‘It was a pig that Mr Thompson killed and give us a bit of.’
‘Ah,’ she said, listening. ‘Mr Thompson did, did he?’
But the boy had closed again. Deliberately. It was as if he had determined to originate on that night, outside the butcher’s shop at Wullunya.
Soon they all sat down to eat in separate silences. The man and woman chewed their food. They eyed their furniture with contented eyes. They too had turned their backs on events that had been too exhilarating or too shameful to bear. In this room there were many objects that had been shaped and worn by their own hands. These are the things that exist.
But the boy had none of these things. After he had gobbled down his meat and some cold potato that had been fried up quickly in beef dripping, he sat looking thin, and after a bit took a piece of glass from his pocket, that he sat holding half-hidden.
What’s that? they asked, through a complacency of digested food.
‘That’s a piece of glass,’ said the boy.
Poor kid, said the woman, I shall speak to him, but later.
She had to ward off some recollection of sadness, for a little at least.
And the man thought about his cows. But at the back of his mind was the flowing of the brown waters, and the doors of houses choked with water, and on an island a sewing machine.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if we’re not careful, it’ll soon be milking time.’
So they all began to go to bed, the child in the kitchen where he had been told. He did all that he was told.
‘Good night, Stan,’ said the woman. ‘What a day!’
She put her mouth on his. She was his wife. Her mouth was rather moist, and familiar. But as he leaned on his elbow to blow out the candle he remembered the strange, dark figure of the girl standing above him on the shore as he sat in the boat, and the greenish-white shadows, the shadows of the white roses in the thighs of his wife once when he had come quickly into the room. He turned quickly from his thoughts. He was tired and could easily have become irritable.
‘Yes,’ he yawned. ‘Those poor buggers that lost their homes. And that kid. Do you think he’s all right?
And now the sadness that she could no longer ward off was floating over the woman who had kissed the mouth of her husband good night. She smelled the sad wick of the candle flame.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Her position in the bed was intolerable.
‘You would bring him,’ he condemned.
She did not feel she had ever loved the man her husband. She had forgotten the moment on the river’s bank, when they had been cast up into each other’s eyes. She longed to be pervaded by a permanence.
‘Yes,’ she said, lying in the darkness. ‘I am to blame. I brought him. But I had to.’
Which her husband did not hear, for he had fallen asleep.
Then she got up quickly and smoothly, as if it had been determined long before that evening that she should do this at that moment, and went straight through the cold into the kitchen.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked gently.
The kitchen still glowed. The boy lay on his side, looking through his piece of glass at the dying coals. He did not look up, though accepting her presence.
‘You’ve still got that old thing,’ she said, shivering in her nightdress on the edge of the bed.
‘That is from the church,’ he said.
‘You lived near a church then?’
‘No. That was afterwards. After I had left the others. It was near the willows. I thought I was dead,’ he said.
‘Was it your family you were with?’ she asked.
‘I can’t remember that,’ he said glibly, looking through the piece of glass, that she saw was colouring his cheek; as he moved the glass his skin was a drifting crimson.
‘It doesn’t matter. If you want it that way,’ she said, touching him with her hand, but without much hope.
‘What are you doing here?’ the child asked.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘I live here. This is my house.’
But her skin was cold. She was uncertain of her furniture.
The child was looking at her hand. It was lying with some lost purpose along his arm. She still had to learn the words that she might speak.
‘Would you like to look through this?’ he asked. ‘I broke it from one of the windows.’
‘You broke it!’
‘No one else needed it,’ he said. ‘I wanted it to look through.’
It was obviously his.
‘At first it fell into the water. But I fished it up. You see, there was water inside the church.’
She took the piece of glass and held it to her face, so that the whole room was drenched with crimson, and the coals of the fire were a disintegrating gold.
‘I will tell you about the church,’ he said. ‘There were birds there too, that had come in through the holes in the window. I slept there most of the day, on the seats, with one of those things that they pray on, a sort of cushion, under my head, but it pricked. There were fish swimming in the church. I touched one with my hand. And the books were floating. The water was moving, you see. Everything was floating and moving.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it was.’
Now the purplish-crimson flood possessed her too, as she crouched on the pew with the child. There were dead things. There was almost the face that floated beneath the willows.
‘Did you say your prayers?’ she asked, pulling the glass away from her face.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There were no prayers being said, not any more, in that church.’
They looked at each other. Released from the glass, their skins were white.
‘Listen,’ she said, her voice coming to their rescue, ‘you can stay here, you know. If you like. This is your home.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ he said.
She put the glass on the counterpane.
‘You’d better go to sleep,’ she told him.
She was again an awkward young woman with a confidence she had learned from others. Her voice was grating and superficial, when it should have come up warmly from a great depth. And in this voice she had to say her piece.
‘In the morning we shall see. Are you warm enough? You want feeding up, you know. You’re thin. But food will set you up.’
It did not seem that he intended to speak to her again, lying curled on his side, with his head in the crook of his arm. She would not possess this child. So she went away, treading through the crimson light that clung to her still, through a wind of dead prayers in the drowning church. She went to her room, to wrestle with sleep.
Then she saw, suddenly, her husband was putting on his pants. The light in the lamp-chimney was smooth and very yellow.
‘Whatever time is it?’ she asked.
‘Time to get up,’ he said, as hard as the thwack of his belt. ‘Fritz has gone across the yard.’
She could, in fact, hear the familiar buckets, and the cock tearing apart the last rags of sleep.
They were going to do the things that had to be done; air and water cold on the skin, they were passing and repassing, each closed in himself, solemnly round the room, knotting or brushing hair, filling their empty clothes. It was obvious that these lives had never shattered into coloured fragments. They went out through the kitchen, quickly and quietly, past the body of a boy sleeping on a narrow bed. They barely glanced at him, as if they were anxious not to disturb, or for some other reason.
There in the stalls across the yard, in the light of lanterns, stood the rumps of cows. There was also the face of the old scrubbed German waiting to tell things and be told. The cows were munching chaff. The scent of slaver and the cows’ breath mounted higher than the cold as the woman and the two men sat on their blocks with the buckets between their knees, prepared for the opening of their ritual.
‘Rain stopped,’ said the old German, wringing his first teat.
‘Yes,’ said Stan Parker, ‘it stopped all right.’
&
nbsp; Hanging on the nail the rag with which he had wiped the udder of the blue cow.
‘I knew it would,’ said the old man.
‘How, Fritz?’ asked Amy Parker.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I knew. You can tell,’ he said.
Then there was the music of the milk.
‘How was the floods?’ asked the old man.
‘The floods were terrible,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Stan saw more than I did. But I saw a little. Some people lost everything.’
The old man sucked his teeth above the gentle milk.
‘We brought back a bath, Fritz,’ Stan Parker told.
‘Stan found it,’ said his wife.
Then they sat dashing the milk from the rubbery teats of the big placid cows.
Stan Parker, with his feet firmly on the clean bricks, waited for his wife to tell the story of the lost boy, but it did not seem as if this would be told, or not yet, anyway.
They sat dashing the milk, and an anxious froth began to fill the bucket that Amy Parker held. It began to be an interminable milking that morning, and afterwards, while the men were clanking cans, and the cows were forming aimless groups, their empty udders flopping at their legs. Then she ran up from the bails and across the yard. To reach the house. But quickly. Now his eyes will be open, her breath said. She would say many things. By the light of morning it is possible to accomplish what the night refuses. She would imprison the child in her house by force of love.
But when she went into the kitchen, slowing up so as not to look silly, and shaping her breathlessness into a smile, the clothes of the narrow bed had been pushed back, they had already taken a cold, permanent shape. So that she did not bother to call. She looked at the piece of crimson glass that had shattered on the boards into other crimson pieces.
Not long after, her husband came in for a quick breakfast before taking the milk. She had put everything before him, beyond reproach. There were the frilly fried eggs, and the red tea that he liked to drink, standing waiting in a blue enamel pot.
He began to cut across the eggs, as if expecting them to be of harder substance, or out of absence of mind.
‘Jewel has two months to go,’ said the woman, tearing the old leaves off a calendar that a store had sent. ‘It’s time we dried her off.’
‘Where is the boy?’
There is nothing wretcheder-looking than a hash of eggs on someone else’s plate.
‘He’s not here,’ she said. ‘He’s gone.’
‘We couldn’t have kept him,’ said her husband. ‘He didn’t want to camp down here. You could see that. He didn’t belong to us.’
‘Yes,’she said.
Though she could not altogether see, nor explain why.
She could not explain that a moment comes when you yourself must produce some tangible evidence of the mystery of life. And now she was going round their kitchen, her daylight skin grey and drained by early rising, her hands performing blunt acts in no way related to the transcendent moments she had lived. This made her frown, and shove the furniture into correct positions, and pick up a grey potato peeling that had fallen from the bucket some time before.
‘Amy,’ he said, trying to make his voice adequate, touching her, after he had finished and pushed back his plate. ‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Of course it’s all right.’
They were close. Their lives had grown together. They would continue in that way, because it was not possible to divide their common trunk.
Now that they stood at the window, their arms touching, present and absent, she did not deny the goodness of their common life. He could feel this in his whole being, through the early-morning weariness, that was also achievement. Now the cows swaggered through the trees, their tails switching, their blue noses touching the pale grass that had begun to rise from the silt, or rubbing their necks against the black bark of the wattle trees. Do you know this? he would have said; and this? and this? That he saw with his eyes and felt with his bones. But as he did not know how to say such things, he stood pinching up the skin of her hand. And it was not necessary, perhaps, to speak, he began to feel in the skin of her hand. She had begun to see the shapes of the trees, the white columns, and the humbler, shaggy ones, stirring and inclining towards them in the morning light. The sky was moving in an extravagance of recovered blue, so that the man and woman arrested at their window seemed also to move for a moment, to sway on the stems of their bodies, as their souls stirred and recognized familiar countries. For that moment they were limitless.
Then the man returned to his stiff boots and began to remember what he must do. The woman put away the table cloth, folding it as if she loved it. She was contented. If she thought of the lost boy, it was for a slight squint in one eye that she remembered from the firelit night. As for her own inadequacies, she was now stronger than they.
‘Perhaps we should tell the police,’ she said, ‘about that boy.’
He said that he might ride in to Bangalay if there was time, later, in the afternoon.
Nobody heard what became of the lost boy that Parkers found at Wullunya in the floods. There the waters subsided soon after, leaving a squalor of yellow mud and quantities of brown snakes. The inhabitants sorted out their furniture, and the bits of themselves that they had recovered, and by degrees forgot to mention the subject.
Only sometimes at Durilgai it was recalled how the noble drayload of volunteers went down to rescue the victims of the flood. It is not known how or why the district in which Parkers lived got its name, but it was about the time of the floods that the official voice began to refer to it as Durilgai. And this meant ‘fruitful’, a friend of Mr Armstrong’s who was a professor, or something, said. But the people who lived in that district were disinclined to use their name, anyway for a long time, except in postal matters, as if something was expected of them that they could not, or did not care to, fulfil.
Amy Parker slowed up her rather slapdash hand in writing it, and spoke it to herself with full, thoughtful breath. Her expression withdrew into her face when strangers mentioned the official word, and she continued to refer to their district by the names of those people amongst whom the land was parcelled out. Sometimes she sat beside the bush of full white roses, her arms awkward in unemployment, at the place that was ‘Parkers’,’ and looked at the road.
PART TWO
Chapter 8
ABOUT a mile from Parkers’, where the road forks, a store had been built, and a post office was added in time, so that Durilgai did exist physically, these two buildings proved it. And as the inhabitants gained faith they trailed up the direct, dusty roads towards their village, and down the several, meandering, gritty tracks, the women to dawdle through their shopping, the men, with less excuse, to waste time.
Summer was a time of white dust and yellow grit. In the glare of sky and iron, in the scent of dry eucalypt and crushed ant, men rounded their shoulders and screwed up their eyes as they leaned against the veranda posts of the general store or frankly sat. Some exposed their particoloured foreheads in the shade, preferring flies to wet felt. There was a smell of relaxed exertion on the veranda of the store. Words would lose their direction, without censure from the audience, for time is so immense; while those who did not talk, the silenter, closed ones, would be writing in the dust with stick or whip, and erasing, and writing, in their own private codes, from which they would look up out of pale eyes.
At this stage of its existence the simple face of the general store at Durilgai still glowed with brown paint. It was a child’s game in wood and iron. Many honest objects stood primly in the window, buckets, and lampwicks, and millet brooms, and axe handles, and darning wool. Nothing perishable in the window was the policy of the storekeeper who had arranged these goods so painfully. They looked timeless and did acquire a permanence. They could have been painted on the wooden backing by some awkward brush that had not yet learned the dishonesties of art.
This store, or establishment, as it
was referred to, belonged in the beginning to Mr Denyer, a rather floury man, but good, who said his prayers and kept bantams for pleasure. Mr Denyer liked to walk amongst his fowls, looking down at them from his height, and smiling at their neatness through thick spectacles. He was, in fact, the complement of his shop, simply, even awkwardly made. But he would endure. People driving from Durilgai along the road to Bangalay could look back and see Mr Denyer in the simple attitudes he adopted, fixed at his counter, or in the doorway of his shop. This in turn was fixed in the landscape, of gentle green hills, or later in the season, scruffy ones. Besides the door stood a tamarisk Mr Denyer himself had planted, that in the early summer waved its pale flags of dusty pink, and in the later summer hung in sad plumes of pink dust. As the trunk thickened, the feathers of this straight tamarisk became something to look for. Strangers often asked Mr Denyer what his tree was, but this was something he did not know. He smiled. He said it was something he had bought, because he wanted a tree, he had to have something, and this was what it had become. But his thick spectacles were obviously pleased.
In all that district the names of things were not so very important. One lived. Almost no one questioned the purpose of living. One was born. One lived. The strings of runny-nosed, black Irish children, and the sandier, scabbier Scotch that spilled out of the bush on to the thin tracks that struggled up to meet the greater roads, were soon becoming elongated youths and girls, that hung around, and avoided each other, and met, and locked hands magnetically, and mingled their breath together in the hot evenings. New patterns of life, of paddock and yard and orchard, would be traced on the sides of the hills and the little gullies. But not yet. In time. In slow time too, of hot summer days.
Even the post office at Durilgai, with its faint echoes of a world and suggestions of other activity, stood still. The post office, which was across from Denyer’s, beside the signpost that the white ant soon got into, was less imposing than the store. Its official importance was by no means obvious. The post office was a creaking cottage, in the side of which was fitted a kind of hatch, through which Mrs Gage shoved the letters and her desperate face, and hung out afterwards to grapple departing backs with those last comments on the weather, that stood between her and silence. She was a woman in a flat hat, like a dried palm, and she wore brown-paper sleeves. In that office, which it was of course, you could also see the dressmaker’s dummy, on which the postmistress ran up cotton frocks for those who cared to submit. There were great drifts of snippets, and an orange velvet carrot filled with emery dust. And there was the dust of the road, that filled the inkwells and clotted with the postal ink, and lay on the official papers that grated together or flapped into new positions when there was a wind.
The Tree of Man Page 12