Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘What you sobbing about?’ asked George. ‘Ya going home, don’t ya know?’ And as he put his arm around her George smiled, for she was indeed a pretty child.

  When George brought her through the door Lil smiled too. ‘She is beautiful. Why George, she has got your eyes too!’ Rose knew only too well and sobbed all the louder. Having his daughter back didn’t stop George drinking too much and he and Lil began to fight something terrible, so bad that in the end they decided to leave Tasmania, which they blamed for all that made them unhappy.

  ‘We’ll disappear and ain’t nobody’ll ever know what became of us and the child,’ said George, ‘and won’t that just nark Eileen and Tronce.’ They booked a ticket on the boat to Sydney, and it was on the evening before the boat was due to go that Uncle Tronce turned up and demanded Rose back. Eileen, who was from the spiritual side of the family, had strange powers. The index finger of her right hand came out in warts and she sensed something bad was about to befall Rose. She told Tronce that he must go and bring her back. George wasn’t happy about it, but then he was drunk and Tronce was bigger, and in the ensuing fist fight George was laid out. Lil screamed and screamed, but beyond throwing a vase at Tronce and missing him, did nothing. Rose sobbed all the way back to Richmond as she sat next to Uncle Tronce on his trap. She stopped sobbing when they didn’t stop at Richmond but kept heading east. She stopped feeling upset and started feeling mystified as the trap made its slow way along the old rutted coach road toward Port Arthur. Tronce took the dray down through the wild, thickly wooded Forestier Peninsula, and when Rose turned around and looked behind she saw that the huge trees seemed to close in, swallowing up the narrow track behind them and the moon and stars above them. Tronce continued all the way down to Eaglehawk Neck, the slash of land connecting the Tasmanian mainland to Tasman Peninsula. There, in the long early morning shadows thrown by a huge and ancient almond tree, stood the old officers’ quarters, a dilapidated half-wood, half-brick building that was the last remnant of the once infamous dog line - a chain of poorly fed wild dogs that had stretched across the width of the Neck, their job to rip apart any convict escaping from the vast penal settlement at Port Arthur - and in this sparse military barracks turned into a humble home, Rose was hidden by the Costello family, long-time friends of Tronce.

  At Richmond Eileen prayed and prayed that no harm would befall Rose, and even sent money to holy places in France so that they too would pray on Rose’s behalf. George came down to see Eileen and Tronce and threatened and blustered, but got nowhere, so he went into Hobart and hired a lawyer to find Rose and get her back. At the Neck Rose cried from fear of that eerie place. Of a night the boom of the waves crashing in on the wild ocean beach that lay below mixed with the screams - like that of a woman being strangled - of the Tasmanian devils as they came into the vegetable garden and ate the cabbage and rhubarb. The Neck was not a place in which Rose felt it was possible to be happy. She cried day in, day out and wet her pants for the first time since she was a wean, and then cried all the more from the shame and the fear of it all.

  One day, playing near the sand dunes a few hundred yards from the vegetable garden, Rose found a strange piece of bone, too big to be a sheep and unlike any cattle bone she had ever seen. The children took it home and Mr Costello took the bone to the police constable at Nubeena. At first it was thought that the bone belonged to an unfortunate convict who had perished attempting escape decades earlier. But when they came to excavate the sand dune, they discovered not one but many skeletons, all in the same position, with the knees pulled up underneath the chin. Scientists came down from the Hobart museum and concluded that it was an Aboriginal burial ground. Rose’s nightmares found a recurrent form in the shape of the sand dune skeletons unfolding and standing up and then chasing her all the way back to Lil and George’s in Hobart. As she ran they screamed, and their scream was that of the Tasmanian devils in the dark.

  The case of who should have possession of Rose was only days away from being heard when Eileen’s prayers seemed to finally have some effect and George’s lawyer was found with his brains blown out. It was said to be suicide. Even Tronce was impressed, and to the end of his days said that you should never push Eileen too far because she could pray so powerful she could kill you. Soon after there was a scandal when Lil ran off with a horse trainer to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. George didn’t have the money to pursue the matter any further, drank even more, and some months later he too left Tasmania, bound, he said, for Sydney. Not that Rose was aware of any of this down at the Neck. Nobody thought it fit or proper to fill her in on such goings on. Even with George gone, Tronce and Eileen kept Rose hidden at the Neck for another year before they dared bring her home. So until the day that Tronce returned with his dray, she continued going to the small school on the far side of the Neck, playing on the vast, empty white beach with the few other kids who lived local, and listening to the ocean ebbing and rising, wondering if her own life had any more reason to it than the gentle rise and sudden crash of the ocean waves, wondering if it was her destiny to spend the rest of her life at the Neck, far from her brothers and sisters.

  Harry never met Tronce, who died some years before Harry was born. His memories of Eileen were of a tiny sparrowlike woman with a large, bright pink nose, off which hung peels of skin, the parchment-yellow colour of toenails. These memories arose from Rose’s yearly holiday in Richmond with Eileen, which came to an end with Eileen’s death in Harry’s sixth year. Eileen’s house was dark and smelt of carbolic soap and stale bread, for Eileen, who had grown hard and mean in the manner of the women of her family, ate little. She had also grown, if anything, even more religious in her old age, and for most of those holidays Harry remembered being upon his knees chanting the rosary with other old biddies Eileen gathered in to help her beseech the Lord above for forgiveness.

  Eileen’s funeral was a grand affair in the Hobart cathedral. Half of Richmond seemed to be there. As the Scriptures were being read it began to rain so heavily that the sound of the rain on the roof above, amplified in the cavernous space of the cathedral’s interior, drowned out the reader. Harry looked up at the ceiling and noticed something moving at the top of the walls. Droplets of crimson fluid. Harry reached up and tugged Rose’s coat arm. ‘The walls, Mum,’ he whispered, ‘the walls are bleeding.’ Rose looked down at Harry, rather than up at the walls, but even as she scolded him, others who had overheard Harry looked up and saw the walls now bleeding in thick heavy runs and droplets. Even the priests, dressed in their finest mufti, looked up and abandoned their normal solemnity and started to point and chatter to one another. As the storm above grew in ferocity, as thunder roared and rain crashed upon the roof in sheets, the bleeding became more pronounced, until the walls appeared to be haemorrhaging. Wherever the congregation of mourners chose to look there was blood. Occasional droplets fell onto the burning candles in the brass stand that sat up against the wall to the right of the altar. Blood began to run onto the Stations of the Cross. It dripped over the figure of Our Blessed Lady, giving to the Virgin Mother a ghoulish aspect as a rill of blood ran round her cheek to her mouth, from where it dribbled down onto her open palm.

  But the most miraculous sight was that of the large crucifix behind the altar. At first a small amount of blood had merely - and, it had seemed, solemnly and respectfully - run onto Our Saviour’s nailed right hand, whence it gently fell to the floor, the effect melancholic and in keeping with the sublime and transformed suffering portrayed in the sculpture. But then, as the storm grew wilder, the blood spilled over His head and flooded over His body, until the crucifix seemed awash with blood. As it ran all over the body of Our Lord upon the cross, the blood gave to the previously inert figure a most immediate and horrifying sense of physical agony. Sobs of shock and fear ran through the mourners and a few scurried along the aisles and left, too frightened to stay. But most remained, transfixed by the spectacle, their fear out-weighed by their wonder. And when at last the rain stopped
and the bleeding subsided to occasional drops and the priest held out his arms and said, ‘Let us pray,’ most believed they had witnessed a miracle in keeping with Rose’s Old Testament religion. Those who later heard that the blood was actually the result of incomplete restoration work on the roof were not inclined to believe it. The story of roof repairmen, immediately prior to an unexpected storm, abandoning wet red paint to run in the rain through unplugged gaps in the roof had little chance against a miracle. While one story was repeated and grew in the telling from a small seed to a large tree of tales, until half the town swore that they had been at the funeral and had seen the Lord bleed, the other story went astray, languished and soon was heard no more, for none wanted to know it.

  There were two unforeseen consequences of Eileen’s spectacular funeral. One was that the cathedral became something of a local pilgrimage point, and some miracles were ascribed to its special powers. The church authorities were uneasy about its new status, but were unable to publicly say a great deal against it. The other was that Eileen, in her death, was elevated to the position of something of a local saint, which was an exaggeration of her virtues, for she was on occasion bad tempered and vicious, and invariably hard and mean. But whereas in life she had by nature been contrary and always contradicted anyone and everyone, in death she was silent upon the virtues attributed to her, and so the stories of her goodness and charity grew. These amused Boy, who remembered how parsimonious she had been with food and how silly she could be when frightened.

  When the bushfires had ringed Richmond in that year of fires, 1934, she had gathered as many local children as she could find inside her home and solemnly told them that the end of the world was nigh. Outside, the day was ferociously hot and gale-force winds whipped small sparks into raging infernos in the tinder-dry bush and pasture. As the fires burnt over an ever greater area of land, the sky filled with ash and the town fell under a pall of smoke so dense that, were it not for shafts of late-afternoon light shining underneath the heavy dark voids of ash, it would have seemed as if it were night. Inside the house Eileen shut all the doors and windows, and in the stifling stillness made the children take turns reading from Revelations about the end of the earth. Harry, who was on holiday with Eileen, had been rounded up from the street outside along with the MacGuires, some of the Greens and Juno Proctor. Harry wasn’t so sure it was as bad as Eileen was making out, and, curious to know what was going on outside the darkened parlour, out in the cracking winds under the ash-black sky and amidst the heavy smell of smoke, said he would just go out and make sure the earth was ending, because if it were, he didn’t want to miss it for quids. And before Eileen could scruff him, Harry and Juno Proctor were up and out the back door.

  Rose died giving birth to Daisy when Harry was ten. Her death came as a surprise to no one except Harry, who had accepted as normal and healthy what was rather the evidence of a person not long for this earth.

  Before the funeral the men sat around the coffin in the parlour and drank beer while the women sat out in the kitchen and drank tea. Neither the women nor the men talked that much, because Rose’s life had not been a long one full of incident and anecdote, had not been a life that in death made people realise how much they shared in common. Rose’s early death made people think, and what it made them think about brought nobody much happiness. It reminded them that they were poor people whose lives were largely ones of hard drudgery, that the incessant work took its toll and could take people away before their time. It reminded them that their lives could be as thin as the gruel made up of kangaroo tails and spuds that they sometimes fed their children. There was not even that rich, desperate melancholia about the occasion that might accompany the death of an old local celebrity - a melancholia as thick as the clotted cream on the sponge cakes that sat heavy upon the lace-dressed sideboard in the parlour.

  After a time the men made their farewells to Boy and his family. The women cleaned up and put the children in bed, then they too left, until there were only Boy and Ruth sitting in the parlour. Ruth pulled out a tin hipflask, a sister piece, Boy observed, to his cigarette case, complete with Ruth’s italicised initials engraved in one corner. He poured half the hip-flask’s whiskey into his empty beer glass and half into Boy’s empty beer glass. Boy sipped at the whiskey. Ruth didn’t. Ruth ran the nail of his right thumb along his upper front teeth. Then he spoke.

  ‘You think I am the only one of Rose’s family here because the rest of them are snubbing the funeral. Because they think Rose married below her station.’

  Boy looked up at Ruth. ‘No,’ said Boy.

  ‘You’d have a right to think it,’ said Ruth.

  ‘No,’ said Boy. ‘I don’t think it. It’s a long way, Richmond to here, and they’ve got their work and their families. I understand that.’

  ‘They could have come,’ said Ruth. ‘If they had wanted to. But they’re snobs. You know that, Boy. You don’t need me to tell you. But you have got to understand.’

  Boy looked at Ruth and saw he hadn’t touched the whiskey in his beer glass. He saw that Ruth was looking at him, not at the beer glass and not at the floor, and he guessed that he could perhaps speak his mind. Boy spoke without rancour, without even bitterness. But with a certain deep sadness that now Rose had gone the wrong he felt would never be righted. Boy spoke slowly. ‘What do you mean, I’ve got to understand? Ain’t nothing to understand. They think I am shit. Well, they’re right. I am shit. I snare in winter and I work on the threshing machines in summer and in between jobs I poach to feed the family. I ain’t proud but I ain’t ashamed.’

  Ruth looked at Boy uncomfortable in his old cheap navy suit cut in the fashion popular before the Great War, at the wide black band around his right sleeve; looked at the way his big flat fingers played with his beer glass, at the thin black hair parted in the middle.

  ‘You have to understand,’ said Ruth, ‘why we are snobs.’

  ‘Well, I understand that,’ said Boy. ‘Some people are cranky and some are bone idle and some are snobs. That’s just how it is.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ruth. ‘Maybe not.’ He paused and leant forward in the overstuffed armchair with the horsehair falling out of the holes in the arms. ‘Look. Did Rose ever talk to you about family? Our family?’

  ‘Yeah. All the time. Never stopped about what you were doing and how well you were all going.’

  ‘But did she ever talk about old Grandad Quade?’

  ‘No, not really. A lot about old woman Quade. But not much about him, no.’

  ‘He was a convict.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ned Quade. Rose’s grandfather.’

  Madonna santa!

  I can see that Boy was shocked and not shocked. And no wonder - so am I. Nobody ever told me this either, and yet, I, like Boy, feel as if I always knew but never suspected a thing, never ever thought but always knew such momentous shame hung over the family.

  Boy’s lips started to move, then stopped. Boy then mumbled a word or two, all the time the furrows in his face dancing up and down as if he were doing some long involved piece of mental arithmetic, adding up so many different things that he had never before recognised as being part of a single grand equation. Realising that he had not said anything proper in reply, Boy grew a little embarrassed and made a small joke to buy a bit more time thinking. He lifted his beer glass and said, ‘Thank God you poured me a whiskey,’ smiled weakly, gulped down some of the whiskey, then finished the glass off with a second, more determined, swallow. And then he was back adding up all the strange evasions, the conceits, the curious pride, the black shames that had been his wife’s nature and his despair, and he arrived at the same solution that Ruth had offered. He checked and rechecked the evidence in his mind, but the addition was its own truth, allowing no other solution. Ruth continued to watch. Boy’s face finally stopped twitching and moved upwards to look once again at Ruth.

  ‘Why the hell …?’ said Boy, but his voice trailed off, because he did know why th
e hell, because he did know what it must have meant to her, because he did know how it must have been terrible for her to continually lie to herself and to everyone else, but worse to turn and look at the unspeakable, unnameable shadow, and to give it a name and give tongue to that name in conversation with others. ‘Why the hell didn’t …?’ said Boy, but for a second time his voice trailed away, because he knew fully why, even before Ruth told him.

  ‘Why would she want you to know? Ain’t no good anybody knowing you got convict blood. Who’s going to respect you? There ain’t nobody respects a crawler’s kith and kin. And respect is everything. Without respect a man is no better than a dog. Who’s going to give you a decent job if you’ve got the taint?’ The final word came out of Ruth’s throat with a peculiar harshness, as if the word itself carried chains and could be summoned up only with some effort from his guts, as if it flagellated his throat and tongue on its journey to his lips. Ruth sipped his beer glass of whiskey to ease the pain the word gave his mouth.

  ‘It might not matter much snaring up in the highlands,’ he continued. ‘But it matters everywhere else. And what sort of future your children got if word gets out they got the taint? They’re as good as filth. There’s no future with that sort of past.’