Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  He had never seen the farm that his mother had helped to clear in the forest. Since her father had worked in later years as a labourer in the large town mentioned often previously, he, the chief character, had supposed that his mother’s father had given up after a time his effort to clear his block in the forest. He, the chief character, had further supposed that some other person had later undertaken to clear, with the help of his family, the same block and to meet the conditions laid down by the Government of Victoria. But despite his supposing this, he, the chief character, had throughout his life imagined the bracken that his mother had grubbed out of the edges of paddocks as having later spread unchecked and the scrub as having taken the place of the grass in the paddocks, and saplings as having grown up among the scrub, and the whole of the so-called block that was required to have been cleared as having become again forest before the end of his mother’s life.

  He had never seen the place that his mother had helped to clear in the forest, but he had seen as a child two other partly cleared blocks in the forest. One of his mother’s married sisters lived for a few years in the 1940s with her husband and their children on a small farm in the forest. He, the chief character of this story, remembered this farm for the first time in many years on a certain day in the early 1990s, which day will be mentioned before the end of this section of this story. On many a day after the day just mentioned, he remembered many details of the farm and of the persons who lived there, but he could not remember his having travelled to the farm from the grassy countryside further south-west, as he knew he must have travelled; nor could he remember his having travelled from the farm back to the grassy countryside, as he knew he must have travelled. The farm was surrounded by forest, but he could not remember in the early 1990s whether his uncle, the husband of his mother’s sister, was renting the farm or on his way to owning the farm. What he chiefly remembered in the early 1990s are the details listed in the following four paragraphs.

  The farm had been surrounded by forest. He had asked his cousins several times to take him a short distance into the forest, but none of them had been willing to do so. This and other matters had confirmed him in his thinking that his mother’s relatives were dull by comparison with his father’s people. One of the other matters just mentioned was the bareness of the house in the forest. He understood, of course, in the 1990s that his mother’s sister and her husband had been too poor even to furnish their house, which lacked such things as window-blinds and floor-coverings, but when he had visited their house as a child, he had been annoyed to find no books or toys such as he always found in the home of his father’s unmarried sisters and brother. He found, however, in the shabby house in the forest one thing that kept his interest for much of the time of his visit. He never learned from where his cousin had got the thing, but his girl-cousins kept on the front veranda a two-storey doll’s house. He seemed to remember forty and more years afterwards that the exterior was somewhat damaged and that some of the fittings were missing from outside the house, but he remembered in the 1990s the upper bedrooms that he had peered into and a certain single bed in one of the upper rooms. He had complained to his girl-cousins that a young female doll should have been sleeping in the bed, and he had even come back to the toy house several times during the day of his visit, hoping to see through the tiny unglazed windows that a girl-doll had turned back the quilt on the bed and had lain her head on the smooth, white pillow and was resting in safety.

  At some time during the day of his visit to the farm in the forest, his uncle had invited him to watch while he, the uncle, fired his rifle at a small flock of eastern rosellas that he had seen in a tree at the edge of the forest. The birds were waiting, so his uncle had said, to fly down into the few fruit trees beside the house and to eat the fruit from the trees. He, the chief character, had watched while his uncle had fired the rifle. The uncle had announced that he had brought down a bird, although the chief character had not seen any bird fall from any tree. The uncle had then led him across the narrow paddock between the fruit trees and the edge of the forest. As he walked across the paddock the uncle had kicked at ankle-high clusters of green growth that was clearly not grass. He had explained to the chief character that the farm would never be properly cleared for as long as seeds and suckers from the forest could get into the paddock. He, the chief character, thought of the clusters of shoots and suckers and seedlings as stands of regrowth forest or of tall scrub in grassy countryside in the eyes of persons small enough to live in the house of two-storeys whose upper windows he had looked through.

  The rosellas had been perched in a tree that grew just outside the boundary of the farm, but the body of the dead bird had fallen just inside the boundary-fence. His uncle had turned the body over with the toe of his boot. When his uncle was looking elsewhere, he, the chief character, had crouched beside the body and had stroked with a fingertip the place low on the belly of the bird where a zone of bright green feathers adjoined a zone of dark-blue feathers.

  One of his girl-cousins had a face of the kind that he had fallen in love with often in the later years of his childhood, but he understood, even as a young child, that he ought not to think of a first-cousin as even a wife-in-his-mind. And even if he had not understood this, he would have supposed that he could not have seen the face of his cousin in his mind for long before he perceived about her the dullness that he found in most of the people of his mother’s family.

  The second of the two partly cleared blocks mentioned earlier he had seen when he was so young that he was never able in later years to connect his memories of the place. He could not remember how he got to the block or how he left the block. He could not remember any sequence of events from the time while he was at the block, which time he suspected to have been about a week. After his father and his mother had died, he recalled that he had never asked them to explain to him why they and he and his younger brother had lived for a week on the partly cleared block in the forest. One day after both their parents had died, he asked his younger brother whether he remembered having lived for a week in a hut with walls and roof of corrugated iron on a partly cleared block in a certain forest. His brother had thought that he, the chief character, was joking, but the brother was three years younger and presumably remembered nothing of their stay in the forest. After he had spoken to his brother, the chief character understood that he, the chief character, was the only person alive who remembered the partly cleared block in the forest as it had appeared during the few days nearly fifty years before when he had lived there.

  The family had lived in the hut during a week of mostly hot weather in January. Every year, they spent a week of holidays with his father’s parents and unmarried sisters and brother. His, the chief character’s, few memories of the so-called old house were of an early holiday there, but later holidays were always spent in the house in the large town. Since his father had never owned a motor car, he, the chief character, saw the countryside only occasionally, when his bachelor-uncle drove one or two of the family out of the town in his utility truck. And yet, in one or another year of the 1940s, someone had driven him and his brother and his parents and, surely, some bedding and a suitcase of clothes and a few days’ supply of food away from the old house and across the grassy countryside towards the line of trees in the distance and then among the trees of the forest and then to the partly cleared block far inside the forest. (He supposed they had travelled from the old house. Since he remembered little of the trip and only a few details from the week in the forest, he supposed he was remembering a time before his grandfather had died and the old house was sold. If so, then he, the chief character, might have travelled to the block in the forest in the back seat of the huge Dodge sedan owned by his grandfather, with the gas-producer attached to the back to provide fuel during the years of petrol rationing.)

  He did not know why his parents had chosen to spend their holiday in a hut with a dirt floor, hessian screens for windows, an open fireplace for cooking and no
sink or wash-trough or bath or ice-chest or radio. He remembered that the block had belonged to his father’s father, but this explained nothing. Seemingly, the block had not been bought under the same conditions that applied to purchasers such as his mother’s father in 1930; the hut had been built, and the trees had been cleared for fifty yards around the hut, but no pasture had been sown, no animals grazed, and no fences had been built. And yet, his father had worked from early morning until late afternoon on every day of his stay, felling trees in the farthest part of the block, sawing the trunks and trimming the branches away, and then dragging and manhandling the logs into stacks as tall as himself. Perhaps, so the chief character supposed, his father had done all this work in the heat of January merely for the love of it. In later years, his father had seldom talked about the bush, but he, the chief character, was always able to remember the sound of his father’s voice on the day when they had been driven into the forest. His father had been pointing out to the driver or to his, the chief character’s, mother, or to both the stretches of the red gravel roads that he remembered having worked on during the year when he had worked as a young man with one of the gangs making roads through the forest. Perhaps, so the chief character supposed, his father had often dreamed of going back to the forest again. Perhaps the forest was the place where his, the chief character’s, father had met the young woman who later became his wife, he being at the time a farmer’s son working on a road gang and she being the daughter of a settler on a block in the forest.

  Any of the preceding explanations was possible, he sometimes thought, but the most likely explanation had to do with the debts that his father owed throughout his life. He, the chief character, had never understood the details of his father’s loans from his father and some of his brothers and sisters but he, the chief character, knew that his father had paid back during his lifetime little of the money that he had borrowed. He had got into debt even before he was married. The western suburb where he lived when he first came to Melbourne was near Flemington Racecourse, and he had got to know several track-work riders and strappers and even a man who made his living as a commission agent for several trainers. He, the father, told little to his wife and children, but his son, the chief character, understood that his father had always bet beyond his means, that he had often bet on credit, that he had several times borrowed large sums against his share of his father’s estate, and that he had paid back none of this money before his father’s death. He, the chief character, supposed as the most likely explanation for his father’s cutting timber for a week on his own father’s block in the forest that he, the man who had got into debt, wanted to show his father that he was not an idler and, at the same time, to remit through his unpaid woodcutting and clearing some of the interest on his debts.

  He, the chief character, sometimes entertained another possible explanation for his father’s having chopped wood for a week. His father, throughout his life, had devised impractical schemes for starting afresh. Even in his fifties, he made enquiries about a scheme for establishing farmers on a so-called land reclamation project near Esperance, in Western Australia. When he remembered his father standing beside the stacks of timber he had built and looking around the large clearing he had made in the forest, he, the chief character, supposed his father might have intended to turn the whole block into a farm and to settle there with his wife and his sons.

  Each morning while they lived in the hut, his father left soon after breakfast. He walked away between the trees in the direction of the rear of the block, following a track that was wide enough for a motor vehicle. He, the chief character, understood that a truck had been driven into the forest from time to time in the past in order to collect timber from trees that had been felled. He was not allowed to walk along the track into the trees. On the one day when he had seen his father at work and the stacks of timber, he and his brother had been led along the track by their mother. He, the chief character, spent much of his time laying out a network of toy farms on the outer edge of the clearing around the hut. In order to make the ground smooth for his toy roads and fences and farmhouses, he had to pull out of the ground some of the smaller grasses, but he left in the soil the larger clumps. He had learned on his first day on the block that one at least of the common plants there could slice through the skin of his hand and could draw blood.

  Whenever he remembered his games during the years when he remembered the hut in the forest often after having seldom remembered it for many years, which years – the years of his remembering – followed an event that will be reported in the paragraph following the next paragraph, he supposed that he imagined himself during all of his games as living with one or another wife-in-his-mind on one of the toy farms that he had cleared near the toy forests that he had left uncleared. At some time during one of the years mentioned in the previous sentence, the chief character remembered having seen for a moment of the one day mentioned in the fifth sentence of the previous paragraph some of the blue or green feathers on the breast of a bird that flew through a shaft of sunlight in a place of dense timber and undergrowth beyond the clearing that his father had made in the forest. He, the chief character remembered his father telling him that the bird was one or another kind of kingfisher. After he had remembered these matters, the chief character sometimes saw in his mind as though they were details that he remembered images of a stream of water flowing through parts of the forest where his father had not yet gone.

  On one of his last days in the hut, the weather was so hot that his mother told his father before he left that she was afraid a bushfire might break out somewhere in the forest that day. He, the chief character, watched the sky all day. In mid-afternoon, the sky to the south-east became filled with dark-grey clouds, but they were the clouds of a thunderstorm that broke over the forest soon afterwards. The sky was dark for half an hour during the storm, and the rain was so loud on the iron roof of the hut that he and his mother had to shout their words. He was afraid for his father, who was still out in the forest, and who might have been struck by lightning. But the storm ended suddenly, and the sky became a clear pale blue, and his mother led him and his brother a short way along the track while they looked out for their father. They saw him before he saw them. He looked old and dejected, but only because his hat and his clothes were wet and dripping and because he was looking downwards to avoid stepping into the pools of water in the wheel-ruts on the track between the trees.

  At some time during the mid-1980s, he, the chief character, calculated that thirty years had passed since he had left school. He had never joined any organisation for old boys of his school, nor had he made any effort to stay in touch with any of his schoolfellows, but at the time just mentioned he decided that he would begin reading each day in the newspaper the column headed DEATHS, keeping his eye out for the first one or two of his contemporaries to have died in their early middle age. On a certain morning soon after the time just mentioned, his eyes were drawn towards a certain entry in one of the columns headed DEATHS, which entry had brought to his mind an impression first of what he called to himself afterwards prickliness and second of what he called to himself afterwards blackness. Each of these impressions was caused by a cluster of full points and upper-case letters in the entry. Both the full points and the upper-case letters had been used in the abbreviations placed after the names of members of religious orders of the Catholic Church. The entry was a report of the death of a man whose four sons had all become members of one or another religious order. The surname at the head of the entry was a most unusual surname, and he, the chief character, had suspected at once what he verified a moment later when he read through the whole text of the entry. The man who had died had been the father of four sons and two daughters. Each of the sons had become a member of a religious order of the Catholic Church, but each of the daughters had married and had become the mother of at least four children. One of the daughters had been, more than twenty-five years before, the young woman who had sat with the
chief character in a private box at Caulfield Racecourse, as was reported in the section of this story headed with the words In the Blue Dandenongs.

  After he had said goodbye to the young woman just mentioned, on a hillside in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne on a day in autumn more than twenty-five years before he would read the notice in the newspaper of the death of her father and in the circumstances reported earlier in this story, he and she merely nodded or murmured to one another if they happened to pass in the building where they both worked. Some months after they had gone together to Caulfield Racecourse, she was transferred to another department on another floor of the building where they both worked. A year or more later, he read in the publication that reported appointments and vacancies and such matters that she had resigned from the State Public Service. He learned soon afterwards from one of the young women in his office that the young woman who had resigned had done so because she had been recently married and because her husband was a farmer in a country district of Victoria. The young woman who gave him this information did not know which country district the married couple were now living in. However, the compiler of the notice of death mentioned earlier had followed the custom of inserting in parentheses after the given name of each of the daughters of the dead person both the married name of the daughter and the place where the daughter lived.