Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  “I can tell you now: Peter Pan’ll win it. Peter Pan’ll win it!” So said Jim Carroll during his commentary on a certain Melbourne Cup when the field had only just turned into the straight. And Peter Pan won.

  “I told you all. I told you weeks ago he wasn’t a stayer.” So said Jim Carroll to his listeners one afternoon when a field of horses was in the straight and when a race-caller of today would not dare to do other than report the positions of the leading few but when Jim Carroll chose to report that the favourite was dropping back through the field, just as Jim himself had predicted.

  Jim Carroll’s best comment so impressed the solitary boy who later became my favourite uncle, and afterwards so impressed the solitary boy who later became his favourite nephew, that he and I would often look for excuses to come out with the comment. On many a Saturday morning in the late 1950s, when I lived with my parents in a suburb of Melbourne, after my uncle had driven during the Friday afternoon from the western district to my parents’ house and had gone out, as the expression was, with his girlfriend on the Friday evening and had arranged with her to go out on the Saturday evening, he and I would set out for the races together, discussing the chances of horse after horse. It had for long been a game with us for one to say that a certain horse should run well, given that it was closely related to some or another outstanding horse. The other would then counter this prediction with the words that my uncle had remembered for nearly thirty years from the afternoon when Jim Carroll, while discussing the entrants in a forthcoming race, had said to his listeners, “We all know this horse is closely related to a champion, but Boy Charlton had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself!”

  My youngest uncle throughout his life observed birds. Whenever I remember him nowadays, thirty years after his death, I tend not to see any image of him but to hear his voice in my mind while he tells me about some or another bird, the image of which appears in my mind where the image of my uncle might have been expected to appear. The bird in question is sometimes one or another of the striped quail-chicks that my uncle hunted down one day in a paddock not far inland from the farm where he had spent his earliest years and still in sight of the cliffs that stood above the ocean. We did not see the mother-bird, but she had seen us and had sounded a warning call to her chicks. My uncle had recognised the call. He told me to stand still. He whispered to me that seven or eight quail-chicks were likely to be hiding near us. The grass was only ankle-high, but I could see no birds. After perhaps two minutes the mother-bird, still hidden, sounded a different call. From place after place around my feet a tiny, striped quail-chick began to run towards the place whence the mother-bird had called. I understood that the chicks were running, but seen from above their movement was so fluent that each bird might have been a tiny, striped toy propelled by clockwork.

  My uncle surprised me by chasing after the chicks. He caught two by flinging his hat over them. Then he imprisoned the chicks in a billy-can beneath a ball of crumpled newspaper. He told me he would give the chicks to a family he knew in the city further along the coast. The family had aviaries in their backyard. He mentioned a surname. I understood that the wife was a cousin of my uncle, or it may have been a second cousin.

  Or, the image in my mind connected with my uncle is an image of the white-fronted chat, epthianura albifrons. My uncle had led me to a nest of a pair of chats in the summer of my last year at school. The nest was in a clump of rushes no higher than my hips. For most of my childhood, I had thought of the nests of birds as being among the many things that I was not at liberty to inspect, most of them being in treetops or dense foliage or on cliff-tops. I got a keen satisfaction from my looking down at the four speckled eggs in the tiny cup of woven grass in the clump of rushes. The chats’ nest was at the edge of a swampy area, five kilometres from the swampy area mentioned earlier in connection with my uncle but still within sound of the Southern Ocean.

  My uncle explained to me on that day of clear sky, when the sun was hot but when a cool breeze blew from the nearby sea, that the chat was a bird of the inland; he had seen white-fronted chats on saltbush plains in the far north of South Australia. The few chats in his own paddocks lived on the uttermost boundary of the species’ habitable territory, although the birds nesting in the rushes did not know this, of course. Those birds would live and die as though their own small territory was surrounded on every side by boundless grasslands. The female hatching her eggs in the rushes, if she could have had knowledge of such things, would have looked from her nest at any hour of the day towards the sandstone cliffs where none of her kind could have survived; she would have heard on most days and nights the sounds of the waves of the Southern Ocean, which was more vast than any continent of land and which sustained many kinds of bird but would have been death to her own kind. And yet, nothing that the bird or her mate saw or heard would have altered in the least their way of life. Nearly every day, their feathers were ruffled by winds from the ocean, but the birds went on living as though no ocean had ever existed.

  My uncle told me that a common name for the white-fronted chat was nun, which name had been prompted by the bird’s white face and throat and by the contrasting black of the head and shoulders and breast. And yet, the bird that most resembled a nun was the male; the female was mostly grey-brown.

  When my uncle was past forty years of age, and when the last of the young women that he had courted during the previous ten years had become married to some or another farmer or grazier, he sold the farm where he had lived alone for ten years with a distant view of cliffs along the coast. He gave as his reason for selling the farm that he was obliged to care for his widowed mother and for his three surviving unmarried sisters. These four female persons lived in a spacious sandstone house in the coastal city mentioned often in this piece of fiction. My uncle found work with a firm of stock and station agents and moved with his few belongings into a one-roomed, cream-painted weatherboard bungalow set among fruit-trees in the large backyard of the house where his mother and his sisters lived. My uncle would never draw the curtains across the large window that opened from his bungalow onto the garden. On most evenings, while he lay on his single bed and read the Weekly Times or the Bulletin or the Catholic Advocate, the window was crowded with moths and other insects and with the spiders that preyed on them. During the warm months of the year, when my uncle left the window always ajar, the insects passed freely through it, and two or three large huntsman spiders prowled the ceiling at all hours.

  My uncle had kept the racebook from every one of the many race-meetings that he had attended. He read often from his collection, which he liked to call his Books of Wisdom or, sometimes, his Books of Lamentations, but he was an untidy man and had never arranged his collection in order. Some of the books were in shoeboxes in his wardrobe; others were in cardboard cartons under his bed. One day, a few months after he had moved to the bungalow, his youngest sister decided to tidy her brother’s bungalow while he was at work and took away and burned most of the cartons and their contents.

  The woman mentioned in the previous sentence will be mentioned again several times in this piece of fiction under the title of my youngest aunt. She was four years older than my youngest uncle and was the youngest of his sisters. She was in her twenty-third year when I was conceived. Four months before my conception, she had become a postulant of an order of nuns that had been founded in Ireland.

  During the year before my conception, my parents were presumably courting and, in due course, marrying, honeymooning, and setting up house together, although I have never learned precisely where or when they carried out these enterprises. During the same year, a so-called mission took place in the remote Catholic parish beside the Southern Ocean where my youngest aunt and her siblings attended church every Sunday. A so-called mission took place every third or fourth year in many a parish of the Catholic Church from long before my birth until at least my twentieth year, when I ceased to be interested in such matters. A so-called mission was usually cond
ucted for two weeks by two priests from one or another of three or four religious orders of priests whose special work was the conducting of missions. The two priests would have prepared for the mission for several weeks beforehand, praying and looking into their hearts for guidance and writing notes for the many sermons that they would preach during the two weeks of the mission, the purpose of which was to revive the faith and the religious ardour of the parishioners, who were presumed to have become lukewarm and complacent during the previous few years. During the two weeks of a mission, a sermon and a prayer-service took place every evening in the parish-church. Each day, the two mission-priests visited homes throughout the parish and urged people to attend the prayer-services and so to rekindle their faith.

  My youngest aunt would never have been lukewarm or complacent in the matter of her religion. What seemingly happened to her during the year before I was conceived was that her usual religious ardour developed apace. At some time after the mission had been conducted in her parish, she decided, so it seems, that she had a so-called religious vocation. She then applied to become a postulant of an order of teaching nuns. She could have had no hope of training as a teacher, given that she had left school at fourteen and had worked thereafter at housekeeping at her father’s dairy farm. However, the order that my youngest aunt applied to join included not only teaching nuns but so-called lay-nuns. The lay-nuns underwent the same spiritual training, so called, that the teaching nuns underwent and took the same vows that the teaching nuns took, but whereas the teaching nuns worked by day in schools as teachers, the lay-nuns were mostly confined to their respective convents, where they cooked and washed up and laundered and generally kept house for their teaching sisters.

  If I were to get up now from the desk where I sit writing these words, and if I were to walk out of this house and up the driveway to the street in front of the house, and if I were to look to the south, I would see in the middle distance, on the highest hill in this district, the largest building in this district of unremarkable suburbs. The building now serves as a so-called centre for so-called aged persons, but when my wife and I first arrived in this district forty years ago, and for some years afterwards, the building was a convent occupied by numerous teaching nuns and postulants and, probably, by a few lay-nuns. The building is of three storeys, and persons looking out from certain windows on the uppermost storey would see, beyond the furthest suburbs, the mostly level grassy countryside north-west of Melbourne with the forested slopes of Mount Macedon in the distance. If my youngest aunt had looked out from one or another third-storey window during the year and more while she lived in the building as a postulant, she would have seen far more than I had hoped to see if only I could have looked out from an upper window of the convent of two storeys mentioned previously in this work of fiction.

  I have for long hoped that my youngest aunt looked out from one or another second- or third-storey window on the day when she left the convent in order to return to her father’s house beside the Southern Ocean, there to take up again her work as a housekeeper. If my aunt had so looked out on that day, she might have been better able to comprehend and afterwards to speak about or even to write about a certain spectacle than many a newspaper-reporter who afterwards used stock-phrases to report what had come to him as hearsay.

  “On that day it appeared that the whole state was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Seventy-one lives were lost.” The previous sentences are from a report of a royal commission that followed the bushfires of January, 1939, in the state of Victoria. The day when the fires were at their worst was known afterwards as Black Friday. By chance, it was the day when my youngest aunt left the convent that would have overlooked, among much else, the paddock whereon would be laid down fifteen years later a certain street beside which would be built twelve years later again the house in which my aunt’s oldest nephew would live for at least forty years and would write books of fiction, one of the last of which would include a passage in which the narrator, who was wholly lacking in imagination, would report mere details in the hope that fiction truly was, as someone had once claimed, the art of suggestion and that some at least of his readers might intuit or divine or suppose, if not imagine, some little of what his aunt had seen or felt on the day when she left the convent where she had hoped to live for the rest of her life.

  My youngest aunt may well have had a so-called vocation to the religious life. She left the convent not because she lacked the will to stay there but because she was beginning, even in her twenties, to be afflicted by the muscular or nervous ailment that afflicted three of my father’s five sisters and obliged each of the three to spend her last years in a wheel-chair or a bed. My youngest aunt outlived all her sisters by many years, but I have never been able to make out the handwriting in either of the two letters that she sent me during the 1980s, each of which letter was a reply to a short letter that I had sent in order to resume negotiations, as it were, with my father’s surviving siblings after the publication of my early books of fiction had caused an estrangement between myself and them.

  Even if my youngest aunt had looked out from an upper window on the day when she left the convent, she surely had more on her mind than would have allowed her to look directly westwards through the smoke and the wind-blown cinders and to hope that her only sister-in-law was safe and well. The sister-in-law, who was also a step-cousin of my aunt, was the wife of my aunt’s oldest brother. The husband and the wife lived in a room in a boarding-house in a northern suburb of Melbourne, and the wife, who was only eighteen years of age, was expecting to give birth within a few weeks to their first child, who would be the first niece or nephew of the young woman who was leaving the convent.

  During the fifty-six years from the time when my mother and I were first able to talk to one another until the year when she died, my mother reported to me only two incidents from the five years between the time when she first met the man who later became her husband and my father and the time when she and I were first able to talk to one another. One of the two incidents was my bawling when I first saw the ocean. The other incident was my mother’s fearing during most of Black Friday that the widespread fires would reach the northern suburbs of Melbourne, that the weatherboard boarding-house where she lived with her husband would be burned to the ground, and that she would die before she could give birth to her first child.

  I seldom saw my youngest uncle during the first years after I had left school. I had come to believe that his being still a devout Catholic and my no longer being so would have caused trouble between us. But later, in the early 1960s, I began to think of my youngest uncle as a person who might be able to get me out of the trouble that I had fallen into.

  I could not have brought myself to confide in my uncle. I wanted only to see him again—to watch from close at hand his bachelor’s way of life. He was still working as a stock and station agent, but he had leased a paddock in the coastal district where he had grown up, and he grazed young cattle there and inspected them every few days. I wanted, during the early 1960s, to draw strength from watching my uncle tramp alone across his paddock of a late afternoon when the wind blew from the sea. I wanted to draw strength from my uncle because I seemed to myself weak.

  In the early 1960s, when I was in my early twenties and my youngest uncle was in his early forties, we were both of us bachelors. He was what was called in those years a confirmed bachelor. I had had hardly any dealings with young female persons and I seemed to lack the skills that enabled most other young men of my age to acquire steady girlfriends or even fiancées and wives. Sometimes I would spend every evening for week after week alone, more or less reconciled to my bachelorhood, while I read or tried to write poetry or prose fiction. At other times, I would resolve to change my way of life. I would prepare a detailed plan for approaching some or another young woman at my place of work, even preparing in advance the topics that I would raise in order to promote conversation between her and me. Then, either I
would fear to speak to the young woman or I would overhear her talking to a workmate and would decide that she and I surely had no common interests. After each such event, I would suppose that I was by nature intended to live as my youngest uncle lived. I would then try to console myself for having been born to bachelorhood as I supposed my bachelor-uncle must sometimes have consoled himself.

  I most commonly consoled myself by foreseeing (not imagining) a sequence of events from twenty years into the future. Never having married, I could afford to own a racehorse. On a certain cold and cloudy day, my horse, which usually raced in country districts, contested a race in Melbourne. My horse was at long odds in the betting, but its trainer had advised me to back it. Something urged me to bet several times my usual amount on the horse. If the horse had won, I would have collected the equivalent of a major prize in a lottery. In fact, the horse was narrowly beaten. After the race, and while I stood alone with the horse’s trainer at the second placegetter’s stall, I happened to glance towards the adjoining stall, where the numerous part-owners of the winner were hugging and kissing and crying out. One of the part-owners, a married woman, had been, many years before, one of the young women mentioned in the previous paragraph. As soon as I had learned this, I took care to avoid meeting the gaze of the married woman, although I did not turn my face away from her. I looked at my horse and then talked with my jockey and my trainer, keeping on my face an expression such as would tell the married woman, if only she had recognised me and had surmised that I was a bachelor, that I had for long been reconciled to my bachelorhood and that my having become thus reconciled enabled me the more easily to endure such misfortunes as that which her own racehorse had inflicted on me a little while before.