The wind began to bash the small wooden box in which she had been caught.
Where is he? she asked, turning in it. Her mouth was cavernous with fright.
Just then the man her husband was down by a small shed he had been putting up. His hammering, which at first had been theatrical and impressive, was no longer heard; his was only inferior iron. But the man laughed. He felt a kind of pleasure in the mounting storm. He held his face up flat to the racing clouds. His teeth were smiling in a taut, uncertain humour at the sky, the Adam’s apple was isolated but insignificant in his throat. When suddenly he was altogether insignificant. A thing of gristle. The laughter thinned out in his throat. The pants hung from his hips and blew against the thin sticks of his legs.
The whole earth was in motion, a motion of wind and streaming trees, and he was in danger of being carried with it.
When he was a little boy he had lain on a hard horsehair sofa and been carried through the books of the Old Testament on a wave of exaltation and fear. And now, brought to his knees, about to be hit over the head perhaps, a lightning flash lit his memory. God blew from the clouds, and men would scatter like leaves. It was no longer possible to tell who was on which side. Or is it ever possible to tell? Surrounded by the resentful inanimacy of rock and passionate striving of the trees, he was not sure. In this state he was possessed by an unhappiness, rather physical, that was not yet fear, but he would have liked to look up and see some expression of sympathy on the sky’s face.
But the sky blew blacker. There was one steady stream of wind, and he began to be afraid.
Presently the man saw his wife running, her limbs fighting the wind and the stuff of her own dress. Seeing her tortured into these shapes he did not know, and the drained, strange face, quite suddenly he felt that this was not the girl he had married in the church at Yuruga, and loved and quarrelled with, but he forced himself to stumble on towards her. To touch.
The stood holding each other in the storm.
‘What will we do?’ she cried, through her mouth that was still of a strange shape.
‘There is nothing much we can do’, he shouted, ‘except hope it will be over.’
They held each other. They searched each other’s thin faces. When the touch of each other brought them back to their bodies. For a while again they were themselves. Their feet precariously held the earth.
‘I am afraid, Stan,’ she said.
He should have said something reassuring, but as he was afraid too, he did not. He touched her though, and she felt better.
And the wind blew.
The yellow cow, curved to the wind as far as her full belly would allow, galloped on no set course. The dog fell against the man’s legs, reduced to ribs and a pair of bulging puppy’s eyes. Fowls flew, or handfuls of feathers. The wind peeled off a sheet of iron and flung it with a brittle tinkling of silver paper.
Ahhhh, cried the woman against her husband’s neck, which once had been strong.
The great trees had broken off. Two or three fell. In a grey explosion. Of gunpowder, it seemed. The trees were snapped and splintered. The yellow cow leaped just clear of the branches, tossing her horns. Man and woman were flung against each other with the ease and simplicity of tossed wood. They lay and looked at each other, into each other’s eyes, as the dog licked their hands with slow, rough system, as if he had discovered a new taste.
‘We are still here.’ The man laughed whitely.
Rain filled his mouth.
‘Our poor cow,’ she cried.
‘But she is all right.’
‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘I know.’
In the blubbery rain.
The cold wet sheet wrapped them till their bodies were naked, it felt, except for the clinging rain. The rain drove down the gully over the jagged stumps where the trees had been, then began to fall straight, as if the wind had passed. There was just the rain.
‘What are we sitting here for?’ He laughed in his new young nakedness.
She saw that his head was very young with the hair plastered to the skull.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must be a bit mad.’
Looking at him with fresh wonder, and at the same time wanting to make excuses for any extravagances of action or emotion. It did not seem that she could in reason have been frightened, sitting as she was now by the blasted trees with the new young naked man. If she were to have a son, she thought, he could be like this, with the shining teeth, the streaming skin, and the clean, beautiful skull. She would have liked to kiss, only it would have been to destroy their present state of purity, after all they had gone through. So she got quickly to her feet, arranged what had been her skirt, because there was a lot to do, and no reason to suppose their lives would become different by thinking of it.
‘Clean through the old shed,’ her husband was saying, ‘but they missed the new one, so we’ve got that.’
‘And the old cow by inches,’ she was saying in wet, helpless words.
The dog shook what remained of himself, for he was now his own skeleton.
The man and woman continued through the rain, holding each other, not because they needed support, now that the wind had passed, but because they had grown accustomed to it, and besides, they wanted to.
At least we shall have this, said Stan Parker, and he remembered again the figures that had plodded through the pages of his boyhood in the face of drought and famine and war, and the great deserts of human and divine injustice, as he lay on the horsehair sofa. And here he was, still fumbling his way through the more personal events. He could not interpret the lightning that had written on their lives.
‘See if you can find a piece of dry wood, dear,’ his wife was saying as she stood in their intact house and wrung the water from her hair.
And he did, after a time, and there on the hearth was the reasonable little fire. And soon, outside, there were the grey patches of still cloud, and the orange fire of evening, burning and blazing in its distance with a prophetic intensity that would no more be read than the flash of lightning.
The man, who went about his evening work, did not try. He was tired. He was also at peace under the orange sky. Events had exhausted him. He had not learned to think far, and in what progress he had made had reached the conclusion he was a prisoner in his human mind, as in the mystery of the natural world. Only sometimes the touch of hands, the lifting of a silence, the sudden shape of a tree or presence of a first star, hinted at eventual release.
But not now. And he did not ask for it.
His dull feet went into the house, where he was grateful for the sound of his wife chafing her skin before the fire.
Chapter 6
SOON there was very little evidence that the lightning had struck. Three squashed pullets were fed to the dog, the boards of the demolished shed were again in use, and any jagged emotions were tidied away. Even the hulks of the shattered trees were slowly being hewn and dragged into neat heaps by the ant-man. The ant-woman watched him in the pauses from her own endeavours. She saw him stagger, but advance, over the uneven ground. There was no real doubt that he would eventually accomplish what he had set out to do; only the path was tortuous, and his once apparently boundless strength seen to be comparatively limited.
Sometimes, in the sonorous afternoons, when faith is at its feeblest and haze at its heaviest, the cock drooling in the nettles and hens brooding in the dust, the man and woman would look out from under their sun-frowns and watch the progress of other ant-activity. Down their track, of which use was slowly making a road, just within sight, beneath the stringybarks and peppermints, another family had squatted down. This was Quigleys’. There were the old people, an old, yellow, bristly man that they laid on a mattress, and there he stayed, and the old woman, whose vague surprise stared at these parts to which she had been transported for no apparent reason at her age. She sat beside her husband, wondering, her hands opening and closing, as if they were waiting to take up what they had dropped at the other place. In the
meantime she sat beside her bundle of a husband, amongst the bundles of mattresses and bunches of hens, and her daughter and her sons moved about her, trying to find what had been mislaid.
The two Quigley sons, with long, sinewy, veined arms and slipping pants, were preparing to build a weatherboard house for their parents to live in. But the two ingenious boys, who could devise almost anything out of wire or tin or bag, would afterwards return to Bangalay, it was told, where they worked in a road gang. As they moved about, sorting and improvising, the mother included her long sons in the gaze of wonder that she kept for all objects, as if she had not given them birth. Life had already passed on from her and left her sitting amongst bundles.
‘Your dad don’t look good, Doll,’ said the mother to her tall daughter, who was freeing a bunch of red hens.
The tall young woman came and bent above the body of her father.
‘He don’t look no worse,’ she said, shooing flies with her long hand.
Like her brothers, she had long limbs. But her body was short. Like her brothers, she could have been carved from wood, but whereas the young men were crude gods, she was an unfinished totem, of which the significance was obscure.
Just as the fates of the boys could not have been fitted into the family circle, the unfinished Doll was born to live inside. If she was not herself the circle that enfolds. Some kind of natural dignity clung to her with her cotton dress. Many people would call her Miss Quigley even when her feet were bare, and her nephews and nieces, still unborn, would be brought to see her in carts, buggies, and eventually Fords, as an object of respect. It was difficult to tell what age Doll Quigley was, and she would remain that age, more or less. She was a dry, sandy girl, the sort that the sun soon plays havoc with, so that there is nothing left on which age can practise malignancies. Early on she had developed a prim, upright handwriting, that she had learned from the nuns, and her people were proud of this. They brought her things to write, and she sat at a deal table beside a lamp, and crooked her neck above the painful saltcellars of her chest, and made little elegant passes with her hand above the paper, to form the words in air first, and her family looked on in pride and wonder, waiting for her to write. She was above them, though she did not choose to be. People coming to the door with a message or request asked for Miss Quigley, preferring to give their words into her keeping. She was a reliable repository, it seemed.
Lastly, of the Quigley family, there was Bub, his child’s face on a young man’s body. He lay beneath the trees and chewed a twig. An implicit simplicity seemed to hold together the long blurred form of his face. He was obviously good. His blue, blurry eyes were wide open. His indeterminate nose ran, but not offensively, and not much. Nobody, except occasionally a stranger, was upset by Bub Quigley, because he was inoffensive as water. And as passive. He had to be taken and poured from here to there, and contained by other people, usually the will of his sister Doll.
Quigleys settled down and began to live in the place that they had chosen, under the peppermints and stringybarks, beside the turpentines. Their house was quite like a house, because of the ingenuity of the two boys, who knew by instinct how to do so many things. They were fortunate, too, in finding a spring just there, and Bub Quigley would sit beside it on a stone amongst the tussocks, watching the water ooze out, while people went ahead, and arranged life in spite of him. Watching them as closely as he watched tadpoles, he never resented it. He was only resentful when his sister Doll left him behind. Then he would run up and down on his long, clothes-prop legs, looking and crying, and his dribbly desperation was terrible in the landscape.
Sometimes Doll Quigley took her brother Bub and they hung around the back door at Parkers’ to have a talk. Or if they did not exactly and continuously talk, they shared the silences of that place, and this was a nice change. Amy Parker accepted Doll and Bub because there was no choice. They were good people, and if she lapsed into a private yearning for intricate relationships and immeasurable events, she did not rightly know why.
‘I used to think once I would have a little shop,’ said Doll Quigley, sitting on the doorstep, with her thin knees under her long chin. ‘I would sell doilies and towels and mats and things, you know, fancy things that I would make myself, and soap and things. Now, Bub, don’t scare the chooks. Because I learned to make a lot of things from the nuns, hemstitch and transfers and all that. There was some that learned baskets, but that was not for me.’
‘I’d like to make a basket’, Bub Quigley said, ‘with red and yeller lines.’
‘And why did nothing come of your shop, Doll?’ said Amy Parker, in one of the remote questions she sometimes asked of people, and Quigleys in particular.
‘It didn’t work out in that way,’ said Miss Quigley, without further elaboration, but as if she knew.
What way things were working out for herself, Amy Parker was not sure. She had not thought till now, but was it not now, perhaps, a reason for panic? A slight gust of panic just touched her skin. Here in this house her life was suspended, a bubble ready to burst.
‘What is it, Mrs Parker?’ asked Miss Quigley, getting up with a grace and kindness that she could suddenly command.
‘Is she sick?’ asked Bub.
‘I just felt a little queer. It is nothing, Doll,’ said Amy Parker.
She sat on an upright chair in a beam of sunlight that was too hot. Till now she had never sensed sharply and personally the division between life and death.
‘It is all right,’ she said.
‘Look,’ said Bub Quigley, bringing in his hands a cat’s-cradle he had made. ‘Can you play?’
‘No,’ said Amy Parker. ‘You’re real clever, Bub. But I can’t play.’
She was looking with sudden loathing into his innocent hands, on which the intricate and grubby string was stretched. She was looking at a working-out in string.
‘Perhaps it is what they call a nausea,’ said Doll Quigley.
‘I am all right,’ said Amy Parker.
But her words could not sweep Quigleys out. And the hands of Bub were drawing fresh shapes out of the string.
‘See?’ he said. ‘That is a mattress.’
Amy Parker ran to the side of the house and began to be sick.
‘That is a nausea,’ said Doll Quigley with grating gentleness.
‘They say if you wet a dock leaf and hold it to your forehead – ’
‘It will pass,’ said Amy Parker, holding her agitation.
If Quigleys would too.
And in time they did, long and slow across the yard, through the slow-stepping fowls.
When Stan Parker came up from the gully that evening he said, ‘What’s up, Amy?’
‘Ah, those Quigleys?’ she said.
She dug her elbows into the table, because that way her arms would not shake.
‘They’re good enough people,’ said her husband. ‘No harm there.’ He was slowly stirring the thick soup into which he had dropped big chunks of bread. Physical exhaustion and the presence of his wife made him content.
But Amy Parker was angrily tearing bread. ‘That Bub Quigley makes me feel sick.’
‘What’s he to you? He’s harmless,’ her husband said.
‘Oh, go on!’ she said. ‘Say it. But I can’t stand it.’
Her mouth was full of hot, doughy bread. The disturbed lamplight made his eyes shine, that looked at her out of his thick, unseeing face.
What is happening, he wondered, in this strange room in which we live?
‘Stan,’ she said, ‘I was looking at that long, loopy boy, and I got the wind up. I don’t know much. I don’t understand the way things work out. Why, for instance, Mum Quigley? I’m going to have a kid, Stan. I’m sure now. He was showing me a cat’s-cradle he’d made, and I began to feel myself slip, as if I hadn’t a hold on anything in this world. I was afraid.’
Then she was not afraid. Now the lamplight was bland. Her words had released her. And his seeing face. There are moments when the eyes flow into
each other. Then the souls are wrapped around each other across a distance.
‘There’s no need’, he was saying needlessly, ‘to be afraid. You’ll get through it like anyone else.’
Already it seemed unreasonable to dwell upon the instance of Mum Quigley, who had conceived Bub.
‘Yes,’ she said peacefully.
He could have put almost any word into her mouth.
‘We’ll have to build another room,’ he was saying. ‘Or perhaps a house. It’ll be a tight fit for three people walking around in this shack.’
And the boy, because that was what it would be, stood in the centre of the floor, of a new house, holding in his hand things to show, a speckled magpie’s egg, a piece of glass with a bubble in it, or a stick that was meant to be a horse. Stan Parker’s positive vision gave even to the furniture a certainty of shape that his wife had never noticed before, so that she was ashamed of her lack of faith.
‘It’ll be nice to have kids about the place,’ she said quietly, bringing a plate of spotted dog, that was not a great success on account of Quigleys.
‘Chop the wood, eh? And wash the dishes.’
He laughed for the first time since receiving his wife’s news, and if his mouth had tightened a bit she did not notice, or did not appear to, with her own thoughts inside her. If Stan Parker’s vision was less positive than before, it was because there were so many bits of himself that he did not know how to unravel, and here was a fresh life, a whole tangled ball of mystery in his wife’s womb. It gave him the gooseflesh to think. The man sitting in the small, frail box of light, himself glowing and waning within the limits of his soul, was perhaps greater, but also less adequate, than the husband who had begotten the child, and who sat offering advice and the consolation of his body’s presence as he chewed the plateful of soggy pudding and generally performed the acts that are performed.
The Tree of Man Page 6