Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  The boys of St Boniface’s suck milk from stones

  At lunchtime on a certain hot day the boys of St Boniface’s school suddenly decide to search for milk-stones. After they have eaten their pies or sandwiches or Boston buns and been herded into the boys’ yard, they crowd into corners and settle down on the gravel to spend the rest of the lunch-hour searching. Launder’s gang occupy the choice spots – the corners near the taps and in the shade of a wing of a building. Other boys have to be content with the exposed parts of the yard where the gravel is hot to touch. Each boy sits flat on the ground, with his legs spread wide apart in front of him to enclose the area that is his own preserve, and scrabbles with his fingers in the dusty gravel. When he finds a small stone that is perfectly smooth and a flawless white he slips it under his tongue or into the space between his cheek and his gum. If his mouth becomes uncomfortably full of stones, he drops some into his shirt pocket or wraps them in a knotted corner of his handkerchief. The whitest stones, when they are sucked hard, yield a steady trickle of cool, sweet milk. Stones that are slightly chipped or marred with bluish streaks give only a thin, watery milk, or even plain water. If the flow of milk dries up it can be replenished by soaking the stone overnight in a jar of water or a glass of milk. Some boys store their stones in small jars of water as they collect them. When lunchtime ends they slip some of these stones into their mouths, hoping to have a continuous supply of liquid in the hot classroom, but the nun who has been watching the boys’ yard usually whispers a message to the boys’ teachers who then walk up and down the lines saying – out of your mouths with those silly dangerous pebbles, and sometimes even orders them to turn out their pockets and throw the milk-stones away. Clement Killeaton enjoys searching for milk-stones. He never admits to the others that he cannot suck milk from any of his stones. Sometimes he tastes cool water, but it never flows for more than a few seconds. He watches the other boys as they suck, and envies them the easy movements of their jaws and the contented looks in their faces. His father tells him that no stone could possibly give milk or water although the early Australian explorers sometimes put stones in their mouths to keep themselves from feeling thirsty in the desert, but Clement does not repeat this to any boy at school. One morning he hears some of the boys boasting that they know the secret of the stones. A boy has heard from his father or his uncle that the Bassett milk-stones are only inferior copies of precious stones that Arabs and travellers in the desert or Australian soldiers in Palestine or Egypt have found in places where a man could die of thirst after one afternoon without water. A man who finds a true milk-stone in those countries guards it with his life and when he has to cross the plains between two towns rests it under his tongue not only to keep his mouth filled with cool milk but to keep his mind clear so that when he sees between him and what looks like the horizon a tree-shaded city with fountains bubbling and trickling in every garden he will know at once whether it is one of those unreal cities that thirsty travellers often follow for miles until they die still as far away from their city as ever or the true city that they have set out to reach. The boys of St Boniface’s school soon give up their search for stones and play some other game at lunchtime, but Clement sorts through his collection and keeps in a special tin those few that seem most like the true precious milk-stones found in far hot countries. He does not bother to soak them in water or milk, but for weeks he always carries one in his mouth while he is walking near Wallaces’ end of Leslie Street or near the McCracken’s Road bridge or in any slightly elevated place from which he can see a long swathe of street far-reaching enough to lead to a real or an unreal city. When he half-closes his eyes and strains with his tongue to force the juice from his stone he sees a boy who has already reached a city across a hot difficult landscape. Boys who might be his true friends and women with faces and arms brown from the sun but still beautiful and unwrinkled and their daughters only a little older than him pass close to the boy in the streets or look towards him from their front gardens as if they would welcome him into their homes but still cannot see him clearly.

  A boy finds a city that may be a mirage

  When the boy who has reached a city but is still not sure whether the stone that he sucked on his journey was one of the true kind tries to follow the people into their yards and houses, no one bars his way or seems to notice that a stranger might be watching them. The people move from room to room as if to do something shameful, but even hours later, in dim rooms that no passer-by would expect the houses to contain behind their simple facades or in leafy corners of the gardens that a stranger might walk past without noticing, the boy sees only actions and gestures that people like the Killeatons and Glasscocks and Postlethwaites perform every day in the yards and streets of the city of Bassett many miles away. He follows one group of people who exchange looks suggesting that as soon as they are in some secret place together they will agree without fear or shame to do whatever they like with each other’s body, but when he and they are sprawled on the grass behind branches so thick that in Bassett they would have compelled a boy to do behind them things that he thought only the people of a distant city would do without caring who saw them, the people still talk and smile politely and fiddle with the belts of their trousers or the hems of their skirts as the Wallaces or Riordans often do in Bassett, and as if they were afraid that someone from a city like Bassett might be spying on them all the time. The boy even makes signs that he has never made in front of anyone in Bassett, but the people still behave so cautiously and politely that he realises he may never know after all what they might do in secret or even whether he has really seen them in secret. In the hottest part of the afternoon, in the city that many people never reach because they have no precious stones to guide them, the boy sets out to find a place where one or two people could be hidden more cunningly and securely than anyone in Bassett has ever been concealed. He goes deeper into a backyard to a place where even the sunlight seldom penetrates. He sees a place like the form of a hare in some long grass under a bunch of low-hanging shrubbery. He lowers himself into the little enclosure of flattened grass and discovers that it has been made by the crouching body of a boy. He fits his arms and head and shoulders into the hollows that lie waiting for them and stares outwards through the leaves. He sees above the fences that enclose the yards there, just as in another city that he knows, the low ominous rim of the hills that even beyond that far town conceal some place farther out from which a person who looked back at the city on its plains might see no more than a dark smear on a surface like a white stone’s and from which the secrets of the people in the city might seem as remote and elusive among all the lands around as the yellowish light that flickered occasionally in the vein of such a stone so that a boy who built a racecourse that remained for a few days in his backyard in Bassett never forgot that a stone of a certain colour stood for a landscape that for a few minutes during an important race stood for the unfathomable thoughts of a certain group of people as they once stared back at a certain town on a hot plain where no one might even know where the real town was unless he had a proper stone to tell him. And then for the first time since he has arrived at their town, some people, a woman, a man, a girl and a boy gather round the tree and stare towards his hiding-place as if they recognised him at last. He cannot even begin to tell them that all they might hope for after years of waiting patiently on their lonely plains might be decided far beyond the daunting glitter of their horizons when a child’s hand pushes forward among a cluster of pebbles a lump of milk-coloured quartz distinguished by a streak of uncertain gold or that if the child whose hand is poised above that stone could only know that they, the people in a far town, were really as he hoped, then he would stay with them forever and let some other hand above some other racecourse decide what might happen to them all.

  The mysterious Silverstone is entered in the Gold Cup

  Clement Killeaton, the owner of a collection of milk-stones long after the other boys at his school have lost intere
st in them, sorts through his jar of white pebbles, but because they are so alike in colour and shape, with only a slight bulge or a faint tinge of blue or gold to distinguish any one from another, and so much smaller than the stones that he first used for horses in racing games, decides that he cannot use them in any races that he might arrange. He visits again each hiding place between the roots of shrubs, beneath forests of weeds, or in the shade of deserted sheds, and recalls again the long stories that he once composed about the people who live in such places, how each detail in each story was once represented by something in the colours of certain stones, much larger than his milk-stones, which he once found in his yard but later threw away because his parents said he was growing too fond of racing games. He walks past the place where his racecourse stood before it was torn down and goes inside to his room. He selects fifteen of the hundred or so marbles that he has kept apart from the others, because something in the colours of each of them reminds him of a stone that is now lost, but which he calls by the names of professional foot-runners when his mother is around. He closes his eyes and lets the marbles trickle out of his cupped hands to form a straggling field on the mat in front of him. He opens his eyes and enjoys the moment of surprise when he sees that one of the fifteen, one that he has not thought about for a long time, lies ahead of all the others. He looks forward to the hot day when his mother will leave him alone in the house with the blinds pulled down to make people think that no one is at home and he can run the Gold Cup with a pencil and some old exercise books on the rug beside him for recording the positions of the horses after each furlong, so that for weeks or months afterwards he may explore the thoughts of a few people during a few minutes of a certain hot afternoon when all the things they had hoped for and dreamed about for years appeared before them as part of an arrangement of patterns of colours whose changing positions would decide at last the worth of those hopes and dreams. Through a gap in his side fence he shows his jar of milk-stones to two of the Glasscock boys. The older Glasscock says that the kids of Shepherd’s Reef State School never play with such stupid things, but when Killeaton boasts of how the Catholic boys can go all day without a drink of water when they have milk-stones in their mouths, Glasscock remembers that a few years ago the big boys at his school collected all the best milk-stones from the streets and yards in their part of Bassett so the Catholic kids would only find the smallest and driest stones. Clement remembers that he has never been able to find even one milk-stone in his own yard and suggests that the boy Silverstone probably collected the stones too. Glasscock says – yes he did all right – he had the best collection of all – some of his stones were as big at that. He makes a shape with his fingers that is as large as any of the stones that Killeaton uses for his racehorses. Clement goes away from the fence and scatters the milk-stones in his yard. Then he adds to the list of runners in the Gold Cup number sixteen Silverstone, a silvery whiteness, for the marvellous secrets of Bassett and its people that Clement will never discover for as long as he lives because someone before him has buried them out of sight more securely than any marble or stone hidden beneath the unyielding soil of the city.

  A Western District grazier inspects Clement’s yard

  Late one afternoon while Augustine is out walking Sternie around the streets, a car stops outside the Killeatons’ house. A well-dressed man comes to the front door and introduces himself to Mrs Killeaton. He is Con McCormack, one of Augustine’s cousins from the Western District. Mrs Killeaton is embarrassed and says that the house is in a bit of a muddle as usual but Mr McCormack is welcome to wait inside for Augustine to come home. Mr McCormack sees Clement resting on his haunches beside a road that he has smoothed with his hands in the dirt, and says he’ll stay outside and talk to the boy for a while. When Clement learns that the man is a relation of his father, he confides to him the true meaning of his system of roads and farms. He explains to the man how the network extends all along the least-used side of the backyard, how each of the dozens of properties forms a pattern of paddocks from any single one of which a man who stood there staring outwards might see a view, across fences and trees towards a stretch of road, different from any other that another man might see and so singular that even the boy who laid out the whole system can never properly appreciate it, even when he lies down on his belly and puts his face as near as he can to the place where the man might stand, and how each man who stood looking outwards across his own unique view of paddocks might believe all his life that somewhere, far out of sight, the great tracery of fences and roads came to an end and wonder what other country began there while the boy who arranged the whole pattern knows that if only he could break down the fences between fifty or a hundred of the yards in that one small part of Bassett that he knows he might lay out such a country that none of its inhabitants would discover in his lifetime any end to it. Mr McCormack asks how all those farmers earn a living. Clement explains that they all race their horses every week at the racecourse that lies at the heart of their district and live off the stake money and their winning bets. The man asks him how much his own father has won with his horse Sternie lately. Clement admits that Augustine has won nothing with Sternie yet, but he explains that Sternie has not been trying because he is waiting for an important race in a few weeks’ time. Mr McCormack asks how can he be certain that Sternie will win the important race. Clement realises that he has been speaking of the one topic that his father has forbidden him to breathe a word about. He tells the man that in the district where he has built his racecourse, every owner wins his fair share of races in the end if only he has the patience to go on training his horse and backing him week after week until his great day arrives. Augustine walks into the yard, leading Sternie. He shakes hands cheerfully with his cousin, whom he has not seen for many years. McCormack smiles and says – young Clem here has been showing me over his farms – he even has a racecourse built somewhere in the bushes so all his farmers can flutter away their profits every Saturday. Augustine smiles weakly and says – of course his mother and I don’t encourage him to take an interest in racing at his age but I suppose he can’t help noticing all the work I put into training Sternie. Later, after Mr McCormack has gone down the yard to look at the poultry, Augustine grabs Clement by the shoulders and whispers harshly into his ear that Mr McCormack doesn’t like people who waste their money at the races, that he is a very rich man with hundreds of acres of sheep country, and that Clement had better ask him some questions about sheep farming instead of blabbing to him for hours about horses and racing. But Con McCormack does not stay for long. He tells the Killeatons he is heading for Queensland to look up some distant relations who have done well on the land there. He says – of course you’d know who I’m talking about Gus – the McGuigans – they were your second cousins too I suppose. He drinks one cup of tea and drives away. Augustine tells his wife that he has always found it hard to talk to Con McCormack even though he is a cousin of his. He says that when he was a boy the McCormacks were even poorer than the Killeatons, the parents working like niggers and the little boys running round the cow-yard with nothing on but their shimmies even in winter, but that they finally paid off their farm and started to buy land round the district, that hardly any of them married, and that now they live in a house with about twenty rooms on a property that once belonged to some famous squatting family on the western plains. Mrs Killeaton says – and you’re still living in this dump of a place up to your eyes in debt – I wonder what he thought of you. Augustine says – but I’ve got things that he’ll never have – a beautiful wife and a lovely little boy – I can go to the races whenever I like – I’ve made dozens of wonderful friends in the racing game – I would have told him about Goodchild and some of the big wins we’ve had but I thought better of it because he mightn’t have understood – he thinks all racing is a waste of time and money. Mrs Killeaton pulls an ugly face when her husband mentions his beautiful wife. Clement says to his father – racing properties are better than sheep f
arms aren’t they Dad? Augustine jumps to his feet and says – I’m sick to death of hearing you talk about racing as though I’d never taught you anything else – come outside this minute and we’ll cure you of racing. Mrs Killeaton says – he hasn’t been racing those stones around the lilac bush again and calling them horses has he? I warned him weeks ago about that. They all go outside. Mrs Killeaton looks behind the lilac but sees no sign of rails or grandstand. Augustine takes his son’s hand and says – we’ll start with your biggest stud property – show me where it’s hidden. Clement takes him to the place where one of the wealthiest owners, a man whose opulent colours have led home many a field, lives among tree-lined paddocks whose outer boundaries he cannot even see from the homestead. Augustine gets down on his haunches and shows the boy what to do. Clement has to tear up most of the dividing fences because sheep need broad acres. But he leaves the lines of trees standing so that the sheep will have shade in the summer. Augustine then explains that men like the McCormacks try to buy up their neighbours’ properties. So Clement builds gates into the fence between the property and one next door. He and his father decide that the owner will live in the better of the two homesteads, leaving the other for his son, who will manage the huge property. Clement and Augustine work together until teatime. The main shapes of the landscape are still the same, although Augustine orders a few low hills flattened and a few stands of forest cleared so that the country will look more like the rich plains of the Western District which he used to think of as a boy whenever he planned to be a wealthy grazier when he was older. All over the prosperous plains sheep graze contentedly. Augustine stands beside his son and looks at the places that they have built together. He says – don’t throw away all your horses son – keep just a few of them – some of the wealthiest sheep men might keep a horse or two and race them as a hobby the way I’ve always wanted to – which is the way racing was meant to be enjoyed.