The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  There beneath that tree, under which they had pulled up, a gnarled, difficult native with harsh, staring leaves, the man and the boy were resenting each other for their separateness.

  Not without sadness and a sense of his own failure, the father said, ‘I’m going to smoke a cigarette, if you want to poke about a bit.’

  There was nothing else the boy could do, except continue to sit beside his father, which would of course have been intolerable. So he got down, slamming the tinny door of their car.

  There was a lizard amongst the stones that the man saw, and to which his attention now clung with the hope of the hopeless. As if he might suddenly interpret for his son, by some divine dispensation, with such miraculous clarity and wisdom, the love and wonder the horny lizard had roused in him. That day could still become transparent, which remained opaque.

  ‘Look, Ray,’ said the man, looking along his own pointing finger, that just did not tremble for its daring tactic.

  ‘What?’ said the boy. ‘Oh, that’s only an old lizard. There are plenty of them.’

  And he almost aimed a stone at it, only desisting because it was small fry, and what was the use.

  ‘Yes,’ said the father. ‘But I like to watch it. I like to look at these things.’

  The lizard closed his eyes, shutting it up in its pocket of stone. Then the man was really alone. He began to roll a cigarette, and to lick at the thin paper with his dry tongue. That part of the bush was very grey. Its symbols would not be read.

  It was to the boy, wandering apathetically through the scrub, the same monotonous bushland that his youth had become. He was perpetually wandering through bush, hacking or scratching, looking for birds or something to kill. He had lost his beauty and was not yet handsome. His skin was thick and dull, full of the tortuous secrets of puberty.

  Ah, if he could escape, he said, bending a sapling till it broke. And do what? He thought that he would become a policeman. He remembered the admirably virile leggings of the young police constable, Murphy, who had shot at a man and killed him, they said, that was wanted for the murder of a rabbiter out Wullunya way. The young constable had no time to speak to boys, for writing reports at the police station, and looking distantly important out of blue eyes.

  Ray Parker took aim with a stick. He could have shot the fugitive as cleanly as Murphy, if with less righteousness. His eyes were not blue. They were a deep brown, which did not yet suggest what they were looking at, or perhaps it was just inward, at those images of himself in a variety of postures, in leggings or without, or naked, clothed in a brooding nakedness that was both fascinating and awful. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the hood of the car. To which he must return. To his father.

  When they had driven home, with much painful changing of gears, and manoeuvring past and out of ruts, they were both conscious of some guilt, common or unrelated, of which the mother was at once aware. She watched the return secretly, with bitter pleasure, and was determined that she would give no assistance whatsoever in any emergency that might arise, because this was something the boy’s father had brought upon himself. For once the problem of her son was not hers to solve. So she went on sardonically drinking the strong cup of tea she always took at that time of day, just before they all went down to milk. She stood by the window, to one side, holding the saucer rather high, and the steam from the meditative tea, or else the queer pleasure she derived from sensing some hurt to her husband, whom she loved and respected, made her nostrils appear finer than they normally were in her full, by this time almost coarse face.

  Then she stepped aside quickly, coughed, shoved the cup and saucer on the table, and was all busyness as the men came.

  She did ask something about their having a nice drive, but she made it sound their exclusive business, as she smoothed back her hair in the glass and put on the old felt pudding-basin hat that she always wore for milking. The origins of that hat were forgotten, though it must originally have been bought for beauty.

  Then when the woman had fiddled a bit more and gathered up buckets and some clean rags, and the men had taken tea in silence, to the heavy chink of the kitchen cups, they all walked down towards the bails. It was a healing autumn light of reddish gold that sluiced the trees. The play of light and wind dimpled the liquid leaves. A poplar they had planted some years ago beside the yards was plashing like glad water. So that the boy emerged from himself and began to sing, furtively, in his breaking voice, but sang, and soon he was running amongst the cows, separating and guiding them, driving them into their respective bails, through the plop-plop of falling dung, pinning their heads, roping their legs, knotting the switches of tails about their hocks. Soon that contentment of cows eating had spread to him, for the father had filled the troughs with dry feed, into which the beasts stuck their melting noses, to gather up succulent, overflowing mouthfuls, and the crumbs fell back.

  ‘Gee, Dad, Nancy’s springing all right,’ Ray said and paused in spontaneous pleasure.

  Stan Parker came, and together they looked at their swelling heifer.

  They met and parted. They passed along the line, and sat, and milked their cows. Once the father bumped the boy, who was passing with two buckets weighing his wiry, youth’s arms. Stan Parker put his hands for a moment on the boy’s hips, to steady him, and the boy laughed, he did not mind. What were you to believe then? Stan Parker was too wry-mouthed from that afternoon to consider. It was, besides, the hour of cows. The white pools of milk rose beneath the milkers’ satellite hands. The moons of milk were in themselves complete. Everyone sensed this perhaps, and bowed the head.

  Amy Parker would look up, though, from out of the abstraction of milk. She was the steadiest milker of all, and would milk along her line without a pause, either for yarns or to ease the ache out of her hands. She sat with the bucket between her strong legs, her buttocks overlapping the little sawn-off block she had always used as a milking stool. What saved her from appearing ludicrous was the harmoniousness of her rather massive form beside the formal cow. Still, there were many people who would have laughed to see the farmer’s wife, in her rubber boots and old hat, pulling out the milk with swollen fingers. They would have laughed at the calves of her legs. Or wondered. For she would dart looks here and there.

  Now she looked up. Her eyes had grown deep in that light of evening, in the shadowy cowhouse. As her son passed back and forth, and released a cow that had been milked, and scraped up its droppings, and drove in that lean heifer with the uneven teats that they would get rid of later on, she intended to say something to the boy that would make him respect her for her wisdom, or more, respect himself for discovering he could share in it. But she was unequal to the situation, and he passed by, whether a boy still, it was difficult to say, or some strange man, for a shaft of light had come in at the door, striking the uncertainty from his face, anyway momentarily, and giving strength to his throat. So the woman continued to sit huddled on the little milking block in the shadow of the cow. It was doubtful she would ever gain upon her son whose lead had been established the moment they took him out of her body.

  About this time Parkers took on a young Greek as a hand. It was difficult to know why he had left the shops and come to those parts, looking for work, for Con the Greek was still shut up inside his language, but he was hungry, and anxious, you could see that. They took him on without giving it much thought. Amy Parker brought him a big plate of overdone meat, with lumps of pumpkin and a good hash of potato, with which he filled his mouth, so that he could not close it, besides, the potato was that hot. Afterwards she showed him the shack where old Fritz had lived, and into which he trod with the unhappiness of a man entering into something sad but necessary. He smiled, though, and nodded his head. The gooseflesh showed on his rather livery skin as he stood holding his hands together. But he stayed. They were paying him a small wage.

  People laughed, of course, because there were Parkers taking on another foreigner. They remembered the German. Only this was worse, t
he speechless Greek, who could only make signs, and laugh, and run to it, in order to express his willingness. Was it possible that somebody might be made to suffer? They thought it was, though how, they were not sure. Then, when everyone at Parkers’ seemed pleased with one another, they turned away, their hopes gone sour.

  The Parker family, once they had recovered from the strangeness of the situation, expected great things of the Greek. Secretly they hoped he would be able to answer all kinds of questions. But he was still a cipher, or a smile. His eyes, which promised frankness on the surface, withheld secrets in their liquid depths. His greenish skin was still repulsive. But he did finally begin to emerge, woodenly at first, leaning on learned phrases, that might give way if he did not take care.

  He was a small, muscular, rather hairy man in his singlet, which he wore mostly for greater freedom, and because his skin seemed to crave the sun. This skin, which at first had been green, or yellow, because he was nervous, or because he had been a bit repulsive to them, because he was foreign, began to be golden, they noticed with some interest and surprise. When he chopped the wood or bent above the tin basin to sluice his neck and shoulders, sinuous lights shone from the golden Greek. He laughed a great deal, to speak to them in this way. Then they looked at his struggling mouth and wanted it to tell them more than it could. They thought about him constantly.

  ‘That young man, Stan,’ said Amy Parker, ‘do you think he is happy?’

  ‘I suppose so. Why not?’ said her husband. ‘You don’t have to understand words to feel happy. But he will learn to speak in time. Then you can ask him how he feels, if he doesn’t tell you.’

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ she said. ‘I only wondered.’

  But a feeling of sadness began to develop in her for the imprisoned Greek, and she began to think what kindnesses she could do him, mend his socks perhaps, see that he went out covered in the rain, like a son, because he was a young man, though not so young.

  Once she had given him a red apple and watched him bite it. His teeth clove the apple with a hard, animal sound. His lips were shining with the white juice.

  ‘That is an apple,’ she said in a flat voice, watching him in the peaceful yard. ‘Apple,’she repeated, nodding her head, but diffidently.

  ‘Epple?’ he asked, or laughed, from his wet mouth.

  Almost as if he were returning it to hers, this word, or fragment of apple flesh, that he had tried in his. So that she blushed for the intimacy of the whole incident.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, laughing roughly, ‘you’ll learn in time.’

  She did not know what to say next, so turned away with a moisture in her mouth, of apple juice.

  Thelma came running. ‘Con,’ she called, ‘I was looking for you.’ She took his hand.

  ‘Yes?’ he laughed, embarrassed by so many tendrils. ‘Oh. You look me. Orright.’

  ‘I want to be with you,’ she said, chafing his hand.

  ‘Orright. I here,’ he said. ‘I work now.’

  ‘You can work, and I shall be with you,’ she said with complacency and determination.

  The little girl, who had begun to write in notebooks and have secrets, and who was hiding things in the hollows of trees and under stones, watched the young man raking the fowl yard for manure. He rose above that squalor. He had climbed back into his past life, and they were separated by the bars of language and his silent face, that looked down with a kind of withdrawn modesty, it did not see her.

  Ah, she loved the Greek then, quite desperately. She stood twisting a bangle she had received for her birthday, which floated loosely round her spindly wrist, getting in the way of things.

  ‘Are you married, Con?’ she asked, looking round to see whether somebody had crept up.

  But he laughed foolishly, because he did not know what this was, and raked the dung.

  ‘Haven’t you got a girl?’ she said, the breath becoming tight in her chest.

  ‘Girls?’ he said, his face breaking out of its withdrawn beauty into a convulsion of sinews, and bone, and pointed teeth. ‘Yairs! Oh, yairs! Girls!’ He continued to laugh.

  They were standing in the fowl shed. She did not like him then. Besides, she had reached that point where anxiety and down stifled her. Her breath came tearingly. Possibilities of shame presented themselves to her beneath the oppressive roof of the dark shed, till she went out into the sun and walked away with her head down.

  But it was the tenderness of music that best expressed her feelings for the Greek. She could play now with some bursts of emotion and an exerted pedal, advanced pieces at the postmistress’s piano. She played out many scenes of love, touching the golden, slightly warped skin of music.

  ‘Thelma,’ insisted the postmistress and her ruler, ‘it just ain’t in the notes.’

  As if it ever was.

  Once she had kissed the Greek for some festive occasion, a birthday or something, when they had given him a bottle of beer, but the episode was so brief and public, her act was swallowed up by others more boisterous, and was not even considered funny. His skin was slightly greasy and mysterious.

  Then Ray found the diary and exposed whole pages of her nakedness. He read and laughed, barely digesting the words before he spat them out.

  ‘“I love Con,’” he read. “‘I would let him cut my veins open.”’ How he laughed. And let her bleed.

  ‘This is good,’ he sighed.

  She threw the mirror at him. Then when they were faced with the cold fragments of their hate he said, ‘I could show Mum all this, you know.’

  ‘I’ll give you anything,’ she said.

  ‘Mightn’t want anything. It might be more fun showing.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Anything.’

  Then he threw the book back where the mirror lay, knowing perhaps it was not worth much, now that she had given her soul. It was a sixpenny notebook with marbled edges that she had bought from Mr Denyer one day, in which to write something, anything, then this had come out. Now she picked up the book by its cheap and gluey covers, but would have to think where to put it.

  Thelma was silly because it was not possible for her to be otherwise. But Ray was a boy. Ray went down to the Greek, down to the shed where he lived, because he was his friend, and they talked together in hard voices about objects, nails and saws and knives. There was not such a great difference in their ages, except by reckoning. Their sex limitations united them closely. They could even look at each other and say nothing, not even looking, but being together.

  ‘Let’s see the thing in the box,’ Ray said.

  This was the little box that Con the Greek had in his swag, with private and valuable and interesting articles, as well as some things that he had forgotten why he kept. His essence was contained here. Ray liked to look at the contents of the box, which he coveted, not for any purpose, but to own. The eruption of coral and the luminous saint, these he did not understand, they were frightening even. For the faces on old photographs he had contempt, old women and black, thin girls emerging from the twilight and the fingerprints. He dropped these back on to the buttons and the sprig of dry rosemary.

  ‘What is that old plant thing?’ he often asked, with only slight interest.

  ‘That is good,’ said the Greek. ‘Drendrolivano. Smell.’

  ‘There’s no smell left,’ the boy said.

  But the Greek did not bother to reply, knowing that this was not true.

  Then the boy took the knife, which was the best thing of all in Con’s box and had the smell of clean, oiled metal. The boy held it in his hand and supposed with cold fascination what would happen if he closed his hand, just that bit closer, and closed. His skin was pricking.

  ‘The knife is too sharp,’ said the Greek, taking it, and shutting it in the box, and putting the box away.

  He was tired of the boy now.

  The boy began to be consumed both by contempt and sadness. The Greek’s box was a miserable sort of box, but he could not possess it. He could not possess
the Greek, who sat on the edge of the bed, and sucked his teeth, and had his own thoughts.

  Then the boy was shaken by a fury of contempt and frustration. He seized the Greek by the wrist and shouted, ‘Anyway, I bet I’m stronger than you!’

  He plaited his hand into the Greek’s hand and bent it back for all he was worth. Then the Greek came to life, coldly at first, glitteringly. His attitude was not yet determined. As he held the struggling, gangling boy. Their breath fought together. They were wrestling on the narrow bed. It was a game, or not, it was not possible to tell in that Laocoön of man and boy. Then the Greek began to laugh explosively, which made his muscles more fluid. His sinuous arms were pinning the boy. Their flat, breathless chests were boarded up together, so that it was difficult in that moment to extricate the hearts one from the other. The boy listened to the thumping and breathing and shouted with rage because he could not possess the intolerable Greek. He would have liked to kill him. To dig his hands into the congested throat. But he was powerless. And presently his resistance dissolved. He wanted to escape from his embarrassing weakness, and the still more embarrassing proximity with the Greek.

  ‘Let us go, Con,’ he wheedled. ‘Go on. Call it quits.’

  But the Greek refused. So that the boy who was writhing on the rack began to fear that still greater weaknesses than his lack of strength might be discovered. They were panting together, and the Greek was laughing.

  ‘I hate you!’ cried the stifled boy. ‘I hate bloody Greeks!’

  Then the mother came in with some things she had mended for the Greek. She had not expected to find her son.

  ‘Ray,’ she said, putting on an improvised voice, ‘it’s time you went to work. We must speak to your father about it and decide.’

  The boy got up and went stupidly across the yard, followed by the mother, who was trying vaguely to remember what she had intended to say to the Greek if her son had not been there. In her distraction she could not.