‘I wonder if this town will still be here in a thousand years,’ yawned Amy Fibbens.
His mind fumbled lazily and failed. He did not see the point. But he did not doubt permanence.
‘I shan’t worry if it is not,’ sighed the girl.
Her shoes were hurting, and the ruts were deeper on the outskirts of the town.
‘I could easy do with a thousand years,’ he suddenly said. ‘Why, you’d see things happen. Historical things. And you’d see the trees turning into coal. You’d be able to remember the fossils, how they looked when they were walking about.’
He had never before said anything like this.
‘Perhaps too much would happen,’ the girl replied. ‘Perhaps there’d be a fossil or two you wouldn’t want to remember.’
Because now they were on the outskirts of the town. They stumbled past the hulks of cows. There was a smell of sheep, and of water drying in a mud hole. And soon the yellow Fibbens’s doorway, leaning outwards, and the yellow straws of light that fell from the cracks in walls into darkness.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘this is where I take off the shoes.’
‘It looks like it,’ he said.
He wondered if, after all, this girl might not be a box of tricks. She was a skinny one, and sharp.
The whimpering of a waking child was not contained by walls.
‘A-myyyy?’
‘Yes, Aunt,’ called the girl.
The shadow of Mrs Fibbens heaved into fresh shapes on its frail bed. Her belly was fretful with her seventh.
‘Anyway,’ said Amy Fibbens, ‘we have had a talk. About a lot of things.’
It was quite right. They had talked about almost everything, because words occasionally will rise to the occasion and disgorge whole worlds.
Just as the darkness will disgorge a white face under a dusty tree.
‘Will you be coming to this place again at all, perhaps?’ asked the girl.
‘On Saturday week,’ said the usually slow man.
And again he was surprised.
Under the sad tree, more frond than bark, beside the girl’s blurred face, less shape than longing, in an amorphous landscape of cows’ breath and flannelly sheeps’ cud, his intention was absolute.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘In that case.’
‘A-myyyyyy!’ called Aunt Fibbens, the shadows knotting on her dreadful bed. ‘Stop maggin. An come inside.’
‘Yes, Aunt,’ said the girl.
‘A person could be dead,’ complained the shadow, ‘an only the flies would cotton on. Here am I, reachin, ever since I swallowed me tea.’
There were people in that place who said that Mrs Fibbens was as rough as bags.
Chapter 3
STAN PARKER did not decide to marry the Fibbens girl, if decision implies pros and cons; he simply knew that he would do it, and as there was no reason why the marriage ceremony should be delayed, it was very soon performed, in the little church at Yuruga, which looks a bit cockeyed, because built by hands less skilled than willing, on a piece of bumpy ground.
Clarrie Bott came to the church, because, as he explained to his reluctant lady and disgusted girls, the boy’s mother was his dead, or rather his defunct, cousin. Uncle Fibbens was there too, in boots, with a handful of family, but not Aunt, whose seventh was at breast. Only Mrs Erbey benefited emotionally by the ceremony. The parson’s wife was happy at a wedding, especially if she knew the girl. She gave Amy Fibbens a Bible, a blouse as good as new (it was only slightly singed near the waist), and a little silver nutmeg grater that someone had given her at her own wedding and with which she had never known what to do.
Amy Parker, fingering the silver nutmeg grater, found it a similar problem but the loveliest thing she had ever seen, and she thanked Mrs Erbey gratefully.
The day was fine, if cold, on the steps of the blunt church, when Amy Parker prepared to stow herself and her goods in her husband’s cart and leave Yuruga. Her nutmeg grater in her pocket, her singed blouse concealed beneath her jacket, she carried in her hands the Bible and a pair of cotton gloves.
‘Good-bye, Ame,’ mouthed Uncle Fibbens.
The wind had made him water, and the rims of his eyes were very red.
The cousins clawed.
‘Good-bye, Uncle,’ said Amy calmly. ‘Good-bye, youse!’ As she smacked a random bottom.
She was quite calm.
Meanwhile the draper, who had given several yards of calico, was telling the bridegroom to make the best of life, and the young man, because his attention had been bought, was screwing up his eyes and nodding his head in a way altogether unlike him. His face too had grown thinner since morning.
‘After all, it is respect,’ said the draper in some torment of moustaches, ‘it is respect that counts.’
The young man stood nodding like a boy as the draper struggled to soar on wings of wisdom.
Finally, when the kids had thrown a handful of rice, and Mrs Erbey was standing on tiptoe to wave, and dab, and smile, and pull the ends of hair from out of her mouth, and wave again, and the cart was beginning to pull away from the stumpy church, under the needles of dark twisted trees that tore at hats, the Parkers, which was what they now were, knew that it was over, or that it had begun.
The cart drove away, over the ruts in that part of the town. The gay horse tossed his forelock. Thin clouds flew.
‘Well, there we are,’ laughed the man’s warm voice. ‘It’s a long ride. You mustn’t mind.’
‘Wouldn’t help if I did.’ The girl lazily smiled at the landscape, holding her hat.
Their different bodies jolted with the cart. For they were changed, since what had been agony, for a split second of confessed agreement in the church. Now they were distinct, and one, they could look without effort into each other’s eyes.
Only, as the town of Yuruga perked past and away from them, Amy Parker’s eyes were at present for the landscape. What she had just done, whether momentous or usual, did not concern other people. She did not belong to anyone in that town. Her fat aunt had not cried, nor had she expected it. She herself had never cried for any specific person. But now she began to feel a sadness as she struggled against the possessive motion of the cart. As if the cart, with its aspiring roll, and the retrospective landscape, were fighting for a declaration of her love. To force from her an admission of tenderness that, until now, she had carefully sat on.
The cart rocked. The road pulled at her heart. And Amy Parker, now in the full anguish of departure, was torn slowly from the scene in which her feeling life had been lived. She saw the bones of the dead cow, of which she could even remember the maggots, of Venables’ Biddy with the short tits, that had died of the milk fever. Ah, she did feel now. It came swimming at her, that valley, from which the nap had been rubbed in parts, by winter, and by rabbits. Its patchiness had never coruscated more, not beneath the dews of childhood even. But what had been, and what was still a shining scene with painted houses under the blowing trees, with the carts full of polished cans in which the farmers put the milk, with staring children and with dabbling ducks, with blue smoke from morning fires, and enamelled magpies, and the farmers’ wives, spanking into town in sulkies, wheezing inside their stays and the red foxes at their necks, all would fade forever at the bend in the road.
For this last look Amy Parker turned, holding her hat in the wind. There was a sheet of iron on the ground, that had come off Fibbens’s roof in a gale once, and that they had always talked about putting back. Ah dear, then she could not hold it. She was all blubbery at the mouth.
He had begun to make the clucking noises at the horse, and stroking with the whip the hairy rump.
‘You are sorry then,’ he said, moving his hand farther along the board, so that it touched.
‘I’ve nothing to lose at Yuruga,’ she said. ‘Had me ears boxed, and roused on all this time.’
But she blew her nose. She remembered a bull’s-eye she had eaten under a bridge, and the wheels ground over the planks of t
he bridge, and there in the hollow afternoon swallows flew, the scythes of their wings mowing the light. She could not escape her childhood. Out of her handkerchief its slow, sad scent of peppermint.
So he stayed quiet beside her. There are the sadnesses of other people that it is not possible to share. But he knew that, in spite of her racked body, which he could feel fighting against the motion of the cart, she was not regretful. It was something, just, that must be fought out. So he was content.
It was a long ride. It was soon the sandy kind of bush road that there is no consuming. But they crunched and lurched. And the horse gave strong, leathery snorts, flicking the health defiantly out of his pink nostrils. The man would have liked to tell his wife, We are coming to This or That, or we are so many miles from So-and-so. But he could not. The distance was quite adamant.
Well, she could sit a lifetime if necessary, she said, once the crying was done.
The girl sat with her eyes on the road. She was not concerned, as, at odd moments, her husband was afraid she might be. Because in her complete ignorance of life, as it is lived, and the complete poverty of the life she had lived, she was not sure but that she might have to submit thus, interminably bolt upright in a cart. Life was perhaps a distance of stones and sun and wind, sand-coloured and monotonous. Dressed too much, as she was, for her wedding, and in an unfamiliar, undistinguished place, she could have believed anything.
But once they passed a tin nailed on top of a stump, and in the tin were a stone and a dead lizard.
And once their wheels thrashed through brown water, and the coolness of the fresh, splashed water drank at her hot skin.
That, he said, was Furlong Creek.
She would remember, she felt, gravely, this that her husband was telling her.
The cart was livelier after that. Wind flung the sweat from the horse’s shoulders back into their faces. There was a reckless smell of wet leather, and broken leaves that the wind had been dashing from the trees in that part of the bush. All and all were flung together, twig and leaf, man and woman, horse’s hair and ribbony reins, in the progress that the landscape made. But it was principally a progress of wind. The wind took back what it gave.
‘Does it always blow in these parts?’ She laughed.
He made a motion with his mouth. It was not one of the things to answer. Besides, he recognized and accepted the omnipotence of distance.
But this was something she did not, and perhaps never would. She had begun to hate the wind, and the distance, and the road, because her importance tended to dwindle.
Just then, too, the wind took the elbow of a bough and broke it off, and tossed it, dry and black and writhing, so that its bark harrowed the girl’s cheek, slapped terror for a moment into the horse, and crumbled, used and negative, in what was already their travelled road.
Achhh, cried the girl’s hot breath, her hands touching the livid moment of fright that was more than wound, while the man’s body was knotted against the horse’s strength.
When they were settled into a recovered breathing the man looked at the cut in his wife’s cheek. It was the cheek of the thin girl whose face had become familiar to him the night of the ball, and whom apparently he had married. And he was thankful.
Oh dear, she gasped thankfully, feeling the hardness of his body.
Their skins were grateful. And unaccustomedly tender.
They had not kissed much.
He looked at the bones in her cheek, and in her neck, exposed willingly to him.
She looked into his mouth, of which the lips were rather full and parted, roughened by the wind, and on his white teeth the blood from the small wound in her cheek.
They looked at each other, exchanging the first moment their souls had lived appreciably together. Then, quietly, they rearranged their positions and drove on.
No other event disturbed the monotony of emotion, the continuity of road, the relentlessness of scrub that first day, until, about evening, just as their faces were beginning to grow grey, they came to the clearing the man had made to live in.
Now his modest achievement was fully exposed. The voice of a dog, half-aggressive, half-hopeless, leaped into the cool silence.
‘This is the place,’ the man said, as if it must be got over quietly and quickly.
‘Ah,’ she smiled, withdrawn, ‘this is the house you have built.’
It is not much better, oh dear, than Fibbens’s shed, she said, and you can cut the silence.
‘Yes,’ he grunted, jumping down, ‘it’s not all violets, as you can see.’
As she could see, but she must also speak, she knew.
‘Once I saw a house’, she said, in the even dreamlike voice of inspiration, ‘that had a white rosebush growing beside it, and I always said that if I had a house I would plant a white rose. It was a tobacco rose, the lady said.’
‘Well,’ he said, laughing up at her, ‘you have the house.’
‘Yes,’ she said, getting down.
It did not help much, so she touched his hand. And there was a dog smelling at the hem of her skirt, that she looked down dubiously to see. The dog’s ribs were shivering.
‘What is his name?’ she asked.
He said that the dog had no particular name.
‘But he should have one,’ she said.
The moment a conviction had animated her bones she began to take the things from their cart, and to arrange their belongings in the house, as if it were the natural thing to do. Carefully she went here and there. She gave the impression she was not sticking her nose into what was already there. In fact, most of the time she was so careful to look straight ahead in her husband’s house that there was a great deal she did not see at all.
But she knew it was there. And would look later on.
‘There is water,’ he said, coming and standing a bucket inside the doorway.
She went to and fro in what was becoming her house. She heard the sound of his axe. She thrust her shoulders through the window, outside which it was determined she should plant the white rose, and where the slope of the land was still restless from the jagged stumps of felled trees.
‘Where is the flour?’ she called. ‘And I cannot see the salt.’
‘I shall come,’ he said, rummaging after the sticks of wood.
It was that hour of evening when the sky is bled white as scattered woodchips. The clearing was wide open. The two people and their important activities could not have been more exposed. About that importance there was no doubt, for the one had become two. The one was enriched. Their paths crossed, and diverged, and met, and knotted. Their voices spoke to each other across gulfs. Their mystery of purpose had found the solution to the mystery of silence.
‘I shall like it here.’ She smiled, over the crumbs on the table, when they had eaten the damper she had slapped together, and some rancid remnants of salt beef.
He looked at her. It had never really occurred to him, in the deep centre of conviction, that she might not like his place. It would never occur to him that what must be, might not. The rose that they would plant was already taking root outside the window of the plain house, its full flowers falling to the floor, scenting the room with its scent of crushed tobacco.
Already, as a boy, his face had been a convinced face. Some said stony. If he was not exactly closed, certainly he opened with difficulty. There were veins in him of wisdom and poetry, but deep, much of which would never be dug. He would stir in his sleep, the dream troubling his face, but he would never express what he had seen.
So instead of telling her smooth things, that were not his anyway, he took her hand over the remnants of their sorry meal. The bones of his hand were his, and could better express the poem that was locked inside him and that would never otherwise be released. His hand knew stone and iron, and was familiar with the least shudder of wood. It trembled a little, however, learning the language of flesh.
The whole night had become a poem of moonlight. The moon, just so far from full as to
be itself a bit crude, cut crooked from its paper, made the crude house look ageless. Its shape was impregnable under the paper moon, the moon itself unperturbed.
So that the thin girl, when she had taken off her dress, and put her shoes together, and rolled into a ball the gloves she had held but had not used, took courage from the example of the moon. The furniture, huge in the moonlight, was worn by and accustomed to the habits of people. So she only had a moment of fright, and chafed that easily off.
Flesh is heroic by moonlight.
The man took the body of the woman and taught it fearlessness. The woman’s mouth on the eyelids of the man spoke to him from her consoling depths. The man impressed upon the woman’s body his sometimes frightening power and egotism. The woman devoured the man’s defencelessness. She could feel the doubts shudder in his thighs, just as she had experienced his love and strength. And out of her she could not wring the love that she was capable of giving, at last, enough, complete as sleep or death.
Later, when it had begun to be cold, and the paper moon had sunk a bit tattered in the trees, the woman got beneath the blanket, against the body of the sleeping man who was her husband. She locked her hand into the iron pattern of the bedstead above her head and slept.
Chapter 4
LIFE continued in that clearing in which Parkers had begun to live. The clearing encroached more and more on the trees, and the stumps of the felled trees had begun to disappear, in ash and smoke, or rotted away like the old teeth. But there remained a log or two, big knotted hulks for which there seemed no solution, and on these the woman sometimes sat in the sun, shelling a dish of peas or drying her slithery hair.
Sometimes the red dog sat and looked at the woman, but not closely as he did at the man. If she called to him, his eyes became shallow and unseeing. He was the man’s dog. So for this reason she had never given him the name she had promised. He remained Your Dog. Walking stiffly past the stumps and the tussocks of grass, stiffly lifting his leg. In time he killed a little fuchsia that she had planted in the shadow of the house, and in her exasperation she threw a woody carrot at him. But she did not hit the dog. He continued to ignore her, even in his laughing moments, when his tongue lolled and increased with the laughter in his mouth. But it was not laughter for the woman. He did not see her. He licked his private parts or looked along his nose at the air.
The Tree of Man Page 3