by Robert Power
THE VISIT
‘Mother. It is me, Michael.’
They sit around the wall, slumped in chairs. Some with baby bibs to catch the dribble, others in outsized carpet slippers, for they have nowhere to go. A big television, the size of a sideboard, shows an afternoon game show. Lights flash on the screen as buttons are pressed by excited contestants. Around the room heads nod in and out of sleep, full of wisdom and hundreds of years of life, waiting for a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit.
I sit opposite the woman who is my mother. Her hair, long whitened by the twist of her mind, is now yellowed by surrender. I hold her hand. It is as cold and fragile as the body of a dead bird. She responds to the touch, looking up and through me as if I am made from glass.
A nurse appears and tells us we can go into the garden if we wish.
‘That’ll be nice,’ I say to her, looking at my mother. ‘Let’s go into the garden, where we can talk better.’
She doesn’t seem to understand, so the nurse eases her up by her elbow.
‘Come on Mrs Daly. A nice stroll in the garden with your son who’s come all this way to see you,’ says the nurse.
My mother clutches her handbag to her chest and takes my arm.
‘Okay, okay,’ she says. ‘I’m not stupid. I know who I am.’
We walk along the long high-windowed corridor to the doors leading out to the lawn. My mother wears a peppermint-coloured cardigan, a long brown skirt and tomato-red woolly tights. She’ll be warm enough. I guide her towards a bench overlooking a small lily pond. We sit down together. Overhead, clouds scurry across the sky, rushing to find a new horizon. Leaves play leapfrog on the lawn, the surface of the pond ripples at the behest of the wind.
‘Not too blowy for you, mother, is it?’
She looks at me, holding out her handbag, ignoring my question. I recognise it from the old house. It is soft brown leather with a gold metal clasp. I remember playing with it when I was a child, loving the feel of the clasp and the sound it made when you shut it.
‘Your handbag,’ I say. ‘I used to like opening and closing it when I was little.’
She smiles. Her lipstick is smudged, making her mouth look larger and crooked, her smile more needy, more disturbed. She seems so much older. So different. Once, though it feels like an age away now, she was tall and strong and as sharp as a pin. Back then she could outride any drover and outwit and outbid the smartest cattle men in the state. When they saw her at auction they turned to each other and whispered warnings. Some pretended to dismiss her, but each secretly watched her as she moved through the stock. The slap on a hide; a glimmer of interest. Subtle signals that she had seen something others had missed. Some scribbled cryptic notes to themselves, others looked away, as if they’d seen nothing, but storing away the memory nonetheless. How I loved being with you then. To see the look of admiration on the faces of the gnarled old farmers when you closed the deals. Their respect was grudging, but it was real, and some of them would tell me what a rare and fine woman you were, a battler. It made me proud to listen to the things they’d say, to tell me something I vaguely knew. What with it just being me and you and no man to hold us together.
As I grew up we talked more and more. Sitting by the fire after another long day in the fields or the cowsheds. We were close. Not like the gossips said, as if we were some odd kind of married couple. No, we knew who we were, what we meant to each other, what we were aiming to achieve. We knew well our purpose in life. I look at you now and it seems so long ago that I heard your voice, strong and clear and full of intent. I see you standing tall on the edge of a field of wheat. I see you looking up to the night sky, watching out for the weather, reading the stars. And here you are now, playing with the clasp of your handbag and you seem so far away, so absent.
Mother. How can I tell you what I need to say? The doctor told me it might disturb you too much, that the news will upset you. Even though you are forgetting so much, the doctor said that if I tell you it will come back to your mind and then disappear, only to return. And that the nurses will see you crying, sobbing. Yet when they come to give you comfort you will have forgotten what it was that troubled you so. But you and I are all we have. All we’ve ever had. I have no one else to tell that will understand, that will comprehend the details. It is to you I have told everything. You were always the one. The one and only.
My earliest, clearest, memory is standing in the paddock above the creek. The sky was so big, so blue all around us. The huge gum trees, hundreds of feet tall. We were just a small boy and his mother, two specks in an immense world. You won’t remember that day. It wasn’t so special to you. I looked up at you, you were saying something, the sun was behind you and I could barely make out the details of your face. But you were beautiful and you were mine and in the immensity of the world I felt safe and held. I squeezed your hand as hard as I could and you looked down at me and the sun caught the flash of your smile and I could feel the soft skin of your palm.
Once, years later, when the crop failed and you looked so worn and worried, you said to me, as we stood together in the barn, that we’d be fine, that the two of us together would be strong and we’d pull through. We hugged, I was only ten or eleven, but I knew I was the man in the growing and that our life was our life. And the flattened crops could be cleared and the soil tilled and seeds replanted. So how can I not tell you now, when we have told each other everything all these years long?
‘Mother, are you warm?’
She smiles, hearing but not listening.
She is still looking past me, over my shoulder. I turn around. What is it she is seeing?
‘Mother, I found Trailer’s old leash the other day. You know the one with the metal studs. It made me think of how he used to chase those big goannas away from the chookhouse, barking like crazy. Those dinosaurs scared the life out of me, with their shoulders like bulls and teeth that would rot your arm if the bite got into your blood. But he’d square up to them any day. You used to say we were the three musketeers. Me, you and that dog without an ear. Do you remember him, Mum?’
In one of those rare moments of lucidity her eyes light up and she sees me as her son. Maybe she even remembers the old dog, but she doesn’t say so. Just smiles a little.
‘The barn,’ she says. ‘the old coppper kettle in the barn.’
She stares at me. Into my face, as if for the very first time. Then she is lost again. Her eyes are distant, as if they are tired and have given up, as if they recognise nothing of this day, of this place.
‘My mammy said he called by today, after his shift,’ says my mother, from somewhere deep in the past. ‘But I was out playing tennis. He’ll call again. He’ll call again, soon. He’s to call again to take me out walking on the promenade. We’ll take a turn together around the sweep of the bay.’
She looks at me, surprised at what she sees.
‘You’re not him,’ she adds. ‘No you’re not him. You look nothing like him and you’re far too old.’
So I hold her hand and stroke her arm and we sit in the fading sun on the bench. Every now and then an old man or woman walks by, separate and deep in their own world, far, far away. I look into your face. It is the face of my mother, but a shadow has been cast between us. Breaking a bond. I grip your hand, but you don’t respond. So we sit together on this bench and that, for now, will have to be enough.
So maybe it’s for the best that I don’t tell you what has happened. Anyway, it is all so strange, even now. After the events. There were warnings. On the radio and from the folk in town. Old Barry Davies drove up the hill in his battered ute to check I’d heard what was in the offing. You staying? he said.
I guess so, I replied. What else is there to do? It was like nothing we’d seen before. So much rain. Day after day, until it got so dark with the deluge of it all that you couldn’t tell morn from night. Then when it came it was as if the world had exploded. The wall of water and the trees crashing and the mud and the machinery and the bi
ts of houses and animals all at once. It engulfed everything. The barn just upped and washed away and the cattle, swirling and screeching, big eyes trying to stay above the whirlpools and the crops and trees all uprooted and swept away. I had climbed to the top of the silo and could see the whole landscape transform before my eyes. As if I was the last man left in the world.
All we’d worked for ripped away in a flash. I saw a huge croc swim by just below my feet and snakes and lizards and all manner of animals drowned and drowning and wriggling in the flow. All helpless together. So I just waited there. Thinking about the long life we’d had, me and you and how it was all being swept away beneath our feet.
Sometime later on in the night the rain stopped and the torrent slowed. It was almost peaceful. I just sat on top of that silo watching for the sun to rise, which it did. As if nothing untoward or remarkable had occurred. As if God had turned his back for a while and had missed the show.
Around mid-morning Barry Davies came by in his old tinny. He circled around where the house had been, his oar barely making a sound. Then he saw me atop the only structure still standing and headed my way. We nodded at each other and he asked me if I was okay and I said I was. Then he told me to get in the boat and we rowed in silence back to town. Eventually the water gave way to higher ground and we tied the boat to a post. Then we walked through the mud and the slop to a shelter that had been set up by the railway station. Not much more than a plastic tent, but everyone was there and it was kind of reassuring to see those familiar faces from town, no matter they all looked so sad and lost, everyone sitting quietly in their grief and bemusement.
I’m glad you were here up-country and away from it all. The doctor said it was on the news, but you took no notice, even though the old high street was shown blown away. Once the flooding subsided I went back to see what could be salvaged. But everything’s gone. All the topsoil’s been washed away, just leaving bare rock. It’s like the present has been peeled back to reveal the past. Just a couple of huge trees and all that rock. And that’s when I saw Trailer’s leash, the studs glistening in the sun. Wrapped around a branch like a snake warming its cold body in the midday heat. I hadn’t seen that leash in years. No idea where it came from, but that’s about the sum of all that’s left. Mother, I’m not sure what I’ll do now. I’m on my own I suppose.
There’s some music coming from the building. Through one of the long windows in the hallway I can see a couple dancing, a nurse playing the piano, an old man on the accordion. The couple turn round slowly, a man and a woman, both in stockinged feet. Some others join them. In ones and twos, circling around to the strains of the music. Hypnotised. Caught in the moment.
My mother is tapping me on the arm.
‘Mine,’ she says, offering the handbag for my inspection. ‘My things.’
I take it from her. I release the clasp and the bag yawns open.
‘My things,’ repeats my mother, nodding her head, urging me to delve into the bag. I look inside. It is full to the brim with silver paper wrappers from chocolate bars, squeezed into tiny balls. I pick one out and roll it around the palm of my hand.
‘Lovely,’ I say, ‘like jewels.’
She smiles, her face relaxes and I can see a trace of the mother I once held so dear. Then the twist of her mouth turns to a scowl. She stares intently into my face. So close I can feel the breath murmuring from her lips.
‘Thief,’ she screams. ‘Thief … this strange man steals. He’s taken everything from me. He takes all my things.’
She grabs the ball of silver paper from my hand and puts it in her mouth. She takes a handful of balls from the bag, knocking it to the floor, the rest of the balls spilling across the paving stones like mercury. I lean down to retrieve the bag. When I look up again she has stuffed all the silver paper into her mouth, chomping and chewing. Behind her a lilac tree hangs blossom like bunches of purple grapes. I feel numbed and detached, almost separate from the scene. An image from the flood comes to me. Not the tumult and swollen bodies bobbing in the water, nor the thunderous sounds of the wind and waves. It was the morning after, when things had quietened down, a flock of birds, cormorants I think they were, flying in a perfect arrow overhead. They cut through the sky as if to signal the contrariness of it all; the shape of normalcy as a reminder that all would return to how it was, how it would be. I followed the line of their flight, shielding my eyes with my hand from the brightness of the sun. They squawked at me and I watched them as they settled in the upper branches of a huge ghost gum up on the hill.
It was a glorious blue-skied morning after the storm. I was standing on the railway platform after another sleepless night in the makeshift tent, where the cries and coughs of my companions had rasped through the long hours of darkness. There was a little rivulet of mucky water dribbling along the tracks. When I looked down I could see a baby’s cardigan caught up in the railway sleeper. I picked it up. It was bedraggled and stretched, but I could make out the carefully crocheted stitching. One tiny heart button hung from a thread as if torn from an infant chest. At that moment I had felt as if something had been lost from my life. Now, standing here in the shade of a lilac tree the feeling returns. In my numbness nothing seems strange to me. Nothing is unusual. Not even my own mother, blood and lipstick running down her chin. I try to hold her hand but she pulls away.
‘Poisoner,’ she screams, blood and silver paper falling from her mouth. ‘I am being poisoned by this poisoner,’ she shouts at the top of her voice.
Someone hears our drama. A door opens and shuts and the nurse appears, running across the lawn.
‘Mrs Daly,’ she says gently, sitting down beside my mother. ‘Open your mouth.’
My mother grips her jaws closed, the blood forming a two-tier line of lipstick. She swallows hard, choking and spluttering, suffocating on blood and silver foil. The nurse slaps her hard on the back. An explosion of fiery, shining balls vomit from her mouth.
‘It’s probably best you go Mr Daly,’ says the nurse, wiping my mother’s mouth with a handkerchief. ‘She doesn’t know you, she doesn’t really know anyone anymore.’
‘My things,’ sobs my mother, the small silver balls all around her feet.
I look into the empty bag. Crumpled into the bottom is a photo. It is faded and scratched, the surface almost erased. A fossil etched into the leather of the bag. The vague imprint and outline of a small boy and a dog in a garden. There may have been a smile. There may have been sunshine. A forgotten memory. I collect the shiny balls from the ground. I pick up every one, even the bloody ones, my fingers sticky with my mother’s blood and saliva. I fill up the bag as the two women watch me in silence. I close the clasp of the handbag, snapping it shut, passing it to my mother. Like a child with a teddy bear she clamps it close to her cheek and smiles.
‘My things,’ she says.
‘Your things,’ I say.
THE STORY OF LITTLE-PATH AND MARCUS KELLOGG
Little-Path stands on the railway platform. He is sixty five years old. It’s been over fifty years since the day of the battle and he knows he has only a few months to live. His smooth black hair, streaked with the occasional grey, is tied tight in a ponytail. In his headband he wears the feather he won for bravery in the counting coup at Greasy Grass. Despite his illness he stands tall and strong. His eyes are bright and clear, belying the darkness of the sights and scenes they have witnessed.
He wears his raccoon-pelt coat to keep out the cold wind from the Great Plains, the one he fashioned and sewed on the reservation in Montana. He cups and blows his hands and watches the train disappear around the curve of the track, then walks slowly through the busy hallway of the North Pacific railway depot. He’s used to the looks he gets from strangers. Hostile. Suspicious. Fearful. Some stop and stare. Mothers hurry children along, worried he might be hiding a tomahawk and bloody intent. But Little-Path pays them no heed. If they knew the life he’s led they might show some sympathy, a modicum of kindness. But how could they really
know?
Outside, the clock on the station tower tells him he is an hour early for his meeting. So he sits on an empty bench to gather his thoughts. He reads again the brief note from Eileen Kellogg that has brought him to this town of Bismarck, North Dakota.
Some half a century earlier it is dawn in the week of Little-Path’s thirteenth birthday. He is woken by commotion. Looking outside he sees the chaos unfolding. Braves running in all directions, gathering horses and weapons. All the tribes mingling, Brule with Hunkpapa, Sans Arc with Oglala. Runs-the-Enemy sees his young friend and brings his stallion to a sudden halt, dust whipping around the animal’s hooves. ‘Quick, Little-Path,’ he shouts, his horse bucking and twisting beneath him, ‘There are soldiers, very close, at the edge of the camp, we must make ready to fight. They’ve already slaughtered the two wives and children of Chief Gall, and murdered our women who were gathering turnips by the creek.’ Runs-the-Enemy’s face is smeared with warpaint. Fast Horn, an Oglala, gallops by, blood pouring from his stomach. ‘I’m shot through,’ he shrieks, ‘soldiers, near the high divide of the Rosebud Valley.’
Runs-the-Enemy’s eyes are wild for revenge as he turns his horse and speeds to the gathering place where the Muskrat Creek and Medicine Tail Coulee empty into the Little Bighorn River.
Earlier that same morning, an hour before sunrise, Marcus Henry Kellogg sits outside his tent. He is a handsome man of forty years, clean-shaven save for bushy sideburns. His deep-set eyes are both intense and sad, reflecting the grief of a wife ten-years dead and two daughters left to be raised by their aunt. He should be back in Bismarck, setting the type for the fourth edition of The Bugle. But the editor’s wife was taken ill and Kellogg volunteered to stand in for Editor Lounsberry to accompany the Seventh Cavalry on its pursuit of the Plains Indians. He pulls the rug around his shoulders, draws on his pipe, enjoying the sweet taste of the tobacco as he composes his thoughts. The scratch of his pen on paper, lit by the first light of this his last day on earth, is the only sound to be heard. He imagines the voice of the postmaster reading the letter to his sister Eileen who, through force of circumstance and no fault of her own, had no schooling for herself.