Heart of the Grass Tree

by Molly Murn

  Emue, Anderson says propping himself up on his elbow.

  Emue stops what she is doing, the animal skin spread across her lap, her belly round as the full moon curved above it. She keeps her eyes on her hands.

  Emue, look at me, Anderson mutters.

  She lifts her head slightly. He tries to remember the night before, sifting through images and sounds that splinter as soon as he tries to concentrate on them. He remembers waking Emue … and the girl … the girl was sleeping with her arm across her mother’s shoulders. He had pushed the arm away and the girl’s eyes snapped open. Velvet brown eyes. Wide and accusing. He couldn’t bear those eyes watching him. He had slunk away, back to the hut. He remembers Munro swilling the rum and he had grabbed the bottle from him. He remembers Everitt, laughing, toothless, as he gulped down more rum. After that, nothing.

  Emue hangs her head forward, springy curls falling down in front of her eyes. Anderson looks at her smooth shoulders, like wet stones. He sees the black and purple circlet of bruises around her upper arm.

  Emue, come here. Lie aside me, Anderson pleads, the words sticking in his throat.

  She doesn’t move. He can hear her soft, quiet breathing.

  Emue. If yer would just lie wid me then I wouldn’t … then I wouldn’t, but he falters mid-sentence because Emue looks up and meets his gaze. She stares right into him and then stands up letting the skin drop to the sand. Turning she walks away and he watches her feet flicking up with each step, the under-side pale like shells.

  Murray Lagoon

  Once inside Caroline’s place, Pearl stands with her back to the radiator until the creases of her knees burn against her jeans. The kettle is on, steaming up the window above the kitchen sink, and Uncle Jim shakes rain from his Akubra and places it on the table.

  I’m sorry to arrive like this. I don’t really know. What I’m doing. I guess.

  Cuppa, love? says Caroline.

  Pearl nods, Yes please, and moves away from the heater. Jim rattles the Arnott’s biscuit tin. Take a seat, Pearl. You’ve had a big day all right.

  She shrugs. I don’t know. Too many people back at the house. I can’t think.

  Do you wanna think right now? Family’s what you need. Just being together. No thinking.

  Caroline carries the cups of tea over and places them straight on the table. Pearl notices whitened rings all over the wood grain from so many hot cups. Do you take sugar?

  No thanks.

  Jim lumps several spoonfuls of sugar into his thick black tea and leans back on his chair. He stirs the sugar for a long time and the cup rings out against the spoon. So I’m glad you’re here, Pearl. I’ve got some stuff for you. And look, I’m real sorry. Culture way, you’d be in sorry camp. Culture way, she’s your mother.

  Pearl takes a sip of the tea. It is strong and bitter.

  In the morning, we’ll go walking, all right. Sunrise okay? Tonight, I’ll leave you two ladies to yarn. He takes three Monte Carlos and dips them into his tea one after the other, shoving them into his mouth before they collapse. Jim stands and scrabbles through a drawer in the sideboard. He drops an envelope on the table and then makes for the screen door. As he steps outside the cold rushes in and Pearl shivers.

  Caroline slides the envelope over towards Pearl. These are for you. Just some photos and things Uncle’s been collecting.

  The room darkens momentarily as the power surges and the lights go off, and then back on again. Caroline is looking for candles. Everyone’s worried about you back at King George, she says, lining up some tea lights on the counter. She places matches beside her. I love a blackout. Always prepared. Outside, the trees toss in the gale. The rain is so loud that Pearl raises her voice.

  I know. I’m awful. Nico just got here. I only just picked him up from the ferry. I can’t face him. Jim’s burning cigarette tip pricks the darkness beyond the screen door. Beyond him, the lagoon is blacker even than the night.

  I lost my nephew last week—that’s why Uncle’s here. And for Nell. He’ll stay for Saturday, of course. Caroline bunches her thick dark hair, blonde at the tips, and twists it up into a headband. She wears a black T-shirt and bright clay beads. She is lined but youthful-looking. He was in prison. My nephew he was in prison. Uncle’s taking it hard. The young men, they’re not learning the law, our law. Uncle feels he’s failing. She shakes her head. Why can’t you face Nico, huh?

  Ah Caro, I feel terrible. Stupid. I’m so sorry about your nephew.

  Caroline covers Pearl’s hand with her own. She wears silver rings and bangles and her knuckles are dry. Hey, it’s all right. Listen to Uncle, though, you need family. That don’t mean sometimes it ain’t hard work, right sister? She laughs and swigs down the last of her tea.

  The screen door bangs open and Jim comes inside, bringing the rain. He’s left his boots at the door and walks towards them in his socks. He warms his hands, fanning them over the oil heater, and Pearl notices that his jeans are wet through. Well I’m off to bed, girls. I’ll wake you first thing.

  Night, Uncle.

  Night, Caro. Night, Pearl. Hey Pearl, I reckon you’re gonna be okay. He winks at her. If you’re anything like that Nell of ours. She’s got fire in the blood that one. Or something like that. He laughs and rubs his jaw. Driving out in that storm. Jeez, Pearl.

  Pearl smiles. Uncle and Caro have a way of slowing her right down—their gentle attention is without agenda. Open-hearted. Fire in the blood? No, she doesn’t want that. She’s working on unfurling the tight folds of her heart instead. Or something like that. Becoming more like water. She tips up the envelope and a photo flicks out. A young man, impossibly handsome, impossibly young, wearing an army slouch—bunched smiling cheeks, straight teeth, dark eyes, shiny skin. She turns the photo over. Solomon, 1944.

  The next morning is damp and gentle. Uncle Jim walks slightly ahead—shoulders loose, body forward on the front of his toes, his steps almost skimming the surface. Treading lightly. Pearl and Caroline follow along the dry creek bed.

  Keep together, he says. We’re a mob. Small one.

  Pearl realises her instinct is to hang back. Walk alone. She thinks about this tendency. And then lets herself be carried along in the wake. There is a memory of water here, the way the sand is gouged and clumps of leaf and stick debris wrap themselves around tree trunks and boulders, as if in mid-flight. As if the creek had only right then disappeared. The sun is newly risen, so everything is silver and cold. Everything is washed clean from the storm and the trees shimmy with water. New branches have fallen. Each gum leaf on the floor of the creek bed holds one drop of moisture. Mercury balls. Caroline stoops to pick up a leaf and tips the water in her mouth. Pearl does the same. Later, all the water will disappear, as if it had never rained.

  What we are looking for, says Uncle, is the glint of wings. He stops at a sugar gum, leans the small tomahawk against the trunk, and looks up. He places his ear to the tree and then knocks it. We’re listening for a hollow and a buzzing. He smiles. Pearl, come.

  Jim moves away and Pearl steps up to listen. She holds the sides of the trunk and presses her ear to the bark. At first, nothing. And then it’s like placing a cheek to a person’s stomach—a gurgling of water and peristalsis. She’s not sure if what she’s hearing is the sound of the wind amplified, or water being drawn up by the tree’s own vascular system, or her own blood coursing. She closes her eyes.

  It’s a talking tree, but no bees there, says Jim, starting to walk again. Caroline clasps her hands behind her back and steps in beside Jim with his little backpack banging on his hips. Pearl bends to peel off her shoes and socks and follows them. The sand is cold and lumpy with mallee roots. Jim tells quietly of the black moss growing on the rocks and Pearl knows the moss story holds many more layers of meaning than Jim shares, or even knows himself. He tells of the grass tree being the spurt of the whale—of the connection between whale law and echidna law. Law of the land and law of the sea. Pearl takes one step after another and tries to keep her s
houlders loose. Her feet burn with cold. They enter an opening as if crossing a threshold, going down a series of stepped boulders, and the grass trees grow thickly for a while, and they look like little humps of families in all their odd shapes and sizes. Pearl feels a honey warmth spreading through her belly and she can’t explain it. She thinks of Nico, and her body softens. Sorry, darling. You could have been here for this too. If I wasn’t shutting you out. Caroline stops to crouch and gestures towards a large stone with a flat surface. It is patterned with a series of rings like the rings of trees, or watermarks from the tide on a beach. Pearl squats beside her.

  Good place here, says Jim, and slips off his backpack.

  Caroline takes a photo of the rock with its undulating pattern. I’ll use this, she says. For an artwork. Pearl nods. She is noticing that there are repeating patterns in the bark, in the rocks, in the clouds, in her own fingerprints. Unseen currents running between the leaves and the stones and the wind and the light and the sky. Between the three of them. Connective tissue. She yearns for Nell. And for her sister. She is almost ready to go home. Her hand closes around the scraper in her pocket.

  They find no bees and no honey on their walk but Jim leads them to a fire circle and he neatens up the stones and he rakes it clean and he builds a fire. We keep the fire clean, he says. Our cooking place. Jim lays a wire rack on the flames and turns it over. Have to clean the wire too, he says.

  Caroline mixes flour and seeds and water in a plastic dish she’s brought with her, kneading the mixture into dough, before breaking it up into small pieces.

  Pearl, flatten each one slightly, like this. For johnnycakes.

  So Pearl moulds the johnnycakes on a flat rock, stacking them into a little pile, and they wait for the fire to be ready.

  Uncle Jim, that photo? Solomon? Pearl ventures.

  For a long time, Jim says nothing. When the fire’s ready, we’ll rake back the coals and make an opening for the damper. Here. Jim points with his fire stick.

  Caroline nods. Pearl, make the cakes a bit flatter. Too thick like that. They’ll puff up.

  Pearl presses her fingers into the damper and pulls out the edges.

  Sol. Born here on the island. He was kin. Handsome, eh? There’s a lotta stuff for you to look through among that lot.

  Jim stands and rolls back some of the bigger logs with his long stick. Caroline stands and arches her back then brushes the flour from her T-shirt. An eagle drifts. The smoke wends towards Pearl and then whips back to Jim. The slight tang of salt tells of the nearby ocean. An eagle marks the sky and the ocean rings out. Clouds striate the sky holding nothing. Ants sieve dirt like flour. Beneath ant mounds, feldspar, quartz, gold, kyanite, lepidolite, tourmaline. Fault lines. Water table. All the folds of the world. All the songs. All the scars.

  Who was he? Pearl asks.

  His aunty came to Raukkan, the mission at Point McLeay, from the island when she was older. Kicked off the island. I grew up on that mission. We could be related—she was Ngarrindjeri. But with our people so scattered, we have to build a picture from fragments. I don’t know, love.

  Your Nell was gathering information, and Uncle was helping because she was writing a history or something of the island, Caroline adds. Did you know that?

  Yeah, so I’ve been finding everything I can for Nell. Photos, articles, scraps. Anything at all related to this place. Jim spreads the coals flat and repositions the wire rack carefully.

  I think she did mention something. Her love letter to the island. It wouldn’t surprise me at all, Pearl says, smiling.

  She gave me things, I gave her things. Mutual exchange. Jim drops a johnnycake onto the rack. It hurts here, he holds his stomach, that there are gaps in our history starting from them sealing times. For blackfella. And whitefella.

  Uncle was so chuffed when Nell found that scraping tool. At Waubs Wall.

  Oh my god, Pearl laughs.

  What is it?

  Oh, I have that here. I’ve been gripping on to the bloody thing all night. Here, you should have it, Uncle.

  He shakes his head. Nah, I reckon that one’s yours. Nell tried to give it to me, too.

  No please. I want others to see it. Take it back to the cultural museum.

  Jim nods and then is wracked with coughing. He leans into his long fire stick. Thumps his chest. For a moment, despite his long-legged height, he seems frail.

  Jeez, Uncle.

  Flip those johnnies over now, Caro. I reckon it’s time.

  Caroline uses long metal tongs to pick up the flats of damper and turn them over. They are puffy and striped and perfectly burnt and Pearl’s mouth waters. Jim wriggles the wire rack over to new coals.

  Pearl lies back in the sand and the sky is clear and thin, a membrane. She closes her eyes, and she can see something like a bright shining tree but wonders if what she is seeing is just her own branching capillaries. Her own membrane. She could sleep now and not go home. She could see Nell’s face and try to hold on to the shifting picture. She could will the deep of her womb into perfect balance. She could rest until she was renewed.

  The johnnycakes are light and fluffy and steaming inside. Caroline breaks them open and slathers them with butter. She passes one to Pearl. The butter drips over Pearl’s knuckles and she licks it up, and then butter drips down her wrist. She can’t remember when she last ate so well.

  For more than two weeks I could not get out of bed. I lay knotted in my sheets, burning up, and the white of the walls shimmied and threw off such a glare that I could barely open my eyes. Mother appeared often with fresh glasses of water and lemon, and fussed with the curtains or the bedclothes, until her bustling made me dizzy and I groaned and turned away from her. Oh how I hated her—that deep frown line and those heavy deliberate steps. Fat ankles. In those murky days of illness it was as if she pinned me down with her solidity, her constant attention, and all I wanted to do was fly up through the heights of fever and out of my body. I could feel Sol just over at the next farm. How I wished for him. If he’d walked into that bedroom then, I would have flown right back into myself as if each cell of my body was spreading out, widening in diameter, instead of this tightly wound thing I’d become. I remember the high watermarked ceiling. The gauze curtains lifting up dancer-like and falling suddenly as the breeze dropped. I remember the knobs of the dresser like big open mouths gaping at me. And I remember the floorboards and how the dust turned to gold in the sunlight. I remember the terrible emptiness I felt in that room that once had been mine, but was now the bedroom of a girl who had been scoured down to powder.

  When Father met us at the jetty the sky was thick and pewter. He was absurdly tall, and from a distance he seemed frailer, thinner, his suit crumpled and hanging off his sharp shoulder bones, and his hat pressed to his chest. I almost wept when he lifted me out of the boat and tucked me under his arm. He didn’t say anything to me at all, but stroked the back of my hand as we walked to the bullock cart. Mother struggled behind with the suitcases. Peter what about the luggage? she called after him. Father just kept walking, not looking at anybody else, as if nothing mattered except he and I.

  Just leave them. I’ll come back for them.

  But she ignored him and I could hear her breathing heavily, straining with the luggage, and following just behind. Father plumped the cushions around me on the back seat, and I looked back at the people scurrying at the wharf like ants when they know it’s going to rain. I searched for him, Sol, in everything—along the tracks, in the paddocks, on verandahs—as we made the slow journey home.

  1823

  Chapman River

  William rushes into the hut to find Anderson hacking at his hair with a sharp but dirty knife.

  The baby, the baby.

  Boy or gerl? Anderson asks as he razors through another hunk of grey and copper coarse hair, throwing it into the fire.

  Girl. She’s tiny, answers William, his voice quivering with pride.

  Anderson finally turns around. Tiny? What’s wr
ong with it?

  Nothing, Father. She’s just. Small, William says, thinking how tiny the baby’s head was against Emue’s heavy breast. He thinks the baby is like the sky and the earth all at once with her blue eyes and brown skin.

  Do you want to come see her? asks William touching his father’s elbow.

  Anderson shrugs William’s hand away. No. And you are not to be lurkin’ down there now. Do yer hear?

  Why can’t I?

  Because you ain’t a half-caste, and I don’t want you gettin’ influenced. Another handful of hair in the flames, sizzling and acrid.

  But Father—

  No son of yer mother is going to ’sociate with a half-caste, do yer hear me? Anderson grips William by the shoulders as he spits the words inches away from his face. William can smell the rum on his breath.

  He meets his father’s eyes and whispers, I ain’t got no mother.

  William hears something break inside Anderson. There’s a terrible tearing sound as he throws William to the floor.

  Anderson holds the boy’s hand to the coals and his ears ring and the angry scar on his chest rages livid. The smell makes him gag yet the boy does not scream. He is limp in Anderson’s arms. You ain’t got your mother’s hands now either. He wraps him in a skin and lays him down. Dotes on him. Ferries water back and forth. Strokes his forehead. Wraps his hand. Puts out the fire. Sings to him. Weeps. Clutches at him. William looks up at him with helpless seal pup eyes. It is nice to be needed, Anderson realises.