‘Can I cure you?’ he wondered, hopefully.
‘You can try,’ I said, to placate him.
And he did try. But so stumblingly, so clumsily, that it was difficult to attend. He unveiled his God to me, and his God had names like the nameless, the sum of all, the ground of being. He spoke of the unity of opposites, and of the overwhelming power of inaction. He talked of becoming a stream, to carve out canyons without ceasing always to yield; of being a tree to grow without thinking; of being a rock to be shaped by winds and tides. He said I must become empty in order to be filled, must unlearn everything, must accept the role of fool. And with curious, fumbling passion he told me of a gate leading into darkness, which was both a valley and a woman, the source and sap of life, the temple of revelation. At moments I thought I glimpsed, through the inept words, something of his vision of fullness and peace; the power and the darkness. Then it was hidden again, obscured behind his battles with the language, and I understood nothing, nothing at all; and I let my mind wander away from him to the diviner, at the altar, brilliant by flamelight, praising a familiar God, through the voice of a ritual bell.
When Tom stopped speaking, I made no remark.
And he said, wearily: ‘That was meaningless to you.’
I was candid, and said: ‘Almost.’
‘Words can’t cope,’ he said. And he added, rather bitterly: ‘Your prophet knows how to cut the truth to fit the language. You don’t get much truth, of course, but it’s well-tailored.’
‘He’s not so simple,’ I protested, for the second time.
‘Ah, he is,’ Tom said. ‘Like the Chinaman who invented gunpowder. “Just a few rockets for granny’s birthday,” he told them. Boom!’
The diviner turned at the altar; burning.
The singing stopped. Only the bell went on, clanging and clanging.
Before the altar. The flame of him. The blaze of his yearning.
He leaned against the altar, his elbows on it. And the brightness then—all muscles and tendons taut. He looked at no one; he saw nothing, only the dancing flame outside the door.
‘God is near,’ he said.
A voice like a far bell.
‘O God,’ he said, ‘O God, remember me. I work for your people. Remember me.’
The bell clashed on. He was crying. In the firelight his tears were like blood.
‘Remember me, father.’
And the bell drowned in our cry. ‘Remember me.’
FOURTEEN
Suddenly gold was in the air again, the gold of Michael’s Reef, as it had come to be called. And out of this talk of gold a new expression of our unity, vaguely thought of, though never perhaps actually spoken of aloud, as the brotherhood.
It was a way, I suppose, of keeping alive by daylight the spirit of the firelit church. The idea emanated from the diviner; but he himself took no part in it. He had become a nocturnal creature, never seen by us except at those barbaric séances. Byrne was the only one who had to do with him in his less ecstatic moments, and even he was only tolerated for his usefulness as a messenger. Still, he was tolerated, and it was through him that Rock received instructions to form what a colder and more methodical mind than mine might call a co-operative society, for the exploitation of the reef. This brotherhood or society we were all, in the same message, ordered to join.
We met in the street around the war memorial, and no one was missing but Tom, Dave Speed and Jimmy Bogada—and, as expected, the diviner. Every remaining man in Tourmaline had come. I will call the roll. Because they are the names of the sons of Tourmaline, that I love to count, as a miser counts his hoard. Rock was there, with Jack Speed and Byrne as his lieutenants. Then I myself, Horse Carson, Dicko; Pete Macaroni and Bill the Dill; Charlie Yandana with his brother Gentle Jesus; Harry and Tim Bogada; Ben and Matt and Jake Murchison; and apart from the rest, and hardly with us except in the physical sense, old Gloria’s even older brother Boniface, who was both deaf and blind. This was the heterogeneous mass that the flame of one man had welded into an entity.
What the diviner proposed was simple and uncommon: it was hard labour. We were to attack the reef and tear from it every pennyweight of gold it would yield to such methods as we should have to use. I remember feeling, as I listened to Rock, a faint unease, a sense of prevarication. What had become of the water we were promised? Surely that should have come first? But if anyone else thought this, he kept quiet about it.
And the gold, once won, and smelted by Jack Speed at the mine, was to be deposited with me. My capacious safe was to become the exchequer of Tourmaline, and I its chancellor.
I was somewhat moved by this honour. True, there was no other safe in the town but Kestrel’s.
In the red light (it was late afternoon) all faces wore an expression that I can only describe as optimism not quite daring to declare itself. Undoubtedly there was a sense of beginning, of waiting for a birth. Not the mood of the church, but something more sober; the mood of men preparing to work with their muscles, a daylight mood. Something, in short (have I the right to say it?), sane.
Yet, in spite of all this hope and all this corporate feeling, which the gold had aroused, there was never a suggestion that the gold was ours. It was his; it was his gift to Tourmaline. And seeing how unquestioningly this was believed, I felt, once again, an obscure unease.
But if anyone shared it, he kept quiet.
I went past my gaol and up the hill. And I turned off the path, for once, before reaching the church, and took the track to the diviner’s hut.
I knew he didn’t want to see me, and would probably resent it. But I couldn’t keep away. I wanted to look at him; to try to guess what he was. And I was not the only one, of course, to pester him in this way. No wonder he would go out at dawn and wander all day over the pink bed of the lake and through the bleak country beyond it, waiting for nightfall and for the firelight which was his wall against all intruders.
There was a scrubby tree outside the door of his hut, and beneath, a wooden box with an enamel basin on it. He was stooping over this, washing himself, or (more accurately) wiping himself with a damp brownish rag.
His blue shirt hung on the tree. I noticed a line of red dirt, that he probably didn’t know about, on the skin of his back just above his belt, trapped in the faint down there. But more than that I noticed, as one couldn’t help, the deep hollow scar behind his heart.
I said: ‘Hullo,’ apprehensively.
He turned so sharply that one would have thought I had caught him at something shameful. And my eyes were drawn then, naturally, to the other scar on his left breast.
He said: ‘Oh, you,’ with a trace of relief, I thought, but sounding annoyed nevertheless. And he reached out quickly for his shirt and began to put it on, in such a clumsy way that I realized he was using it to hide the scar from me.
And with a kind of dull misery I asked myself: But why the heart? Why not the head, if it was dying he meant?
‘We’ve seen it,’ I said; like a fool, thinking aloud.
‘Seen what?’ he asked, with his dreadful eyes on me. No one else in the world has ever had eyes of quite that colour.
‘The wound. The scar. When you were sick. Everyone’s seen it.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ he said.
‘How could you do it?’
‘It’s my life,’ he said.
‘And robbed us of you. Robbed Tourmaline.’
He shrugged. He tried to grin. But his lips trembled.
‘But you won’t—again?’
He looked down at his hands, methodically tucking his shirt into his trousers, and would not answer.
‘Ah, Michael——’ I said, feeling so cold and wretched suddenly, in the hot sun. Because he had not meant to come to us at all. He had meant to die there, in the wilderness.
‘Why should I justify myself to you?’ he asked, in a low voice, not looking up.
‘That’s twice you’ve tried.’
‘I’m getting more efficient,’
he said, ‘maybe.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Don’t tell me how to talk, old man.’
‘But you’re ours,’ I tried to explain to him. ‘Not your own, now. Ours. My poor boy——’
‘I’m God’s,’ he said, simply and sullenly. ‘Don’t kid yourselves.’
‘We saved you. We made you. And not for your use. For ours.’
‘I’m God’s,’ he repeated. ‘And my own.’
‘I think you’re selfish,’ I said. It sounded pathetically feeble.
And he laughed, lifting his head and screwing up his eyes against the sun. And something in the look of him then was familiar. I had seen him somewhere, in a picture, perhaps; or perhaps I had dreamed of him. The laugh of a man with despair at the back of him; of a great hater whose hatred has outgrown its strength and died, leaving him empty. That was how he struck me: empty. And yet, still prepossessing.
‘There’s nothing I can say,’ I realized.
And he agreed. ‘There are limits.’
‘You were right. It’s your affair.’
‘Now that you know,’ he said, watching me intently, and seeming amused (although the humourlessness of him was actually aggressive), ‘I suppose everyone will.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘And no one listens to me, anyway.’
And he nodded. But he wasn’t really concerned.
I looked at him, and I felt betrayed. So much health, and hope, and strength, in the look of him; there was nothing I would not have trusted him with, from his appearance. One would have judged him, by his looks, invulnerable; one of those made without a doubt of themselves, without a second thought. And it was all deception. He was not sound. How could I think so, when he did not?
‘What are you thinking about?’ he wondered.
‘Can’t I help you?’ I asked. But it was a question expecting no answer.
If there had been any consciousness of having failed, any regret, my sympathy might have reached him, might have found him human after all. But he had rendered himself almost without qualities; there was nothing to him but his ferocious pride, and his yearning. No creature on earth seemed worth his attention.
And still he kept his brightness. He confronted me like a locked chest, containing unheard-of things. If I could break into him, I thought. If I could. And I had a sudden ludicrous vision of myself, starving in the desert for want of a tin-opener.
Then the gold began to come in, like a harvest.
Weeks passed. Nights of fire and singing, under the voice of the bell. Days when the town looked uninhabited, for the gold drew everyone away. Even some of the women. Even Byrne’s dog.
And the rapture held. Mary was converted. Only Tom openly persisted in his heresy. I let no one know of mine.
I felt the ranks close against us: against Tom and me, against old Boniface. Not that they wished to exclude us. But the sense of purpose that first woke in the church had strengthened in the field; this was no matter of singing, but of the employment of muscles and sinews for common gain, of sharing labour, of giving aid to whoever, wiping the sweat from his forehead, should say: ‘Take over, will you?’ and go off up the hill to the open cave there to rest. And we could take no part in that. We were the elders of the tribe, tolerated, but outside.
I said to Mary, looking about for Deborah: ‘Don’t tell me she’s gone too?’
‘She has,’ Mary said.
The degradation of old men, feeling envy for what a girl can do.
‘I’m surprised you don’t go with her.’
‘I’m younger than you,’ she said, smiling, ‘but no chicken, believe me.’
Yet she did go, once, plodding across the desolation in a broad straw hat.
Jack Speed worked at the mine, whistling. The gold flowed into my safe.
‘The town’s rich,’ I realized with surprise.
I told this to Tom.
‘What’ll we buy with it?’ he wondered. ‘How about some priestly robes for Michael?’
‘Don’t be like that,’ I said.
And he was ashamed of himself, and laughed. ‘But fancy dress is all that’s missing.’
Somehow I couldn’t confide my doubts, or my knowledge. I let him think me a believer—or a dupe.
It was some consolation, anyway, to see so much happiness, so much beauty. Nothing is more becoming to the human face than hope.
Rock, in his garden, in the dusk, lifted his head, listening for the bell. I noticed his brown forehead, rough with knotted veins, and his brown eyes turned to the church, full of plans.
I saw Jimmy Bogada sitting on the step of the store, and I went away again. I knew Dave Speed was in there with Tom, and I couldn’t face him.
I went back to my stone cell and waited, in the dying light. Then the bell began, with the first stars.
The diviner leaned against the altar, his elbows on it, as his custom was, and his head hanging, paying no attention to us. The firelight glinted in his yellow hair.
Over the weeks a kind of ritual had developed. There were actual songs now, or at least actual tunes, that Byrne and Charlie Yandana had put together. And the camp people would break out, from time to time, into their keening; so throbbing and so compelling that even I, knowing what I knew, could be moved by it to the point of joining in. Because the diviner, whom they praised, was only a symbol; a symbol for what I believed in, the force and the fire, the reaching unwavering spirit of man like a still flame. There were times, in the tumult of voices and instruments and tireless bell, under the white fire of the stars, when I felt, so surely, the presence of God, that my heart swelled. Then, for a while, I was one with Tourmaline, and the diviner was transfigured for me as he was for the brotherhood. He was our captain, our delegate, the son of Tourmaline, who had come to set flowing the holy waters locked in my rocky breast.
I write this, now, as coldly as I can. But you too will remember those nights of singing, the red fire on the hill, the white fires through the damaged roof, the clang of the bell. And the golden aureole, before the altar, of our delegate, our son, on whom we had settled everything.
On those nights I believed in him. Because he was no longer himself. On those nights we created him, dedicating him to the glory of God. If he had been an image, an anthem, a cathedral, he could not have been less his own.
‘I have sinned,’ said Deborah. She wept, for pure joy.
And old Gloria cried out: ‘Make it rain, dear God. Dear God, dear God.’
The bell and the voices went on saying it. Dear God, dear God, dear God.
All that for years no voice had spoken. Holy waters, locked in a rocky breast.
The diviner raised his head. All sound stopped but the bell.
‘Remember God,’ he said.
He stared out towards the fire, while we remembered.
‘God is peace,’ he said. ‘How did we know God was there? Because we were tired.’
Over his shoulder the red flowers glowed.
‘A kid couldn’t know God was there. A kid gets tired, and he goes to his mother or his father, and they know he’s tired and they take charge of him. They know his limits. They won’t let him break. But he grows up and he goes away. And he finds that no one knows any more what his breaking-point is, and no one cares very much. He goes walking round in all directions, trying to find the right way to go, and no one can tell him. And when he’s ready to break, he thinks: “This isn’t how life should be. This isn’t what I was brought up to expect,” he says. “Doesn’t anyone care? Where’s my father got to?” And that way he finds God.’
Byrne was rapt. There were tears of self-pity in his black eyes.
‘This is what we pray. Take charge of my life, father. Because it’s too hard—too hard. And I’m close to breaking.’
The diviner’s voice was trembling a little, and his eyes were unfocused.
‘He is peace. He is joy, too. He’s every beauty you ever saw. Everything that ever made you go small and hard, in the heart or in the
groin. Fire and stars and flowers and birds. And great lakes and streams of blue water.’
And everyone caught on the word, sighing. Water.
‘There’ll be water. There’ll be a sacrament. A sacrament with water.’
His voice was rising. The firelit tears on his cheeks were like blood.
‘Take charge of my life, father. I’m close to breaking.’
And the voices from all sides drowned the bell. ‘Take charge. Take charge.’
Then suddenly the diviner was frozen, staring. There was something outside the door; not the fire, something he had not seen before. And all the voices died, and the questioning heads turned, one by one.
The black shape in the doorway came lurching forward into the church. It was Dave Speed. And he was laughing.
‘What is all this crap?’ asked Dave, showing as many teeth as he had. ‘What’s it in aid of?’
Somehow the bell only underlined the silence.
‘You won’t find no water,’ Dave told the diviner. ‘You? You ain’t a diviner’s bootlace. You’re either a nut or a flicking con-man. Why don’t you hop on the truck and go home?’
The diviner stayed where he was, leaning on the altar. He glittered like ice.
‘Go to bed, you stupid bastards,’ Dave said, addressing the congregation. ‘Stone me, don’t you feel silly? Get up off that floor before you all get piles.’
But the only one who moved was Jack. I saw his face as he went towards his father. He was suffering.
‘Go home,’ he said, taking Dave by the arm.
‘I am,’ said Dave. ‘And you’re coming with me.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Jack said, quietly, trying to drag him away.
‘Here,’ Dave said, breaking free. ‘Don’t try to push me around, young fella.’
Jack said, in a tense murmur: ‘This is the house of God.’
‘House of God?’ said Dave. ‘House of crap.’
Then Horse surged up on the other side of him, and fastened his mallee-root fists on Dave’s arm. And between them, he and Jack hauled the old man away.
All this time the diviner had not moved; not even his head.
Outside, in front of the fire, Dave was still resisting. ‘House of crap!’ he was shouting. ‘Tell that half-baked bloody crook to get out of town.’
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