‘We are on a hill,’ said his wife.
She tried to sit on her hill, in warmth and confidence. She held the iron to her cheek. It was ironing day. She would not listen to the waters of Wullunya.
‘Yes,’ said her husband, ‘we are on a hill. But what about the poor buggers at China Flat?’
‘I don’t wish any harm to anyone at China Flat,’ said the woman, in the warm smell of pressed sheets that came from under her determined iron. ‘I was just stating something. We are on a hill. I forget how many hundred feet Mr Armstrong said. I can never remember figures.’
And she flung her weight and that of her iron against the steaming sheet Or against the rain. That is what it amounted to. All acts or facts ended abruptly in rain. This was falling still, and would. The waters parted above their heads where the roof met in a peak. The waters parted and streamed, and it was only by grace of a piece of iron that they lived beneath that canopy of water, and grudged each other their opinions.
‘I’m hungry, Amy,’ said the man. ‘Got anything to eat?’
He was standing looking out of the window, into the solid rain.
‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘There’s a nice little bit of pickled pork. And a piece of apple tart. But wait till I finish this. Then I’ll get it.’
In the contenting smell of sheets and her warm kitchen, the woman once more possessed her husband; why, she would not have held her children with firmer hand, if they had lived. So she was pleased.
But the man was looking out of the house into the rain. He had escaped from his wife, if she had but known it. He was standing on a small promontory of land above what had been the river at Wullunya, which he had not visited but knew. He knew the old woman in her apron, and the two or three younger women, and the long boy, the poddy sheep, the cows, and the yellow-eyed hens, all with the common expression of disaster, congregated on the last island. Because this is what their promontory had become. And the shiny horns of cattle swam and sank in the great yellow waters of what was no longer river. It was no longer possible to distinguish the cries of men from the lowing or bleating of animals, except that the old woman made some protest to God before gulping at the water with her gums. But the arms of men, like the horns of cattle, were almost not protesting, as they were carried sinking away in the yellow flood that had taken the lives from out of their hands.
‘Why,’ said Amy Parker, who had brought the nice plate of pickled pork and put it on the kitchen table, ‘aren’t you going to come and eat? The tea’s stood a bit since Fritz and I had our cup, but you like it strong.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
The man sat down at his table to eat what his wife had brought.
She brushed against him, to unite her warmth with his apparent coldness, and he looked up at her and smiled with his eyes, which was what she wanted.
It’s the rain that gets on your nerves, she said, we’re forever having words, or almost, and over nothing.
She looked out at the rain and was temporarily pacified, because she had reduced it to the simple reason for their behaviour.
But the rain continued to fall. There was nowhere you could hide your head and say, Well, here am I.
This rain was no longer personal that streamed out at the wrists of Stan Parker as he went about his business. It was so many weeks, it had got beyond that. So that when the old German came and said the cows were not feeding, they were nosing the grass but would not touch it because of the silt that had been washed down, he would have liked not to feel that this was a problem, or that the cows were his even. The sense of responsibility had been sluiced out of him in those weeks, and if he were to take action it could only be on behalf of someone else.
Then it went round that they were asking for volunteers at Wullunya, to take supplies to those who had been cut off, to carry off the women and children, and to help with the destitute. So Stan Parker, together with O’Dowd and other men of their district, went down towards the river, to exercise their strength, to exchange anecdotes, to get sucked under perhaps, but, in any event, to be released by some process of flowing water. The men went down to the river, singing and laughing, in a dray belonging to old Mr Peabody, with a bottle brought by O’Dowd.
But Stan Parker was silent, because he did not have anything to say. He sat holding his coat around him, inside the rain, and waited for his first sight of the great river.
Till there it was at last.
Ah, they all said in the dray, becoming silent.
The great yellow mass, pricked and dimpled by the grey rain, was there before them where the plain had been. The world was water now. It went in at the windows of houses and swirled at the roots of a steeple. The heads of dead trees were weathercocked by perching birds.
When the dray reached the township of Wullunya, where the mayor was directing operations in his oilskin and ladies in smocked raincoats were dispensing soup and bread in the School of Arts, the volunteers were brought to a flat-bottomed boat and, after an explanation of local geography, were asked to row in the direction of Red Hill, where two farms were believed to have been cut off.
The world of water was very quiet. The rowers did not speak, because of a sobriety that had caught up with them, and because their muscles were uncertain of this work. Their torn breath sounded against the hissing of rain on water, their hearts thumped with the monotony, and only the ultimate certainty of rowlocks.
‘Are we getting anywheres, Mick?’ asked Ossie Peabody.
‘Nowhere much,’ said O’Dowd, whose breath poured metal on the air.
Then Les Docker broke wind, and everybody laughed.
Everybody felt better as they rowed across what had been the paddocks of Illarega, and the close branches of trees scored their taut ribs. Conflicting currents and yellow eddies played with their small and clumsy boat. But the men pulled in their dumb fashion. It began to appear strange that they had been set afloat on the flood waters. It began to appear strange to everyone except Stan Parker, who by this time knew in himself that you can expect anything, and that it was not necessarily the hand of the mayor of Wullunya pointing the way to the flat boat. And as he rowed, accepting the strangeness and inevitability of their position, which nevertheless he could not have explained – he would, in fact, have smiled sheepishly at the inquisitor – the half-submerged world became familiar as his own thoughts. He remembered things he had never told, and forgotten. He remembered the face of his mother before her burial, when the skull disclosed what the eyes had always hidden, some fear that the solidity of things around her was not assured. But in the dissolved world of flowing water, under the drifting trees, it was obvious that solidity is not. The rowers rowed. He listened to their men’s-breath, but from a distance. As they rowed under the liquid trees the sound of leaves, swishing, dipping into his wet skin, was closer to him.
It was not unexpected, then, when Ossie Peabody called out there was something sort of round bobbing against the anthill on the right, and they eased in that direction, and turned up the rubber body of a man, in clothes that water had translated into uniform darkness, the smooth man’s-face nibbled at by fishes.
Crikey, said the rowers, when the body lay in the bottom of the boat.
Their crisp skin did not believe in death. Their nostrils, grown white and gristly, refused it, like those of animals finding evidence in the undergrowth.
Stan Parker bent forward and covered the rubber face with a bag. Then they cleared their throats, somebody spat, somebody copied him, and they rowed on.
As they rowed, fragments of the still, safe lives that are lived in houses flowed past. There was a chair with no one in it, there was a piece of bitten cheese, and letters grown spidery, and a hassock in the blackberry canes, a hat with a drowned feather, a baby’s chamber pot, a Bible open at Ezekiel. All these things came and went. It was the boat that was stationary. And the house, almost, that they touched upon.
‘Hello there,’ O’Dowd shouted, sticking his head in at the window. ‘
Anyone at home? It’s the postie called, and the fire brigade, rolled into one.’
Everybody laughed, because by this time they were doing things in unison.
In the still house the table was set for dinner. A snail dragged across the tablecloth. The chairs stood round in a glug of water, which had come in without the welcome of an open door. Water, at least, was united. Only the people had gone. So that in the circumstances, as they rowed round, clawing the outer wall of the house, O’Dowd felt that he might put in his hand, and take the bottle that stood on the shelf, and give it a swig, like, for the sake of his circulation, and even put the bottle in the boat.
Someone said that was thieving.
‘‘Tis not,’ said O’Dowd through his moister mouth. ‘Anyone can see, plain as day, there is no value attached to the bottle, left, you might say, abandoned on a shelf, as good as throwed out.’
No one was dry enough to reply. On the edge of a washstand, in a slimy room, a set of teeth was shut tight.
Then the boat was rowed away. The crew was all arms now and ribs; they had left their bodies behind. Just as the people had left their houses to the water, the men were possessed by motion and breath.
In one place Stan Parker saw, stuck in the fork of a tree, the body of an old, bearded man. But he did not mention this. He rowed. All omissions were accepted by the blunt boat. And soon the old man, whose expression had not expected much, dying upside down in a tree, was obliterated by motion and rain.
At a house on what had been a rise but was now an island, a small, spry woman with a heavy coil of hair ran down to the shore.
‘I thought youse were never coming,’ she called. ‘I been waitin and waitin. Dad is gone in a little gimcrack bit of a boat the kids made one summer. I said, “You’re mad, you’ll never do no such thing.” But he’d seen a ram stuck in a tree.’
She stood on the shore, in the scum of water and a fringe of sticks. There was a slight white scum of excitement on her open mouth.
‘Did any of you men see Dad?’ she asked. ‘An old man with a white beard?’
But nobody had.
‘There now,’ she said. ‘I said they’d send from town. I got me things fixed.’
She began to run.
‘But what about Dad?’ She stood in her tracks, on the tips of her toes.
Perhaps her dad had put in somewhere else, they said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope. There’s the machine, you know. I got to take the machine.’
‘Eh?’ said Les Docker.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The sewin machine.’
That she dragged from the veranda, barking her shins on the treadle.
‘There’s only three things I care for,’ said the small woman. ‘The two goats an the sewin machine. An the goats is gone.’
‘So is the sewun machine, missus,’ said O’Dowd. ‘Or we’re on the bottom.’
‘Well, I’m stayin,’ said the woman, whose name was Mrs Wilson.
She began to cry rather loud, with her fingers in the iron of the sewing machine.
So that they had to put her in the boat, as if she had been her own wicker port, in which her things were stuffed, with a strap around.
‘You didn’t ought to,’ she cried. ‘I’ll never get over this. The goats, an now the machine.
‘Ah,’ she said quietly, touching the bump beneath the bag on the bottom of the boat. ‘What’s this? Don’t tell me it’s a body!’
It was, they said, some poor young cove they picked out of the water.
‘I never seen a dead person,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not even when Mother died. I was away at Muswellbrook, stayin with relatives. It was them that gave me the machine.’
And she began to cry again, mingling with the rain.
The presence of the woman in front of him as he rowed made Stan Parker return to himself out of the great abstractions of death and water. He bit his lips, apparently on account of his exertion, but actually because he had failed to mention her dead father. He would soon, he said, but later, not now. He rowed on, in friendship for the rowers, and pity for the woman. She wore an old blouse with sprigs of little purple flowers. And Stan Parker, remembering baking day, saw the loaves risen in their tins, and his wife’s hot cheek as she pricked the loaves. All that day as he rowed he had not thought of her, but now, as he did, he was glad to remember.
That evening he sent word by old Mr Peabody, who was returning to their district, that he would hang around a day or two and see what he could do to help.
The team of volunteers that had come down from the hills spent the night at a livery stable, in a loose box, of which the new straw pricked their necks, and all night there was a pawing and stirring and velvety whinnying, through the stables, through their sleep. O’Dowd, who had taken a drop at the Oak, lay down outside in the rain. He had the intention, he said, of breathing the fresh air. But they took him by the armpits and the ankles and brought him in. Then again there was the warm stirring of sleep and horses in the velvety night. You forgot the rain in the stables.
Once in the night Stan Parker woke and remembered that he had not spoken of the small woman’s dead father, even as friends took her with her wicker port when she landed from the flood. He could not communicate. There are certain things you cannot tell. So he fell asleep tranquilly, sinking deeper in the stableful of warm straw, inside the night of rain.
It continued to rain.
It was a national disaster, said Mrs O’Dowd, the farms washed out, there was poor souls without a stick to their backs, and the governor’s wife to take a collection round, and ladies making a sale of knickknacks and things of which they had plenty over, because the destitute and orphans had not the bread to put in their stomachs, even if politicians, inspecting the scene, of course, in a boat, each with a mouthful of speeches, promised the subsidies and what not, better a decent loaf of bread and a warm pair of combies.
‘Because’, said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘air never did no good in the stomach, except to come out, an words never clothed the bottom, not of a newborn bastard baby.’
Then she put up her hair that was coming down, and the rain in it too.
Amy Parker, who had lain alone in bed those three nights, on the warm side and the cold, and chafed her feet together, and listened to the drip from the kitchen ceiling into the basin and the bucket, said, ‘I’m just about sick of this bloody rain.’
‘Listen, dear,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, who had begun to sound wheedly, ‘shall we be goin to look at the floods?’
‘All that way?’ said Amy Parker. ‘I have never been to Wullunya.’
‘Ah, it is a fine place,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘Four pubs an a flour mill. There was a circus once that we saw in a tent. Ah, it’s not so far. We can cut a bite to take with us. It’ll be a jaunt, dear. An us stuck here.’
The rosebush by Parkers’ veranda, the rose that they had moved from its original position in front of the old shack, had begun to look formidable. The rain sluiced its staggy limbs and parted at the black thorns. The brown sods of dead roses were rotting in the rain.
‘It’s not much of a life here,’ said Amy Parker, ‘mucking around, waiting for it to stop.’
‘The mould growun on your shoes,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘while you shred the cobbage.’
‘And we would see them perhaps,’ said Amy Parker.
‘Sure,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘they’ll be important men, all them that volunteered. Beer on the house, I’ll bet, for fishun the poor souls out of the water.’
Till the young woman was kindled for her husband, whose face was the bravest. She saw him again, sitting in Peabodys’ dray, not looking; he was not for her, but all those men. So men drive off together as if they are ashamed of women.
‘But it is out of the question’, she said, in hope of a rescue, ‘unless I am back by milking time.’
‘An if you are not, what is wrong, may I ask, with the old Hun that you have, eatun ’is head off, and bustun ’is pants in the shed ou
t there, if he cannot pull an extra tit an deliver the milk?’
So there was nothing more to say.
They were riding down to Wullunya in O’Dowd’s spring cart, all ajingle on the yellow road, lashing the water with their wheels. The horse, tossing his thin mane, struck at the surface as if he meant it. Anyway, in these early stages, his bones had lost their resentment. Even his wind was gay.
‘In that circus I was tellun you of,’ Mrs O’Dowd said, ‘there was a lady dancin on the rumps of two white horses, from one to tother, and through a hoop, with the band playun beautiful. Oh, I like a circus, for a change, and so does he, if he is sensible, like, at the time. Well, at this circus that I was tellun you of, we had paid our thruppence to set on the grass – or straw it was, it had been trampled on - we was settun eatun our little pies, when he becomes as bold as brass. Mind you, it was no more than a pint, or two perhaps – you know what he is – that he’d took at the Oak, or was it the Bunch of Grapes? No matter. There he was, hitchun up his pants and all for ridun a buckjump nag, with me hangun on ’is arm. ‘‘Hold hard,” I said, ‘‘you obstropulous man, haven’t you circus enough? An clowns?’’ I said. ‘‘An ackrybats? If they happen to break their limbs, that is what they are there for. But I have not paid thruppence, O’Dowd, to see me own husband in splinters.” Oh, but I am tellun you, it was terrible, Mrs Parker, an me by rights a sensitive woman for scenes in public. Anyways, they played the band. To distract attention. An they run up a dago girl on a rope. There she was, hangun by one toe from the ceilun, and out of her teeth a cage of birds. “There,” I said to His Nibs, “observe”, I said, “what we have paid to see.” But he was too far gone, Mrs Parker, to expect much from the ceilun, when he was not adjusted to the ground. He fell down after that, an I was fannun the flies from off of his face, while I got me own money’s worth. But it was a lovely circus, I shall never be forgettun, and the smell of elephants and monkeys that night.’
Mrs O’Dowd drove down towards Wullunya, in command of both the past and the present, slapping the landscape with her whip.
The Tree of Man Page 9