Cape Grimm
Page 8
I yearn to chronicle the beliefs of my people—with the loss of the people, disappear the truths we have lived by, truths for which my people died at Skye, fled into a vast eternity. I mourn for the family I have lost, and yet I must rejoice that they have passed before me to their ecstasy beyond the stars. I shed tears—for the dear people so bitterly lost, the sweet laughing faces, the children, and for the fruits of our labours—the toys we made, the books and the painted signs. I confess now that I had a great love for all the dolls I made for trade, those astonishing little personalities figured from simple cloth, so desired, I believe, desired by children all over Australia. The Skye Dolls are on many Christmas trees—well, they used to be. At least there are still thousands of them in homes far and wide, but the new ones, the recent ones have all been reduced to the soft black misery of ash. The tears of a great rainbow well of sadness come to my eyes when I think of the dolls, and I weep for those dolls of cinder and sorrow. Once upon a time, Caleb told me, when there was war, ships carrying dolls were granted immunity on the high seas. Caleb told me, Caleb told me—always my thoughts return to Caleb, my love, my darling, my self. Caleb.
And with those dolls and everything else have gone the paintings. Oh, the paintings. In the 1930s there was an incredible woman called Sweet Dahlia Mean who recorded the history of Skye in a series of a hundred primitive paintings that resembled in some ways the work of Grandma Moses, although some of the subject matter is not really very pretty. These pictures decorated the walls of the Meeting House, and sometimes as I explore my memory I see them, one by one, bursting into wings of flame and flying off to heaven—one by one as the souls of the dying people leave the earth. So far as I know there is not a single piece of Sweet Dahlia’s work in existence anywhere in the world. Hence they must live in my head alone. Ah, but they must also be located in Caleb’s head, yes? Most of the faces in those pictures used to remind me of owls—fat, thin and squinting owls.
There was the picture of the shipwreck with the monster coming up to swallow the boat whole, with Niña flying through the air in her white cotton gown, and Puddingstone Island where Minerva met Magnus and the story really started. Beneath the ocean a terrifying picture of drowned green people through whose eyesockets swim fantastic coloured fish. There’s the rescue and then there’s the sweet sad little wedding of Minerva and Magnus at the Presbyterian Church at Circular Head. A picture of the family outside their first bark house at remote, remote and windy Skye. Magnus and Minerva and seven children and a horse and two dogs and a garden full of vegetables and hope. Then the building of the Meeting House, the coming of the next family and the next, seeking a kind of sanctuary from the towns and the forests and the mines, seeking Magnus the Father and Minerva the Mother, and the structure of a good new religious way, apart from the prejudice and pomposities of the official faiths of the time. Then the building of the Temple of the Winds, and the joyful processions of little figures making their way out there to celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Imagination. Minerva and Magnus and Niña visit the local landed gentry in their funny little rose garden at Highfield. Down the generations the faces never change, and even the clothing scarcely alters. The children of all ages sit in the painted schoolroom, the self-same schoolroom where I sat. The blacksmith and the doll-maker and the market gardener are in their shops. The apothecary stands beside his big stone jars. The most beautiful pictures are those showing the people working in the poppy fields. These I love. The little figures are almost swallowed up in the dreaming dusty-green and silver-coral seas of leaves and petals in the meadows out past the Temple of the Winds, out where no outsider ever goes, where no outsider ever imagines going, out where Caleb took me on the first walk we ever went on when I was five years old, deep into the waving stems of the poppies in the fields. They are gone, all gone, the pictures of paradise on earth, all gone. Goodbye, goodbye sweet Sweet Dahlia Mean, goodbye to your pictures and your thoughts.
Caleb is gone now, I think he is gone from me forever and forever. He has not died. He could be dead, but he must not be so. He is forever and ever amen behind the bars of the psychiatric facility, on the Black River in the heart of the deep dark forest. For he is judged to be insane and murderous by the standards of the society that rules the land. There was Skye—for so many years in peace behind its own sweet walls of simple innocence—but all has come to a strange and terrible end, leaving the brethren in paradise and leaving us—me and Golden and Caleb—in a new blur of outer darkness, a world of fracture and mystery. I must live in this cold world without Caleb by my side. I have with me his daughter Golden, who is a sacred trust for me, a gift, a temple. She is our own miracle, the fruit of our passion, the holy promise of the future. I fear for what the world might do to her, a child, for she is innocent, and yet she is the child of such a father. She is the ‘mass-murderer’s daughter’—I must write those words even if they strike the deepest wound into my heart. If people were to recognise Golden, I believe she could be stoned to death for what her father has done. Caleb’s blood in Golden’s veins—there is a fearful potency. Like father, like daughter people would say, would whisper, would imagine in their dark hearts, in their misunderstandings and their understandings, in their thirst to punish. From fear of what they might do, I have told nobody that Golden’s birthdate was one of the signs Caleb consulted when calculating the auspicious time for the final apocalyptic fire. He calculated by the date of his own thirty-third anniversary, which was also the date of Golden’s blessed birthday. It is strange that the date also marks the anniversary of the day when Magnus and Minerva Mean arrived in safety on Puddingstone Island in 1851. Golden was Caleb’s favourite child, and so he chose his birthdate and hers. What guiding fate had given her this date for entering the world? Golden is the child who wears the sacred family bracelet, fashioned from the blackened sinews of a wallaby and bearing the tiny arm of an ancient china doll.
I may not visit Caleb, and his own child may not visit him. He is forbidden to write letters to me and I to him; so I do not write to him, save for what I might say here in my journal, for they must never know what passes between us. We will communicate by the power of thought alone, as we have always done. Perhaps this is what is called telepathy, people may call it what they wish to call it, we have always been joined by unseen waves of thought. As a child Caleb used to have the gift of bi-location. If he still has that power, he may even yet be able to visit me here, and nobody will know. Perhaps he still has that power. I do not know, and I would not say. To the world I am the silent one and mine is a secret chronicle.
They stared in stupid horror and amazement when they learnt my age was seventeen. I must seem much older by the standards of the world outside Skye. I have studied many of the classics, and have studied also the great philosophers and the composers and the artists. We followed a very strict regime of study and, although still young, we were expected to be adult and responsible, to be sensitive to the smallest details of the natural world, and also to groom our own imaginations. We had lessons called ‘Listening and Looking’. Our parents and other teachers would take us out into the garden, or into the bush, or to the beach, or onto a far and lonely hillside. They told us to close our eyes and to remain very very still. Listen, they would say, Listen to the music of the world and the heavens. Then each of us would tell what we could hear—the rustle of the wind in the leaves, the lapping of the lake, the cry of a gull, the whirr of an insect, hum of a bee, murmur of an unknown song. The beating of each heart. A footfall. The drop of a pebble. The pounding of waves. Then we had Looking. The feathered scribbling on leaves, the shades of blue in the turning heavens, the movement of an ant in the dust, the radiating edges of the pages on the underside of a mushroom. We spoke of these things, then we wrote of them. We studied the works of many scientists and poets and other writers. One of Caleb’s favourite writers and thinkers was always Maurice Maeterlinck. We read his work on bees and ants and flowers, and we performed scenes from The Blue Bird and ot
her plays. Caleb sometimes said he had conversations with Maeterlinck, who died ten years before Caleb was even born.
Because I am only young they have treated me gently, have let me be. It was clear to them that I had been Caleb’s innocent slave, and I believe that being so young, living through so much, perhaps I frightened them. Young mothers were not unusual in Skye, were, in fact, quite common and accepted, even expected, but out here in the world such things are considered wrong and dangerous. Golden is quiet; she knows only what a child knows; they will not breech her understanding. Yet I know that Golden will be a subject of interest to the doctors and the criminologists all her life, and to the media no doubt. She must be insulated from all this if possible. The child is the child of Caleb Mean, the man they see only as the man who drugged the villagers of Skye and burnt them to death in their Meeting Hall. They probably imagine that if they wait long enough, watch and listen hard enough to Golden, daughter of Caleb, she will tell them some of the things they think they want to hear, will furnish an explanation for what has happened. They will never understand. Understanding was obliterated in the conflagration, purified in the light, in the flame, and it is gone.
All of this society says Caleb is insane, dangerously, criminally insane. I know that he was sent by God to save the world, but in some strange way he was defeated. He is locked away forever in the white and windowless fortress up on the Black River. Folks call that place the Crystal Palace. If I did not know it was a prison I would imagine it to be a fabled fastness, some sparkling sugared Alcazar surrounded by a force field of armed guards and dogs and the magic crystal eyes of electronic surveillance, the Magical, Impenetrable, Impermeable, Impregnable fortress. Castle Magical, home of the sleeping-beauty-prince, My Prince.
I love him. I have always loved him. He taught me how to read the stars, taught me how to play the dulcimer. I would play the strings, and he would play the ancient pipes of Scotland that have been in the family, a family that sets great store by its history, for so many generations. Together he said our melodies were light to illumine the endless night. I will love him forevermore, love him as he taught me to love the deep pink roses which have grown for generations in the front garden of the first house ever built by Magnus Mean. I will write my poems and songs for him, for he whom I will never again hope to see upon this earth.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Water
‘If I die in the sea, don’t leave me here alone.’
CHILD REFUGEE, SIEV-X, October 2001
Caleb’s grandmother, Minnie Mean, was born in 1900 in Skye. She was the one who saw the vision of the multicoloured butterflies streaming from the white umbrella of God. Minnie was named after her great-great-grandmother Minerva who sailed from Liverpool in 1851 and was shipwrecked in a storm in Bass Strait, and ended up on the rocky beach of Puddingstone Island off the northwest coast of Van Diemen’s Land. Puddingstone Island was named by Henry Hellyer who was an explorer in Van Diemen’s Land during the early part of the nineteenth century. The pages of the early histories of the Great South Land are seeded with the lives of men who set out into a most strange unknown, who sometimes died, who sometimes discovered wonderful things, who certainly graced all they saw with names. Puddingstone Island. Much of the island is made up of rock which consists of large round red pebbles, black pebbles and white pebbles, cemented together with hard white clay. The cliffs are covered with succulent edible pig-face, and there are small stands of dense tea-tree, dark and twisted, which is a great survivor in the weathers here in the middle of the ocean.
The original Minerva for whom Caleb’s grandmother was named was miraculously saved from death by drowning when her ship went down long, long ago. In this family, signs, wonders, visions, miracles are, if not commonplace, then not entirely unexpected.
The site of this miracle was Bass Strait, where there have been many, many shipwrecks, and anybody who wants to read about some of the others can go to www.oceans.com.au
A gale took the barque Iris to the bottom of the Strait in 1851. As the ship, having sailed from London docks, entered the Strait, the world was in a mood of darkness, as if a cloud had descended out of nowhere, and a furious tempest arose and blew for almost an hour, after which the wind dramatically fell, and in the sudden calm the sea itself arose as if sucked towards the heavens by a gigantic and ravenous mouth, great black-purple bruise of a maw that gulped all in its path. Mountains of inky water rose and clashed against each other in whirlpools of furious foam, high, high above the ship, enclosing the vessel in a vortex of steely turbulence. Waves, sheets of swarthy icy glass, rose on all sides, lit by ghastly flashes of lightning that filled the scene with a horrible, brilliant, deathly glow, a sudden hallucination. The ship was thrashed and battered and broken by torrents of bitter rain and then by cloudbursts of giant hail, until it rose up, a mere wooden toy at the mercy of the play of the waves, twirled, it seemed, in the air, and pitched over as if fashioned from biscuit dough and filled with a breath of air. Human screams were raised in a hellish harmony that was part of the symphony of the storm, and the cries ripped through the air in a choking cacophony. Then silent frozen people tried to hold their breath as fantastic towers of water rose and crashed and fell in boiling foam. The howls of the dogs, the majestic terror of the horses as all were overwhelmed and sucked into the boiling, freezing ocean. The captain’s pig went flying through the space between this world and the next, crying a terrible unearthly cry that was sucked into the clangour of human and animal and angel cries as all reeled and roiled around the rumpus surface of the sea.
Then something happens. The quality of the terror changes and an unearthly grumble, a grotesque and slimy murmur has been set in motion far beneath the waters of the Strait.
Through the blackness of the turbulent frothing waters come the whipping and thrashing of the tentacles of a most astonishing blubbery rubbery puff of sea monster. The creature’s arctic eyes the largest eyes in the world, its beak stronger than steel, and the bodies of women and men and children are lashed in the deep pink passionate and succulent embrace of its tree-trunk spiral arms. The Iris is a broken coffin, spilling its corpses into the abyss, to be swallowed in an instant, in a flash, into the waters of the Strait, some gathered up in a fierce ecstasy by the monster’s raging bliss.
The storm awoke the Kraken and he came to exact his toll. Seen yet unseen the giant grey squid looped up out of the ocean, swept up its prey, and torpedoed down again into the cold cold Stygian darkness of the deep. To sleep again. To dream. To wait and wonder.
The storm abated as quickly as it had arisen. Sixty-two crew, forty-five passengers, nearly all were lost, and yet three passengers survived, squeezed out by some miracle, some freak, between the crushing arms of the great animal that had come from the bottom of the sea. These three were flotsam from the ship, the ship that had so suddenly gone, taking every twist of rope, every ragged patch of sail, every black cigar box, every beating heart but three.
These three survivors were Minerva Hinshelwood, Magnus Mean and an orphaned baby girl whose history was unknown. She could have been any one of four baby girls on the Iris. Who will ever know which one? Her unknown history gave her a fairytale quality later on in the family, and it was a quality that became exaggerated, embroidered upon, as the decades passed. If you don’t know who you are, you can imagine anything. If you don’t know where your great-great-great-aunt came from, she might be a Russian princess or the child of Irish fairy-folk. But I am getting ahead of myself. The baby is still just a piece of flotsam in Bass Strait.
Minerva Carrillo Hinshelwood was born in Peru in 1830. She was the only girl in a family of six boys, four of whom went to sea—captains of ships or just plain sailors taking life as it comes. One brother was a lawyer who became an explorer. The other one was a priest, and he died young. Minerva, the only girl, had an English governess, and she listened as if to strange legends when Miss Monkhouse spoke of high tea at the village hall, of boating on the river Thames, and o
f glimpses (hushed and joyful tones) caught of Queen Victoria herself. When Minerva was only seventeen she set sail for England where she became for a time a singer and dancer, an exotic South American beauty in dark-pink silk with emeralds in her hair. Her parents had died, her brothers were wanderers, and she never saw or even wrote to any members of her family again. Her life became like part of the romance she sensed in the stories Miss Monkhouse had told her in her soft English voice.
Magnus Mean was born in Minginish on the Isle of Skye in 1829. During the famine of 1841 the family, a family of weavers, moved to Glasgow from where Magnus eventually made his way to London, and then sailed alone to Van Diemen’s Land, his plan to become a farmer with sheep and property of his own. He spoke English as well as Gaelic, and some members of this family of crofters were educated enough to read the Bible and the newspapers. As a boy Magnus loved to read. A memory that often rose to the surface of Magnus’s mind was of the Sunday afternoons when his sisters read aloud from the Psalms in English. The edges of the pages were rosy pink and gilt, and Magnus derived a sweet pleasure from the way they moved and shone, from the whisper of the pages, shush-shush, from the murmur of the women’s voices as they softly spoke the verses. ‘From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed.’ On the table of his memory there was a white cloth and a cake with red jam, and steaming hot tea in a dented silver pot, one of the few family treasures. And always in his nostrils was the aroma of the weaving hall, the softness of the raw wool, the sound of the spinning wheel, the dark scrape and clunk of the loom, the slow magic of the pattern as it began to form in the cloth.