But his wife was comforted.
She went about. She went to Quigleys’ once, where the house was almost finished that the boys were building, and Doll took her to see a slope at the back, which they would plough up, she said, and plant with orange trees, and she would have the fowls and the oranges.
‘I am glad we have come here,’ said Doll Quigley. ‘I didn’t want to. But it has begun to be our home. It’s funny the way you take root. You get to like people.’
Standing in the paddock, with her arms held awkwardly across her stomach, she was not unlike a tree, of which something had roughened the bark in passing.
And Bub Quigley showed Amy Parker the tadpoles he had caught, and she was not disgusted.
A great many little coloured parrots lit on the hills at that season, flirting and settling, stalking woodenly in the stubble, destroying the silence with their hard cries. It had become a season of activity. Life was simple and benevolent on many evenings. The wattles were in flower. Now their black trunks were less desolate, now that the sun shone through the tears of oozing gum. Amy Parker, walking beneath the froth of wattles, broke off pieces of transparent gum, stuck it in her mouth for its prettiness and promise, but the gum was nothing much, neither sweet nor particularly bitter, just insipid.
Still, it was a season of activity and life, that might hold almost any issue, as she walked with her pail, evenings, to the waiting cow. They had soon begun the new house, and were working day and night, to have at least one room finished before Mrs Parker’s time had come. She heard the hammer in the evening, and the voices of her husband and the Quigley boys, who were giving a hand. Then the whole landscape would seem to be built around the woman, which made her silent and important.
How still it was those evenings after the wind had died, the stillness made stiller by the sound of milk. The wattles, which had been turbulent all day, stood penitent then. Their clouds of dying light gilded the gathering darkness. The milking tree, of which the dead wood had been polished by the cow’s neck, was white as a tree of bone.
This cow, their Julia, that had had the mastitis in one teat, and for that reason they had got her cheap, was again heavy in calf. Her laborious sides palpitated with the unborn calf. She chewed and sighed. Soon they would dry her off. But she would continue to chew, and sigh, and look, and stand beside the milking tree, waiting for attention to be paid, and to take part in the ritual of the milk.
She was an aged cow.
‘Better to sell her’, said Stan Parker, ‘while we can still get a price.’
‘No,’ said Amy.’ She’s my cow. She’s a good cow.’
Stan Parker did not argue, because he did not feel strongly enough. It was not important at that moment.
So his wife became fonder of the cow, especially now that she would have her child. She buried her forehead in the cow’s soft side, and there was a continual stirring, and the gentle cow smell. The whole air those evenings was soft with the smell of cow’s breath, as if the blue tongue had slapped it on. The old cow stood wisely waiting. Her ears were held twitched back, as if she were pleased. Her brown eyes looked inward, it appeared. There were little dots of passive moisture on her granite-coloured nose.
Stiller even than the dusk was this peaceful relationship between Amy Parker and the yellow cow. Their soft, increasing bodies were in full accord. I shall have a little girl, said Amy Parker, and she smiled for this luxury into the acquiescent belly of the cow. The child sat on a smooth log. She was as pink and white as painted china, and the hair, parted in the centre, smoothed in the mornings with a wet brush, sprang at the sides into little tinkling curls as yellow as the waning wattle trees. Yes, said Amy Parker, I would like a girl. Then she remembered that this was not her husband’s wish, and looked downward into the milk.
When the time came for the old cow to go dry and rest before dropping her calf, the woman was at a loss. She would walk in the sharp evenings, from the shack to the skeleton of their new house, and along the edges of the paddocks, wearing an old jacket she had knitted, that had a darn in the left elbow, chafing her hands together, that were suddenly dry and papery in their inactivity, the bones frail. Then her own pregnancy stretched out before her in heavy days. The thorns of the straggly rose bush caught at the harsh blue of her jacket as she passed. An early bud was white and sickly on its stem.
‘You look pale,’ he said, meeting her kindly in the path, his heavy boots coming to an abrupt stop at the toes of her more pointed woman’s shoes.
He took her cold hands. There was a smell of sawdust about him that was reassuring, and his hands that had been working with the timber.
‘Oh,’ she laughed into his eyes. ‘I feel no different. Well, of course, you do feel different. But I’m all right, all the same. It’s funny though, not to go down to the cow. She’s standing there, Stan, expecting me.’
She looked into his eyes, expecting him to offer her some assistance, while at the same time knowing he could not.
Even her hands at times, he felt, are distant. Even the mystery of possession is a mystery that it is not possible to share. And now, as they stood in the path, verging on the discovery of half-veiled shores, the child was not theirs, and he was already embarrassed by those things he would be unable to say to the stranger-child.
‘That old cow is nothing to worry about,’ he said out of his kind face.
She bent away and continued along the path, feeling that she was in herself, anyway at that moment, too thin and dry to encounter his goodness.
I have a good husband, she would say, not aware that she was specifically unworthy, yet unworthy she was in some yet-to-be-discovered way.
‘As you say, there is nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘Only the cow is old.’
She walked slowly on, taking care of herself, and the harsh blue of her woollen jacket flickered through the evening colours of the garden, the colour of moss, almost of foreboding, and her skirt in passing stirred up an intolerable scent of rosemary and thyme, that lingered after she had gone.
Sometimes Amy Parker sat on the edge of the bed, and the sensation of love and joy for the child she would have became unaccountably one of sadness and loss.
If it would be over quickly, she said; I am ignorant of almost everything, I am ignorant of the sensations in my body, and of the meaning of almost everything; I cannot really believe in God. Then she recoiled also at the thought of the man with whom she lived in a house, whose strength was no substitute for her ignorance and weakness, and whose passion was disastrous. As she sat and listened to the spidery motion of leaves moving against the wooden wall.
‘Amy,’ said Stan Parker at last, ‘your old cow’s had a nice little heifer.’
It was as if this at least was something he could recount to a little child.
‘Ah,’ she said feverishly, ‘and what colour is it?’
This of course was what had been upsetting her peace of mind. All would now be well. She got up at once, intending to go quickly to the cow.
‘A sort of piebald,’ he said. ‘And strong as they make them.’
There indeed was the spotted calf, curled in the bracken, and the mother stood, her nose outstretched, surprised, it seemed, even now, although this one must be her seventh. The woman began to make noises of love. She wanted to touch this prize. The little calf got to her feet, all legs and umbilical cord. She stood glistening, and swaying, and licked, in the curled bracken.
‘Coop, cooop, cooop!’ called the woman. ‘A little love, Stan! You little darling!’
The cow snorted and tossed her head, but not with feeling, as if she were ready to stand and allow somebody to take over. Her flanks were hollow. She was still bloody.
‘Poor Julia,’ said Amy Parker. ‘We shall call her Jewel. See, Stan? Jewel! Julia’s calf!’
And she laughed in the coloured morning. It was over. She was a girl again, standing on the flat at Yuruga, with her thin arms outstretched towards miraculous life.
Al
l that morning she was running to look, to touch, to be with the calf that had been born. She was all the time murmuring, improvising some new tenderness with which to express her relief, until this relief flooded her, and she was impervious to the trees that stood, to the cow even with its awkward calf, that had released her. She was translated into a serene air. She was herself the blue morning in which the event had taken place.
Later in the day, when the shapes of things had hardened and she had been caught up in her life again, the man her husband came abruptly to fetch hot water from the kettle.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He said it was the cow.
‘But she was all right,’ she said, almost in anger, to defend her own peace of mind.
‘She was,’ he said sulkily, filling an old iron basin. ‘But now she’s down. She’s crook. It looks like the milk fever,’ he said.
And the cow was indeed down in the bracken, but peacefully, unobtrusively, her mild shoulders rising from the bracken like a statue.
‘How do you know?’ the woman asked.
‘She’s got a bright eye,’ he said. ‘And she’s lost interest. She won’t get up. Look,’ he said, and he kicked her in the rump and twisted her tail, as if she had in the meantime become an object. But she would not get up.
‘And the calf?’ she asked.
‘We’ve got to get the cow right. It’s a mess,’ he said. ‘We should have sold her. That’s what comes of keeping old cows.’
‘Blame me,’ said the woman.
‘I’m not blaming you,’ he said, wringing the boiling water out of a rag.
‘I don’t know what else you’re doing,’ she said, because she was superfluous and wretched.
She watched him hold the steaming cloth to the cow’s udder, and the cow stirred and moaned with hot breath.
The woman watched the man. She did not feel he was resentful of her. He was absorbed in what he was doing. He had flowed away from her into his hands. These had forgotten they had ever touched her, it appeared. She was useless and desolate, standing there, and she began in a sick twinge to be anxious for her child.
‘We’ve got to feed that calf, Stan,’ she said, or her voice, taking possession. ‘I’m going over to O’Dowds’.’ She told me they have cows. So they ought to have the milk.’
‘All right,’ he said, just as if all that were secondary, as if his whole being were flowing out of his hands into the body of the sick cow.
She looked away from his hands to which she had no right, and clung to her fresh purpose. She went away to harness the horse.
As she drove down to O’Dowds’ behind the clinking little horse her self-pity fell away. She had a bitter taste in her mouth, but the cold wind tightened the flesh on her cheeks. She drove purposefully. The trees opened before her, as if there were no track and she were blazing one. And in no time there were the bones of the dead horse, just as the neighbour woman had told, and in the scrub there was a blur that might well become a house.
So Amy Parker came to O’Dowds’.
‘Well, I do believe it is Mrs Parker,’ said the neighbour woman, who was herself standing on a step, surveying everything and nothing, as if there was something she ought to do but she could not bear the thought of it.
O’Dowds’ place had evolved out of a series of impulses, it seemed. Out of the original room sprang evidence of the complications of living, in the shape of further rooms, or protuberances, in slab, iron, and bark. Nothing harmonized, except that the whole was a barky, rusty brown, and this had settled into the landscape well enough, under and amongst the trees. Round about on a crust of mud hens picked at their own feathers. The red sow ran inquisitively to inspect the arrival, her dugs flipping her sides like leather, her farrow squealing over cabbage stalks. Cows stared from where the mud was becoming grass. There was a smell of ducks.
‘I do believe it is Mrs Parker,’ the neighbour woman said, and she came down, or, rather, the step on which she was standing pitched her into the yard.
‘Yes,’ said Amy Parker.
The wind of her journey died about her, leaving her wretched again, and in that yard.
‘I came to ask a favour,’ she said. ‘We are in trouble, Mrs O’Dowd.’
‘What is it, dear?’ asked the fubsy woman, intending already to be lavish.
On this occasion she was less festive. In several places, indeed, she was done up with safety pins, but her breasts were not less cordial in their motion, and the blood was moving in her smooth cheeks.
‘We have a cow calved this morning,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Of a little heifer.’
‘Lucky you are! The lovely little calves!’
‘But the cow is down with the milk fever. It is an old cow,’ she said.
The neighbour woman sucked her teeth.
‘A bugger of the old cows. Poor things. ’Tis always the same.’
‘But we must rear the heifer, Mrs O’Dowd.’
‘Sure you must.’
It was already her anxiety.
‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Where are yer? There’s a lady visitun. Show yerself for God’s sake, an they’ll know I’ve got yer. Ah, it’s terrible, the men, when all is said and done, an him officiatun, and the fowls not fed. But if it’s milk you want, dear, we are swimmun in the stuff. We’re milkun the two big beasts hand over fist, and the bally heifer comun in. You are welcome, Mrs Parker dear, whatever he says, it is me that says last.’
‘What are yer squawkun for? Ain’t I comun when I found me boots,’ her husband called.
And he did. He was there.
‘This is him,’ said his wife.
She jerked her head towards the back door. Her black hair was coming down, that on this occasion she did not put up.
O’Dowd was a broad man. He had two black holes for a nose, that you could look right up. He was rather hairy, and his laugh was black and white.
‘Trouble with the cows, eh? The milk fever,’ said O’Dowd.
‘There ain’t no need to recapitulate,’ said his wife.
So that everybody was surprised, and not least herself.
‘Kerosene,’ said her husband. ‘There is nothin like kerosene for milk fever, or anythun.’
His own breath was testimony.
‘He’s a one for the kerosene,’ said his wife. ‘He’ll pour it into a sick beast, either end, no matter. I go in mortal terror meself whenever I have the wind.’
‘There is nothun like the kerosene,’ said her husband. ‘If you will take a bottle of beer, an empty it, an fill it just so full, to where me finger is, see, no more, no less, which is about a two-thirds, I should say, an after that the danger begins, as Paddy Connor knows who was too enthusiastic, an his little beauty of a Jersey heifer writhun in the dust, but just so full an you will not look back, if you insert the bottle, like, in the beast’s mouth, an ram it gently down till the liquid’s took, a course she’ll protest, but it’s too bad if she does, an the fever will pass, you’ll find, like Sunday mornun.’
‘But it ain’t the kerosene that she wants,’ his wife began to nudge. ‘For everybody’s got his own treatments. It’s the milk.’
‘If it ain’t the kerosene,’ said her husband, ‘at least she has the information, an that is free.’
‘An so is the milk. For a little heifer just calved.’
‘Ah, the milk is free.’
‘Then what are yer maggin for this half-hour?’
‘A man must say somethun,’ her husband said.
Standing in the hugger-mugger yard, Amy Parker was groggy at the knees, but love lapped at the muddy puddles with the bills of ducks. Even the bottles that were lying where they had landed had a rightness now, because it was O’Dowd himself that had thrown them out of the window, for what better purpose than to be rid of them inside.
‘Have you a bocket?’ he asked.
He took it and walked across the yard, with firm pleasure for his generous deed.
‘Mrs O’Dowd – ’ Amy Parker began.
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‘What is you today is us tomorrer,’ said her friend. ‘Tsst, tsst!’ she sucked, withdrawing her rather greasy hand. ‘I will be forgettun me own name. There’s the goat as kidded Thursday night, of a buck, an we hit um on the head, poor thing, but you are welcome, Mrs Parker, to the doe, an her with a bag of milk that will make you happy. Hey,’ she called, ‘Mrs Parker will have a loan of the doe! They do say, dear, there’s many a child would ’uv wizened right away but for the blessed goats. And as for the lovely little heifer – ’
Acts of kindness fall, at some times, with the force of blows. So Amy Parker hoped she could withstand.
‘Do you have any kiddies of your own perhaps?’ Mrs O’Dowd asked.
All this time the sky was fading. It was now quite white.
‘No,’ said the white young woman, whose nakedness was only for her husband. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have no children.’
‘Ah well, not yet perhaps,’ Mrs O’Dowd said.
And she hummed some tune that had stuck in her head and that vibrated strangely against her teeth.
‘We also are not endowed,’ she said, ‘though ’tisn’t for want of tryun.’
Then her husband came with the goat.
So Amy Parker took O’Dowds’ struggling goat, and began to poddy her newborn calf, that was soon mumbling at her fingers in the bucket. Its blundering gums could not suck in too much lire. So that while she felt her calf grow in strength and gaiety, the woman was inclined to forget their sick cow, that had huddled in the bracken two days and nights, now truly a statue of patient bronze.
‘But she is no worse,’ the woman said, trying to explain her passing indifference; she did have a true affection for the cow.
‘And she’s no better,’ said Stan Parker.
The man still tended the cow in the space that had got trampled by so much bringing and squatting. He had stuck quills into the teats, to drain them off, and would bring the bowls of steaming water, because he had begun, or to see whether his own will added to a hot rag might rouse the cow from her torpor. But his will was not strong enough. And once when he was alone, after staring at the gentle, staring eye of the cow, he began to kick the beast in the rump.
The Tree of Man Page 7