After Stan had enlisted and it was time for him to go into camp, they all waited for a cart which was to come, for O’Dowd was going too, and a boy was driving them as far as the village where they would meet other enlisted men.
So Parkers waited on the veranda. They were so stiff, it might have been Sunday after dinner.
‘Will you have blankets in the camp, Dad?’ Thelma asked.
None of this touched her personally, but there were moments when she took a vague interest. She was a neat child, who liked washing her hands. She would not miss her father much, although she would cry.
Just then Ray called that he could see the cart, and there they were too, Mrs O’Dowd as well, who had come for comfort, she was quite swollen up.
Then it was time to gather up with quick nervousness the few things. Everybody’s limbs were stiff and shy, except O’Dowd’s. He had taken something for the journey and was singing a song of some patriotism.
‘Listen to the man,’ said his wife through the blubbery big face that could not hide itself and had given up. ‘It is we women should be singun, but we can’t. Get on, you buggers, and let us at least have a good cry, an be done, it is near on milkun time.’
The cart prepared to take her advice, while Stan Parker kissed his wife. How stiff she was in that white blouse. Some people called her a stout woman. She was not fat, but she was well covered. And now she stood firmly, waiting to be extricated from this enormous event, which she would be, if she waited long enough. It was not so very different from other departures, to the fires and the floods, the backs of men disappearing in a cart. It was only more formal. So she stood and held her breath in.
They were all standing. The children without their shoes, which they wore only for church and school. Mrs O’Dowd, who was by this time quite reduced. And old Fritz, who had grown very old, but who still pottered, and mended his shirts in front of his hut of an evening. They stood and waved even after the cart had stopped taking notice; they waved because they had not yet thought what they should do next. The gentle, soothing rise and fall of hands filled their emptiness.
Stan Parker returned home once on embarkation leave. He was different then. His hair was shorn extra short, and there was a smell of khaki on him even when he went about the place and did his jobs in his ordinary clothes. Sometimes he would sit and wind his puttees, as if he had taken a liking to this ritual, and wind and bind, till he was shrouded. Then he was more than ever closed up.
‘You must like all this soldiering,’ said his wife bitterly. ‘There is no telling what a man will like, even the one you know best.’
‘What else should I do?’ said Stan Parker. ‘Run my head against a wall?’
‘Do they give you enough to eat, Stan?’ she asked.
Food, after all, was something you could touch and talk about. If a professor came, or a rich man, you could roast him a round of beef, and feel safe,
‘Are you ever hungry?’ she asked. ‘What do they give you?’
‘Stew,’ he said.
He looked at a piece of brass he had just polished, that glittered in the lamplight as if it had been precious.
Because it was the last night, and because the mysticism of evasion and self-destruction in which he had been immersed ever since he wore a uniform had finally made her lonely, she asked, ‘Don’t you ever feel lonely, living in tents with a lot of other chaps?’
‘How can you feel lonely,’ he said brutally, ‘when your thoughts are so close to the thoughts of the next bloke they jog each other? Even on the lavatory.’
Then he got up and went outside. It was a cold night of stars. He went up on to a little rise beyond the house, on which a couple of ironbarks stood, the stars shivering in their leaves and branches. Then he too was cold and shivering, his flesh was flapping; he leaned against one of the trees, but it was no support. He would have prayed, but he was afraid at that moment it might not have been answered, nor any prayer.
So he returned to his wife, who was about all the certainty he had, and she received him with conviction. They clung together as if they were drowning in darkness and would at least sink together. As they reached the depths they no longer cared.
After Stan had gone, together with the other enlisted men, in the public conveyance to Bangalay, with tears and cheers, and a bit of a flag that Mrs Gage had run up over the post office, it took Amy Parker some time to realize all that had happened. Mercifully she did not cry. She had the cows and the children. She ran at once to do whatever had to be done next, and she continued to do this, by clockwork, for many days, till the muscles cracked in her broad back and her detached face met her in mirrors at night with some surprise.
Mrs O’Dowd, whose arches had fallen since the men left, said that it was up to the women. She was full of kindnesses for her neighbours, at any rate in the beginning, and would come when there were potatoes to be dug, or would hold the cow to the bull. Or everybody went to Quigleys’ for the oranges, and made short work. There was Doll standing amongst her wooden cases that everyone had nailed, smiling, and counting, and smiling her sandy smile. Even Bub learned to do a few simple things, but mostly he was too obsessed by the great joke of war, neighing with laughter as he made the sound of guns. Once he announced that he was dead and it wasn’t half bad.
Anyway, the women and children at Durilgai got along, and in the beginning shone with those virtues they were exhorted to discover in themselves.
Ray had begun to milk. He pulled the stiff teats in the sleepy darkness, his head lolling against the full belly of a cow.
‘Gee, I’m tired, Mum,’ Ray said at night.
So that she kissed his full mouth with passion. Even Thelma’s prim face above a sock, she looked at with less disappointment and more affection, and took the sock, and picked the stitches up. Amy Parker at this time performed many such acts, from above, as it were. Because her weakness had not yet been discovered, she was still strong.
About this time, though, people began to take notice of old Fritz, who had been with them all those years, tiring, and going, but always returning, to chop wood, and dress fowls, and scald the milk cans, and pull each thread of pale weed by the roots from round the sunflowers. Now people had begun to notice Fritz for the first time. He had shrunk a good deal since the war, as if he were sick or something. He would chop, and leave off, and go inside. He no longer sat outside his door, but in his hut, neither at the window, but sideways, just sitting, the knots of his bones and the last vestiges of old flesh.
Perhaps Fritz will die, Amy Parker began to fear with a first foreboding.
But Fritz would not be allowed to die, not before he had been wrung. His downcast eyes knew this.
People coming into the yard tried to get a look at Parkers’ Fritz. They would have prised his face open and picked his thoughts over, if they had been hardier. But as they were not, they looked and pretended innocence, or looked with slow candour and frowned.
Then Amy Parker, returning from the butter factory at Orwell, to which they had begun to take their cream, met Ossie Peabody on his matted horse. As it was decent to speak about the weather, Ossie stopped. He was a sharp man, with excuses. He had not enlisted because his parents, of course, were old and of uncertain health, and his wife was mostly sick since that trouble. He was ready to give such reasons, and many others, if people had asked him why he had not gone, but they did not, because they had forgotten Ossie Peabody. He was not memorable. His eyes had frosted over since those transparent days when they had all driven down to Wullunya to the flood.
‘That old Hun of yours, Amy,’ said Ossie Peabody when he had come to the point, ‘surprised at you keeping him on, these days, a German. I only say, because people are wonderin, and Stan not here.’
So that Amy Parker was amazed at this thought, and her eyes proclaimed such innocence that Ossie Peabody was pleased. He had violated something.
‘I would not send away my father, if I had one,’ Amy Parker said. ‘I do not understand the
se things. But Fritz is good.’
‘It’s nothin fer me to decide, of course,’ Ossie Peabody said and smiled.
‘It is not for any of us,’ said Amy Parker, urging on her horse.
‘It is for Fritz.’
But now she was uncertain of her life.
‘Women,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, who liked to propose an abstraction in her steamier moments, especially after a cup of tea, ‘women are the half without the men. It is the men that make the round figure, even such men as we may have, some of us, they know how much of what we know to be right, is right. It is not enough to know that something is right if you cannot add an subtract an get the final answer. Do you see what I mean, Mrs Parker dear?’
But Mrs Parker was not sure.
‘It is that old man that ought to go, Amy, an our boys with the bayonets in their guts, and innocent little children that have died with such dirty Germans, I would spit on them willingly, any day, Sunday too.’
‘No!’ Amy Parker cried.
But it was decided.
It was a day of rain. The old man, his good face now quite destroyed, had gone across the yard to chop a few sticks, because doing this, if he could for a little, he would feel less numb. And in the drizzle children stood around, screaming, and pushing, and telling secrets, and killing time. The children had become brutish with boredom and rain. They would have liked to break something. But they were not brave enough to smash glass, or take the axe and start gashing the house, so instead they began to imitate their parents, and nudged, and told each other about Parkers’ German, and laughed, and whispered.
Ray and Thelma hung around, apart from the other children, and kicked the mud with their toes, and felt ashamed. He was a good old man, whom they had loved, they knew, but they resented the indignity he had imposed upon them. In their hot shame they began to hate him worse than anyone.
Then boys began to shout and sing:
‘Fritz the German,
Fritz the Hun,
Wait till you see him
On the run.…’
How they laughed then.
Somebody began to throw little pats of red mud that flattened on the old man’s patched back.
‘We shan’t give him
Even a chance,’
sang Jackie Holloway, who was good at rhymes.
‘Not even to button
Up his pants.
We’ll put a cracker
Under his tail,
To blow him right
To the doors of jail.’
How the girls in their jumpers shrieked, and the scabby-kneed, knobbly boys. Then Eileen Britt, who had got the hiccups, she had laughed that much, stooped and picked up a big, daring handful of mud, and shrieked, and flung it smack in the middle of the old man’s turned back as he was gathering a few sticks of kindling at the woodshed.
Then he turned. He was quite white and papery. He did not protest. He was bled too weak. He began to walk towards his shack, in his shambling way that was now so ridiculous and hateful.
Some children had qualms, or were perhaps afraid when faced with the front of him, and were silent. But several continued to scream and chant.
It was altogether hateful, and Ray Parker, who was panting, his mouth open with excitement or disgust wished that it had not happened, or that worse would. He was shining with sweat and exaltation as he picked up the stone that laid Fritz’s lip open. They heard the stone strike his teeth. Then the blood began to run, to trickle down his clean chin. Ray was horrified, but he had freed himself. Now he could hate the old German that he had loved, and stand amongst the other children without doubts.
The old man continued to walk across the yard and into his shack, and the children melted away into silence and rain, and wondered if they should forget what had happened. They were torn between respect for the old man’s face and the stirring and patriotic-nature of Ray’s act, in which they had all participated.
When Amy Parker went outside to see what the row was, though by then, of course, all was rain and silence, she found the old German sitting on the chaff bags that covered his bed.
‘Why, Fritz,’ she said, ‘whatever is it? Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not hurt no more. But I must go from here,’ he said. ‘It is not good for us that I should stay now.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t go.’
She stood twisting her ring, and helpless, like a little girl in a wedding ring, touching it for an inspiration of maturity that did not come.
‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘I will go.’
She wondered what she could say to comfort him, but knew that there was nothing in that wooden room.
So next day Amy Parker drove Fritz the German to Bangalay. He was wearing his black suit, which was decent if rather thin, and he had a case with a strap around it, and a pollard bag, into which was stuffed a variety of soft or awkward things. The woman drove, but the road was the active element on that journey; they would simply remain on it until it had exhausted itself, and the road did momentarily deaden pain by its sheer monotony and length.
When, however, they had reached the edge of the town, and the scattered tins, and the tethered goats, the woman began to feel desperate. Because it was plain now that everything must come to an end.
‘Where do you want me to take you, Fritz?’ she asked, nervously jerking her whip.
‘Anywhere,’ said the old man. ‘I can get down. It is all the same.’
‘But there must be somewhere,’ she said, shepherding with care her lost voice.
The old man did not answer. He sat fingering a kind of medal on his tarnished watch chain, touching an inscription that for a long time now had been unreadable. His face too was almost beyond interpretation, and was entering a state of intense and original purity, of air.
‘This will do,’ said the old man, his hand on the rail.
By this time they had driven fairly deep into the town and had become involved in its self-importance. They were in the vicinity of the market. Ducks were being brought by scaly, yellow women. There was a bellowing of hopeless calves. A dray lurched, with its dense heads of cabbages piled in a blunt pyramid.
‘I thank you,’ said the old man to the woman, who did not dare speak.
Then she saw him standing on the ground with his possessions, and she reached down and seized his hand.
‘Ah, Fritz,’ she cried, and the desperate sounds of a bird with the knife at its throat came out of her mouth.
‘Good-bye, Mrs Stan,’ said old Fritz, taking away his hand, because there was nothing else he could do.
Then he went up some side street that she did not know, and she did not see him again.
So she hung there crying for the lost world. Now that the structure of her life was shaken, full misery smote her, as it had not when she kissed her husband good-bye, whom she loved nevertheless, in tenderness of spirit and with sensuality of body, she loved and would. But she loved the old German for that contentment of first light, with the strong clank of stubborn buckets, for the drooling hours of midday, when leaves hung and hens drowsed in the dust, for the hours of evening, of which the face was a wilting sunflower. And these were lost.
So she hung crying, lopsided and ludicrous on the seat of the buggy, with her hair coming down, and the little greenish flies almost permanent on her dark back. People passing looked at her and wondered why she was taking on. There was something almost obscene about a strong, healthy woman blubbering in the sunlight in that public place.
A boy carrying a halter, and walking on assured feet, did snigger and ask, ‘What’s up, missus?’
But as she continued to cry he was afraid, realizing that this was not a toothache but some pain that he had not experienced. So he went on and did not look back.
And in time the woman righted herself, and put up her hair, and blew her nose, and turned the horse, because she must resume omnipotence in her house.
The stones were cruel that strewed the road to
Durilgai.
At one point she met Bub Quigley and took him up. He was very pleased.
‘Well, I am alone now, Bub,’ Amy Parker said.
‘Ah,’ he said, looking at her in some surprise, as if he had not expected anything else.
But he could not see her face; she was keeping it away from him and was looking out over the country, or into herself.
‘Fritz has gone,’ her hunched shoulders said.
‘Who will chop the wood?’ asked Bub.
‘Oh, we shall all have a chop,’ she said.
‘I don’t like chopping wood,’ said Bub. ‘I’d rather my sister did. Then I am free.’
This ageless man was singularly free, Amy Parker realized. That was his one blessing from God. For a moment the woman thought that she would pray, but she had lost her faith, or else had put her trust in the strength and goodness of her husband.
‘Look,’ said Bub, pointing vaguely everywhere. ‘It is green again now. It has never been so green as after them fires. There are ferns in the gullies,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I lay down in them and sleep a bit, and my sister goes crook because I don’t come, but I come in time, of course. You can’t stay there always, you get hungry.’
It was true, she realized, she was herself quite hollow.
‘There’s some young foxes I know,’ said Bub, ‘in a hollow log. I have a nest of mopawks.’
She was wide open, on a gaping emptiness, but he was filling her with hills and valleys, and down of birds, and balm of fern.
After a bit he said, ‘Let me down, please. I’m going down to them foxes. Here’s the place.’
When she had let him down he began to run down the slope, his boards of feet slapping the ground, his wild arms steadying himself on the air.
The Tree of Man Page 24