by Alex Miller
What have you found? Feng asked, leaning forward to better see the object which Patrick had picked up from the bottom of Dorset’s half-dug grave.
Patrick crossed himself. Mother of God! he breathed, awed and gazing in wonderment at the thing in the palm of his hand. It is gold! A lump of purest native gold!
Feng reached for the nugget and took it in his hand. The weight of it was unexpected. It pressed upon his palm with a softness in its touch that tugged at him. As if it were the touch of a woman, arousing in him a desire more potent than any he had known before. The gold took him and woke his senses. He did not take the gold. His grief parted, as if grief were a curtain to conceal a vision, a memory, it might have been, a luminous reality beyond the everyday, and he saw his city, Amoy, transformed. And there on the wharf himself and Captain Larkins – as if every moment that has ever been is preserved and continues to exist somewhere, enriched by subsequent events. What do you desire from the dragon? the gilded Captain asked once more.
Perceiving the mesmerised expression on Feng’s face, Patrick leaned over and delicately retrieved the nugget from him. We shall be rich men, laddie, he said, pocketing the gold and resuming his mattocking with a renewed will. It is the good Lord himself who has placed this wealth before us so that poor men may yet have the power to see justice. The rhetoric of Patrick’s vengeance was perfected in the gold.
In the days and weeks that followed they tried the ground all round the lonely spot where Dorset lay, but they could not find a place to put him. Wherever they opened the earth they discovered gold. Dorset’s motherland resisted his interment. She refused to take him back. There was to be no reconciliation between them. She offered the inducement of her gold rather than receive him to her bosom. He had declared himself free and free he would remain.
Meanwhile, he rotted. They could no longer consider moving him in one piece. We’ll let him down where he is, Patrick decided aloud. But they found gold under him too, glowing with the fierce yellow eyes of a wild creature, not more than a handspan beneath their mate. Patrick declared that the bush, with its parrots and its sheep and its mysterious feeling of absence, was volunteering itself at last as a prospect for the serious concerns of civilisation.
The winter went by and the spring came on, and still no solution was found to ‘the problem’ of Dorset, as they soon came to refer to the shabby remains of their friend. By now the junction of the two gullies was knobby with heaps of mullock for acres around, as if the continent here had been provoked to a terrible case of boils. And all the while the little hessian bags of nuggets were added to daily under the hearths of Feng’s and Patrick’s huts.
On each occasion that they struck into the ground afresh, the question hovered over Feng and Patrick as to whether they were still looking for a place to decently dispose of the corpse of their murdered friend, or whether they were simply digging for gold. Dorset was there as a daily reminder of himself, but little by little his red coat became not so much him as a memento for them of a less serious time than the present.
And anyway, he got so dried up and eaten into and fallen apart and dragged this way and that by the wild dogs that it was no longer possible to see a direct resemblance to their mate in the remains. To save what was left of it from an absolute dissolution Feng hung the red coat in the fork of a stringybark one morning. The natural solution had presented itself.
If we cannot let him down then we shall set him up, Patrick declared, retrieving Dorset’s skull from the bed of the gully nearby and placing it on top of the coat. There! They stood back and admired the memorial. We’ll make it official then, Patrick said. And they clasped hands and swore an oath of eternal mateship on the matter. And so the lonely unnamed space where the gullies met became a place, Dorset’s Gully, to which memories might be firmly attached and future references made as to the occurrence of certain facts of history.
Feng and Patrick grew so accustomed to working under the heraldic banner of the red coat and the bleached skull – propped in the fork of the stringybark for the parrots to puzzle over, as if this challenging totem guarded the pockmarked landscape – that it became the preservation of Dorset, rather than his disposal, which grew to be the source of their new anxiety. The ritual objects of skull and cope assumed a sacred and precious quality for them. Indeed, it seemed to Feng and Patrick that good fortune might very well depend upon them.
The friends neglected their shepherding as much as they dared and enjoyed fifteen months winning gold undetected from the rich alluvial gravels of Dorset’s Gully. Then, in August 1851, John Dunlop and James Regan’s find in the White Horse Range nearby was reported in the Geelong Advertiser. The biggest gold rush in the history of the world descended upon Ballarat Station, in what had ceased to be the sheepman’s paradisial province of Port Phillip, in the meantime – indeed on the first of July – and which had become the colony of Victoria. It was not many days before the aptly named Commissioner Armstrong rode up to the camp at Dorset’s Gully at the head of his squad of black troopers and demanded to see Patrick’s and Feng’s licences to dig. The friends agreed the time had come to lift their treasure from their hearths and quit the district.
When the last moment came, it was Feng who voiced their dilemma. We cannot abandon him here, he said, and he fetched Dorset’s skull from the fork of the tree, where wind and rain and the scouring brilliance of the summer sunlight had burnished the bone to a pearly gloss, and from the rotted coat he took the six gilt buttons and carried these relics in a sugar bag to his hut, where he transferred them to the more seemly container of an empty tea box from Ceylon.
Wherever Feng ventured during his life after this, on his journeyings to and from the Southern and Northern hemispheres, he kept the skull and the six gilt buttons from Dorset’s coat close beside him. He guarded these objects so carefully and so possessively, indeed, that his motive for guarding them was taken, by those he most trusted, to be a superstitious dread of losing them, a dread, indeed, of the power these objects must possess to direct his destiny. It was rumoured the box contained the skull of Feng’s first, his earliest known and aboriginal, ancestor. Feng’s true and secret quest in life, it was often claimed by certain of these lieutenants, was to find a place where he might at last inter this bone and erect a fixed shrine to his displaced forbear.
Those of a more cynical turn of mind were inclined merely to observe that, as death was the daily companion of his affairs, the merchant of the living cargo could scarcely have carried a more fitting badge of office than the death’s head.
The blind storyteller hawked and spat confidently, missing the spittoon by a metre or more. He banged his cup on the table beside him and shouted imperiously for tea.
Huang woke and stared about him in terror, certain his house was being overrun by Feng’s bandits from Shanghai.
In the quiet that followed the storyteller’s forthright request for tea, Lang listened to his mother whispering with Yu behind the blue screen. He strained to hear what they were saying. That she had chosen to remain invisible during the telling of the story had distressed and angered him. He felt both afraid and betrayed. For she had knowingly withdrawn the reassurance of her presence from him just when he was to be most in need of it. He was too scared, however, of what had been implied to attempt to interpret just yet the full meaning of her unprecedented action.
He feared, indeed, that she had judged him to be entirely of his great-grandfather’s party. Had she not begun to see him as just such a fearful hybrid? During the telling of the story, that is how he had seen himself. During the telling of the story he had been his great-grandfather, the first Feng, the friend of the inept black tracker and the ape-faced Irishman. It was as if his great-grandfather’s past now resided within his own memory. The skull and the buttons, to be sure, were not a book and a mirror, but they replaced too neatly those ritual objects that he had destroyed to be viewed by him as anything but their intended parallels.
Lang knew himself to have bee
n accused. History had been made to accuse him. It might be possible to fish about in the mud at the bottom of the Qiantang River for the cosmic mirror and, with luck and perseverance, to recover it. But the book was gone forever. Things can return unchanged through water but they cannot return unchanged through fire. Fire transforms everything. His guilt could never be purged by returning what he had stolen. The unravelling of his own destiny, he had been warned, was to lie with the fiction of the skull.
He did not dare to look directly at the blind man, who he knew saw everything. Who he now knew had watched him tear Huang T’ing-chien’s ancient poem from the book and feed it to the flames beside the clacking bamboo forest, just as he had watched Feng rise from the ashes of his fire in the shelter of the wattles on Ballarat Station. To what can we liken human life? Perhaps to a wild swan’s footprints on mud or snow. He would never forget Huang Ting-chien’s question. He wanted to look at the blind man, but instead he looked at his grandfather, whose features were wild and staring and dishevelled, as if his worst old nightmares were about to break cover and play their demonic scenes across the surface of his polished skin.
Lang feared the magic arts of the storyteller, and secretly he envied him his possession of them. What he feared and envied was the blind man’s ability to dwell at will within the past and to rearrange it – as if every moment that has ever been continues to exist somewhere, enriched by subsequent events. He dreaded the consequences of the storyteller’s ability to recover and to reconsider those moments, to offer them up as judgements. What do I desire from the dragon? he had asked himself during the story. And to this question he had replied, with a singular passion, I desire to possess the storyteller’s magic arts myself!
While he drank his tea the blind man kept a curtain drawn across the past. There was no way to see through it. Lang stole a glance at him. A power greater than memory sat smugly behind the face, which shone in the lamplight, the waxed and painted features of a demon in the temple, blindness a shuttered casement preventing those outside from seeing in, blindness a transfiguring cloak, an attribute of the gods, draping his being, a woodenness and a stillness in him like a presence. He was elsewhere. He was absent. He was not with them in the study. He did not see what they saw.
How to invoke his powers? How to pull aside the curtain without his help? Where was the key, the sign, Lang asked himself, that he must learn to read? Or was he to be forever like Dorset, illiterate in the language of what has befallen? Feng might have urged him to aspire to a reading at once. Feng, indeed, might have been his only friend, his alter ego, and have urged him to recast the past for all their sakes. The lieutenant of the Lord of Death in the unimaginable Australian bush. The traveller eternally setting out and returning. The lost Phoenix in the darkness of Hell clutching the skull and the coat buttons of his lost friend! Lang juggled the images, willing them to fall into a revealing configuration like the sticks and potato peelings on Feng’s table, longing for them to become an ideograph, to form a word. But they remained apart, detached, incomprehensible and disconnected. Bits and pieces lacking the linking threads of structure. He could see no further down the track of the story. To enter those indeterminate places, those revealing boundaries between definite locations, which invited his enquiry, was it not enough? What prevented him from seeing as the blind man saw?
A warm night wind gusted through the open casements, lifting the silks and filling the hushed room with a troubled whispering. The old scholar gripped the arms of his chair and called shrilly for Yu to close the casements, his voice thin with panic and enfeeblement.
Lang observed him with a mixture of bewilderment and sadness and disgust. No sooner had the study been closed up than the air began to stink. It was old men and death and the lamp oil and the stench of the unwashed storyteller. Lang watched Yu assist Huang to his feet and together fumble their way unsteadily to the cupboard below the bookshelves.
He watched the old man approach the empty secret compartment, and he felt the massive wound he had inflicted on Huang. The emptiness. The absence of vitality. A literary painter no longer. The struggle now to keep breath in the body.
Cursing Yu and whining with irritation, Huang at last found what he was looking for. In his right hand he clutched a hornbill phial no larger than his thumb. He waited, impatient and fragile, bracing himself against his writing table, while Yu fetched a bowl and filled it with steaming water. The little phial lay in the palm of his trembling hand, translucent in the lamplight, the soft colour of amber, a shape with shoulders and a rounded cap, a glowing figurine; not something from this world, but a relic from another world. A votive offering recovered from a tomb in a remote province, sited there undisturbed for five thousand years in the darkness, lying with the bones among carefully crafted effigies of owls and frogs and lions and phoenixes, among jars and dishes and ceramic vessels incised with mysterious figured signs that pleaded with the powers beyond the grave.
Lang watched Huang unstopper the phial and pour three drops into the bowl. The air in the study was cleansed in a moment with the spring perfume of jasmine blossom. He remembered the honeyeater that had swung from the vine and had screeched at them and flown away that summer evening, its flight direct and dismissive across the garden, and he thought, with astonishment at his own audacity, perhaps we are ourselves those powers beyond the grave, the gods and the demons, to whom the pleas of the ancients were addressed?
All civilised people know there is Heaven and there is Hell and that harmony rules in Heaven and discord rules in Hell, the storyteller shouted.
They looked at him. He directed his gaze to a point above their heads among the shadows in the high corner of the study, and he waited. When he had assured himself of their attention, softly he drew aside the curtain …
The Nimrod stood at anchor off Williamstown among more than forty ships of sail and steam in Hobson’s Bay. Captain Larkins stepped into the waiting cutter and was rowed ashore. As the little boat drew near the busy strand he was gratified to recognise Feng and two companions waiting for him among the crowd. It was no surprise to the Captain to see Feng transformed from a wretched indentured coolie into a gentleman of means, for he carried with him a letter in the side pocket of his blue jacket in which the circumstances of this feat were neatly recounted in all their details.
It took a few minutes for the sailors to pull to the shore. The Captain used his opportunity to study the group that waited for him. Feng, the shortest of the three by a half head, stood between his tall companions. He wore a black frock coat and high collar with a large scarf-necktie and a tall top hat. On his left stood a more modestly dressed man of middle age. All that was visible of this person’s features beneath his low-crowned wide-brimmed hat was the spiky rosette of a startlingly orange beard.
A more interesting figure for the Captain stood on Feng’s right. This was a young woman. She kept still and erect and straight and seemed to wait for his arrival with an intention and a purpose. She was so concentrated, indeed, she must have been impatient to draw him on to the shore. She was dressed in a handsome riding habit of a deep black-green. It was of a rich material and cut in the very latest fashion, the single-breasted jacket tight-fitting and forming a basque with its skirts. The jacket was trimmed with a profusion of metallic buttons and the open cuffs showed off the pearly cambric sleeves of the habit-shirt beneath. In her right hand she carried an American quirt with a braided lash about two feet long. With her left hand she alternately gripped and released the shank of this item in time with the strokes of the oarsmen. The Captain perceived in her a quality that he thought military and impatient. That young woman has an eagerness, he observed to himself, to get on with this matter without delay.
Having spent most of his life out of the company of women, the Captain did not consider himself to be a great judge of women’s temperaments from first appearances. As with horses, in whose company he had likewise spent very little of his time, he generally considered a closer acquaintance to
be necessary before judgements might fairly be made. On this occasion, however, he felt that his impression of the young woman who stood beside Feng was not due merely to her attire. To be sure, he cautioned himself, she could not have projected such a vision of herself to him across the space of twenty or more yards of water if she had been dressed in the limp look of mantled cope and Quaker bonnet, as were the other women who passed along the strand on the arms of their companions, or, even more slopingly, a pace behind parents.
He held himself most properly as the cutter neared the shore, sensing he was to be questioned by her and perhaps tested in his views and opinions by her on the cause of their common interest and, more particularly, assessed as to his fitness for what lay ahead. He felt himself, indeed, to be mistrusted by her on principle. It made him nervous to have her gaze fixed so unflinchingly on him. She must be certain to find some thing amiss. He looked elsewhere.
On the roadway behind the group an open step-piece barouche waited. The groom, who stood beside this well-proportioned and functional vehicle, held the reins of a saddled bay gelding, whose polished coat gleamed a deep red-gold in the sunlight. The attention of this watchful animal was fixed upon the young woman, its fine head turned in her direction, its ears pricked forward at the full alert, its forelegs stiff and straight. Beneath its belly in the shade sat a heavy bloodhound, its coat the colour of fresh liver.
The unwavering attention of the group on shore impressed the Captain considerably. They seemed to place great importance upon his arrival.
It was Miss Nunan, Feng confessed to the Captain when the introductions were being made, who acted as my scribe in the matter of the letter. She placed her gloved hand on Feng’s sleeve and pressed his arm and she smiled a little inward smile, giving the Captain to understand that she had appointed herself Feng’s protector.