The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘But if he was a corpse,’ said Amy Parker.

  If it was, to the young man still rowing in the same boat.

  ‘And perhaps the others did see,’ his wife pursued subtly, now that she had speared the needle’s eye, ‘and were not letting on either, because it is unpleasant to stop a boat, and pull in the body of an old man.’

  But his guilt remained, and because of this he was humble.

  ‘It is all too silly,’ said his wife.

  She had her own corpse, that she could not share. She stood in great isolation on the banks of the swollen river, and strong young men rowed splendidly over the brown and flashing waters, towards her, and there was her husband whom she recognized finally, but with whom she could not communicate.

  Amy Parker put away her sewing because her hands were trembling. She did not feel now that she had ever had definite control of her actions. At any point in her life the wind could have blown her with fantastic force in directions that immediately would not have seemed improbable.

  Just then the wind was blowing by infernal gusts, to beat the iron that was nailed to the wooden house. The sticks of dead shrubs were scratching the walls. If the roof should lift off, she breathed.

  But in the meantime she went to bed, holding her hair. She took the pins out, and let it fall, and was looking at herself, when her husband, who was pulling off his boots, said, ‘Was it a green car that that fellow had, who came here selling things?’

  She was holding a hairpin.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘It could have been green. No. It was blue, I think. Why?’

  Looking at her own face stranded in the glass.

  Stan Parker, who was pulling off his second boot, said rather jerkily, ‘There was a green car down the road, before you get to O’Dowds’. The bloke seemed to be selling a woman some kind of kitchen things.’

  ‘I told you,’ she said angrily, ‘this was not kitchen things.’

  And did experience some twinge of pleasure for what she had lived that day. Her grey flesh glowed again. She was glowing and blowing in the gusty wooden box, in which there seemed room for both good and evil. In this mood she arranged the sheet beneath her chin, and would not look at the face of her husband, fearing that a preponderance of good might upset this satisfactory balance. Of course she loved her husband. She fell asleep with this conviction. But other immeasurable impulses moved with the flapping of the blind. It was tapping on her skin with stained fingers, that reckoned up her age ten years from then, she could not, she said, laughed, it was not arithmetic or cats’ tails.

  Stan Parker, who had fallen asleep tired, in a draught, dreamed that he could not lift the lid of that box to show her what he had inside. It does not matter, she said, holding the dishcloth between, to hide. But he could not lift. It does not matter, she said, Stan, I do not want to see. I shall show, he said, pulling till the sweat came. But still not. No, she said, Stan, Stan, it has gone bad in there, it has been in there all these years. Pulling, he could not explain it was his act that had died, and grown wool, like a ram, and lived again. I am going, she said. The dishcloth blew through the doorway. Running through the kitchen. Grey water was flowing between them.

  He woke then, stretched stiff in the bed, his feet nailing the sheet to the rail, and his neck bare, on which the sweat was cold. But she was breathing. She had not gone. Then he understood. He understood the husband of the postmistress hanging from the tree in the yard, the reason for whose action had always appeared obscure to him. I could take my life, he said behind stiff lips. But she had not gone. She was breathing. So he lay sideways against her, drawing up his knees for comfort, and her warmth flowed through his veins again, and gradually he fell asleep, and was sleeping, and sleeping because she was there.

  Even so they woke a bit stiff, and were going stiffly about their jobs, and were talking to each other in thin grey voices.

  We must expect this at our age, he said, and the cold weather coming on.

  But when the sun rose finally, and while it remained an innocent and recognizable ball balanced on the crests of the trees, it was a magnificent and clear autumn that Amy Parker saw. The leaves had not yet all been torn off those trees which would eventually lose them. There were still golden tatters, and the dark, almost black thickets of the evergreens. Light lay in masses on the paddocks, which smoked and glistened.

  Later in the day the woman would begin to divest herself of the old scarves and cardigans and hat she had put on as a precaution in the early hours, while she was still grey and grumbling and tentative, and which made her into an unsightly bundle of fraying wool and stained felt. She would shake back her hair. Sometimes when she had time, some afternoons, she would walk through the bush along the bed of the creek, where strange objects were to be found, stones, and the skins of snakes, seed pods, and skeleton leaves. She would look for things, and she would gather sprays of leaves, to have something in her hand, to acquire some reason for her being there. Then too, with the stronger light beginning to weigh her glance down, she would think more boldly of what had happened. It was the brazen light touching things. She would think about the man Leo, avoiding those aspects of him which were repulsive to her, reducing him to meet those needs of her own for destruction or renewal. So she moved thoughtfully along the dry bed of the creek, turning a stone over, picking at a leaf, trying the polished limbs of a dead tree. Silence and reckless thoughts exalted her incongruity into lightness. But finally, at the bend in the creek, when she was faced with turning, and must go back in company with her body, into that life which remained, she began to walk in a panic across grass and sticks, her nostrils grown thin. She could not walk fast enough, whether to escape or to arrive. There had been no indication that the man would come again, and when she reached the road, she was glad that she could look along it disinterestedly, following its ribbon with her eyes, right along past the little tuft of trees, and farther, to where it touched the sky.

  Once when she got back to the cluster of sheds which were gathered round the house, walking with her eyes cast down, and holding her side on account of the speed at which she had come, there was her husband, with a piece of wire that he had cut off and twisted into the shape of a circle, apparently for the purpose of making something.

  ‘Hello, Amy,’ he said, pausing deliberately. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Oh, down the paddock,’ she said. ‘To get a bit of air,’ she said. ‘And up along the road. You get stale in the house.’

  He paused, and then asked, with the obvious intention of being kind to her. ‘And did you see anyone?’

  ‘Only an old man,’ she replied.

  Her instantaneous conception of this event turned her blood cold, but once conceived she continued to watch placidly enough as it grew.

  ‘He was on his way to Wullunya,’ she said, ‘where he has a block of land. He has pigs, and some poultry, and a citrus orchard. Poor old man, he is walking because his horse went in the feet, back near Badgerys’, where he left it. He had been to Bangalay to see his daughter, who is suffering from the quinsy.’

  Stan Parker shook his head incredulously.

  She turned away, guarding a pulse in her throat, and a coldness for that wave of falsehood which had overtaken her.

  And as she walked away he realized that he no longer saw her eyes, or very rarely, as just now, and then they were filled with great distances. So he turned back to that piece of wire which he had cut, the original purpose of which he had momentarily forgotten.

  They began to be kind to each other, as if each sensed the other was in need of the protection of kindness in that world of strange truths in which they now found themselves. So they performed simple acts to please each other, which had only a sadness for the recipient. One night she began to pin on him, for size, the pieces of a cardigan she was knitting for winter. She went round him, touching his body, patting, and arranging.

  ‘Ah, it is too small,’ she said, standing back. ‘I did not allow fo
r the stomach that has come.’

  Then they both laughed, as, of course, it really did not matter, all this.

  ‘The wool will stretch,’ he said, drawing his mouth down and easing his weight on to one leg, as he stood with his hands on his hips waiting for the operation to be finished.

  She went round him thoughtfully, touching the body of her husband. His wrists were rather gnarled now.

  All round him he could sense the play of her hair. Sometimes her hands, which were rough, caught in the soft wool. As she was stooping and looking, he remained considerably taller than she, and closed his eyes while submitting. He was locked up now in some impersonal state of warm grey wool, neither good nor bad, but tolerable.

  Then he opened his eyes, and they were looking at each other, for she had straightened up.

  ‘It will be all right in the end,’ she said quickly and guiltily, to atone for her glance at his sleeping face. ‘I know what I can do, I think, to make it fit better.’

  He smiled, and did not intend irony, but he was tired that night.

  She sat down and begun to pull out part of her work, and to knit desperately, paying out the thread of wool, gripping her needles nervously.

  ‘I am worried about Ray, Stan,’ she said.

  She really was too, as she sat on the edge of her chair.

  ‘Do you think it was in him, anyway, all this badness? Or was it his upbringing? Or is it something that he has got from us? Together, I mean. It is like the cattle. Two goods can make a bad. We may not mix well,’ she said, and waited.

  He sat with his chin on his chest. He would have liked to throw aside the weight of what she was putting on him.

  ‘I have never known what to do,’ he said, wincing. ‘I am to blame. I try to find the answers, but I have not succeeded yet. I do not understand myself or other people. That is all.’

  He wondered whether she would leave him alone after that. He felt weak tonight, with a bitter taste in his mouth.

  She continued to knit. She was propitiated. At that moment she could feel grieved and frustrated for the weak husband that she had got. All her own potentiality for evil streamed away from her in soft, elusive wool. And since she had bought her innocence, her memory crept back into the languorous attitudes of afternoon, tremulously amazed at her own desirability and youthfulness.

  It was natural enough then, one afternoon when Stan had gone somewhere on some business or other, and she could see the deliberate blue car again in fact, that she should go straight out of the house, flinging back the wire gauze of the outer door so that it hit the wall of the house and quivered. The dead balls of brown roses were hanging on the old staggy bush, that brushed her as she went down, feeling in the calves of her legs a tautness that could have been confidence or anxiety. She was at the gate soon, a minute or two before the slow but fateful car, and there held herself masterfully erect in waiting sunlight.

  ‘How are we doin?’ asked the man Leo, who was driving casually enough, and had pushed his hat back, so that she could see that hair which would still have been repellent to her if she had been able to consider.

  Instead she said back, in even but rather colourless tones, ‘Thanks. I am all right. Where have you been all this time?’

  So that he was forced slowly to stop, and began to tell her how he had taken his holiday just then, and how they had made a trip to the North or perhaps the South Coast, she did not hear which, and that they had visited relatives and had a bonzer time. His voice was slower than she had remembered. Wherever they had been, sitting in the sunlight in their night things, eating fresh fish, and lazily sharing other lives, she realized that he was not dependent on her.

  She looked down and frowned even. You are a lazy man, she said, as well as ugly.

  ‘An you,’ he said, ‘what’ve you been up to?’

  ‘Oh, I!’ She laughed. ‘The same.’

  Looking down.

  But she was conscious of his behaving very slowly, leaning on the wheel and spitting slowly.

  Then I shall not catch fire? her dry mouth asked. All around, the garden, or what remained, the sticks, could have gone up with one match.

  ‘The same, eh?’ He spat between his teeth.

  He was, in fact, remembering this full-blown woman whom he had forgotten, because of certain aspects, of which he had been afraid. He had deliberately forgotten. There she was now, blowsy was the word, and still. It is stillness that perplexes more even than the mystery of passion opening. To a thin man. For this man was thin inside his flesh.

  ‘It is all right, I suppose, to them that likes it,’ the man said. ‘All this,’ he said, looking around. ‘The cows down there. Gettin up with cold hands. Good Christ!’

  ‘It is my life,’ she said, again evenly, which gave no echo of the drumming.

  For her ears were bursting.

  Then she threw back her head. ‘And you are a flash type of man,’ she said. ‘That is all right too, I suppose. Stringing people along with all that talk. And holding out the material for women to see.’

  ‘You don’t like me,’ he laughed.

  He slammed the door, but he had come out.

  ‘I did not say so,’ she said.

  She was all gentleness again. He liked that inflection, which appealed to his virility. So he came on, easing one leg, which had grown stiff from his sitting in the car. And she continued to stand there, still gently feeling the situation, which was as subtle as air, and which, because it was first and foremost her situation, must be handled tenderly. That was what nerved her to look him full in the eyes, which were rather puffy, and which would teach her to say things that he expected. She could have followed the wildest intricacies of that situation because the necessity was hers.

  They went into the house then.

  He put his hand in the small of her back, ushering her into her own house, and she closed her eyes in its familiar gloom with complete passivity; otherwise she could not have endured its strangeness.

  But today it was different. As if the revelation of passion is not revealed twice.

  This time they laughed, and she saw his gold tooth. Their flesh had been made to run together sensuously. He looked at her.

  ‘What is your wife’s name?’ she asked.

  ‘Myra,’ he said.

  Then when she had thought about it enough, she put her mouth in his mouth, as if she could have bitten out the word. And they struggled together, not heroically, but to bruise each other’s bodies, and she swallowed down any suspicion of repulsion that rose in her throat to oppose her lust.

  When they had exhausted themselves he said to her, ‘What’s become of your old man?’

  She told him that Stan had gone wherever he had.

  The man beside her, who was yawning, laughed a low, slow laugh, full of collusion.

  Then she sat up.

  ‘But I love my husband,’ she said.

  And she did. The goodness and sudden perfection of their life together were trembling before her, because lost, in the face of such obscenity, foisted on her by a strange dictatorship of the body.

  ‘I haven’t said anything against him,’ said the man. ‘I ain’t made his acquaintance, and shan’t neither. Probably.’

  He was grumbling now, as she stepped heavily about the room, gathering stockings and things. Her gooseflesh filled him with contempt for his own impulses.

  They were getting up, wondering.

  Get out of this mess double quick, he said, and could not find his collar stud immediately.

  Her hands were fixing the disguise of her hair. Soon, she saw, nobody would be able to accuse her. She was unrecognizable, except to her own desires. These were never dead long.

  ‘I would like to go to the city once or twice,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah? What would you do there?’ he asked, without interest.

  ‘I’d walk in the streets and look at the people,’ she said.

  He laughed down his nose. ‘That’s one thing I ain’t done yet.’
/>
  ‘I’d sit by the sea,’ she said, ‘and watch it. And I’d listen to music.’

  ‘’Ere,’ he said, ‘where do I come in?’

  Now that he was in a position to make a quick getaway, and was altogether possessed of himself, he put his hands on her shoulders, so that the ring he wore, which was set with a very small ruby star, smouldered. In the counterfeit of this fresh situation she did just flash back, commonly enough, putting her breasts against him.

  ‘Are there no other women?’ She laughed. ‘Don’t tell me!’

  They went out, exchanging more jokes with a brutality that the time seemed to demand.

  She was surprised that she could be one of the flash women.

  ‘So long, Leo,’ she said brazenly, looking at the veins in his neck, into which the collar cut too tight.

  His smooth car was ready. She watched him prepare a deft departure. These are easy to some.

  ‘If I had yer picture,’ he said, ‘I’d keep it underneath the mattress.’

  ‘Good thing you haven’t,’ she laughed.

  Then she held her hand straight above her eyes to shield them from the metallic light and watch this man drive with such ease along the dust. She saw with some indifference, almost as if her life had not been broken into, except by watching, by her eyes following the smooth passage of a blue car, mingling for a moment perhaps with a man’s eyes. Remembering his eyes, though, through dust, these were too close, and livery, with little red veins.

  It was in this position, with her straight hand held above her eyes, that Stan Parker, driving down the road, saw his wife. He still drove with some thought, one of those old cars they always had. He saw Amy standing there. There was the plume of that dust. It was floating and disintegrating but still attached.

  As Stan drove in at the gate, on which the kerosene tin was nailed for the bread delivery, he waved at his wife, because this was his habit. She was still standing there, stiff. She had not taken down that straight hand. As he got down from the car he too began to move with wooden limbs.

  He cleared his throat and said, ‘I saw Merle. She’s willing to come on Thursday and give you a hand with the curtains.’