The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  Dick meant well enough going on like that, but the list of misfortunes was no help and nor was the word he used, ‘few’. What was the real meaning of that word when what it said was not many when what it meant was many while what it denied was too many? He and Ettie both already knew about most of the few and more of the same, not to mention their baby that was never more than a lumpy mess of blood, and as for getting on with the job, he knew about that too and intended to do so. But before he could do it and keep his mind on the view of his clean cleared hillsides well sown with fresh green grass and stocked with sheep, he crossed the stream where they had bridged it at the narrow and walked down on the other side to where the lad had been crushed. There was no need for Freddy’s sextant to help him find the place, the sextant and compass were in his mind now and he found where he had dug out under the great elbow of the branch to free the lad’s body. It was already like a grave and should remain so. He would fence it when the tree was gone because that was decent and the least he could do.

  He felt the bee hit his cheek before the pang of its sting, and then another and another on his neck and face. Then he saw that they were everywhere around the fallen tree and the droning sound of them all around him, and suddenly louder and shriller as they stung. His hat was covered with them when he tore it off to wave the bees away, and they chased him as he ran to the riverbank and jumped in. The water was freezing and when his feet found the shingle at the river junction he was shaking with cold but also with the shock of the stings. There were stings on his face and neck and also on his hands and some of the bees had got inside his shirt and stung him on the chest. He got his coat and shirt off and brushed the bees away into the stream. His face and eyes were swelling up and the pain of the stings was very sharp. When he got home, Ettie pulled his boots and his wet gear off and nipped the stings out with tweezers – she knew not to squeeze the poison. Then she put bluebag on them. There were maybe two score of them, she said. He could hardly see her face through the swelling. Then he lay down on the bed and she covered him with a couple of blankets to warm him up.

  He thought he had not slept at all but had only been seeing the dark stained crack in the fallen tree trunk around which the bees had been flying. There was a strangely shaped collar of broken brown honeycomb around the crack. The image was very clear and sharp as if he was paying it special attention. But then next there above him were the faces of Aggie and Adam and he could hardly see them clearly at all.

  It was bees from their nest in the tree that got knocked down, he told them through lips that were numb and thick.

  The meaning of it was clear but he could hardly speak what he thought that was.

  By next afternoon the swelling was somewhat gone but his face was still red and tender and the bites had become itchy. The rain came down steadily, cool and with its dripping rustling sound in the trees, as he rode over to the settlement to see about some help with trimming branches from the fallen trunks. He lifted his face up to let the rain in under his hat brim and down his neck to his chest. In his mind still the image of the bees’ nest and along with it the image of the shallow scooped-out place where young Tom’s crushed body had lain. And the kiddies’ faces, blurred and worried.

  Were the bees angry, Adam asked?

  That he did not know, he told them. At any rate the bees had been disturbed when the tree with their nest in it was pushed over.

  But did they know who had pushed the tree over, and would they remember? Aggie’s brow was wrinkled with worry and with the effort of looking into the future where her daddy would always be hunted by the angry bees.

  That he did not know either, but he doubted it.

  ‘My God!’ said Dick when he saw his face. ‘They had you in their sights! But never troubled us when we were cutting the scarfs and whatnot the other day.’

  But at that time of course the nest had been high up?

  But perhaps it was the bees that had chased young Tom down the hill when he should have been going up? Wolf kept this thought to himself because he doubted it but also because the two images, that of the dark honeycombed nest and that of the shallow scoop under the great branch elbow, could not be joined up in his thoughts. Both were there but each one was itself. They made a meaning not by being joined up but by being next to each other.

  Dick thought the bees were a swarm that had got away from the Badem place a bit further down the river. They had hives there with honey bees they’d brought in, they’d begun planting orchards a few years back. Wolf should chuck some kerosene into the nest and burn the buggers out before anyone went back to work there.

  A story began to be laid out after Wolf decided there and then to ride on a bit further from Dick’s to the Badem place and talk to the beekeeper. He did not hurry and nor did the story. In a way it was as though the story was telling him, not the other way around. Now the part with the almost sore stretched sensation in his arms and shoulders as he drove the last wedge into the drive’s uppermost back-cut was followed by the long loud creaking groan of the tree as it began to fall, and that groan by the clamour of birds flying up into the sky, and that racket by the silence that filled the shallow scoop where poor Tom’s body had been, and that scooped-out silence amid the sounds of the early-morning forest was followed by the all-around whine of the bees, and that sound and the pangs of the stings that came with it by the image of the dark opening to the bees’ nest and the crooked collar of brown honeycomb around it – and now that succession of story-parts, laid out along the path of the horse Blackie’s careful treads through the rainy scrub and the piles of half-burned rubbish along the valley floor, was joined by the sound of Ettie laughing and laughing as she looked at their finished handiwork, the dwelling on the cleared flat delta above the river that was half tent and half hut back then in that summer past, and her saying she thought old Thoreau would have run away for all he was worth.

  And each time he got to that part with the sound of Ettie’s laughter and the sight of her face still thin from being sick and then from losing the baby, another part got added, such as the picture he had in his mind now of the bees’ nest flaming up from a lit dousing of kerosene. And then, plod plod, Blackie’s hooves on the wet track. She huffed and gave her head a shake from time to time as if to say that the story would tell itself again and something more would always be added to it, but meanwhile she would just keep going.

  But when he saw the beehives on the far side of the cleared bush, the story halted and he reined the horse in and sat there looking at them. The rain had stopped and it was quiet in the clearing without the sound of it. The hives were simple wooden boxes stacked up three or four high, each stack with a flat plank on top and a large river stone on top of that. There were about a dozen of them in groups of two or three along the untidy edge of the clearing. The scrub had grown back behind them, the scruffy manuka stuff that Yorky cut his tea leaf with back at the railhead. The story had stopped at the bees’ nest burning with the stink of kerosene, or rather it had stopped with his decision not to do that, and now he wanted to turn around and go home but instead he hopped off Blackie and led her cautiously toward the hives. There was no sign of any bees around them but he kept his distance in any case. Then he heard a whistle and a shout and saw a man coming from the other side of the clearing.

  He was Wolf Wenczel from just up the river a bit, he had only wanted to have a closer look at the beehives, he told the man, he was sorry if he had trespassed, and was he Badem? Had they not met once back at the settlement when he was setting up his forge?

  The man was looking at Wolf’s face. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘It’s the blackasmith. So you’ve madeah their acquaintanceah.’ He was thin and dark with some streaks of grey in his beard and in his speech added an ‘ah’ to some words as if the thought they contained was not quite finished, though his manner was very quick and sure. Why didn’t Wolf walk back to the house with him and have a glass of tea? Then he could tell him ‘whereaboutah he got stungah’. He sa
id blackasmith and glass not cup, whereaboutah not whereabouts and stungah not stung as if English was not his usual speech. So they walked along to the house with Wolf leading Blackie. And so the story started up again, with Denis’s sharp look and the glint of a gold tooth in his mouth.

  When he got home that night he told Ettie about the Turk Badem who was from Levant near a town called Is-ken-der-un and whose name meant almond. They drank tea black out of glasses, with a spoon of honey to stir in. He was a widower but had his son and daughter-in-law with him. Where he came from was beautiful near the sea and mostly warm but there had been trouble and so they left. His joke was that no one could grow almonds down here in the valley where it was too cold in winter, but that his son was doing a good job of it – there were three little almonds already.

  And there they had been, running around. They were the same ages as Aggie and Adam but of course there was one more, the third, who had just begun to stagger, a little boy who flung his arms out to keep his balance, ‘like a dancer’, said Badem, kissing him.

  And why were the almonds here in the middle of nowhere, Ettie wanted to know. What was the matter with Levant wherever that was?

  Well, what had been the matter with Hamburg in Germany, was his reply. She should ask Ma when she came up here. And he bet she didn’t know that when it was cold in winter the bees all cuddled up together around their queen to keep her warm and hardly ever went outside. Just like this. He was holding her from behind in bed and telling his story in her ear.

  That was a fib he was just making up, Ettie reckoned – but she was almost falling asleep, and so he left out the part where Badem whose familiar name was Denis told him that the nest of bees that had stung him must have come from his place a while ago because the ones from around here were not like honey bees and could not sting. They must have come out after the tree was felled and their hive was broken. That would have made them angry because they would have been keeping their queen warm in there. He had bared his teeth with that glint of gold on one side and made a bzzz noise.

  ‘Bzzz,’ Wolf went in Ettie’s ear but she was asleep.

  What he would not be telling Ettie about was that the little Badem almonds were very beautiful, with dark serious eyes, and he had imagined picking the smallest of them up as they stood in a polite line to say goodbye to their grandpapa’s guest with the funny red face and bringing the little almond back to his and Ettie’s place, because she was missing one and was thin and unhappy. He had ridden back as it began to be dark in the bush, and the picture of borrowing the smallest almond had ridden along with him for a while but had left when he saw the lights of their place on the cleared flat above the river.

  The story that had begun to tell him earlier in the day was peaceful now next to Ettie’s slow breaths. The story was resting as if waiting for him to start telling it himself.

  The train came grinding slowly into the station as if exhausted, and stopped with a long screech in a cloud of steam. The screech and the steam frightened Henry who began to cry in Ettie’s arms but Aggie and Adam were standing up straight because they had their best clean clothes on including their new shoes, which were too hot said Aggie. Aggie had the fresh flowers that Henry wanted to snatch and so she was standing with Adam between her and Ettie to keep the flowers out of Henry’s reach. They were a mixture including pink and blue sweet peas that would soon droop in the heat, and red and yellow zinnias that grew well in the hot summer down the valley.

  The best idea, Ettie reckoned, was as soon as possible to show his Ma something different from all the bloomin’ dark forest that she would have seen for those hours on the train. And perhaps they would lighten her mood before she saw the house that was still mostly just walls and a roof and some of the windows with greased paper in them.

  Ah, but she had her own room with its glass window on to the veranda and a view to the river. And her comfortable new bed with a proper mattress, not a straw one. What more could she expect?

  Ah well, they would soon be seeing how wide the gap was between what his Ma was getting and what she might have been expecting. And the view of the river was usually much the same from one day to the next – she might well get over the great loveliness of it before too long, didn’t he think?

  Ah, but perhaps she did not know his Ma as well as he did? And after all he was her son and he had not yet got over the great loveliness of the river as she put it.

  Yes, well, that was certainly true, Ettie agreed, he could often be seen looking at the river or the hill for periods of time with no other sign of life in him, but after all now she would be getting the chance to match him in knowing his Ma since they would be together much of the time and not least while he was away at the forge or with his trees and bees, if not looking at the river or the hill.

  She made treeees and beeees sound like a long extent of time by drawing the length of the words out.

  But of course she was just teasing him, that was her way, and he even mostly liked it – it was as much Ettie as the rusty colour of her hair or the bend of her neck as she sat to read by the lamp at night or the way she screwed her eyes shut when she hurt herself and then always said arse!

  But now here Ma came with steam hissing across the platform and around her ankles, that small upright woman in a plain straw bonnet with a blue band around it that he recognised at once, carrying a single old carpetbag that he also recognised, as he did the fact that she was not wearing gloves. She kissed Ettie first and admired Henry whom she called Heinrich and who she said would get used to her after a while, and then Aggie and Adam whom she thanked for the flowers, and then finally he had her attention.

  He bent down towards her face and she lifted it up towards him, and there they remained for a moment while he kept his eyes shut. Then he felt her warm damp palms against his cheeks, and her quick kiss on his lips.

  ‘Oh my big Wolf.’

  There was no need for him to be blubbing, she suggested, surely she had not changed so much for the worse? And my God, they had certainly come to the back end of the world had they not? And the train had crossed an unmöglich high narrow bridge on stilts that was surely the last defence against the outside world?

  But she was laughing and laughing with happiness, or was it relief? – and then so was Ettie who was not very respectfully repeating ‘back end of the world’ and ‘welcome to the arse end of the world!’ while the two big kiddies looked on with wide eyes and Henry began to howl with dismay.

  For weeks before she arrived he had repeated to the river mostly but also to the ground he was clearing and to the place he had fenced where Tom had lain that night, and to the rhythm of hammering as he laid the veranda planks, and to the plod of Blackie’s hooves up the hill to the forge, and to the wheezing of the bellows there, that he was sorry, Ma, for the lost grandchild that might have been saved if their conditions had not been so hard here – at the back end of the world as she called it now even though she was almost joking and had yet to see their house by the river with its fine garden of vegetables but also of sweet peas and zinnias – but now she was here and the words he had tried out over and over lost their will to be said and stopped just like the motionless train.

  There they stood for a moment next to the train while it seemed to be catching its breath with huffs and puffs.

  But now they should get the rest of her luggage?

  There was one old leather trunk with wooden straps and brass rivets that had belonged to the man he knew was his father but whom he had never met. For all the years of his childhood it had been in Ma’s room at Bute Street and she had kept her best linens and an ancient sewing sampler in it. Sometimes she had taken the sampler out and shown him the pictures in coloured threads. The pictures had stories. There were owls that he had liked for their large eyes. Catha had liked the picture of a little house with a smoking chimney, and another of a little deer on a mountain. Well, now here they all were where there were owls in the bush at night and a house with a chimney from wh
ich smoke often blew away across the river. In the sampler there had been a pond with yellow ducks but no river. He lifted the chest to his shoulder and carried it towards the cart. There did not seem to be much in the carpetbag he had in his spare hand. Blackie was stood there with her nose in a feedbag, and gave him a backwards look when he lifted the chest and the bag into the cart.

  But was that all?

  She had sold off the old furniture and everything in the house. Catha had kept some books and things, she no longer knew what nor cared.

  His Ma gave him a steady look. ‘I did not need to bring all that with me. And I did not need to leave it where it might think it could call me back.’ A little pause while she kept her look on him. ‘Also, weg! Off we go!’

  Perhaps Ma had been prepared to say that. Her preparedness and her interest in getting going suggested it. He helped her up to the step and into the cart where he had fastened a couple of benches along the sides. Then Ettie hopped up and he gave her Henry. Then Aggie and Adam in their shoes that it was clear were making their feet feel as if they were no longer feet. They sat looking at their feet, and sometimes at their grandma. She was holding the flowers and then gave a red zinnia to Henry. Of course Heinrich was the name requested by Ma in honour of Papa Hein, even though he had not been Henry’s grandpa, but they would have to work their way around that.

  Then off they went down the bumpy valley road that was a packhorse track the first time back then. Ma had persuaded Heinrich to sit on her lap waving his zinnia.

  ‘Hoppe hoppe Reiter,’ she was saying to him as they bounced along. ‘Wenn er fällt, dann schreit er, fällt er in den Sumpf, dann macht der Reiter’ – she opened her legs and let him drop with a shriek of joy into her spread-out skirt – ‘Plumps!’