Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement learns from hillbilly songs

  Every week-day morning Clement’s mother turns on the wireless to Station 3BT while she is lighting the fire in the stove. Clement always wakes up when the Hillbilly Half-hour begins, then lies in bed listening for a few songs that are the most beautiful music he has ever heard – except for Santa Lucia and the Skye Boat Song. Sometimes many weeks pass without his hearing his favourites, and he has to be content with songs like I’ve Been a Fool Too Long in which a man stands awkward and shivering while the woman whom he tried to please by taking off all his clothes sits laughing in a train about to leave town with all his clothes in her suitcase, A Soldier’s Last Letter in which a man calls his mother his darling before he dies because he has no proper girlfriend, The Blind Girl in which a man’s words are impossible to make out because his face is trapped in the thick cobwebs hanging all around a poor girl’s tumbledown hut, and Don’t Leave the Old Man Boys in which a ragged newsboy takes pity on an old man because the boy once had a father who used to look at himself in the mirror every morning as Augustine Killeaton does and sing as Augustine does You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone so loudly that his wife and son laughed at him and mimicked him until the day when his song suddenly came true. Four songs in each Hillbilly Half-hour are requests from listeners, but few people in Bassett or the country around love the same songs that Clement loves. At last the boy persuades his mother to send in a request program for him. He asks for I Am Thinking Tonight Of My Blue-eyes in which a man whose girlfriend has grown up and gone to live in a country like America stands trying to see the hills that are all he knows of that place, It Makes No Difference Now in which a man who found a wife after years of travelling around country race-meetings arrives home late one Saturday night but discovers no one waiting to hear the story of his horse’s run that day because his wife has fallen in love with the owner of the horse that has beaten his own in a famous race, There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall which always brings tears to Clement’s eyes and in which a man’s horse breaks down in a Cup race and has to be destroyed and a man comes home and puts the horse’s gear away in the empty loose-box, and The Blue Velvet Band in which the same man sells his remaining young horse to pay his fare to America and reaches a certain small town of white-walled houses and yellow-and-silver poplars among a blue haze from the cliff-like hills around only to learn that his darling has died a few weeks before still wondering what he was doing during all those years in the far country that she scarcely remembered. Months pass. Each morning Clement hears the name of someone from a distant street in Bassett whose request program has been chosen from the huge bag of letters that rustle emphatically as the announcer dips into it. Out of the jostling throng come such popular favourites as Old Shep, When the Rain Tumbles Down in July, and The Overlanders, and Clement sees a tedious grey-brown colour spreading across a city that might otherwise have been cut through by a green pathway down which the waiting people would peer for the first sight of unknown outlandish colours and horses with evocative names and histories of promises still not yet realised. But one day someone called Miss Shirley Hazelwood from Honeysuckle Street North Bassett requests a program that ends with the song about the empty stable and the horseshoe nailed above the door. A horse gallops up and down on the one spot inside Clement Killeaton’s skin, trying to find a way out. The boy jumps out of bed and runs to the kitchen to hear his song. His father listens to it for the first time. When it is finished Augustine reminds Clement that it is only an imitation Yank song and that Australian men and horses have done things that would make fools of the soft Americans and their fancy stunted ponies. That evening Augustine urges his son to listen to some genuine Australian entertainment. A Musical Families session has just begun on Station 3BT. A man is singing The Wild Colonial Boy while his son accompanies him on the piano accordion. Augustine makes Clement sit down beside his mother, who is reading the serial in the Australian Journal, and tells him that this is the way a family should enjoy their evenings. When Musical Families ends, a program called You’ve Got To Laugh is relayed from Sydney. The compere Chuck Hoobin calls himself The Boy from the Ozarks. In his native American accent, which Augustine refuses to believe is genuine, Chuck Hoobin invites people from the audience to compete in quizzes on stage. The losers have their faces pressed into apple-pies or their clothes pelted with ripe tomatoes or water poured over them, or they are made to jitterbug on stage. Augustine turns off the wireless not long after this program has begun and begins to add up sums of money in the margin of his newspaper.

  Mr Glasscock ill-treats his family

  Clement is woken by the sound of someone sobbing. It is Saturday morning and the sun is already hot. Clement peers through the curtains and sees Mrs Glasscock sitting on her front veranda sniffling and shuddering. Behind the greasy floral dress that she has been wearing for weeks, her huge slack titties roll wearily and aimlessly against her belly. Her youngest son Nigel stands on the dirt path beside the raised veranda. One arm is around his mother’s neck and his face is close to hers. During the morning Clement plays quietly near the Glasscocks’ fence and learns that Mr Glasscock has locked out of the house all his family except the eldest girl Dorothy, who has to get his meals for him. The other children have gone away to play, although Nigel comes back now and then to sit with his mother in the woodshed where she is spending the day. At lunchtime Dorothy sneaks out with a sandwich and a cup of tea for her mother and some money for Nigel to buy a Boston bun at Wallaces’ shop. A little later Clement catches sight of Mr Glasscock going off to the Clare Castle for the afternoon. Clement’s father too is spending the day in a hotel but the boy knows that Augustine drinks only an occasional lemon squash, that he hates the smell of the drunken crowds in the bar, and that he only goes to the hotel to talk to a few racing men and to hear from the starting-price bookmakers in the dim back lounges the betting fluctuations on the Melbourne races so that he gets the best odds for his bets. In the evening while Clement is buying a family brick of ice-cream in Wallaces’ because his father has had a small win, he hears the grocer saying that Lloyd Glasscock is a disgrace to the neighbourhood and that someone ought to give him in charge. After tea the Killeatons listen through the laundry window to the noises from next door. Mr Glasscock sends his wife and Nigel out to the woodshed for the night. The other children have still not come home. Mr Glasscock tries to belt Dorothy because his tea is not cooked properly. The man who lives on the other side of Glasscocks’ place knocks softly on the Killeatons’ door and asks Augustine to go with him to phone the police. He too has been drinking, but he looks seriously at Augustine and says – it’s not right for that big well-grown girl to have to stay in the house with that beast – even if he is her own father you never know what he’ll be up to next. Augustine says he’d rather not interfere, but the other man persuades him to go. The two men climb over the Killeatons’ fence and sneak through the long grass in the yard of the church hall so that Lloyd Glasscock will not see them. When the men have gone Mrs Killeaton tells Clement to get straight into bed without turning the light on, to leave his pyjamas off for just this night, and to say his prayers lying in bed because God will understand. The bedroom is stuffy and hot. Clement is too frightened to peep around the blind. He throws off his sheet and lies naked on his back. He listens for sounds from the Glasscocks’ house, but hears only the occasional thump of a chair falling as Mr Glasscock chases Dorothy from room to room threatening to lift up her dress and tear her pants off and belt her until he raises big red marks all over her white bottom and the tops of her legs without caring how much of a certain other white thing he might happen to see between her legs as she kicks and struggles. Just when Mr Glasscock has her trapped in a corner and she offers to cook his tea every night and make his bed and wash all his clothes and pretend to be his young wife if only he will let her off the belting and let Mrs Glasscock sneak into the back room to sleep, Mr and Mrs Killeaton creep into Clement’s room. Augustine whispers that everyth
ing is all right now in the Glasscocks’ place. The boy’s mother warns him as usual not to sleep on his back or he will have bad dreams.

  A boy teaches Clement some Catholic devotions

  During afternoon playtime at St Boniface’s school, Clement persuades Kevin Cuming, a boy with long bony legs, to run short frantic sprints and long tiring stayers’ races up and down the narrow laneway between the main yard and the back gate of the school. Cuming only narrowly beats Killeaton in the shorter races but in every long race he leaves Clement far behind. Clement asks the long-legged boy to train him as a runner and improve his stamina. That afternoon Clement jogs beside Cuming as the tall boy leaves the schoolyard. When Cuming, still jogging, veers off the footpath and into St Boniface’s churchyard Clement follows him. They stop to a walk at the church door. Cuming dips his fingers three times into the holy water basin, making the sign of the cross first on his forehead then on his lips and last over his heart. Clement does the same, although he has never seen his father make more than one sign of the cross at a church door. Cuming falls to his knees in the back seat on the epistle side of the church and buries his face in his hands. Clement kneels beside him. The taller boy looks around the church, sees only two old ladies kneeling near the altar-rails, and moves towards the gospel side. As he crosses the axis along which the tabernacle lies, he goes down on both knees, touching his chin to his chest and striking his fist three times against his belly. Clement follows him, doing as he does. Cuming prays again on the gospel side then walks slowly, with his hands pressed together in front of his face and the tips of his thumbs resting under his nostrils, towards the altar-rails. The old ladies take no notice as the two boys kneel briefly on the sticky leather cushion, bowing their heads and fingering the starched altar cloth that dangles on the inner, forbidden side of the wooden railing. Cuming leads the way to a side altar. He pulls his rosary beads out of his trousers pocket and twines them through his fingers as he looks up at the statue of Our Lady crushing the head of the Devil disguised as a snake. He leads Clement down the side aisle, crossing himself hurriedly as he passes each station of the cross, then into the rear part of the church beneath the choir gallery. He kneels in front of the life-sized crucifix in the corner, then tiptoes forward, clasps his arms around Our Lord’s crossed shins, and kisses the nail that pierces His feet. Cuming waits while Killeaton kisses the sacred wound and even guides Clement’s head so that his mouth touches the drops of dried blood on Our Lord’s instep. After glancing around the church, Cuming enters the confessional through one of the side doors. Clement hears him kneel down and murmur the short act of contrition, but he himself only peeps inside one of the empty booths. Cuming next leads Clement up the narrow stairs to the choir gallery, where he sits for a few moments on the stool in front of the organ. Then he returns downstairs, goes out by the same door through which he entered the church, blessing himself three times as before, and jogs towards the street. Clement jogs most of the way home. On the way he passes Margaret Wallace arriving home from Shepherd’s Reef State School. She tells him that her father always lets her into the aviary for a few minutes as soon as she has put on her apron and eaten a double-header ice-cream from the shop. Clement gets home ten minutes late. He tells his mother that he wants to pay a visit every night after school. She speaks to Augustine about it that night. Next morning the parents announce that Clement may pay only a very brief visit to Our Lord in the tabernacle because He doesn’t expect long-winded prayers from little boys. They warn him about talking to strangers, even in the churchyard, which is a favourite place for wicked old men who want to get hold of children. Each afternoon Clement sprints ahead of Kevin Cuming to St Boniface’s church. After sprinkling himself three times at the holy-water basin he stands still for a moment, looking up at the lowest fringe of the colossal system of delicate golden tracery that reaches down through the dusty rafters and encloses in its barely visible web the rows of thickly varnished seats, the impassable altar-rails, and beyond them the pink and cream turreted altar itself. Alternately drifting down towards the levels of air where the whispered prayers of kneeling people pass on the first stage of their devious journeys through its baffling network, and billowing up towards the colourless slopes where the elaborate robes of the least of the angels and saints might sometimes trail carelessly past, the maze of filmy pathways, one remote corner of which is more complex and multifarious than the pattern of streets in any unvisited city or the tracks of cattle or hares or people of long ago through the grasses of inland plains or the sequences of coloured silks at successive intervals of fifty yards in famous staying races on broad racecourses or the whereabouts year after year of the well-knit nests of birds cunningly lodged among dense thickets in a thousand narrow gullies, tempts anyone watching its diffuse pulsating glitter to order his own steps or the involuntary shifting of his features or the spilling over of his unruly thoughts into a semblance of the first irregular but compelling arrangement of laneways in a long vista along whose farthest twinkling tracks not even the wisest or most saintly priest or nun may yet have travelled. Clement is allowed so little time for his visit that he is able to choose only one or two of the places that Kevin Cuming visits for his devotions. He kneels at the altar-rails or presses his mouth against the petrified blood of Our Lord or stares at the dusty wire grille inside the confessional before he jogs homewards, wondering at how little his stamina has improved since he first followed Kevin Cuming to the church and at the vast slope of changeable yellow haze that he still sees above the few systems of pathways that he has so far discovered and trodden devoutly around and the God who looks out and knows every pattern in it all. Each night Clement passes Wallaces’ and sees Margaret at the gate of the aviary. After a week of jogging to the church and then home, Clement sees how little of the shifting sun-tinted maze he has so far crossed. That night he hurries straight from the schoolyard to the Wallaces’ place, where he finds he has ten minutes to spare before his mother expects him home from the church.

  Clement confesses to Margaret Wallace

  Margaret Wallace stands on the other side of the fine wire mesh. The door of the aviary is locked, and the key dangles from her faintly freckled wrist. She boasts to Clement that she is going out of sight behind tall clumps of reeds surrounding a shallow grassy swamp that her father has copied from some coastal paddock in the far south-west of Victoria. As she disappears, Clement hears the flapping and splashing of startled dabchicks and moorhens. When she returns he asks her what kind of country lies inland behind the cold swamps. Margaret tells him that she has seen pleasant plains where the trees stand wide apart, where flocks of bustards cry out shrilly so as not to stray too far from the birds they may choose as their mates next spring, and clouds of green parrots rise up from the tall grass ahead of a traveller. Clement asks has she noticed places where people might settle and arrange squares of streets with clusters of gardens between, and she tells him that beyond the farthest place that she has reached the grass grows less abundantly and a huddle of low inviting hills sprawls around a vaguely defined creek-bed where infrequent rain-storms have exposed in the faces of boulders a close-set pattern of golden streaks. She claims that whenever she chooses she may go and make her home in that tempting place beneath the nests of honey-eaters and tree-creepers. Clement tells her that she will need a husband or a boyfriend. She answers that there may be a man already living there in a hut alone who will choose her for his wife and teach her all about the place, or that a boy whose father is a friend of her father may go on ahead of her and be the first man to explore the place and become the owner of it all and plant a lawn and garden and send for her to come and live with him, but that whatever happens no Catholic will be allowed to pry into the place and certainly not to kiss her or try to marry her. Margaret goes off again into the tall grass and low scrub and stays away longer than before. She returns with her hands full of brilliantly coloured feathers and claims that the birds are so tame in the places she has visited that they all
ow her to pluck a few of the finest feathers from their tails and breasts. When Clement asks her to tell him more, she says that beyond even the last inland place that she has told him about there may be a region so luminous that even her father who owns the whole aviary is not sure where it begins and ends because in certain weathers even the rocks and hills and bare grasses near the outer fences seem to flash for a few moments with its colour. Her father has crossed the aviary from one side to the other several times without seeing anything very remarkable but he still prefers to travel within the greener parts around its perimeter because he suspects there may be something too bright and powerful about the inmost area. Clement begs her to let him inside to see for himself whether there is something strange at the centre and whether birds or creatures still unnamed may live there. Margaret insists that no Catholics are allowed inside because they keep too many secrets from other people and dress up in coloured robes that no proper Australian would dream of wearing and speak in foreign languages when they pray. The boy offers to explain the mysteries of the Catholic religion to her if only she will let him explore the aviary with her. While she presses her surly face against the wire he describes the colours of priests’ vestments, choosing feathers from the bundle in her hands to illustrate each sacred shade – green of eastern rosellas for the Sundays after Pentecost and the hope that God will change the drab pagan spaces around Bassett into small neat fields like those of Ireland where a man can travel from village to village within the one green vista, scarlet of gang-gang cockatoos for the feasts of martyrs and the Holy Ghost to remind people that God may one day send His messenger to inspire a small band of His faithful followers to set out for a vivid place that they have scarcely heard about, white of plumed egrets for great feasts and saints who were not martyred but died pure to urge some specially chosen people to live like priests and brothers and nuns spending all their time in walled gardens where only the tops of trees toss about in the north winds that tempt ordinary people to commit sins of thought about warm yellow-white plains where men and women play naked games together or rub the hottest parts of their bodies against the tickling grasses, black of clinking currawongs for the souls in purgatory to remind people of the dark grid of the edges of days that God has marked out on His holy calendars that are meant to warn Catholics and Protestants alike, and purple of paradise rifle-birds for Advent and Lent to remind people to press their faces in shame against the purple veil in the confessional and tell the truth about the things they have wanted to do with their wives and girlfriends because the grace that will pour back into their souls from the sacrament of penance shines with colours a thousand times more satisfying than the treasures that girls and women keep hidden in their playhouses and bedrooms. Clement persuades Margaret to weave her rifle-bird feathers through the wire-netting to make the shape of a purple screen. She agrees to turn her face away, and he murmurs – bless me Margaret for I have sinned this is my first confession Margaret and I accuse myself of – I have thought bad thoughts many times about a girl who goes to a State school – this is all I can remember Margaret and I am very sorry for all my sins. He looks over the screen and tells her in tones of ordinary conversation that she must now think up a punishment for him. She tells him to look his hardest through the wire, then teases him by holding aside the thick barrier of rushes that hides the inland parts of the aviary. He tries to make out the flat drier country behind her but a tall spike catches Margaret’s dress and as it springs back into place exposes almost the whole of her pants without her knowing it. He calls her back to the wire and begins to teach her how to make her confession to him. She repeats the words after him but then claims she cannot remember committing any kind of sin. He urges her to recall the thoughts she has when she is alone in the farthest parts of the aviary, but she says she only feels pleased that her father owns the whole place and that if she feels like it she may explore all over it without any fear and without worrying whether anyone will catch her doing something wrong. Clement pushes a few times against the aviary door then turns around to go home.