Tourmaline

by Randolph Stow

  When I had concluded this lesson, I carried the book to him and let him gaze upon the photograph of Tourmaline in its pride, the main street thronged with stores and pepper trees, a handsome street lamp prominent in the centre foreground. I don’t know why, but the town was deserted except for a black dog on its way across the road.

  He looked at it, smiling faintly, and then glanced through the encomium I had just read him. Suddenly he burst out into a bubbling laugh.

  I was bitterly disappointed. I am not humourless, I hope, but the splendour of Tourmaline is not a laughing matter. Still shaking, he went on to ask: ‘Does the—does the volunteer fire-brigade still function?’

  ‘In case of fire,’ Byrne said, ‘every able-bodied man drops what he’s doing, rushes to the scene of the conflagration and pisses on it. On account of there’s a water shortage, mate.’

  Again the laugh bubbled up; infectious, and very youthful. I could not be displeased.

  ‘You’re a crude beast, Byrnie,’ said Deborah from the door. ‘I’m ashamed of you.’ And she did manage to look severe as she came into the room, so that Byrne blushed, as she had intended he should. He was very modest with women.

  We stood up for her. The diviner took her tawny hand and thanked her for her kindness to him in his extremity.

  She rested her fathomless gaze on his face. And again I had the impression that he was uneasy, on his guard, with her as with Byrne; and yet with the Springs, with me, there was no hint of such constraint. And I remarked to myself that he seemed to be a diviner of less tangible things than water.

  ‘You’re famous now,’ she said. ‘The most famous man in Tourmaline. It’s good to see you looking so well.’

  ‘I’ve got you and Mary to thank for that,’ he said. ‘And Byrnie for my fame, I reckon. Mary tells me it was your husband who saved me from flattening my face on the street out there.’

  She turned aside to sit down, and murmured: ‘Fancy Mary speaking well of Kes.’

  ‘Is that speaking well of him?’

  ‘In a way. He wouldn’t do much to save Mary from flattening her face.’

  ‘Deb,’ said Byrne, ‘he doesn’t want to hear this.’ That Kestrel should be disparaged was a blow at whatever shreds he himself possessed of confidence and self-esteem.

  ‘Will he come here?’ the diviner asked her.

  ‘Kes? No, never. He’s scared of Mary.’

  ‘Kes is all right,’ Byrne hastened to explain. ‘She’s joking. He did get you out of the truck. Him and the Law, there. He’s okay.’

  ‘You’ll find Tourmaline a funny place,’ I said. ‘People like each other. There’s a lot of what we used to call esprit de corps.’

  ‘Like in the days of the volunteer fire-brigade,’ Byrne put in; with intent, I suppose, to mock me, but the diviner did not respond.

  ‘In spite of what Deborah says,’ I added (portentously, I need not confess), ‘Kestrel has a great regard for Mary. Tourmaline’s like that.’

  ‘A funny place, all right,’ the diviner said; and I could not tell from his tone whether he was impressed or covertly amused. But he must have known, behind those blue hills, terrible things. He must have been acquainted, as we are not, with the danger—the terrible danger—that danger of which I know nothing, but which drives me night and morning to prayer, and fills my sleep with images of wind and annihilation.

  ‘Do you come from the coast?’ I was impelled to ask him. ‘You’re a seaman, perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘A seaman? Never.’ And would say no more, then or ever.

  ‘Where do you come from then?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘From the other end of the road,’ he said; and smiled, evasively. ‘Where else could I come from?’

  ‘And what’s there?’ asked Deborah. It is the women, always, who are most curious about that road.

  He sat twisting in his lap the fingers of his multi-coloured hands, and studying them. Then he said, rather quietly: ‘Hell.’

  And I felt cold. No one would speak. He meant it.

  ‘You seem to believe in hell,’ I said at length, for he oppressed us too much with his sincerity. ‘That’s rare.’

  He shrugged. ‘In Tourmaline, maybe.’

  ‘We’re innocent, I suppose.’

  ‘More than I ever hoped for.’ He spoke very softly.

  All the while Deborah and Byrne were gazing at him, much as children used to stare at Ah Quong the Chinaman. It must have been trying.

  ‘Tom has told me a lot about the place,’ he said; and I tried to determine what Tom, who was so religiously wordless, could have found to tell, and how much he had observed in his hermit-existence, and whether his observations might not contain elements which had escaped the rest of us. ‘I’ve never met a man like Tom. I’ve never struck a town like this. Maybe there aren’t any more. I could believe it.’

  ‘You sound as if you’d never had a home,’ said Deborah.

  ‘No,’ he said, shortly. ‘Out there——’ Then he stopped for a moment, but meeting her eyes for the first time went on, with a sort of despairing candour: ‘I’m not the kind, you see. It’s—ah, chaos. Like nothing here. Tom couldn’t live. I couldn’t live. D’you understand?’ And suddenly he was far younger, terribly eager that we should understand, that we should acquit him—but of what? Again he appeared to me obscure, alien.

  ‘And the man who drives the truck?’

  ‘Is a saint, a crazy saint. So they say.’

  ‘That bastard?’ Byrne said, incredulous.

  ‘It’s different,’ he said, ‘out there.’

  ‘You mustn’t tell us,’ I said suddenly. Because I was afraid. Because of the danger—the terrible danger. It was as if my silent wireless had finally spoken, and for Tourmaline’s sake I must clap my hands to my ears, and close my mind, and hear nothing—nothing—but the gathering wind, perhaps, and the slow soft hush of sand at every door.

  ‘Wild beasts are loose on the world,’ he said, from another place, as it were. ‘When you know that, you don’t need to know much more.’

  But Tom, who had come into the room, unnoticed, said: ‘Don’t you?’ And as the diviner turned to look at him the luminous smile transfigured his lean face and Random’s equally. ‘This room’s full of wild beasts, too, that might be let loose at any moment. The question is, what controls them?’

  ‘You know,’ the diviner said, with great trust and happiness.

  And Tom wondered: ‘Do I? Because it might be just a kid’s convention, mightn’t it? What if the Word was only ‘Barleys’, after all?’

  The diviner stared into his eyes, and the light went out of him. He said, or rather queried: ‘You’re fooling, Tom.’

  ‘Tom, Tom,’ I pleaded with him, ‘don’t destroy what you can’t build again.’

  ‘If I believed that,’ the diviner said, ‘I couldn’t live.’ And he gave to this most grotesque of conversation-killers an awful force and solemnity.

  ‘Don’t stop at the first gate, Mike,’ Tom gently said. ‘It’s not a substitute for thinking.’ And he stood with his back to the edge of the open door, swaying himself back and forth a little, as he looked down, luminous, on the young man. He was very thin, and somehow shrunken, although I don’t remember that he was ever larger. Deep lines ascended his forehead and almost overtook the receding hair. Even so, the impression he gave was of youth; an impression reinforced by the youthful timbre of his voice, and by a certain diffident and respectful quality in his smile.

  ‘Then what’s your belief?’ asked the diviner, blind to the rest of us.

  ‘I’m still waiting,’ Tom said. ‘Who’d dare say before the end of the road?’ And with his hands behind him, palms to the flat of the door, he swayed himself.

  The diviner lolled in his basket-chair, limp. I remembered his phrase before, speaking of the loss of his divining rod. ‘The virtue went out of me.’ He looked like that.

  ‘What’s it matter, anyway?’ Byrne demanded. ‘We’ll live till we die. Who gives a st
uff about beliefs?’

  ‘We’ll live till we die,’ Tom echoed. ‘If we believe we exist, that’s enough.’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ Deborah said, ‘not if you just believe that you exist. You have to believe that Mary exists, or Byrnie, or someone. You’ve got to believe it in your guts.’ And what startled me was not so much her apparent reading of my thoughts as the ferocity with which she spoke, the bitterness in her. Poor girl, I thought; Kestrel has broken her heart.

  ‘Ah, Deb,’ Tom said, ‘won’t you come home?’

  ‘I’ve made my bed,’ she said; and laughed. ‘My good old double bed with the brass knobs. I’ll lie in it.’

  ‘Kes is all right,’ said Byrne, forlornly.

  ‘D’you think he believes you exist?’

  ‘How do I know? I can’t even understand what you buggers are talking about.’

  ‘You think he treats you like a brother,’ she said. ‘Well, he does, too. Like a brother to Jock’—meaning Kestrel’s black mongrel. ‘Except that Jock doesn’t drink his grog.’

  ‘Stop it, Deb,’ Tom said, unsmiling.

  ‘He brought me up,’ Byrne protested (it was terrible, it was harrowing to watch him). ‘From the time I was thirteen. Tom——’

  The girl put her hand up, wearily, to her hair, which was tied behind with a strip of blue cloth, and did something to it without noticing. Her small breasts showed sharp under the blue dress. Her eyes were on the carpet and her full lips drawn in.

  ‘Oh Byrnie,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Poor boy…’

  ‘You must hate him,’ he accused her. ‘Why don’t you leave him? Is it fair, do you reckon?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, sombrely. ‘I don’t hate him. I’m the biggest fool of all.’ She rose as she spoke, and looked towards the diviner. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘This isn’t what you thought we were like.’

  He glanced up, absently, with eyes that had grown sullen. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘I hope you’ll come to the pub and meet him.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said vaguely. ‘I’ll do that. Goodbye, Mrs—ah, Kestrel.’

  She was taken aback by that. So were we all. It sounded like someone else’s name. But she smiled after a moment, and turned away to Tom.

  ‘Must go home, Pa,’ she said to him.

  ‘So that’s home,’ he said, ‘is it? Ah well.’

  She dropped a gentle kiss on him and went out.

  When she had gone, Byrne stretched out his long legs. Then he scratched himself, intimately. Then he said, in an injured tone: ‘She reckons she’s doing him a big favour. Who does she think she is?’

  ‘Shut up, Byrnie,’ said Tom.

  He took no offence, but continued to glower at the piano. ‘I’m mixed up,’ said the diviner, with a sigh.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ said Byrne, but with no particular eagerness.

  ‘Not now,’ the diviner said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to see the town,’ I hoped.

  He beat on his knee with the flat of his hand, irritably. ‘My head’s cracking open,’ he complained. ‘Oh hell. Tom——’

  ‘I’ll get you something in a minute.’

  ‘I didn’t know the girl was your daughter.’

  ‘She’s not,’ Tom said. ‘Well, foster-daughter.’

  ‘They don’t seem very happy across the road.’

  All of a sudden he had deteriorated, had become querulous, like an invalid. He made this last comment fretfully, as if the fact were an injury. The peeling forehead was knitted with pain above the resentful eyes. I felt that he meant us to leave him, and prepared to go quite gladly because, I discovered, I didn’t care for him. He was no longer prepossessing.

  ‘Are you crook again?’ Byrne enquired, with excessive sympathy.

  ‘My head,’ he said, sounding confused. ‘Doesn’t matter, just get worse, got to expect it.’ He put his hands up to his eyes, and kept on muttering in muffled tones from behind them. ‘Have to stop thinking, that’s all. Could have been dead, anything else is pure gain.’

  Byrne looked at me, at a loss, and then at Tom, who removed his spine from the edge of the door and went out. In a moment he returned with a glass of water and a couple of tablets, which the diviner took and swallowed without opening his eyes. Then for a while the room was still.

  ‘I’m off,’ Byrne said at last, getting up. I rose too.

  ‘Sorry,’ the diviner murmured. ‘Some other time.’ But as we passed through the door he called out: ‘Byrnie.’

  Byrne responded like a sheepdog.

  ‘My rod,’ the diviner said. ‘Tom said you might make one. Can you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Byrne said. ‘In the forge up at the mine. Glad to do it.’

  This he need not have said, for he looked like the recipient of some outstanding honour as it was. But the diviner had his eyes closed.

  ‘Good bloke,’ said the diviner, weakly, and relapsed into the self-absorption of his pain. So we went out, Byrne and I. But we heard, as we entered the shop, his voice rising to ask Tom some question, and Tom’s replying, with irony and compassion.

  FOUR

  In the morning, feeling aimless, I came out of my back door and wandered across a stretch of bare red earth to the gaol; my gaol, to which I am constantly returning, the shrine and the museum of law in Tourmaline. Against the intense blue of the Tourmaline sky, the walls of the exercise yard, like a low square tower, glimmered with all the light and purity the sun could discover in their pale stonework; and I noticed again, with pride, the rough beauty of the round window set high in the front wall, the handsome curve of masonry above the gate. The wooden door that used to cover that gate has fallen from its hinges and lies, cracked and blistered, in the open sun. The gate, lightly filmed with rust, cried out as I put my shoulder to its resistance.

  In the yard, nothing has changed for many years. The long cell facing the entrance is unroofed now, and the wall around its doorway has collapsed, covering the floor with rubble. An odd collection of old basins, bits of harness, branding irons, ledgers and journals and papers, buries the paving of the yard to a depth of about a foot. I squatted in the cool shadow, luminous with reflected light from the walls, and began to read a report, in brown ink, of the disappearance of a box of gold between Lacey’s Find and Tourmaline. The affair was mysterious, and I had my suspicions of the constable who recounted it. But I couldn’t help liking him for his generous commendations of P/H (or Police Horse) Rory.

  While I was reading, a shadow came across the light from the gateway, and I looked round and saw Byrne there, watching me. He was returning from his second home, the hut on the hill, and had seen me go into the gaol.

  ‘What’ve you got there?’ he asked, idly, standing over me.

  I showed him. He glanced at the pages, but quickly lost interest. And I remembered that reading was something of an effort to him.

  ‘I’m going to see Mike,’ he said. ‘About the rod.’

  ‘You’re making it, then?’

  ‘When he’ll come and show me. I don’t know what he wants. I thought they used a bit of bush, but he doesn’t.’

  ‘He’s a very serious young man,’ I suggested.

  ‘He doesn’t muck about,’ Byrne agreed, looking very spindly and drought-stricken as he stood there among the high walls.

  ‘Come with us,’ he invited.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s a long hot walk to the mine. I’ll stay and dig about in this.’

  He looked down at me, with his bright black eyes, like a clever sheepdog’s. ‘You’re getting an old man,’ he remarked, as if he had never observed this before, and thought I too might be interested to know. ‘I forgot that.’

  ‘I forget it myself,’ I confessed, rummaging among the papers. ‘But there’s plenty to remind me—especially in here.’ I went on, as I spoke, to flip through the pages of an ancient police gazette from New Zealand, studying the inter
esting faces of long-ago felons; but I was aware that as I did so he stood, with thumbs in his belt and long head on one side, studying me. The thought had come to him, I suddenly knew, that I must die. And what will become of Tourmaline then, he wonders.

  I scanned the sad features of one Timaru Joe (robbery with violence) and waited for Byrne to follow up the painful topic. But on this one day he seemed less inclined to pass on the first thought that came into his head; there was even an air of conscious tactfulness about him, as he stood over me, which depressed me profoundly, and drove me to say at last: ‘You’re wondering who’ll come after me when I’m gone.’

  But to my intense humiliation, he replied: ‘What’s it matter?’ I had misread him, utterly.

  ‘I am the law,’ I said, as humbly as such an assertion could well be made; for I meant by it, the memory and the conscience of Tourmaline. ‘Grant that to an old man.’

  He looked at me with pity—with genuine pity, I swear it. It was too much, too much to bear. ‘But there’s Kes,’ he said. ‘And Tom, and Rocky. And Jack at the mine. And now Mike. What do you want?’