Mrs Gage was always coming and going, to untie the string that bound the bundles of letters or to look for things. On Sundays she drove out, with a red fox around her neck and a blue dog beneath her gig, and she would rein in, and talk, in yellow tones of statement from behind her broad, unconscious teeth.
The postmistress had a husband who was no good. It was not clear in what way, except that he could not make money, and once had painted a picture of an old wooden fence with a couple of dead trees behind, that made you wonder. Mr Gage’s remunerative jobs were varied and mysterious. Sometimes he was there and sometimes not. He was a shadow in a singlet.
If anyone spoke he would look up before he had listened and say, ‘Ah, good, good, I’ll run and fetch Mrs Gage.’ And he would, at once, furtively, as if he were a boarder in that house, on charitable terms. It was the postmistress’s house.
Once Mr Gage had thrown himself on the ground and looked so intently at an ant that the eyes bulged in his head, and he was swallowed by fluctuating brown waves, and his arms were fixed to the ground at what appeared a permanent angle, their grey flesh quivering. When he recovered himself there was a soldierbird in the spider bush, and Mrs Parker, who had come along the road.
‘Is anything the matter?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I was looking at an ant.’
‘Ah,’ she said, in doubt, moistening her lips that were hot and dusty.
She did not question his attitude further, and he was surprised.
Perhaps she was absent for the moment, or perhaps it was the heat. Because it is not usual for a human being to resist an opportunity to destroy. And she could have crushed with her foot such ecstasy as remained in his ant-body.
So he continued to kneel and look at her, a scrawny object in his singlet, but the intensity of his eyes penetrated the woman’s unconscious face almost to the darker corners, as if here too was some mystery he must solve, like the soul of the ant.
Amy Parker, who was half for pausing to satisfy some unrevealed need of the kneeling man, and half for mounting higher on her way, was at this time a young woman broadening into maturity. Her pointed face and bony cheeks had filled with almost satisfied desires. She was a honey colour in the summer day. Her thickening arms could lift great weights, when there was no man to do it, but they were better seen putting up her hair. Then her strong, honey-coloured back with the lifted arms was a full vase. She was filled with the thick, honey-coloured light of the heavy summer days.
‘Is Mrs Gage there?’ Mrs Parker asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ replied the husband of the postmistress. ‘She’s in the office or round at the back. She’s there. She could be sorting out the mail.’
He picked a blade of yellow grass.
‘Aren’t you going to get up?’ Mrs Parker asked. ‘It can’t be comfortable kneeling there.’
‘All right,’ he said.
And he got to his feet, and went farther into the bush, trailing the yellow stalk of grass.
After the husband of the postmistress had removed himself Mrs Parker continued to mount the hill. In company she might have questioned the behaviour of Mr Gage, but, alone in the heat of the day, he was a child, or an animal, or a stone, from none of which she could have hidden herself. Dreamy bits of life that she had lived floated to the surface and mingled with the hard light. She looked up into the face of the sun her husband, and because she was blinded did not see that the bushes had observed her nakedness.
So she went on, touching the fence, on which there was a tinkling snakeskin that somebody had hung to dry. It was the post-office fence already, and the lavatory which a gale had knocked sideways, and the hatch in which was the face of the postmistress, looking out.
‘Mrs Parker,’ called Mrs Gage. ‘I say, Mrs Parker! Is it hot enough? No sign of a breeze. No sign of rain. And the big tank is nearly dry. Because I’m doing what I can for the termarters. I do like a nice termarter.’
No one but the postmistress suffered from the weather. It was recorded on her that her days were unbearable.
‘Is there anything for us, Mrs Gage?’ asked Mrs Parker.
‘No, dear,’ said the postmistress. ‘Anyways, I don’t think. Not that I can remember. But I’ll look.’
Withdrawing her hat from the hatch in a chattering of dried palm leaves.
‘You never know’, she said, ‘what you mightn’t overlook. In this weather. It drives a person potty.’
The postmistress removed the string from the bundle with great skill. When she licked her yellow thumb it was more than an official act, a ritual rather, to soothe the humble suppliant, who would stand snuffing the scent of melted sealing-wax as it mounted in the sanctuary behind. It was improbable that any of those letters, elevated like a host to the level of the postmistress’s eyes, could belong in substance to anyone. Many of them never did. But Amy Parker continued to attend this ritual, because it came at the top of the hill, and sometimes there was a catalogue, with pictures of things, and once there had been a letter from her Aunt Fibbens, dictated to a lady who could write, about some unpleasantness.
‘No, dear,’ said Mrs Gage, ‘it’s as I thought. People are not writing in the heat. There was a storm, though, on the North Coast, and a young fellow struck by lightning on his horse. It ran up the stirrup irons. Had a baby, it said, only six months. He was a timber cutter. Can you understand?’
‘How should I understand, Mrs Gage?’ said Mrs Parker, who at this moment was strong.
She began decently to walk away.
But the yellow postmistress wrenched her hat through the hatch, her face desperate in its pleats for the state of lightning and her own impending loneliness.
‘But it does somebody good,’ she called. ‘You’ve got to admit. The rain. And the tank half dry. They say there’ll be a southerly buster later in the afternoon. But no rain.’
Holding her hat in the wind of her own words, the desperate woman was a victim of her own roots. Ah, strike me, she would have said, into shapes of fire and radiance. But lightning was a thing of horror. So she withdrew her head, rearranging her hat, that rustled like her brown-paper arms.
Mrs Parker walked away, as if exempt from the weather. For this reason some people did not care for Parkers. But lightning is a personal matter. She remembered their own lightning with some tenderness, how they were both untouched, and at the same time open for each other’s eyes.
Now she quickened her pace. Now she wanted to get home. Now she wanted to tell her husband all kinds of simple things, even if he did not listen. Quite apart from the words of the postmistress she had reached that point in the road where she always experienced the anxiety of not belonging. Faces on the store veranda, pasted there some time past, it would appear, stared at her out of their permanent positions and dared her to approach.
There was a gig too, outside the store, that did not belong by rights to that scene. No dust lay on the splendid varnish of the bright gig. The horse, hardly in a lather, shook the flies from his dark face, and with them a shower of clinking brass, that slashed, and flashed, and dared. Altogether there was an air of great daring about the horse and gig that made Mrs Parker shy. So that she approached determined not to look, with her awkward, wooden movements exposed, she felt, in the open wastes of dust.
It was Armstrongs’ turnout, she began to realize, that young Armstrong sometimes drove. At that moment he was not present. Inside the store, perhaps, buying something unimportant, for any thing of importance was brought from Sydney to the brick house. And now the horse waited, striking at the ground with his shapely hoofs, shifting the gig gratingly, in which sat the two young women.
Amy Parker did not so much see this as know, in shame beside the tamarisk. That the women rocked with the gig, laughing and eating caramels and tossing the silver paper on to the road. No other pastime could have been theirs, because none would have been careless enough. They belonged to that gig, under the parasol that one of them held, and that shifted indolently and mo
ttled their skins.
Any words let fall were not interpreted by the woman on foot as she passed in the shadow of the tamarisk; not could she have looked at the faces, she was too displeased with her own. This was now brick-coloured, with a little down of hairs. She wore a hat that once she had thought pretty, with a bunch of shiny cherries, but now she held her head away, to hide the silliness of cherries on her cheap, crushed hat.
And all the time the harness of the gig jingled cruelly, like the words of a distant conversation that would seem to have a personal bearing, even though unintelligible. As the young ladies laughed, and twirled their parasol for occupation, and tossed the silver paper on to the road.
Several men on the store veranda were admiring and resenting the rich man’s turnout, and making indecent remarks about the girls. When Mrs Parker went up, old Mr Peabody said something, as if he felt he had to, but what, she could not have told, in that scene of excitement and distress. With a blue ribbon winding through the parasol. And young Armstrong coming against her, whom she had known from a wristy boy, now a man with thick lips.
‘Hold hard,’ he said, steadying her by the elbows and laughing distantly, thickly, in his throat.
He stood back looking at her, as he did now at women, at their breasts, but in a permissible way which some liked. And into her burned face. But it would not open for him. A draught coming from the shop carried her skirt between her legs, that were thick, and even ugly.
‘Mrs Parker,’ he said, seeing at last. ‘Sorry,’ he laughed. ‘That was a near thing.’
But with some redness for his remembered boyhood of long wrists. Then he ran down the steps, in a splendid pair of pants, towards the gigful of girls, who had been brought from Sydney for him to choose from.
‘Some people always make it an occasion,’ said Mr Denyer, whose watch chain cut the gentle gloom.
‘Oh yes, I suppose so,’ said Mrs Parker, building with her burned hands an abrupt monument out of boxes of starch.
She began to remember what she had come for, and to name these innocent things almost brutally, as if one might compel them to assume some superior significance. But the pearls of barley were dim and artificial, that fell on the grocer’s brass. And she gathered up her dean-smelling, ordinary parcels, and paid, and went out.
The gig had gone of course, but the air was still turbulent. Some men took off their hats, others put them on; some were shifting in their clothes and telling stories of horses, while most remembered the throats of the two young women and accepted thoughtfully the insolence of their white skins.
And Amy Parker began to accept, as she returned along the deserted road. Its monotony was even comforting. Now the incident of the gig was the faintest tingling in her blood. Her feet tramped calmly where wheels had disturbed the dust.
In this state of recovered calm and prickling silence she was again close to her husband, though he spoke to her with the thicker accents of the rich young man, and their mouths exchanged a lazy sensuality. So that she had to laugh, and redden, and shift her basket. Because, of course, it was not like this. Her face grew thoughtfuller, and thin. Many aching incidents of regret and tenderness came at her from the ridge, from which she looked down and saw the willow, spread above the muddy water of the dam, and the first intimations of their wooden house. Although their district had become more closely settled the house still appeared to stand alone, and it was this isolation, this silence, towards which she now quickened, and which fitted her like a skin.
Looking this way and that, she began to feel possessive even of the tufts of shivery-grass that stood outside the fence. She was both possessive and possessed. Cooler leaves spattered on her face, and the first mouthful of a breeze was blown upon her elbows and the nape of her neck. So that the paddocks undulated with a greater joyfulness, in which the blue crane stalked, and neat peewits tumbled, and young calves managed their tails in awkward play. She herself was hastening over stones, in that disguised pace which is between walking and running. Because it would have looked silly, running home for what reason, except to embrace the cat at the gate and feel his rough tongue on her salt skin.
But she was in her own place at last, in which she would not be expected to find answers. Inside the house a tap dripped, boughs scraped the roof, sounds fitting into silences with such justice that already she was refreshed. Before she went out to where, beside the well, he stood treadling the grindstone, that he had brought from Bangalay in the beginning, in exchange for something that she had by this time forgotten.
‘Well,’ she said, approaching the grindstone, and the smell of wet stone, ‘I got back. And it was white hot. You should have seen, Stan, there was a gigful of ladies at the store, that young Armstrong had brought. Society ladies. With a white parasol. It was lace, I think. Fancy, a parasol.’
But he did not look up or say anything much, nor did she expect.
He held the blade of the gleaming knife to the uneven surface of the stone, and the stone sang and lapped at the brown water in the little trough beneath.
Ah, she sighed, sitting on the edge of the well, and her skin drank the cool.
She watched the white knife in her husband’s hands, that he pressed with his strength against the stone. She held her throat up, in the dim cool light of the tree above the well, offering it almost to the gleaming knife, that she would have received with what cry of love.
Then when he had finished he felt the knife with his thumb, and looked at her at last. He looked into her in the cool gloom of the old tree, biting his lip with some thoughtfulness. Outside the circle of the cool tree there were his cleared paddocks, burned to a white-grey by the heat of summer, and the house he had knocked together, and enlarged, and improved, and that had finally taken its place with some dignity in the fields, even pretending a bit beneath the tendrils of vines and a shower of roses. All was ranged round him, radiating out from him in the burning afternoon. So that Stan Parker was pleased.
And he was pleased with the strong throat of his wife.
It seemed that a firmly founded architecture had risen at Parkers’. Even in the flesh. Though Stan Parker himself had dried up a bit, though the back of his neck was wrinkled as he bent down to pick up an axe that he would grind next, though his eyes were somewhat cavernous, from surprise and acceptance; he had withstood the battering and would continue to withstand.
Let all things come, his body suggested, his shoulders rounded above the grindstone, his foot controlling the treadle as metal ate stone, and stone metal, with the harsh gurgle of their consummation. All was good, almost, that could come to this pass. The stone leaped and was restrained by the controlling wire. The strength of his hands shaped the metal. It would have been possible at such times to shape almost anything into a right shape.
But he sensed her restlessness as she sat at the well head and tossed her foot. So he said, ‘Perhaps he will marry the girl in the gig.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said dryly. ‘There were two girls.’
She tossed her foot now for something that eluded her, in the stance of his body, in his impervious skull. But she looked at his hands and was glad that her husband was a poor man.
She got up. Ah, she felt, restlessly, how can I prove he is the best of men? And was suddenly very restless, and empty.
‘We’ll have a cup,’ he said, squinting at the axe’s edge. ‘Then it’ll be time to go down to the cows.’
And after, as they walked with the buckets, out from the leafy borders of the house, out to where the heat began, she was again all restless to prove to herself some perfection. In the lesser heat of the evening the long shadows of the fence-posts lay, and the cows dawdled towards the yard. Some young heifers jumped and ran, but it was the slower, gentler progress that prevailed, of the older, swollen cows. All was heaviness, yet apparent perfection in the yellow drawn-out evening. And anticipation. The cows were twitching their ears. The heifers looked.
‘It’s the wind that’s coming,’ said th
e man, who was possessed by a great fondness for his evening paddocks; he would have liked to point to things.
So that he was glad of the opportunity to raise his arm with the bucket at the wrist and say, ‘Look, it is the wind all right.’
As the crests of the trees bent over in an obeisance of silver, as dust flirted, as a young cow jumped in fear or pleasure, tossed her rump in the air, and farted.
It was the postmistress’s predicted southerly buster that struck the figures of the man and woman, sluiced them with cool, and would have torn the buckets from them.
Now the old German came out, smiling, and white with bran that he had been tipping to the stalled cows. And they laughed and made jokes. They made the standing joke about Tricky, who was her cow, they must not touch her – a man’s hand on her side, and she lashed out and flung herself on the ground.
It was fun at the bails that evening in the wind. There was a soaring sound of wind, boisterous without malice, that almost drowned the hissing of the milk. This mounted in its loveliness. The cows came, and gave, and were content. It was the contentment of absolute perfection again. Till the man grew thoughtful at mouth. His substance, which had been solid enough, omnipotent even, at the grindstone an hour or two before, had begun to thin out. The draughts of glad wind, almost liquid in their cold, made him wring the milk from the last teats, anxious to be finished.
The Tree of Man Page 13