The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  Even when I had my first wife, Girly used to run in to tease and howl at me. The mockery of seduction. No one is better at it than her. Some of the neighbor girls of ours with fancies of their own to marry into the Otherside now run in, hallooing in delicious scorn, hoping to win the benefactions of ancestors and implant themselves enchantingly in the memory of the Otherside wrestlers. And though the real contest has not yet begun, already the wives and children of the members of the Baldy party are breaking away from the feast and running, hooting, to greet the returning men.

  The wrestling councillor, in his great hat of council, goes on instructing his wrestlers. And the young wrestlers listen, now and then stamping and raising impatient dust. Soon, at a moment the old man and they know chiefly from having so often magicked themselves into the role of wrestlers, wearing the pigments fit for their gifts, they will separate out into four different two-men contests. The two sides of earth and lake must bind, white to yellow, and in their grappling is delight and healing. I see Girly in her group of women, walking amongst others, a light-boned woman herself. It is pleasant to see her shape amongst the massed shoulders.

  I am now older than most of these women. My own shoulder tells me I am older. But I delight more in the simple sight of a young woman’s shoulder slipping the limits of pelts than when I was young. Once, I could not find the seconds of rest to relish such simple sights in the tumble of my present wishes and tasks. Now that I can so relish plain things, I believe I am being prepared for my journey by the powers of the air and the old councillors sitting together at the midpoint of the wrestling ground. The first journey is solemn though usual, yet I have never before had such a potent sense of pending journeys to be made in earth and sky, in body and in spirit.

  The wrestling councillor has still not been distracted by the remote appearance of Baldy and the others. He finishes his instructions, and at the sound of a clap the young men, the white and the yellow, enmesh themselves in each other, making fretful unions of muscle. The women shrill as the men’s first sweat cuts small runnels in the decorative clay of their wrestling bodies.

  It is already happening then, the wedding of powerful shoulders, and legs grinding in the dust to find hoist. They are magnificent legs, legs to sing of, as some of the women do, rejoicing in the power of those legs on the upthrusting earth which represent a future for the Lake people.

  The councillor has already drawn a chart of the wrestling ground, and now he keeps a count of the falls, for he understands wrestling and its numbers. He marks the wrestlers’ falls with chalk on a tablet of bark as the eight contestants contend for us all.

  The count is important insofar as it reflects the future health and numbers of the eight clans. So no one can say that the old man is indifferent to the arrival of Baldy and his party. In these circumstances everyone has his duty. But the sad thing is that Baldy and his returning party will not be permitted to lie with their wives until tonight, since they did not know that the wrestling ceremony, the balancing of the earth by young, striving limbs, was due for the morning of their homecoming. They have been gone many days, many times three and many times four, traveling towards the Morningside and the Upper Waters, returning the long way Nightwards to us.

  The wrestling continues mightily. Yellow backs are pounded into the dust, then white backs. A pleasing and promising toil, seamless limbs in the most earnest contest, regular, to be expected yet still marvelous, the union and the splitting of the earth, the embrace, then the halves hurling each other to the dirt. The women are now shrilling like one creature. Girly, a woman who likes display, stands up, free of her skins now, her breasts painted white, howling a birdlike chant to recognize and celebrate the contest. I can see the scars of mourning slashes on her long ribs and beneath her breasts. She is so proud of these scars she inflicted on herself when her mother died, and her uncle, and our Son Unnameable. The scars are a warrant, visible to God and man, that she grieved them fully and dutifully and still in some way possesses them. Occasionally she turns Morningwards to check on the progress of the returning party. She liked Baldy when they were young.

  I like to fancy I can read the land, but Girly is a remarkable assessor of all things within the circle of her view. Within the circle of my view, Clawback and the children are still playing the game of them pestering him and then squealing at his mock rage and reachings-out. I look across the wrestling field to the place where the Earless Lizard women, streaks of yellow on their breasts, are standing—where only the oldest still sit. There, following Clawback’s movements and clowneries with limpid eyes, is the broad-faced girl of great beauty forbidden to him. I know the somber man, Crow, for whom the girl is intended. Yet Clawback wrongly gave her his poisonous consolations, endearments that blight us at our source, the source where man meets woman to make the world.

  * * *

  Clawback was a member of my own hunting squad. Younger men like him often distinguish themselves with close passes at the beasts, and Clawback was brave enough, though he generally played the role of the joker who enacted the hunting as a comedy afterwards. Unless someone was killed, as was my Son Unnameable when we went on an ordained hunt for the thumbed slicer, the one that is a test of every skill and every sharpness of eye and spirit. Even Clawback could not make a joke of the slicer, since when it pounds in at you it takes away the choice of hunting or running. The hunters must remain, singing mercy and driving our spears into the armpits, and flinching and hiding behind our blinkings as we wait for someone in our party to have the thread of his life ripped from his throat, or else to find and pierce the heart of that grand killing creature. Not many jokes from Clawback on those days.

  On normal days, however, hunting allows relentless jest. And as Clawback dances amongst the children, the eyes of that girl from across the ground still follow him with her criminal adoration. Honey is her name, and she glints like nectar. I feel a stir of sorrow for her and for Clawback. But more for her. She is young, and Clawback knows better. Men of my clan can marry and have affections for women of the Small Lightning clan, which is Girly’s own clan. That is the mercy of things, and any other arrangement clogs and drowns the mercy. One could feel one’s own vain pity though for the girl casting her eyes in Clawback’s direction. The only way she could be cured of it is by marriage. Marriage is the great cure for forlornness and hapless dreams. But Clawback’s Parrot clan cannot have women from the Small Lightning crowd, or from the Earless Lizard clan either.

  I notice that my nephew Redder, who has had a number of wins, has just been thrown by a young man from the Tan Hawks who is far broader-shouldered but squatter than Redder, and fit to throw Redder once he grew tired, as now, after many successful assaults on the yellows. The wrestling continues because tiredness is intended by the wrestling councillor and is prized for its capacity to even the earth out, and give both sides of the people, each side with its four striving clans, a proper ratio of triumph. And the women get shrill as they see young men who have been thrown earlier in the contests now becoming the equals of the wrestlers from the other side. It is only when things are equal, when the shouting of old men and women advising the exhausted not to let them down or praising those with remaining strength for not doing so has reached a point of equivalence, that it will all end. Only the councillor, a noted wrestler himself from the old days, can tell when the earth’s hunger for the even and the composed will be satisfied. But that will take hours yet.

  Meanwhile, Baldy and his party draw nearer still to the wrestling ground. Old men claw their way up to full height to greet them. I notice even from this distance that though Baldy looks somber and tired, his eyes are unresting and alive and they are searching. When he sees my figure—I am still alone on the fringe of the clan—he raises both arms, irrespective of any plans his wife might have, and makes a slow gesture that says he has plenty to tell me. But the time for it is not now, in this turmoil of return and wrestling and cooking.

  I watch as my nephew is thrown again. Redde
r accepts it, but when he rises I see in his eyes a bleak desire for more strength or else the close of the contest. The wrestlers will change opponents soon, and his next opponent might enable him to find an equalizing vigor. Meanwhile, Girly and a group of women, hallooing, have now drifted from the wrestling and surrounded Baldy and the other men, who by now have reunited with their women, children, aunts, uncles. Clawback leads his trail of children into the midst of the reunion and makes it more playful still. Through all this, Baldy’s eyes remain bleakly on mine; I remain in place like a man interested in the contest, for Redder’s sake.

  Jack the Dancer

  I STILL REMEMBER vividly the morning in 2015 when my doctor called me with the news that I had small tumors on the lowest section of my esophagus. I was surprised, but something else as well. I was instantly and crazily fascinated. I thought, So this is what will do it. This is what I will spend my last days with, a cancerous assault on my esophagus, an organ to which I have paid so little mental attention.

  That day, as Dr. Gleason reported the sighting of the cancerous tumors to me and recommended I see a further specialist, a professor of the gastroenterological craft, was a day of particular sharp winter light, and I felt something unaccustomed: specifically, a profound sense of what a good life I’d had! I also thought of Andy, dead by accident in youth, my doppelgänger in the shades, someone who had endured the nullity of death on my behalf. I have never taken much time to be a counter of blessings, nor do I believe the gods are interested in showering them in any way equally. But some of us are lucky. And I’d been one of them. I felt above all grateful that I would have time to make peace—not with the world, because it’s unappeasable—but with my daughters and grandchildren and, above all, with my enduring wife, Cath. Well, “make peace” is too dramatic. We were already pretty much at peace in those days. That too is my good fortune.

  “That was Dr. Gleason,” I told Cath when the call was over. “I’m sorry, but she says the scans I had showed a few tumors on my esophagus.”

  I reached out my arms to her then—a compact woman a bit over midheight, her hair dyed an attractive reddish-silver, the underlying silver having an impact of fashion statement rather than the decline of age. Cath entered the embrace so simply, but not compliantly, never compliantly, full of questions and plans. I could feel her breasts through the sweater. At eighty years, bespeaking shelter.

  “Oh, Shel, what’s the prognosis, for heaven’s sake?” Cath asked.

  “She wouldn’t give me one. She’s recommended another doctor for that. A professor of gastroenterology. She did say I can afford to be hopeful.”

  Indeed, Dr. Gleason had been a little staid in her recital of the news. What the tumors meant I was to discover, so she told me, from the professor she was sending me to.

  From the day Dr. Gleason called, Cath had a better sense of the peril I might face. She did not take a pessimistic view. But she knew of the standard treatment for what ailed me—a serious, old-fashioned excision of the esophagus, large surgical wound side and front, the fashioning of a new, alien esophagus out of stomach tissue. Long convalescence. And the fact that the operation brought on that state of vulnerability and frequent accompaniment of old age—“morbidity”; death’s door.

  Cath has always proved calm at times of true peril. When our children were young, it took domesticity to make her hysterical—a messy room could do it. But big emergencies left her clear-eyed and wise, ready and brave and generous. At any crisis in our marriage she’d adopted a steely air of waiting for reason to dawn.

  “You might have to cancel that meeting with the premier,” she said, thinking of the diary which I had forgotten. Every human dies in the midst of a diary of some sort. But not necessarily with the sort of composure I kept feeling.

  “Bugger it!” I told her. “We’re still going skiing!”

  * * *

  I suppose that given our age, that was a brave assertion. Cath had found it hard to tolerate turning eighty. Older than me, she still has fine features, and is very beautiful in a way that—at least I think—resists age and asserts itself in a face. Her complexion, for an Australian, is still composed of milk and Celtic mist, a sort of ivory remembrance of another place. As far as I can work out, this enviable complexion came from a convict woman named Kate Heaney, transported pre-Famine to New South Wales. If you’re old enough you’ve probably seen me on TV exploiting the fascinating connections I possess through Cath, in what the exhibitors called “groundbreaking documentaries.” One of the headings that had to be filled in on the convict ship’s muster in Cork was “complexion,” and the clerk had written of Kate’s that it was “fair and milky.”

  Not that I would like to imply Cath is entirely a creature of vapors. She is solid and healthily but not excessively tanned, all to a wise antipodean level, though she complains of the unevenness the sun has brought to hers as to most European-Australian skin. She is used to people telling her she doesn’t look a day over fifty-five, though she secretly thinks of fifty-five as a tragic enough age. And, Mother of God, she didn’t want to turn eighty! It was not fear of death. It was as if she worried she would become disentitled to being spry in demeanor and movement.

  For once she didn’t want her children and grandchildren round her. She didn’t want to have a party. She harbored a murderous hostility to anyone who might tell her on that day that she was marvelous for her age! She did not want to celebrate her survival either, her “making it” to eighty. We were both aware of the delusion most people harbored that life had time to amend itself, to emerge on a serene plateau, and that by eighty that’s where you were: arrived and completed in soul and destiny. She knew she was still arriving, that despite our mutual good luck the plateau was the same mountainside as ever, and that she was still Miss Sisyphus with her rock. In any case, she didn’t consider turning eighty a triumph and didn’t want any friends, especially the four women she normally delighted to spend time with, to get their jollies out of toasting her.

  Instead she and I had driven to Victoria’s haunted, beautiful Wilsons Promontory, the furthest south you can go in Australia without actually leaving the mainland. In the country behind us the dispossessed Highlanders and islanders of Scotland, brought here on bounty ships, had slaughtered the Kurnai people in the nineteenth century, all according to Jorgensen’s proposition; disrespect equals gunpowder in the end. And the bush was so melancholy and underpopulated you could nearly hear the protests of the dead or the suggestions of screams from the unmapped massacre sites. The deep sclerophyll forests were full of ghosts who did not feel fully content. The rough, vivid sea of Bass Strait ran so potently, a water road that traveled south of Cape Horn, and was on its way uninterrupted by landmasses to southernmost South America.

  It was also de rigueur that we had to have sex on the night of her birthday. That was as important as the Nordic skiing. She had some black lingerie that always demanded I take notice. She leaned over me. With her girl’s smile.

  * * *

  In my reckless life, I presumed my esophagus, humble and functional organ whose purpose I had never before inquired into, was invulnerable in a way that I never attributed to my visible outer skin. I had not even known I possessed an esophageal valve, which until recently had prevented stomach acids reentering and scalding the esophagus and taking my breath—an experience I’d had more commonly just lately. At the time Dr. Gleason first gave me the news about what she called “Barrett’s syndrome,” my esophageal valve had been working for humble decades in the dark—unnamed and unappreciated by its owner. But it was under threat now, and if I was unlucky it might cease its steadfast work of conveying nutrition into my body altogether. For somewhere down in the dark was a new player, or a colony of new, dark players. Jack the Dancer had moved in.

  I told Cath that despite the news I’d just received I would still like to take my daily walk. Our house is a short walk from a bold set of honey-colored cliffs above a boisterous Pacific. The mass of the headland is
a grand lump of Gondwana upsurged from the pre-Pacific with all its antipodean oddities intact, and now returned to the use of folk like me. One found on the bush tracks around where we live young travelers from Japan or Germany or Brazil or Spain. When I was a child, Australian beauty spots like this were not frequented by the people of the world, only by one’s aunts and relatives. Sydney in the old days was a secret only we possessed. Now it is, delightfully, the world’s.

  When I set out for a walk on the day of Dr. Gleason’s pronouncement, I was still in an equable condition, still a citizen of the world, likely to point out an echidna to a foreigner who saw its spines and thought it a porcupine instead of being one of two survivors from an ancient megacontinent. A mammal that nonetheless lays its eggs duck-style to produce its young, whom it then suckles. I loved to encounter this sturdy, industrious long-snouted and spiny creature. A being from before nature clearly worked out who should do what, and consistent rules for warm-blooded beings.

  This oddly beautiful landscape still felt like home to me, and the pre-Flood bushes named banksias held the same charms as yesterday. I think if Monet had ever met the banksia he wouldn’t have wasted time on pallid irises. Banks was the first European we know to have encountered this splendid plant and its big flowering cone. He must have thought, when he saw it on the shores of Botany Bay down where the airport is now, that he had hit the naturalist jackpot. Here was a shrub which grew serrated leaves and the most exquisite golden upright stems of filaments, providing a fountain of nectar for birds and bees, a candle on the altar of the life machine. The cones shone in that robust winter afternoon sun, as they did in light, and so did the glossy side of the leaves.

  Stopping for a while, I took out my mobile and looked up case histories of esophageal cancer. I still felt I was doing research for a relative rather than myself. Some kindly chemistry prevented me from feeling doomed in my bones and my waters.