The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘Would you like a glass of water, dear?’ Amy Parker asked Thelma, who was coughing, she could not stop.

  No, no, she said with her head, and drawing on her dark gloves of fine suede.

  ‘It is not an attack?’ asked the mother hopefully.

  ‘No,’ coughed Thelma, ‘it is not an attack.’

  ‘It will pass,’ said Dudley Forsdyke very quietly.

  As if it might, indeed, before he had reached his hat, then that excuse would be removed.

  The mother was making clucking noises against her teeth.

  Stan Parker, who was more or less resigned to that state of god-lessness he had chosen when he vomited God out of his system and choked off any regurgitative craving for forgiveness, did experience a freedom. He looked at the time. It would be time soon to go down to the cows, and on this evening, when she would be persuaded to stay behind and see to the washing up, he would be quite free in the large, cold shed, the animals in their bails, and his knees beneath his chin, milking. Then the large, raw sky is emptiest, and free. He knew this, and was shivering for it inside his unaccustomed waistcoat.

  In the meantime Thel was going, or Mrs Forsdyke, with her husband.

  Kisses had begun. Regrets hung on the air, and reluctant drops on rosebushes.

  ‘Button up your collar, dear,’ said the mother.

  ‘It has not got a button,’ laughed Thelma. ‘That would be hideous.’

  She had overcome her coughing, with assistance of the brutal air, or sight of her own car.

  She was ready. Then, on looking back, she did remember that she had forgotten to ask her mother to tell about herself, what sort of person she was, and what was happening to her. Well, it could not be helped.

  Then they were ready, and drove off. She had forgotten to kiss her father, because you took Dad for granted, he would still be standing there, his hard and surprising trunk, rooted.

  Mr Forsdyke sighed and drove.

  ‘Those Bourkes,’ he said, ‘I had never heard of them.’

  ‘She is a purple woman,’ Thelma laughed. ‘Almost always dressed in blue. But blue.’

  And as if that were not brutal enough she added, ‘He is a horse trainer.’

  They drove on.

  ‘There is no reason’, said Dudley Forsdyke, ‘why you should not be nice to them.’

  The germ of good deeds implanted in others begets a sense of nobility.

  ‘And your brother,’ he said, ‘Ray, whom I have not met. Why have I never met Ray?’

  ‘There is no reason,’ it was now Thelma Forsdyke’s turn to say. ‘He has been away. That’s all. He’ll turn up, I expect.’

  Would he? twitched Dudley Forsdyke, wondering what kind of man his brother-in-law really was.

  The Forsdykes drove on, each wondering who had the hold.

  When the car had driven far enough to be eliminated, the parents who had been left behind, standing at the gate, sorting their hopes and disappointments, turned to each other, and Amy Parker said, ‘Do you think they were pleased, Stan?’

  ‘They did not eat, but then people don’t.’

  ‘But were they pleased with us, Stan?’

  ‘We are only for an afternoon.’

  ‘They are pleased with each other.’

  ‘He is a bit of an old woman.’

  ‘Well, Thelma always liked things nice.’

  ‘It is a fine shiny car.’

  ‘But has she got him, Stan?’

  Looking at her husband’s face.

  ‘Has she got him!’

  He averted his face, bristling at something, his hair did bristle sometimes, and on the nape of his neck.

  ‘Who has got what?’ he said.

  He was glad to go and get the buckets, following those paths of behaviour, back and forth and down to the shed, which habit had made geometric.

  Then Amy Parker went quickly and got the chicken she had roasted that day, and of which the smell was still hanging in the house. She took the long loaf, a bit floury, and made the basket ready. She was very quick and sure, as she was invariably in secret matters. And she thought of the letter still secret in the drawer.

  Amy Parker was going out in that secret light. Deep smells of evening rose up out of long, fat grass. Shrilly birds were settling, or first spring feathers twittered on the black twigs. The undergrowth was moving. Skeins of evening hung about the creek, unwound. Some people were coaxing fire out of damp leaves, but all they made was smoke. All things are wreathing and dissolving at that hour, before stars.

  But the woman on the road, in her dark dress, was solid and stubborn. Her loud feet brought the silence down. She went on. She was glad to be having secrets at dusk, and especially with her son. Don’t tell Dad, wrote Ray, he will go crook on me. Of course not, she said, she lived on secrets, the handkerchief sachet hides electric letters. And if you can bring us twenty-five as a loan Mum – quid, I mean, wrote Ray, bring them in fivers, they’re easy to carry, to Glastonbury; it is quiet there about evening I will meet you in the kitchen, I will not be long about it, Mum, I have a journey to make but I will see you, your ever loving son.

  So she walked on. She had taken a lamp against darkness, and this clanked.

  ‘Why, Amy,’ said Doll Quigley, who was there at the cypresses in the hollow, less matter than voice, ‘it is you, ain’t it? What do you know?’

  ‘Not much, Doll,’ said Amy Parker, who was not at all pleased.

  ‘I will accompany you for a little,’ Doll said, and did begin to take shape, her long body in a long dress.

  Ah, this would, Amy Parker said.

  ‘I am walking to get my thoughts straight,’ said Miss Quigley. ‘It is my brother.’

  ‘Why, what is wrong with Bub?’ asked her friend.

  ‘It is the fits’, said Doll, ‘that he has been having, oh, for years now. But they are getting worse.’

  ‘And what do you do, Doll?’

  ‘I stick in a cork, and if he bites it I put a second. That is all. I watch him. He must not hit the stove. But Bub is very strong, poor boy, when these fits are on him.’

  ‘You would do better to have him put away in some place,’ said Amy Parker desperately.

  Then the voice of Doll Quigley said, ‘He is what I have got.’

  And I have got Doll, said Amy Parker, I should not be disgusted, but I am.

  Then Doll Quigley told about her life with Bub, how they sat beside a lamp and looked at curious stones and the skeletons of leaves, and this life was sometimes past, but always present, its steady yellow light.

  ‘So you see,’ she said, ‘I could not do away with Bub, he is too young in spirit.’

  Bub was an old and dribbly man in flesh, Amy Parker knew. She was exasperated now.

  ‘Ah, dear,’ she said, her skirt lashing the darkness, ‘I should have brought the trap. I shall be late.’

  ‘You have an appointment,’ said the tranquil Doll.

  ‘I am taking a few things,’ Amy Parker hissed.

  And did almost add, to Mrs Gage, who had left the district not long after her husband killed himself on that tree.

  ‘I am taking a few things’, said Amy Parker, who was just saved, ‘to a friend who is having a hard time.’

  ‘Poor souls,’ said Doll Quigley for all mankind.

  She hung fire now, and Amy Parker, touching her, loving her, said, ‘We must think of something for Bub, Doll, of what will be best, and kindest.’

  But Doll Quigley was full of doubt, knowing that any solution must come from herself, but how she could not tell.

  Soon after this Amy Parker lost Doll Quigley in the dusk and hurried on towards the gates of Glastonbury. These still stood, almost immoveable in rust. To open the gates was to struggle with accumulated time, but if you won, as Amy Parker did, she was a strong woman still, your heart beat harder to be inside that strange place, in which anything might be found, half-buried, objects of beauty or just a little rusted can that could be cleaned up and used again. People some
times emerged from under the trees, from eating, or making love, or merely exorcising unwelcome spirits of their own. So the air, if it had a mystery, was also public. The dark, coarse branches of neglected shrubs, and tendrils of rank vines, had been submitted to a treatment of hands and made more ragged. Bits had been dragged or snapped off and abandoned. Once or twice goats had got in and cleaned up the lot. For a season. It was always growing, the wilderness, and forming liaisons with small animals that watched, and moving, its leaves and air, particularly at evening, when velvet scents unite with a stink of rotting.

  Amy Parker pushed on up the hill, caught at by the more rigid things, torn in one place, but also destroying many of the fleshier, more supine weeds beneath her firm heels. As it grew darker she became more expectant. What did he look like now? Would she be embarrassed in the presence of a stranger? Had she perhaps grown a little deaf, so that she would misinterpret, or smile in wrong places like deaf people do, to insinuate their understanding? She was not deaf, of course. She was not deaf.

  The leaves trumpeted with silence. Quigleys intruded at times, going with her, Doll’s face exasperating for its beautiful perfection. I am not perfect, thank goodness, said Amy Parker, and she is an ugly thing, that bag of skin hanging from her neck. And he, Bub, pffuh! The leaves were rotting in that part. It was a slow smell, that she hurried to escape. But Quigleys would not be put off. He is what I have got, Doll said, the way she hung on. Then he is what I have got, Amy Parker said, it is not Thelma, it is not anyone else, then it is he.

  So she burst out hopefully on to what had been the drive, crunching dandelions and gravel, and looking for a sign. The constant Quigleys, if they had existed, were dissolved by will or darkness. Only the house stood, or half house, that Mr Armstong had begun, and left off when there seemed no further purpose for it, except as a kind of monument to the dead. Amy Parker began to be afraid now, remembering dead people she had known, or people who were not, but they might have been, they had gone away. Birds flying through the night barely touched it with their soft feathers. The hand of a statue had broken off.

  When the woman of flesh and blood had gone round the back towards the kitchen quarters, and there was the door of what must be the second kitchen, she did feel comforted, remembering a basket of young ducks she had brought there in her youth. She had lit her lamp, and now went in. The room was large and shadowy and blank. Only leaves were moving, or a mouse.

  Presently Ray came, though.

  ‘Is that you, darling?’ she said.

  She held the lamp up, trembling for her tenderness, and the unfamiliar word with which she had expressed it. Supposing she had used it on a stranger? Or would this perhaps be preferable to her son? So she trembled.

  Looking straight at the lamp, because that blaze was all that he could see, the man was frowning and wincing. This, or something, was making him edge round the room. He was big, though not as big as his shadow.

  ‘Cut it out,’ he said, ‘You’d blind a man.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, putting the lamp on a sill, ‘I had to bring a light. If we must meet here. What made you choose this place? A wilderness. And a house that’s nobody’s house.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’ve always remembered this place.’

  ‘Is that all you remember?’ she asked.

  Now that they were normal, standing on their feet, and of their own height and substance, she came forward to look at him.

  ‘What’s up?’ he laughed. ‘You trying to identify me?’

  ‘You have changed,’ she said.

  ‘What did you expect?’

  She did not know. A reflection of herself perhaps, to recognize from mirrors. Or some boy that she could kiss, and advise about his underclothes. Now she was aghast at the mystery of a man. So some people light fires, then wring their hands when the fires have got away from them. He was good to look at, though.

  ‘You have grown up,’ she said, looking, half-ashamed.

  She would have liked to look at him by daylight.

  Then he came forward, and touched her elbow, and said, ‘You brought what I asked, Mum?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You have not shaved, Ray.’

  ‘I got a lift on a lorry,’ he said. ‘From Melbourne. I worked my way on a freighter to there from the West.’

  ‘From Albany.’

  ‘Yes. Albany. Broome. I was at Coolgardie at one time.’

  ‘You have been everywhere.’

  ‘There’s always one more place.’

  ‘But we thought you were in Albany. In some business, you said.’

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking into the basket, which was the only equivocal object in that room.

  ‘That is a bit of tucker, dear.’ said the mother, who had forgotten what pleasure she would have in watching him eat.

  He did so, very quickly, tearing the legs off the chicken and wrenching open the bread, of which the crumbs were scattered, or hung from his mouth. He was uglier eating. His face was fleshier, shining with such of the yellow grease as had escaped his mouth, thinking already of a patch of crackling skin still farther on the bone, he was particularly greedy for the crisp skin.

  ‘You were that hungry?’ said the woman, who was watching a traveller she was feeding, incidentally her son.

  ‘I been on the road since yesterday.’

  He threw the bones into a corner, and the carcass with its little shrivelled heart.

  Then he sighed, and was easier in his clothes.

  ‘I should have brought some apples,’ she said, seeing his teeth tear the flesh of apples.

  He was rather a muscular man, not yet set. He moved about the room, sometimes gold when the light struck him.

  ‘I done well,’ he said, wiping and blinking.

  She liked to watch him.

  ‘Now you can tell me about yourself, won’t you?’ she asked. ‘What you have done and seen.’

  She was standing with her hands crossed low against her dark skirt. Her thoughts had abandoned her in an attitude of great awkwardness.

  ‘You haven’t lost that habit, Mum,’ he said, giving a kind of twitch that came to him apparently at moments of defence, ‘that habit of cross-questioning a man. You would kill a person dead to see what was inside.’

  ‘After all this time,’ she said, beginning to kindle, ‘I am entitled to some kind of explanations.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, looking at his toes, ‘but explanations don’t explain.’

  Then what can we expect of you?’ she said, harder than before. ‘Haven’t you anything to show?’

  ‘No.’

  When she had got him defenceless she began to cry for him. She had been waiting a long time for this.

  ‘Oh, Ray,’ she cried, putting her hands on his shoulders, to be comforted.

  The two people filled the empty room intolerably. It was not possible to escape from each other, as it is amongst furniture. Here they had to submit. Besides, the young man had not yet got the money, and she was his mother, and she had not wrung herself enough.

  After he had felt her crying against him for some time he was in fact almost hypnotized.

  ‘I am to blame,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘We are all of us to blame.’

  She had put a soggy handkerchief against her nose, which had swollen up. She said, ‘At least I hope you are honest, Ray.’

  ‘What is honest?’ he asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that you have never committed any crime.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Have you?’

  All around the abandoned house night pressed, and trees. There were pine trees, seedlings of those which had been lit the night of the fire. These pricked the walls of the house and scratched at the windows. There was a great uneasiness.

  The minutes began to force the woman into a belief that she was innocent. It could not be otherwise. She had not killed anyone, anyway, or stolen.

  When the young man saw the advantageous position he was
in he was quick to make the most of it.

  ‘Listen, Mum, I got a long way to go. Let us have the money. I gotta meet a bloke at Cairns, who has a carrying concern up there. I’m gonna be in on that if I get there in time.’

  ‘Is that true?’ she asked, bringing the money out of her dress.

  He laughed, looking at the notes.

  ‘You don’t believe me. For some reason,’ he laughed, receiving money.

  ‘I believe you,’ she sighed. ‘I am getting too old to argue.’

  He was quick at counting money.

  ‘But stay here for a bit, Ray,’ she said. ‘Stay and talk to us. You can help your father with the cows. I’ll make an apple pie. Do you remember those kidney puddings that you used to like?

  But Ray Parker was as good as gone. In trains he put his feet up on the seat opposite and felt the flash of telegraph poles. He whistled between his teeth. He played at cards with commercials in trains, with commercials in grey dustcoats, and could look after himself all right. Sometimes he cut across country on foot, leaving the road if it suited, other people’s property did not deter him. He broke off cobs of corn to chew. He tore off branches of plums and spat out the sour stones. At night he slept in the backs of lorries that had taken him up, sleeping on a heap of bags that smelled of bag and whatever had been in them. In spite of the hurtling and the rough, hairy bags he slept good enough, and got down, and had yarns with people in the starlight, after making water. In country towns girls looked down at him from windows. He liked best the girls with big breasts. The iron beds creaked under the stress of girls, some of them greasy, some of them powdery. When he had had enough he went on.

  ‘You ought to settle down, Ray,’ his mother was saying in the empty room. ‘Find some good, steady girl.’

  ‘Nah,’ he laughed, buttoning up the money. ‘I was going with a tart in Albany for a while.’

  ‘And what happened to this girl?’

  ‘I went away.’

  ‘You know best, I suppose,’ said the mother with some satisfaction, and although time was slipping from her own grasp.