Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Clement’s parents encourage him to read

  When the first-term tests are over, Clement takes home his report and tells his father proudly how he gave the dux of the class Michael Maggs a long start from the turn into the straight and only just failed to catch him. Augustine says – I’m very disappointed to hear that my son couldn’t even beat a field of weak Bassett hacks. He tells Clement to find out what Maggs’s father does for a living, and supposes that he is a meek little man behind the counter of a shop with nothing better to do at night than stand over his son and drill his homework into him. Augustine takes Clement to the corner of the lounge-room and stands him in front of the bookcase, resting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He says – I’m sorry to say I’ve never really had the time or money to build up a proper collection of books – but now that you’re at a college you should be ready to read some of these and get some benefit from them – there’s even a few books here that I’ll bet you wouldn’t find in your precious Maggs’s house – when I was a boy I used to sit up till all hours in the kitchen at Kurringbar by the light of a kerosene lamp with my nose stuck in any book I could lay my hands on – you can pick out anything here and read it provided you show it to me first to make sure it’s suitable. Clement knows the titles of his father’s books almost without looking – Leach’s Australian Birds, Man-Shy, Dusty – the Story of a Dog, Lasseter’s Last Ride, The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns, Fair Girls and Grey Horses – Ballads by Will Ogilvie, The Arabian Nights Entertainment, Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary, On Our Selection, Our New Selection, Three Plays by Sir Arthur Pinero, The Children of the Pool and other stories by Arthur Machen, Victorian Government Handbook of Meat Inspection (with pictures inside of cows and bullocks marked with dotted lines), Mendelism (with coloured pictures of white, black and golden rabbits, sweet peas, and human hands with chubby fingers), a book with the cover missing and with pages of diagrams of different kinds of Japanese and German bombs and instructions for digging air-raid shelters, The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc, J. J. Miller’s Sporting Annual 1947, Coast to Coast an Anthology of Australian Short Stories 1946, half a dozen National Geographic magazines, several dozen Walkabout magazines, more than a hundred consecutive issues of the Australian Journal. Augustine takes down Man-Shy and says – this is probably the best book for a boy to start with – you’re a bit young for some of it perhaps but there’s a good dictionary there for looking up any words you don’t understand. Clement does not remind his father that he has already read the book only a few weeks before. He remembers how he wept all through the last chapter, and sits down to read Man-Shy again. Before he goes to bed he asks his father may he join the junior library in the Town Hall buildings. Augustine asks suspiciously whether any Catholic boys from the Brothers’ College are members of the library. Clement says that he has seen some of the bigger boys changing books there. Augustine says that he can join on condition that he shows every book to his mother or himself before he starts it. The first book that Clement brings home is called Manco the Peruvian Chief. When he has almost finished reading it and is planning to convert his backyard into the landscape of Peru crossed by secret pathways known only to the Incas whose treasure lies concealed at the end of the most formidable of them all, his mother tells his father – I was looking through Clement’s book today and I don’t think it’s suitable for a Catholic – he’d better take it back tomorrow and borrow a Geographic magazine or something harmless. She reads aloud to Augustine – the Indians of that part of the country had been converted by the Spanish priests and were nominally Roman Catholic. But in secret they scoffed at the creed of the priests and went on celebrating the rites of their forefathers. Augustine says – yes I see what you mean, and tells Clement to take the book back the next day.

  Mr Glasscock and Augustine give up beer and betting

  All Saturday morning Augustine stays in his backyard. He catches and handles every young pullet from a pen of about twenty and puts purple rings on the legs of a select few. He explains to his son that he is culling. Clement pretends to be interested, but whenever his father turns his back the boy watches the roosters in the pens where the pullets are being thrown for the first time. As soon as a pullet falls fluttering to the ground a rooster pounces on her and bounces up and down with his beak gripping her neck feathers and his pink bottom pressed against hers. When Mrs Killeaton goes into Bassett Clement wanders through the house wondering whether he will ever have another chance to be alone with another boy or girl now that his father is going to give up going to the races. At lunchtime Clement finds it strange to see a cloth spread over the old blue lino on the table and his father sitting with the paper propped against the tomato sauce bottle. Augustine reads the racing page. He tells his wife that he has marked down five good bets just to see how he would have gone if he had travelled to Melbourne or taken the house-keeping money to the Clare Castle just around the corner where a small S.P. bookmaker bets all day in the bar. Clement wanders outside to the Glasscocks’ fence. Mr Glasscock is hard at work scything the long grass that has grown unchecked in the corners of the Glasscocks’ yard for as long as Clement can remember. Clement goes inside and tells his mother. She warns him not to say anything to the Glasscock boys about their father being home on a Saturday afternoon for the first time for months instead of out drinking. Clement listens with his father to the first race in Melbourne. His mothers says she doesn’t see any harm in the boy taking an occasional interest in racing now that his father has been cured of it for good. Augustine’s selection wins the first race. Augustine says – of course it was favourite but it’s a good healthy way to build up your bank early in the day backing the favourite in the two-year-old race – I’ll put myself down for six pounds to four – I’m winning six pounds already and the next race is the hurdle – I’ll go off under a shady tree somewhere and have a sandwich and a yarn with a mate – a man’s mad to touch the jumping races because the jumping riders all belong to a ring that works out whose turn it is to win. He goes back to his chooks. Clement peeps through the Glasscocks’ fence. A game of cricket has started, with Mr Glasscock and little Nigel versus Gordon and his older brother. Mr Glasscock has opened the batting for his side. Clement leaves the fence and goes on with a game that he has started a few days earlier after bringing home the first book that he has borrowed from the junior library in the Bassett Town Hall. He builds a monastery for a community of monks who do not suspect that as they retreat farther back into the mountains away from the fierce Spanish soldiers, their own countrymen, they are drawing nearer to the secret lost city where the last of the Incas still rules his faithful band of soldiers and his palace filled with wives. Mr Glasscock’s score mounts up. Sometimes he slogs a six into the Killeatons’ backyard and Clement has to toss the ball back. For years the Glasscock boys have had a rule that over the fence is six and out, but today they ignore the rule for fear of annoying their father. Augustine calls Clement inside to tell him that his each-way special in the third race has run a close third at about eight to one so that he has made a profit of two pounds and is now eight pounds ahead on paper. The monks chant their office and enjoy the peace of their garden and the serene ridges of green hills stretching for as far as they can see in every direction. A cry goes up from the Glasscocks. Mr Glasscock has been clean bowled for 128. The boys sympathise with him and point to the rough patch on the pitch that caused the ball to keep unfairly low. They offer to declare a no-ball and to let their father continue his innings, but Mr Glasscock insists on going out and hands the bat to Nigel, who gets a soft easy delivery and lifts it over into the Killeatons’ bamboo patch for six. One of the holiest of the monks builds a little hermitage of his own over the brow of the hill beyond the monastery with a grotto where he plants rose bushes so that Our Lady may rest her feet among the petals. Augustine’s third bet wins at about seven to two, making him twenty-two pounds ahead. He decides to play up his winnings and have a good lash at his last two bets. Nigel is fin
ally caught out by his own captain, Mr Glasscock, who has been invited to field by the opposing captain. Mr Glasscock opens the bowling for his side. The monk can hardly believe his eyes when he sees across the valley the golden walls of the lost city. He sits down out of sight among the trees and tries to decide whether to return to his monastery and help the monks to go away again on another weary search for a spot that is truly remote and secure, or to stay and help the Incas to guard their treasures and their wives during the last few years before the Spanish soldiers finally discover them, which may be even sooner than they expect. Mr Glasscock bowls both boys with fast round-arm yorkers for a total of seventeen runs, then sends them in to bat again, trying for an outright win. Augustine paces up and down the kitchen with his hands to his head because his second-last bet has come home at about five to one. He decides to have twenty pounds each way on his special in the last, and says that he has a good mind to go around to the Clare Castle after all and have at least something on it. His wife says – so that’s how long your promises last. Mr Glasscock’s side wins by an innings and 118 runs. He tells his wife that he’s so hot and thirsty from playing cricket that he’ll just nick around to the Clare Castle for a few bottles. Augustine’s horse runs second in the last race. He listens to the starting prices and works out that he would have won nearly a hundred pounds on the day. He sits for a long time with a pencil and a notebook and the racing page, then says that he honestly doesn’t know how he can live with himself for the rest of the night. Mr Glasscock surprises his family by arriving home before dark. He sits on the back veranda drinking from a bottle and tossing tennis balls at the stumps still standing in the backyard. His sons run to retrieve each ball. Shadows fill the valleys of the Andes. The monk finally goes to plead with the Incas to let him live as one of them for the years that remain before the Spaniards find them. They give him cold lumpy porridge for his evening meal and a wife with scabs in the corners of her mouth and a red rash all down her chest. The monks in the monastery decide that he is lost in the jungle, and do not go searching for him.

  The Master summons Augustine

  After weeks of weather so hot that even Mrs Killeaton, who has spent all her life in northern Victoria, goes around muttering – I’m fed up to the back teeth with this stinking rotten heat, huge black clouds arrive over Bassett from some unlikely quarter further inland. When the first lightning strikes at the town, Clement watches his mother running from room to room hanging clothes over the mirrors and the glass-fronted pictures in the way that her own mother once taught her to keep the bolts of lightning from getting into the house. The boy is still just as frightened of storms as he was when he was little, but his mother no longer lifts him onto her knee and tells him about little children waiting in their shabby leaking houses for parents who will never come home because they have been struck by lightning while they tried to shelter under trees or recites poems until he cries. Now he stays as far away from the windows as possible and asks God to keep the Killeatons’ house safe from the lightning and its walls and roof secure against the rain. His mother reminds him that his father is still not home from work and may be pushing his bike through the storm outside. Clement kneels down in front of the altar in his bedroom and prays – dear God please keep Dad safe and bring him home so we can all go away together to the Western District. The storm passes, and a strange colour spreads across the northern sky. Clement sees it as a kind of orange-red and suggests to his mother that a great fire might have broken out on the far side of Bassett. His mother says that she can’t see anything to make a fuss about. She claims that the colour is the reddish-pink of the soil in the northern country and that it comes from a dust-storm just like hundreds of others that she has seen since she was a little girl in a town north of Bassett. She thinks that she has read somewhere lately that a bad drought has struck up north and that farmers have to stand and watch their land blowing away. Augustine comes home and laughs at Clement for worrying about his father during the storm. Clement makes him look up at the sky. Augustine says that it looks more like an orange-golden colour, that sometimes the light plays funny tricks after a storm, and that the thing in the sky could be the miles of paddocks of wheat away to the north-west, in that part of the Mallee which is the only district of Victoria that he has never really explored, reflected or mixed up somehow in the sunset. After tea the rain starts again and hammers on the Killeatons’ iron roof. Someone knocks at the front door. Augustine walks up the passage, whistling the vague tune that he always uses to hide his uneasiness. The visitor is Stan Riordan, who has never before called at the Killeatons’ house. Stan refuses to come in and says that he has a message for Augustine. Someone has just phoned the Riordans from Melbourne. Augustine has to ring a Melbourne number at nine o’clock on the dot. Augustine looks at the number in Riordan’s notebook and says – I don’t have to write that number down mate – I ought to know it by heart after all these years – it’s the old Master sending for me urgently – there’s something terribly important in the air. Stan offers to drive Augustine back to his house to use the Riordans’ phone. Augustine leaves him standing at the door while he puts on his hat and coat and takes out of his wardrobe his best propelling pencil with the silver cap and the notebook that his wife is not supposed to look into because it contains a record of his bets. Clement is in bed when his father arrives back from the Riordans’ place. The boy sits up in bed and listens through the wall. Augustine reminds his wife that this is the first time in all his years at Bassett that the Master has phoned him, but she does not seem impressed. He says it has cheered him up no end after all his troubles to think that Goodchild is keen to use him as his agent in Bassett. Mrs Killeaton asks him how does he know that Goodchild hasn’t phoned other men in Bassett and told them the same story. Augustine says he has no idea what the name of the horse is and he won’t know until late on Friday night when he phones Melbourne and Goodchild talks to him in code and tells him the name and how much money to put on it. His wife asks him where on earth he can find any money to bet with when he owes every bookmaker in Bassett. He tells her not to worry because he’ll be happy just to square his account with Stan Riordan and let the others whistle for their money. She says she can’t understand all the mumbo-jumbo that goes on over a single race and why Goodchild doesn’t just take all his money to the races and plonk it on the horse and be done with it instead of worrying the life out of men like her husband all over Victoria. Augustine cheerfully explains to her the idea behind S.P. betting. He explains that if Goodchild was stupid enough to take say two thousand pounds to the races and try to put it on a horse, every sticky-beak and gig in the crowd would back the horse too, so that if Goodchild wasn’t killed in the rush he would probably average something like two to one for his money, but if he spreads his two thousand around with his agents and each of them has say a hundred on the horse two minutes before the race starts, and if, while all this is going on, Goodchild is at the racecourse standing under a tree where everyone can see him eating a pie or picking his nose and not taking any interest in the betting or better still throwing away twenty pounds on some other horse in the race, then the price of the horse he really wants to win might drift out to sixes or eights which means of course that his two thousand at starting price odds will return him twelve or even sixteen thousand pounds, provided of course that some agent doesn’t let the team down and phone his bet too early and give some S.P. bookmaker time to ring Melbourne and warn the big S.P. men there who have men waiting outside the course ready to rush inside with big money and lower a horse’s price before the race starts. Mrs Killeaton says she thinks she understands what big betting is all about for the first time in her life and realises why her husband has always kept so quiet about his bets. Augustine does not tell his wife that before leaving Riordans’ that night he told Stan that the best bet of all time would be coming up in a few days and that his boss in town might want two hundred pounds on it, or that Stan Riordan agreed to place the bet himself wi
th another bookmaker and add perhaps another two hundred of his own, and certainly not that he (Augustine) will lie awake for hours every night until the day of the race hoping that Stan will not make his bet too soon and ruin everything.

  Clement says a prayer that has never failed

  One day at school Mr Cotter tells the boys that although they learn their religion from Brother Cosmas it will do them no harm to learn something extra from him. He tells them what they have already heard many times from him – that he has a special devotion to the Immaculate Conception – and that they can forget all he ever teaches them so long as they remember to pray to Our Lady whenever they really need something. He stretches his arms out towards the pale statue of Our Lady on the altar in the corner of the room and says – there she is boys – and I tell you from the bottom of my heart that she’ll never refuse you anything you ask her. The boys are silent. Some faces even show the beginnings of a genuine interest in the strange young man and his special devotion. Then Mr Cotter adds, in his normal teacher’s voice – so long as it’s for the good of your soul of course. The boys relax again, and their faces fall back into their usual slackness. Clement Killeaton believes that he is the only boy still interested when Mr Cotter begins to write on the blackboard the words of the Memorare, the one prayer that will always be answered, and tells the boys to copy it into their books and learn it by heart. As Clement writes – Remember O Most Loving Virgin Mary that never was it known in any age that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was abandoned. Inspired with confidence therefore I fly to thee O Virgin of Virgins my mother. To thee do I come, before thee I stand sinful and sorrowful. Do not O Mother of the Word Incarnate despise my prayers but graciously hear and grant them. Amen , he recites them under his breath as though they were the last words of a race-broadcast shouted hoarsely into a microphone as a bunched field passes the post and rippling outwards in unseen waves across miles of somnolent farmland where women on shady verandas and men alone in bright treeless paddocks and children beneath great solitary pepper trees never suspect what a story of victory won against tremendous odds is passing silently above their heads towards houses perhaps a hundred miles away where people who have placed their trust in horses will hear the end of it all. Before the end of the period Clement has learned the words of the prayer by heart. Lying in bed that night, he whispers certain words and phrases aloud until they suggest the vague movement of indistinctly coloured jackets wheeling aimlessly on the far side of a racecourse before the start of a decisive race. He focuses clearly in his mind first the streets of Bassett in some year to come when Clement Killeaton, the champion long-distance runner of the Brothers’ College, sees again for the first time in many years the girl he once loved at St Boniface’s school and realises that she has heard of his great finishes in mile races and is willing now to let him take her to any quiet shady spot and do whatever he wants to her, then the cold coastal plains of the Western District in the same year when Clement Killeaton, whose father allows him to run his own cattle in the farthest paddocks of his farm, stands watching his own young bull mating with his favourite heifer in a sheltered hollow and realises that he will soon have enough money from the sale of his calves and yearlings to look around for a wife of his own although there are so few Catholics in the district that he may have to choose some Protestant girl who, since she was a small child, has watched bulls and cows mating and played animal games with the boys at the State school and who will want to copy the animals when she and her husband are alone together, and trusts that Our Lady will decide which of the two places will be better for the soul of Clement Killeaton. Until he falls asleep he recites the Memorare with all the fervour he can muster. He does the same every night for a week. Then he learns that his father is planning to have one last bet to get out of the worst of his debts. That night as he prays the prayer that has never yet failed he sees in the last hundred yards of the straight of a racecourse a desperate struggle between two evenly-matched horses and, as first one and then the other head shows in front, alternate glimpses of two landscapes, one a cluster of low hills glinting with quartz in the western sun and marked with intricate patterns of gardens and streets that might yet reveal something that has so far escaped the people who came first to look for gold beneath the soil and stayed to sit behind drawn blinds during long silent afternoons when anything might have happened but nothing did, and the other a sweep of thickly grassed plains, marked only by distant stands of dark-green cypresses and exposed farmhouses and relieved only by a few hollows near the cliffs of an abrupt coastline, that promised so little to the people who settled there that their only hope was to remember in some room overlooking a tract of plain that few others crossed another land where great deeds were done on every hill until something in all that windy expanse told them that even there one day a man might discover why the land where he had lived all his life mattered after all, or of two young women, one who might have kept all her life a face as pure and aloof as any saint’s on a holy picture but was persuaded at last to learn a little of what pagans did alone together, and the other who might have spent all her life playing games that she learned from animals until her husband persuaded her that some games were too wicked for him to enjoy, and leaves the result to Our Lady.