Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  Fishman said his last words about what happened in Desperance. ‘We never killed Truthful, and he never killed himself either, just like the boys never killed themselves. They were all killed by other hands, just like Gordie, and Elias. The mine made killers Will, and now I’ve made the mine go away. May the great spirit show us some mercy one day, that is all I say.’

  So, so, on Cloud Nine…

  The men, signalled with flicking fingers by the Fishman, worked quickly with Will to bring Elias’s boat down from the hills. It was not that they wanted to waste time helping Will Phantom’s craziness. What did they have in common with someone wanting to extract some weird kind of revenge? The scum of the earth lying flat out on the ground as dead as? These were nothing more than a couple of charred corpses that should be buried with as much decency as the next person.

  Grumbling all the time about being used, like they were anyone’s, they thought they were something else now; a huge metamorphosis had taken place. In their new grandeur which felt like infinity, it was as plain as day that a special something had been defined out of their ‘what for?’ kind of half life, in so-called normal society. Their heads swelled with a greatness comparable to the once biggest mine of its type in the world, which they had conquered. It was as though the mine’s greatness had been pasted on their identity. It felt like they were on Cloud Nine. Now, revelling in the Star Wars theme tune, which they were softly humming as jives to each other, these vigilantes were oscillating on the knife edge of some kind of madness in the ‘belly of the big fish’, where nothing could be assumed normal, and helping Will! Well! It felt like it was blunting the edge of their mania, and they did not feel this should be happening to them.

  So, the men of Cloud Nine worked like a pile of snakes, dragging the only concrete memory of Elias, old Choice, through the woodlands and rocks like a piece of Desperance backyard junk. The skip skidded through the unyielding, thick, skin-stabbing twiggy scrub. Their styleless contribution of labour, together with their noisy skylarking full of curses and bad language, had scared the living daylights out of hundreds of scavenger crows perched in the scrub. The birds soared straight up into the red ochre clouds, squawking and carrying on throughout their hurried flight, while others, appearing from out of nowhere, flew in untidy flocks to land. Clouds of birds fought each other for places to perch on the spindly dry branches which in all of the kerfuffle, snapped off close to the ears of the men who became so anxious to leave, they quickened their pace, until they saw the full red sun.

  When all is said and done, none of these men had a wish to run about with death. Death had its own air, and in this red haze, that unworldly air sang long, sacred vowels across the land. And while Mozzie’s men ran quicker to be away, they heard things they had never heard before. The ghostly poem, summoning the spirit tribes, swept past them as they moved down into the battleground of the spinifex flats. The ode unfolded seasons and months of wind, rain, storm, sun, night owl, swarming flying ants, crows, eagles, dingos, dung beetles, flies, and fish spawning. All came in droves to claim the unprotected spirit until only bare, bleached bones remained.

  ‘Be careful with that boat,’ Will demanded.

  ‘What for?’ came the reply. ‘It aren’t that anyone will be using it again.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Will snapped. It was not worth wasting words explaining family sentiment to the Fishman’s men.

  Once the green boat was moored on the shore again, Fishman came along to have a last glance at the killers. Above, a dark cloud of sentinel flies – dart, dart, darting to and fro – pestered their eternal rest. He looked at the dead men’s spirits pleading to be released from inside the decaying bodies. With a deadpan expression on his face, everyone could see for themselves that he had lost interest in pleading clemency for them with Will.

  Within seconds, the men had plucked the two dead killers from the ground. ‘Okay boss? Heave Ho!’ They laid Chuck and Cookie in the boat, side by side, without shedding a tear in mourning. Fishman looked, grunted his disapproval through clenched teeth stained with rolled tobacco, then turned his back and walked away. The men continued the task without thought, and anchored the boat out there, fully exposed, by throwing a rock attached to a rope over the cathead, into the middle of the lagoon.

  Fishman led the way with a long stick, pushing along an ancient path invisible to the naked eye, heading through the foothills. Unquestioningly, instinctively, he was following a map etched on his mind from the times of the many fathers’ fathers before him. The men followed in his footsteps, each sending off little bubble clouds of thoughts into the wind, thoughts of faraway places, of people and noise, children laughing, and dogs running down the road to see the convoy leaving. They threaded through golden papery grasses rustling with white flower tips, through flowing green-gold spinifex whispering through waving coolabah branches, and silent rock faces of red granite, white quartz, white-grey quartzite, all looking down, watching a funeral procession for the children who marked a full stop in history.

  All three boys were wrapped in new, red tartan blankets bound with rope. Inside the blankets, Fishman had covered each of the boys with bunches of a leafy aromatic herb that grew wild in flat clumps over the red land. The strong tangy odour, similar to mint, spilled into the air to drown the smell of death. It was a strange sight of brightness and drab. Most of the men were still wearing Gurfurritt good quality uniforms and boots. Long ago they had ripped off the long sleeves on the shirts, trimmed the long trousers to become shorts, immediately after they had finished up working for the mine. The lads with the smiling Bob Marley T-shirts carried the Fishman’s faithful port. The handle of the old brown fifties suitcase had a long stick threaded through it and they carried it ceremoniously, because it was an honour to carry the Fishman’s port.

  The port contained little. A few rolls of wire, a bit of a canvas, a butcher’s knife, a Swiss army pocketknife, spare matches, spare torch batteries, a small radio, a notebook and pen, and a can of Coke he had forgotten to drink. Several men carried black billycans containing any personal belongings worth carting around. They walked through one narrow valley after another, and along a spring-fed river lined with dropping paperbark trees. The going was slow in the valleys where the heavy humidity caused them to perspire badly, and it ran off them like water. The men knew what they had been told. They would carry the boys far into the hills to a cave where their journey would end, and the boys would begin their own journey, and when their destination was reached, they would live in a state of harmonious coalescence with their ancestors.

  The journey continued for many hours without rest, until at last, the Fishman stopped. He told the men to wait behind, ‘Settle yourselves a while,’ he said, pointing to a fairytale grove of gidgee trees where the air was so still, you could swear you heard the daydreams of lazy lizards sunning themselves on the branches. This was the first real break in over eighteen hours of moving west, away from the lagoon. The men watched Mozzie go on alone, until he disappeared into the hills where the only things living were dingoes and marsupials. Down onto the ground, he crawled on his belly into a smelly dingo’s lair hidden by grassy tussocks, turpentine scrubs and wild banana vines. From the distance, the men began to hear an echo of bell-like voices wafting down the strange grim faces of the hills.

  ‘How could dingoes make such a sound?’ Certainly, it was more than one voice.

  ‘Sounds like cats caterwauling somewhere.’ They listened, some asking, expecting more trouble, what could be happening now?

  ‘Listen! Strange words? Listen!’

  ‘Smell that?’

  ‘It’s all the dingoes around here.’

  ‘Stop ya cavilling. It’s him. Mozzie’s speaking a different tongue, a dead language, talking to his passed-away relatives. Tribespeople were shot here.’

  For a long time they stood waiting. Time passed. They sat down and waited, and more time passed. They dozed off under a weak shade. They woke up hungry from waiting. Th
ese were good men consumed with thoughts of how long they must wait until, one by one, everyone started to relax again. They stretched out long fit arms and legs, comforted by the resounding echoes of Mozzie’s voice. Finally, he ended. A long silence emanated from the grim hills, and the men rose to their feet, and craned their necks towards the cave, trying to see if something had happened.

  Some of the men threw glances at Will Phantom, seeing what he was going to do, whether he was going to help the Fishman or something. Noise or silence, nothing had bothered Will Phantom. He was still sitting like a sad statue, staring off into space. Small colourful finches bobbed around the ground at his feet, drawing in those who watched them, until, someone who had not been paying attention to the finches, suddenly said, ‘Look at that.’ Two small green-feathered birds, no bigger than mice, jumped from twig to twig in the nearby grass. Rare birds. Rare find. Night parrots. The reward was discussed, but no one was interested. When Will heard their voices, he raised his head towards the kingfisher he heard flying overhead, and with the other raised eyebrows following his, they watched its flight path, heading north towards the coast.

  Soon enough Fishman was heard coming back. He came gently swishing and swashing, pushing aside the twiggy scrub with his stick. It was time to go, he announced in a dignified voice. The boys were carried up, and passed through the dingo’s lair into the red-ochre-walled cave. The solemn young men went into the place where only the old people had gone before. Once inside, past the dingo’s entrance, the cave opened out to the one large room of towering red walls. On the floor of the cave lay a heavy coating of dust which when moved by their footsteps, flew into the stale air like red powder, revealing its antiquity. They saw small pieces of animal bones, old broken glass, rusted match tins, ancient stone tools – grinding stones, spearheads, axe heads, all perfectly executed in their manufacture. The ceiling left evidence of fires, of those who had come and cooked and slept beside a fire, back, back and further back in time, one hundred thousand years of dreams, ascending in smoke that rose to the ceiling and stayed there in a dense cover of soot.

  And the walls, they screamed at you with the cryptic, painted spirits of the Dreamtime. And inside the walls, was the movement of spirits, moving further and further forward, so the surface appeared to be falling into the frightened eyes of the Fishman’s men. They all stood there inside, crowded like that. Old Fishman was in another world, crying and talking the dead language, walking around, gently pushing past anyone standing in his way. His staff pounded on the living wall, and the men looked away, down at the dusty floor, before seeing the Fishman moving forward through a narrow opening inside the resting spirit’s body. The entrance must have been there already, but it was impossible to have noticed it, because the cave seemed so crowded and occupied with relics from other times. The song cycles’ arias of devotion that had droned on in this place for days and days like locusts before rain, which came from forever in the old, musty air inside, were heard now. The men felt the sound lingering inside their heads.

  So, it was with astonishment and awe, these men gaped at what they had been shown, and allowed themselves to be taken into the powerful spirituality, which was somehow the same, but much older than the ornate cathedrals made with stone, or the monasteries and places of worship to relics of bones and other bits and pieces of sanctified saints of old Europe and the Holy Land.

  Like some old wizard, Fishman turned back, to indicate with a wave of his stick that the men should follow him. The sombre procession continued onwards into the depths of the creature of the underworld’s belly, into the people’s past. The Fishman kept the march moving, undaunted, and waved his staff left and right, as they proceeded down into the labyrinth of strange corridors in the dimly lit cave, where essential rays of light came tapering down like roots of trees, those of the desert fig tree, or the fat bottle trees, all twisting their roots through cracks in the rocks in search of the cool moisture far, far below. They moved past bones of the deceased laid to rest on rock ledges, or hemmed into crevices. Others leant against the wall in a sitting position, as though they had brought themselves to their final resting place to die.

  Using the Eveready torch, kept jammed inside his trouser belt, the Fishman led the way. Behind him, the men followed, carefully watching their steps in the darkness, trying not to slip over the wet rocks in the calcite world of dripping limestone. Inside these chambers, it was a world of cymbals and chimes, children’s music reaching further on, deeper into kilometres of underground watercourses feeding the spring-fed paradise far above in the world of sunshine. Finally, their dark, shadowy figures came to a full stop behind the dull light of the torch.

  ‘Well! This is it,’ announced Fishman. The men, bunched up behind him, were stunned by what they saw in front of them. On the other side of the small opening, the torch shone across a large underground sea. The open sea was so large rippling waves skimmed across the surface. A breeze filled the darkness. In the ray of torchlight, silvery white seagulls with scotopic eyes that could see in the darkness, were piercing the green water. The birds were feeding on a species of fish the men said they had never seen before.

  Shallow shafts glowed intermittently from dim faraway lights which were the stars of this world. The men listened to Mozzie’s gravelly, inharmonious voice continuing his nocturne. Perhaps it pleased the spirits that at least somebody had come along to demonstrate his pietism to the old world.

  There did not seem to be any other side to this water world. What’s this place? each had thought. The zealots were simple people, and they found it difficult to adjust to this world which Mozzie had kept from them. Once they had familiarised themselves to the darkness, and explored further, they found a jetty. Glow-worms lit its edge.

  All along the stone-carved mooring were well-constructed paperbark canoes resting, it seemed, from antiquity. Each craft was covered in gull droppings and cobwebs. From the bow, a grass rope moored the craft to another cobwebbed rope appearing snakelike up through the water. No one would have been able to guess how long the boats of the dead-language people had been floating there. Many, many centuries, perhaps. The men’s recent grand feelings of having saved their traditional domain had now been completely eaten away to a bundle of raw nerves. What if we invoke the dead being in this place? someone whispered, and it must have been heard by everyone, for they were all startled, as though the question had been screamed at them. No one uttered a word.

  ‘Where’s Will Phantom? Where is he? Land Rights! Is he here?’ the Fishman suddenly demanded, as if he had no time left in the world, as if they had to get going, high-tailing it out of the place. Will appeared from the darkness, and moved to the Fishman’s side. The old man’s face glowed like a peaceful beacon. Will began helping by pulling in a canoe, positioning it beside the flat rock harbour, holding it steady so the Fishman could place his son inside. Others started to help, just enough, so Fishman could perform the ritual of placing the children himself. It was his responsibility. Will joined the three canoes in a line, one behind the other, with the rope. He was surprised to find the rope was still as supple and strong as the day it was made, possibly thousands of years ago. Did it take aunties, grannies, mothers, sisters, sitting together working the reedy grass in a day of clear blue skies with sunlight on their hands as they talked about living things around them? This was what he said to the Fishman as they stood side by side looking at the canoes, rocking steady like cradles, ready to take the journey across the sea into perpetual night.

  The old man said he was thinking it was about time to go, to take the boys across, ‘I got to make sure they learn the language so they can get on.’ Will said that was right, it was time to go, and he gently tossed the rope he was holding, let it fall out in the water, instead of giving it to the hand held out to receive it.

  ‘You did everything, and they are going in peace now,’ Will said, with a protective arm steadying the old man, and both watched, as the three canoes moved away from the mooring in
the swiftly moving current. Silently, the men stepped forward to pay their respects to the canoes drifting silently into the darkness, before turning to walk away. Up ahead, they heard the cavern echoing with the Fishman’s voice bouncing from wall to wall, penetrating their blood, saying his goodbyes to his sons. Wishing them well in their new world. Be good boys. He would put his own affairs in order, then he would be coming back to them, very soon. ‘Luke Fishman, Tristrum Fishman, and you too, Aaron Ho Kum.’ He explained he had adopted this dead boy as his own flesh and blood forever, brother to Luke and Tristrum.

  Only Will heard it, while leading the Fishman away, when he looked back over his shoulder. ‘Hear it? Listen!’ He heard a droning sound, and imagined the sound was converging from many different directions. The sound he heard, was as if someone a long way off was playing a stanza on the didgeridoo, then, others responded with their own version of the melody which went droning on as one long prophetic oratorio. Fishman said he had heard it too. ‘Listen!’ He dug his elbow into Will’s ribs. Will looked back and in the blackness, using his eyes like a cat, he saw the seagulls gathering together like a glittering, silvery cloud over the canoes. He saw how the beating of scores of wings could create its own air currents until the waters rippled and splashed into small groups of white capping waves. In the company of the cloud, the canoes moved away, navigating the routes to the spirit world, across the sea.