Peter Carey

by Bliss

  'You make it worse,' she told him once, and then regretted it because he drew strength and confidence from anything she said to him.

  There was a story she had heard that he had killed Bettina. He made her nervous. He skulked around in the bush by her hut. She heard him thumping around out there. 'A man who believes he is in Hell,' she told Crystal, 'is capable of any-thing.' She went down to Jerusalem John's and took the lock from the door. She fitted it to her own door (the only lock in Bog Onion) and kept it snibbed at night.

  It is curious, but hardly surprising, that Honey Barbara, who spent the greater part of her time outdoors, on the road, her head out the window looking for new blossoms, carrying hives with aching arms through the bush, never walked a hundred yards into the bush around her own house. Sometimes her bees ventured in there when the blood wood were on, but the blood wood were not on in April. The only thing on in April was the groundsel weed which produced an inferior grade of honey of use for nothing much but the rather medicinal mead that Paul made each year. But then, one April, the bees began returning heavy laden and the hives were filling; not a heavy flow, but it was good honey, not groundsel.

  Investigating this discrepancy she walked through the bush behind her house and found it planted densely with silver-leaved ironbark which was now in blossom. But there was also yellow box, a famous honey tree, and bottle brush and ti-tree and, if she had cared to walk amongst the so-called timber trees in the bottom thirty acres she would have found amongst the tallow woods and blood woods, stands of young trees carefully planned to provide blossom all year round.

  It did not happen as Harry Joy had often (so very often) imagined it. Because there is his beloved Honey Barbara, her two hands around an ironbark trying to uproot it, whilst all the time her bees (whom one might guess, fancifully, to be in some confusion about their mistress's behaviour) feasted on a nectar which was far too good to be wasted making Paul Bees drunk at night.

  He was sitting out on his verandah catching the late sunshine when she came into his house. He knew who it was. He had been waiting for two weeks. There was no one in the world who walked like Honey Barbara and when she strode across the bare boards of the living room he imagined he could hear the talcum dust of Bog Onion Road on her beautiful feet and that the whole of his house vibrated subtly with the rhythm of her body. He did not dare stand up. He rubbed his palms together as farmers sometimes do when they have to shake hands with people they imagine to be somehow cleaner.

  He was clean-shaven that year and his face showed all the lines of his forty-five years, many lines around the eyes, and around the comers of the mouth. His brown eyes looked up towards the doorway and he brushed his bare chest on which the scar of his initiation still stood, a pink ridge across a honey-brown terrain.

  She stood at the doorway. She wore an old pair of khaki shorts and a loose white shirt tied at the waist. Her hair was short, cut as gracelessly as his. She was five years older than when he had known her and the only marring of her beauty was the suggestion of a tightness in the comers of her pale lips and for this scar he recognized his own responsibility.

  'I am not going to waste my whole life,' she began and his heart sank so sickeningly he had a sensation not dissimilar to suddenly losing sight. 'I am not going to waste my whole life hating you.'

  He stopped breathing, waiting.

  She also began to brush. She brushed her knee. She smoothed her cheeks. She squatted on the floor by the door jamb.

  'You are forty-five,' she said. 'I am thirty-two. We're getting too old for this nonsense.'

  She leaned forward and held out her hand and took his, loosening it, releasing his palm from the closed trap of his nails.

  'If you ever steal my Cadillac,' she smiled (her moist eyes searching his face for signs), 'I'll cut your bloody balls off.'

  It was so quiet they could hear a pitta bird down in the rain forest, rustling its bright feathers through the rotting leaves.

  And now there is not much more to say about these lives, not, at least, in a book that will be sold mainly in cities and to strangers at that. There were days, nights, meals, storms, fires, trees, bees, many things that were tedious, repetitive, as expected as peas uncurling through red soil.

  There were stories, of course, in the natural course of things, which came to be told more slowly, with greater humour and with a pride that could not be mistaken for arrogance. Harry often seemed as happy to talk about the clay he dug, or the trees he planted (and a man who makes a forest has reason to speak about it with a little pride). In short he began to talk like a farmer and became the sort of character who makes city people laugh, drawling slow directions, complaining about rain or the lack of it, believing improbable (unscientific) things that more advanced people have discarded a century before, suspicious of new chemicals and things in packets, gazing off into the distance before answering easy questions, discussing a piece of fencing as if it were important.

  He lived through thirty more wet seasons, seven droughts and two cyclones which happened, coincidentally, to have the same names as his new children.

  So now there are only two stories left to tell, or rather two halves of the one story, and then it will all be done.

  On the day of Harry Joy's death he was seventy-five years and two days old. He looked fifty. His face was deeply lined, you could even say creased, and it had been likened, by his children, to an old handbag. He walked with a slight limp, the result of a fall he suffered fighting a fire below the ridge at Clive's place. It was as close to a perfect day as might be possible, a warm sunny day in late October with the yellow box in flower and the 'Yard' bees travelling out from their racks (necessary to protect them from cane toad) out through the canyons and canopies of Harry Joy's forest.

  He had only come out to look at the blossom, nothing more, but he walked amongst the trees like a true gardener and even removed a piece of groundsel weed he judged had no right to be there. Down below in the valley he could hear Dani singing.

  Nothing will happen in this story, nothing but a death. It is as inconsequential as anything Vance told. Soon the branch of a tree will fall on him. A branch of a tree he has planted himself, one of his precious yellow boxes, a variety prized by bee-keepers but known to forest workers as widow-makers (widder-makers) because of their habit, on quiet, windless days like this one, of dropping heavy limbs.

  Any moment this thirty-year-old tree is going to perform the treacherous act of falling on to the man who planted it, while bees continue to gather their honey uninterrupted on the outer branches.

  There – it is done.

  There is nothing pretty in this last death, this split head, this broken life: There was nothing beautiful in the cracking cry of Honey Barbara as it later resounded around the valley, swept and swooped like a great panicked crow in a glass cage, like jet-black dove wings, the flapping overhead of flying foxes in the night.

  But now the last story, and the last story is our story, the story of the children of Harry Joy and Honey Barbara, and for this story, like all stories, you must give something, a sapphire, or blue bread made from cedar ash.

  He was dead, the yellow box branch across his head and arm, bees still collecting from the scanty blossom. He felt perfectly calm, and as he rose higher he could see Daze bringing the Clydesdale down the valley to where his grown-up children were dropping logs. He could see trees, trees he could name, and touch. Their leaves stroked him like feathers, eucalypt graced with mint, rose, honey, violet, musk, smells, came to him. He was in a place he had been in before. His nostrils were assailed with the smell of things growing and dying, a sweet fecund smell like the valleys of rain forests. He did not wish to return to his body and instead he spread himself thinner, and thinner, as thin as a gas, and when he had made himself thin enough he sighed, and the trees, those tough-barked giants exchanging one gas for another, pumping water, making food, were not too busy to take this sigh back in through their leaves (it took only an instant) and they made
no great fuss, no echoing sigh, no whispering of branches, simply took the sigh into themselves so that, in time, it became part of their tough old heart wood and there are those in Bog Onion who insist you can see it there, on the thirty-fifth ring or thereabouts of the trees he planted: a fine blue line, they insist, that even a city person could see.

  He was Harry Joy.

  He talked to the lightning, the trees, the fire, gained authority over bees and blossoms, told stories, conducted ceremonies, was the lover of Honey Barbara, husband of Bettina, father of David and Lucy, and of us, the children of Honey Barbara and Harry Joy.