The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘Get up!’ he cried, kicking her with all his strength. ‘For God’s sake! Get up! Get up!’

  He was exhausted.

  Amy Parker, who had come through the trees just then, did not know her husband. The rough, uneven volume of his voice.

  ‘Leave her for a bit,’ she said, touching a clod of earth with her shoe, as if here was the strange aspect of life she had just perceived. ‘I’ll stay with her for a little. The tea is on. Lie down on the bed, Stan, and afterwards we shall have a bite to eat.’

  So he went away as he had been told.

  She did not remember having experienced such power before.

  If anything, it made her melancholy, in the damp hollow with the sick cow, to feel her husband resign his power and authority in her favour. Because she who should now have been strong was not. The gathering darkness and the nets of blackberries pressed her thin soul into greater confinements, and the child inside her protested, perhaps sensing some future frustration, already in the prison of her bones.

  ‘Poor Julia,’ she said, going and putting her hand on the passive neck of the cow.

  Now it seemed as if there was nothing the woman could touch to life. All those moments of joy or knowledge that she had ever lived might not have been experienced. At present she was destitute.

  She began to walk away from the cow. She walked through the trees of the piece of land that belonged to them. There was a blurry moon up, pale and watery, in the gently moving branches of the trees. Altogether there was a feeling of flux, of breeze and branch, of cloud and moon. There would be rain perhaps, she felt, in the dim, watery world in which she walked. In which their shack stood, with its unreasonably hopeful window of light. She looked through the window of this man-made hut, at her husband lying asleep on a bed. There were the pots standing on the stove. A scum from potatoes falling from the lip of a black pot. She looked at the strong body of the weak man. Her slippers were lying on their sides under a chair. She realized, with a kind of flat, open-mouthed, aching detachment, that she was looking at her life.

  It should have been quite simple to break this dream by beating on the window. To say, Look at me, Stan.

  But this is not possible, it seems.

  So she was forced back from the poignant house, into the world of tree and cloud, that was at present her world, whether she liked it or not. Her feet drifting through the bracken. And this child that I am to have, she said. That her body was making in spite of itself. Even the sex of the unborn child had been decided by someone else. She was powerless. Her skirt drifted against the rough bark of trees. Everything she touched drifted out of her grasp almost at once, and she must grow resigned to it.

  Then she saw that it had happened to the cow, while she had been gone, that which she had hoped at least it would not be her lot to discover.

  The cow was lying on her side. She was stretched out black in the moonlight. Her legs stuck out straight. She was stiff as a table. The woman prodded it with her foot. Their Julia had died.

  So that now the woman was alone with the moon.

  She began to run, accompanied by her own animal breath. Wet leaves of flesh spattered on her marble face, or discovered whips, and cut deeper. She had to get back, to tell, to leave the dead cow, to run, if her ankles and the branches allowed. She was running through a slow and solid moonlight. Vicious shadows held her hair. She could not run fast enough through the agonizing trees, towards the houseful of light that she had in her mind’s eye. Running. But the farther she left their dead cow behind, the closer she came to all that she had not experienced. So that her skin was cold as she ran through the nets spread to catch her, straining without much thought, except to escape as directly as possible from her own fear.

  In this way Amy Parker, when not quite within reach of their house, fell against the shadow that was by day a heap of stones, and matters were taken out of her hands for a while.

  Now there was the moon.

  When the woman returned to her body, the world was in the grip of a relentless moonlight. I have been running away, and I have run too fast, the woman said through her teeth. The pains had come on. She began to cry gently, for the sadness of the cow, for the sadness of the white light, for the sadness of her own soft, dissolving body, over which she had no control. There was nothing, indeed, over which she had control, as she stumbled again weakly over the wet bracken.

  When she arrived at the house the man her husband was stretching himself. He had been wakened by the smell of burning, of some potatoes that had almost boiled away, and had got up to move them from the stove. He was still mealy with sleep. His sense of responsibility was not yet at war with his kindly nature, and she could have come very close to him if she had cared. But she did not want to see him now.

  ‘What,’ she said, ‘did you let these potatoes burn?’ And would have turned it into a major issue.

  But he looked at her shoulders and said, ‘What is it, Amy? Is it the cow?’

  Through the door that she had left open stood the halls of moonlight filled with secrets.

  ‘The cow is dead,’ she called through her shivering lips, that she was biting now, whenever the pains recurred.

  She could not bear her husband to be there. Her body was slipping from her, and a great flood of tenderness that she could have offered if it had been allowed.

  ‘Well,’ said the man, looking at the earth floor, ‘that’s – why, that’s bad. But you mustn’t take on, Amy. There’s the heifer. And this one was an old cow, and not particularly good; she had the trouble in her teats and all that.’

  Sitting on the edge of the rather lopsided bed, he was going over it thoughtfully, while she had grown older than facts, and was looking down on the crown of his head, at a little whorl that was open in the hair.

  He was looking up at her then, and she saw how well she knew his face.

  ‘It’s nothing else?’ he asked, hesitating, in his wooden voice.

  She sat down on a remote corner of the lumpy bed, so that he could not touch her.

  ‘I want you to go and get Mrs O’Dowd, Stan dear.’ Her voice shivered. ‘Leave me now, Stan,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we shall have our child. But fetch Mrs O’Dowd. She will know, perhaps, what there is to do.’

  So that the incommunicable misery was his too. He could not communicate, he could only fasten cold buckles on the horse, and trail his long shadow through the white night.

  Chapter 7

  SEVERAL times in those years Amy Parker attempted to have their child, but evidently this was not intended to happen.

  ‘This is a barren stretch of the road,’ she said, laughing.

  For nothing was coming out of Quigleys or O’Dowds, and now Parkers were adopting the evasions and pretences of a childless intimacy. They had persuaded themselves that their neat house, which Stan and the Quigley boys had built, was not the box which enclosed their lives. They were still young, of course, so that their fallibility had not yet been revealed, except by flashes, which can be dismissed as dreams. Even though circumstances had started them to think, it was in a tangled way, in which they made little progress against the knots of thought. They were praying too, more or less regularly, in accordance with the fluctuations of belief. They loved, sometimes with inspiration, also occasionally with resentment. They desired each other’s presence perhaps less than before, cherishing the moments of peace, even of past sorrow. Sometimes they made excuses for each other.

  ‘We can get along all right as we are,’ said Stan Parker. ‘If you have kids, they can blame you for it forever after.’

  It was like that.

  More often than not, Amy Parker was a bright, industrious young woman, shaking a duster off the veranda or sitting on a log to shell peas. If the floods of life swelled inside her, they were not seen in those parts, where she was respected, and also liked. Only sometimes her face devoured the landscape, or she waited for the roof to be torn off, but only sometimes. So Parkers continued to be respected in thos
e parts. There was no one could sink a post hole like Stan Parker, or fell a tree, or shoe a horse at a pinch, with improvised tools, in shorter time, which he had of course from his dad. If a poetry sometimes almost formed in his head, or a vision of God, nobody knew, because you did not talk about such things, or, rather, you were not aware of the practice of doing so.

  Halfway to Bangalay a church had been built, for people of the surrounding district to keep their Sundays in. And some did. Prayers were read, and the lurching hymns were sung. You could not call it worship so much as an act of decent behaviour, at least for most. Amy Parker went out of respect for the gentler moments of her up-bringing. And she liked to sing a sad hymn. If she ventured beyond acts, it was to consider the remoteness of her husband’s shoulder. What does Stan, in his Sunday clothes, think of in church? she wondered, brushing from her face the flies and a shadow of resentment. She resented some personal experience enclosed in him, subtler than her own yearning occasioned by the sad hymns. Her voice had a slightly voluptuous curve. She kept a bottle of scent, that she shook up and sprinkled on her front for Sunday church, and that scented the hot horsehair and the dust. As she sang through her rather moist lips, she was glossy to look at, her substance was indisputable. But you could not put your finger on what there was about Stan.

  The man himself could not have told. He was confused, because his wife was watching, and the words of worship expected too much. His body too, of which he was partly ashamed, made him kneel with an awkwardness that he did not connect with humility. But he was humbler. When he failed to rise to the heights of objective prayer he would examine himself, or the grain of the pew, finding such flaws in each that there was little hope of correction. At times, though, peace did descend, in a champing of horses’ bits at a fence outside, in some word that suddenly lit, in birds bringing straws to build nests under the eaves, in words bearing promises, which could perhaps have been the grace of God.

  At about this point in the Parkers’ lives their neighbour Dad Quigley died. On a morning of frost, on the path to the lavatory, he fell amongst the docks, and lay there till they found him. He was quite dead. Expert women washed him, and he was taken in a cart, with much jolting, to his grave in a paddock of long grass, which was the micks’ cemetery at Bangalay. The dead man’s widow, who by this time was present only in body, stuck a bunch of marigolds in a jar, which goats robbed the same day, so that the old man was spared the final pathos of brown flowers.

  The same evening the mourners returned to their districts, and all of them forgot Dad Quigley, except his widow, who was old and dotty, his daughter, who was ugly and tender, and Stan and Amy Parker, in whom the uneasiness of thought would sometimes stir. These last lay in the darkness in each other’s arms, together resisting the possibility of death. They breathed into each other’s mouths, and their spirits were strengthened. Their hands compelled each other’s bodies into a temporary life.

  Apart from these intimations of mortality, their lives stood foursquare. Now they had a string of cows, and two heifers, and a young chubby bull. Parkers were going over to cows. Their mornings were lit by the yellow light of lamps. Their silver breath went before them in a cloud. They were stiff as the bucket handles that clanked beside them through the frosty yard, towards the milking.

  When times were hard Stan Parker worked with the road gang at Bangalay. He came home at week-ends. He was silenter then, more dried up, harder, the dust of road metal had lodged in the lines of his face. But they put by a bit. And Amy milked the cows. She would take the milk round afterwards, to those parts north of Bangalay which were becoming more closely settled.

  For one stretch of several months Stan worked for Mr Armstrong and got good money. Mr Armstrong was a rich butcher who had built a country house. He had made so much, it was time to become a gentleman and perpetuate his importance in red brick. So his country house was built about a mile from Parkers’, in gardens and a maze of laurel hedges and ornamental trees. In some windows there was coloured glass. And there was a stone statue of a woman modestly disguising her nakedness with her hands.

  Stan Parker worked for a time in the butcher’s garden, and about the place generally. He chopped wood, and dressed fowls, and burned leaves, and weeded the oval beds of roses and the oblong ones of cannas, that decorated the garden with the florid impersonality of a public park. But the butcher was pleased. He had achieved magnificence. He wore leggings and was a country gentleman. He spoke in a jolly, familiar way to his servants, turning the money in his pockets, that made Stan Parker lower his eyes, and other servants take advantage of confidences, becoming either predatory or insolent. But this, the butcher felt, was something you bought with your money, the privilege of being fleeced or wounded. When he saw that Stan Parker did not react in this way, Mr Armstrong himself was embarrassed, cleared his throat a lot, and looked here and there. But he respected Parker and would have paid him more money if he had dared exceed what was already liberal.

  When Stan Parker was no longer employed by him and had returned to work on his own farm, Mr Armstrong liked sometimes to ride down, and, sitting askew on his thickset horse, would give advice on the cutting of sorghum or the stacking of lucerne to the man who had been his man, and an old German called Fritz, who was lending a hand in those days at Parkers’. Then Mr Armstrong was very content. His well-shaven face and his leggings shone. He shaded his eyes with a fringe of leaves to look across the land, and his attitude expressed condescension and approval for one whose modest advancement could never increase and equal his own. On these occasions he was particularly condescending and jokingly ironical to the old German, both because he was a foreigner and because his exact status at Parkers’ was something the butcher could not assess.

  Fritz had arrived one night with his swag and was allowed to doss down in a shed, which was the original Parker shack. He was sick at that time. His guts were rattling awful bad. So he stayed in that shed. He made a compound of bran and treacle for the sickness in his stomach – it was never clear what this was – but he reported on it from time to time. Parkers would give him a shilling or two and a lump of boiled brisket. They liked his clear eyes, that were of a German blue, and accepted at once the permanence of his attitude.

  ‘Here is a chair, Fritz, that you can have,’ Amy Parker said. ‘It wobbles a bit, but no doubt you can do something with it.’

  Fritz made many things. He helped milk, and scalded the big cans, and would take a turn on the milk run. Most mornings his lamp was first across the yard. And in the evening he brought his chair to the door and sat amongst the wide-open sunflowers he had put in, and of which he would also chew the seeds, after he had dried them, and spit the black shells of the pointed seeds.

  Like a bloody parrot, people used to say.

  And they laughed at this ridiculous though simple act that was taking place before their eyes, and would have willed it not to, because all things that existed or took place outside the sphere of their experience had no right to.

  But the old German said, ‘The oil of these seeds is good for the health.’

  He did not mind. No one could contest his faith. So the people turned away, shaking their heads, their lips grown resentful at the shells of sunflower seeds.

  Not long after Fritz came the rains began. It had never rained in this way. It began normally enough, the usual surly clouds, the usual lulls in which the sheets were hung, and in which the cows, no longer rumps to the weather, glutted themselves with cold young grass.

  ‘It will rain plenty,’ said Fritz.

  ‘Yes, it’s set for rain all right,’ said Stan Parker, shallowly, because it did not concern him yet.

  He went out across the mud. But the old German shook his head for other rains. And the cows stared opaquely into his transparent eyes.

  When the rain began in earnest, after the honeymoon of blown showers and blue patches, the lives of men and animals appeared both transitory and insignificant events beneath its terrible continuity, alth
ough in the early stage of deluge the rain was still rain, the flesh accepted it as water, and the spirit grumbled only over what must end.

  But it was bad enough. The house was no longer a house; it had been reduced to a pointed roof on which rain fell. People in their houses at night no longer occupied themselves but sat sideways, with thin and yellow faces, doubting each other’s motives, as they listened to the iron rain. It fell always. It fell in their sleep. It washed through the dreams of sleepers, lifted their fears and resentments, and set them floating on the grey waters of sleep.

  ‘Listen, Amy,’ said Stan Parker, waking in the night, ‘there’s a fresh place in the kitchen.’

  There was the sound of water in the bucket that they had put beneath the first leak, and now there was the fresh sound of water on wood. The rain was entering their house, at first only a little, but it was coming in.

  ‘We’ve still got a basin or two,’ laughed Amy Parker from her unprotective bed, from against the body of her husband, that she might perhaps pit against the rain, but without great confidence. ‘Put that old iron dented thing, Stan, that I was going to throw out. Good thing I didn’t. It will hold a bit of water. Put that.’

  So she heard his feet on the floor, for a step or two, and felt comforted, but not for long, for soon she heard the rain.

  It was the rain that possessed their lives to exclusion of themselves. The frames of their bodies, under protecting sacks, walked across the yard to perform the necessary acts of the day. Their hands slithered customarily amongst the teats of cows, to make the milk stream, but it was a poor, white, pizzly stream beside the solid magnificence of rain.

  ‘The river is up at Wullunya,’ said Stan Parker the day he got back from town, the fragile, hairless legs of the horse halted in the water, the straps swollen in the buckles. ‘They’re cut off at China Flat.’