Ah, said Amy Parker, remembering, and blushed.
‘Now you will understand,’ said the postmistress, turning on them all. ‘I have nothing left to hide. I just had to show somebody,’ she said. ‘And yet we were happy at times. I cooked him the things he liked. He was very fond of a kidney. We would sit outside together of an evening. He knew the names of the stars.’
Then she swept the window sill with her hand, and the bodies of several dead flies fell down, and a little dust.
By this time nobody was listening particularly. They had either seen so much they could not see more, or else they were anxious to climb back into the room of their own thoughts. So they began to slide out.
‘It was kind of you, Mrs Schreiber,’ said Mrs Gage, in the snivelly sort of voice that is often put on for a person of wealth and some power.
Because Mrs Schreiber, who was foreign, was also rich. She had bought a property in those parts, and would sometimes make the butter, to feel it on her hands.
‘It was very interesting,’ said Mrs Schreiber in her thick dark voice, drawing down her black veil. ‘I should forget about it for a little, Mrs Gage. Then it will appear differently.’
‘But it will not leave me,’ cried the postmistress, as the veiled woman went away in thought.
Others were moving.
‘Mrs Parker dear,’ called the postmistress and came after her in a sound of rushing skirt. ‘I would not say anything about it,’ she appealed, ‘not to anybody else.’
Amy Parker lowered her head and said that she would not.
When she got in her husband said, ‘Where have you been, Amy, all this time?’
‘With the postmistress,’ she said. ‘Mr Gage has taken his life. He hung himself on a tree in the yard.’
Stan Parker, like everyone else, had not known the husband of the postmistress, but marvelled that death could have caught up with anyone he knew by name.
‘Go on,’ he said.
And asked why, before he realized.
Amy Parker brought cups and plates.
‘Mrs Gage showed us some pictures he had done,’ she said finally.
‘What sort of pictures?’ her husband asked.
‘A kind of oil paintings,’ she said. ‘But we are not to say anything.’
She began to set the crockery. She began to tremble for the strangeness of her own house. Her own hands were strange birds blundering and flumping amongst cups.
And Stan Parker wondered why it had never occurred to him to want to take his own life. Where is the point at which this necessity arises? He cut bread. He wondered. The thin air of the morning drifted about the house, rubbing at the paper walls and moving them. At what point does solidity dissolve? But this was not decided yet.
After the body had been buried in the scrub beside the cemetery, Stan Parker forgot, but his wife remained preoccupied, less with the act of dying than with what could have been her relationship with the dead man. She would remember his grey face as he knelt that day upon the stones. It had looked at her, but possibly with some expression that she had missed. Or supposing there was something she could not remember? She searched herself feverishly, but it eluded her, until she did, in fact, resemble the turgid woman reaching for the incandescent sun. Her body was what she had.
So she grew restless. She would harness a horse and drive out, with the reins lying in her hands. The sky, of that blue, was moving with little whorls of impatience. A whole field of corn would pursue her blatantly with secrets to be guessed at. Then she would become angry and frighten her placid horse. On such an occasion she said, slapping with the leather: I will visit O’Dowds, this is what I know. And she drove down, with her hands grown firm, pleased now that this solid objective had materialized. A confusion of spirit would not enter into the presence of O’Dowds. So she drove on, in a jingle, in a smart little trap that she owned at that time, with a good solid taffy pony. Trees fled. I shall not think, she said, of what I do not understand.
When Amy Parker drove up the track towards O’Dowds’, again in full possession of assurance and her broad back, there was no sign of inhabitants. There was the house, and pigs, and a little yellow runty pig that had been sick, of worms or something, and was nosing after a cabbage stalk in a halfhearted sort of way. It was many a day since Amy Parker had seen her friend and neighbour Mrs O’Dowd, through no actual quarrel, but rather because there had been no special favour for either of them to ask. So now she looked around, looking at a strange house, which she had known then, and forgotten. It was standing there, supporting itself, as it were, by some special grace of gravity. Pieces of it hung. Pieces had been pulled off, for comfort, on a wet day, to make a little fire with, and save a soul a trouble with an axe in the shed.
Now, in fact, there was a fire in the middle of the yard, or a sulky black heap of ash with smoke upon it, just rising and coiling, dirtily. There was the fire, and there was a stink. This reached out, and down the nostrils – there was no mistaking they were two pipes in the skull, exposed to unreasonable torture.
Amy Parker groped through this stink and tied her little snorting horse.
After the neighbour woman had looked out, and put in her teeth that she kept on a shelf in the kitchen, and come out on the step, and pulled her blouse about a bit, Amy Parker said, as if it were yesterday she had seen her friend, and what else could she, it was so long, ‘What is it you are burning, Mrs O’Dowd?’
‘Ah,’ said the neighbour woman, shielding her mouth, ‘it is a little fire.’
‘It is a little fire. It is a big stink,’ her friend Mrs Parker said.
‘Ah,’ said Mrs O’Dowd behind her hand, ‘it is the old rubber we are burnun.’
‘But what rubber?’
‘It is the old tyres that he bought cheap.’
‘Then you have your own car?’ Mrs Parker asked.
‘He would not drive anythun that goes on spirit,’ said Mrs O’Dowd from behind her hand. ‘He would drink it up sooner,’ she said. ‘No, this is old tyres that he bought as a speculation, like, and then got sick of, so we are burnun them.’
‘That is one way,’ Mrs Parker said.
‘Dirty things,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, giving the fire a kick.
So that her teeth shot out from behind her hand and were caught mercifully in the V of her blouse.
‘These are new,’ she said with her gums. ‘It is a plate that I got by letter, and it is the bugger for poppun out.’
It was like a shining shoebuckle that she stuck back.
‘It is the devul,’ she said from behind her hand. ‘If they should fall an split it would be money wasted. That is why I am forever holdun me hand in front of me face, as you may have wondered at.’
‘I would take them out,’ said her friend.
‘Why,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘that is an idea. It is not that I am wearun um for social reasons, only they are bought, you see.’
Then she put them in her pocket, and they had a laugh. They were glad to see each other when they did. Each was reminded by the other of her own substantiality. She discovered that she had endured.
So they laughed agreeably together, and forgetful, till the smoke got them.
‘Old black-in-the-guts,’ coughed Mrs O’Dowd. ‘It is not us that is to blame, it is the constable.’
‘What is the constable to do?’ coughed Mrs Parker back, she could have choked with black smoke.
‘I will tell you as a friend of years,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, taking her by the hand. ‘An show. But Mrs Parker, you will never, never tell?’
Amy Parker promised, for she burned to hear, and they went back into the shaky house.
‘It is because they will not let decent an freedom-lovun people alone, the police an all,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘who are stickun their noses in. “Well,” says he to me, “let um stick, an we shall give um somethun to be smellun at.” So we built this fire of most convenient tyres.’
By this time they had come into a kind of little larder, which
may or may not have been there before, through a curtain of bags that had been stretched there for some reason. All was obscure, and smells too had become more complex. Amy Parker in her groping kicked a drum of mutton fat that was standing there, for greasing of boots and such like, and which the rats had been scratching at.
‘“This fire will fox um,” he says,’ the neighbour woman said. ‘“It will make a royal smell, though not so royal as tother.”’
This other smell had indeed begun to predominate as they blundered on towards the kitchen of the house, over boards that threatened, and some that frankly let you down.
‘Ah,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘draw your foot out, dear. It is the white ants. They are terrible things. We shall be fixun it one day when he finds the time.’
So they came on, and into the kitchen, where the royal smell smote them in the nose, and Mrs O’Dowd smiled.
‘It is ale then?’ asked Amy Parker, who was gasping from the impact of fumes.
‘We never mention it by name,’ said Mrs O’Dowd with a lovely smile.
She stirred the pan, from which a lazy steam laved her face, giving it a warm colour that it did not normally have; she was more the colour of bark and leather and old dried-up brown things, for the sun had been at her quite a while.
‘We was driven to it,’ she explained, ‘since he was warned off the hard stuff, and the expense too is somethun to consider. So we sit in the evenun and take our innocent glass. Afternoons too, it is no harm to knock a couple back, but quicker like.’
‘Then you are on it too?’ Amy Parker asked.
‘What do you mean, on it?’ paused Mrs O’Dowd. ‘If a poor soul is so afflicted, the least a person can do is to bear him company, insofar as she can. I do not drink, Mrs Parker. I alleviate the sufferun of me husband only, by sympathizun a little.’
Then there was such a belching, such a rocking of the house and a bell-pulling, that she dropped the spoon.
‘That is the bugger now,’ she said. ‘He is after his mid-noon ration.’
As the bell belted brass. As the lungs lifted up.
‘Old woman, old woman!’ called the voice of O’Dowd, and it was black and leathery.
‘That is his joke,’ she explained, uncorking a bottle from a former brew and pouring the conciliatory liquid into some receptacle that happened to be at hand. ‘An he has fixed up a sort of bell arrangement, as you have heard, and will see, it is quite clever.’
If Amy Parker did not want to see, she was compelled by that force of circumstance which swept her friend and neighbour down a passage with the tin tray, and on, and out. They were soon fanned out on that side of the house on which O’Dowd sat, on a veranda, beside some fuchsia bushes.
‘Stop yer bellerun,’ said his wife. ‘Here is a lady that has come to pay us a visit.’
‘What lady?’ he asked, and did stop, though the bell, which was controlled by a string from his toe, continued a while longer to jerk and clap.
‘I was never shook on the female visitors,’ said O’Dowd. ‘But if it happens, it happens. Mrs Parker,’ he said, ‘take a glass with us. I will answer for all consequences. If it don’t rot your guts, it will lift you op.’
‘Thank you. I’m not in need of it,’ Amy Parker said.
She had by this time repented of her impulse to visit O’Dowds. Her sobriety had made her prim.
‘She is above it,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, whose own nose was not unwilling to nuzzle in a glass.
‘I am not. And you know it,’ Mrs Parker said.
‘She is a great lady in a hat,’ Mrs O’Dowd pursued, removing a fly or two from her glass.
‘I am nothing that you say, but sober, and with every intention of staying that way.’
‘That is terrible in onybody’s life,’ shuddered O’Dowd. ‘To stay stone cold. I could not look me own reflection in the face, if it was not kept warmed op.’
But Amy Parker was looking at the fuchsia bushes. She wondered why she had come.
‘All tastes is not one,’ Mrs O’Dowd supposed. ‘Still, it is nice to have a conversation with a friend, an her droppun in.’
She had taken to swilling her glass round and round, and rocking her ankle easily, and cocking her head to one side, as ladies do.
She said, ‘That boy of yours, Mrs Parker, young Ray, is he keeping well, I hope? We have not heard of him this long while.’
She was looking, Amy Parker saw.
‘Ray’, said the mother in a clear, easy voice, ‘is out West. He has written. He is in business,’ she said.
‘In business? That is nice. An what kind of business? Groceries perhaps, or hardware?’
‘He did not say,’ said the mother in the same clear, assured voice. ‘It is not always easy to explain a business, an important business, in a few words.’
‘That is true,’ Mrs O’Dowd said.
But she was looking. Her eyes were rather small. She was looking for a crevice, through which to turn a knife idly on an afternoon.
‘Ah, business,’ said O’Dowd gloomily, ‘I should’ve been in business, ef I had not’uv been done in by a feller that I knew from Forbes, for an invention that I thought of some years ago, for pluckun a cockerel by mechanical means. It was a contraption like this,’ he said, spreading his fingers into Vs and half getting up, to demonstrate the intricacies of machinery.
‘You kind of catch the chicken by the neck, like. An give it a sort of twist. See? An roffle his feathers till there is no hope but they must fall out. You onderstand? It was the simplest device, Mrs Parker, that this feller pinched, an has never looked back, they tell me, since that day.’
‘That old machine!’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘An your Thelma, Mrs Parker, we have heard that she is doin well.’
The mother cleared her throat. ‘Yes,’ she said directly. ‘Thelma is engaged.’
‘Well now,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘You don’t say so. Thelma is engaged.’
‘To a solicitor,’ said the mother, ‘a Mr Forsdyke, whose confidential secretary she was. Is still, for that matter.’
‘I could’uv wrung that feller’s neck,’ said O’Dowd, ‘as if he was a cockerel himself. I forget what he was called.’
‘Fancy, little Thelma,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘An such a pasty child I would not’uv been surprised if she had died.’
‘But she did not,’ the mother said.
As they rocked in the perilous boat of friendship.
Amy Parker did wonder why she had come. Or she had known and forgotten. Or habit is the motive force of most acts. Anyway, they were sitting there, all three somewhat at the mercy of one another’s balance, in the bland light of afternoon, through which little birds came and went, to and from the fuchsia bushes.
‘With kiddies and a business, we would’uv sat pretty,’ said O’Dowd, spitting between the teeth which were his own.
‘It is what you are blessed with,’ said his wife, draining the brown dregs. ‘An it is you that would be sittun on the same rump, come Thursday, blessuns or no blessuns, so help me.’
And she put her glass down.
‘You are a cow’, he said, ‘that likes to use the truth as if it was a weapon. To bash the first poor bugger across the head that answers to its description. You are a bloody cow of a woman,’ he said.
And he sat farther down in his seat, after spitting a second jet between his teeth, which were still very white, Amy Parker saw, and remembered that O’Dowd could split walnuts with those teeth and land the shells quite a distance off.
Now he was dejected, though.
And his wife began to hum, putting her arms up, still monumental in their way, to fasten a comb of imitation tortoiseshell that she wore. She hummed that same tune which had pursued her remorselessly from girlhood.
So they sat leaden. They were not quite statuary. O’Dowd was sunken. He sat with his chin upon his chest, looking at Amy Parker, as if she were almost connected with his thoughts. He was a hairy man, she saw, and shuddered.
Ah, she sai
d, I must get away from here. What had been a fair day had turned to lead. She longed to be raised up out of that heaviness from which it is difficult to stir.
‘Do you happen to know the time, Mrs O’Dowd?’ she asked.
‘It is an acquaintance I have given up these many years,’ said her smooth friend, who was determined to destroy somebody, and perhaps herself, that afternoon. ‘But you will not be goin yet, Mrs Parker, it is too soon. An if he is in the dumps, he will lift op again. An sometimes is most entertainun if he is in the mood.’
So she poured him another to put him in it, and another for herself, in sympathy.
‘Here’s luck,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘Me husband will perhaps tell us a story or two.’
‘I have forgot um,’ said O’Dowd.
‘Ah, I did hear’, said his wife, ‘that the husband of the postmistress was doin oil paintun all this while, before he hanged himself, an that nothun curiouser than these pictures was ever seen. Did you hear tell perhaps?’ Mrs O’Dowd asked.
And her breath listened.
‘I have heard’, said Amy Parker, ‘what people say.’
‘What sort of paintuns, for heaven’s sake?’ asked O’Dowd, yawning till his uvula stood up.
‘Dead trees and Jesus Christ,’ said his wife. ‘And naked women. Mad things, it seems.’
‘Hold hard,’ said her husband. ‘Is it mad then to paint a naked woman? What would Mrs Parker say? What sort of a mad, naked-woman paintun was it that you saw?’
‘I did not say I saw,’ Mrs Parker said and blushed.
‘You are drunk, you,’ said Mrs O’Dowd to her husband, looking at Mrs Parker all the time.
‘I would paint a naked woman,’ he said, rolling his red eyes, so that they almost turned their inward visions out.
‘But you cannot paint,’ said his wife. ‘An you are drunk.’
‘If I could paint I know what I would paint,’ roared O’Dowd. ‘I would paint the guts of a sheep, because it is a pretty thing, an I would paint a naked woman,’ he said, narrowing his vision and looking at Amy Parker, who was afraid she had been caught in some situation, terrible, but also half-expected, ‘a naked woman in a wicker chair, with a bonch of fuchsias in her lap.’
The Tree of Man Page 36