Tourmaline

by Randolph Stow

‘I want him to come.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Here. I keep this house clean for him. Might be he come some day. I keep asking him.’

  ‘And what if he comes?’

  ‘Water,’ she said. ‘Kangaroo, duck, everything. People pretty hungry in the camp now.’

  ‘What do you ask him?’

  ‘I ask him to make it rain,’ she said. ‘And the stones, I give him.’ She pointed at the altar, where two round black pebbles, unnaturally smooth, lay before the wilted oleander flowers. ‘Rain stones,’ she said. ‘He can make rain if he want to.’

  ‘And no one else comes here to ask him that?’

  ‘Only me. I come. No one else love God now. They all forget.’

  ‘Everyone? Everyone forgets?’

  ‘I think might be old Dave Speed and Jimmy Bogada love God too. But they don’t live here. They don’t care about his house.’

  ‘Tom Spring, too? Mary Spring? Don’t they love God?’

  ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘No one love his house. Only me.’

  They stood gazing. She was in the shade, he in the sunlight. A rectangle of sky was above him. Over her shoulder, through the open door, the flowering oleander burned in the sun.

  ‘You love God?’ she asked, after a time.

  ‘Yair,’ he said. ‘Yair.’ His eyes were brilliant. He was looking into the light of the doorway. ‘I love God, now. He’s saved me.’

  ‘Always?’ she questioned. ‘Always you love him?’

  ‘No, not always. How was I to know?’

  ‘He save you, all the same?’

  ‘Against my will, maybe. Yair. He sent me to Tourmaline.’

  ‘You still young,’ she said.

  ‘D’you know who I am?’

  ‘’Course. You the diviner.’

  ‘D’you believe I’ve found God?’

  ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘How you tell?’

  ‘Through pain,’ he said—half-laughing, she told me, in a very strange way. ‘Shame. Weakness. He makes me suffer. Persecutes me. Won’t let me go. So I know I’ve found him.’

  He lifted his hand to push back his flopping forelock. His hand was shaking.

  ‘You don’t hate God?’ she asked, uncertain.

  ‘No, no, I love him. Have to. There’s nothing else.’

  ‘Nothing else,’ she repeated. ‘Only God. Nothing else.’

  ‘Pray for me.’

  ‘How? How you want me to pray for you?’

  ‘At the altar,’ he said, drawing her with him. ‘Here.’

  He knelt. And she, after a moment, went down beside him.

  ‘No, not for me,’ he said. ‘Just pray. So I can hear you. Please.’

  So she prayed, bowing her rag-wrapped head in the hot sunlight; on the hot stone floor, before the stone altar in the open shade.

  ‘Our Father, which are up in Heaven, hallered be Thy name. Give us today our daily bread, and give us our trespasses, as we give them to trespassers ’gainst us. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done. And deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory. For ever and ever. Our men.’

  Then it was quite still in the church. And he whispered, at length: ‘The water?’

  ‘Dear God,’ she said, ‘we all poor sinners. We don’t know how we going on much longer. Make it rain, dear God. You very big, dear God, and we don’t look much next to you. But your world look real pretty before you take the water away, and might be you like to see it looking pretty again. I hope so, God. I only telling you because I love you. And this young fella here love you too, and he say the same. Make it rain, dear God. Bless you. Our men.’

  She let her clasped hands fall to her thighs, and knelt in silence for a time. Then the diviner murmured: ‘Pray for me.’

  ‘I dunno what you want,’ she said, uneasy.

  ‘Peace,’ he said. ‘Just peace. Talk to him for me.’ He begged her, almost.

  So she prayed, uncomfortably. ‘Dear God, give this young fella peace. Make him happy, God. Our men.’

  Then she stood up, bowing, and moved back into the shade. But he stayed where he was, though he went on talking to her.

  ‘There’s a place for everyone,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there? In God’s kingdom.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You were told that, when you were young?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know much about it,’ he confessed; still with his head bent and his back to her. ‘I’ve found him for myself. Or he’s found me.’

  ‘You talk to him?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve shouted at him,’ he said, very quiet. ‘What’s the use? What’ve I done?’

  He was trembling, she noticed, even in that posture.

  ‘Did I sin before—before? Dear God, did I deserve it?’

  She could not understand him. His emotions defeated her. He sounded wild, she told me, very wild. And I can imagine it. His ferocity, that had in it almost nothing of self-pity, exploded before the altar like a grenade. He had had enough, he seemed to be saying. But of what?

  ‘I’m not—cast out,’ he suddenly claimed, in a loud voice. ‘If I was, I could have—I could have—ah God, what do you want me for?’

  Astonishingly (I was astonished when she told me) the old woman murmured: ‘One talent.’

  ‘One talent,’ he repeated, foolishly. ‘One talent. Is that it?’

  ‘Let your light shine,’ she said. ‘No good hiding it under a bucket. Let it shine.’

  ‘My talent,’ he said; or groaned. ‘My talent.’

  She would not move closer to him; but she did, with her voice, try to give comfort. ‘I dunno what’s wrong with you,’ she said, ‘but God loves you. Don’t you forget it, because he don’t.’

  ‘What love,’ he muttered. ‘What love. Ah hell. My head’s beating like a drum.’

  He sprawled. He laid his forehead on the cool altar step, in the shade.

  ‘You crying?’ she asked him.

  ‘No.’ His answer came back muffled by the stone. ‘You reckon I could?’

  ‘Pray,’ she said. ‘Pray.’

  ‘I am,’ he cried. ‘I have, for days, for weeks. Why am I here? Am I meant to stay? Or can I go on?’ He beat on the step with his palm. ‘God. God. Tell me where I stand.’

  ‘I got to go now,’ Gloria said, in a low voice.

  He did not hear. She moved back to the door; seeing him, as she left, still prostrate before the altar; hearing, as she passed the empty windows, broken incoherent phrases of his pain and praying.

  Byrne sang, sober and melancholy on the war memorial, a lament of his own devising.

  ‘Tourmaline!

  Red wind, red sun.

  I thought I’d never come

  to Tourmaline.’

  So quietly his guitar grieved, as though played at the horizon. So tender, heartbreaking, his nasal tenor voice.

  ‘In Tourmaline

  the wind blows high.

  The wind tears down the sky

  on Tourmaline.’

  ‘I wish he wouldn’t sing that one,’ Mary Spring said.

  ‘Ah Tourmaline,

  your walls’ll fall;

  doors crack, and dunes get tall

  in Tourmaline.’

  ‘Listen to the idiot,’ said Kestrel.

  ‘From Tourmaline

  no news comes back;

  the sand has swamped the track

  to Tourmaline.’

  ‘And yet he doesn’t feel like that any more,’ Tom said. ‘He believes in young Michael. More than anyone.’

  ‘Tourmaline!

  Red wind, red sun.

  Gone, gone—they’ll never come

  to Tourmaline.’

  ‘If I say I love you,’ Kestrel said, ‘tonight, this minute, do I have to promise to be the same every second for the rest of my life?’

  He lay in his vast brass bed. Deborah was in his arms.

  ‘Suppose love fills your life,’ he said, ‘it still doesn’t fill your
day. There are times I forget you exist. And you do the same.’

  ‘If that was all,’ she sighed. ‘Often you hate me.’

  ‘Well, you hate me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. When you’re cross and cruel.’

  ‘If you’d just understand that you don’t own me. I’m my own property. It’s good to be alone.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t want to be alone.’

  ‘You’re a woman,’ he said—gratefully.

  ‘Just a woman,’ she said. ‘There’s no more to me than that.’

  ‘It’s enough for me.’

  ‘You’ve got—oh, no curiosity,’ she accused him. ‘You don’t even wonder about people. You think there’s only you in the whole world.’

  ‘It’s the one thing I can be sure of.’

  ‘And the way you treat poor Byrnie. Like an animal. And he’d die for you.’

  ‘He’s weak. Weak people’ve got no resistance to it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, wearily, ‘it’s a disease, is it?’

  ‘Or a defence. Like a gecko’s colour.’

  She sighed for his cynicism. ‘And with me, too?’

  You’ve got to love someone. You’ve said so yourself, often enough.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Have we got to keep talking?’

  ‘It’s not love,’ she said, ‘not with you. I don’t know what it is. A sort of partnership, or something. Like dancing.’

  ‘What do you know of that’s better than that?’

  ‘I’d want to feel that—oh, that no other partner would do instead. I’d rather have the whole business go bust than have you carry it on with another woman. But you’d never feel like that.’

  ‘Quit pretending you do.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she admitted. ‘I feel like a partner too. Temporary.’

  ‘You loved me one time.’

  ‘Oh well. “One time” isn’t now.’

  ‘So now,’ he said, not quite joking, ‘you love the witchdoctor.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she cried, very irate. ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

  ‘I can read the signs. When we had him lying out on the road there, with his face like a horse’s backside, I could see you wondering what he was going to be like. I reckon you started getting ready for him before I even opened the truck door.’

  ‘You bastard,’ said Deborah.

  He laughed, like a prison gate.

  ‘I’m not like you,’ she fumed. ‘Sleeping with every coloured woman in the camp—that’s what you did. I’m another kind.’

  ‘But what if you did find you loved him,’ Kestrel said, suddenly very quiet and grave. ‘Would you leave me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I s’pose I would. What would you do then?’

  ‘I don’t know either,’ he said. And clasping her in his lean brown arms, he conjured her: ‘Don’t do it, Deb. Don’t. Don’t.’

  I stepped out of my door to look once more at my garden. I have said before that the sky is the garden of Tourmaline.

  The much-praised, the inexhaustible stars above me. Islands, ice-cold and burning. The burning ice-cold purity of God.

  Love inexpressible, inexhaustible. My love for him, it, them. No matter if such love is not returned. In the contemplation of stars, in the remembrance of oceans and flowers, in the voice of the lone crow and the jacaranda-blue of far ranges, I have all I need of requital.

  When I think that before the world began to die I did not know this love, I can praise the manner of its dying. On the tomb of the world, ice-cold, burning, I reach out with every nerve to the ultimate purity.

  Lord, fill me with your sap and make me grow.

  Make me tall as karri, broad as a Moreton Bay fig. Let me shelter all Tourmaline in my shade.

  Birds in the air; sheep in the far green distance.

  Love, love, love; like an ache, like an emptiness. Dear God, my gold, my darling.

  I could not sleep, not on such a night. So much had happened in the day to brood upon; so much had happened in the past to remember.

  There was no light in Tourmaline. Pacing the road I reached the war memorial, and went beyond it to the fallen fence that marks the road’s end, turning to look back. My footprints, in the moonlight, were small pits of darkness. A bottle, abandoned at the foot of the obelisk, glittered bluely. Long shadows of Tom Spring’s veranda posts reached towards me. The moon was behind and to the left of the store, leaving its front, under the veranda, in deep shade; but the hotel front was lit up for two-thirds of its height, and barred diagonally with the shadows of veranda posts, each pane of the windows reflecting a moon. The iron of the roof, where the moon shone directly on it, had a curious appearance of flatness, as if the surface were no longer corrugated but a plane, striped with silver and intense black. Around all these things a faint stir of air moved, bringing a hint of freshness; but even then, even at four in the morning, one could distinguish in the cool (which is itself a scent) the smell of exhausted dust.

  Mary Spring’s black cat came stalking towards me, from the direction of the moon. Grotesque, the huge shadow-legs. Rubbing herself against my shins, indifferent, she accepted me without question as a feature of the night landscape.

  Inside the dark houses, behind the blind windows, Tom and Mary, Kestrel and Deborah lay asleep. Moonlight would be coming in, perhaps, falling on the yellowed sheets that would be their only covering; lighting the soft curves of the women, the men’s lean folded angles. I could see them, as I walked by the walls that hid them. I could feel the heat of their close houses, I could smell that bedroom smell, of shoe-leather and powder, of cloth and warm flesh, that lapped them. I believe I loved them, without wishing to interfere.

  Kestrel’s dog came loping to meet me, curious to know my intentions. But the cat, not to be ignored, walked back and forth in his path, brushing his face with a waving tail; so that he deserted me, after a moment, to interrogate with his nose the other animal. But from time to time, as I walked homewards, he would come bounding back, and lay his muzzle challengingly on the ground one step ahead of me.

  In the iron shack behind his garden Rock would be asleep. In his tall room at the mine Jack Speed would be asleep. On the hillside, in their two stone cells, Byrne and the diviner would be asleep; stippled with moonlight, probably, from between the unmortared rocks. At the hospital, and in the house by the ruined Miner’s Mess, Horse Carson and others would be sleeping; and outside their humpies, dogs by their sides, the natives. And ten miles away, by their stock route well, Dave Speed and Jimmy Bogada lay, presumably, under the stars.

  Remembering the natives’ stories (unsubstantiated) of lone men savaged by dingoes, and their use of protective campfires, it occurred to me that now, in this country, in this drought, there is nothing whatsoever to fear.

  Church and bell tower on their small hill stood out black against the luminous horizon. Police station and gaol glimmered, very pale, in the moonlight. Behind me, in the Springs’ yard, the rooster flapped and crowed; and Kestrel’s dog, leaping about, forequarters low to the ground, gave for my benefit a yap of mock alarm.

  It came to me suddenly that man is a disease of God; and that God must surely die.

  There is a book I remember, from the days of my schooling; a child’s book, a school book, from which I began (I didn’t succeed) to learn French. And it had a picture that haunts me still. I knew that picture long before I could read, for the book had been my mother’s, and I was struck, as illiterate children are, by the strange image. So for years I returned and returned to it.

  There was a well beneath a great tree. And in the tree was a princess, in hiding. And by the well, a hideous, pathetic, ludicrous negress, with a pitcher on her shoulder.

  The negress was gazing into the well; which reflected not her, but the face of the princess among the leaves. The black woman’s vast teeth showed in delight.

  ‘Ah, comme je suis belle!’ s’écria la négresse.

  A joke, then—was it?


  Oh you in the branches.

  I don’t find that funny.

  EIGHT

  Byrne pushed the swinging door and went into the bar. No one was there. The door was cutting the sunlight into strips and dropping them on the floor. Imprisoned flies were crying.

  He went on, through the stark dining room, to the kitchen where Deborah was drying dishes.

  ‘Where’s Kes?’ he asked her.

  ‘Sleeping,’ she said, turning her head, a willow-pattern plate in one hand, the same blue as her dress, and a tea-towel made of Kestrel’s shirt in the other.

  ‘Lazy sod.’

  ‘He and Tom are the only ones who work in this town,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t he sometimes?’

  ‘I want a drink.’

  ‘I thought you’d stopped it.’

  ‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘It’s when I feel good I mostly need it. I feel so good I’ll bust if I don’t calm down.’

  ‘You can’t wake him up. And he’ll clobber you if you take it.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘Well, you can’t say I gave it to you, anyway.’

  He leaned in the doorway, watching her. Beyond her, through the high sash window, lay the courtyard of the hotel, a veranda on three sides, the fourth wall made up of an iron shed. Warped crates and crumbling cartons were piled on the slate paving of the yard, and dust-coated bottles of extraordinary antiquity. The shed was actually a garage, a museum for a dead utility.

  ‘It looks as if no one lives here,’ he said. The dusty windows were stone blind.

  ‘It feels like it too,’ she said, opening a cupboard and putting the plates away. Then she combed her hair in front of a greenish mirror, and turned back to pick up a bulging flourbag from the table.

  ‘What’s that?’ he idly asked.

  ‘Bread,’ she said.

  ‘Going visiting?’

  ‘He won’t ask for anything. You have to offer it to him. Is he up there, in the hut?’

  ‘I think he is. He’s not too keen on visitors, but.’

  ‘I can’t help that,’ she said, echoing him. ‘I bet you’re there half the time.’

  The light from the doorway lit one side of his poor cratered face. ‘You reckon I’m a nuisance?’ he asked, anxiously.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no. You’re too touchy. If he doesn’t want to see you he doesn’t want to see anyone.’