As they walked and talked, or stood, daring to think or remember, you could open the cupboards of their souls on the objects arranged neatly or immoderately inside. Some overflowed. There was the wife of a storekeeper, for instance, who could not contain her lust for a policeman; she wore whole nights of tortured sheets, her lips were quite swollen from biting on her lust. But Doll Quigley, who did not move much from her one place of mud, except to restrain her brother, who wanted to see a Chinaman – Doll, the stationary Doll, contained a lamplight. As the water lapped to and fro she remembered her father. Her thin, drowning, but also rescued smile dwelt on the faces of nuns, from whom she had learned the copperplate of which her family were proud. Doll Quigley was sitting with several nuns that were engaged in various works of thread. The cones of their anonymous faces were teaching Doll the yellow light with which she was being filled.
But the crowd frowned and said, ‘Ah, those Quigleys.’
Because Bub Quigley was brushing up and down, demanding a Chinaman, or, worse still, he stood looking into the faces of people with such candour that it became obvious he was mingling with their thoughts.
‘She ought to control him,’ they said,
So that Doll Quigley was compelled away from the lapping of the past, to say, ‘Sh, Bub! The people don’t like it. Stand here and see who the boats bring in.’
‘It’ll be over soon,’ he sighed.
His washed eyes were embracing fresh simplicities.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s stopping. It’ll be over.’
Although the fall of the floodwaters and an end to the rain had been discussed, it was only theory. Nobody believed that this would happen, and many, in their hearts, would not have wanted it. Some, following Bub Quigley’s finger, looked at the sky, and now for the second time that day there was blue, but a considerable blue, and folding of clouds. In it flew an arrow of black birds. Even if no dove, the formation of birds suggested possibilities, and the Governor went so far as to make the joke, at which those who were protecting him from pressure laughed with almost physical violence.
The naked faces were immodest without their habitual clothing of rain.
‘It seems that the boats would be landun about here,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘An perhaps we shall find our men.’
The two women, who had left their cart a little way back from the crowd, chaining the wheel, and sticking on the horse’s nose a nose bag, from which the chaff had trickled long before the floods, advanced towards the water on stiff legs, in ponderous wet clothes. It made Amy Parker feel rather ridiculous to have come that long and arduous way to recover her awkward body at the end. So she held the wet bag round her shoulders and looked angrier than she was.
‘Have you seen Stan?’ she asked Doll Quigley.
‘No, Amy, I ain’t. But we ain’t been everywhere.’
Because she was humble, Doll Quigley accepted as perfectly natural what she presumed to be Amy Parker’s anger.
And gradually everything was natural. Amy Parker stood in the crowd, that concealed her awkwardness, with her friends, in the first shy sunlight, that was becoming by degrees more metallic and blatant. The trees, isolated in the glistening brown water, crackled with green light, A windmill flashed, and slashed at any remnants of grey. And a boat began to approach, that people were trying to identify, making jokes and even laying bets.
Then Amy Parker was seized with terror, that this should be the boat, and that she would not know what to say to her husband in public. The stranger-faces all around her were not stranger than her husband’s skin, which for the moment was all that she could remember of him.
‘It is Ernie,’ someone ventured from under his hand. ‘It is Ernie Oakes all right.’
‘We grass widders’, said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘would not be reckernizun our men, with three days on their chins, at half a mile.’
‘It’s Ernie Oakes all right,’ said the confident man.
Then Amy Parker knew, with a slight scorn, that this would be the boat. She knew. Wind took a tail of her hair and mingled it with her smile, which was the smile of knowing. And with her conviction, her husband’s face returned to her, in its least line and pore; it might have been her own, and she was holding it in her hands, devouring it in her mind, down to the bones, so hungrily that she looked round quickly to see if she had been seen.
But of course she hadn’t.
And Mrs O’Dowd had begun to call, ‘See? ’Tis our boys, whatever you like to say. It’s the black devul himself, pullun fit to trip all the others into the water.’
The boat was rowed on through the lively air, on which Mrs O’Dowd had painted sails. Some said it was the Tingles and little Mary Hunt that had been taken off this time. It was Mary Hunt holding the tabby cat. It was old Mrs Tingle – you could begin to see her goitre. And the boat was rowed on, and after much straining, and slewing, and manoeuvring, and breath, and advice, was brought to the side where the people stood.
Then Stan Parker looked up as he sat, he was tired, and saw that his wife was there. She stood in her dark wet clothes, with the bag falling from her shoulders and her hair drying in the wind. He was not surprised. He did not wave and make jokes, as other men did with acquaintances and relations. But he looked into her and was content.
‘Don’t you have nothun to say to your husband now?’ Mrs O’Dowd asked her friend.
But Amy Parker looked away. She had looked into him, into his eyes, and had never looked deeper, she thought. There was very little to say.
‘Go on,’ Amy said, ‘don’t be silly.’ She bit the tail of hair that was flying into her mouth and frowned.
So that Stan Parker remembered coming into the room where she stood at the enamel basin, pushing the dark hair back from her face, and there was a greenish light in the white skin of her thighs. In that window, in summer light, there was the greenish gloom that the white roses made.
‘Hey,’ said Ossie Peabody, leaning across, ‘your missus’s come.’
‘Yes,’ said Stan Parker.
So that Ossie Peabody did not advance further into his mate’s privacy.
It was decided that the mob that had come down from the hills in Peabodys’ dray should go back home that night. Interest in the flood was waning. Some began to point and show how the water had fallen, only a little, but a little. It was cold in the mud on the edge of the yellow waters. People began to trail back into the streets. A lamp was lit in one window. A woman, pouring tea, held the pot high above the cup, so that the red stream appeared to be fixed.
Parkers walked against each other in the dwindling light.
‘What about the cows?’ asked Stan Parker, because he was expected to speak.
‘The old man’ll see to them.’
In the presence of their friends, as they walked back to find Peabodys’ dray, their conversation was almost guilty. But they were close. Their clothes touched. And in the dray, waiting for the leg of pork that had been promised to Ossie Peabody’s mum, Parkers were interchangeable.
‘Ta-ta!’ said Mrs O’Dowd, who was already slapping her horse. She would make her own way, with her husband, and a bottle or two.
‘See you this side of Killarney,’ Mrs O’Dowd called.
She was gone then, in a jingle, into the friendly night.
All that night would remain friendly. Someone had a twist of peppermints that they handed round in the dray. There was a fumbling of hard hands as they waited for the leg of pork. And Amy Parker, who did not care for peppermint, took, and bit, and rejected, and put the bitten sticky half in the place where she knew her husband’s mouth would be. He took the strong sweet, laughing, in his teeth, and was pervaded by peppermint right to the backs of his eyes.
‘Whose little boy are you?’ somebody asked.
There was a child crying in the dark.
‘Ah, look,’ said the butcher’s wife, coming out with the leg of pork wrapped in the advertisements of the local paper, ‘he’s been up an down, up an down. That kiddy’s b
een crying all day. “Who do you belong to?” I says. No answer. He only looks. An cries. “Come in, then,” I says, “an I’ll give you a lovely cake.” But he just cries. Up an down. I says I’ll go to the police, give him in charge, as a lost child, of course, nothing nasty. People, you know, can’t stand it. “Can’t you do somethin to that child?” they say. As if it’s mine. Cry, cry. As if it was the last Christian left on earth. There, Ossie, is as sweet a piece of pork as your mum will ever put tooth to.’
While the child cried in the dark.
Perhaps he was washed down from somewhere, they said in the dray.
He’d be washed on farther if he squalled like that, was the honest opinion of a second body.
But without malice. There was only the tolerant kindliness of intimacy in the dark. They were returning home.
Then Amy Parker had to see the child. ‘Let me down. Let me see him,’ she said.
She had to get over the side of the dray, as if some purpose were forming in the darkness. She had to touch the child.
‘What is your name?’ she asked, holding him in the light that fell from the inside of the butcher’s shop, that was really closed.
And the child’s face was fully closed. The mouth and the eyelids would not be prised. She held in her hands the body of a caught bird.
‘Don’t they call you something?’ she said, aware that they were waiting in the dray, shifting and coughing and gathering reins.
But the child eluded her, except for what she was holding of his bones.
Come on, they called, it would be morning.
‘Get up, Amy,’ her husband called.
‘Then we’ll find you a name’, she said, ‘when we get you home. Stan,’ she called, ‘we’re taking the kid along with us.’
Then the child gave her a long look, as if he doubted whether it would be possible. And Amy herself was not sure.
Her husband had begun to grumble, what would they do with a stray child.
‘Well, perhaps for a day or two,’ he grumbled, ‘until we find out all about him.’
‘There,’ she said. ‘We shall soon be happy.’
Though she herself had begun to doubt, her bright voice embracing the silence to which it was addressed. Still, she began to bundle the child over the awkward woodwork into the dray. He did not protest. Nor sitting in the crowded dray, that had begun its long homeward jog.
‘I have forgotten the stars,’ said Amy Parker.
She was tenuously happy. There were whole quarters of still sullen sky, but that from which the cloud had been torn away glittered with a new jewellery of stars. As the dray reeled across the stones you could breathe the cold stars, that shivered, and glittered, and contracted, and lived.
‘Yes, the rain is gone,’ said a man called Ted Fosdick, who was getting a lift home.
But Ossie Peabody slapped with the leather and said he would never believe that, not till the drought was on.
People in dreamy voices began to recall the flood, that was already history, and to enumerate those articles they had acquired. Because in a flood many objects change hands. There is no vice in this. It is not a stealing. It is merely a change of ownership. This way various pots and pans, a cheese, a length of rope, a world gazetteer, even a hip bath, had passed honestly enough to the passengers in Peabodys’ dray.
‘An Parkers got a bran new kid free for nothing.’
They laughed in their friendly, dreamy voices, and passed to other subjects.
But Amy Parker rocked with the stars, and Stan Parker looked out into the darkness, past the skeletons of trees, into darkness. The child was sitting between them, hearing perhaps, you could not tell, the words of the detached passengers.
‘Are you warm?’ the woman asked him, with a kindness that sounded as if she was trying it out.
He did not answer. He sat stiffly. All three of them were stiff, the boy, the man, and the woman, apart from the other passengers. Packed together, their bodies listened to one another; later perhaps, in a lull of suspicion, on a wave of sleep, they might even flow together in love.
Amy Parker rocked with the wheels. Her head glittered with the events she had lived that day, growing and contracting, eluding or consuming. She was at this moment quite feverish with life, with all those events she possessed in her head, inside her glowing skin. As she was jolted against the hard side of the dray, seated stiffly, on the floor, the road was interminable, that she could have accomplished quickly in her mind. Even her failures were taken from her by the child that she might now perhaps possess.
They were going over a wooden bridge. There was the touch of leaves on their faces, and the man called Ted Fosdick was singing a song about a drummer boy.
Stan Parker sat with his own awkward, uncommunicative childhood all along the inevitable road. He could feel the resentment of the strange boy pressed against his side. He did not want to possess this child as his wife did. But if he would not attempt, he would also not refuse. So the dray carried him equably through the flowing darkness. In his exhaustion his own life ebbed and flowed, along other roads, or he opened doors and went into the houses that he had known, in which the familiar faces were looking for him to behave in an expected way. But because he too, for all his apparent solidity, was as fluid and unpredictable as the stream of life, he left them standing with the words half out of their mouths and a surprised row of teeth. He would have liked to satisfy people, but he could not. He would have liked to subscribe to their gospel of the stationary, but he could not. He would have liked to open himself and declare, Here am I. Then they would have looked inside and recognized with smiles of approval their own desires, standing in rows like objects at the ironmonger’s. Rigid. Instead, his star palpitated, and his cloud drifted, threadbare.
Here and there along the road the passengers in Peabodys’ dray were climbing down with stiff limbs, out of the sleep of those that remained. Soon there was only Ossie Peabody, and Parkers, and the lost child. In its emptiness the dray was quite cold, and there were even less chances of escaping one another.
So that when Ossie Peabody said, there they were, delivered safe at their own door, the child was desperately exposed on his platform in the starlight. He stood as if waiting for his benefactors to decide what form his sentence should take.
At the moment they were having a slight argument about something the man was bringing out of the dray.
‘What is that?’ the woman asked suspiciously.
‘That’s a bath,’ said her husband, banging it awkwardly against the side of the dray, before he heaved it out.
‘Whatever for?’ she asked. Her voice thickened, as if this second problem was too much.
‘To wash in,’ her husband replied.
‘Make yerself sweet for church on Sunday,’ said Ossie Peabody, spitting at the darkness.
‘I didn’t know’, said the woman, ‘that it was you brought the bath. How ever did you get the thing?’
‘It was there,’ said her husband, kicking the hollow object with his toe, not by design, though it sounded like it. ‘It was there,’ he said. ‘Nobody seemed to want it. So I took it. It will come in useful.’
‘Oh,’ she said doubtfully.
The lost child sheltered behind their words, against the stars.
‘Anyway,’ said the woman, her voice exhausted by the weight of possessions, ‘we’re home.’
‘Give us your hand,’ she said to the boy in a revived but dangerously personal tone. ‘You can jump down, can’t you? You’re quite big, you know.’
‘Of course he can,’ said the man, who was shifting about, and stamping, and avoiding the bath, ‘he’s a sollicker.’
So the child jumped towards them, as he was told, and they were calling good-bye, and bundling through the darkness, past the twigs of a rosebush, into a house.
In the room of the house where they went, that was all bumps and thick airless darkness from being closed, the woman let go the child’s hand. For the moment she thought only of
reacquainting herself with her shell. She breathed the warm darkness and was relieved. Oh, I shall talk to him, she said, but later, and take his hand, and sit on the edge of the bed, and talk about animals. She knew already the shape of the face she would take in her hand, and for this reason perhaps was less afraid of losing it. For the moment she thought only of finding things. The matches.
Both the man and the woman were bumping about.
‘Here’s the matches, Stan,’ she said.
Then he made the light. There was a table and chairs, and a black stove, and dead ash lying in a hearth.
‘This is the kitchen,’ said the man, jerking his elbow in a spasmodic, jovial way.
The tone of voice was not his, but he had felt it his duty to speak, to explain something to the child.
After that he went outside to make water, and to put the bath in a shed, where it remained quietly. Parkers were always uneasy about that bath.
The woman, who was moving about with authority and relief in her recovered house, placing and shifting things, began to talk to the child, not yet with the directness and tenderness that she ought, but to talk.
‘We’re going to make up a bed for you here,’ she said. ‘He’ll fetch a stretcher that we’ve got. Then we’ll find the sheets. But after we’ve had something to eat. There’s some cold beef. Do you like beef?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Some prefer mutton.’
‘I had pork once,’ said the boy, ‘with crackling on it.’
‘Your dad kept a pig, perhaps,’ said the woman, making a careful pattern with plates and forks.
The Tree of Man Page 11