Never far from the dog the man would be at work. With axe, or scythe, or hammer. Or he would be on his knees, pressing into the earth the young plants he had raised under wet bags. All along the morning stood the ears of young cabbages. Those that the rabbits did not nibble off. In the clear morning of those early years the cabbages stood out for the woman more distinctly than other things, when they were not melting, in a tenderness of light.
The young cabbages, that were soon a prospect of veined leaves, melted in the mornings of thawing frost. Their blue and purple flesh ran together with the silver of water, the jewels of light, in the smell of warming earth. But always tensing. Already in the hard, later light the young cabbages were resistant balls of muscle, until in time they were the big, placid cabbages, all heart and limp panniers, and in the middle of the day there was the glandular stench of cabbages.
If the woman came and stood by the man, when the sun had risen, after frost, when the resentful blood had settled in the veins, he would show her how he was chipping the earth in the rows between the cabbages.
‘Not this way,’ he said, ‘because you cover up the weeds. But this way.’
Not that she had to be shown. Or listened. Not that he did not know this, but had her by him. The earth was soft and exhausted after frost. After the awful numbing and clawing and screeching of the fingernails, it was gently perfect to be beside each other. Not particularly listening or speaking. He could feel her warmth. She wore a big old straw hat with frayed spokes where the binding had come unsewn, and the hat made her face look too small and white. But her body had thickened a little. She no longer jerked when she turned, or threatened to break at the hips. Her flesh was growing conscious and suave.
‘Not this way. But this way,’ he said.
Teaching her not this, but the movements of her own body as she walked between the rows of cabbages. She walked narrowly, on account of the hummocks of earth that he had hilled up to serve as beds, but her movement pervaded the orbit of his vision. He did not often raise his eyes, chipping the thawed earth, but he carried against him the shape of her body.
So that he too was taught. She was imprinted on him.
Sometimes she would look up from her plate and speak, after tearing a mouthful of bread, speak with her mouth too full, the voice torn. He would hear and remember this voice again when he was alone. Her too greedy voice. Because she was rather greedy, for bread, and, once discovered, for his love.
Her skin devoured the food of love, and resented those conspiracies of life that took it from her before she was filled. She would look from the window into the darkness, hearing the swinge of metal and the thwack of leather, seeing the dark distortion of a cart with its mountain of cabbages against the stars.
‘I have filled the water-bag,’ she would call.
As the man tore at stiff buckles, and cold leather resisted his hands. As he moved round and round the horse and cart, preparing for the journey of cabbages.
‘And there’s a slice of pie beneath the sandwiches,’ she said.
To say.
Because it was cold on her shoulders in the morning, and in the bed when he had gone, and the hoofs of the horse were striking their last notes from the stones, and the cart had creaked its final music. She could not warm back his body in the forsaken bed.
Sometimes he would be gone a whole day and night after the market, if there was business to transact or things to buy.
Then the forsaken woman was again the thin girl. The important furniture of her marriage were matchsticks in the hollow house. Her thin, child’s life was a pitiful affair in the clearing in the bush. As she walked here and there, tracing maps in scattered sugar or in the receded undergrowth, close to the ground, staring eye to eye with the ant.
Sometimes she mumbled the words she had been taught to say to God.
She would beg the sad, pale Christ for some sign of recognition. On the scratched mahogany table which the man had bought at auction, she had put the Bible from the parson’s wife. She turned the pages respectfully. She said or read the words. And she waited for the warmth, the completeness, the safety of religion. But to achieve this there was something perhaps that she had to do, something that she had not been taught, and in its absence she would get up, in a desperation of activity, as if she might acquire the secret in performing a ritual of household acts, or merely by walking about. Suspecting she might find grace in her hands, suddenly, like a plaster dove.
But she did not receive the grace of God, of which it had been spoken under coloured glass. When she was alone, she was alone. Or else there was lightning in the sky that warned her of her transitoriness. The sad Christ was an old man with a beard, who spat death from full cheeks. But the mercy of God was the sound of wheels at the end of market day. And the love of God was a kiss full in the mouth. She was filled with the love of God, and would take it for granted, until in its absence she would remember again. She was so frail.
The woman Amy Fibbens was absorbed in the man Stan Parker, whom she had married. And the man, the man consumed the woman. That was the difference.
It did not occur to Stan Parker, in the suit of stiff clothes he wore for town, that his strength had been increased by an act of cannibalism. He swallowed, and forgot his own body too, when once he had been conscious of it, in the presence of other men. Nor did his words hold back. He was still slow, but his slowness had become, and would remain, a virtue.
In the town in which men transacted their business, bought flour and sugar, got drunk, talked big, and spewed up under the balconies of pubs, Stan Parker began to be known. He did not assert himself but would give or receive opinions, whenever asked. People began to recognize his face. His hands, with scabs on the knuckles, were respected as they received the change.
Sometimes he stood in the pubs with other men, wrapped in the damp blankets of beerful reminiscence, and listened to what they had to say. This was endless. The stiff, moustachy, or the smooth and blubbery, or the blue-eyed, empty faces of confident men in pubs do not draw the line. Their cows had full udders. Such hams, bacon, and pork had not been known from other pigs. Tried in drought, flood, and fire, the heroic muscles of these men had performed prodigious feats. They had caught fish and killed snakes. They had hurled bullocks into heaps. They had bitten the ears off angry horses. They had eaten and drunk, lost and won, more than other men. Their involved voices spun out their deeds in the dark and swirly, damp and drooly atmosphere of the pubs. It was an atmosphere of reported fact. It was an atmosphere of branching smoke, that began, and wandered, and broke, and continued, and hesitated, and fizzled out. If the smoke began in fire, at some point or other it lost itself in patterns of ostentation.
Stan Parker sometimes listened to the voices of men in pubs, but he did not feel the necessity to translate his own life into brave words. His life as lived was enough. So that when the swing doors swung on him, it was sometimes wondered whether they liked his face, whether he was not perhaps a surly sort of cove. But Stan Parker walked away beneath the lace balconies, and the dog that had waited followed him.
Life at Bangalay, the market town, did not convince Stan, not even such solid evidence as the red courthouse and the yellow jail. He drove along the straight streets, where men were persuading themselves, and past the stone homes, where girls sat beneath the pepper trees, exchanging confidences and sipping raspberry vinegar. He would blow down his nose at times, as if to settle the flies. His cart crunched almost insolently through the outskirts. He sat upright, asking to be knocked off rather than acknowledge belief in that town.
And he would smile for his own secret existence, and for its most significant, most secret detail, his wife.
Once, intruding on this privacy, an old woman in a crumpled bonnet ran out into the middle of the road and asked, ‘Where is Delaney’s, please, son? It is either Smith Street or Broad Street, I forget which, my memory is not too good. He is the big building contractor come to live here from The Glebe. His daughter is m
arried with me sister’s boy.’
The young man, who knew Delaney at least by sight, frowned and said, ‘I’m a stranger here, mother.’ Pulling the shadow over his face. He had been taken by surprise. He was ashamed for some indelicacy.
‘Ah,’ she said, her mouth doubting above the stubble, ‘I thought youse would know Delaney. He’s a fine figure of a man.’
But the young man shook his head. He was ashamed of something. Afterwards he was sorry, and anxious for the fate of the old woman, but he had kept his secret, which was also, after all, his strength.
In the comfortable silence, in a blandishment of trees, in the smell of hot leather, the young man drove homeward after market days. Distance flooded his soul. He began to open. He would remember many simple but surprising things: his mother combing the hair from a brush, the soldiers on the battlements of Elsinore, the breath of a roan cow at daybreak, mouths biting at a prayer but not consuming. All the riches of memory were recounted on these mornings.
He had been brought up in a reverence for religion, but he had not yet needed God. He rejected, in his stiff clothes, the potentialities of prayer. He was strong still. He loved the enormous smooth tree that he had left standing outside the house. He loved. He loved his wife, who was just then coming with the bucket from behind their shack, in the big hat with spokes like a wheel, and under it her bony face. He loved, and strongly too, but it was still the strength and love of substances.
‘Well,’ he said, hiding his love, ‘and what has happened? Anybody come?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, diffident beneath her hat, and wondering whether she should offer some sign. ‘What do you expect,’ she said, ‘a steam engine?’
Her voice broke the cold stillness too roughly. She stood squeaking the handle of her bucket, a sound of which the air was less shy. She too was ashamed of her voice.
She was ashamed of not being able to say those things that she should. All day long she had listened to the bell on the cow, the laughing of a bird, the presence of her silent house. Her thoughts had chattered loudly enough, but took refuge now.
Anyway, the young man her husband was thudding down from his cart. His coat, uneasy on him, had got hitched up on his back.
‘Your coat’s too tight,’ she said, touching.
‘Then it will have to be.’
But he kissed her mouth, and at once it was clear that this had been his goal, and anything else, words, harness, the weaving of the cart between the grey stumps, even his jacket’s wrinkling upward, all was part of an elaborate bird’s ritual.
So she went away from this climax with his breath in her mouth. She went to find the yellow cow, that had stood this how long, her patient belly, her mouth full of her blue tongue. The old cow that the young woman called to herself Julia, because of an affection she had had for the parson’s wife. And in this light her gentle cow was gentler, turning the eyes in the direction from which she came, her welcome sweet-breathed. She loved her copper cow in the orange light of evening. The world was open. Peace fell into her bucket. Her hands that had just now touched her husband’s back, if casually, performed these further acts of love. All things that she touched were translated. She bowed her head against the cow and listened to the sounds of peace.
Once about this hour a stranger came, whom they remembered for many a day, because he was the first. He came up the track towards the dead tree, against which she milked her yellow cow. The man’s approach mingled with the steady milk. Till the woman looked up to see. And here was a man with a long nose and a sack over his back.
He was making for Wullunya, he said, which was some way still, where a big river ran. ‘Have you been to Wullunya?’ the man asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I have never been that far.’
It was too far to contemplate. She was fixed now, seated with the bucket between her knees; the river flowed away from her.
‘I have only been to Yuruga, and here,’ she said. ‘Oh, and to Bangalay once or twice.’
‘I have been to most places,’ said the man.
His scurfy coat had not reaped the benefit, but his face could have seen many things, his rich nose revelling in them.
‘Have you seen savages?’ she asked, wringing the milk into the still evening.
‘Lord,’ he laughed, ‘more than enough. In many an unexpected place they’ll shake their feathers at you.’
So he was a sort of educated man.
‘I knew a lady,’ she said bitterly, ‘who told me there’s savages diving to the bottom of the sea and fetching things up in their teeth.’
Her eyes had a hungry glitter for something she did not possess, or as if she had not yet walked on the bottom of the sea, and would not perhaps, seated at her cow’s side, with the teats slacker in her aching hands.
‘You are interested in literature?’ asked the man, assuming a glitter of his own.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I mean, you are a young woman that reads?’
‘I have read four books,’ she said. ‘And I read the newspaper when I was at Yuraga.’
‘Look,’ said the man, plunging his arm into the sack. ‘Here’s books.’
He had, in fact, a whole lot of glossy Bibles in the lumpy bag.
‘There’s pictures,’ he said. ‘Twenty-seven art plates. Look,’ he said, ‘there’s Samson pushin the temple down, and there’s Job examining ’is boils. Perhaps the gentleman would buy you one of these here Bibles as a present. It’s a gift as should appeal to a young lady with a taste for reading.’
‘We have the Bible,’ she said.
‘But not with pictures.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but there’s the potatoes to peel, and the mending, and the cow, and the sticks to chop when he is not here, and I take a hoe sometimes when the weeds are extra bad, after rain. When should I ever be looking at pictures, even if they are Bible ones?’
The man rubbed his nose. ‘You are the practical woman,’ he said.
She pushed back the old box on which she had sat to milk her cow. ‘I don’t know what I am,’ she said. ‘I was never taught a great deal.’
‘Ever seen that?’ asked the man.
He brought from his pocket a chunky bottle. ‘Thompson’s Genuine Magnetical Water,’ the label said, ‘Guaranteed Killer of Most Pains, Safe but Sure (No Humbug).’
‘This is also a good investment in its way.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘there is my husband.’
And she began to walk across the paddock with the white milk slip-slopping up the side of the pail. She was glad to leave the man, for she had begun to feel her inexperience of life.
‘Who is this cove?’ asked her husband.
‘He’s a man walking to Wullunya, with a bag full of Bibles and some funny water in a bottle.’
‘It’s a long way to Wullunya,’ said the young man as the stranger was gathering his books in the dusk, wrapping them in the sheets of crumpled paper from which he had taken them.
In the clearing that had not very long ago been bush, the light drained fast. Their house looked quite frail. They were themselves strangers to their own place. Until the lamp was lit, it would not be theirs.
‘Better ask him to have something. Can you do it?’ asked Stan Parker.
‘Oh, there’ll be something, I suppose,’ she said.
‘He can doss down outside,’ said her husband, ‘or on the veranda, on a few bags.’
‘ Though what it will be,’ she said,’ I don’t yet know.’
She was suddenly full of angry importance. Excitement chafed her anger. She was pretty now. Her important actions filled the lamp-lit room as she dealt with the business of a first guest.
And the stranger with the Bibles rubbed his hands as greed began to ease through his humility and relief, as he smelled the meat the young woman was grilling at the hearth. There were three chops and a kidney, that she cooked on a slither of a wire gridiron. The chops spat fat, and the kidney swelled and shone with little drops o
f blood. As he waited, there was a sadness beginning to invade the stranger’s eye, whether of patience or from a conviction that the angry chops might finally explode.
‘Ah yes, food, it nourishes,’ sighed the man who carried the bottle of magnetical water, and who had not eaten that day. ‘There is also drink, he said. ‘There are those that deny the nourishin properties of alcohol, but you will’uv read, I don’t doubt, you are thoughtful people, it is obvious, you will’uv read that this is also a form, a form, mind you, of pure food.’
The stranger narrowed his eyes, as if he were squinting through a crack. It emphasized the delicacy of his argument. He was a bald man, or not quite. A few surviving strands of hair straggled across the bluish skin of his scalp. Without his hat, his burned face looked less experienced than exposed.
I had an uncle who was nourished. Still have, for that matter,’ said the young woman, who was slapping down the thick white cops.
‘It is only a theory,’ said the stranger gently.
But the husband was moved by some pleasure to take from the rickety dresser the bottle that he had kept for an official occasion, and why not this, they had not had a guest. Now, too, in the lamplight it was confirmed that the house was theirs. Any uneasy moments of doubt that hang about at dusk had been dispersed.
‘Well,’ said the young man, ‘whether it is food or not, here is a drop of good rum.’
‘To warm the cockles,’ said the stranger, slipping it in, as you do, before turning to subjects of significance. ‘It reminds me of an occasion on the Gold Coast of Africa, where I had important business with the chief of a tribe of savages.’
‘There’s your tea then,’ said the young woman, as if she would shut her ears.
The Tree of Man Page 4