‘Could you sober up enough to take the launch in tonight?’ Way wondered.
‘I reckon.’
Gunn said suddenly: ‘He’s going to die. That old man’s going to die. We make me sick.’ They looked at each other in the hot little room with faces blank as stone.
Coming down the hillside, seeing, instead of rock, spreading grasslands patched here and there with blue pools and with gum trees, cadjiputs, and lonely baobabs, Heriot sighed and felt peace rise like a wind from the plain. The horses struggled down the slope, but at the bottom was a clump of pandanus, and a shock of cool air heavy with the smell of damp grass, so that they revived, nervously, and remembered that there were other things in the world beyond stones and heat.
‘That pool,’ said Heriot, ‘that waterhole, that looks fine, that looks like a pool to bring a man back to life.’
‘Yes,’ Justin said.
They made towards it, the sun in their eyes, hanging low over the flat-peaked blue hills to the far west with their high diadems of rock. ‘We have far to go,’ Heriot said. ‘But here’s a pretty place for bed and a bath.’
‘You stop here,’ Justin said, pulling up and slipping out of the saddle. ‘I going to get duck.’ He made off towards the pool, bent low, looking apelike with the rifle hanging from one long arm.
Heriot sang to himself peacefully. Presently there was a shot, and a clatter of wings as cloud upon cloud of ducks rose in relays from the water and streamed overhead with a high ethereal whistling, as if some stringed instrument had been hurled with great force through the air. Heriot waited, knowing their habit, until the flock turned, far away across the plain, and came whistling back over the pool and wheeled again, and finally, with a volley of splashes, descended on the water. Then there was briefly silence, before the second shot came and the birds took to air again, whisding and wheeling distressfully over the grassland. From the pool Justin shouted.
When Heriot came to the water’s edge, leading Justin’s horse, the brown man was wading out of the water, and stood proud and naked among the lilies holding in each hand a limp duck. The low sunlight glowed through lily petals as if through quartz, and Justin stood in a circle of ripples ridged with light.
‘Hawk-eyed hunter,’ Heriot said courteously. ‘That, with a rifle, is clever.’
‘You get off and sit down,’ Justin said. ‘You looking real tired.’
But Heriot sat still in his saddle, watching the sun with red-veined eyes. His wild hair glowed with light at the edges, there were lights also in the white stubble on his face.
His back ached, he ached all over from riding. He closed his eyes.
‘Old man—’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you go to sleep, sitting up there.’
‘I’m not sleepy,’ Heriot said. ‘I’m in love. Never say good-bye. This earth seduces me.’
‘Get down, old man.’
‘I grudge stopping. I’m thirsty for horizons.’
‘Look ’im, eh,’ Justin said, with a deep eruption of laughter. ‘Real sleepy now, like little kid.’
‘Are you afraid, Justin?’
‘Me? No, I not afraid.’
‘Come on with me. There’s nothing in the past, there’s nobody behind us or ahead. Doomsday will find us.’
‘I coming with you,’ Justin promised. He threw his ducks in the grass, reached for Albert Creek’s bridle and led him away towards the single baobab that stood guard over the waterhole. ‘You get down here,’ he said, grinning privately, shining dark and wet in the late sun. ‘You go to sleep.’
Heriot turned from the assisting arms and sank down beside the swollen tree trunk. The cool scents of damp grass and reeds and water washed over him, drowned him, he fell asleep.
‘And remember Sophy,’ Way prayed in the crowded church, ‘in the leprosarium at Derby, and Molly and Maurice in hospital at Darwin, and Rex, here, in our own hospital. And remember especially Brother Heriot and Justin, and all others in sickness or distress of mind or body. May God in His mercy guard them, watch over them in all adversity, and bring them at the end to everlasting life.’
In the still church the amen came loud and firm. They love him, Helen thought, now, when he is in trouble. Now they can give the white man what they need most to give but are never allowed, their kindness and their pity. And now I love them, too, they are good people.
On the heels of the organ they swung into singing, and she, singing with them, found in their voices a depth and a sincerity that she had never noticed before, so that she was taken by surprise and felt a stiffness of tears in her throat. The hymn welled up and broke out over the grass half-walls to the hot night and the earth lying dead as the moon under a still sky:
‘Guide me, O Thou great Redeemer,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but Thou art mighty,
Hold me with Thy powerful hand;
Bread of Heaven,
Bread of Heaven,
Feed me now and evermore,
Feed me now and evermore.’
At first the boat sat, white with moonlight, on mud. Then the tide began to creep in, circling through mud channels, until it reached the soft island in mid-stream and the boat listed and floated and rose on the brown water. On the mud-bank below the cliff the mangroves stood deep in the currents of the twice-a-day river.
Afterwards, a dinghy put out from the shadow of a baobab on the near bank and one of the dark figures in it boarded the boat. The lights went on, and out again, the engine roared. Presently the boat moved up the water, and turning came gradually in to the landing-stage and to silence.
Way, standing in the shadow of the baobab, pulled an envelope from his pocket and said: ‘Don’t let me forget this, Terry. It’s the report you have to make to the police.’
‘Let’s have a look at it,’ Dixon said, taking it out and reading it over in the light of Way’s torch. ‘“Miss Bond, the nurse,”’ he mumbled, ‘“confirms that Mr Heriot had been in a depressed state of mind for some time, a fact which had been obvious to many of us. We therefore think there is good reason to fear that his motive in disappearing may have been to inflict injury on himself.” I couldn’t say that to Bill Williams,’ he protested. ‘He’d bust himself laughing.’
‘Well, put it in your own words and then give them the statement.’
The men were standing waiting on the lighted boat. ‘Time we pushed off,’ Dixon said. ‘See you, padre.’ He stuffed the envelope into his shirt pocket and went on board.
The boat drifted out from the landing-stage into mid-river. Then the lights went out, the engine roared, the light of Way’s torch under the trees receded and disappeared. They travelled for three hours among mud-banks thicketed with mangroves, past cliffs rising sheer out of the water and rocky hills softened a little by trees. At the mouth of the river they anchored for the turning of the tide, and there the slack water mirrored the Southern Cross, and the sudden flash of a torch picked out red eyes of crocodiles among the mangroves. After sleeping briefly they took to the sea, and came in the early morning in sight of the little township cowering under its mountains, where the hawks wheeled and watched forever over their high, vertical country.
6
Heriot woke to the harsh outcry of crows, it was a crow his eyes saw first as they opened unwillingly on the light of day. A shining bird, it clung in the tree close above his head and broadcast its discovery to the air. Presently two more crows came planing in to join it and to perch and peer sidelong at the prone man.
‘You think I’m dead,’ he said. ‘Damn your impudence. I’m a strong man yet.’ He got to his feet energetically and waved his blanket at them, so that they flew, protesting.
Justin was in his usual post at the fire, smoke rising blue and clear into the sky. ‘I’ll never starve,’ Heriot said, coming up behind him, ‘while I have you.’
The brown man looked round with a grin. ‘I thinking we better keep that tin food. Not much there, old ma
n. You like duck?’
‘Jau, ngaia nambal.’ He took the little cooked wing Justin handed to him and chewed it.
‘Good, eh?’
‘Manambara.’
‘Why you talking language now, old man? Angundja-gu jei gram?’
‘Gadea gabu,’ Heriot said, ‘ngaia bendjin, nawuru morong nangga. No more white man. I’m a blackfellow, son of the sun.’
Justin laughed, slow and shy, looking up glowingly from under his jutting forehead. There was grey in his hair, Heriot saw, and it showed in the incipient beard, but his smile was young. ‘Maoba,’ he said, ‘old man, bendjin don’t always say gadea for white man.’
‘No?’
‘Most of the people, they say djuari or they say bungama, because you all white like devil-devil or ghost.’
‘Bungama ngarang,’ said Heriot contentedly. ‘I am a ghost.’
‘Which way we going today?’
‘Gala. That way. West. To track the sun.’
‘Gare,’ Justin said, ‘okay. Now you have you breakfast.’
When they had packed up and were moving again a troop of hawks came and hovered over their heads and moved with them, hanging so low that Heriot, when he looked up, could see their watching eyes.
‘What are they doing?’ he asked, suddenly frightened and old.
‘They just looking at us. They not cheeky.’
‘Why are they following me?’
‘They follow anyone, old man.’
‘No,’ Heriot said shakily, ‘they’re following me, they’re waiting for me to die.’ He screamed at the hawks: ‘Get away, you filthy vultures, go on! I’m not going to die!’ But they wheeled still.
‘Don’t look at them,’ Justin advised, ‘they go away soon, they got their own countries.’
‘Shoot them,’ Heriot commanded. ‘Where’s the rifle? Give it to me. Why are they watching me?’
‘They all right, old man.’
‘Filthy birds! Look at them,’ Heriot raged, ‘watching me. They’re going to follow us, all the way. Why don’t you shoot them, damn you?’
‘They always around,’ Justin said. But though the birds presently dropped back, others rose and briefly followed as the two men rode on towards the new range; and when, hours later, they stopped to rest and eat by a palm-shadowed spring at the foot of one of the sentinel hills, the hawks were above, circling the peak in restless vigilance.
‘Why is the earth so hungry?’ Heriot protested weakly. ‘Where is God?’
Standing in the tin shade of one of the stores, bored and out of place, Dixon thought longingly of the mission. Here, in this little shanty township, he was a foreigner. He felt an urge to call out after people he had known in his unregenerate days: ‘Hey, look, I’m a human, I don’t go round preaching and Bible-bashing, I’m still an ordinary bloke.’ But it would have been useless. His acquaintances knew that something strange had happened to Terry Dixon, and if you got too close to him he might start talking about it, and that would be intolerable. So there was unease in their manner when they spoke to him, and no conversation lasted very long.
In the shade of the same store a young English couple were forlornly waiting. Came off the boat, Dixon thought, most likely flew to Darwin and now they’re going down the coast, seeing the sights. Good luck to them. The man, looking around him with tired disbelief, said gloomily: ‘God, this place doesn’t really exist. It’s an hallucination of the underprivileged.’
Dixon wandered away and turned at the end of the street towards the foreshore where the brown sea lapped at the brown mud. The sea and the hills hemmed in the town, it could never be more than one street wide. The boat rode at anchor on the water, and he could see one of the boys asleep on the deck, but there was no sign of the others. But he guessed where they would be, and strolled on towards the citadel of empty petrol drums on the shore, and through its passages, walled higher than his head, until a whispered: ‘Djuari brambun!’ stopped him. White man, devil-devil coming.
They were sitting in a kind of room inside their labyrinth, and seeing a few scattered cards he knew that they had been playing their own peculiar form of poker with a few natives from the town. The cowboy hat that he remembered seeing on Arthur’s head, during the trip in, now sat on a stranger, but Matthew had acquired a girl’s scarf and had it knotted round his throat. Around them lay broken and empty beer bottles, relics of ancient parties. But they had not been drinking, they swore it with their defiantly innocent eyes as they watched him.
‘When we go, brother?’ Matthew asked eventually.
‘Tonight’s tide. That’s what I came to tell you. Should be about ten past eleven if I’ve worked it out right.’
Arthur gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘I happy now, brother. This country make me sick.’
Wish it made you sicker, Dixon thought. Wish it made you sick enough to stay on the boat and leave these town blokes alone. Lines from a song that Gunn sang with the children round the piano came back to him.
Tell Bill, when he leaves home,
To let them down-town coons alone.
This morning. This evening. So soon.
‘This isn’t our country,’ he said. ‘The mission’s our country.’
‘I feeling homesick,’ Matthew complained, ‘away from my country.’
Dixon grinned. He liked them, he would have preferred to stay with them, but he was more than ever foreign to them, and unwanted, here. He was foreign everywhere, and disliked it, being a friendly man and anxious to be in no way different from the rest of the human race. At such times he recognized, without congratulating or pitying himself, the extent of his sacrifice. But there was no help for it, he could only go and fix up about a few stores, then drift into the hotel and sit about somewhere waiting for the tide. It’s a dog’s life, he thought. I feel homesick for Matthew’s country, too.
Waiting in the still room, oddly nervous: ‘You don’t remember anything?’ Helen asked softly. ‘Nothing at all?’
Below the white bandages Rex’s eyes were very bright and very lost. ‘I don’t remember nothing, sister. What happen to me?’
‘Wait, Rex, tell me—what was the last thing you remember?’
‘I were walking in all that dust. It real windy then. Getting dark, too...’
‘And then?’
‘Nothing,’ Rex said, his voice blank as his face. ‘Just getting dark.’
She remembered a day in her childhood when she had gone out with a farmhand and met with an accident. It had been clear daylight when they left the house, but as they crossed the paddock darkness began to fall. It was twilight when they reached the gate, and when they passed through it, night. Later in the day she had fallen from a tree and been carried home unconscious, but though they told her afterwards all that had happened she could never remember more than that, the dimness through which she perceived the gate, and the entry into nothing. Now, since it seemed likely that Rex also had lost irrecoverably this small part of his life, she began to see why Dixon and Gunn had so vehemently cried down her proposal to tell him the truth, and was afraid they were right in calling her reckless and irrational. Yet she clung to the conviction that there could be no healing of the wounds inflicted by Heriot unless Rex knew and forgave.
Her fingers were restless, making pleats in her skirt and smoothing them away. ‘You don’t remember seeing anyone?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘You don’t remember Brother Heriot?’
‘No, sister. He weren’t there then.’
‘Rex—what do you think of Brother Heriot?’
The thick eyebrows lowered a little and the eyes looked away. ‘He don’t like me, sister.’
‘But if he was in trouble, you’d forgive him, wouldn’t you, and shake hands?’
The man said suddenly and with bitterness: ‘I don’t apologize to no one no more. When you apologize, they just think you beaten then. They just laugh at you. I sick of that.’
‘I don’t mean apologizing, Rex, I mean forgiving. Forgiving someone who has done
wrong to you. Wouldn’t you do that?’
‘Might be, if they was sorry. Brother Heriot, he done wrong to me, but he not sorry. He never sorry, that old man.’
‘Rex, listen. Brother Heriot has disappeared. He’s gone bush somewhere and he might never come back. He may be dead. Don’t you feel sorry for him now?’
After a moment he nodded, but bewilderedly. ‘What for he done that, sister?’
Now, she thought, now I’m going to prove myself really a fool. If I left things here I’d have done quite enough. But to keep him in the dark because he doesn’t remember would be as unfair as to ignore the whole thing because he’s black. And there must be forgiveness, there must be reconciliation, for everyone’s sake. And she said, with extreme care: ‘You may as well know what happened to you that afternoon.’
‘Someone hit me?’ he asked listlessly.
‘Why, you don’t—you don’t remember—do you?’
‘No, sister. But plenty people,’ he said with a faint grin, ‘don’t like me.’
‘Supposing someone had hit you, and you knew—what would you do?’
‘Hit him, sister. Real hard.’
‘I’ll explain to you. You were hit with a stone, and you fell and hurt your head on another stone.’
‘Yes, sister? That was woman, eh?’
‘Oh, can’t you see?’ she demanded impatiently. ‘I’m trying to tell you that we think Brother Heriot threw the stone. And then, when he thought you were dead, he ran away, and Justin followed him.’
The dark eyes stared at her. He was stricken into silence.
‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you anything to say?’
‘I—I don’t know, sister. It real hard for me to believe that.’
‘I know it must be, but—’
‘Justin gone, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Might be Justin try to kill me, and Brother Heriot see him and chase him.’
She had never thought of that possibility, and was suddenly in terror that he might be right, that she had accused Heriot unjustly, that she had done irreparable harm to the mission and to the whole white race. ‘But Justin—’ she said. ‘Justin?’
To the Islands Page 11