The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said.

  She had forgotten.

  What would they say next? she wondered horribly.

  But the machinery of their lives had soon sucked them in.

  Except that they were talking in stiff voices, with words like dry sticks that would have broken under slight pressúre, nothing changed much. If they did not look at each other, it could have been that, through long experience, they knew what they would see. But Stan Parker listened to his wife a lot, those sounds that she made about the house, or calling hens, or speaking to cows, or her breathing even, and most of all her silences. All these sounds with which he had been familiar too, most of his life, like the beating of his own heart, were suddenly swollen, and his own heart was intolerable in his ribs.

  ‘Last night’, she said at one stage, coming to him in horror, ‘the rats killed another hen. One of the good ones.’

  She had come to him so that he should do something.

  ‘We must bury it,’ he said, moving his dry limbs.

  ‘But what can we do?’ she said, standing there. ‘They ate the head off and tore out the inside. It is a horrible thing, Stan. And if they keep on, now that they have begun, tearing our good fowls to bits –’ She could not say any more, but waited for him.

  He did not know what to do.

  ‘We can put down poison’, he said, ‘outside the sheds.’

  ‘Not poison, Stan,’ she said. ‘We might poison some dog or cat.’

  Then neither of them knew what to do.

  Amy Parker became quite obsessed over the importance of this issue, she had to, and while in the grip of her obsession three or four more hens were killed and devoured by rats.

  ‘Now that they have begun they will not stop,’ she protested.

  He heard her above the tapping of his spoon upon an egg, that he would eat for his breakfast, but that first he must examine most carefully. If he was unable to accept the importance of her problem, he was also unable to solve his own. But from hearing her talk he did look at her eventually, and saw that her hair was untidy, and knew that he loved her.

  ‘Perhaps we should try the poison,’ she hesitated.

  She had seen him look at her, which was what she wanted, and was reassured.

  But he was less certain than before. He went outside and begun to feel his pockets for his tobacco pouch, which was not there, he realized with sudden anger, and rummaged in his pockets over and over for what was mislaid, or even lost. His hands were catching in the folds and confines of his clothes, his bony hands. Sweat was in his eyes now, and behind his knees. For it was inconceivable that habit should be thus destroyed. His pouch. And he began to walk about slowly, almost totteringly, feeling his way through the situation, like some blind man, and through his thoughts, trying to arrive at where he might have put the pouch, which was a little rubber bag with a twist at the top, an old thing that had turned black.

  In the shed he used as a workshop, and in which he was searching now, he began to despair of finding the pouch, and he flung down an iron last that he used when repairing boots. There was immediately a clatter and chaos of falling tools, and a sweet smell of shavings and sawdust shot up. The lost goodness was unbearable in the narrow shed. So he stood there panting and sweating, and remembered his wife when she was thin and rather shy. He remembered her, of all times, with a mouthful of clothes pegs, fixing washing on the line.

  In that rainy light, between clouds, in the light of blue, blowing sheets, she appeared so simple and touching, it was not possible for such things to happen. If I put them out of my head, he said, they cannot. But the event continued to occur. It drove back into his mind attached to a plume of dust. He heard the slamming of a car door. He imagined, or tried to, and could not imagine the words spoken. Other people, even the innocent, or strangers, speak mysterious and perhaps explanatory words, which the within earshot.

  So that in the end there was nothing he could seize on. He stood there fingering the hieroglyphics of the workbench, that had been chiselled into the wood, and as he stood he remembered miserably that he had lost something, which finally his mouth told him was that old rubber tobacco pouch, which he would not have lost for anything, although perished, he was used to the shape of it.

  When he did find the pouch, by kicking it with his toe as it lay on a path, he began at once to rub trembling tobacco between his palms, and to stuff his pipe with a good wad. He should have been comforted, but he was not.

  There was much that comforted the woman, on the other hand, who was able still to see things in their persistent shapes, whether it was a cloud swelling, or some weed she bent to look at, and which, in the absence of true flowers, was a flower, a common blue thing, but pleasing. There was a certain amount that she allowed herself to remember, and a certain amount that she compelled herself to forget. This arrangement is admirable, if possible. And she would think too of the many ways in which she might show her affection for her husband. A great warmth enveloped her at that time, of safety and contrition. Her contrition did indeed signify her safety, it began to seem.

  So the woman walked in what remained of her garden, her face fresh and absorbed in autumn air. Sometimes a dog came, a big yellow rangy thing, that had attached himself, some kind of a kangaroo dog, they said. She strolled, and the dog followed, hare-footed, or she stopped, and he lowered his neck. She did not like that dog. He would appear. He would stand there, just moving his tail, of which the joints were visible. Looking at her. That dog, she said to her husband, gave her the creeps. But he was docile. He loved her in a tentative sort of a way, moving his neck. But she disliked him so, frowning at him. Then the dog would lift his lip, smiling and conciliatory, his yellow teeth gnashing for approval. For his part he would approve any behaviour he might witness, translating through the eyes of love all that is depraved and bestial. If she had lived alone she could have been cruel to the dog. As it was, she walked away, quickly, round the corner of the house. And the thin yellow dog followed. His light eyes saw her wherever she went.

  The cat, at least, did not watch, and she did, after a fashion, return the advances of the cat, under cover of exasperation. The cat was furry and insinuating, as he described those slow arcs about her legs, or direct, as he backed his quivering tail against the lavender bushes.

  ‘Dirty thing,’ she laughed, by now acceptant.

  And the big cat yowled up at her.

  One evening, when the horizon was a thin red line of cold fire, she caught up the cat, and was kissing him, holding his vibrant body to her breasts. Then she knew that she was lost, or would be, given another opportunity for total destruction. But would this occur? It was so doubtful that the cat began to struggle against the desperation that was in her arms, and scratched his way free, and scrambled down. Leaving her.

  The woman Amy Parker began to turn out the house during those days, to fold quantities of brown paper, to make little hanks out of lengths of string, to glance through old letters, and come across yellow photographs. In one photograph she wore a hat of flowers, and was eloquent in shyness as she seldom was in words. This photograph she stood upon a chest in the bedroom, propped against a vase, and would go there guiltily to look at it. Before resuming the business of her house. Arranging and furbishing.

  ‘Here are some handkerchiefs that I put by, Stan, and that you have not used,’ she said once to her husband, with the clear overtones of voice used by one whose secret life is cloudier.

  She brought the pile out to show that it was true, that there should be at least this between them. She was a good wife, putting a handkerchief in his pocket before he went on a journey, and brushing the fallen hair from his collar with her hand. He accepted all this, of course. And today, which was the day he had agreed to advise a young man, a Peabody, about the purchase of some land at Hunger-ford, which is the other side of Bangalay.

  When she had done her duty she watched him go. He was staring up at the sky, as if to read its intentions, then starting the c
ar, which he always did rather badly, looking closely at the panel. And as she watched this erect and honourable man she realized with blinding clarity that she had never been worthy of him. This illumination of her soul left her weary, but indifferent. After all, she had done her material duty in many ways. Putting a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket, for instance. She was standing there, as she had stood many times in church, with people around her who had apparently realized their spiritual aspirations, whereas she could not rise, could not discover to what she should aspire. In time the knowledge that some mystery was withheld from her ceased to make her angry, or miserable for her own void. She accepted her squat body, looking out from it, through the words of canticles, in dry acceptance of her isolation.

  So, now, she was looking at her husband as he started on that journey.

  Then she went back into the house, from which she had swept most of the dust blown there by the droughty winds, and which was now clean but fragile. Her circulation was not very good that morning, her bones were brittle, and she walked about nervously amongst the bright furniture. She longed for some event of immense importance to fill the house’s emptiness, but it was most improbable that it would. Glittering, dusty light spilled from the mirrors. That was all.

  After looking round, which was foolish, because she was alone in the house, she went to the mirror in the front room, and on this mirror she wrote the word Leo. She could just see it, written in the smudge of her finger. As a spoken word she disliked it, for some coarseness that she could feel in her mouth. But she had never written it before. Even here, in silence, it was shameful, if desirable. So she looked at it. In this way invocations are made. But when the breath was tight in her chest she rubbed out the name savagely.

  After she had taken a bucket of scraps to throw to the fowls, and derived some benefit from having these round her in their blamelessness, she came back and found him sitting on the veranda, eating from a little paper bag.

  ‘How did you get here?’ said her mouth.

  ‘Same way,’ he said, between stuffing in what were apparently peppermint lollies, she could smell them now, in his vicinity.

  ‘That is a fine sort of welcome to give a man,’ he said, full of peppermint.

  ‘I did not mean it that way,’ she said, putting down the bucket, bowing her head to whatever might happen, and wiping her hands, which he looked at glancingly, to see that they were broad, and cracked by cold mornings.

  ‘I have been on the grog two nights running,’ he said, wincing. ‘Don’t ask me how. These things happen. And smoke – Christ, I have curdled me stomach. I have given them away, the smokes.’

  He tossed the little bag, in a ball, that fell upon the hard ground and lay there. Then he belched once and said,’ Pardon me.’

  Amy Parker looked at the little ball of paper, which was a point of burning white, and most necessary.

  ‘I have never been really drunk,’ she said.

  But it was not necessary to explore the shallows when she had reached the depths.

  ‘You gotta do something,’ he said.

  And suddenly, although it was the back veranda, he had drawn her with him into the same waiting-room, very square, with blank walls. They were sitting there waiting, though presently disgust began to come over his face for some past nausea. She was so still by this time she could hear the shape of objects.

  What will he tell me? she wondered.

  In expectation, considerable litheness had crept into those pepper trees round which fowls were scratching. There was a nervosity of fronds just twitching in a little breeze. The woman remembered how, as a girl, she had run up the side of a hill, gathering her breath and laughing, and had lain on the top. She remembered the cool touch of the fronds of pepper trees, and now this same smoothness and litheness had returned to her, if she could tell him.

  But the man looked, and saw the sallow woman sitting by the scrap bucket, and her stockings, old stockings certainly, which she wore about the place, were dragged round, and wrinkled.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was out this way. Thought I’d look in and have a word, like. Friendship don’t cost nothing and is a lovely thing.’

  He sat with his hands resting on his pursy thighs, very deliberate. Everything he said or did would be deliberate now.

  Christ, it would have to be.

  ‘We have been busy these few weeks,’ she said. ‘We have had several calvings. There was one in the middle of the night, poor thing. Stan had to fetch the vet. But it was all right in the end. A little heifer.’

  She shifted on her upright chair, which grated.

  Ah, she could have expressed to this man, or not necessarily man, to some human being, visions of great and permanent beauty. But shifting light destroyed that side of the house on which they sat, leaving their minds in shadow.

  ‘I feel crook,’ said the man Leo, holding his stomach and thinking about himself. ‘It don’t do to racket around, I got ulcers, or somethin.’

  He stood up.

  When Amy Parker saw his back, which was broad and still young, inside the flash suit that had worn shiny over those country roads, she said loudly, ‘You should see a doctor, Leo.’

  ‘They’d skin yer’, he said, ‘for a bottle of poison. Some of that white stuff. I know.’

  She passed so close to him that her hand brushed the cloth of his coat, but it did not answer.

  He began to tell her of a cousin of his father’s who had died of a cancer.

  So that she was not to come closer to this man, she saw, or perhaps to anyone. Each one was wrapped in his mystery that he could not solve. This man and woman already remembered with surprise the excesses of their bodies, and forgot what else had been attempted.

  ‘So they buried Cousin Herb,’ said the man Leo. ‘His funeral was wrote up in the Advocate. And what he had done. Though not all of it. He was a bit slippery, but a decent bugger.’

  The man Leo’s sweat had begun to cool, knowing that they had eased past the dangers into that placid state from which you can pretend that things have not happened. He might soon tell a joke, if he could think of one.

  ‘Of course they are inventing cure’, Amy Parker said, ‘for all those diseases, all the time.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yairs.’

  Remembering.

  ‘It is wonderful’, she said, ‘to read of science.’

  And presented to the knife the grey muscles of her throat. Grey of floorboards, she saw, and of earth, that had been tamped down by people coming and going through a drought. She pushed back a lock of hair, which was grey too. She had reached that time of grey. It would be calm, though.

  ‘Gotta be twisting the old Ford,’ the man Leo was saying.

  So they walked out between those stiff rosemary bushes that catch at the clothes, and he got in, and drove off, and would not come again.

  In the afternoon Amy Parker began to absolve herself of all that had not happened. She felt old indeed, now that the race was run, but this state did also enjoy a kind of superiority. She began to remember disagreeable details of the man who had ceased to be the shadow of her desire, the way the hair grew on the nape of his neck, in red whorls, a habit of talking about himself, the smell of peppermint. And as her flesh slowly ceased to tick, she thought that she would love the silence.

  Things that she had known began to return. That old rosebush, thorny and horny, which they had planted in the beginning. A sewing machine with an intricate treadle. A white jug with a brown crack. She looked at these with conviction.

  But she would not think about her husband yet.

  When, in the afternoon, a young man came and said, ‘Where is Stan, Mrs Stan?’ she did look up in genuine surprise.

  It was that young Peabody, the nephew of Ossie, all dressed up in blue serge, that was to have met Stan Parker to inspect the land at Hungerford.

  ‘Why, Joe, Stan went to meet you,’ Amy Parker said, looking at the clock. ‘He left here, I couldn’t say when, but some tim
e.’

  She could not judge time since several years of her life had passed in instants.

  The young man laughed, and hesitated, and wondered what he should do. He was awkward before the wives of men that he knew well.

  ‘I don’t know what to advise you,’ said Amy Parker.

  Young men moved on a different plane. Their eyes did not see older women. The sons even had shallow eyes for the mothers. This one, who could have been her son, stood sideways at the door, so that he should not see her. His blue, blazing tie of festive satin was arched on his chest, for himself, or a formal occasion.

  Presently he drifted away, and she had not gathered what he intended to do, or what anyone would do.

  Later in the afternoon, and more particularly at night, when the work was done, and everything washed and arranged in cupboards or on racks, dutifully, Amy Parker was compelled to think about her husband; he came forward, who had stood not so far back in her mind. She had been listening for him, she knew, some time now. Faint sounds of wind and animals drifted in the darkness. Darkness, stars, and cloud were streaming away from her as time passed. The frail chairs in the rooms were apathetic.

  Whatever is to happen now will happen in spite of me, she realized. She was standing against a window frame, and shivering, because it was cold really. Solitary stars trembled. Then she put her head against the frame and gave way to her own solitariness, which she feared, though did expect.

  When Stan Parker returned, shortly after leaving, to pick up the hundred-foot measure he had intended to take on the expedition with young Peabody, but forgotten, when he did see the blue car shining in the ruts and dust, he knew this was something he had both expected and feared. Then he felt how very frail was the little wheel on which his hands lay. Visions of violence rose up in him like blood, and boiled over. His lips were blubbery as he took an axe perhaps, or a hammer, or his own hands gave a quick answer.

  But in the hollow before the house, where the cypresses were just moving, heavily, suffocatingly, under sheets of dust, his own breath began to suffocate him in his throat, and he turned the car round, with those jerky, unconvincing movements made by the steering of old cars, and drove back along the road. He settled down then to what would very likely be eternity. Or he would make some decision.