The Vintage and the Gleaning

by Jeremy Chambers

  And the room the same, always been the same, never changed, not from the beginning, and a sudden feeling comes over me as though I am seeing it for the first time, the familiar unfamiliar and vague recollections of bustling noisy presences, voices, but faded now. And I think how it is at this time of life, at the end of life, that it is now I sit in this room as though for the first time and for the first time I feel the stillness and the silence, those long-time presences gone and even after all the long years it is only now I realise that they are gone for good. And even with the girl sitting close by me, the room and the house feel empty and it is only now, for the first time and after all these years, it is only now I know that I am alone, this room, this house, but not just that, more than that, gone, everything, all of it, it is all gone.

  I look back out the window at the overcast sky, the dampened sun, the poison swimming like oil and the backyard shrouded and strange, everything become strange.

  Things pass through my mind, things of childhood and forgotten but always there somehow, at the edges of my mind they were always there. Iron things, heavy latched doors and shutters, kerosene tins, canvas waterbags, sacks and harnesses, hessian sacks and trace chains, greenhide ropes, plaster saints among dry yellowed books, tin baths we used as boats in the floods but only bathed in once, yokes and swingle trees, the tamped earth floors and wooden bunk beds, straw mattresses, coarse and prickly sheets, we slept in dirt as we lived in it, dirt and dust, my childhood. And I remember the tins of jam and boxes of salt, tea, the single tiny bottle of vanilla essence, codliver oil, the jar of humbugs, things with coloured labels and names and pictures that we would look at in quiet fascination, things from far-off places. I once tamed a cockatiel.

  And I remember the cats, half wild, that scattered and spat and milled about at feeding time, waiting for the sisters to put out scraps, darting up and speeding away with tails in the air, the patterns of their coats, tabbies and brindles and ginger cats, their coats clean and they were the only things. And I remember we loved the kittens, sprung forth in litters and I suppose it was in spring, some time of the year that only the cats knew, for there were no seasons, just the dry and the wet, and we spent many hours trying to catch those kittens, crawling under the foundations and into the wood pile, setting up traps, but they were slippery fellows and vicious, and I remember the sisters scolding us as they tended to our arms and hands with their filigree red lines and beads of blood, the sting of iodine and I don’t think we ever caught a single one.

  Metal objects. A silver candelabra with twisting arms and two matching candlesticks, a chalice, finely worked incense burners, a crucifix bursting in all directions, more a star than a cross, and other holy, nameless things. Copper oil lamps, a coffee pot, a silver tray, all taken down once a year and dusted and washed and the silver and copper polished and we would watch as the dun objects turned to shining, radiant things and they were as though from another world.

  And I remember the wild blacks came in hard times, dark and gaunt and near to naked, their long thin legs and squat bodies, and faces like horrors from dreams, carrying their children, flanked by dog packs, and they would set up camp against the stone walls and demand flour and sugar which the sisters doled out for them every morning, for they feared them. And they would huddle in the shade of the buildings and we would watch them go about their ways, campfires smouldering day and night, the women laughing as they cornered a cat and beat it with their yam-sticks, then skinned and cooked it with damper and lizards and grubs and us boys standing at a safe distance to look at their clubs and spears and thick raised patterns of scars and at the women, but them giving us barely a glance, although their dogs stood and snarled, showing their teeth, and they went about their ways until it was heard about and men came with guns and drove them back into the desert.

  Always with an eye on the meat locker, always starving, us boys, and I remember jutting ribs and the constant gnawing in my belly and we would sneak into the larder to inspect its changing contents, mutton quarters, skinned rabbits, wild goat, beef when times were good, wallaby when times were tough and sometimes a rooster killed and its twitching body wrapped in cloth, hung out and bled out, the meat brought in with the other supplies, sacks of flour and oats, potatoes and onions, tea, sugarbags and hay bales, brought in by a worn-out man in a worn-out truck that was little more than a chassis.

  And in the mornings cracking the ice in the enamelled wash basin, the precious spring water shared among us, the flannel stiff. And on those frozen desert mornings we would run out, shoeless, shivering things to fight over fresh cow pats and I remember the pleasure of sinking my bare numb feet into the warm and steaming dung.

  And Sister Margaret and her fancy chook, I remember, fancy chook the other sisters called it, Margaret’s fancy chook, so proud of her fancy chook, a black silky hen, feathers gleaming, touch of green, a small bird and she loved her fancy chook, brought it back from some trip she made, her mother’s funeral I think it was, none of the sisters allowed to buy things for themselves, they had a word for it, some church word, but Sister Margaret brought her fancy chook and I remember her saying they were good layers, the silkies, saying it to the other nuns but blushing and she loved that fancy chook and it never laid a thing and died in two days from the heat, and the other chooks, big solid squabbling things, stout, reminded me of the sisters, colour of the earth whatever colour they were, or had been, pecked out the eyes and the feathers and gashed the flesh before Sister Margaret gathered the bald and bloody thing in her arms and buried it, lashed two sticks together in a cross and planted it over the grave, and the other sisters laughed and they told the story often over the long dining table, to laugh at her again, and I remember them telling it, cackling away, Sister Margaret and her fancy chook and Sister Margaret blushing, and I realise now that she was scarcely more than a child.

  And the man and his truck brought bare-rooted fruit trees and we dug holes and planted them and they withered and died. Small chalky pumpkins grew in a tangle with sour melons and that was all.

  And we would play wild games, mostly of our own invention, running around like mad things, chasing and tackling each other and wrestling in the dust, kicking the melons about until they split and fell to pieces. And cricket with a piece of timber for a bat, war with sticks for rifles, clods of dirt for artillery, knucklebones and other games without name. And the flies would swarm us, cover us, crawl inside our ears and noses and mouths and I remember boys stopping in their stride to cough and they would cough out flies. And there were snatches of rhyme and we would recite the Lord’s Prayer with dirty words and if the sisters ever heard us they would beat us with a length of spent leather until we wailed or the strap broke.

  And we were all of us covered in chilblains and our skin blistered and split and itching with scab-mites and lice and the bites of insects, the sisters burning off ticks and lancing boils with a hot needle. And the measles went around and whooping cough and all childhood diseases, and it seemed there was never a time wasn’t one of us laid up with something or nursing a broken bone or a festering and flyblown wound, and sometimes a boy with consumption or lockjaw and the doctor would come and take him away to some hospital and the sisters made us pray for his soul when news came he had died.

  And the visits of the dog stiffener during his journeys through the desert, his large black Mexican hat with red tassels, larrikin boots and gold teeth, and he would show us his rifle and revolver and the scars and tattoos about his body and the bottle of strychnine he used to poison the waterholes, and he would say with a grin and not just dogs either. And I discovered what he meant when I was older and had learned to walk the desert and knew the rocks and trees and tracks, and one day I came across such a waterhole, deep within rocks and not such a pool as I imagined but little more than wet sand, a dirty water seeping through to the surface and, yes, not just dogs, but birds and lizards, rat-kangaroos and wallabies and wild blacks, all strewn around the place, the bodies of man and animal
bloated and ripe and food for ants and flies.

  And I remember scrabbling about the place, exploring the old mission buildings of rough hewn stone, others of cracked pisé, flaking whitewash, leaking silt, some hollows deep, and we would dig into them with sticks and makeshift tools, as though expecting some discovery but only finding more of the dry hard stuff. The rarely used chapel with its crude altar table and benches and dry font, the old bullocks’ stables, the empty stonewall pigsty and the deep claggy old quarry with its piles of rough rocks and cool inside where we would sit and make stories and take shelter from the sun.

  The mad old Trappist, emaciated and long-haired, beard to his stomach, he lived in one of the outer sheds and rarely left it, and we would peer into the place and watch him as he wrote, great piles of paper all about the place, and when I got older they would send me with his meals and he would jabber at me in strange words which the sisters told me was Spanish but I heard in it also the voices of the blacks and occasionally he could be seen tending the pumpkins or waiting for the truck which brought his ink and paper also, and sometimes he disappeared into the desert for weeks at a time and returned sunburnt and ragged and sometimes painted in ochres, and you could hear him coming talking from far off because the man never stopped talking or writing in that old bark shed, and when he died the sisters took his sheafs of paper and used them for tinder and waited for a priest until the body stank, and when the priest arrived he gave him rites and buried him, digging the hole himself, and the sisters told us he was one of twelve who had left their monastery in Spain to come over the sea and trek through the desert with bullock-teams and drays and had quarried the stone and built this place as a mission for the blacks and had made no converts and had died here and he was the last.

  And I remember the sisters’ china, carefully placed on the high shelves and never used, for we ate and drank only from enamelled plates and mugs, worn through to black tin, but the china displayed all the same with its flower-patterned pieces, the matching tea-set, the enormous tureen, bowls, a gravy boat and a large jug showing a woman and a bearded man flanked by columns, wearing long loose robes which fell in folds. And the row of painted plates along a shelf with scenes of men in frock coats and tall hats, arm in arm with women in gowns, girls in flowing white dresses chasing butterflies through lush gardens, cobblestone streets with ruddy fat men and carts full of fruit and shop windows laden with meats and bread and all other things I did not know, snow-covered landscapes, lakes of ice with the same such men and women in their coloured clothing, scarves and hats and bonnets and fur-lined coats and long dresses, skates on their feet and all in motion, laughing and throwing snowballs and falling on the ice, red-coated men on horses with a pack of hounds and a fox running before them through shady woods of broad-leaved trees, all pictures in bright paint and wreathed in gold and gold about the edges of the plates too. And I wondered at these pictures of things that I had never seen and never thought I would see and never did see.

  And I remember once a grim-faced man came in a car and drove me and Sister Bernard across the dusty roads to a black encampment, and the blacks lying about in the shade of their shanties and the man called them out and they came and sat before us on the ground and Sister Bernard had me sing for them, conducting me as I sang. And afterwards a man in a sack suit came before the assembly and I watched as he stood just as I had stood, taking on all the appearance of a young boy, chest out, head up, and his face become innocent as a cherub and he began to sing too, in a high falsetto and another man put his coat over his head and waved his hands about, his smile the smile of Sister Bernard’s, and the blacks all laughed and the grim-faced man grew angry and shouted at them and struck the singing man with the back of his hand and Sister Bernard pulled me away and it was only then I realised they were laughing at us.

  Lined up with our bowls in the great hall, waiting for watery porridge for breakfast and watery soup for tea, lucky sometimes for a chunk of bread, the sisters doling it out of a great iron pot and there was only one, breakfast, tea, every meal come from that black steaming pot. And stopping to look for a clump of oats, a chunk of meat on our way to the table and disappointed usually, and we sat and ate and licked our bowls and our stomachs gurgled. Treacle in the porridge on Sundays and that was close as we got to heaven and hope.

  And the teams of stockmen would come in, hard-faced men with kangaroo-hide whips coiled over their shoulders and butcher’s knives in their belts. And they would water their huge dusty horses from the bore pump and the sisters would line up the black boys and the men would pick out a few and strip them naked and squeeze their arms and legs and bark at them and give them a kick or a backhander to see if they would cry and the ones who cried they pushed back to the sisters. And the sisters would bring out the doctor’s reports and any man among them who could read would read aloud to the others, who smoked and talked and looked at the naked piccanins all the while, their pale eyes made all the more pale by faces filthy as ours. And us whites and the half-castes would stand looking at the Chinaman cooks with their coolie hats and long braided queues that reached to their horses’ flanks, and strange broad wizened faces with slits of eyes that watched us without acknowledgment or emotion, and sometimes one of us would hurl a rock at them when the sisters weren’t watching. And the stockmen would talk and spit and empty out their pipes and hoist one or two of the piccanins onto the saddles of their great stomping, snorting horses and they would ride off and we would never see those boys again.

  And I remember flocks of birds that blocked out the sun, turning day into night, lizards that came out in the cool of evening, running about in front of you and so thick on the ground that it seemed as though the ground itself was alive, the mouse plagues and frogs falling from the skies before the rains, plopping about the place and sitting surprised for a moment before hopping off, and then the rains coming down, water to your chest, the whole desert turned into a dirty sea and running in torrents, and after the rains the wildflowers, tiny things, the ground covered with them, every inch massed with bright colours, everywhere you turned and for as far as the eye could see, and they only lasted a day or two and then red desert again.

  Sunday morning and the world is white, everything coated in residue and glistening in the sun, the lawn thick with powder.

  It is like winter in other places.

  I am still not feeling right and decide not to go into church.

  I get out my bible and try to read it, tracing my finger along the page, silently sounding out the words. I doze, I don’t know for how long. When I wake it has clouded over again.

  Charlotte is in her room with the door open. I look up at the mirror above the mantelpiece and in it I can see her reflection. Charlotte is brushing her hair and I watch. She parts her hair and leans to the side, brushing in slow, steady strokes. She brushes one side and then the other. She looks up into the mirror and sees me watching. She smiles at me.

  So it all started with the Florence trip, says Charlotte, Brett, my father, everything. But I suppose there was a time before that and a time after, and I don’t mean in weeks, months or years, but I mean in memory, and the time before soon forgotten and then the time after turned into now, and now I feel like I am at the end of things, but it has been like that for so long now and I remember at the start it seemed too dreadful, too dreadful to live and I didn’t think I would live through it, because how can you live when there is nothing, no hope, no future and no emotion, not even sadness, and all good things in the past and lost to the past, and knowing they can never come back. But during that time before, not knowing, never knowing that, not then.

  And so now at the end of things, and for a long time now, and as though stuck in time, waiting and watching life pass and everything pass me by and me falling apart, fading, growing older, and how could I live with that? I couldn’t see how and I thought it would kill me because how could I possibly live like that, and knowing. But it is still at the end of things now, and the feeling th
at there is nothing and there will never be anything and that every day will only be as it is now and every day the same only worse because of time passing. And I remember I would lie as though dead, already dead, and I waited and I wanted to go out into the streets and shout, let people know, tell someone, because someone had to hear and see and care. But there was no one and there never will be anyone and nothing changed, and I feel as though a part of me has died and there is less of me now, that’s true, no hope, no emotion, not even sadness, just getting through each day, and I don’t expect the world to notice, not anymore, so I have learnt that much.

  And sometimes I think that it was because things changed too quickly for me or that I lived too much in too short a time, like I used it all up, because even then I knew something was wrong, I could see that, and everybody could see it at the time and they told me, of course they told me, and they talked about consequences, that I should think about the consequences, but it isn’t consequences, it’s nothing to do with that, what you do, how you end up. Because in the end nothing matters, not really, not in the end. It only matters to yourself and that’s the thing, there’s really no such thing as consequences, not in the end, it’s just how things are and it doesn’t matter why you are there because there’s no going back, no changing things, so no, it was never about consequences, but it was that I never thought it would all be so brief, like I lived my whole life in that short time, not starting exactly with that Florence trip but with the time before and the time after, but brief, still so brief, such a short time, and now gone and at the end of things and only left in memory.