The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  Suddenly the track was gone and there, at the limit of the headlights, stood the willow tree, with the stone bench beneath. Beyond it a rocky shelf dropped away into blackness. Then William’s uncle switched off the engine and the lights, and the night rushed back.

  The old man gasped for breath, reached for the door. ‘Bring the gear,’ he said.

  William climbed out. Looking up, he saw that the ragged edge of cloud was closing upon the moon. A questing gust of wind came, and the shadow of the willow tree danced. With it muttered something that might have been thunder, vastly distant, but still there was no shimmer of lightning, only an inky darkness sweeping towards them. William shuddered, and reached into the back of the utility for the equipment. His uncle had already disappeared into the night. William hurried after him, dreading to be alone even more than he feared their purpose here. He found the old man shambling across the rocks, a wild figure with his bathrobe flapping. They had to work their way around to the far side of the water hole, where the banks were lowest.

  ‘Some light,’ his uncle demanded, hoarsely.

  William switched on the torch, played it downwards. The dry floor of the water hole sprang into view, sand and stones and dead branches. They descended, the old man clinging to his nephew, and then crept across the stones, back under the lee of the shelf. The willow tree bowed above them, tendrils undulating in the wind. But beneath the swaying tree a hole opened at the base of the cliff, and down there nothing moved. At the brink, William aimed the flashlight, and they peered in.

  White bone shone in the beam.

  ‘William,’ the old man moaned, clutching.‘William.’

  But William didn’t answer. The rank smell of rotting had returned, as if the cave was filled with it, even though he knew that the bones were dry as the dust.

  ‘No one must ever know. You understand, don’t you? They must never have the proof they need. They must never take this land from me.’

  William looked up at the old man’s face and saw an immeasurable misery etched there, hollow and wretched and beyond hope.

  ‘Give me the light, boy. It’ll have to be you. I can’t get down there.’

  And as William descended into the hole, the world became a dream to him. He felt the sacks in his hands, he felt the awkward weight of the shovel, but they were meaningless things. Light shone from above, but he had forgotten about air and sky and his uncle. He was deep within the earth, surrounded by rock. He watched as his hands picked at the bones. Some of them lay loose on the sand, others were half buried, and others again crumbled at his touch. He did not allow himself to recognise them as human, not even the white domes with holes that gazed darkly, not even the rows of pebble-like teeth. He refused to count, to ever know or remember how many bones there were, or how many people they represented. He acknowledged nothing at all, working in silence and putting whatever he could recover into the sacks. When the ground was bare he heard a voice from above, telling him to dig. The shovel scraped and bit at the earth and he was hardly aware that he himself moved it. Then there were more white sticks and shards of bone, and the dream went on, darker and deeper and without end.

  Finally his uncle was calling his name, telling him that it was over. The beam of light wavered and disappeared, and William rose again to blackness, dragging the sacks behind him. He was filthy. Dirt was in his hair and caked under his fingernails, as if he had clawed his way from the grave. There were no stars in the sky now, no moon. The old man was rattling the sacks, and the flashlight flickered back and forth. William could see tiny droplets of water falling in the beam, drifting slowly downwards, like snow. There were cold pinpricks on his face. He almost laughed. The rain had come too late. Too late to refill the pool and hide its secret, too late to wash him clean. He would never be clean.

  His uncle was still urging him fervently — their work wasn’t done. Numbly, William took hold of the sacks and carried them back towards the utility. Was the night full of watching eyes, were his visions still with him? He felt he was one of them now, that his own ghost would eternally haunt this place, bearing its burden back and forth amidst the shadows. Then the utility was loaded, and his uncle was behind the wheel, steering them away, back around to the road. In the headlights William could see white drops floating, still only the merest mist of rain, spiralling in flurries. They sparkled on the windscreen, until his uncle swore, turned on the wipers, and the windscreen became a blur. Dizziness claimed William in the darkness, and something hot and awful was dripping from his ear.

  When he looked again they were pulling into the driveway. The House rose in the headlights, a wall of ruined stone and clinging ivy, and a cold drizzle was falling.

  ‘Now for the finish,’ his uncle said.

  The old man was dragging the sacks towards the front door, limping drunkenly. William circled around to the back of the House, his face to the sky, feeling the dirt on his skin turn into mud. He knew what his uncle was going to do, had known all along. The things they had dug up could never simply be hidden again. The threat had to be eliminated completely. He came to the woodshed, and groped about in the darkness, picking up splinters of timber from amidst the sawdust. The rain whispered on the tin roof. His arms full, he stumbled back across the yard, bent over the wood to protect it, and on through the rear entry of the House. It was dry and still inside, the warmth of the day lingering. The hallways were lightless, but he knew his way, and he knew where his uncle would be. When he came to the office he found the old man kneeling before the fireplace, stacking wood in the hearth.

  ‘More,’ his uncle demanded. ‘Pile it on here.’

  William heaped on the wood while his uncle clutched newspapers from the piles around the room and jammed them in.

  Then the old man was fumbling at a box of matches. The fire caught in moments, and flames crackled and leapt. His uncle opened the sacks and began casting their contents upon the blaze, his withered face aglow, fervid with triumph. He might have been laughing, but William heard only the fire, raging high now. The hunger of it throbbed with the pain in his head, as if the disease in him too had finally been unleashed. In a daze he raised his hand to his ear, felt something wet. He lowered his fingers and saw blood on them, black, clotted blood, shot through with white streaks of pus. It was hideous and it stank, and it had come from within him.

  There was a voice at his back, crying out a question. He turned and saw Ruth, her hair tousled from sleep, her eyes wide.

  ‘Gone,’ John McIvor cried back, his hands full of bones. ‘You’re too late. They’re all gone. They were never here.’

  Ruth stood aghast.

  The old man was hurrying now, before his daughter could act. He snatched up the last bag, turned towards the flames — and his bad leg crumpled beneath him. He swayed, and in the final instant Ruth reached out for him. Then he toppled forward into the fireplace. Smoke and ash billowed into the room. Ruth screamed. She grabbed at her father’s bathrobe and pulled him back, burning wood and bones scattering everywhere. Taking up a sheaf of newspapers, she started swatting at his clothes, pounding furiously as the old man writhed.

  She shouted to William. ‘Get help! Get a blanket!’

  Already the flames were spreading greedily amongst the rubbish. William fled, aware that he was yelling, but not hearing the words. A blanket, he had to find a blanket. He dashed to his bedroom and pulled one from a cupboard. His mother appeared in the living room, sleepy and confused, and he shouted at her before running back. But it was such a long way, the passages twisted and turned, and then there was the doorway to the office, a fiery rectangle from which thick smoke poured. Ruth came staggering out, slapping at her own smouldering clothes. She fell to her knees, coughing uncontrollably, but William stopped short, the blanket tumbling from his hands.

  A burning shape walked through the door.

  It was wrapped in smoke and flame — bathrobe, pyjamas, they had all been transformed into streaming sheets. And it was silent. Or perhaps William’s
hearing was stricken along with the rest of him, for he was aware of no sound. The thing came down the hallway towards him. Ruth fell away before it. The figure didn’t reel or stumble, it seemed possessed of a calm and terrible deliberation. Dark hollows among the flames suggested eyes and a mouth, and its head turned slowly, searching, just as it had been searching the first time William had seen it. Then its gaze fell upon him, and it paused, grave, and yet somehow horribly eager at the discovery. The mouth opened, a black hole, guttering smoke. In the depths of his horror William was sure that it would speak, that it would utter the question it had carried with it for so long. But instead the head tilted upwards slowly, beseeching, its question unasked and unanswered, and then something within the shape gave way.

  John McIvor fell headlong at his nephew’s feet.

  The roar of fire shook the House, the office wildly ablaze. William was pulled backwards suddenly, and his mother was there, pushing him further away. He saw Ruth lurch to her feet and stumble down the hall, staring in disbelief at the burning corpse of her father. And then everything descended into chaos, a blur of smoke and fire and panic. William was pushed this way and that, faces loomed through the smoke, and he was fleeing along the hallway towards the front door. He could see spurts of flame licking along the ceiling, jetting ahead of him, faster than he could run. Then he was out in the night air. It was delicious and cool upon his face, and the rain was falling softly.

  For a time he was alone, standing stupefied at the bottom of the steps, gazing up at the House. Already the entire western wing seemed to be alight, flames flaring from the windows, the crumbling verandahs catching fire with a savage glee, the dead ivy igniting in a fiery wall. No rain would help, not even a deluge. Flames raced across the facade and whipped up over the roof. William heard the crack of the slate tiles as they shattered, he heard a series of explosions and knew that the ammunition in the red room was detonating in the heat. Burning debris tumbled down about him, and he retreated beyond the fountain. From the front doors his mother and Ruth emerged, supporting Mrs Griffith between them, the housekeeper white and half naked and barely recognisable. They staggered away from the building, and Mrs Griffith sank to the ground.

  Then amazingly William saw that his mother was heading back towards the House. Ruth went after her, and the two women were arguing, gesticulating, and William could only watch numbly. His mother looked like a stranger to him, a madwoman streaked with ash, screaming crazily at the fire. She broke away from Ruth and dashed back through the front doors, disappearing into the smoke and glare. Ruth followed her as far as the top step, but then she hesitated, turned and came back. William saw then that his cousin’s face was livid, her hair singed, her eyebrows reduced to powder.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she shouted over the roar of the flames. ‘She’s gone upstairs!’

  William stared. The House was swollen with fire, as if the great walls were bulging outwards. Why had his mother gone in there? Then he remembered his uncle’s bedside table, and the document the old man had hidden away in it. He remembered his mother’s joy at the news. All she had ever wanted, for herself, for her son, was contained in that one piece of paper. But the old man’s room was deep within the House, far away up the staircase and down the empty halls where the fire now walked. William’s whole world had shrunk to the single focus of the doorway. But the front of the House was ablaze from end to end, and Ruth was dragging him backwards. He felt her fear, and worse, her horror and pity. He was frantic now. His mother, where was his mother?

  In answer the great House groaned, a long anguished sound, the wrenching of timber and stone. And then, with slow majesty, the blazing line of the roof began to sag inwards. For a tortured moment it held, and then thunder filled the air as it collapsed from one wing of the House to the other. Flames exploded from the windows, and a great fireball belched out through the front doors and across the garden, black with smoke and flying debris. Then only a great bonfire remained, roaring within the roofless walls, towering up into the night, and defying the rain-drenched sky.

  It was the last William saw of his inheritance. Ruth turned him away from the sight, set his face to the south. He felt cold droplets upon his face. Shrugging free of his cousin’s hands, he walked into the rain. He made it as far as the empty pool. Beyond it, he could see that the whole hillside was lit by the blaze behind him, the trees lurid against the greater darkness of night, sentinels of the station bearing mute witness to the fall. He was incapable of any tears of his own, but the scene before him was misty, blurred by mournful sheets of rain. Far out upon the plains there were lights moving, a file of them with revolving points of blue and red, distant rescuers racing along the Powell road. The pool waited like a grave to receive him, and his ear pulsated as if the fire was inside his head. Blood trickled down his cheeks and the night began to spin. William laid himself carefully down on the ground. It was already muddy from the rain. He stretched out, turned his head, and sank his ear into the cool earth. For a moment he knew relief.

  Then the ground opened beneath him, and he fell into blackness.

  Epilogue

  RAIN DRUMMED DOWN FROM THE BRISBANE SKY.

  Ruth McIvor sat motionless in the hospital chair and gazed at the newspaper on her lap. She had found it discarded in the hallway. It was a copy of The Australian, dated December 22nd, 1993. One story dominated the front page.

  MABO WIN FOR PM AT LAST

  By Lenore Taylor

  The Prime Minister, Mr Keating, declared yesterday the beginning of a ‘new deal’ for Aborigines after the West Australian Greens finally agreed to support the Government’s Native Title Bill, ensuring it passed the Senate early today.

  After months of uncertainty, torturous negotiations over amendments and 41 hours of debate in the Senate, the Greens announced yesterday they would support the Bill, which was put to the vote right on midnight.

  Moments after their announcement, Mr Keating held a press conference to say the Bill’s passage marked ‘the end of the great lie of terra nullius and the beginning of a new deal … a turning point for all Australians’.

  ‘At the start of the debate I was told by a great many people that this could not be done, that the interests were too conflicting, that there was not sufficient good will,’ he said. ‘The passage of this legislation will demonstrate that this generation of Australians would not buy that sort of bigotry…’

  The Leader of the Opposition, Dr Hewson, said that it was ‘a day of shame for the Australian people’ and vowed the Opposition would ‘make the Government’s unjust, divisive and damaging Mabo legislation a major issue right up until the next election…’

  Dr Hewson said the Bill was ‘an unprincipled piece of legislation which has lost sight of what Australia is all about — a united, democratic country in which all our people are equal before the law’.

  Ruth let the paper slide from her knees. With her hands the way they were, she couldn’t open it beyond the front page anyway. For a time she stared through the speckled windows, watching grey sheets of cloud drift low above the city skyline. It was getting dark out there. Lights gleamed in high-rise apartments. She could hear the swish of peak-hour traffic on the wet streets below, the clatter of horns, and the hissing air brakes of buses and trucks. But the sounds were faint, dulled by thick panes of glass and the whisper of air-conditioning. She shifted her body carefully, still in considerable pain. Both her hands were heavily bandaged, and her face, bright red and peeling, was slathered in ointment. But worse than the pain was the smell of smoke. She couldn’t rid herself of it — it was in her hair, embedded in her skin, and her throat was layered with soot and grime, making her cough periodically.

  Still, she knew she was better off than the boy.

  William lay sleeping in front of her, the bed curtained off from the other end of the room. It was only an hour since he had been moved there from the post-operative ward, and he was not expected to wake for the rest of the night. The upper half of his head was
swathed in bandages, and a great lump of padding was situated over his right ear. His face, thin and pallid, looked absurdly small underneath it all.

  Ruth sighed, and it became a slow, hacking convulsion. Spots swam before her eyes. She had not slept since the fire, and the day stretched out behind her in a blur of hospital rooms and doctors. The paramedics attending the blaze were the first to realise that something serious was wrong with William. He was unconscious and blood was oozing from his ear, thick and smelling of rot. Ruth rode with him in the ambulance to the district hospital in Powell. But specialists were needed, so at dawn William was in another ambulance bound for Brisbane. Again, Ruth went along, for who else was there to go with him? By nine o’clock they had arrived, and more doctors were examining the ear. They declared an emergency, a theatre was cleared, and by eleven, William was undergoing surgery.

  The disease was called a cholesteatoma.

  According to the specialists, it was a tumour that grew in the lining of the middle ear. It usually began when some minor injury created a perforation in the ear drum. Foreign tissue from the outer ear was then able to invade the middle ear cavity, where it could latch on and develop into an abnormal growth. This tumour itself was not malign, said the doctors, but as it grew it distorted the cavity, shed dead skin, harboured bacteria and, worst of all, released an enzyme that ate away at the bone. The cavity would thus fill with necrotic tissue, some of which would leak back through the perforation in the drum, resulting in a foul-smelling discharge. The odour was what usually alerted the patient to seek treatment. In William’s case, though, the tumour had been left to rage unchecked, eating its way from the ear right through the bone of his skull. Abscesses had then formed on his brain.