Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  Now, I’ve never been much interested in history. What’s past is past, that’s been my motto. Get on with now. All this business Ruth is dredging up should be dead and long gone. But it’s not. The past isn’t ever over, otherwise why would I be starting to get that pain back in my guts just watching Ruth and Boy? And if the past doesn’t matter, why was Boy getting so angry?

  I can see that now he knows the lie, he hates the way it came between him and Rose, the way it always kept them separate despite his love, the way it always made her despise as dirt the one she loved above all others, and inevitably left him unhappy when he was with her. But the angrier he gets, the less any of it makes any sense, and though he knows the answer he asks the question.

  ‘Then why the hell is the family such a pack of bloody snobs if they’re only the whelps of an old crawler?’ Boy asked Ruth.

  ‘Because they are the whelps and the whelps of whelps of an old crawler. Because to get somewhere we had to make up a new world to replace their old world, because there was no hope for any of us in that old world. That’s what old Eileen taught us, and she was right. And if part of that new world means being a bit superior and putting on the plum - well, so be it. I admire the family for making something of itself out of nothing. Cos having nothing and wanting something meant pretending to have everything.’

  Ruth paused. He had played piano for some difficult crowds at Ma Dwyer’s and he had learnt the value of the pregnant pause. Boy looked up at Ruth, expecting him to say more, then looked away when no more came, then looked back and said, ‘But you can’t go around denying your own blood.’

  ‘Why not? Look, the whole country does it. We pretend we’re gentry and we’re not. And you think it’s bad. But do you ever wonder why they renamed Van Diemen’s Land Tasmania? They wanted everyone to forget, that’s why. And everyone wanted to forget with them. Whether they were convict or policeman, none of them thought it was worth remembering.’ Ruth was an educated man. He had, after all, finished high school. And Rose had often told Boy how, if he had not followed his path in music, he would almost certainly have become a school teacher, so clever was Ruth. He was a great reader and owned over fifty books, all of which he kept locked in a big battered green trunk in his bedroom. Boy found it hard to say anything that came close to matching the cleverness of what Ruth was saying. But without being able to analyse and reply on equal terms to Ruth, he felt - as he sometimes felt when he saw a piece of timber and, without using a level, without even raising it to his eye, felt so strongly that he knew - that something in Ruth’s logic was warped.

  And the next morning when Ruth arose late and said that he had drunk so much that he could remember nothing of the night before, then Boy knew that what he knew was right.

  A river can grant you visions in an act at once generous and despicable, but even a river like the Franklin in full flood cannot explain everything. It cannot show me where, for example, after Rose’s death, Harry’s three older sisters were sent into domestic service in Launceston, cannot even show me what their faces were like, and that is a cause for sadness for which the river seems to try and compensate by showing where his baby sister Daisy was sent, the town of Strahan, a small port on the remote and wild west coast of the island, to there live with Boy’s mother, her grandmother, known in spite of her many and varying blood relations only as Auntie Ellie. Nor can the river’s waters reveal to me why Boy was at such a loss what to do with Harry, or why, when the snaring season opened, he felt impelled to take Harry with him, but I can only assume that he too must have had some vision, some premonition of his own mortality.

  The river does show me that the father and his son spent two weeks packing their gear and food into the remote hut. They walked through the last of the farmland, the boggy, marginal paddocks of the soldier settlers whose hope sagged even more than their post-and-rail fences. The meadows gave way to button-grass plains and scrub, then, as they slowly climbed, to a wonder world of pencil pine and King Billy pine forests, wide and open, interspersed with lawns of undamaged moss, the occasional deciduous beech copse orange in its final autumn show. Harry had never been to the hut before, and was surprised when he first had it pointed out to him by Boy. They stood at the head of a thickly forested valley, and down below them in a small and pleasant grass clearing sat a hut built of split timber and roofed with wooden shingles, the whole long silvered in the rain and sun, each plank finely etched with tiny tendrils and tufts of dry moss. To the left of the hut was a more roughly built shed, which Boy explained was for storing the skins.

  Harry learnt to lay the thin twisted brass-wire snares out along the wallaby runs. He set them so that they dangled just above the track, near invisible. When a wallaby or possum came scurrying along their customary track it would run straight into the snare. The wire loop would slip around the animal’s neck and, released from its peg in the ground, spring into the air, tightening as the desperate animal struggled and thrashed to be free. ‘It but bothers them little,’ said Boy to Harry, but Harry was never quite so sure. The small shit that hung out of their arses and the dried blood line down the side of their mouths said otherwise. But Boy was not one for killing anything unnecessarily, and all his family were as soft as warm dripping when it came to killing things that didn’t need killing. Boy’s brother George would lay a piece of wet bark down the side of the logs burning in the fire to allow the ants to escape, and only shot just what was needed for his pot. Harry learnt to kill quickly and cleanly. He learnt to cook wallaby stew, to not cook the delicate meat for too long lest it became dry and papery to the tongue, learnt to cook his father’s favourite meal, roo patties, and he learnt to make bread in a fire. He learnt also to love his father, who until that time had been a distant figure, often away for months at a time snaring, or working on the huge threshing machines that went from farm to farm up the coast, returning to sleep, drink, and fight with Rose, sometimes hitting her when he had drunk too much. At such times Rose would cry, though it was evident even to Harry that she cried as much out of sadness as physical pain. When she held her children to her belly and Harry’s head pulsed in and out with the sob of her body, Harry knew, though he would not have been able to say it, that she wished for something better between her and Boy, and that she knew it would never happen.

  In the hut and out on the snaring runs Harry found Boy neither distant nor violent, but quiet and happy and warm and open to his son. He pointed out the ways of the animals and the birds and plants and smiled more than Harry could ever remember him smiling. One morning Harry asked Boy why he had never brought Rose up to the hut. The question seemed obvious to Harry, for if they had lived in the hut, he thought, then their lives would have perhaps been happier. ‘What would your mother be wanting to live here for?’ said Boy, perplexed by the question. Harry never raised the matter again.

  Of an evening Harry would make the roo patties and watch the red firelight flutter upon his father’s small compact body as he tacked the latest batch of skins around the inside of the fireplace to dry. Harry would watch the fireglow briefly illuminate in old-gold puddles the grey flannel his father wore upon his upper body, long and loose, flapping down to his worn brown breeches. The glow would sometimes throw his father’s face into total darkness, then highlight in turn a part of the wooden wall behind, so that Harry would imagine his father merging into the soft brown and grey hues so completely that he became one of the hut’s upright King Billy pine posts. Sometimes Harry would be sent out to the drying shed where the skins were stored to fetch more wood, and though he would go obediently he would be filled with fear by the leaping, cavorting shadows thrown by the dull greasy yellow light of the kerosene lantern that swung from his outstretched arm.

  Those shadows, those greasy, slippery shadows, they dance before me now like some cabaret of lost souls of slaughtered animals performing a burlesque in Hell, and amidst the moist snouts of possums and wallabies I can see one more soul depart its human body. But then, of course, nothing
was so immediately or obviously apparent, particularly for Harry. Watching him now, I can see Harry did not know when Boy died. Harry did not know for four days that his father had been squashed lifeless under a rotten myrtle limb, fallen down in the wind and his father unlucky enough to be standing beneath it. Harry lay in bed all the first day, sick and sweating from a fever, seeing in his hallucinations strange things form themselves out of the rough split rafters, animals cavorting and square-ended dinghies rowing through the air. Boy had told him to stay put for the day on account of his sickness and not bother with any work. ‘Cept maybe keeping the fire going and getting the roo patties ready for tea.’ Harry lay there till late afternoon, then he built the fire up good and blazing. He went out to the drying shed and picked the oldest of three wallaby carcasses hanging in the drying chimney there. The carcass was black from the smoke. Harry cut a leg off the carcass and took it inside where he boned and minced the meat. He then boiled and squashed some potatoes into the meat, adding some bacon and diced onion, then, despite his nausea, rolled the mixture into ten balls, which he squashed flat. He set them in the pan with some dripping, but didn’t put them on the fire, waiting for the signal of the noise of his father returning. After it had been dark for some time Harry’s unease turned to a terrible cold fear, and he fought the fear down by pulling the blankets over his shoulders and face and retreating into the strange strong sleep of the sick.

  When he awoke everything was black, the fire long out. He looked at the bunk below him, but no form covered the stretched hessian sugar sacks that served as a mattress. His father had not returned. Try as he might, sleep would not come to Harry. Outside he heard the soft swish of snow falling and the occasional scream of a devil, loud and piercing. Finally he got up, lit the kerosene lantern, and sat in its weak puddle of light till morning came. Only then did he return to his bed. That night he built the fire up again, but this time he had filled the hut with wood during the day so that he would not have to venture out into the drying shed in the dark. Shortly before nightfall he stood at the doorway and called his father’s name, but there came no reply. He called again and again, called until he was hoarse, then went inside, but did not cry for fear his father would at that moment of weakness walk in and find him blubbering. He sat the pan with the roo patties next to the fire once again, ready to go on the fire at the sound of footsteps. There were no footsteps that night or the following night. There was a lot of snow. There was a lot of cold wind. Harry burnt the kerosene lantern through the second night and through most of the third night, until there was so little kerosene left that he had to put it out so that there would be some to use when Boy returned. On the morning of the fourth day Harry’s fever passed and was replaced by the serene weakness of those who have not eaten for so long that their bodies no longer recognise the sensation of hunger. Though he felt no desire beyond that of wishing to endure till his father returned, he recognised that he must eat. He cooked the ten roo patties he had prepared four days before, ate them all with a growing urgency, then prepared and cooked and ate another ten. Then he knew he must go search for his father.

  He boiled some potatoes to take with him and put them in a sugar bag. He put on his father’s bluey coat, which his father had left the day he had last been at the hut, for that, unlike now, had been a warm and pleasant day. He strung the sugar bag around his body with a piece of old thin hemp. He stood up, walked over to the fireplace, hitched up the thick black flaps of the bluey coat that hung heavy as a woollen blanket down to his knees, opened the buttons of his fly, and pissed on the dying fire. A small cloud of ammoniac ash and steam rose from the fireplace, as if a miniature bomb had struck. Harry did up his fly, let the coat flaps fall back, turned, and walked out of the hut.

  He found his father an hour and a half later, up one of his runs, a great branch on top of him, his body a stiff snow-white form. It did not anger Harry that the carrion-eating devils had eaten half his father’s face and parts of his hands and arms. That was how it was. It was the same law that allowed them to snare wallabies with the slag of blood about their mouths. But like he felt for the wallabies he felt for his father. He felt shock. The way that in death the pink bone of his father’s skull looked so similar to the pink bone of the wallaby carcasses. Shocked at the way living things can be killed, and how there is no coming back from death. He went back to the hut and returned with a rope, an axe and a spade. He chopped the branch into sections that he could drag away with his rope, then nearby found a small, straggly stringybark gum, Boy’s favourite tree, close to which he dug a hole through the snow and into the hard, stony earth below for his father’s body. This labour took most of the rest of the day. By the end of it he was very weak again. Harry placed his father’s body in the grave, covered the savaged side of the face with small branches of beech, looked at the half that remained and tried to remember his father. But Harry could recall nothing, and he felt ashamed that the only thought in his mind was how the sprigs of beech betopping Boy’s coarsely hued and textured woollen clothing made his father look more like a tree than ever. Albeit a fallen, broken tree. Harry filled the grave up with dirt, at first slow but then quicker and quicker, because as his body worked he felt his soul fill with an anger. Why had his dad done this? Harry’s anger became a fury and the fury propelled mounds of earth violently into the grave, until there was no respect or grief but only something that verged on hate. Why had Boy stood under this tree? Why had he allowed this branch to fell him, when all that while Harry was waiting at the hut for him in his sick bed? Why had Boy forgotten him? Left him? Betrayed him? Not that Harry said any of these things or anything at all. Not that Harry even had words for what he thought. But Harry felt it and he felt it as a flame that consumed his body. Then the grave was full and complete with a mound. And Harry’s fury dissipated into the cold early evening air as quickly and completely as his mist-breath. He felt as if nothing remained within him, not love, not hate, not even a desire to move. He turned for home and had taken at best six steps when something impelled him to swing around and look one last time at the grave. What he saw was miraculous. The stringybark was unfolding into massive lemon-coloured blossom, six weeks of summer compressed into as many minutes of winter.

  Harry returned home in the dark. This time the darkness did not frighten him. Nothing seemed to touch him. He felt as if he were his father’s ghost.

  He went straight to bed without even lighting a fire. The next morning he ground up more of the roo meat, cooked sixteen roo patties, ate four, and packed the rest in a possum skin in his sugar bag. He boiled a dozen potatoes and put them in with the patties. He filled up the rest of the sugar bag with matches, a billy, some tea and sugar and a blanket. Then he went out to the drying shed and carefully tied three dozen wallaby skins onto the back of his pack with hemp string, wrapping the lot in Boy’s oilskin coat. To not carry them out would, he knew, be a waste of a trip. There were hundreds of skins remaining and it would take a number of trips to get them all out, but Harry knew that by taking what skins he could, no one could accuse him of being a bludger and shirking his duties. He knew he ought go and clear his snares of the latest catch, but he did not desire to see any more death. Instead he struck out north west, back to the land of people and farms and towns.

  Harry had been walking for a day and a half when he met up with his uncles George and Basil. Before Harry even spoke, they seemed to know what had happened. They looked at him in a way different than he had ever been looked at before. They looked at him as if he were no longer a child but an adult. Harry looked up at the two men. George short and, as was Boy, built like a brick shithouse. Basil as thin and sinewy and tough as a piece of reused fencing wire, and on occasion as brittle. The one whom Harry would end up resembling. Basil went round the back of Harry and took the pack off his shoulders. ‘Get the load off your feet, Nugget,’ said George, Nugget being the name the family had taken to calling him on account of his complexion, so dark that Basil, who (and perhaps for thi
s very reason) was every bit as dark as Harry, once said Harry looked as if someone had rubbed his face with Nugget boot polish.

  They all sat down. The long man with the sinewy arms and wide shoulders on a fallen log, thereby accentuating his height; the squat, powerful man with his back to the log, thereby accentuating his shortness, and opposite them the dark boy-man with the face that spoke of nothing and suggested everything. Basil rifled around in the right pocket of his pants and pulled out a battered tin, from which he took a pack of cigarette papers and some tobacco. Placing the tin between his legs, Basil moistened the edge of three cigarette papers and stuck the three papers to his chapped lower lip, so that they dangled like washed nappies from a clothesline, then used his flat index finger, the tip of which was missing from some long-ago chopping accident, to roll the tobacco leaves into three sticks in his left palm. He placed each stick into a paper and rolled it into a cigarette. When he was finished, Basil placed the three cigarettes in the left side of his mouth, lit all three with one vesta struck off his boot, and passed one to Harry and another to George. They sat there, enjoying the brief flare at the end of the smoke as they inhaled and the sensation of the savoury wet sweet smoke filling their mouths and tumbling down their throats and out of their noses, not looking at each other, all looking straight ahead or straight down till George, in his low voice both melodious and gravelly, finally spoke.

  Saying: ‘And Boy?’

  Harry turned and looked at George, and knew what he must say and how he must say it, like a man, and he was at once grateful for being allowed the space between his feelings and his tongue that this response allowed: ‘A tree,’ said Harry. He stopped.

  After a time George said, ‘Yep,’ as though he had just lost some money at the horses and was philosophical about the loss. George looked down at the rollie he held between his thumb and forefinger, the smouldering end shielded within the cavern of his curled hand, and, his voice now a halting whisper, said, ‘Ye-ep,’ as though it were two words, two of the saddest words he knew.