Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
In the silence for breath that followed, a falling pine cone clattered in the guttering. Walter saw a tangle of green branches high up in a clear pane of window. Most of the windows were frosted over with whitewash, but here and there a pane had been left clear. In one of these the square of green hung like a painting in an otherwise bare room.
“Let us pray.”
The minister’s gaze wandered on a cobbled square of bent backs and bowed heads. Again the women pinched the bridges of their noses, while the men held their hands over their foreheads and looked at the floor as if shading themselves from an earthbound sun.
Billy swallowed a yawn. At the start of the prayer he had peered at a cup-hook of hair dangling on the lace collar of his older cousin. On this he built a rapid dream of defilement: yet his cousin became someone else — only the lace and the hair remained of her — he wanted the dream to be pure-someone, but it swelled — who was she? No face — he needed a face, but not Ethel’s, and he raised his hand prayer-like to disguise his hunt for other possibilities, and as he glanced around, finding nothing, he heard his amplified breath rising from the palm of his hand: a thin cooling intake of air followed by a thick expulsion. The repeated sound was hypnotic. It caused his thoughts to step back from his body, so that he saw himself as a sleeping shape of flesh. And he disliked what he saw. Not the shape itself, not the work-thickened fingers or scrubbed-clean neck, but the immobile prison his thoughts had suddenly escaped from. In that second or two he conceived the idea that other people were not so trapped, and he envied them. When he tried to stay with the idea, to discover it properly, the tone of his breath changed, flapped wetly, and abolished the spell. He fell back to noting his boots dusty from the ride — he’d been up early polishing them — and he saw again that his fingernails were getting long. So he bit them.
“Amen.”
After the children’s address Mr Fox invited the younger ones to leave the church for Bible class. Douggie slipped away, and Mrs Gilchrist’s hand, which seconds before had been resting on his knee, now lay flat on the empty seat. Father and son folded their arms, bumping elbows.
Mr Fox reminded the congregation that the year had been one of rich blessings. He spoke of grapes and melons, figs and honey, bread and milk — as if the produce of Palestine and the produce of Parkes were the same. The hoped-for rains had come, but elsewhere others had not been so fortunate. He referred to distant parishes. We must think of these less fortunate places as we garner our harvest, said Mr Fox, and thereby make a storehouse for the well-being of our souls.
Billy’s mind now wandered the district, starting far away from the hospital, then coming closer, yet never actually entering the room where his mother lay. He felt for a bruised thumbnail and pressed it till it hurt. He thought of the silver roofs of Forbes, brick chimneys, the Bible class outside gathered in the shade of the tankstand — then far-off things again. Suddenly something forced him to view his mother walking the track near Pine Creek as she loved to in spring. But he wrenched that picture aside. He saw May Armitage escorted down a rocky laneway to a spot where an overhanging pepper tree plunged the track into utter darkness. She was black and blue now, and wouldn’t be kissed by choice for ages.
Ethel thought Billy knew more than he said, which was true.
The police had walked him down the lane and asked what he’d seen that night, where he’d stopped. Near the pepper tree they tried to be clever:
“Remember how dark it was. Did she run?”
“Come off it!”
He’d been unable to help because what he knew and what they wanted to know would never fit together. They wanted the culprit — who wasn’t Billy. But Billy knew something all right. He had kissed May Armitage the night before she’d been bashed, and he could have told the police why it happened and how. But that would have been about May, not the culprit.
Billy had half jokingly thought of getting Walter together with May some time, she would have been a treat for his innocent soul. The plump Baptist kindliness held surprises, though you had to be daring to track them down because she never offered a thing. When they kissed a suddenly fierce contest of limbs occurred and it took Billy a minute to realize that her cry was not “You’re hurting me,” but a plea for rougher treatment. Then a light had spilt from the kitchen door of the nearby rectory. “Spot?” called an approaching voice: “Here, Spot — Spotty Spotty Spotty — Oh!”
Billy wondered about his cousins, if any bloke would be tempted to get rough with them: and decided they were too jolly. Though Ethel wanted things, and demanded them smartly enough with her sinewy body, they weren’t peculiar needs like May Armitage’s. Nor did they catch at some half-buried need in Billy himself. He lifted his rump from the hot seat and unpeeled his sticky trouser-bottoms. In the deepening boredom of the service his thoughts now changed direction as abruptly as a horse’s swinging head: his mind galloped everywhere. He dropped Ethel and shouted himself a tall glass of beer, he swung from a rope and splashed in the Lachlan, he scrutinized May Armitage’s damaged body under the sheets and studied her swollen lips as they crackled madly with an electric phrase: “Kiss me.”
Because the church encased these thoughts in its stone frame the idea of being trapped in his body came back, and he crossed and uncrossed his legs in frustration.
The cattle and sheep are finding the festive season a little dry, said Mr Fox, so we must pray for fresh growth. The hot weather — and he unfurled a white handkerchief from the arm of his cassock and dabbed his forehead — is a burden to us all. Mrs Fox left the organ and took her seat in the front row. Her husband retreated from the prow of the pulpit and polished his spectacles on the sleeve of his gown.
He referred to notes.
The women, like a field of straw-winged butterflies, fanned their glowing throats rapidly. The men braced their shoulders as if for duty.
He spoke the text: “When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”
Christmas, purred Mr Fox, is indeed a time of great rejoicing. Today we have sung carols and heard the Christmas story from the word of God Himself. Yet the festival would be without meaning if we failed to look beyond it. The annunciation and the birth, the bearing of gifts to the child, all these are wonderful in themselves, but their full importance lies in the future. Those coming events in the life of Christ, those bursts of light as he grows and the falling shadows on the road to Golgotha — these are the things that complete the meaning of Christmas. Look at Christ the Child in the old paintings. He is beckoning us with his raised hand to look at the life ahead.
Billy sank as Mr Fox spoke, sliding to a position where only his legs locked on the rung of the pew in front prevented his slipping off altogether. And at the same time Walter was raised up.
Pews creaked, and Mr Fox beckoned on behalf of a distant truth.
But suddenly he turned strange and difficult to follow. His spectacles reflected the frosted glare of a window as he steadied his head, and the effect of a brief, isolating blindness caused Walter to lose track, and then to feel mistrustful. The minister paused and lifted his chin as though listening to an instructing, inhuman voice from elsewhere. It was the same manner he adopted sometimes away from the church when you could tell he wasn’t listening at all. Yet here he was asking the congregation to follow him who was following Christ. What if he was just — mad! His tense mouth pursed like a fish’s … Mrs Fox half-rose from her seat as her husband manipulated his jaw, loosening a streak of foam-coloured light at one wet corner.
We do not store our grain without preparing for the next season — he leaned from the pulpit — we do not, we shall not sit down at our full tables on Wednesday unmindful of the tasks of the morrow. Therefore he proposed to look forward to a time of tribulation when God was inwardly to be called upon and ble
ssed.
But for most this was Christmas, or near enough — no time to wrestle with the troubles of the future. Wednesday loomed, as far forward as anyone wished to look. Mr Fox pleaded with God from his lonely height while dozens of dinners sat ready in hot kitchens. Heads drooped, the old and careless dozed, the busy fans creaked right and left.
And now, well beloved father — he quoted from somewhere — what shall I say? I am taken among anguishes. Save me in this hour. Please it thee, Lord to deliver me, for I am poor and what shall I do and whither shall I go without thee.
A wasp’s nest high on a lamp chain held Walter’s attention for a minute, and the creeping heat that advanced from outside cradled him. Then he heard Mr Fox talking a kind of sense — and he understood. For as we are taken, said the minister, and destroyed, so we shall glimpse the destination.
Walter clenched one hand in the other and bent his head as if in prayer.
Mr Fox returned tø the Christmas scene but it sounded merely everyday. He rattled through its moral as if the thing he really believed in was lightning, and it had cracked once to show a black torrent and glistening rocks and bobbing white faces: and that was that. He seemed to have discovered something for himself in the sermon, and now he could feel it slipping away. But he squared up to his obligations and presented a sensible gift to a parish that had more than once addressed veiled queries about his capacity to the moderator. He called the nativity a light, the star over all our dark nights no matter how gloomy. This is what Christmas means when we recall it in our worst hours, as we should — as, if we are to find the Lord, we must. For He is the Shelter in the storm, the Lamp in the depth of night, the Beacon on the dangerous shore.
There was more of this, but the Christ part meant nothing to Walter — though heads nodded wisely and booted feet scraped on the gritty boards in agreement. He watched a line of dust motes climbing to the bare window pane — pollen-coloured swirling atoms held to the shape of a plank. Again through the glass he saw the dense cross-hatching of pine needles, and suddenly the tree moved. The needles shook as if a current of air were striking the tree continuously in one place. Wind? But wind moved around, wind went everywhere: then a glimmer of white appeared among the green. It grasped a small branch and pulled it aside. Douggie’s face peered down, a white disc that had floated up from Bible class and was now suspended bodiless in the branches. Then the face and hand just as suddenly disappeared, and the tree was still.
All this time Billy had been asleep. As the congregation made its finishing up noises a dream flew from him in which his mother — to be buried in the small graveyard outside — thanked him for his concern and said, “God will speak to me in his sauce bottle.”
He woke infuriated.
Mr Fox removed his glasses and slipped them away through a rent in his cassock.
“Therefore, Rejoice!”
The word travelled slowly this time and padded on the hot underside of the roof.
After a pause he uttered a low whispered “Amen”.
The organ in the corner gasped with relief.
After the service Walter posed with one foot propped on a pine root.
“I saw you up the tree.”
“What tree?” Douggie adopted the “at ease” position of a well-behaved Great Public Schoolboy.
“This tree.”
“I didn’t climb a tree.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did, you little liar.”
“Don’t call me a bloody liar.”
“You’re a liar. And don’t swear.”
“Bloody. I’m not a liar.”
“Who’s a liar?” asked Billy. He approached Douggie from behind. “You’ve got pine needles stuck in your hair.”
“Dunno how I got those.”
“You’ll be at the Bindogundra hop, won’t you? Aunty Bea and Uncle Len will be there” — he lowered his voice to exclude Douggie — “but a short leash never worried Ethel.”
Walter glanced at Ethel who was perched on a shaded ledge of the tankstand: she fluttered a hand, made to get down, but was intercepted by Duncan Grieve who blocked her with a massive palm resting on the tank’s rust-streaked corrugations.
“He treats her with respect,” observed Billy, sneezing and flinging a string of snot to the grass — the rest was carried into his pocket. “Nothing turns off a good sport quicker.”
All this talk about Ethel made it hard to bring up the name of May Armitage. Walter opened his mouth to ask but Billy elbowed him — “Just watch her.”
Though Ethel rolled her eyes at Walter and had butted his hip at the show, and, he supposed, would do with him all those things Billy promised she would, still he felt she disliked him. But he said: “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“He’s already got a girl,” intruded Douggie.
“Oh yeah?”
“Scamper!” Walter raised an arm to threaten his brother who sauntered off, but called back, “The girl on the train,” then ran.
“Who?”
“No-one.”
“Go on,” Billy taunted. “Just the kid talking, eh? Or did you make it up to impress him?” He searched for his cigarette papers and finished off a laugh by hawking drily — nothing came out. “The harvest always gets me like this.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and stuck a dampened corner of cigarette paper to his lower lip, letting it dangle while he rubbed a leathery strip of tobacco until it expanded into a ball.
“Well?” he mumbled.
Until he spoke Walter had no idea what might come out. He intended denying everything.
“Ar,” he confessed, “Douggie meant the Reilly girl. We bumped into her at the station the other night. You know what kids are like.”
Billy rolled his cigarette with great care. “I should have guessed you’d like that one.” After he’d licked the glued edge, which was when most people looked up, his eyes remained hidden.
“It was only hello.”
“Who knows who she’d go for, eh? But you’d be near enough her type for starters.” Billy struck a match which popped and hissed. With the cigarette wedged in his mouth he now looked Walter in the eye: “The educated type,” he enunciated. The cigarette waved around as he spoke, and the corners of his mouth gave a twitch that converted to a smile. “She’d always be looking for what she could say about a bloke to her friends, don’t you think?”
Billy had spent a lot of time thinking about her.
Walter lied again, to throw him off the trail:
“She mentioned blokes in Sydney.”
“She knows her onions, that one does.”
“I got the impression she had some bloke down there she was especially sweet on.”
“All the same, you’d do all right with her,” Billy persisted — though he was suddenly tired of putting things on a plate for Walter and then having him hold off. He decided he’d like to punch him instead — and hard — so he laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You couldn’t guess.” Billy looked around for his father, and it was easy for Walter to see everything: all the old resentment from years ago. “We’re off to sit with Mum. See you at Blacky’s.”
“Merry Christmas” Walter called.
“It’d better be.”
7
Harvest
To avoid a three hour ride before dawn on Boxing Day they spent the night at the Reids. Billy had ridden across from Bindogundra and when Walter got there was lying on his stomach on a camp bed on the veranda with his boots off and a wet towel draped over his head for the heat. His hands dangled from the end of the bed holding something — a stone — swaying it in blunt arcs which now and then scraped the floor.
After freeing Peapod and lugging the saddle to the veranda Walter asked for a look.
The stone was grey and slightly carrot-shaped. Billy rolled it between his palms, examined it as if for the first time, tapped its thick middle, then handed it across. “An
Abo thing I found by the creek.”
Walter rotated the stone and followed a vein of lighter colouring which petered out towards one end. Then, wetting it with spit, he noticed dozens of faint marks tilted this way and that, numerous small deliberate scratches.
“What about these marks?”
“Yeah, Abo writing.”
When Walter had finished Billy held the stone tight in his hand and thought about his mother, who was now unconscious, and had kissed them both that afternoon with great weariness: it had been goodbye, he was certain. Yet she had managed to say: “Go to the Reids’”, and his father had nodded, holding her yellow hand.
Blacky and Ned were still asleep on the veranda on the other side of the house when Mrs Pepper, who was to cook for the harvest, arrived at dusk with her husband. They unloaded boxes of food from their dray and a pot of stew ready for that night. Then Mrs Pepper set about gathering up the empty beer bottles from the dining room and the drained rum bottles from beside the beds where the Reids and their departed cronies had let them fall after their Christmas dinner. Old Pepper leaned on a veranda post until his wife brought out a pot of tea, then he sat on Walter’s bed. “Queer,” he said, examining the stone by lamplight. Mr Pepper blamed the Aborigine for not being a military fighter like the Maori. “Of course, they’re a blacker race here,” he explained, returning the stone to Billy. “And the professors at the university — you’d know all about this, Wally — they definitely put ’em low in the scale of black races.”
No-one spoke up for the departed blacks, but Billy gripped the mysterious stone and mourned his mother angrily, for nothing in his world was able to offer the kind of consolation he demanded.
Blacky was up at four thirty to feed the horses. Walter woke to hear the lick and munch of a massive mouth and peered into the gloom to see the head of Flower, who had followed Blacky on his return to the house, elongated by her nose bag to the snout of something prehistoric.
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