The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  You will see the forbidding stones as you approach the law ground through the green brush. You will see by these marks that it is forbidden ground except for men of high degree. There are august stones also laid there by the passage of ancestors, and beyond and amongst them, the law ground itself.

  It has taken time to get the word out and to reach the men’s law ground, and by that time the sun is high. We are all fully armed with long spears, the kind that are used for ceremonies of blood reconciliation, and for the larger creatures such as the slicer and the huge-hearted, big-bodied dome nose. We have brought shields too, and have slung throwers, wedged prong outwards, against our shoulders and, in front, the returning sticks wedged in the cords around each of our chests.

  These councillors, men from the whole people, start a fire, light branches, and stalk around sanctifying the place with smoke while chanting a prayer. All daemons of misrule, all spirits of malice are to depart the place, leaving behind unclouded spirits of wisdom and order. It is an old chant, of course, to which we all respond “Let it be so!” after every enunciation of the plea. We all stand there, four and four, and four and three of us, all we councillors. My old rival and friend Baldy, home just yesterday, is there. “Let it be so!” he sings.

  Soon the ground is cleansed by the smoke sufficiently to allow us to sit in council. The old councillor of the Small Lightning clan, Croaker, is too much under a baleful wasting to allow him to come here. He is a loss of wisdom, and so to begin with, we murmur away to the All-Father to smile on our deliberations, and then we cease to do so one by one, the oldest men first, the younger ones like me and the returned Baldy carrying on the plea, acknowledging we need it more, being further from embarking on our last journey, as far as we know.

  All this became a matter for Council to sit about, since I did not wish to act on my solitary interpretation. The meeting was called and at last we were all seated, and Clay began to explain that I had beseeched him most earnestly for the meeting following a revelation on my sky journey. And then he asked me to speak.

  “My friends,” I said, “while traveling in the star forests I was met by Gray Bounder Man and his face was stricken. Parrot Woman came from the trees. Let me say, I have only glimpsed her once before. Whenever I see Gray Bounder Man he is sure, he is serene. But now he looked harried or saddened, like a normal man, and his wife walked towards me with a terrible grieving in her face, and she held up her womb. It was the womb of all women, I was sure, not just of one clan but of all peoples. To be brief, it burst in front of me, and its children washed up dead at my feet. It was a warning, I knew that. It was a warning about disorder …”

  Clay made a throaty sound. Grieving and authoritative. “It was a warning all right,” he declared. “It was a warning we must not be slow about rooting out disorder.”

  Two of the councillors repeated that as if to themselves. “Rooting out all disorder.”

  “It seems you have been slow,” Baldy said, almost as a suggestion. “From what I saw on my return.”

  He looked at me then, assessing me and not condemning. I could see he was not at peace, had not been since his return yesterday. But he knew it was my duty to name the name and be done with it.

  I said, “Our brother Clawback has violated that woman, the one from the Earless Lizard clan. Her blood’s forbidden to him. He’s a stupid creature. And I believe Parrot Woman told me last night that in poisoning that womb, he is poisoning all wombs.”

  There was terrible and utter agreement around the ground we sat on, and I could not help but grieve for Clawback.

  Clay said to me calmly, “You had better get started on all that. It is the narrow bone for him. There’s no other cure.”

  The other councillors agreed.

  “You and Stark,” said Clay. And then asked it as a question. “Shade and Stark?”

  There were sounds of immediate sad assent from those lovely old men.

  Clay said, with an edge of doubt in his voice, “You are sure it is all as simple as that idiot Clawback. Were Gray Bounder Man and his Wife talking of something worse? You mentioned many children bursting from the womb …”

  An old councillor called Bandy said, “No, he’s the criminal of the moment, he’s the one on the ancestors’ minds. What a fool! But a violator, fool or not!” And he talked on further, in tones you would expect from a lawman.

  Stark was there, on the far side of the ground from me. A very slim man my age. He did not speak. Like me, he had the dislocated toe of our caste. It was not for either of us to speak.

  Clay cast his eyes in my direction. I could see he was tired and touchy. “You should go at once,” he said, and one of the councillors groaned agreement. “Then we can soon wake to a clean day.”

  And then after all the grunts of the older councillors as they hauled themselves upwards to make their way home, Baldy stopped by me. “I must speak to you soon. I must do so …”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He paused, as if thinking he should do so now, but he was mumbling with exhaustion. He had put a hand, and a great deal of his weight with it, on my shoulder.

  “Take your sleep,” I advised him.

  “You’re right. I do not sleep enough.” He grinned crookedly, made a decision, and walked away under a high sun.

  Surfing with Jack

  I AM GOING TO have a meeting with the professor of gastroenterology whose name is Colin Brown. He’s the top bloke, says Dr. Gleason. And I’m seeing him in two days. He’s not going to let my wayward cells proliferate by seeing me later than that.

  I remain in a calm mood and plan a letter to the prime minister about Learned. I’m not expecting a great prognosis because, in my generation’s imagination, Jack the Dancer has always been his own prognosis. Death.

  In the meantime, life does not await the diagnosis. You discover at such a time that the entire world operates on the assumption that no one is ever dying. It must do so. When I complain to Cath about the unstinting tide of online correspondence, she says, “Send all your emails to me.” And I know she will do them more competently than I, since for some reason Cath knows how to say the sort of no that people actually accept. No because everything is changed and bets are off and any undertaking of being delighted to launch Cranbrook School’s film club’s festival of student documentaries is now madness.

  I go to my computer and send Cath a number of my invitations to deal with. I open a file ready to write a letter to the prime minister. He’s not such a bad fellow—by vision an old-fashioned conservative who believes in keeping the punters prosperous by giving them a stake in the equation. But he’s a captive of right-wing brutes in his party who still believe in serving the market Moloch as an almost theological duty. But give him this—or so I hoped—give him a vision, give him Monsieur Learned and the chance for him to take his own vision to the three sets of elders … Well, he might yet make a leader of himself. For no one in his position, no one with a revenue stream, has ever taken a passionate vision of his own to the elders.

  I get as far as putting the prime minister’s address in the letter. After that I sit and my hands begin ridiculously to tremble. That’s never happened before. I want to see Cath as acutely as I want to take my next breath. When I leave my office again, I see, over a few intervening rooftops, the harbor beyond the glass. Then, in front of me, Cath sits at her own little desk in the living room, and her unconscious generosity being an aphrodisiac, I’m moved by more desire than I have recently had the chance to experience, and the images of black lingerie and unloosed breasts come to mind and do not leave the supposed sexual Sahara of my groin unaffected.

  Before Cath bends to answering the first email she raises a hand and runs it down my forearm, cosseting me. It is much easier now than when we were thirty. Then we had all the juice but poor knowledge of the other. Grievances as well as hungers inhabited the embrace. Alas, alas! Grievances which by eighty have either driven you apart, or killed you, or been absorbed. How often the breathle
ss ardor of those days, which seemed based on a more gravid and cosmic need as vast as the sky and not unconnected to the earth’s furious core, was, in the way of lovers, interspersed with a gasping rancor.

  I can tell Cath is herself a bit awed today. Even though the omens of this have been there in the vanishing years and her husband’s follies, I don’t think she’s prepared to be a widow. We have failed to believe in the weight of our own years, and to prepare ourselves.

  * * *

  Cath has always had such competence. She was a very fine and exacting editor. How often did she drop the kids at school before coming to the sound suite I rented in North Sydney to induce order in the too-much I had exuberantly filmed. She also did the production schedules of a number of my films, which I shot to an extent by making things up on the spot, seeing what came along, and taking a stab at how much money was left after I got the footage I wanted. I chose to do things in that way—it was my thing. Extempore. People thought my method-less method was remarkable and even wrote learned articles on it, elevating what might have been a character flaw into a theory. And I could let myself go because in the editing Cath always took the care I had no temperamental gift for. Mind you, I always had a clear sense of narrative, both before I started and, in a more nuanced way, when we’d finished, and I was able to convey the narrative, and Cath was typically loyal to my intention.

  Yet even when she was a visitor to a shooting location, I felt she had a stronger sense of the practicalities that were in play than I ever had. I had, after all, shamelessly left the details of our life to her. As I got older, I became cavalier about waking up and thinking about who I had to see that day. She had it all written down. She was, fairly or not and without apparent rancor, my diary.

  But then … I know many men who say their wives were happy to serve the flame, the career. I sometimes tell Cath I am guilty of repressing her career, or subsuming it into mine. She tells me not to be ridiculous, but she says it with a particular flavor, not as if it isn’t true, but as if it’s a proposition she does not choose to examine—the dear old Pandora’s box itself. I have certainly given our daughters lectures on the matter of subservience, woman to man. But I am not utterly sure I do so from a position of innocence.

  * * *

  People told me I was a good grandfather, in part for being the joker. But I am aware my record with my daughters is, in my memory, more ambiguous. I was already in my thirties when our first daughter, Colley, was born. In our house in West Ryde, with its big backyard, Cath and I envisaged a playground for our children, where each of their movements would be intimately studied by us, the enchanted witnesses in the garden. In those days the father was considered superfluous in the whole drama and pain of the birth. He was told to compose himself in the waiting room and read old Time magazines. But because Cath knew some of the nurses, I was allowed in to see Colley the instant after she was born. Improbably small, those few seconds after birth, the creases of the struggle on her forehead, the smears of her passage on her body, Colley was already a mixture of wariness and energy, both of which qualities would mark her in the future. For a number of seconds, she would not begin to breathe. She had a placidity, an air of making a considered Libran decision—it was, after all, a morning in October. She was deciding whether to retreat back under the blanket of time, or to go forward onto its surface. She seemed to know either had its pitfalls.

  In those seconds she did not seem blue or short of breath. A doctor approached with a hypodermic as big as her leg and injected something, and she decided, with apparent good humor, that now she would make her first claim on life. And so it came. The first cry of an estimable woman.

  A year later, the vigorous, alert Gracie was born, and I saw her after a prompt passage into the world she seemed unbewildered by. That is, more like her mother. Like Colley, Gracie chose early morning to be born—both were daughters of the dawn.

  Oh, what a work is man/woman. For example, the child grows in its solitary cell—some poem I read, yes, Judith Wright, called the child in the womb the eyeless laborer in the dark. Its sole discourse with its mother’s heart, which imbues it with rhythm. And then, it emerges as a social animal, ready for a meeting, a party, a seminar. Particularly Gracie, born with opinions writhing in her.

  In any case, just as our deaths are each, at the ultimate moment, the only death in the universe, so every birth is the first. The father of Mitochondrial Eve’s first child could not have looked on an infant fresh from the blue with the wonder I brought to both occasions.

  With Colley, a wariness Gracie would not exhibit. Even at two and three years of age. Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. And like my quiet mother and vocal father, it may be that the bite of the quieter one, Colley, was subtler and more enduring than that of the tumultuous, daring Gracie.

  But it’s not the damage they did each other that worried me.

  * * *

  There was at one stage a great conflict between Cath and me over the term “brusque”!

  Because of the delicacy with which my mother conducted the life of the Apple household, knowing that my father was capable of great verbal passion, we Apples were a polite family—sometimes to the point Cath would come to condemn as emotional dishonesty. By contrast, Cath’s family, the McKelveys, insulted each other routinely and robustly and in ways I sometimes thought extreme and harsh and wounding. When Cath began verbally disciplining our daughters, there was conflict between us. I felt I had the same sensibility as Colley—and partway that of Gracie too. But when Cath was tired and furious at mayhem in the kitchen or living area, she could turn ferocious and bark instructions in the McKelvey manner. If I was home and, of course, playing at being the jolly giant, I would see the girls recoil, would see their eyes bruise. And when I raised the matter one day, using that silly and inadequate term “brusque,” Cath chose to see in the nicety of the adjective evidence of the Apple family’s fear of conflict and their mealymouthed, neurotic politeness.

  I see now that we were both right—the McKelveys too reckless with abuse, the Apples crafting everything they said to avoid the risk of affront. At this distance of time it is obvious that Cath did moderate her “brusqueness,” just as I moderated my fear of terror. And yet there was another aspect of the Apple family’s ethos that wasn’t as tame as fear of brusqueness, and in some ways was more ruthless than the McKelveys’ brand of easy-come, easy-go fury. For we did not forgive. My father taught me that forgiveness should be denied unto the third and fourth generation. And in my middle years, still not utterly reconciled and when tempted by the urbanity of this or that woman, I remembered, or chose to remember, my daughters’ bruised eyes.

  Both Colley and Gracie claim to have forgotten it all: my erratic rages, Cath’s, our arguments.

  My reluctance to forgive is so far gone now, but perhaps I hung on to it, willfully, a stored-up reason for ultimate betrayal.

  I sometimes ask myself whether, had Cath not yelled at our kids with passion, she could have displayed her profound enthusiasm for beating Jack the Dancer, and his ambitions for my organs. People are, after all, a package. And I am now more puzzled by the package I am than by Cath.

  Now, together, we went to see the gastroenterologist, Professor Brown. He took me by surprise, as many young doctors do now. Instead of a professional gravitas—the irreproachable carapace of a well-cut neutral suit and a tie with some medical association’s or college’s restrained logo—Professor Brown was tie-less, ageless, healthy, and at peace with earth and sea.

  There was something in me that resisted these younger, unpretentious specialists. Did I want a sun-addled democrat with a shock of rich hair negotiating with Jack the Dancer on my behalf? Or did I want a God-the-Father imitator of august mien, whose severity and inscrutability were so absolute that you felt you were in the hands of heaven? In my childhood, great-aunts and -uncles died without doubt, were buried without second guesses or grievances, under old doctors—the young ones were in
the army for World War II—whose capacity for impersonating God was probably much better than their surgery.

  In any case, I was to have the surfer kid. We shook hands and all sat down, whereupon Dr. Brown became earnest in that new sort of way, with a far more egalitarian manner than that of the old doctors. He had the report and X-rays from my recent endoscopy to go on, along with an MRI I’d undergone the day after Dr. Gleason had broken the news. He explained the terms he flung about, and encouraged me not to leave the office with any unanswered questions.

  This young man, distinguished but humble about it, but without any demigod ambitions, explained that there had been until recently only simple and grievous options or outcomes for people in my situation. If the cancer had metastasized, or spread, the esophagus would need to be cut out. If the whole of the esophagus needed to be excised, the stomach was then connected up directly with the throat. The victim’s stomach, as I understood it, my stomach, was then in my chest for the rest of my life.

  As well as taking out all or part of the esophagus, the surgeon during a total or partial esophagostomy took out any lymph nodes that might contain cancer cells. Apparently, unknown to me, lymph nodes encircled the esophagus. They too had been doing their humble dark work since my infancy. Now I heard about them as a line of vulnerability, the support trenches that the enemy wanted to overrun. For they would tell whether I needed therapy before the slap-up surgery.

  “And scars?” asked Cath, who did not want to see me bear heavy ones.

  “I used to go the transhiatal route.” Brown smiled as if he were discussing methods to ride a surfboard, regular or goofy foot. “But even now, the cutting is substantial. I won’t pretend otherwise.”