The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  But he began to look at her, stuffing his mouth with the cake, that she might replace with kisses. He looked at her hat, with its butterfly in sparkling stones, and at her face, that was gathered in towards the gums.

  So that she began to be uneasy, and even melancholy.

  ‘Boys’, she said, ‘never go much on kissun. That is’, she said, ‘they will, but up to a point. It is funny.’

  A great sheaf of bridal roses hung from the window frame, that she looked at when his eyes let her. They were the big papery roses of crushed country brides.

  ‘It is the girls’, she said, ‘that is the hungry ones, however they crook their fingers an refuse.’

  While the little boy munched and looked. Till the fubsy woman was impressed by her body’s insubstantiality.

  ‘If you must stare till Sunday,’ she said at last, ‘what is it that you see, sonny?’

  She would not have looked over her own shoulder, not in the dark, not for the world. And remembered a funeral too, she had seen from an upper window, wiping the white suds from her arms, and a girl called Beatrice, who was in the same situation, straightened her cap and made a joke about a dead man as the expensive roses passed in slow rain.

  ‘Eh?’ she said. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘What did you do with the teeth?’ asked the little boy, whose face was all wonder and crumbs.

  ‘Sure, I put them in a tin,’ she said and sighed. ‘To keep. An one day I will have them threaded on a silver wire, to wear with me best dress, on partickler occasions.’

  Then the little boy hid his face against his mother, because he was no longer sure how he was being used.

  ‘Run along now,’ said the mother, ‘and play some game. You don’t want to hang about here. It is better outside.’

  He went, but unwillingly, his eyes still thoughtful for those glimpses of life that he had just been given.

  Then Amy Parker settled down to being with her friend, to drink the pot dry, to the dregs of intimacy. The neighbour made her, by turns, satisfied, anxious, contemptuous, forgiving, superior, ignorant, pure, hypocritical, giggly, bored, breathless, possessive, even cruel; yet all these phases were impersonations by her true self, that loved the lives they had shared on that road of ruts and raggedy trees. The two women sat, and a sweat of words or tea was appearing round their noses, at those pores which open first, after disguise is laid aside. As it has to be, of course, in time. Either you turn your back forever on those who have seen your youth, or else you will admit its nakedness, and even shame has some sweet melancholy. So the two women were riding again to Wullunya in the rain, and the fat woman tended the other the night she slipped her first child, the night their Julia died.

  ‘Tt-tt,’ sighed Mrs O’Dowd, sucking her thoughtful gums when all was said. ‘I would never’uv thought you would take to breedun, Mrs Parker, in the end.’

  ‘It was intended,’ murmured the mother.

  Because she had not known what to say, her reply conveyed a flat conviction, which could have wounded, and perhaps did.

  ‘Then, if it was intended, and by who,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘it was a long time up his sleeve, in a manner of speakun. And then two. Well, good luck, and God save um, the little children.’

  So, delivering her final blessing, she got to her feet, and rumbled, and the crumbs were falling off her blouse.

  If Amy Parker continued to sit, it was because the rose is rooted, and impervious. The big milky roses nodded on the window frame. She was firmly rooted in the past, as old roses are. This was her salvation in the face of words, as she sat, and stirred, and drowsed, but could not move beyond her fate, even if her neighbour waited. She had grown up full and milky out of the past, even her little girl must wait for roses, while nodding and stirring her mind twined again, twining through the moonlight night on which it had half-spoken, half-dreamed the rose.

  ‘I will not be denyun you are lucky,’ her friend was saying. ‘Only it is the little girl I would be worryun after, if she was mine, which she is not.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with the baby,’ said Amy Parker, torn from her chair. ‘Nothing. As I have said before.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘but she is pasty.’

  ‘What do you know, Mrs O’Dowd?’ Amy Parker said.

  Her throat was full of knots.

  ‘Sure, an I know nothun, o’ course, but it is sometimes those that knows nothun that knows.’

  They were going to the door, and soon along the path that had known their friendship these many years. There was a scent of rosemary that they brushed, and of some crushed weed that stank of cat, tightening to the chest.

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ said Amy Parker.

  ‘I’m not sayun nothun at all.’

  ‘Like nothing, you aren’t.’

  ‘And a fine little boy. But boys, they’re indiapendent. You can have boys. Turn their heads away. Then go off and leave yer.’

  Then Amy Parker curled her lip. Her house was full of the children she had made, and the fat woman her friend, whom she had loved at times, was a ridiculous, an empty figure.

  ‘Boys,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, who was opening the little gate, ‘boys’, she said, ‘turn into men, an the only argument in their favour is that they are necessary.’

  And she pushed the stiff gate.

  ‘I will be paying you a visit one of these days,’ said Mrs Parker, who could now afford to be kind, ‘in spite of all the things you say.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said her neighbour, ‘an we will have a talk.’

  She loosed the chain from the wheel of her cart.

  ‘There is nothun I so much enjoy’, she said, ‘as a talk on interestun subjects with a friend.’

  No one else found fault with the health of the Parker children, or if they did, they were too polite to speak their thoughts. The mother reared her children, first with diffidence and a cyclopaedia, then with arrogant infallibility as her experience grew. Very soon no one could tell her what she did not know. Indeed, she became oracular, giving advice to others in flashes of inspiration, for which the younger and more timid were grateful, but which older women received with slow, sour-sweet smiles.

  Amy Parker was not deterred, now that she had achieved her family.

  If there had been delay in christening Parker’s second child, it was because the baby did show some signs of delicacy in her first months, however her mother might deny. But finally the parents grew used to their fears, and arrangements were made with Mr Purbrick, and they drove the little pale girl to the plain brown church in a buggy the father had bought from a baker’s widow in Bangalay. The family sat up against one another in the still quite presentable buggy, in their best clothes, which were too dark for the heat of the day. The mother held the baby tightly, hotly, in her best shawl, shooing the flies away with her glove. The father’s large, hard hands lightly and expertly held the reins, making a glad business of it, as if on that day he were playing an enormous, playful fish, as he whistled through his lips that were cracked by the sun. And the little boy blew out his red-brown cheeks and kept on making an obscene noise with his mouth, till his mother had to tell him to stop.

  ‘You get on my nerves,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, his voice sulking towards a cry.

  ‘Because,’ she answered wearily, bending to search again the sleeping face of the wax baby, that did just flicker under the fly’s wings.

  ‘Look,’ said the father in an amicable, masculine, peacemaking way. ‘There’s Peabodys twin heifers. We’ll be there soon. I wonder if old Purbrick’s dusted his voice.’

  ‘How?’ asked the little boy.

  ‘Your father’s being silly,’ said the mother. ‘He means that Mr Purbrick doesn’t always speak very clearly. What’s that?’ she asked suddenly. ‘How did you cut your knee, Ray?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said.

  ‘But there it is, as large as life. I’ll trouble you not to tell me lies, please. Or
play with knives.’

  ‘He gave me one.’

  ‘He? Who?’ she breathed.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘When you’re not to play with knives!’

  She drew the shawl tighter on the baby, as if to protect it out of existence.

  ‘A boy has to begin,’ said the father.

  Today he was too lazy to defend, to resist or protest. He half-closed his eyes to the sun, and knew that he owned the horse and buggy, and even the woman and the two children beside him. As much as you can own anything. But the hours of lightning are usually far between.

  ‘Here we are at the church,’ he said.

  Doves were drooling on the roof to emphasize the peacefulness of the occasion, and the mother began to feel both happy and sad. Churches took her that way.

  ‘I hope she will be all right,’ she murmured tearfully.

  Then she prepared smiles for the old parson, whose wrinkles were opening and closing in anticipation of the holy words, and for the godparents, who were standing in a group, wondering what would be expected of them, both then and afterwards, in life. Would they have to give advice or, worse still, money, forever and ever and ever, to someone they had not begun to know? Or would they, if careful, be quietly forgotten? The parents themselves were uncertain why just these people had been chosen. You had to have somebody, though. So here were Ossie Peabody, in a hat that he had tortured into a most extraordinary shape, and Mrs Gage, and a Mrs Firth, a kind sort of woman that no one had anything against.

  The church had the smell of a closed wooden box, and of birds’ droppings, but the words were marvellously simple that fell amongst the hassocks and glowed in the shafts of amethyst and ruby from one or two smouldering windows, that had been given by the rich, and that told with crude directness the stories they were meant to tell.

  Under one such window the group stood for the child’s christening. She was to be called Thelma, that the mother had first seen in a newspaper, the name of a grazier’s heiress. The father had been doubtful at first, but he was won over finally by his wife’s silences. Anyway, he did not think much about names. So Thelma the little girl became. The mother spoke it to herself, filling her mouth with it like a satin sweetie, except that the word had about it something richer, rarer, less attainable.

  When the old man pronounced the name of Thelma Parker in a sound of cool water, the little boy, her brother, smiled for something which he recognized out of the welter of words. The name was already losing its mystery, and would in time become something short and common, to be carved on a tree.

  The baby cried of course, and the mother was proud and agitated, prickling with the woollen shawl.

  Stan Parker, the father, was trying to recapture the sense of ownership that he had experienced on the journey to the church, but now that his daughter was labelled with his name he was less sure. He was uncertain even of his own boots as he listened to the words of the unfamiliar service chasing one another in the moustache of the old man. So Stan Parker felt the strain of his immediate vicinity. Inwardly he edged a little farther away from the christening group. Soon he was wandering quite frankly beyond the confines of the crude church, unashamed by a sudden nakedness that had fallen upon him. Simultaneously with this pleasing nakedness, the flow of words, the flesh of relationships, were becoming secondary to a light of knowledge. He held up his face to receive he did not know what gift.

  Then the water fell in a tinkling shower, not only on to the baby’s face but on to the father’s skin, and he was ashamed. He began to worry about the fee, when it should be paid to the parson for his services, and coughed, and was awkward; he was too big, and the dirt of manual labour was shameful in his hands.

  ‘What?’ he asked in a guilty whisper.

  Because his wife was speaking.

  ‘She behaved beautifully,’ she repeated with round satisfaction, as if it had been she and not the baby, and arranged the fold of the shawl.

  The touch of the old clergyman’s hands was the touch of cool, papery, blameless skins, and his words too were blameless, as he gave advice and made attempts at jokes, not altogether successfully, for he was not by nature a jolly parson, though he felt he should have been.

  ‘She’ll soon be a big, bouncing girl, making mistakes in her catechism. Won’t she now?’ Mr Purbrick said.

  But he could not convince himself. He was happiest observing birds in the silence of his garden.

  The little boy, who had been running up and down the aisle ever since the service was ended, and standing on hassocks under cover of his elders’ conversation, and reading the prayer books upside down, now began to cry.

  ‘Whatever is the matter, Ray?’ asked the kind Mrs Firth, giving him a hand.

  But the little boy continued to bellow.

  ‘Well, if you won’t tell us, we can’t help.’

  But the little boy cried, walking stiffly on chafing legs, as the result of an accident he had just had.

  The group was soon drawing away from the church except for the old clergyman, who remained behind on the step, smiling not so much for his departing parishioners as for his own approaching solitude. At the moment of departure, foreshortened in the yellow light of summer, everyone, even the united family, was a bit solitary. The half-grown, raggedy pine trees dared the personality to assert itself. The more recent graves in the churchyard had not yet begun to furnish the landscape. They were too close to the act of death. This was still present in the wounds of yellow clay that had not healed up. But the family drew away, past the jars of dead flowers, through the yellow, clinging burs, and very soon all feelings of awfulness, exaltation, doom, or self-importance began to be translated into the comfortable and earthy crunch of the buggy.

  On the journey home, and afterwards, the children predominated. Their childhood was the usual lengthy one. This lengthiness would impress itself sometimes also on the parents, as they dragged up hot hills or sat on long evenings listening to the sleep of children in another room. These were, on the whole, becalmed years, in spite of the visible evidence of growth. Any reference to the future was made, not with conviction, but in accordance with convention.

  ‘I would like Ray to be something in the government, or a famous surgeon, or something like that. In dark clothes. And we would read about him in the newspaper,’ said the mother in a dream voice.

  The father laughed, remembering how his own mother had failed to contain him. He laughed and said, ‘What will become of the cows?’

  ‘We can sell the cows,’ said the little boy, who was already listening to most things. ‘I hate smelly old milk. I want to be rich, like Armstrongs, and have horses and things, and a pair of yellow boots,’

  Then he ran across the yard, to put an end to speculation, still without belief in the efficacy of this. He was surrounded by sunlight, and the warm, hard forms of stones, and the fluffy, melting ones of red hens in the dust. He lived for what he saw and did. He took from his pocket a little catapult that an older boy had made, and was looking about to let fly when he heard his father call, ‘I’ll tan you, Ray, if I catch you again at those hens.’

  So he began scratching at a tree, to scratch his name, to impress his will with his hands on something. He was already quite strong. Stronger than his sister, whom he liked to persecute. She had a kind of fretful pallor that is altogether distasteful to strength.

  ‘Go away and leave me alone,’ she learned to say with a round mouth. ‘Boys are a nuisance.’

  She liked to play neat games with a doll, and handkerchiefs for sheets. She smoothed the sheets of her doll with the palms of her small, moist hands, bending over the box in which it lay, so that her thin pale hair hung. This was not curled, as her mother had once wished. Its pale gold shone more sinuously in straight lines, but there was little joy in Thelma Parker’s hair. She got tired, and was a worry to her mother, and coughed at times. Later this was diagnosed as asthma.

  ‘You mustn’t worry your sister, she’s delicate,’ the mother
said.

  ‘Why?’

  He could not understand this. He roamed about a lot by himself, and flung stones into the distance, and buried his face in the creek water where it ran between rocks, and watched animals, but failed to become absorbed into his surroundings. He could not do enough.

  Sometimes he hit his sister in retaliation for all that he did not understand. The scapegoat went bellowing.

  ‘I’ll tell Mumma,’ she howled.

  But sometimes, more especially at evening, after exhaustion had set in and the light was gentler, they would hang together, or on their mother, in a conglomeration of love and tenderness, and tell stories that rose out of their imaginations, and finally doze. At these moments the mother was crowned with satisfaction. The closeness of her children excluded all else.

  By this time Amy Parker had grown greedy for love. She had not succeeded in eating her husband, though she had often promised herself in moments of indulgence that she would achieve this at some future date. But she had not. He retreated from her once again. She knew him down to the pores of his skin, and through many acts of kindness, but it was perhaps just this kindness that defeated her. So it continued to be for some future date. As she smiled lazily in her kitchen. One day she would love her husband enough. As she gathered the rustling onion skins.

  Amy Parker had broadened with age, was almost what some people would have called a little coarse. Her hands and back were broad. She was filled with a deep breathing, that conveyed itself to people of another kind as contentment, and especially to children, who liked to be near her, and hear her, and touch her. Her skin was particularly pleasant, clear, and brown, and comforting. Sometimes, though, she could be sharp, sour even, as if the thin and anxious girl were still buried in her flesh, and she could complain and sting. At such times her dark hair hung in tails, that she would not bother to put up. Then her husband would walk quietly, or round the other side of the house. His face looked long and grave on those days.

  ‘Come here, Ray,’ she would say. ‘Do you love me?’

  As if he might answer, instead of kick the ground.