The man’s breath came in gulps now, as if he had never been free to breathe enough. He was palpitating and shivering with the leaves of the garden, the wood of the house even, against which his face was resting. The storm came. It bent the garden. Large flat drops of rain were plastering the leaves and hard earth. Soon the land was shining whenever lightning opened its darkness. That torment of darkness, of lashing, twisted trees, became, rather, an ecstasy of fulfilment.
The man who was watching the storm, and who seemed to be sitting right at the centre of it, was at first exultant. Like his own dry paddocks, his skin drank the rain. He folded his wet arms, and this attitude added to his complacency. He was firm and strong, husband, father, and owner of cattle. He sat there touching his own muscular arms, for he had taken off his shirt during the heat and was wearing his singlet. But as the storm increased, his flesh had doubts, and he began to experience humility. The lightning, which could have struck open basalt, had, it seemed, the power to open souls. It was obvious in the yellow flash that something like this had happened, the flesh had slipped from his bones, and a light was shining in his cavernous skull.
The rain buffeted and ran off the limbs of the man seated on the edge of the veranda. In his new humility, weakness and acceptance had become virtues. He retreated now, into the shelter of the veranda, humbly holding with his hand the wooden post that he had put there himself years before, and at this hour of the night he was quite grateful for the presence of the simple wood. As the rain sluiced his lands, and the fork of the lightning entered the crests of his trees. The darkness was full of wonder. Standing there somewhat meekly, the man could have loved something, someone, if he could have penetrated beyond the wood, beyond the moving darkness. But he could not, and in his confusion he prayed to God, not in specific petition, wordlessly almost, for the sake of company. Till he began to know every corner of the darkness, as if it were daylight, and he were in love with the heaving world, down to the last blade of wet grass.
Soon a new gentleness had crept into the rain, because the storm was passing. Sound became distinguishable from sound. The drops were separate on the iron roof, the last cold gusts rubbed leaf on leaf.
Stan Parker, who was still standing there, holding on to the veranda post, had been battered by the storm. His hair was plastered to his head, he was exhausted, but he was in love with the rightness of the world. Smiling at his own daring in accepting this conclusion, he began to go back into the clinging, sleepy darkness of the house, feeling his way between the furniture, of the house in which other people lived. He was quite distinct in this fuzzy world of sighs and clocks. Still smiling, he took off his clothes, and sleep swallowed him at one gulp.
The next morning they all threw the sheets off as if life were waiting for them. Summer wore a fresh glaze. It was also the morning that Ossie Peabody was to come about Nancy’s heifer.
‘Poor thing,’ Amy Parker said again, later on, after she had hung out the rags with which they dried the teats of the cows. ‘And Ossie Peabody, Stan, they say he’s mean,’ she said, ‘so watch out.’
‘Ossie’ll buy at our price,’ he said, ‘or we shall keep the heifer.’
‘That is all very well, now,’ said his wife. ‘But you are too soft. We shall see.’
Stan did not answer that, because it was unimportant, and he was feeling good. He tightened the belt on his waist and went out.
Liquid breezes were licking the trees into tender shapes of green. The fowls were round the yard, burnished or mottled. The blue bitch came sidling, her mulberry nose moist in that morning of light.
‘OO-er, Ray! I’ll tell on you!’ Thelma cried.
Because he had rubbed her face with red mud. She was dirtied. That day was too much for Thelma’s thin face. She shrank away from it. And Ray flung a ball of moist red mud, for good measure, that flattened on her pinafore.
Thelma screamed.
‘Go on,’ said Stan Parker between his teeth.
He would have to stop and play the father. He cuffed the boy’s head that was bristling up at him. On this morning he could have spoken to his children, but the boy, seeing this, was shy and ran away to stir up an ants’ nest.
‘It’s all right, Thel,’ said the father, mumbling between contented lips. ‘It’s going to wash off.’
‘I hate him,’ she screamed. ‘I’d kick him in the stomach if I could, but he always runs away.’
Then she went into the wash-house, and when she had washed her face, looked at it in the glass, wetting her lips and pursing them up, till she had become quite dreamy with her own reflection.
Stan Parker went on towards the cow yards, where he would meet his friend and neighbour and transact this small bit of business. He walked a roundabout way, for the pleasure of it, across the stubble from which he and the old German had already brought in the oats. A wind was flattering the trees. They tossed and curved to it. And the man’s spirit was lifted on the wind. He half-remembered a tune that he had whistled as a boy, on a horse, behind cattle, hunched forward on the pommel of the saddle. What if he was still this whistling youth? he wondered. It was a cold thought, that left him tingling in the callous wind, but possible. He went on. A crane rose from water in a lower paddock and set slow sail, back across the blue morning.
Just then Stan Parker saw his neighbour Ossie Peabody open the side gate, bending down from the matted bay gelding that he almost always rode. The neighbour was going quite casually through the rather complicated manoeuvre of gate-opening, while searching the landscape for things that would make him jealous. For many years Ossie Peabody had envied Stan Parker, in private, with many a slow twinge. Now he saw Stan walking across his land. Both men looked away. They had known each other so long, each took it for granted that he was recognized. Eventually they would meet and talk together, or shape words between grunts, and silences, and glances, and memories of all that had happened to each other over the years.
Ossie Peabody was a man with a long nose, of Stan’s age perhaps, but drier, and always showing several scabs. The good nature with which he had been born had turned rather sour since he drove the volunteers to Wullunya for the foods. He had closed up. He lived at home still with his mum and dad and a young, negative wife, who bore children, and that was about all. Ossie Peabody did not like his children. He did not like much. He respected his parents. He liked a good cow. Somewhere in his fastnesses there was a kind of affection for his neighbour Stan Parker, but complicated by much that was envious and sour. Because he would have liked to talk to Stan, mostly he avoided him. He drove his spurs into his shaggy, patient horse and took another road, feeling, to his increased sourness, that he would not be missed.
Now the two men were converging on the cow yard at Parkers’, where the meeting would take place. They came on, with their heads down, pretending.
They said, ‘Lo, Stan.’ ‘Lo, Ossie.’
Almost with surprise.
Then Ossie got down. He stood disgruntled on the ground, in his old strapped leggings, with his feet apart, realizing he was a shorter man than Stan.
‘Where’s this three-legged, flickin heifer you got?’ Ossie Peabody asked.
Stan Parker smiled but did not reveal yet, as if he would release his dove all in good time.
‘Well, how are we, Ossie?’ Stan Parker asked.
But Ossie Peabody sniffed; he could have had something up his nose, and it so long, and flushed in summer.
‘Nice oat crop, Stan?’ he asked.
‘All right,’ said Stan Parker.
He was feeling good. He was glad even to be with this sour man, his neighbour, whom he had watched dry up and get longer in the nose. Often he thought of things he would have liked to tell Ossie, but Ossie was not there, and so he forgot.
‘Nice rain,’ he said.
‘What there was,’ replied the neighbour. ‘Nice day, anyway.’
He looked at Stan, wondering whether he was playing a game. Because Ossie Peabody was now aching to see the lit
tle heifer, whose great beauty he could only suspect. She was Stan’s too. He wanted to own this. So Ossie Peabody looked at his neighbour, and wondered, and resented, and thought perhaps that Stan was clever, and that was why he was a queer bugger, he was always coming round the corner, up to something. So Ossie spat.
But Stan Parker only felt good.
‘Want to see the heifer, eh? All right, Ossie,’ Stan Parker said.
He was stretching himself, as if he had risen from sleep, and his bones cracked, in a way that was most irritating to his neighbour, who flicked at the dust with his long black ugly whip. Ossie Peabody was taut, but the day had lulled Stan Parker into a sense of security as sure and soft as cranes’ wings. Once or twice he remembered the storm, in which he had confessed his weakness, and which he should have denied now, though he did not, for actually there was no need to.
Suddenly he went from the yard in which they were standing, through another and smaller yard, in which hung a pepper tree, and flung open a grey gate. At this point in the ritual Ossie Peabody did not know how he felt about Stan Parker, his sure step, and his well-repaired yards. Ossie was biting his lip, in a long old green greatcoat that he was wearing for the change in the weather. His bronze skin had a tint of verdigris.
But there was the little heifer. Her shining nose suspected life, as she advanced on props of legs, rolling her soft eyes and butting the air with buds of horns. Stan Parker made all kinds of consoling noises. He walked behind with his hands spread like fans. The heifer advanced. The fronds of the tree stroked. But she was unwilling. Her beauty trembled.
‘Not a bad sort of cow, Stan,’ said Ossie Peabody in a clear, metallic voice that was not going to give much away.
The heifer plunged into the last yard. Her feet would have been playful if they had not been distressed. They were lost on that earth. She sprayed the air with fear.
‘Nicely built. I want to handle her,’ Ossie Peabody said.
He was throwing back the sleeves from his wrists. He was urgent. He could not wait to touch this cow flesh.
Stan Parker was coming round on soft feet. Now the whole air was slow, the bright morning trembled, it waited for a moment. Before he touched the rope her glistening neck wore.
‘Quiet enough,’ said Ossie Peabody, who was examining the cow.
He began to prod and squeeze. He touched her with a resentful excitement, as if this were the only pleasure that would ever ripple on his still life.
And Stan Parker held the little heifer. There were magpies calling to each other, and falling in play out of the sky, in bundles of pied feathers. There was a scent of fresh dung and recent rain. He was powerless against all this, and anything that might happen: he stood smiling foolishly at whatever Ossie Peabody said.
‘Yes, Ossie,’ he said, ‘she’s got the milker’s lines all right, the milker’s rump.’
He stood there smiling. He was a big man, and rather erect. Now he had in his face all that simplicity and goodness that he sensed to be paramount. Why, each frond of the pepper tree could not have hung otherwise. He looked down, a bit ashamed of his happiness, at his clods of boots.
‘Could be short in one tit,’ Ossie Peabody was saying.
‘Calf’ll pull it down.’
‘That’s all right. What if she’s barren?’
‘Sell her for beef.’
‘Ah, no, no, Stan. I don’t want to waste me time.’
And he began to give reasons why.
But could not compete with the upright posts of that yard, which Stan Parker had felled, and shaped, and tamped the earth round. Through the interstices of the high yard the sky showed. By now it was ablaze. Stan Parker closed his eyes, accepting the foolishness of words, and disintegrating into little spasmodic waves of knowledge and contentment. His knowledge of goodness was impervious.
Ossie Peabody looked sharply at Stan Parker and thought, You’re a funny sort of bugger all right, simple, or is it clever?
‘How much are you askin for this beast?’ he said suddenly in a low quick voice.
‘Six,’said Stan.
‘Gor struth, six for a little bit of a thing! Unproven, Stan. You’ll have to look somewhere else. I’m a poor man. With a family. There’s the kids’ education. An clothes. An sickness. There’s the flickin doctor’s bills. The wife’s crook too. She’s never been right since the last kid. It’s her womb’s fell, Doc Pillinger says. Well, that’s just my luck. They tell me I got to send her to Sydney, see a specialist or somethin. Course, I dunno. But I ain’t got the cash, Stan, for cows.’
Then he watched that Stan Parker twisting the bit of rope that hung from the heifer’s neck.
But Stan did not speak. He wished that he had been on his own because he could not contain the greatness of that day. So he twisted the piece of rope.
‘I might be able to do three,’ Ossie Peabody said and watched. ‘If I tighten up on one or two things. But a man’s human, Stan. You got to have one or two smokes, and a flutter with the books, Stan. But I could do three if you are willin.’
Then the magpies were calling those long clear cold calls, and the immense sky expanded still farther. So Stan Parker opened his hands that were holding the rope. This Ossie Peabody was a miserable sort of a man.
‘All right, Ossie,’ he said, ‘you can take her, if you like, for three. You’ve got a good cow.’
‘Ah, I don’t doubt that, Stan. You’ve got the right strain. Now here you are. I have it with me. We’ll count it out.’
And they did. Note by note.
Stan Parker took the money, which was rather crumpled, and put it in his pocket. He doubted the importance of this transaction, and of most acts. People who did not know him might have thought he was uncertain of himself. But on this morning he was certain, if never before. So much so, he tilted the hat over his eyes to hide his knowledge. The glare was blinding also by that time of day.
Then the miserable Ossie Peabody was climbing on to his matted horse and was heading the little heifer towards the side gate, stretching out along his horse’s neck and flapping his elbows, in case he might lose her even yet.
When they were gone Stan Parker returned to the house, from which his wife was shaking a duster and looking out.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘did he pay?’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I got what I wanted.’
From under the brim of his hat.
‘You did!’ she said. ‘Then I am surprised at you.’
She compressed her mouth into a tight shape to deny some tenderness.
‘But he’s a miserable sort of coot,’ he said, ‘that Ossie Peabody. He says his wife’s womb has fallen.’
‘Ah,’ she said, her duster suspended. ‘It could have.’
Then she drew back into the room, though she could have hung there a long time on the sill, looking at her husband in the sunlight.
Chapter 12
SUMMER took hold of the country, and it dried up. The leaves of the trees were sandpapery together, and when a wind blew through the yellow grass it rattled in dead yellow stems. There was a scurf of dry seed on the grey earth, and where the cattle gathered at the waterholes and creeks, nosing the green scum, the earth had set in craters. There were many dead things in the landscape – the grey skeletons of trees, an old weak cow that had stuck in the mud and did not rise again, lizards that life had left belly upwards. It seemed at times during that summer that everything would die. But people did not care, as they shaded their feeble eyes or mopped their greasy skins. They just did not care, that is, in the early, passive stages. Later on, when the fires broke out, and got out of control, and scorched along the gullies, and arrived in the fowl yards, and entered windows, so that the limp curtains were a pair of demoniac flames, then the people woke up at last and realized that they did not want to die. Screams came out of the throats of those that were caught. They remembered their childhood, and their sins, and could have reformed altogether and become saints, if there had been question of a second cha
nce. Some did receive this, but only fled out of themselves for a short time, then returned worse than before.
However, it was before the fires that Armstrong sent for two pairs of dressed ducks, that Amy Parker took up one evening to the house, after she had made things tidy. Armstrong had company at this time, several ladies and gentlemen from the city, people of wealth, if nothing else, Mrs O’Dowd said. It was on account of the girl Madeleine, she thought, that there was great doings in the house, so Mrs Frisby said, and ducks ordered, because this Madeleine could no longer hold young Armstrong off, she was taking him at last.
Amy Parker set off that evening through the dry world with Armstrongs’ dressed ducks in a shallow basket on her arm. She was neat enough in her clean blouse, with her arms still red from scrubbing off the blood of ducks. She walked with a slight breathlessness, wondering already what she would find and say, and whether she would see Madeleine. Most probably not. So that she grew slower on the hill, and red, for she was plump at this time, if not actually fat, and her limbs became awkward, with their smell of innocent, best soap.
So she came to Armstrongs’ gateway, which had cost a great deal of money and showed it, in volumes of iron and brick, and on each pillar of red brick the name was printed in white flints. Armstrongs’ property had been called Glastonbury, since a gentleman of education, after a few drinks, said it was not unlike the place of that name, of which nobody else had heard, in the old country. So Mr Armstrong was pleased. He spoke it softly to himself, and looked it up in a book, and his place became Glastonbury.
At this time Mr Armstrong was quite the man of leisure, though his skin had never lost its beefy grain. But it was so long now since he had put the apron off that people had forgotten. Only sometimes, eating his meat, the malice stirred in some, and they would look up, and feel superior above their plates, and take what he had to offer, and get out. But most just ate. Or strolled on his lawns and spoke about Europe. And were obsequious to his son, who smelled of bay rum, and to his daughters, who wore the scent of gardenias. There was, in fact, an English lord dangling after one daughter, Mrs O’Dowd said. So Mr Armstrong was pleased. He had a crest now, and a club, and a great many parasites who did him the honour of relieving him of his cash.
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