Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Augustine thinks of his home in the Western District

  Augustine finds on the mantlepiece a letter from Kurringbar. He reads it through quickly then says to his wife – a man’s mad. He waits for her to ask him what he means but she goes on rummaging in a cupboard. He says – a man’s mad to go on wasting his life here when by rights I’ve got a fifth share in 250 acres of good dairy country and the price of land’s gone up every year since the war. His wife says – haven’t I been telling you that for months only you’re scared of what your father might say if you turned up on his doorstep with nothing to show for all the years you’ve been working except the seat out of your pants? Augustine says – don’t talk to me about being afraid when I’ve heard you say a dozen times you’d never live near my sisters with rosary beads draped over their bedsteads and holy pictures on their dressing-tables and asking you questions to see how much you know about your faith. She says – you know damn well I’ll live anywhere if it means we can get away from your stinking rotten cursed debts. Augustine says – it so happens that my brother Phonse is getting married in a few months and starting out on a farm of his own – that leaves only Dan and my father to work the home farm and reading between the lines in Dan’s letter I reckon they’d be happy to have me home again as a working partner even after all these years I’ve been away – we needn’t live on the property with my sisters still there – there’s bound to be a neat little cottage to rent somewhere in the district and I could ride the bike backwards and forwards each day until we could afford an old car. Augustine writes a long letter to his father. He reads it aloud to his wife before he seals it. Clement is puzzled by the opening words – my dear father a lot of water has flowed under the old bridge. When the answer to the letter arrives Augustine reads it silently in front of his wife and son. Then he opens the door of the stove and pokes the letter and its envelope into the fire. He tells his wife – if you must know the old chap says he’s put up every spare penny he can find to start Phonse off on his farm and all the profits from the home place will be needed for years to come to pay off another mortgage – he says he and Dan can handle all the work on the home place and they can’t see why I want to descend on them when I’ve got a good safe government job. During the next few days Clement hears his father deciding aloud to look for a position as a share farmer in the Kurringbar district. Augustine explains that a share farmer does all the milking and certain other jobs around the farm for a third share of the milk cheque. He does not explain how even the poorest farmer struggling to pay off his own farm and wading knee-deep in mud in his cow-yard looks down on a share farmer as a kind of low-caste labourer. Clement, who knows that his father is planning to sneak out of Bassett without paying his debts, is secretly glad that Augustine will not be living on his father’s farm where the bookmakers or their men might find him at last after following his trail all the way across the western plains asking where people named Killeaton lived and trap him in one of the treeless paddocks beside the ocean so that he can only lie down like a hare in the long grass and try to hide from them until the sea wind blows his scent their way.

  Clement sees no mystery in the Western District

  When Clement arrives home from school on hot afternoons his mother allows him to have a glass of water from the jug that she keeps in the ice-chest. While he sips the water he goes behind the kitchen door to look at the calendar. He knows by now that the streets and footpaths and waterless vistas of Bassett may be no more than a plain of yellowish stuff that happens to be marked with patterns of squares that give some meaning to the continual journeying of children or men or horses to and from buildings or groves of trees that the people thereabouts call old but which are no more than a few golden grains scarcely more prominent than thousands of others on a plain of countless dusty specks across which the inhabitants of a landscape of quite a different colour might trace far longer and more challenging journeys than those of the people who think that each journey is about to bring them to some place where they may rest and be satisfied that they understand a little of what all that untrodden yellow around them means. As he looks more often at the squares and learns how insignificant are his own travels across the bright stuff, he tries to remember the stories that his father has sometimes told him of how he, Augustine, first set out from the Western District, a country of grey-green grass that leans before the wind, and only came across this place of dull golden gravel on his way back from a much wider expanse of reddish-gold dust farther north. As page after page of the calendar does no more than tempt the boy Clement to discover, with nothing to help him except his pink stubby fingers and his cock, which he might poke into the teasing dust and lay bare some path leading like a great broad glorious stripe towards a flaw on a distant horizon that will prove to be the first sign of a land not yet pictured on any calendar, the colour whose unyellowness must shine across places much wider than calendars, he wonders more often about one last journey that the whole family might make away from the inland place, where they had given up the hopeless struggle to find some dome or mound or hill whose hundreds of closely packed layers they could peel back like pages to see what other countries they might possess without setting out on any journeys again, towards the plains that Augustine had once known for longer than any others. If the Killeatons should turn back towards the place that Augustine sometimes calls his true home, Clement will know before they set out that ahead of them is not the search that he had once hoped to make among unexpected prospects of yellow with barely perceptible boundaries for a far-reaching square in which people like themselves could see in certain directions as far as any of the saints and holy people saw within their remote borders, but a journey across a great grid of perfectly regular angles and interstices whose only mystery was that they seemed to stretch back so far in a uniform sequence beyond the place that Augustine called the true end of it all, with still only the overhanging scenes of holy people in dim countries to distinguish any row of rows from any other, or the wonder that nowhere on all those routes of lifetimes paved with stages of journeys was there any gap through which a traveller might wander into the other squares that surely lay somewhere only a little apart from the yellow squares and the sheer blessed wall to one side of them.

  Clement and his class refuse to learn from Mr Cotter

  Clement Killeaton and all the other boys in grade four stand quietly outside their room on the morning of their first day at the Brothers’ College. The Head Brother walks across the yard towards them. Beside the brother is a frail young man with a foolish grin fixed on his face. The brother tells them to say good morning to their teacher Mr Cotter. The boys are shocked. Every other grade has a brother for their teacher, but they have a young man looking unseemly and effeminate in a light-grey suit instead of a brother’s manly black skirts. The Head Brother says – they’re all yours Mr Cotter, and strides away. Mr Cotter says – well chaps let’s get inside and get to know each other. A murmur of resentment travels down the rows of boys as they shuffle into their room. From the very first day the boys exchange rumours to explain who Mr Cotter is and why he is teaching at the college. They say that he wants to join the brothers but has to prove first that he can teach, that he has recently been expelled from the brothers but has to work for them for years to pay them back for all the food that he ate while he was one of them, that he was in love with a Protestant woman but his parents sent him far away to stop him from making a mixed marriage. Mr Cotter himself tells them that he comes from the New England district. A boy asks him why doesn’t he talk like a Pommie, and the teacher realises that his class has barely heard about New South Wales, let alone the New England Ranges. He gives them a geography lesson about New South Wales and makes jokes about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne which none of the boys understands. Before lunchtime on the first day, Mr Cotter has lost control of his class. After lunch he reads them poems that he says he keeps by his bedside every night, but the boys can make no sense of them. He tells the
m that every single blessing and success in his life he owes to Our Blessed Lady under her title of the Immaculate Conception, but they are embarrassed to hear from an ordinary man things that should be mentioned only by priests and brothers and nuns. He sings them a song that he says will make them tap their fingers, and cannot deliver the last verses above the thumping of fists on the desks. He allows them to put on a little play about St Francis taming a wolf, and has to run in and save St Francis after the wolf has felled him and begun to savage him on the classroom floor. Not long before home-time Mr Cotter calls a boy to the front and says that he is very sorry but he will have to give him a taste of the stick. The class falls silent at once. For years at the nuns’ school they have told stories of the canes as sharp as knives that slashed through the trousers of boys at the Brothers’ College. During his last week at St Boniface’s, Clement Killeaton talked for hours about the brothers’ canes that were so much more painful than the nuns’ straps, in the hope that Barbara Keenan would overhear him and wonder sometimes during her year in grade four whether the boy who loved her was bending over touching his toes and waiting for the cruel stick to fall on his trousers. Mr Cotter takes out of his desk a common black leather strap no different from Sister Tarsisius’s or Miss Callaghan’s and tells the boy to hold out his hand and bear up like a man. The class murmurs. The boy at the front explains to Mr Cotter that boys at the Brothers’ are always caned on the pants. Mr Cotter hesitates, then tells the boy to bend over. He brings the strap down with an awkward over-arm stroke. Afterwards the boys are uncertain whether to call this strapping or caning. They watch closely as they pass the windows of other rooms to verify the stories that they have told for so long about the brothers and their canes. Sometimes they hear noises like the swishing of canes, but nobody actually sees a cane. Being the youngest boys in the school they know better than to make fools of themselves by asking older boys. While the question is still being argued, Mr Cotter one morning sees a boy grinning at the class after being strapped on the trousers. Mr Cotter orders the boy to hold out his hand and straps him just as the nuns used to strap boys. After this even the more polite and tractable boys are reckless of what they do to annoy Mr Cotter. Each day as he struggles to teach them they misbehave more outrageously. The only time when he holds their attention for more than a few minutes is around ten o’clock in the morning. The autumn frosts have come early to Bassett, and Mr Cotter tells the boys that they need exercise for the body as well as food for the mind. Half-way through the morning arithmetic lesson he stops suddenly and says – down to Fairbairn Street and back. Forty boys leap from their seats and rush for the narrow door, grunting and squealing and dragging at the clothes of those ahead. Some who sit in distant corners of the room spring like deer across the tops of desks, scattering exercise books and pens as they go. A struggling pack forms in the narrow doorway. Boys kick and punch to force a way through. Every morning two or three tumble down the steep steps to the gravel, but they pick themselves up and join in the race to the Fairbairn Street fence at the opposite end of the playground. Clement Killeaton, who feels sorry for his teacher and only misbehaves when he finds himself in danger of being called Sir Cotter’s pet, sits half-way across the room from the door and tries every day to win the long race to Fairbairn Street and back. Day after day he makes a long run from the middle of the field but the finishing line is too close, and he is never better than fourth or fifth. One morning Mr Cotter warns the grade to prepare for their term tests. The boys squawk and yelp and pretend to be terrified. Some boys boo softly. Someone else says – we’ll report you to the Head Brother sir. Clement is no more interested in the tests than the other boys. After the first day of tests Mr Cotter pins to the notice board a list showing every boy’s name and his marks in every subject tested so far. Beside it is another list showing each boy’s total marks to date. The second list is arranged in order of merit. It shows that Killeaton C. lies in second place, five marks behind the leader. The other boys take no notice of the marks, but Clement draws on the back cover of an exercise book diagrams showing the positions of the boys after every test, as if each test was a furlong post in a long race. He is fifth after Arithmetic, third after Spelling and Dictation, and second after Composition. He sees himself coming from behind to threaten the leaders as the field enters the back straight. Next day the boys have tests in Reading, Poetry, and Grammar, and that afternoon Killeaton takes a narrow lead. On the third day there are tests in History and Art. Clement deliberately does not answer several questions in History because he wants to drop back behind the leaders as the field enters the home straight and then to come again with a late run near the post when the last test, Geography, is given. For the test in Art Mr Cotter tells the boys to draw in pastels Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Clement has never been able to draw realistic human figures. He draws Our Lady standing on the mast of a ship with stars in her hands and rays of light shining from her robes. Some of the boys around him catch sight of the absurd squat figure like a stuffed bird with a doll’s face perched on a mast like a telegraph pole, and begin to laugh. Killeaton smiles too because he is ashamed of not being able to draw. Mr Cotter comes down to Killeaton’s desk to see what the trouble is. He turns white with anger and says – I hope you little devils know who it is you’re laughing at. He snatches the pastel book from Clement and says – I’ll mark your art as it is now Killeaton. Next morning Clement finds himself in third place, twelve marks behind the leader. He checks every answer on his Geography paper, crouched stiffly like a jockey in his desk. He takes heart from the fact that Geography is his best subject, and that he can recall the name of nearly every capital city and river and mountain range that he has ever learned about or looked at in his atlas. That afternoon Mr Cotter pins on the board the marks for Geography. He points out that Killeaton’s mark of 100 is the only hundred that any boy has scored in all the subjects tested. Then Mr Cotter sits down to add up the total marks. The boys chatter and laugh among themselves. Killeaton sits waiting for the numbers to be hauled up over the judge’s box on a crowded racecourse. Mr Cotter says – Michael Maggs is your dux chaps, and walks briskly down to Maggs’s desk to shake the embarrassed boy by the hand. Then the teacher says – Maggs won by only two marks from Killeaton who almost caught him at the finish. Clement realises that no one but himself will know the true story of his great finish and decides that perhaps the best way to run a race is to lead all the way and go further ahead the further the race goes on.