Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  Harry, 1946

  As they came down the river in the drizzle, Harry lay beneath the oilskins in the damp pungency of the Huon pine-planked bottom of the boat, the pain growing and growing until Harry had no existence beyond the pain. Anything else was just a small comma in his sentence of pain. With each pull of the oars the fire flared in the stump that had been his thumb and the flame consumed his hand and leapt up his arm. And every so often he would open his eyes and there would be the sea eagle, the same bird he had seen above Big Fall with the two tailfeathers missing. When Harry’s eyes opened the bird would be staring down at them from a tree on the riverbank, and then it would fly off, only to be back when Harry next opened his eyes. Harry no longer knew if what he was seeing was real or a dream. He remembered Auntie Ellie telling him the story of a sea eagle plucking a baby out of a paddock up Port Sorell way, then flying out to sea with it, and how it had raised the baby in its nest on Three Hummock Island far out in the strait. She believed the story. Harry neither believed nor disbelieved, he simply listened. And remembered.

  At Double Fall and Big Fall, they had to portage the punt around rapids, while Harry staggered alongside, wrapped in a shivering grey blanket. As they rounded into the Gordon River the rain began to bucket down and the river became curtained in low-lying mist that rose and fell and swept as if swirled by an invisible hand. The beginning of a fever gripped Harry, and the fire in his hand and arm sweetly warmed his entire body.

  Harry drifted in and out of sleep. At one stage he pulled aside the blankets and oilskin that covered his head as well as his body and looked up at Old Bo and Smeggsy, each with an oar, Smeggsy on the right, Old Bo on the left. He looked at their legs, at their trousers, heavy with the wet, falling from their knees in folds, thickening out onto their boots. He looked at Smeggsy’s thin hair, sitting wet and shiny black, flat upon his head. Old Bo wore a grubby green beanie that was covered with a white fur of water that looked like the mould upon an old lamb chop. He looked up at their stubbled, lined faces glistening with rain. The faces were unmoving, save for the occasional beads of water joining into a necklace of droplets that snaked down the grooves around their cheeks, and from there dripped onto their grey flannels. Their eyes were bright but empty, focused on some distant point to ensure they kept the correct line down the river. The rain spiked the river’s surface. Harry fell back asleep and he dreamt that he was in a boat being rowed through the rainforest canopy by two ancient myrtle trees that bore the faces of Old Bo and Smeggsy.

  They reached Sir John Falls late in the afternoon and went up to the old tourist hut where there was always kept a store of dry firewood. Old Bo lit a fire and made a billy of tea. They sat around and drank the tea in their chipped enamel mugs, drank it sweet and black, pondering whether to stop there the night. Harry said nothing. For one thing he was too much fevered; for another, in his few moments of lucidity, he felt it wrong to ask anything more of these men who would lose a week or so of work rowing to Strahan and then back up to their camp in the rainforest simply to help him. In the end he curled up like a dog in front of the fire in his blanket. He realised he was shaking bad, that his body was wildly convulsing and dripping sweat, while all the while his mind felt becalmed in the eye of the storm that had taken hold of him.

  ‘The boy’s buggered,’ said Old Bo.

  And that was that.

  They walked back down to the punt, bailed out the rainwater, made Harry comfortable in the stern. The rain had for the time being ceased and the mist lifted. The sun sank before them as they rowed down the Gordon and Harry felt its final rays as a brief warm weight upon his eyes.

  ‘Forty-five miles to go,’ said Smeggsy.

  ‘Piss it in before tea,’ said Old Bo. They all laughed, even Harry, then no one spoke as the stillness of the night came upon them. Above him Harry watched the thin ribbon of stars shining, framed on either side by the rainforest. He fell asleep and again dreamt of being rowed by two myrtle trees, except this time they rowed through the stars to the moon, and it was quiet, and while everything went on forever the stars were as knowable and as safe and as comforting a world as that of the rainforested rivers.

  They rowed past Butlers Island, past the Marble Cliffs, then for long silent hours down the long straights, past Eagle Creek, past Limekiln Reach - where the barefooted starving convicts had once been stationed in the rainforest to burn lime - around Horseshoe Bend and out to the mouth of the river, where the river valley was swamped by the immensity of Macquarie Harbour. The moon had risen, a three-quarter moon that silvered the sky and sea, the flat sea, not a ripple upon it. They rowed to Sarah Island where the infamous convict settlement had been a century before, from where men had bolted only to have to resort to killing and eating each other in the bush, before they too died, their skeletons left to bleach and slime and entangle and entwine with the growing myrtle roots. They pulled into Sarah for a break. The moon was at its highest. The two men walked stiffly and awkwardly up to a small clearing in the blackberries used by local daytrippers. Harry slept on in the boat. Old Bo made the tea like a honeyed tar.

  ‘Christ knows, I need something as bad as this to keep me going,’ said the old man as he ladled the sugar into the billy.

  ‘Twenty miles to go,’ said Smeggsy, ‘if we go direct.’ Smeggsy wanted to cling to the shoreline lest a big sea blow up and swamp their small boat in the middle of the harbour, but it would extend their trip by another seven miles. Old Bo smelt the air and gazed at the stars.

  ‘We go straight,’ he said at last. ‘No wind till mid-mornin’.’ They drank the billy dry, then made another, and then another before their thirst was finally slaked. Smeggsy lay back on the earth and closed his eyes.

  ‘I could sleep for a million years,’ he said.

  ‘Sleep as you row,’ said Old Bo, kicking him in his side. ‘For Chrissake, don’t fall asleep here.’ They stood up and pissed on the fire to put it out, and as their urine fell in a steaming arc they rubbed their hands in it, to make their hands tough yet supple for the rowing. Smeggsy’s hands were pink with the loss of skin from the friction of the oar, and the urine smarted. He shivered. They walked without enthusiasm, with the gait of exhaustion, slow stumbly steps back to the punt.

  Smeggsy closed his eyes now as he rowed and he wasn’t sure if he was rowing, or whether he was simply dreaming he was rowing, so established had the dull pain of movement become to his body. Old Bo’s eyes never closed. He kept the boat on its course across the inland sea to Strahan. Somewhere out in the middle of that sea, Old Bo began to tell stories, strange wonderful stories, and Smeggsy’s eyes opened and as he listened he suddenly felt wide awake, so awake his mind left his body that rowed like a slow steam engine and entered the world of Old Bo’s stories, a world where past, present and future seemed to collide and exist together.

  Harry, 1993

  I can see Old Bo and I can see the freshwater lobster telling a new story, and at some point the two have merged so completely I am no longer sure whether a lobster is rowing the boat or Old Bo is telling the story. Then the punt they row disappears into the night light of Macquarie Harbour. All sight and sound of them is gone.

  I thought I had a handle on this vision thing. At the beginning, watching myself being born - fine. Watching the early days of the river trip that led me to this mess - fine. Even watching what turns out to be my father losing his thumb whilst pining years before I was born - fine. And I can understand seeing my childhood and all that business with Couta, but now I just feel myself getting more confused. Having drunk animals tell stories, personal stories, I ought add, about yourself and your family, then getting too drunk to continue - well, it’s wrong. Visions ought be given you by some divine being, not bantered about by a mob of pissed marsupials and their mates. But these visions, they proceed as a series of abrupt images, being told to me by any number of people and animals, and the connection between one and the next is never stated or obvious, and now the visions all seem to be happenin
g together, invading each other’s worlds.

  Which is perhaps why I am not surprised when Aljaz and the Cockroach and their party of punters fail to notice the hospital ward replete with heart monitors, drips, and stainless-steel tea trolleys that protrudes out of the rainforest and sits upon a beach, as though a modern hospital ward is as much a part of the river rainforest as a myrtle or a sassafras. Why nobody on either raft waves to Harry, who lies there upon the hospital bed. They just paddle on.

  A nurse enters the ward from a copse of manferns.

  ‘Your wrist, Mr Lewis?’

  Harry looks up in surprise, his pleasure in watching and smelling and listening to the Franklin River in flood broken by the question.

  ‘Your wrist,’ she repeats. Harry looks up at her young face, upon which a smile briefly glimmers outward like the rings around a stone falling into water and then is lost, as she places a thermometer under his tongue. She finishes taking his pulse and wraps the blood pressure tourniquet around the slack, wrinkled skin of his arm. Harry feels embarrassment at the young nurse looking at such flaccid skin wrinkling over the withered waste of his arm, when once the arm had been strong, its strength evident in its taut suppleness, the forearm and bicep revealing individual muscles pulling up and down with the slightest move of his hand. Now - and the thought leaves him weary beyond despair - now it is the arm of an old man, soon to die. He feels the need to say something in explanation.

  ‘Life is the cruellest of boxers,’ he says.

  Again the brief, glimmering smile. ‘Yes, Mr Lewis.’

  Harry continues to try and explain what it is that she ought know, almost a warning to her of her own mortality, of the fallibility of all flesh, even her most beautiful of flesh. While she knows from her work that all people are mortal, her youth prevents her from realising - beyond as an abstract, academic point - that this great truth also applies to her. ‘Yes, it is,’ he says. ‘It gets you in a corner as you grow old, on the ropes, and there is no referee to call a halt. And it hits you and it hits you again and again. And when you slump there is no referee to say enough is enough. There is no referee to say you shouldn’t kick a fella in the guts and in the head when he’s down. But that’s how it is. Life just keeps kicking you until there’s nothing left to kick.’ The nurse looks down at him as she unstraps the tourniquet, and pulls her mouth back in mild frustration.

  Harry sees the great mountain ranges creasing around the river, wrapping around him, sees the rainforest, sees the river rising, feels the moist heaviness of the air upon his face, smells the scent of peat.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mr Lewis,’ she says. ‘Please don’t cry.’ She is about to say that it can’t be as bad as all that, but her medical knowledge tells her that it is. She feels warm breath upon her back and turns to see Dr Elliot, the young registrar in whom she is more than passingly interested. Dr Elliot has overheard the conversation. He takes the nurse aside and whispers to her under a large myrtle tree.

  ‘I think we might up Mr Lewis’s morphine. He seems in a great deal of pain.’ And then, ‘Friday night - that new Thai restaurant in Barracouta Row.’ She smiles her agreement.

  Harry envies the young nurse and the young doctor their sexual communication, the way their flesh is so alive it has a life separate and independent of their minds, to the extent that small movements contain messages that are read by the other body in a rising excitement that can only be sated by their coupling. He might have even hated them for their sexual vibrancy, but he was as beyond hating for such reasons as he was now beyond loving.

  Harry relapses into his solitary world of pain. He had never imagined old age would be like this, but then he had never really imagined what old age would be like. To the extent that he had talked about it in the past and had reflected upon the condition of those he knew who were old, he had presumed there would be some pleasures to be had, that he would feel satisfaction at having achieved some things of which he was proud. But on his deathbed he can only despair of so little achieved, of so many opportunities for friendship and love missed and dissolved in the minute trivia of daily living, and his final time approaches not as an autumn but with the sharp and fearful damp coldness of a mist rising on a winter’s nightfall. He feels alone, terribly alone. Life seems to him to be the promise of pleasures unfulfilled. He looks upon what he knows of the world and finds it sad, sad, sad, and no longer has the confidence of youth to declare that the world can be remade better and kinder. There seems to be too little love and too much hate. He feels naked and the world and his life his own to wander through for a few short moments that stretch to infinity. In both he sees only desolation. There is nothing to look forward to, little to look back upon. He thinks what he would do if he had his life again, then thinks that he has no desire to have it again, that once was too hard and has worn him out so utterly that he wonders if he will even have the energy to die. He feels only an overbearing tiredness, which in the end eclipses even his capacity to think, and then, after that, his desire to dream.

  And at that moment he sees his long-dead uncles Basil and George walking toward him. ‘Get the load off your feet, Nugget,’ says George. He sees his mother Rose coming toward him, a very powerful feeling it is, and she says, ‘I love you.’ He sees the river advance toward him. But it is no river he recognises. He sees two large old stringybark gums burst into flower in the middle of a blizzard, and as they do so, a miracle take place. The trees stretch and unravel toward the sky, unfolding into blossom, and as more of the cream-coloured flowers appear, the gum trees begin to float and then soar into the heavens. He sees Old Bo and Smeggsy, and Old Bo says, ‘Carry the boy gentle, Smeggsy.’ Harry opens his eyes.

  But he is no longer in his hospital bed.

  Ned Quade, 1832

  He is in a punt being rowed by a freshwater lobster talking with Old Bo’s voice. They have just emerged from a bank of gentle, fleecelike snowclouds when he spies far, far below the airborne punt a solitary figure upon a remote alpine moor. Old Bo the lobster is yakking away.

  Saying: At the end only Ned Quade the stone man and Aaron Hersey remained. The others had passed on in the manner they had agreed upon before the escape, such desperate measures accepted as the corollary of the world they were fleeing. When it came to the moment of truth, only a badly fevered Jack Jenkins had not fought it, asking for half an hour alone to make his peace with the Lord. None quibbled that the alternative of returning was preferable. Aaron Hersey and the stone man sat around their campfire, gaunt-faced with exhaustion and terror, knowing whoever fell asleep first would only momentarily reawaken before being committed to that ultimate rest beneath the vast gorge of the southern night sky. In the event, it was the stone man whose eyes closed first. He rocked back and forth where he sat and his eyelids closed though the rocking continued. Aaron Hersey eyed him nervously, knowing this might be some trap. But after some minutes it was clear that the stone man was asleep, perhaps somehow thinking in the back of his mind that because he was still sitting upright and still rocking that therefore he must still be awake. He was not. But the moment that Aaron Hersey went to kill Ned Quade more or less as they had killed their three fellow escapees, cleaving his head open like a blighted turnip with the axe they carried, the stone man’s eyes fluttered open. They eyed each other off, the stone man sitting, Aaron Hersey standing in front of him with the axe poised to fall.

  ‘I seen some things,’ said Aaron Hersey, not moving, axe held high.

  The stone man said nothing.

  ‘Seen barefoot men chained to a plough in place of oxen. Seen a woman in Hobart made wear a spiked iron collar and her head shaved for lying with another woman, raped by redcoats and lags alike. Seen a native woman with child shot down like a bird from the tree in which she hid. I even seen a boy buggered by an entire chain gang, the constable holding him down.’

  The stone man said nothing.

  ‘Bad things mostly,’ continued Aaron Hersey. ‘Don’t remember being bad myself before being sent ou
t here. Maybe I was. Maybe it was always there and just needed this for it to come out. Don’t remember exactly why I was transported any more. But they must have had their good reasons for doing it to me. Maybe not even a good reason but a bad reason. But there must have been a reason. There would have been. That I know for sure.’

  The stone man’s eyes were rheumy with tiredness.

  ‘So many bad things,’ said Aaron Hersey, ‘that have been my punishment, and me a part of them bad things. Which is why it is right I have been punished and why it is right because there was this reason.’

  ‘Reason,’ said the stone man, ‘is the evil fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.’

  Then, with a movement both rapid and violent, the stone man lunged at the legs of Aaron Hersey and toppled him face first into the coals of the fire. Hersey screamed and rolled out of the fire, but not before the stone man had wrenched the axe from him and with it struck a fiercesome blow to the head.

  The grey milky matter of Hersey’s brain flowed forth and formed a gritty gruel with the dead coals at the edge of the fire. The stone man finished Aaron Hersey off by hacking through his neck. It takes a lot to kill a man though. Hersey did not fight, yet nor was it straight away that he stopped breathing, and his breath and blood guttered through the rent in his neck for some moments, steaming and hissing as it splashed the coals below. Then Ned Quade stood up and looked into the speckled darkness and he felt beyond fear and beyond weariness, and felt all the wretchedness of this earth arise within him and he wished it he and not Hersey who had died so.

  He stripped the corpse and hung it upside down from a tree by its trousers to let it bleed. While it so hung, Ned Quade cut it open and disembowelled the body. He built the fire back up and upon it grilled the heart and the liver, but such was his hunger that he ate them before they were properly cooked. He travelled with renewed energy all that following day and the day after that, carefully rationing out Hersey’s limbs to last him until he reached the New Jerusalem. Upon a huge button-grass plain thick with black wallaby turds he came across a mob of natives and he raised the stick upon which he now hobbled and made as if it were a musket and he about to fire upon them. He was not so distant from his fellow countrymen that they did not understand the meaning of his gesture and they ran away, dropping a possum carcass in their haste. This he took with him and continued on, back into rainforest, in the reaches of which he grew so dispirited that when he passed out of it, back into the higher country, he stopped next to a King Billy pine tree in which he prepared to hang himself by his leather belt. The mood passed, and after two days he arose from where he lay beneath the tree and staggered off. Ned Quade continued to hope that he would find the coast and there a boat in which to get away from Van Diemen’s Land to New South Wales and from there make his way to the New Jerusalem.