The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  And while he stood there Death observed him. He possessed a short, muscular stature and his face was ugly, his thick dark lips hanging open loosely with a kind of stupid vacancy. Where his right eye had been, inquisitive flies probed the rawness of the socket. But the Lord of Death was not recruiting him for his looks, but for the strength of his intuitions.

  How was he to go forward? was the question that held him. How might such a place as this be entered? How did one navigate upon it without rivers to navigate by? Where might one go if one did venture into it? It was just a feeling, but he was sure the wharf on which he stood could not be the end of his journey. There was more, he knew.

  While he stood there, observed by Death, pondering the way forward, all around him exhausted travellers were lying down and dying. The sight of the sea seemed to convince them they had reached the end. Some walked into the waves with their children in their arms and didn’t look right or left or alter their expressions as the water closed over their heads. They were glad the tortures of the journey were finished. They had, indeed, foreseen no other destination for themselves than death. They were content to know their bones would lie close to the soil in which the bones of their ancestors lay.

  The port was Amoy and the date, according to the new calendar, was 1848. The Lord of Death assumed the disguise of a Western devil by the name of Captain Larkins, and in this manifestation she strolled over and stood next to the boy. Moored to the leeward side of the wharf was the Captain’s ship, the Nimrod, which it was his intention to fill with a living cargo of recruits from the Middle Kingdom. It was a unique venture, for his contract was to supply the pastoralists of the British colony of New South Wales with indentured labour; a plan certain to have far-reaching consequences for everyone concerned.

  Standing beside the boy the Captain gazed upon the sparkling swell. What do you see, young man? he enquired pleasantly.

  I see the hide of a sleeping dragon, the awed boy answered without hesitation.

  And what do you desire from the dragon?

  I desire to be a rich man like you, sir.

  That is an easy matter to put in order, replied the Captain. All you need do is to forsake the ways of the Middle Kingdom and sail with me and my crew on the good ship Nimrod, yonder, to the colony of New South Wales, and you shall never know poverty again.

  The boy looked at the ship. So that is how it is done? he said, seeing the sailors readying the white sails. But will the dragon not object to carrying us on its back?

  Indeed, the Captain said sadly, remembering the good friends he had lost at sea over the years, he may well object. But then again, he may bear us safely to our destination. No one can foretell the moods of the dragon. He turned to the boy, Will you take the risk of being devoured by the dragon and sail with us?

  I am ready, the boy answered.

  At this the Captain produced a form of indenture from one of the large side pockets of his blue jacket and he led the boy to the gangplank, where there stood a writing table with quills and ink laid out. First, the Captain said, we must have the permission of your parents.

  I have no parents, the boy replied sourly.

  No parents, Captain Larkins wrote neatly in the space on the form for ‘parents’ permission’. And what about ancestors? he enquired with silky good humor. Can a gentleman of the Middle Kingdom willingly forsake his ancestors, forever?

  I have no ancestors either, the boy said, his good eye flashing with truculence and a note of contempt in his voice.

  There’s not much point in being Chinese if you’ve no ancestors, is there? the Captain observed sympathetically. You are better off being something else. No ancestors, he noted on the form, though there was in fact no official space for such a piece of information as this. No ancient deaths, at any rate, he said cheerfully, trailing along clinging to your shirt and holding you back. He smiled, You will find it an advantage in New South Wales. There is one further question. What is your name?

  The Captain and the boy looked into each other’s eyes.

  There’s no need for you to say it if it distresses you, the Captain was quick to offer, by this time sensitive to the boy’s uneasiness with these questions of identity. There’s nothing to be ashamed of where I come from in not having a name to call your own.

  There are plenty of people in New South Wales with new names. He opened his arms encouragingly and grinned, Don’t be downcast! It’s to be a new start. A vita nuova. The Italian poet first saw ‘the glorious lady of his mind’ at the age of ten. The auspices are with you. Jack’s as good as his master there, you’ll see.

  The Captain became serious and considered him gravely. But we must be careful in this. A person’s name is an important feature of their character. One is known by one’s name. We can’t call you Dante. Your nose isn’t right. And a name has to be right. It won’t stick if it’s not right. It will come adrift when you are most in need of it and leave you wallowing in the doldrums while your more tenaciously named rivals progress. A good name is essential. Our bodies are buried in peace, but our names live forever. Is that not so? the Captain asked rhetorically, adjusting the text of the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus to the occasion, as if there were something of the liberty of a poet in him.

  In order to signify the solemnity of the moment, he paused for a considerable time. To be renamed is to be reborn, he said at last. I shall call you Feng, the Phoenix. Is that not a fine name for one who is reborn?

  Feng was moved by gratitude. He felt the name fall about his shoulders and clothe him with identity. He thanked the Captain and said he would never forget the gift.

  Well, anyway, Larkins responded gruffly, not unmoved himself by the sincerity of the boy’s thanks. A man who is going to be rich needs a name with a bit of mythology in it. And in the place on the form for the name of the indentured party he wrote, Feng the first of his line.

  Despite her ancient grip on her sons, China could not withstand the departure of Feng. He shed her as naturally as the awakening serpent sheds its former skin when it is touched by the warmth of the spring sunshine. He slipped silently away from her shores and did not look back, for he had left nothing behind. Ten thousand years of China’s history had bequeathed him nothing. He had made his bargain. He held in his hand the twelve silver dollars that had been paid for his Chinese soul. He was no longer a man of the Middle Kingdom, but was a Western devil now, like the Captain on whose ship he had taken passage.

  ‘Travel is a good thing; it stimulates the imagination. Everything else is a snare and a delusion.’ So wrote the great French novelist and so it seemed to be to Feng and the other one hundred and nineteen indentured men and boys on the Nimrod; so it seemed also to Captain Larkins and to his sailors, as their ship feathered southward through transparent seas.

  They rode high on the curving bosom of the swell, a small black ship skimming the outer membrane of an inward-plunging universe. Feng hung over the side and gazed with rapture into the crystal sphere that drifted beneath. And when he had forgotten the existence of land, and that there was to be a destination to this voyaging, in the middle of a starlit night, with no wind stirring the sails and the ship lifting and falling on the slumbering ocean, her copper-sheathed keel hanging suspended in the silvery light above six kilometres of clear tropical water, Feng started awake with the terrible pull of the deep within him. It was the voice of the dragon speaking. On the deck lay the sleeping figures of his companions. He heard their groans and pitied them, for he saw that he and they were merely human beings.

  This should have been a warning to him of what was to come. But he soon forgot. Once the journey ended, it was as if it had never been.

  At seven o’clock on the morning of 8 December 1848 the Nimrod docked at the Geelong wharf in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, and Feng said goodbye to Captain Larkins. It was a fine summer day and the settlement looked cheerful and promising.

  Feng was the first indentured man to step ashore. After a consideration had bee
n exchanged with the Captain, an allowance being made for the missing eye, Feng’s new master took him to his property, Ballarat Station, situated in the middle of this sheepman’s paradise.

  Feng cut off his cue and threw away his rag and, with his twelve silver dollars, he bought from his master’s store a red woollen shirt, a pair of moleskin breeches, tan English boots and a broad-brimmed cabbage tree hat with a blue ribbon fluttering from its crown. And when he was got up in this outfit his master gave him an axe and a sugar bag of stores, and he sent him off with two dogs and four thousand sheep.

  In an Arcadian grove on the edge of the plain, Feng found a likely spot and there, according to the fashion of the times, he camped while he felled a mighty redgum and built a one-roomed dwelling for himself from split slabs and bark. It was not many months into 1849 before he had become so accustomed to the uneventful routine of shepherding on the peaceful downs of Ballarat that Feng found it very difficult to recall the details of any other life. With his new name and his new clothes and his new country, he knew he ought to be content. A righteous man, he saw, might live well and decently in this society by the simple code of fallen Adam, a code he had been willing to adopt. Why then, he asked himself as he stood in the entrance to his hut one wintry morning as the sun was rising over the plain, should he feel this continuous niggling discontent? It wasn’t even as if he was lonely. For he had made two firm friends, both shepherds and like himself in more than that.

  Dorset, the younger of the two, rode a lively chestnut thoroughbred and wore a hunting pink riding coat, which had been fashioned for his shoulders by a tailor in London’s Saville Row. His elegant breeches were made of velvety buckskin, and his boots had been stitched on his own last by Prince Albert’s bootmaker. Though a shepherd by trade these days, Dorset was a fine gentleman to see. On his head he wore a black box hat and in his gloved hand he carried a plaited quirt.

  Patrick Nunan, however, who hitched a ride on Dorset’s horse, sitting double on the chestnut’s rump with his long arms clamped around the red coat and his deeply recessed eyes twinkling with fear and amazement from within his wild orange hair and bushy-beard, was not to be mistaken by anyone for a gentleman. Patrick was a man of the people.

  In tandem on Dorset’s horse, these two galloped over from their huts every Saturday night and sat at Feng’s table on blocks of redgum and played euchre and talked of their ambitions and their dreams by the yellow light of a tallow wick until it was breaking day and time again to go shepherding.’

  Feng boiled a joint and baked fresh bread and built up the fire for the occasion, and Patrick regularly managed a half pint of rum. And on this liberality their discontents were dispelled and they grew gentle and gracious and generous with each other. At times, between the cards, they spoke of their pasts. Or Dorset did, for he liked to tell a story more than the others. He was fifteen years of age, he claimed, and had been taken from the side of his murdered mother at Broken Bay at the age of three on the twenty-second of June 1837, the very year her gracious majesty Victoria was crowned the Queen of England. And he would add to this, God bless her. As a curiosity from the ends of the earth, he was shipped to England that same year, where he lived in opulent splendour with a great and whimsical duke until he was fourteen and the duke died suddenly. The dead duke’s son was not whimsical but determined to be a politician, and he shipped Dorset and his chestnut horse back to Australia. So here I am lads! He spoke English with the refined accents of an aristocrat and had been the intimate of many notable personages of London society.

  As with Feng, Dorset possessed only one name. Which seemed to be a common condition among those who had become severed from their tribes. He sprang from a proud nation, he claimed, and quite as ancient as the Han. A nation whose unbroken filial piety and veneration of ancestors had never been surpassed, he asserted, for the elaborate purity of its pervading ritual. But I, too, my dearest Feng, have joined the devils, as you see. And am I not as free a man as you are yourself? Deny me that if you dare! I challenge you! But Feng declined the invitation, for he saw how Dorset cherished his freedom as dearly as his benighted brothers and sisters cherished their humbler places among the fast vanishing clans.

  Patrick Nunan said less and listened more than Dorset. He was forty-two years of age. An old man, but no less free than Dorset for all that, according to his own sketchy account of it. He would say little more than that he had been born at Bertraghboy Bay on the rainswept Atlantic coast of Ireland. Though he did talk on occasions, it was often to himself. And frequently with a suddenness and a sharpness that disquieted his two friends. He had spent a good deal of his life as a solitary shepherd. And this, it appeared, had startled him into a kind of soothsaying for which he was not entirely responsible. One evening, with an unexpected clarity that suggested another life way back beyond the shepherding, a life in his youth, he said, I have a daughter with the nuns in Melbourne. It was my dream to take her back to Ireland. There is something in my past, however, which is an impediment to this. I will not discuss it with you. After which, angrily flicking the cards face up onto the table one after the other, he relapsed into his mumbling predictions of disaster.

  They communicated in a language of their own invention. They dug about in likely corners of Gaelic and Fukienese and English for this and that part of speech, and constructed a lingo comprehensible only to themselves. They waved their arms a good deal and grimaced elaborately whenever called upon to argue a fine point of philosophy or metaphysics, readily enlisting the aid of twigs and leaves and potato peelings and bits of wool, and whatever else came to hand, and arranging these in suggestive configurations on the table, the cards forgotten while they admired the eloquence of the illustration. Delicately one might reach forward and realign a twig a tiny, but significant, fraction. Which action was certain to draw either an exclamation of assent or disagreement from the others, and the argument would either rest there or flare again. They became masters of linguistic make-do, their discourse rose upon it as it was elaborated, and they enjoyed between themselves friendship and understanding and harmony.

  Until the eighth of May 1850.

  It was to be one of those days when certain lines of evolution in human affairs, lines hidden beneath the everyday and which have their origins in events aeons past, converge and collide. We are not speaking here of Armageddon, or even of Gettysburg or Waterloo (nor of even so modest a show as Bakery Hill) but of a brief shower of sparks and a little debris. Nothing for history books. Two men died, were killed, in fact, by other men; a few others seemed to understand something about themselves which they had not understood before, and one was deflected from his station toward a destiny greater than he might otherwise have supposed himself fitted for.

  Monday the eighth of May 1850, then, on the pastoral holding of Ballarat, in the province of Port Phillip, in a society predicated upon the inseparable concepts of dispossession and punishment. The facts are important. The shaping spirit of the story is not my own.

  Though there was no one there to witness it, the first sign appeared early that morning. The frost was on the grass when Patrick opened the hurdles and let out his flock. As he watched the sheep streaming across the paddock, an involuntary soothsaying shout rose in his throat and he cried out. The Day of the Apparition of Saint Michael the Archangel! It was.

  Winter had arrived early in the district. By noon the temperature had risen no more than two thin degrees above freezing, and a veil of high grey cloud had covered the sun. A south-westerly, bringing freezing air from the Antarctic oceans, had begun to blow across the plain. It was a day when everyone who could find an excuse for doing so remained indoors.

  It was not possible to get out of the wind altogether, but Feng found some shelter from it among the thicket of wattles in the lee of a stony gully. He sent the dogs round the sheep and lit a fire and he wrapped himself in his cloak, a dismally inadequate garment he’d sewn together from sugar bags. The rising gale thrashed among the clacking sticks a
bove his head, and flurries of sleety rain stung his cheeks and sent shivering spasms through to his bones. He lay on his side and curled up close to the fire, and he hugged himself and closed his eyes against the driven sparks and thought of his hut and his hearth and his friends.

  The wind grew stronger as the day wore on, until it was moaning and howling through the gullies and shaking and rattling the wattle scrub, as if the earth were trying to shake something loose from its hide. Ash and smoke swirled around the sleeping form of Feng beside his fire. He groaned and his body twitched as dreams swept through him.

  A tall, full-bearded Koorie warrior stepped out of the trees. He held his spears lightly, their shafts resting on the gravel. He examined the sleeping figure of the one-eyed boy from the Middle Kingdom wrapped in sugar bags. The Koorie did not stay long. As he turned to leave, his silvery-grey cloak of possum skins swirled out around him and was caught by the wind like a sail.

  Slowly, Feng opened his eyes. He did not know where he was. He stared in puzzlement at the circle of cold white ash where his fire had been. A feeling he could not put a name to told him that while he’d slept the world had changed. On the far side of the remains of his fire, no more than a metre from him, there stood the iron-shod hooves of a horse. As he realised what he was looking at, the hooves stirred restlessly, shifting the little stones about. Feng raised his head.

  A dozen horsemen were ranged around him, their coats snapping in the wind, their uneasy mounts tossing their heads and snorting and laying back their ears, frightened by the thing that moved on the ground before them.