenience and that he was mightily pleased about it. When they came into sight of her, hump-backed above the scrub, he cried out, ‘Yakkarai!’

  They came into full view of the aircraft to see Alfie’s dusty bottom disappearing through the cabin doorway, obviously in rebuffment of Rifkah, who was standing staring with brows drawn. Rifkah looked round at Jeremy, but without waiting to consult him, at once turned again and went heading for the cabin door. She climbed the steps, halted in the doorway. Alfie was in the cockpit, in the pilot’s seat, out of sight of those below. Rifkah called, ‘Alfie!’

  Dark head and shoulders stiffened, but did not turn.

  Rifkah cleared her throat: ‘Ve haf brought picnic dinner, Alfie.’

  Alfie’s head may have been a dummy’s.

  Rifkah stood for a moment, then stepped inside, said as she began to move slowly up the aisle, ‘It is nice stew of pigmy-goose . . .’

  Without turning, Alfie snapped, ‘Nice and kosher, I presume.’

  Rifkah halted, drew a deep breath, answered in a constrained voice, ‘As mooch as possible.’

  The snap became strident: ‘Well, it would be just too mooch for an unclean Gentile like me.’

  The copper head drooped for a moment. Raising it, its owner said carefully, ‘You go to great danger. It is not goot to go hating ev’body . . .’

  The black head swung round, with black eyes blazing. ‘I wouldn’t have to go into danger, out of my own country . . . if it weren’t for you, you Jew-whore, directly, and your evil race, indirectly. Not good to hate you, and all your filthy mob? It’s the breath of life to me now. Yes . . . I hate and hate and hate you . . . and will till the day I die!’

  That old bubbeh’s look fell upon the bright young face that stared back. A moment. Then Rifkah turned, went hurrying out so fast that on the step she stumbled. Fergus leapt to her aid, handed her down. All eyes were on her, because all ears must have heard that last tirade.

  Fergus climbed the stairs, looked in to meet the black eyes, scowled and said, ‘You’re mad . . . the girl was only trying to be kind to you.’

  ‘Trying to take me in like she’s taken the rest of you . . . like her dirty race has taken the world in for ten thousand years . . .’

  ‘Aw, shut up! She’s coming with us.’

  ‘She’s not coming with me!’

  ‘Then you’ll have to get out. I’m taking them to the Mission. And if she’ll come, I’ll take her to Timor, too.’ Fergus withdrew.

  Jeremy, standing staring glumly, as if moved by sudden impulse, went quickly to the steps, mounted. Alfie was staring out of the windshield again. She sat rigid till he reached the cockpit, then swung on him with a smirk: ‘So you’ve come to fighting her battles for her now . . . not like last time!’

  He stopped with hands on the backs of each seat, looking down at her. The smirk widened, although the black eyes blazed and the small bosom heaved: ‘Last time you put your halfcaste woman onto me.’

  He bit his lip as he met the challenge of her eyes. Still standing, he said, ‘If I could be sure your antipathy’s only personal, some woman’s thing . . .’

  She screeched at him, ‘If you could be sure my bitterness over your rejection of my love and all it stood for, for me, for our country, is only Some Woman’s Thing!’

  He went red, blinked, utterly at loss.

  She went on, almost spitting up into his face, ‘You only understand cows. No wonder they called you the Scrub Bull! Driven out of the herd because you refused to conform . . . but it was only bull’s stubbornness, not courage. Go to your Jew cow and back to the scrub and die defeated!’

  ‘For God’s sake, girl . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake leave me alone! I loved you, loved you . . . like a god . . . and you call it Some Woman’s Thing!’ She was shrieking now, and rising with small fists clenched and quivering. ‘Now I loathe you. Go away . . . go . . . before I hit you!’

  No doubt about the loathing in those black eyes. He drew back.

  ‘Go, I said!’ she screeched.

  He backed away, muttering, ‘Goodbye, Alfie . . . don’t . . .’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do . . . you who don’t do anything. Go, I said!’

  He nodded, swallowed, muttered again, ‘Goodbye,’ turned away. At the door he glanced back, to be smitten by the eyes again. Heaving a great sigh he went out.

  That awkward meal eaten beneath the starboard wing hardly could be called a picnic dinner, despite Rifkah’s seemingly compulsive efforts to make it so by pressing her food on the others and jollying them for lack of appetite. Only the horses responded. The others, even while they nibbled, kept glancing towards the source of the tension, silent behind the cockpit window. Even the Pookarakka, sitting under the other wing gobbling more bread and soup, although he could have understood hardly a word of the bitter outbursts, appeared to be little less affected by it. He could see the source, and kept his sunken eyes fixed on it. Nor could the youngsters have grasped much of the significance of the situation — unless all of it lay in that simple sentence, I loved you!

  Jeremy looked aghast, as if confronted for the first time with vivid sense of the awful responsibility one has for one’s fellows. His grey eyes were blank, as if their vision were drawn back along the years, seeing the havoc he had wrought in the smugness of his own self-sufficiency.

  Fergus must have read the look, because when soon it was time to depart, taking Jeremy’s hand, looking something like his old cheeky self, he said, ‘Don’t let our troubles get you down, Jerry . . . or else you might’s well come along and share ’em.’

  Was it a covert way of begging patronage? Jeremy might have thought so, the way he avoided the hard stare of the greenish eyes.

  Rifkah kissed him lightly in farewell, then at the steps turned back and flung herself into his arms and clung a long moment with lips and hands, breathing as she released him, ‘Dear Jeremy!’ The grey eyes rolled in the burning face. Some Woman’s Thing — sealing possession to spite a mean rival — or the act of an insecure child setting seal on security? If the rival saw it, she gave no sign. But Fergus saw it, with narrowed eyes. How much is one responsible for others? Is the measure reason or compassion? Is the demand made on one’s strength, or one’s weakness?

  The cabin door shut on it with a soft bump.

  Inside, Fergus ushered Bobwirridirridi to the cockpit, where he said to Alfie staring at the scarecrow in surprise, ‘Old medicine-man friend of mine . . . going to the Mission . . . wants to add aviation to his talents. Mind riding in the cabin to the coast?’

  Without comment she rose, came into the cabin, completely ignoring the others there, seated herself alone, buckled herself in.

  Up in the cockpit, how those red coals in the dusky death’s head with its topknot glowed as the engines erupted into bellowing life. The topknot danced as the head, like that of an inquisitive bird, followed the flitting of Fergus’s hands over the controls. When the claws would have done likewise, Fergus shouted to him to wait till they got On Top. The Junkers rolled.

  In the storm of the run-up at the end of the strip, the sunken eyes watched the magic motors spin silver webs about themselves and start dust devils leaping from the earth, which they swallowed and farted out as flame and smoke. Then away, seeming to swallow the very strip — and up, to swallow the trees, then bore into the blue. The whole world spun beneath them. There was a midget man with tiny horses — then the koornung’s trance-state of level flight, one’s seeming to hang there while the green-brown wilderness tore along beneath like waters of a mightly flood — violet distance far ahead rushing to meet them.
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  Fergus called, ‘All right . . . you want to have a go?’ He explained lightness of touch of hands and feet, demonstrated roll and pitch. ‘You follow me through . . . foller-him-me up. Now, easy . . . easy!’

  Soon Fergus took off hands and feet, and the Pookarakka came into his own, cackling for joy.

  ‘You’re a natural!’ shouted Fergus.

  ‘Yakkarai!’

  There was another topknotted death’s head mirrored in the windshield by a trick of light. Both grinned at each other — ‘Yakkarai!’

  Thus straight to the Leopold River, reaching it about ten miles from the mouth, following its python-windings down just above the trees, scattering the white birds, the blue birds and black birds, as a Cock-Eye Bob does — ‘Yakkarai!’

  Then out over the emerald and brown opal of the estuary, with sea stretching away with islands seeming to float on a tide stream, jade-green shallows deepening to saxe blue and indigo, creamed by the sou’easter.

  Fergus took over, to bring them low along that stretch of beach from which those going on to the Mission must embark. The canoes were there, but no person. The tide, in neap, was only halfway up the beach and on the turn.

  Back over the mangroves, so swiftly that the distance seemed only an easy boomerang-throw, then down to land on a glittering salt-pan.

  Alighting, the Pookarakka embraced his Mekullikulli, cackling, ‘Prop-er-lee, prop-er-lee . . . number one!’

  ‘No doubt about you blokes,’ said Fergus. ‘If there wasn’t this bloody war on, I’d start a flying circus with you.’

  ‘Yakkarai!’

  Fergus, with chart and compasses, was telling how best the voyage to the Mission could be made with set of tide and wind — when he became aware of the steady staring of those who would be doing the navigating, the almost imperceptible glowing coals, the intense grey. He shut up, folded up his chart, murmured, ‘How silly can a whiteman get!’ He contented himself with giving Rifkah written details of the mode by which he wished to communicate with Glascock, and then with seeing them on their way, to the passage through the mangroves.