But Amy Parker, the commanded, was silent all that mile, hushed by the tinsel of the neighbour woman’s words. How drab she was, dressed in bags against the wet. Under the wet bags she held her feverish hands. Whip cracked. Cart rocked. Drops hung from the wire of moving fences. Skies reeled above, opening for a moment on an act of blue, but groggily, from which the cage of birds must fall.
In that moment of tinsel sunlight and slashing swords the grave hillsides were tinkling and rustling with repentant drops. A whole slope gurgled with a yellow torrent. From out of the varnished leaves the sun was bringing the greeny-golden balls of oranges, to juggle with. For a moment. And exit. To make way for rain.
All along the road to Wullunya the trees hung, but expectantly, for some entrance of animal life.
‘Listen,’ said Mrs Parker, chafing her neck on the wet bag. ‘Did you hear something, Mrs O’Dowd?’
‘We have company,’ her friend replied.
For by now you could hear wheels, and at some rate.
‘He will belt the daylights out of the horse,’ the neighbour woman said. ‘An no mistake. If he has not robbed the bank, then his lady’s pains is comin on.’
The two women became quite nervous waiting for the urgent wheels. They sat upright on the board. Their necks were thin.
Till the wheels were round the last bend, and it was a sulky that they saw, turning in their seats, a sulky splashing, with three flash young coves jammed together in a row.
‘Good day, missus,’ they said, slowing down, or it was the one that held the dancing whip. ‘Is this the way to the floods?’ he said. ‘At Wullunya?’
‘It is all floods,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, looking ahead. ‘And all ways is one.’
‘Funny, eh?’ said the cove with the whip.
He was a big young cove with a gold tooth in front.
‘We are two decent women out for the day,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘Enjoyun ourselves too. Or was. Till you all come along.’
The young cove spat through his teeth at the rain. There was another one that laughed.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘That is what I am doin,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘And I may add, at a decent pace.’
‘Huh!’ said the young man, digging his mate in the ribs. ‘Then you ’aven’t ’eard’ ow me grandmother is dead? Drownded fore they could row ’er orf.’
‘Huh!’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘Your grandmother and Bridget Duffy! All that is dead of yours is the marines you left behind.’
So that Amy Parker was both trembling and exalted from the neighbour woman’s audacity. She turned her brightened cheek and looked tautly at the wire fence, on which the rain was running beads.
‘That is a bloody insult for a man,’ said the young fellow.
He was wearing an overcoat that was greeny-old and made him look bigger that he should have been, though this was big. And it squeezed his mate, the little black nuggety one, with the bloodshot eye, but bright and inquisitive, in his burned face, into the ribs of the outside passenger, who in turn was squeezed against the rail. This did not seem to matter much. He was the thin sort. He was the sort that does not speak but laughs in the right place, and out, or snickers. He was the egger-on.
‘Insults?’ said Mrs O’Dowd, flicking her thin whip. ‘What will you be expectun? Violets perhaps, with a ribbon round?’
And Amy Parker wished that she would not go on. The delirious tightrope on which her neighbour walked was more than she could bear. So she turned her face and would not look.
‘You there, the one that says nothun,’ said the nuggety mate of the big cove, leaning out from behind the greatcoat, so that his face was detached and pointed and particularly inquisitive. ‘You ain’t doin justice to the occasion. Ain’t I seen you somewheres before? Bangalay? Dingwall’s Commercial perhaps.’
‘I don’t go to Bangalay. Or very seldom.’
She was mortified. Although her blood leaped she could not walk the wire. She was clumsy and atremble.
‘My friend is a lady,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, who was experienced. ‘She has led a sheltered existence. My friend has not kept company with all and sundry.’
‘If a couple a good-lookun tarts is also ladies, I’m not one to pick a quarrel,’ the big fellow said.
All this time the horses were ignoring each other, that walked at even pace, wet and relaxed.
‘Saucy man,’ breathed Mrs O’Dowd. ‘I never met such a bold feller.’
The outside passenger in the sulky laughed.
‘Listen,’ said the cove in the overcoat, ‘we got a drop of the real thing underneath the seat. What do you say to findin a dry spot an havin a talk. Boil the old billy if you like, and talk.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, handling her reins, ‘it’s too wet for talk.’
‘She’s got the answers,’ snorted the small bloodshot man.
He had begun to have a hungry look, and shifty also. He sniffed the air with his long nose that was inflamed up one side.
‘Oh dear, ‘tis nothun,’ said the fubsy woman, ‘’tis nothun to the answers you’ll be gettun when me husband comes along.’
‘What’s a husband?’ shouted the small black bloodshot man, who was more inclined to take over from his mate the hungrier he got.
‘I could tell yer in detail’, said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘if I had the time. But as I haven’t, I must be brief. This is a very big sort of man, let me tell yer, with muscles on um like the pumpkins, an fire comun through his nose for the likes of you. There’s nothun that me husband so dislikes as a little, creepun, lousy, crow-be-day-light, scoot-be-darkness bantam. So help us God.’
And she dealt her horse a smart cut, so that his wet ears started, and he dashed his tail against the shafts and protested with his wind.
Sounds of a confused anger now arose from the sulky, in which the three coves were packed tight. Opinion was divided, it seemed, on whether to use words or blows.
‘Job ’er one!’ somebody said.
‘’Usbands!’ said another. ‘Which ’usband is she flickin well talkin of?’
While the outside passenger sniggered and shifted in his seat.
‘If you would wish for an interduction to me husband,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘Constable Halloran of Bangalay will oblige. It is him that is just comun over the rise. I would know his whiskers at a mile.’
It was, indeed, the long young policeman with the shining whiskers, of which the wax repudiated water, jogging along on his loose bay, and a bump of distance on his own back.
The sulky became rather surly. It rambled a lot, then crunched away, and was gone at its former pace of chariots, before you could say knife.
‘Good mornun, Constable Halloran,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘We are makun a day of it to the floods. To see what we can see, like. Poor souls, an dumb animals too. An we’re for pickun up our husbands perhaps, who have been given a helpun hand these two days, or is it three.
After more pleasant conversation of this kind, in the warmer rain, with the agreeable young policeman of long legs and white teeth, the cart with the two women continued on its wet way.
Amy Parker, who had been exalted out of her dull life by circuses and personal danger, and relieved and pleased by the encounter with the constable, was settling sadly down to the last stages of a journey on an unfamiliar road. If at the end it was just trees, and again grey, wet trees, she began to wonder why she had come. She tried to think of her honest husband’s face, that she would see, and of course welcome. She tried to rekindle her friendship for her neighbour, still jogging on the board at her side, still admirable, she knew, and still surprising, but interminable as herself.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, stretching her cramped limbs under the wet bags, ‘when do you think we will arrive?’
‘One day,’ yawned Mrs O’Dowd, who was also feeling flat.
And the road continued.
Mrs O’Dowd, sunken in her carapace of stiff bags, denied the possibility of circuses.
‘It makes you
wonder’, she said, ‘what you can’uv done. I remember, it was the time he was kicked in the guts with the big black wall-eyed horse, that I never liked, and we sold, not too soon neither, with himself all but passun into the next world; I said, “Will you have the priest?” I said. What with runnun all night with the hot plates to hold on his guts, and the hot clouts – he was that blue, but nothun to the yeller he afterwards became – I was fit to lay down meself, but I didn’t, you see, I was wound up. So I said, “Will you have the priest?” Like that. “Have the priest?” he says – he was in the spasms. “After all these years I would not know how to be havun the priest. Give me a good-size goat, in a weskit, with a book, an I will sooner have that. It will not’uv learned to hold out its hand, besides.” Because O’Dowd is tight, you know, as tight as the wallpaper round the room. Not that I blame um. It is a shillun here an a sixpence there with priests, an overnight a pound. So I said, “Yes.” Knowun his weakness. “Pour me a tot of rum,” he says. “You cannot have priests and bottles, an if it is the priests that has to go, it is just too bad.” And him sweatun in agonies, and hardly a stick on his body. O’Dowd is a hairy man.’
Now at that part of the road the trees were rather close, and the clouds met blacker than before, in conspiracy over the small cart, which crawled up over the rise, and was alone.
‘Still, he did not die,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘for all that he cheeked the priests. I would not like um to die. An me not knowun where I stand. Because some people choose one way, Mrs Parker, and some another.’
‘How do you mean, Mrs O’Dowd?’ Amy Parker asked. She could not, would not, help her friend. Her handkerchief had become a ball.
‘I mean, we were married before God,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘I mean, there was no priests. Seein as his views. And mine – why, I never went nap on the priests meself. There is God and there is priests, I allus said. An a few shilluns saved. Though who is to know for sure, dear, who is to know?’
‘Then you are not married to Mr O’Dowd?’ Mrs Parker said.
‘Silly thing!’ said the neighbour. ‘What do you think I have been tellun yer this five minutes, in elegant speech, seeing as some take offence!’
It was enough to fascinate. Amy Parker was struck dumb.
‘Well,’ she hesitated, when something was awaited, ‘I don’t expect that you are any different,’ she said, or lied.
‘Oh, there is nothin I regret,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘If we have thrown things at each other and used words, it is because we are inclined to it. Only I would like to’uv been married in ivory satun an a big hat.’
It should have ended there, but did not. For Mrs Parker it would never end.
They were passing a bit of a shack, of wood and tin, with two children outside, paddling in the water with their bare feet.
‘This is perhaps the beginning of a town,’ said Amy Parker hopefully.
Now that her friend was different, she would have sat sideways and looked at her. Because she could not, she was burning.
‘I shall be glad when we are there,’ she said. ‘I am sick of this.’
Mrs O’Dowd did not reply, but was sucking her wet lip, as if experienced in endlessness.
Continuing to look to left and to right, in search of something round which she could throw a rope, young Mrs Parker would have liked to offer her friend words of love and assurance, but she was prevented. And they were being washed farther apart. The waters were lapping at the spokes of the wheels. The two women began to accept the distances. The wheels hissed through the water. Later I shall make amends, Amy Parker felt, who was neither cold nor cruel. Later, she said, but not now. She had been washed too far. She swam against the strong current, in which the circus dancer bobbed, and the naked body of O’Dowd.
And Mrs O’Dowd was singing, because she was feeling sad.
Suddenly, though, the road lunged towards the present island of Wullunya. The causeway was quite firm, that their wheels ground along, through a mob of sheep that was going across.
Now, to be sure, there was hope of husbands.
‘Do you think we will find them easy?’ Amy Parker asked. And bending down, her hand would have dawdled in the backs of the greasy sheep,
‘The place is not all that big,’ Mrs O’Dowd replied.
As they went along in the comforting smell of warm wool the women were united again in their common hope. As they were carried, it seemed, on the bunched backs of sheep, they listened to the scattering of pellets and the sound of frogs, and sighed their satisfaction.
So they came on into the town, past the flour mill and the paddock in which the circus had been pitched, past the pale tower of the church, in which the clock had stopped. And underneath, someone was being buried in the long wet grass.
‘Ah dear, it is terrible,’ Mrs O’Dowd said, her head caught between looking and turning away. She had the gooseflesh. Remembering some funeral of her own, this one had become personal.
But Amy Parker looked at the spindly umbrellas of the relations of the dead as if her eyes had opened for the first time on the road to Wullunya, with the advent of the floods. She could not die yet.
And they came on into the town, where the shops were full of hardware and gloves and coconut ice and withered beetroot, but the people, even the old, had gone down to the water’s edge.
You would not think it, said a woman who came down a side street, carrying a Muscovy drake by the legs, you would not think it, but the place was chock-a-block, what with victims and volunteers, and the Governor had come; they were airing the sheets at the Oak and killing a whole yardful of fowls.
‘We are looking for our two husbands,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘Stan Parker and Mick O’Dowd. They are here to do the rescue work. Have you seen them?’ she asked.
But the woman had not.
‘They are big men. Both,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘An mine has a black moustache.’
But the woman had not seen. Her eyes had a blank look, as if she were gathering behind them fragments of her own life, which, when assembled, she would offer to these two visitors to her town.
‘We was nearly washed out Friday,’ the woman began.
But the duck that she was carrying raised his nubbly head from the street and hissed, and Mrs O’Dowd herself was not a one for other’s tales.
‘Which is the way to the water?’ she cut short.
The woman swung her body and pointed with her whole arm. Her dank hair hung and swung. She was the supreme messenger.
‘Down there!’ she said, and it issued like a forked tongue from between two fangs, for the middle teeth were gone. ‘Not the first, not the second. See the balcony? Turn right. It’s down at the common.’
The great yellow animal was already grazing on the grass.
‘It’s halfway up the common,’ the woman said. ‘It’s as far as Trelawneys’. It’s in at the windows, and ruined the new suite.’
Mrs O’Dowd clacked her tongue, whether from sympathy or not, but the resigned horse moved on towards the terrible scene.
The whole world was involved in the floods at Wullunya, either watching the water, or lending a hand, or led from the boats that had rowed them from one dream to another. Some had even woken and were carried out. From these the spectators generally turned away, either from good taste or because they were afraid to accept the evidence of those bare faces. Only Bub Quigley, who had come with his sister Doll, could endure the smiles of the dead.
‘That old fellow is good,’ he said, meeting the face of an old man with his own rapt smile. ‘See it?’ he said. ‘He is good. Good. You can tell.’
And he touched the smile of the old man, that they had found hanging upside down in a tree.
Many people, including men who could crack whips and throw steers, turned away in disgust, saying it should not be allowed. So that Doll Quigley had to hush her brother and hold his hand.
He had found a curious round stone, that had been rolled and polished in other floods, and now that he was rest
rained he stood looking at his stone, surrounded by the forms of spectators. He was a tall young man, but he could look down, and it did not matter. The world was concentrated in his hand.
There was much talk going on all the time amongst those people who were watching the flood. There was the undisciplined expression of the emotions that is found in all gatherings of spectators, but there were those also who spoke with authority and public feeling, whose faces seemed to think they might solve a problem. Some people said they should cut a channel to the north; others said it was obvious that such a channel should only be cut to the south. Some, who had had experience of floods, considered the waters must soon fall, taking into account their present, apparently fixed level, the direction of the wind, the texture of the sky, and some intuition of the bones.
And the Governor, who had been brought by an official party, asked questions demonstrating his sympathy and tact. He stood with one foot advanced slightly in the direction of the waters, merely to ease his stance, because of a wound he had once got, but some people asked themselves whether this position had not a particular significance. They watched the toe of his slender English boot and waited for something peculiar to happen. But the Governor continued to radiate tact, in his overcoat of a good stuff, with velvet at the collar. He was a greyish man smoking a cigar, of which the exquisite, pearly cloud of smoke had got mixed up in all this by mistake.
‘There will be funds, of course, and a distribution of garments,’ said the Governor to the mayor, easing his neck inside his well-fitting collar, intensifying the cloudy sympathy of his well-bred eye. ‘But in the meantime,’ he said, lowering his voice a little, out of respect for a situation, ‘have the people enough soup?’
The mayor said he thought that there was no lack of soup, thanks to the generosity of some landowners and butchers, and that the ladies had the matter in hand, the wife of a certain butcher, in particular, and an ironmonger had lent stoves. The mayor stood beside the Governor with his legs apart and bent at the knees. His hands hung open like bunches of bananas.
All this time the crowd stood, or moved, as their emotions or curiosity drew them here and there. Many of them were wearing bags, not from poverty, of course, but for practical reasons; they kept the water out. So the crowd held its Gothic hands to its breast, to maintain its covering of wet bags. At times, and in certain obvious attitudes, this gave an impression of prayer. Some did pray to themselves, either in fragments of mutilated prayers remembered from the churches or else in their own jagged words. But mostly it was just a holding of wet bags. There was a smell of bags. There was a slight mash of bran and pollard about the shoulders and the breasts of some.
The Tree of Man Page 10