Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement sees how American families live

  Clement has known for a long time that his father is very different from the fathers of other boys he knows. Augustine’s telephone conversations with important men in Melbourne, the many Saturdays when he is away from early morning until late at night, the great wealth of racing knowledge that keeps him continually frowning into the distance during meals or sitting at his desk in the evening with a pencil in his hand scribbling rows and columns of figures in the margin of his racing paper, the hours that he spends carefully training the horse Sternie for the race that he might still win at good odds, and the creased racebooks that he brings back from distant race-meetings with their blank pages filled with details of bets and names of horses and men and will not allow Clement to play with for fear they might fall into the wrong hands – all these remind Clement that he must not expect his father to play cricket in the backyard as Mr Glasscock does or to take his wife and son out walking on Sunday afternoons or to have friends who might come to visit them on Sunday nights or to listen to the wireless for more than a few minutes without tapping a pencil against his teeth or crossing his legs and swinging his foot restlessly to and fro or reaching for a piece of paper to scribble on or going down the street to make a phone call. Clement understands that his father’s racing business is the reason why Augustine has never been with his wife to the pictures since they were married, why he never learned to dance as a young man, and why he never brings home a bottle of beer or wastes his money on cigarettes or tobacco like ordinary men. But one evening in the summer holidays Mrs Killeaton finally persuades her husband that he can afford the time to take her and the boy to the Miami Theatre to see a film called The Sullivans that everyone in Bassett is talking about. Augustine has never heard of the film. He asks his wife whether it is for general exhibition. She shows him the newspaper advertisement to convince him, and he agrees to take them in on the special picture bus to Bassett. Clement is so pleased to have his father with him at the pictures that he keeps glancing sideways and nudging Augustine whenever the audience laughs during the newsreel and the cartoon, but Augustine does not seem to understand the jokes. The supporting film has so many adults in it and so much conversation that Clement gives up trying to understand what his mother calls the hang of it and simply watches a boy a little older than himself travelling all night in a luxurious railway train from New York to somewhere and when he first looks out in the morning in the heart of America seeing not desert as he had expected but smooth farms and inviting forests. The train stops at a tiny station, and the boy tries to get out and look among the great thick mats of cornfields and the massed tufts of plantations and the few lonely houses and deserted cross-roads where no signposts stand for his father, but the grown-ups who are looking after him, a woman that some of the men on the train have fallen in love with although her breasts are sharply pointed and cruel and her face is stiff with layers of powder and another older woman who keeps saying things that make the people in the Miami Theatre squeal with laughter, look meaningfully at each other behind the boy’s back and the younger woman, his mother, tells him he mustn’t keep worrying about his pa like that because he’s gone to live in the most peaceful place of all. While the passengers go on chattering, Clement keeps his eyes on the edge of the screen where spikes of trees fling themselves at the train and roads appear at the windows offering access for an instant and no more to soft distant paddocks that may lie at the very centre of America and filmy bits of prairie float up and drift off again to wherever they belong until his eyes begin to water. Someone on the train says something about a gambler, and Clement watches to see whether the people are interested in racing, but a man takes out a pack of cards – something that Augustine has never touched in all his life – and Clement tries again to see the places where the boy wanted to go searching and beyond which his father has found a quiet town somewhere. Augustine whispers to his wife that he won’t be long but he has just remembered a phone call that he has to make and he thinks he’d better save his eyes for The Sullivans because the film they’re watching now is pretty dry. He climbs past the people’s knees and walks out of the theatre. The film ends among tall buildings in a huge city, and the boy finds out that his father has died, probably in the war, and pretends that he loves the new father that his mother has decided to marry and never mentions again the great stretches of land that he saw all that morning from the train windows. The lights come on in the Miami Theatre, and Clement’s mother shares a box of koolmints with him. The lights go out again and The Sullivans begins, but Augustine has still not yet returned. The Sullivans are a family of Catholic boys. Clement is shocked to see for the first time on the screen the inside of a Catholic church. When the smallest Sullivan boy only waves his hand in front of his face instead of making a proper sign of the cross because he is in a hurry to follow his big brothers out of the church, the audience roars with laughter and Clement suspects that most of them are Protestants making fun of the Catholic religion. The Sullivans’ father belts his sons with a strap when they get into trouble, and the audience laughs loudly again. Clement realises that Mr Sullivan is only pretending to be angry with the boys and decides that the Killeaton family, whose quarrels last for days, leads a life so different from the true American life that it would be useless to to try to learn any lessons from the Sullivans. He notices the furniture and ornaments that clutter up the house although the Sullivans are supposed to be a poor family and the Sullivan boys’ strange habit of throwing their arms around their mother and pressing their heads so hard against her tired old titties that she gasps for breath and giggles. Mr Sullivan works as a driver on an unlikely sort of train. Year after year he has to travel around the same route between the same drab backyards and factories. Clement’s father climbs back into his seat just in time to see Mr Sullivan waving to his sons as he does every morning when his train passes the street where they walk to school. Augustine bumps Clement with his knee because the boys are so fond of their father. The boys are anxious to finish school so that they can find jobs on other railways that travel on fixed routes like their father’s but through far wider districts of America where the sky is free of smoke and soot and people have more secrets in their houses and paddocks than the people of the crowded cities. Their mother explains to them that the war has started. She urges them to stay inside the steel-coloured gloomy corridors and cupboards of a battleship instead of looking for adventure all over America. But when they leave home to go to the war she throws her apron over her head and shakes her titties. Clement, who has never understood why his friends at school are so interested in war and the clashing together of machines whose names he does not even know or the plunging to earth of planes whose make and nationality he has never learned to distinguish among great surges of smoke that obscure what he would really like to see – the earth far below with its plains marked faintly by roads and towns – feels disappointed because he will see no more of the trains that the Sullivans might have driven all over America. Towards the end of the film, the submarines and torpedoes and bombs and the water pouring into ships’ cabins and the men shouting orders at each other are so confusing that Clement has to ask his father whether the Americans or the Japs are winning. Only when a sudden tense silence settles over the Miami Theatre does Clement realise that the Sullivan boys have all been killed. Mr Sullivan still rides around the city on his toy-like train. Clement decides that Mr Sullivan is the real hero of the film because he has now become so used to the route that his train follows every day past the same back fences and grey streets that he will only be able to dream of going where his sons wanted to go out across strange plains where the railway line reveals little-known views of the rear ends of farms and forests. At the very end, when the old man looks out at the place where his sons used to wave to him, Augustine puts his arm around Clement and rests his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Mrs Killeaton weeps into her handkerchief. Clement’s throat and nose fill up with a great load of t
ears and snot for the sake of the tired old lonely man who still looks around the same old city for some place that he can stare at and believe that all his life he was driving his train towards a view of something marvellous that no one else had discovered. But as the curtains tumble across the screen, the Sullivan boys suddenly climb out of a great silvery explosion and stand on a shining cliff and point to something that may be more marvellous than any view from the most far-reaching railway line. Clement asks his father – didn’t they die after all Dad? Augustine says – don’t worry about them son – it was only a story that some Yanks made up. But someone in the seat behind them says angrily – no it wasn’t – it’s all true – I read where it said this story is based on actual fact.