Crow's Breath

by John Kinsella

  ‘I know things about this place. It has its secrets.’ He turned to her now and the monitor fled. ‘In the network of burrows, there is the anatomy of a fall, the map of a town.’ She could see there was pain in his eyes. He was talking to himself. She saw herself in him.

  ‘This town is a town of hate and needs purging. My father says you are from one of the first families of the district …’

  ‘First white families,’ she half said. She studied him through her veil. He was tall, thin – she could tell this even though he was half crouching, half leaning against a York gum; maybe seventeen. Jeans and sports shoes, a black T-shirt. The clothes didn’t seem to fit the voice, but she was remembering the codes from a long way back. His hair was voluminous, and looked too heavy for his head. It had a streak of blond through the black that glared out in the light. Dan would have called it ‘holy man’s hair’. She almost laughed out loud, thinking: and Dan would have called that stuff on his face ‘bum fluff’. She felt grateful for the veil. But the boy was sharp, or sharp when it suited him.

  ‘You checking me out, old hen?’

  She felt the redness that defined her features more than her whiteness. She was burning. Strangely, she liked the feeling. The inner heat of humiliation.

  The boy leapt up and almost shouted, ‘Two things: my father and his cronies have a plan for getting hold of this land. They’ve cut a deal in the highest echelons, at the watershed of corruption. Not just with the shire – with the state government. You’ll receive a letter soon. Secondly, I know something about this place you don’t know.’

  She no longer had it in her to register shock. She felt her senses awaken and she could hear the monitors moving in their burrows in the rip of the breakaway. ‘I can hear them,’ she said.

  ‘That’s it, now you’re getting it. Listen harder!’

  She did listen. She joined him under the shade of the York gum – a tree so straggly that it offered little respite. ‘I need the shade – whatever shade I can get.’

  The boy moved aside so she could benefit from the shade of the trunk. She nodded by way of thanks, and listened harder. Then she heard it. ‘He’s down there, isn’t he?’

  ‘… Yes, old hen, yes. His bones are as white as your skin, and as damaged. I heard the story when I was a small child; my grandfather told my father and he told me. That a white girl with a rich farm, that would be richer one day, was having it off with a blackfella – and that the other families of the district, The Five, as they’re known with respect and affection, the old white families, sent their sons to save you from yourself, to have a word in Black Dan’s ear, to suggest he go walkabout.’

  She stood petrified, as still as a monitor under surveillance. Waiting for the spell to be broken so she could make a run for it. For the house and the shade and the cool, a long way away.

  The boy persisted. ‘All we kids of the district know the story. Though what I know that they don’t, is that Dan never went far away. I found him, when I was a kid. I was trying to dig a monitor out of its burrow, to kill it and cook it, to see what it tasted like. I heard they were good to eat. I wanted to try it out. And as I dug, I found the monitor had woven its burrow into the shallow grave of a man. I came back each day after school and excavated a bit more until I had unearthed a whole skeleton. Around its wrist was a chain with a plate engraved: To Dan from Mary with Love.’

  The day seemed to slow down. The oil from the eucalypts was heady.

  ‘That could save your bungarras from extinction,’ he said. ‘Or, if you like, I could burn the block out, and the whole town with it. Bastards, old hen, they’re bastards.’

  Unable to absorb the import of what was being said, she noticed the boy starting to twitch, to grow manic. His voice sped up and heightened. He lost his posh accent and spoke as if he’d done time in a shearing shed. He started to cry. He fell to the ground. She knelt over him so her white robes sheltered him from the fierce sun.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’ She pondered the reflective nature of her white robes, driving sun rays back to their source, breaking back out of the atmosphere. Too many get through, though, I won’t last out here.

  ‘They didn’t kill Dan,’ she said, ‘I killed him.’

  The boy seemed barely conscious. She needed to get someone to help him, but she didn’t, she kept talking, calmly.

  ‘I shot him. It was an accident. We were just messing around, shooting at cans on fence posts. He was setting them up and I was adjusting the sights and the gun fired. It had been my father’s. He always said it was a useless gun because of the hair trigger. I didn’t know what to do. I just went numb. I left him where he fell. I went and sat in the shade of the verandah till I’d pulled myself together. Then I phoned a neighbour, who rang around the founding families, and they sent their sons, and their sons took him out here so he’d be somewhere that mattered to him. I never knew exactly where, but hereabouts was good enough.’

  The boy’s breathing was growing fainter. But she had to finish.

  ‘I always look in from this edge, watching the monitors mark the land. They tolerate the sun better than any other creature. Dan was actually liked by them, by the Five. It was me they hated, but I knew they’d never betray their own. My skin is whiter than theirs. They need me.’

  She collapsed on the boy, who was deaf with heatstroke. Her weight forced out his last breath.

  When the fire came, it took out half the district. The developers left no trace of what had come before, and no two versions of the story made sense. The sun is hotter there than anywhere else in the wheatbelt. Parents carefully monitor their kids for skin cancers, but even so, they grow up with the skins of goannas.

  SLEEPER

  The sleeper developed a fixation on a memory from childhood. It was very early in his life – when he was three or four and hadn’t yet fully succumbed to the harsh realities of insomnia. He was with his parents and travelling east in a train. A long, long train that took days to get to the other side of the country. During daylight he fixed on the vast stretches of open space, of sky and an endless flat surface that his father had called nothingness. He remembered being amazed by this, as to him it looked like a fullness he had never seen before. Intermittently, he would see and be told the names of kangaroos, dingoes, emus, camels and eagles. There were never too many and they didn’t come frequently, so every sighting was an event. The odd clump of bluebush, a rare wizened casuarina, filled his imagination out of the flatness. The sky was wakefulness at its most complete. A wisp of cloud was a waking dream.

  Thinking back, he felt there was a truth for him in this journey – that his sleeplessness was of planar qualities, and that it needed to be unwound. At night, for they were on the train for three nights, they had slept in a sleeper carriage, and though he remembered nothing about the first night, he remembered the other two nights and how he had stared out of the window at the stars which moved with him, and hadn’t feel tired at all, and hadn’t told anyone he’d stayed awake all night, and they never knew. When they had emerged from the flat place and came to hills and finally mountains, he had been dissatisfied, and his inability to sleep had bothered him.

  He hadn’t been west for many years and hadn’t travelled back by train since that time when he was a small child. His parents were long dead and he only had a distant auntie to catch up with, but he invented a research project that could only be realised on the west coast and used that to justify the trip.

  He only half admitted in any kind of cogent way that he was making the train journey to unravel himself. He booked a roomette, which seated you during the day and converted to a sleeper at night, and took the necessary reading to cover three nights of stark wakefulness. A sleeper in name only, his life’s experience told him. He took some pride in thinking that almost four thousand kilometres of this line in fact used the synthetic railway sleeper he’d invented. The rail lines sat more securely on his sleeper and they lasted a lot longer than the old wooden job
s. He’d thought of the design at three o’clock in the morning, when his first real girlfriend was sound asleep with plugs in her ears and a cover over her eyes to prevent any disturbance at all from his nightly perambulations.

  His first night on the train was like his first day, and he read two books he’d saved up for the occasion. Reading has been his salvation and damnation, his mum would say. She told him that as a baby he was the perfect little sleeper. Like clockwork. Never any trouble. Fall asleep as soon as he was put down. But gradually the desire to sleep wore off. Would sleep fitfully, couldn’t settle, grew irritable. But after he’d learnt to read, there was a form of liberation. It brought peace to the house. When his parents noticed his bedside lamp on in the small hours of the morning, and called out for him to put it off and go to sleep, to stop all that reading or it would make him blind or mad or both, he continued silently with a torch under the bedcovers.

  The second night passed in similar fashion and the train staff couldn’t help remarking that he seemed not to sleep – the bed had not been disturbed, and when they asked if he wanted it pulled down, he said, No need … But when he reached the entirely flat place, the treeless place, his mind filled with its vastness and he fell into one of his waking sleeps. The fact that it was not entirely flat, but rose in gentle and elusive curves, as if planar surfaces had been forced slightly upwards from beneath, as if the world’s curve was closer and both less and more than he’d realised, confused his topographical memory and assumptions. The horizons were close and gathering fast. All circles and spirals, and the planes were twisting like water down a plughole. His sight blurred. Someone in my business should have this at the forefront of his mind, he insisted. He absorbed every detail, and it was as if the most vivid series of dreams was cascading into his reality. He followed an eagle across the vastness and became that eagle. He could see through its eyes, and homed in on the nest jammed in an old tower near the railway lines. There, awaiting him, was his partner for life. They shared a common vision and set out together over the gibber, over the sand made from shells ground down over the millions of years since this place was an inland sea, the bluebush. They flew together into the radiated zone and felt the forbidden eat into their feathers, claws, beak and flesh. The other eagle, the female, his life partner, swooped and snatched a snake from the ground. It hung from her beak, a writhing curlicue.

  He skipped his meals. An attendant knocked on his door, poked his head in and asked if he was okay and he heard himself saying ‘fine’, but it wasn’t him speaking. The attendant pulled a face, as if confronting something slightly off-putting. The sleeper’s early loss of hair, his squint, his indeterminate skin colour, the early appearance of a stoop, were put down to his lack of sleep. Few said this to his face after his successes. But out here, in the desert, he was strangely vulnerable, anonymous, exposed in his roomette. Things could be thought and said with impunity.

  Images from a vast, sleeping world burgeoning with potential spilt through his head, but no ideas connected them and no conclusions were reached. Kangaroos paralleled the train, counterbalancing the vastness, the immensity, with the deft curve of their tails. He was full, replete. He was inside the shape of sleeping and waking at once.

  When night fell he got up, went to the bathroom, returned, took a big drink of water and decided it was time. He lowered his bed, undressed, and climbed in. It was so narrow and the rattling of the train so intense that he couldn’t see how he’d stay put without full concentration. Through the window he could see the stars – many more than had been named, than had been charted. He could see all the stars to be seen in that part of the sky. He could see the stars as if through daylight. And then he forgot who he was and forgot what wakefulness is. Was. He slept the sleep of the dead.

  Obituaries appeared in papers across the country, even around the world. Some written by colleagues, some by old lovers, and some by strangers. Most were written by those who write obituaries for a living. All of them, however, finished with the same words, as if the ironies of his sleepless life were swept away by the fact that he died in the way we’d all like to die. They marvelled at how he had accomplished so much in one lifetime, but those last words made his nighttime musings acceptable and human: ‘passed away peacefully in his sleep, while travelling across the country he did so much for …’

  THE TIP

  Our local rubbish tip is fab. We’ve decked our entire house out with stuff – perfectly good stuff that’s been dumped by the too-well-off or the plain stupid. It’s taken us years, but that’s okay – it’s nice to build a portrait of who you are. And what’s even better about our local tip is that we only ever have to vie with a few others – mainly singles, but there’s also a couple, Jess and Charlie, who are as determined as we are to collect the homemaking items. We don’t know them really well, but we sometimes head down to the pub together after spending the afternoon filling our trailers. And we’re pretty decent about sharing what’s there. If one of us sees something and calls ‘mine!’, it’s generally agreed it remains yours no matter who reaches it first.

  The singles who work the tip are pretty good as well, though Pete is a notorious drunk and is only in it for what he can sell. So we usually buy the homemaking items off him – well, us or Jess and Charlie – for a bottle or two of beer, and he goes for the stuff we don’t particularly want, like cool drink bottles and aluminium cans … stuff that brings an immediate return. And none of the others are as determined as we are. At the end of a day at the tip, we compare what we’ve got, and on the odd occasion even swap.

  Our relationship with Jess and Charlie has been building over the years. We’ve never been to their house, nor they to ours, but it’s been on the cards for months now. It’ll happen. They are an attractive pair, and we like to consider ourselves hot as well. Not that looks matter, but it’s nice to be friends with a couple who also like to keep fit. And we understand each other. Sometimes in the pub, eighteen-to-twenty-somethings out having their first drinks will call us scroungers and scabs – everyone knows we jump on the stuff they dump. Actually, as an aside, I’ve heard it said some people refuse to dump their old stuff, just to prevent us having it. We’ve had a bit of a strategy meeting with Jess and Charlie about this, and it’s generally agreed that we should widen our orbit – check out some of the smaller satellite tips around the region. No doubt that’s where the spiteful ones are depositing their unwanted goods. And back to the occasional put-downs we cop – well, we consider ourselves collectors and recyclers. And in a world down on its knees from over-consumption, we’re sitting pretty in the ethics stakes!

  We’ve got regular jobs, so we keep our collecting to weekends and, occasionally, after work. I work at a plant nursery, potting seedlings (at the moment), and Ben is a farm labourer – he’s carting hay until the end of the month, then back to general farm work. It’s dairy country and fully irrigated, so there’s a rich hay crop this year. He’s stuffed when he gets in from carting – it’s backbreaking work. As for Charlie, he’s a boatbuilder and Jess does leatherwork. She doesn’t sell it at a stall or anything like that – it’s on commission from some big-city outfit. See, I’m wearing one of her belts now. She sold it to me at the pub one night after collecting – cheap, real cheap … she doesn’t usually sell her stuff privately. It’s got her name on it, tooled in deep, but it’s a good belt. Boatbuilding inland? Yes, apparently. Charlie makes small sailboats that take forever to craft. It doesn’t matter that the sea is fifty k’s away … he says he never sails them anyway. When he was young, he says, he won trophy after trophy, but since hitting forty, and that’d be about eight years ago, he’s happier inland. Maybe that’s the primary difference between us. They’re mid-to-late forties and we’re just early thirties. A lot of difference, now I think about it. But I never do, usually. As I said, they are fit and attractive people.

  Well, I am shifting time and stuff around here. What I want to tell you about is the day we’ve just had. We’re sitting in the
pub now, having a cold beer with Jess and Charlie. It’s been a wonderful day collecting! I spent hours with Jess – she’s asked my opinion about every treasure she’s gathered. It’s nice to be someone’s confidante and advisor. And to balance it all out, Charlie and Ben have been working away together as well. And we had the tip entirely to ourselves. It was a day of rich pickings. I am telling Jess I really like the set of ceramic ducks she found – an entire set, with only a few chips. They could be mounted on the wall – kitsch, sure, but kitsch that has become art now. I really like them. I’m not saying I really mind her finding them rather than me, but it was the find of the day!

  The boys are back at our table with another round of beers and Charlie is on at Ben about our visiting their block. Why don’t you guys come around tonight? – we could have a few more drinks and go straight around to our place. Jess is a great cook and could whip something up real quick, couldn’t you, Jess? he says. Sure, Charlie, sure. It’d be great to have our friends around. What do you say, friends? Both of us mutter something and somehow it gets sort of lost in the froth of the beers as we take deep, long draughts.

  What we have on the days we’re together at the tip is special and almost spontaneous. We like that. And then we go home and collect our thoughts. That sort of collecting is as important as the real thing. Part of it. But Jess and Charlie are always suggesting we visit – it came up (yet again!) at the tip earlier today when Charlie found an excellent rake head and swapped it with Ben for a couple of oil drums – Charlie said he could clean them out and use them as mounts for one of his boats (… and wouldn’t we like to see his workshop?). We do that all the time. Bartering. We all stood as one when some bastard yelled, Scabs! Scabs! Dirty bloody scabs! at us. I’ve got to admit, I got a warm buzz up my spine when Charlie yelled back, Maybe, mate, but which of us drives a Merc? And it’s true, Charlie’s other car is an old Merc in showroom condition. Done up, loved and nurtured. He drives it down to the pub sometimes. When ‘tipping’ (Jess and Charlie sometimes joke and say tupping … we can get away with it because Jess was born in New Zealand … one of our in-jokes), we drive utes to cart away our collectibles …