by Alex Miller
‘No!’ I objected. ‘I can’t possibly accept such a generous gift. You will need it when you go out on your researches again.’
‘When’s that going to be? I don’t think I’ll be going out on too many of them. But if I do, I promise you I’ll come over there to Hamburg and get that book back off you.’ He looked at me and said steadily, ‘Take it. It will be a reminder to you.’
10
The miracle of the yellow robin
Dougald’s old red truck bounded over the corrugated surface of the road at a surprising speed, its shock absorbers, like the knees of old men, no longer absorbing the shocks but delivering them to our spines. We had left the town behind some while ago and were travelling along the wide gravel road that Vita and I had come in along those three weeks earlier. I did not remember it. To either side of us the unbroken drift of low grey scrub. We saw no other vehicles and when Dougald’s mobile telephone rang he did not pull over to the verge to answer the call but stopped on the crown of the road, at which our following dust rolled over us, as if the sky darkened. Vita’s voice was loud and aggrieved. There was a crisis in her department and she was needed. Dougald grimaced at the loudness of her voice and held the telephone inches from his ear. I could hear Vita’s every word, Dougald discreetly murmuring his responses. She was not on the plane to Mackay but was in her office at the university preparing to go into a meeting. ‘This trip’s just never going to work out,’ she yelled. Where had I heard this phrase before? I wondered why I did not feel surprised. Our dust drifted slowly over the low scrub. I got out of the truck and walked to the side of the road.
Standing in the cool morning air was a relief from the pounding in the cabin of the truck, and I was glad to be in contact with the place. I did not really want to leave. There was a delicate spiciness in the air. I could see that the surface of the ground within the scrub was a grey hardpan and was littered with dried leaves and twigs, as if someone had gone around scattering them there to make it look real. The small trees and shrubs were so densely grown I had to search for a place where I could gain access. The branches yielded easily, however, when I pushed against them, bending and swaying with the movement of a curtain. I had soon penetrated fifteen or twenty paces into the scrub, my footfalls crunching lightly on the dry ground cover. I stopped and looked back the way I had come. I could not see Dougald’s truck or the road. Had I arrived at this place from within the interior, as Leichhardt and his party must have done had they come this way, I would not have suspected the existence of a road only a few metres away. The sense of concealment and solitude was perfect. I stood in the perfumed silence and looked about me, charmed by this unlikely other world so enclosed within itself and hidden from the outside. I was standing there listening, as if I expected to hear something, when a small bird landed on a trembling twig a few inches in front of me. I held my breath. The exquisite little creature examined me curiously with its tiny black eyes. It was the size of the European robin; its breast, however, was not red but a rich cadmium yellow that glowed from within the shadows of its perch. The bird observed me without fear, the two of us regarding each other with a kind of wonder. Suddenly the yellow robin was gone. I had entered its magical world. There was a serenity, untroubled and modest, within the shelter of the scrub that was at once calming, reassuring and strangely familiar. I could easily have belonged there. There was something akin to memory in my recognition of it, quite as if I had been there at an earlier period of my life, or in another life altogether. How many lives do we have? But I am no kind of resurrectionist.
The dry crunching of a step behind me made me turn. Dougald was making his way towards me, the mobile telephone held to his ear, his outstretched arm brushing aside the branches of the low trees and shrubs. He came up to me and handed me the telephone. ‘Vita wants a word, old mate.’
I took the telephone from him and held it to my ear. ‘So you’re not coming up to see us after all?’ I said. But she did not want to talk about her aborted trip.
‘I met someone,’ she said, imparting a secret.
‘Is he the black prince?’
‘This feller’s not what I had in mind, Max.’
‘But you like him?’
‘He’s a whitefella.’
‘I see,’ I said, although I was not sure that I did see.
‘I want to know what you think of him.’
I wondered if Dougald had told her about the death of her goat.
She said, ‘That’s not all.’
I could not see Dougald and supposed that he had gone back to the truck.
‘He’s an academic. I can’t seem to get away from them. I just feel so good when I’m with him, Max. We never stop laughing. It sounds so bloody clichéd! What I want to know is, what am I going to do when the black prince does show up? It scares me. What am I going to do with my little Brian then?’
I smiled to think of her dilemma. ‘Keep them both.’
‘It’s not funny! Don’t laugh at me! I love the little guy. There’s nothing to him. Honestly, wait till you see him. His shoulders are narrower than mine. D’you reckon that’s all right, for the bloke to be narrower than the girl? And what’s this shit Dougald tells me about you heading home?’
Her abrupt switch took me by surprise. I replied carefully, ‘I was going home with you anyway.’
‘That wasn’t settled.’
‘This is only a week sooner. It’s time for me to leave, Vita.’
She said, ‘You’re making a run for it.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘You’re a disappointment!’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘What happened?’
‘Dougald didn’t tell you?’
‘You tell me.’
I cleared my throat. ‘I’m sorry, Vita. But I’m afraid I accidentally caused the death of your goat.’
She said nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Fuck you, Max!’ she said quietly.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘That poor little bugger. Jesus! What happened?’
I told her.
‘You’re hopeless. You’re not to be trusted.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t keep saying you’re fucking sorry! This is not why you’re running out on Dougald.’
‘I’m not running out on Dougald.’
‘He needs a mate to get him out and about or he’s not going to last the distance. I’ve told you that. What happened to the idea that you’d talk him into showing you his country? You’re running out on him. Face it. He needs you. But he’s never going to say so. He’s too proud to do that. You don’t know anything about that man.’ She was silent. Then she said, ‘This could be your last chance. Have you thought of that?’
‘I’m an old man.’
‘Don’t start that old man shit, Max! Have enough respect for me not to make pathetic excuses for yourself!’
Neither of us spoke for some time.
She said seriously, ‘I loved that little nanny-goat.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I hope you gave her a decent burial.’
I said nothing. An image in my mind of the goat’s hideous carcass spinning slowly above the green slime in the stagnant pool accused me of failing my friends.
When she spoke again she was being quieter and more persuasive. ‘Promise me you’ll sleep on it, Max.’
I said, ‘I’m packed and on my way.’
‘This is me, Vita, who’s asking you. Remember me? I’m the reason you’re here. If it wasn’t for me you’d be six feet under in bloody Hamburg. You owe me for the nanny-goat too. And you owe Dougald. Don’t argue! I know what I’m talking about. I’m asking you to think about this. Promise me you’ll sleep on it, just for one night. Then, if you still want to go, well just go. Will you promise?’
I always seemed to have to promise her something. We were back at the airport in Hamburg.
Dougald called to me from the ro
ad, ‘You all right in there, old mate?’
I called back that I was still talking with Vita.
‘Remember what you said to me in front of those PhD students?’ she said. ‘I was impressed. You apologised to me for betraying my generation. For doing second-rate work. That’s what you said. I thought that was pretty good. I said then I’d ask you one of these days why you did that. So I’m asking you now, why did you do it? What was the point of apologising if you weren’t going to change your ways and make amends? Come on, Max, I’m asking you, for Christ’s sake. Why fucking apologise unless you meant to reform yourself?’
The yellow robin settled on a branch inches from my face, as if it needed to satisfy itself that the apparition had been real. Having satisfied itself that I was really there, it proceeded to ignore me. It turned its head quickly this way then that, then it pounced on something on the ground and flew off, the tiny legs of an insect sticking from its bill like whiskers.
‘Do I get an answer or what?’
I said, ‘I apologised to you that day because I knew Winifred would have approved.’
‘And she’s going to approve of you making a run for it now?’
When I did not reply she said, ‘It’s not my generation you’ll be betraying if you make a run for it. It’s Winifred. The trust you two guys had between you all those years. Your life and hers, your love for each other, the point of it all. Hey Max? That’s what you’ll be betraying. The point of it all. I have to go. You’d just better be sure this is the way you want it to end between you and Dougald. You’d just better be sure of that, Max. That guy loves you. Sleep on it tonight and give me a call in the morning and let me know what you’ve decided. I’ll accept your decision. I won’t argue. Okay? Will you promise me, please, Max? Just one night. It won’t kill you.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Okay. I promise.’
‘Thanks, Max. I’ve got to go now. Call me tomorrow.’
Dougald was sitting in the truck with the radio playing country and western music. I handed him the telephone. ‘I’m not going to Mackay today,’ I said.
He switched off the radio and started the engine. He chuckled. ‘I didn’t think you would be.’
‘Well you were right.’
He grinned and swung the truck around and started back towards Mount Nebo.
The red road unrolling under us, the cloudless blue of the sky above. I asked him, ‘What did you mean when you said this is not your country?’
He lifted a hand from the wheel and pointed across the ocean of scrub towards the south and without the least hesitation, as if I’d asked him what time of the day it was, he said, ‘My country’s over in them escarpments in that old Expedition Range.’
I said, ‘So why do you live here? Why don’t you go back and live there?’
‘We’re working on it, old mate. We’ll get there. These things take their own time.’
I said, ‘I should like to see your country, if there is an opportunity to do so before I go home.’
He turned and looked at me. ‘That would be good, old mate. Real good. I’d like to show her to you.’
11
A decent burial
I dreamed I watched a horse kill its rider, and the horse looked back at me, its eye fierce and triumphant, the man’s torn and bloodied corpse twisted and awry beneath its hoofs. I knew it to be a horse though it possessed the features of my uncle. I was afraid of it with a child’s fear. The dream woke me and I lay in my bed shaken by the violence of it. I could not get back to sleep, and I sat up and put on my light. I resolved to write an account of the events of the day in my journal, in the hope that I would bring myself to an understanding of my true place in this affair of Vita and Dougald, and would perhaps begin to find my way by this means to a resolution of the uncertainties of my own existence—if such an ambition were not entirely ridiculous.
When I took up my pen, however, I was scarcely able to compose the simplest of sentences. I wrote a sentence then crossed it out and sat a while, then wrote another and looked at it. But it too made little sense to me and I crossed it out also. There was a stubborn silence in me that refused to yield up my emotions and my thoughts in words. My subject was closed to me. Why? It was as if my mind—my unconscious, I suppose I must say—had decided that this thing was not to be written but that something else was required from me on this occasion. Not writing, but action. It was not a time for words. But what action lay open to me?
I put my pen and my journal aside and got out of bed. It was my intention to make a cup of tea and to read Leichhardt’s Journal in order to bring calm into my mind. Dougald snored steadily in the next room, an engine of contentment. Despite his exile, he seemed certain of his universe and of his place within it. I envied him his untroubled sleep. I put on my dressing-gown and my slippers and went out into the kitchen. The back door was open to the night as usual. The great old tree hung in the frame of the doorway as if it were a theatre backdrop, its limbs black against the luminous sky. I was glad to see it again. There was a sense of privilege in standing there. My two brown dogs came and stood at the threshold and looked with me into the night. I remembered Vita saying, with a certain degree of trust that had shamed me, I hope you gave her a decent burial. And at once I saw the strangled goat hanging above the river out there in the moonlight where we had abandoned her to the scavengers, to the eaters of carrion who would find her there. She had surely not deserved that. I stepped out into the yard and stood beneath the tree, attending to the wonderful silence. The night vibrated with the stillness of outer space. I had no plan, but was moved by the need to do something. Cautiously I stepped along the path, careful to make no sudden noise in case I disturbed the rooster, who would be certain to crow to the moon if woken. As I walked along the path an after-image of the merciless eye of the horse touched my mind with its passionate horror.
I grew uneasy as I climbed through the slack wire of the back fence into the paddock. Being alone in the night in this place made me a trespasser, I knew that. My dogs kept me close company, staying at my heels as if they too felt this unease of trespass. I walked past the looming hulks of the abandoned bulldozers—dreary objects to the mind—and went on across the incline of the paddock, the silver grass shining in the moonlight, until we came to the river. I stood on the bank looking over the sheer fall of the cliff.
She hung below us just as Dougald and I had left her. She was still now, no longer revolving slowly at the end of her tether, a dark weight above the gleaming pool of phosphorescent algae. It was little more than two metres from where I stood on the bank to the point below me where her peg was caught among the exposed roots. I could see no way of reaching across the gap, however. I searched around among the fallen limbs at the base of the tree for a stick. I soon found one and lay down on the bank and reached with it to the full stretch of my arm. The end of the stick just touched the peg but I could do nothing with it. I threw it aside and found a longer one. I managed to force the point under the peg where it was lodged in the roots, but the moment I put a little strain on it the end of the stick snapped off. The dead weight of the goat’s carcass had locked the peg firmly in its trap. I stood looking down at her. I could see that it might just be possible for me to climb down and release the peg with my bare hands. Such a manoeuvre looked difficult, and even dangerous, for it was quite a drop to the stagnant pool, but it did not look impossible. If I were careful, surely I would be able to use the lattice of the roots as a ladder. When I was a boy on my uncle’s farm I would not have hesitated for an instant before attempting such a feat. Now I recalled the iron bar in the cottage and I doubted if I still possessed sufficient strength in my arms to hold my own weight. If Vita could hear my thoughts she would no doubt have accused me of using old age as an excuse for my cowardice. It was an accusation that did not seem quite fair to me.
I stood looking down at the goat for some time, hesitating and uncertain. It was true and was not an empty excuse for cowardice. I no longer en
joyed the confidence of youth. Everything I contemplated these days was hedged about with these pathetic hesitations. Vita had scoffed at me for claiming the excuse of old age, but it is easy to scoff when you are young and have not yet felt the pains and the failings that plague our bodies and our minds when old age arrives. When that happens we know ourselves to be the victims of a sudden disease for which there is no cure. The irony was, surely, that I almost certainly despised my faltering even more than she did. The onset of old age seemed unjust to me and I was often angered by it, wanting nothing more than to revolt against it and to rid myself of it and return to my former state. Indeed I sometimes almost believed, in moments of utter self-delusion, that I would recover from this temporary setback and return to full health and vigour one day, as if old age were nothing more serious or lasting than a tiresome dose of the flu. I had been youthful all my life, after all, and youthfulness was the condition I was accustomed to, not this trembling infirmity.
It would have been reasonable at this point to have returned to the house and to have waited until Dougald was awake, when I might have enlisted his assistance. But there was a stubbornness in me that night insisting I release the goat unaided and give her a proper burial, an aim which had by now become my ambition. It was my responsibility alone. There is surely an element of madness in all of us, which at times refuses to yield to the sadness of mere reason. That moonlit night on the bank of the Nebo River, I knew that according to the irresistible laws of this madness, laws which are little different to the laws of literature and myth, the challenge before me was mine in the solitary and heroic sense of such deeds and could not be shared with someone else and remain a true act of contrition. Was that it then? An act of contrition? Was I humiliating myself out here in the night of the Australian wilderness because I was troubled in my spirit by a sense of guilt? I suppose I was, or at least that such a sense was partly my reason for this. I had regrets, after all, that gave me sufficient reason to be troubled in my spirit.