Heart of the Grass Tree

by Molly Murn

  July, 1829

  William is reminded of Minnie. There are smears of dried blood on the baby’s head and a white, waxy coating that makes it appear lighter-skinned than it is. When Minnie was born he had watched with curious dread from the bushes, and perhaps it was that experience he had called on now to help Maringani. William kisses Maringani’s glistening forehead. The skin of her cheeks is polished crimson. As it sucks noisily, the baby’s wet, fuzzy hair gleams against Maringani’s full breast in the firelight. Maringani motions for William to sit beside her. Kneeling down gently, he smooths the damp curls clinging at Maringani’s neck and then takes hold of the baby’s foot. It is softer than anything he has ever felt, the sole criss-crossed with thousands of tiny creases, like a crinkled, unblemished square of silk. Maringani leans her head back on the pile of skins and closes her eyes. She is barely able to hold the baby from exhaustion or something else that William is unable to read in her. William slides his arm underneath hers and moves her carefully so that she is propped against him. He has learnt to be so very gentle with her body, learnt to make it sing with his. He puts his arms under hers and supports the baby against her breast. Maringani’s hair tickles his chin, so he rubs his whiskers into the crown of her head and he can feel the perfect weight of her body as she sinks against him.

  Maringani watches William with the baby. It is wrapped in a sling, secured to his chest. Maringani refuses to look at the child, even as he passes it to her for nursing.

  Mari yer should see ’is eyelashes—they long. Like yers. Brown eyes. They is gettin’ darker. William sits beside her with the fleshy lump lying on his knees, its feet pawing at William’s stomach. Maringani turns her face away.

  Mari, William whispers. I’ve brought you some ngalaii, he says, holding out the honey he has collected in a wolokaii from the stem of the grass tree, just how she had taught him.

  I knows yer tired. I knows, Maringani, I knows. I’ll help yer. I’ll take ’im away and yer can rest, he says, as she takes the sponge of honey from him.

  Bundling up the little boy and putting his little finger in its mouth to placate it, he pads quietly away.

  Maringani catches a glimpse of the baby’s dark hair against the curve of William’s arm as they disappear behind a line of skins drying in the heat of the afternoon; she takes a deep suck of honey to keep her from falling.

  William decides that Maringani isn’t interested in the baby because she is still missing Emue. After he’d returned from the mainland and when he’d finally found Maringani again living alone with Minnie in the bush, he’d asked her if she wanted to go home. But she had wanted to stay. With him. Maringani never utters Emue’s name, but there is a faraway look to her now that he can’t penetrate. Perhaps she misses the other women too? Poll, who’d stayed on the mainland, and Mooney and Puss, who were god knows where. He imagined after the camp disbanded that Mooney and Puss had stayed with their men. But there was no telling what those women would do once they put their mind to something. Unease gripped him across the shoulders. His people, all broken up. And his fault, too. He should have protected Emue. And now here’s someone so new and helpless on his watch. William worries how they will get sealskins now—how they will get enough with just the two of them hunting, and how they will get their lays without Anderson and the merchant ships. He realises that, for the time being at least, he is the protector of this baby, and he is reluctant to leave him alone with Maringani. Mari needs time to recover. Then he’ll know what to do. Wallen’s farm perhaps?

  William straps the baby on his back and only unwraps it when he hands it to Maringani for its milk. He can’t think of anything more dizzying than the smell of the baby’s damp neck. He will protect this baby. And when its small fingers grasp at Maringani’s hair William’s heart just about shatters because she bats those brown hands away. He ignores the copper sheen when the baby’s own hair catches the light because it is unthinkable to see Anderson in him. William wants to name the child but Maringani shakes her head at every name he suggests. For weeks, he is just ‘boy’, until William decides that a son deserves a proper name. He calls him Samuel. Minnie calls him pangar, seal, and Maringani doesn’t call him anything at all.

  Melbourne

  Pearl uses the story-wire now, too. It sits on the little shelf behind her desk and she hopes it can help her understand. From her window, the small square of lawn holds shadows as the day slips away. A low Melbourne sky. The story-wire belonged to a friend, was all Nell had said—but it’s for scratching out stories in the sand. Pearl sweeps crumbs from the desk and then leans back in her chair, pressing her spine into the top strut and cracking her shoulders. Sometimes she is afraid of words and what they will bring—the way they can shape things; but also, how open one must be to receive them. They could burn you down to ash, or give you wings, fins, gills. She has read Nell’s little book three times. Almost every scene sets off a recollection: something Nell has told her, the overwhelming physicality of an island location, a conversation, a dream, a memory, a smell. All of these things inside the story. It is like a topography—this book. Everything she knows of Nell can be tracked. And everything she doesn’t know. Pearl places the story-wire round her neck and closes her eyes. She wants to recall the salt-collecting day, almost eight months ago now.

  She’d half run half slid down the dune to the beach, the canvas bag with all the salt-collecting things banging against her legs rhythmically. Nell followed more carefully behind with the water bottles and her cloth hat scrunched up in her hand. When Nell caught up with Pearl they’d walked to the furthest end of the bay, the sun firm on their necks. Nell paused every now and again to pick up shells, but also to cough. Planting her hand square in the middle of her chest she coughed lightly, more like a clearing of the throat, and then some bright or worn shell or stone would catch her eye in the sand and she’d stoop from the hips to inspect. Pearl wondered whether Nell was trying to take attention away from her breathlessness. It was like walking the length of the beach with a child—they got nowhere.

  Will you see Diana on your way home? Nell had asked.

  Probably not. I have to be back for the school holidays. We’ve got Lewis for the whole lot this time. I’ll call her tonight maybe.

  And how is Lewis?

  He’s um, quite lovely and a bit … quiet.

  Oh?

  Well, I don’t know. We’re very close but I can never quite get to him. He worries a lot, I think. About his mum. About us. Something like that.

  It must be confusing for him, going back and forth.

  Well yes. But he’s fine with it.

  The conversation went something like that and Pearl remembers now that she’d been annoyed with Nell bringing up the back and forth. As if she was such an expert. But then, Pearl supposes, she was.

  The water nipped gently at Pearl’s ankles, her chipped silver nail polish glinting in the colourless water. She remembers that image like a photograph. And the whole uncluttered expanse of the bay lying before them—the dramatic slate cliffs in the distance too sheer, as if they’d been split clean like a log. Something cleaved.

  They’d talked about Crete and how beautiful the beaches were there, but how they were strewn with litter. And they talked about how Nico was desperate to take photos without any rubbish in the background. Or even people. We’re so lucky to have this, she’d said to Nell, gesturing to take in the whole lot, the water, the dunes, the muddy frothy inlet.

  Yes, I remember, Nell said. You sent me your ‘rubbish series’ of photographs. And a mountain herb pressed between pages.

  Oh god. I did. Yes.

  It still has a smell to it. Even three years later.

  Well getting close to four years now, thinks Pearl, and she sucks in sharply as if she’s been struck in the chest. The same reaction she’d had then on the beach.

  Nell had grabbed Pearl’s wrist and squeezed it, pecked Pearl quickly on the cheek. Pearl leant down and pulled on her sandshoes, and Nell began clamb
ering up the first clump of rocks. Pearl followed, scrunching up her toes inside the damp and gritty shoes. The rocks were nibbed and spiked and pitted and held bowls of shining water in large craters. She is like a mountain goat, thought Pearl, observing Nell’s quickening pace once they were on uneven terrain. Her arms and legs were brown angled sticks, her skin buffed to sheeny velvet, as she picked on ahead. Pearl remembers this imprint of summer—how bright the sun was compared to the quiet deep dusk of now. Of winter.

  They reached a rockpool, neck-deep, and the water gushed in from the ocean side. She’d swum in the same pool with Nico and Lewis in the days after Nell’s wake, and when they’d hopped out and were all wrapped up in their towels, they noticed a black stingray butterflying around the white scaly edges of the rockpool. Pearl and Nico looked at each other in alarm and didn’t mention it to Lewis. She gazed into the depression and made a wish. The same one. In Crete, she lit votive candles inside humpy whitewashed churches. On Kangaroo Island, she prayed mostly to water.

  It was reading about Maringani scraping salt at the lagoon that took her back here, to the rockpools and the salt and the stingrays, and to Nell squatting down, hitching up her skirt into her knickers. Nell clamped her hat on her head impatiently, as she always did, like she was annoyed by having to worry about such inconveniences. Pearl hurried over, wincing at the pointy rocks digging in even through the rubber sole of her shoes. She crouched beside Nell and slipped the canvas bag from her shoulder. She passed Nell a spoon and set out the containers. The salt was bright, tessellated, and crusted the edge of the dry pool in rough crystals. Pearl stuck her finger into it, the top layer cracking. Nell scraped the spoon through the whitest part and collected the salt, banging the spoon on the container’s edge to plop out the contents. Pearl followed with her own spoon, careful to avoid the watery grey parts. The edges of her fingernails stung. This is a memory overlaid and overlaid from every time she’s collected salt with Nell. The stinging was because she bit her fingernails.

  Nell had asked her about work. The bookshop. And they’d discussed how books made a room beautiful. They’d mentioned the smell of paper. Pearl told Nell that once she’d been asked to recommend a book for a dying child. How do you ever choose such a book? When the customer left, the book all prettily wrapped, she’d cried.

  The two of them had then moved wordlessly over to the next pool and started on a new container. There was salt in little dips and curves everywhere like white shadows. Like snow. The scraping rhythmical, Nell first and then Pearl shadowing.

  I was always writing little books and poems when I was a girl. I’ve got drawers full of them. Little books all stapled together with funny names, like Duck Girl, Nell explained.

  Ha. You do? You should show me.

  I’m writing a bit at the moment, Nell had said.

  It was the first Pearl had heard about writing. She’d always thought painting was Nell’s thing.

  I don’t have things, Nell said, irritated. I’m what you might call a dormant writer. I was always writing as a girl. Making up stories. But I stopped at some point. Just couldn’t. My words were drops of rain disappearing on concrete.

  Pearl remembers Nell’s face then. Brown, strong, lean. A warrior. This image of Nell is forever emblazoned.

  She wanted to ask her more about the writing, but Nell was already walking off around the next corner of rocks, one hand wedged into the small of her back, the other steadying herself on rock ledges. And so there it was. The only time they’d ever spoken about writing, a passing conversation, etched now forever, and this story unfolding before her. What was Pearl to do with it?

  Afterwards they’d spread the salt out thinly on trays to dry off in the sun. There is still a whole jar of salt left from that day, sitting on her kitchen bench in the next room, a little of it spooned into an earthen dish for crushing straight onto cooking. The salt day was the last day she ever spent with Nell—she has run through every detail of it over and over and over again, combing their conversation. Sitting at her desk now, she looks up the word ‘dormant’. Lying asleep or as if asleep. Torpid. In a state of rest. Quiescent. Inoperative. In abeyance. Are you still a writer if you don’t write? How long had Nell been dormant? What awoke her out of torpor and why? She looks up the word ‘write’. Etymologically speaking, its meaning is associated with cutting, rubbing, tearing, scoring, incising, writhing. All of these activities can be done to the body, thinks Pearl, as much or more so, as to sand or bark or clay or paper. Is writing a kind of writhing, she wonders. Did Nell come to accept that to write is to also incise, involve herself bodily? Pearl has a headache. The only thing she knows is this. We each have a body. And we each have a story. In the end, only the story remains. And Nell’s is just so full of gaps, so dripping with honey-drenched holes. She rests her palm on Nell’s little red book. Her beautiful heart story. She opens to the very last page.

  So, the story went something like this, but of course, it’s not the beginning. Sol’s ancestors—long before Maringani and William—already knew white danger would come from the sea; the fires of knowledge had warned them so. Their sacred story fires were always burning, before the pale men arrived, and are still burning, so that as I write this, I know my words fall short. That beyond words there are ways of seeing, ways of knowing, that illumine the currents between all things—the connective tissue of the universe.

  All I have of Sol now is his story-wire—a lightning rod to bring down words—and the smell of smoke in my clothes from all that burns.

  Pearl, I hope you read this story, and I hope you understand that I’ve held it in me always, but that I had to wait for the words to come. That now I burn with fever. Fire that renews. And dear Pearl, please release this story from the heart place where it grew.

  1831

  Three Wells River

  William has been told the story many times but still doesn’t believe it. He imagines his father unbreakable. A tree that will not fall. A fire that will not go out. Hewn of rock and timber, is Anderson. Sturdy stuff. He is of this earth. Taken by water, in the end. William sees it clearly in his mind—the way his father’s body must have turned over and over, filled to the gills with water, becoming debris, swollen with dying and rolling in the undertow. There was nothing to be done, Munro said, he drowned. Would Anderson have thought of William in those last moments? Of his mother? Emue? Maringani? He shudders. But William’s days are spread out cleanly now without a wrinkle. Here at the settlement there is plenty to be done with the crops and the hogs and the wallaby skinning. And now there’s no Anderson to take them by surprise. The girls are safe. And baby Samuel. Yet he aches for his father—the briny, manly smell of him a primal stirring—even if it makes him sick to think of it and that awful night and the faraway look of Maringani sometimes. She is better here, just being with the women, ‘Guvner’ Wallen’s wives, Sal and Suke, and the others from Van Diemen’s Land with their close curly hair, and different song in their voice—Palawa—and Mooney, who is here with Munro. William remembers when he’d first clapped eyes on Maringani—the jut of her chin and her wide scared eyes, straight hair like reeds. But especially he remembers how much light she brought. She was like an unexpected flower quivering in the new air. Even then, she made him smile in spite of himself. Even then, he worried for her knowing what men could do.

  He turns the soil, black and loamy, spreading it over the first green shoots of the potatoes, covering them up for they grow in darkness. Like me, he thinks, not able to remember much of anything but the cold and the dirt and his father’s big hands before Maringani came. Behind him are the rows of cabbages, little nubs still forming in the folds of their leaves, and the fowls strutting and scratching and clacking between them. And further in the distance, on the sloping bank of the river, is Wallen’s log hut, leaning crooked to the west—held up it seems—by the stone chimney built at one end. The bark of the exterior is rough, stringy, and all the piccaninnies, as Wallen calls them, like to pull at the fibres unti
l Guvner chases them away with his stick. But he is gentle with them. And this is what William admires most in the guvner—he is a kind of chief hereabouts but doesn’t use his lordship to make others small or do his bidding. Not like it was before. And so here they all are, chipping in, the men more like their wives now, draped in skins and digging for water. Talking in language. Smelling like foxes, say the ones who don’t stay—say the ones who pass through, tossed in by the sea, taking skins and salt—leaving rum, sugar and heavy-booted footprints. William doesn’t envy them at all. No, this is the life.

  He checks on the watermelons by knocking on them. They’re a way off yet.

  Lately, he’s been thinking there never was a mother, or house, otherwise wouldn’t he have a memory, even just a song of one? His skin, though not like Maringani’s, darkens up in the sun and he is always in the sun, and it doesn’t blister and peel and welt like Anderson’s. If he makes the space in his skull very still and spacious, he thinks his first impressions are of green green light, mosquitoes, saltwater, singing. Somewhere else.

  Maringani can feel it again. First it was a dream, a knowing, and now it’s a quickening inside. It will come when the nights are getting colder, when the Maringani stars appear in the sky, but before the song of the whales, kondoli. In her sleep she sings it into being. As she weaves, she stitches in time to this new heartbeat, winding the rushes over and through, the mat growing in her lap like her family’s growing. Different, this time, she knows. Maringani sits with Sal—Maggerlede to the women—at the entrance to the wurlie. Sal with her grubs and kalathami, native currants, stored in her frizzy hair, and the dogs lying around her, muzzling in, had been the one to rub Maringani in wallaby fat and bring water to her lips when first they arrived here. She’d been cold—so cold on the inside like she was just bones.