But her husband could have heard more. His lips wondered on the fat meat they had begun to eat.
‘The Gold Coast, eh?’ said the young man.
As if the permanence of furniture was a myth. As if other glittering images that he sensed inside him without yet discovering, stirred, heaved almost to the surface. The seat of his pants prickled on the deal chair. His wife, who was blowing on a forkful of hot meat to cool it, could have got up and kissed the sockets from which her husband’s eyes had withdrawn.
Making room for words, eventually, in his full mouth, the stranger explained, ‘I was engaged on a mission at the time, you might say both private and hofficial, to investigate a possibility of purchasin mahogany from the Ashanti tribes. Very difficult natives too. Things might have turned nasty if it had not been for one chief with an attack of the backache. I prescribed quantities of rum.’
‘You were not in the water then?’ asked the young woman.
‘In the water?’ said the stranger, who was tilting the bottle as if he had been invited, but at the same time with a kind of invisible air.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the stuff that you carry in your pocket.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that is a different line of business. Yes.’
And he sucked the naked bone of a chop, till his mouth glistened, but it had also closed up.
All this time Stan Parker was torn between the images of gold and ebony and his own calm life of flesh. He did not wish to take his hat from the peg and say, Well, so long, I’m off to see foreign places. This did not bring the sweat to the backs of his knees. He had a subtler longing. It was as if the beauty of the world had risen in a sleep, in the crowded wooden room, and he could almost take it in his hands. All words that he had never expressed might suddenly be spoken. He had in him great words of love and beauty, below the surface, if they could be found.
But all he said was, again, ‘The Gold Coast, eh?’ And reached for the bottle.
All his impotence and power flowed together in his veins.
‘When I was a nipper,’ he said, ‘I read the Works of Shakespeare. I dug out bits. I don’t think I ever dug out more than bits, not out of anything.’
Literature’, said the stranger, ‘is man’s greatest consolation – that is, well, there are one or two competitors perhaps.’
‘Here,’ said the young woman, scraping the gnawed bones from their plates and throwing them to the dog in the doorway.
She was oppressed by a sadness of night, and the removed souls of the men, who no longer threw her scraps. Any poetry that had got into the conversation was personal. The stranger’s nose glowed for himself, whether he spoke of the Gulf or Ethiopia. Her husband’s mood she had met once or twice and grudgingly respected.
‘Yes,’ said the stranger, ‘if it is not the consolation of consolations, it takes a honorary mention. There’s many benefits by a good read, just as some must sing a lungful of psalm, or take the bottle down from the shelf. You will appreciate,’ he said, ‘I am being frank.’
As he killed the rum.
‘You, on the other hand, are differently placed.’
Hearing the man’s words, feeling herself brought into focus again, the young woman leaned against her husband the other side of the table. The skin of her hand brushed the hair of his arm. She was rehabilitated.
‘How’s that?’ she asked.
‘Because the Almighty ’asn’t yet shown ’Is ’and. You ’ave not been ’it over the ’ead, kicked downstairs, spat at in the eye. See?’
This old man is not only drunk, but perhaps a little bit mad, felt Stan Parker. But the warmth of his wife against his shoulder kept him distinct from any such states.
‘All young married couples are a vegetable sex,’ said the stranger. ‘They don’t compete. Marrows and squashes. They coil and cuddle on the bed.’
‘You are a nice sort of man to be peddling the Bible,’ the young woman said.
‘There are all sorts to everything,’ yawned her guest from the side of his mouth. ‘And talking of Bibles, I’ve been filled with such fire, you wouldn’t believe. I was dazzled. Oh yes. Only it don’t last.’
His hair hung, the few sad strands. The husband and wife sat against each other. It was true, they were untouched. Their faces had the golden waxiness of closed contentment.
‘And now, with your permission, I’ll lay down somewhere,’ said the guest, easing the stuff of his pants. ‘Stretch out with the whirligigs. That’s a pretty little thing.’
Which he fingered, from a distance, on the mantelpiece.
‘That’, she said, ‘is a little silver nutmeg grater that was given me at my wedding.’
‘Ah, weddings!’ Ow we try to insure ourselves!’
But he was disposed of outside on one or two gags. He was asleep.
A crazy moon had risen on the deathless trees. The oblong shack lay at a distance in the moonlight. Inside, the fire had died to coals, of which the flames no longer exalted the human flesh, with the consequence that such poetry as man had dared to conceive was just silly. Habit prevailed in those who were taking off their clothes and preparing for sleep. Their backs turned on each other, they knew the next move. They knew the hands responding to each other. They recognized the sigh of the bed.
‘Amy,’ said Stan Parker into his wife’s cheek.
The silence was complicated.
‘Tt-tt-tt,’ she said, ‘and that old boy outside.’
But his body was flooding her with tolerance. They flowed together in the darkness. The coasts of tenderness opened to admit their craft. Sleep swam out to meet them, from under the trees.
When finally it was morning, all square and full of birds, with the red dog yelping after a rabbit in the dew, Amy Parker, again a thin young woman, her face creased by sleep, sat up and remembered that old boy outside.
‘Waiting for his breakfast, Stan, perhaps, and the bacon that salt. I should have soaked it if I hadn’t forgotten.’
‘He’ll be too furry to notice a thing like bacon. He’ll keep,’ her husband said, for whom it did not matter, only the warm smell of sleep and the shape of their bodies, with which the sheets were still full.
‘Go on, Stan, leave me!’ She laughed.
Her slippers slapped across the floor as she elbowed her way into the dress.
‘Why,’ she said, and she was still shaking her hair and smoothing, ‘why,’ she said to the morning, ‘can you beat it, he has gone.’
And he had. There were the innocent bags on which he had slept, before some problem of conscience had propelled him out along the track, towards the great river for which he had been making.
Later, when the young woman was sweeping the place where he had slept, she could not sweep him out. So few people entered her life, she remembered the warts on the faces and the colour of the eyes of those who did. She would have liked to perpetuate her dreams and lift the reflections out of mirrors. So now, from desperate, retrospective sweeping of the veranda floor, she had to go back into the room to see what her possessions really were. There was nothing much of which she could be proud; there was nothing sufficiently useless, except her little silver nutmeg grater.
Then Amy Parker began to burn inside her cold skin.
‘Stan,’ she called, ran, her skirts brushing hens, ‘Stan,’ as she ran, and the woolly clumps of horehound were crushed by her passage, ‘do you know’, she said as clearly as her breath allowed, ‘what that old man has done? He has pinched the nutmeg grater!’
Her husband had earth on his hands. It was wet and black and comfortable.
He whistled. ‘He did?’ he said. ‘The old bugger!’
She looked at his naked throat. All these mornings there was a glow of bluish cabbages.
‘It was never much use,’ he said.
‘Of course it wasn’t.’
But her words were hot and slow that trailed back towards the house. It had never, of course, been any use, except to hold that morning they had jingled out from Yuru
ga across the flat, past Venables’ dead cow. Or as the sparks flew, and the man with the Bibles had talked his exhilarating rot, mounting upward through the evening, this in the end had been her one contribution of treasure, her Gold Coast, only it was real, her silver nutmeg grater.
Stan Parker, who had never yet attempted to possess the truth in final form, was a lesser victim of the same deception. His Gold Coast still glittered in a haze of promise as he grubbed the weeds out of his land, as he felled trees and tautened the wire fences he had put round what was his. It was, by this time, almost enclosed. But what else was his he could not say. Would his life of longing be lived behind the wire fences? His eyes were assuming a distance from looking into distances. So he did begin then with impatience, even passion, to hew the logs that still lay, and to throw aside his axe at the end, with disgust, apparently, for something wood will not disclose. He would listen to the sounds around him too, the thick and endless murmurs, from which a theme will threaten to burst, the one theme, and continue to threaten.
In the meantime he was growing a bit older. His body was hardening into the sculptural shape of muscular bodies. And for the casual speculator there was no obvious sign that his soul too might not harden in the end into the neat, self-contained shape it is desirable souls should take.
Chapter 5
OTHER people came to live in those parts. From time to time they passed by, all tables and mattresses, on drays and bullock wagons, or some putting on dog in a buggy with new black paint. Sometimes somebody would come in to fill the water-bag from Parkers’ tank. But most were tardy to recognize those who were already there, and Parkers returned their sideways glances with long, flat stares.
One young woman who was taken queer, and who came in to sit a while on the veranda, and to clean her face with a soaked handkerchief, said it was terrible lonely.
Amy Parker did not answer this. Loneliness was something that she had not learned about; she did not connect market days. Then the people went away, and at once the silence filled in where their rather thin presences had been. There was a ringing almost of bells of silence in the parrot-coloured morning. She was happy.
There was a rosebush now, growing against the veranda, a white rose, of which she had thought and spoken, and which he had brought to her from town. It was already a branching, irregular bush, with the big wads of shapely paper roses just smelling of tobacco. Cold perhaps. It belonged to the dank green light on that side of the house, where it stood in the long weed that is called cow-itch. Its branches would grow black and straggly later on. But the rosebush of Amy Parker was still green, sappy wood. The marble roses were solid in the moonlight. The white roses glared back at the heavy light of noon or fluttered papery down into the yellow-green of the cow-itch.
‘You’re a one for the flower plantun, I see,’ said the woman whose cart grated to a stop, though she only half-intended it to.
‘I have a rosebush,’ said Amy Parker quietly.
‘Gingerbread never got anyone nowheres,’ said the woman in the cart, ‘but it is all right, I suppose, for them that has the taste.’
Amy Parker disliked the woman, much as she had disliked her Aunt Fibbens, though this one was young.
‘You’ve got to have something,’ said Amy Parker.
‘Ho,’ snorted the young woman, and she would have flicked her tail if she had been a draught mare. ‘We have the pigs, two sow in farrer, and a pretty young boar, and the pullets besides, and he’s for growun things as well, we’re tryun the taters this spring, though it’s a frost holler we’re in if ever there was.’
As she rolled her round words, turning her head this way and that, with its black coil of glistening hair, and the high colour in her cheeks, the broad young woman was more than ever like a draught mare.
‘So you cannot say there is nothun’, she said, ‘without roses besides.’
‘I shall have my rose,’ said Amy Parker stubbornly.
‘You are not for bein wild at me, dear?’ the young woman asked. ‘I was expressun a personal opinion. He says it is me life’s vocation, but after all, a woman must breathe, and what is wrong if a word or two gets into me breath, like, I says.’
Amy Parker had begun to warm to words.
‘An it is terrible lonely here,’ the woman sighed. ‘I was born in a bog, to be sure, but you could call to other Christians on either hand.’
Amy Parker leaned upon the gate. Her life, which had never been a wilderness, was becoming one perhaps, with so many hinting at it, except that for the moment it was peopled by her friend, the fubsy woman in the cart.
‘We’re here, for two,’ Amy Parker said, to help.
‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘that is so.’
But she sat looking rather blank. She sat looking straight ahead. Her jaunty face was flat, and the heavy coil of glittery hair had begun to fall apart.
‘Well,’ she said, as if she were tearing the word out of something that might get the better of her, ‘I am for town, with a few things. He will not be visible, not today, nor tomorrer. He has an affliction, I might say, except, as it is his, it is not, it is a gentleman’s pastime. It is his privilege, he would have you know, to get shickered periodical, like a lord or a bastard, and fling out the marines, so that his wife will break’ erankles one fine day on the bottles floatun round the yard.’
She put her hair back where it belonged and began to gather up the reins with some vehemence.
‘I’m just tellun you,’ she said, ‘seeun as we’ve made each other’s acquaintance, but for all that, he’s not too bad.’
She began to clack with her leather tongue, to slap with the whole bunch of reins, to jog with her bottom on the board, all of which would have started a better horse than this.
‘The horse is sick?’ asked Amy Parker.
‘Tother one was,’ said her new friend. ‘But not this. He has got his bones dug in.’
Whether or not, he was certainly all bones, and a girth gall or two, these and his eyes a liberal fly-feast.
‘He is good in motion,’ panted the woman. ‘Only he stands awful fast. Hey there, now! Who’s the deaf and unfeelun one?’
The cart began to groan.
‘As I was sayun before, we are now acquainted, which is as it should be between neighbours. We are only a couple a mile down, where the chestnut mare is dead at the turn. If you would care perhaps for a drink of tea, and a conversation, sure, nothun could please me better. The house is easy to find, what there is, it is incomplete. You have only to look for the old dead horse that he left layun for a sign.’
She called as the reluctant cart was pulling out, lurching over stones, and she leaned down, shining from her sweat of words. You could see the moles above her best blouse, and the knitted jacket, where the egg had fallen that day. She had a pretty smile, the neighbour woman. Her soaped skin was friendly to her audience.
‘Oh,’ she called, ‘an I forgot to mention, but me name is Mrs O’Dowd.’
Soon after Amy Parker had told hers in return, with a boldness she used now that it was not Fibbens, the neighbour woman was gone. There were the trees again.
The young woman left the gate and went inside, thinking about her friend. Because she was her friend, she was sure of it, who had never had one before. That morning as she scrubbed the table, as she beat the mat, as she stirred the pot, she digested the neighbour woman’s words. Some objects in the house now looked quite startling through the young woman’s new eyes. The bed, for instance, of which the enormous brass knobs glowed with reflections upon the posts of humbler iron. So the young woman went about her house, and laughed at the dog that she had never liked, and he was looking at her straight, with his surprised but unforgiving eyes, just moving the tip of his liver-coloured nose.
‘Stan,’ she said to her husband, who was not far behind his dog, ‘we have a neighbour who passed by. Her name is Mrs O’Dowd, and her husband’s on the bottle.’
‘The Irish have come,’ said Stan Parker, putting do
wn his hat and filling the basin to wash for dinner.
‘What of it?’ she said. ‘It is lonely here.’
‘Since now.’
‘It is nice to have someone to talk to.’
‘And what about me?’
‘Oh,’she said, ‘you!’ Piling the big, steamy potatoes.
He could not kill her warm pleasure.
‘That is different,’ she said.
She brought him his dinner, looking down from under her eyelids in a way that was annoying to him.
‘Keep an eye on your things,’ he said, filling his mouth too full with righteous potatoes.
‘Why, but she was an honest woman’, she said, ‘by the way she spoke.’
‘So was the bloke with the Bibles,’ said her husband, whom the hot potato had made sound angrier.
He sat there breaking bread in such a way that the bones of his wrists looked bigger and unreasonable.
She did not speak then. There was a speckled hen that had come in, her pet, that she allowed at times to peck about beneath the table, and now in the silence there was the pecking of the hen’s beak upon the hard floor. It punctuated most firmly all that had been said.
But Amy Parker could not dismiss her friendship, nor her husband. They mingled in the drowsy noon. She was invaded by a warm melancholy that was rather pleasant to indulge, just not serious enough, and sweet as the strong tea that made her steamy-eyed, remote.
Presently her husband put down his cup and went outside. Nothing had been settled. It was the first time in their relationship that there were any loose ends, and the sad, pleasurable situation persisted through the sultry afternoon.
What of it? she said, running her needle angrily and excitedly through the sock she had taken to darn; none of it is important. There would be thunder later that day. The sweat stood out above her lip. Already leaves moved in a little breeze. Clouds were swelling in the right direction. She pricked her finger in anticipation of some event, sucked it, rolled the socks into a nervous ball. All this time the big clouds, moving and swelling, pushed and shouldered each other. The little and, at first, subtle breeze became moister and more blatantly vicious. It was lifting the corners of things. The woman in the house got up and closed a door, in an attempt to secure for herself an illusion of safety, if only an illusion. Because the black clouds were bursting on her head. And the grey wool of torn clouds that the wind dragged across the sky raced quicker than her blood and began to rouse the terror in her.
The Tree of Man Page 5