The man looked back at the Awa Inlet. His slack, exhausted face registered surprise.
“What?” Laura said.
“The causeway,” he said. “It’s not there.” He was terribly puzzled. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. “I’m shortsighted, but even I couldn’t miss a strip of black across the Inlet. That is the Awa Inlet?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand. I helped build that bloody thing.”
Laura put out a hand and touched his forearm. He flinched and snatched it away. She said, “Tell me your story.”
He glared at her. “And I don’t understand why you’re not running away from me.”
“Tell me your story,” Laura said again. She kept her gaze level and calm. She stared into his eyes—eyes the color of oil and hot with hatred and suspicion and hurt. She said, “We’re going to have to help each other all the way down the slope. So, as we go, you can tell me your story.”
He put a finger in the outer corner of one of his eyes and pressed the eye into a slit. Laura had seen one of her glasses-wearing school friends do that when she’d put her own pair down somewhere and was looking around for them. “How old are you?” he asked, trying to get a good look at her.
“Five months ago I turned sixteen.”
“You’re just a kid.”
“A kid?” She was unfamiliar with the usage.
“A kid.”
“I suppose you think I just flaked out in the forest?” said the man. “I guess I must have. I was trying to do something. Something incredible. Of course it didn’t work. It wasn’t ever going to work. I must have been crazy. I had strange ideas in my head that I guess I resorted to in a time of need. I should be dead. I should have keeled over dead and deluded. Gone off in a happy fantasy.”
Laura interrupted him. “No. I wish you’d start at the beginning.”
“I was starting at the point where I’m dead and discover there’s no heaven.” He sounded as though he hated his story—and himself.
“Please,” Laura said. She held the branch of a bush so that it wouldn’t flick back into his face. When he took it, she saw his tattered nails and bloody nail beds. He must have dug his grave using only his hands.
“All right,” he said, and began again. “You can see by my trousers what I am.”
“No,” said Laura.
“Do you mean no, you can’t see that I’m a convict, or no, don’t start there? Maybe you want me to start with my birth?” He was sarcastic.
“Yes. Start there.”
“Well—how is your history, girl?” he asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he just began.
“My mother was a dreamhunter, but the Place disappeared before I was born. I didn’t have a father. I lived with Mother and Grandfather, who wasn’t ever a well man. He taught me to play the violin. We lived on a small trust fund my mother had. She’d had a famous uncle. Her uncle made films. But when I was still an infant, he went to the Ross Sea with one of those expeditions, and he died there. His daughter, my mother’s cousin—they were very close, they wrote each other letters every week for years. This cousin had married a man no one in the family much liked, and she went with him to live in another country. It was a kind of exile, I think. After the Ross Sea, my mother’s aunt joined her daughter. I can just remember her—the widow—she used to bring me expensive chocolates whenever she visited.
“Grandfather passed away when I was eight. After that we lived quietly. I went to a little country school. My mother died in the Influenza when I was ten. When she was dying, she burned all her cousin’s letters. I was left to suppose that she hadn’t wanted me to know them—her cousin, and her cousin’s husband.
“After she died I went to live with her father’s sister, who sent me to school and gave me more music lessons. Even after its lonely beginning, my life should have been not too bad, but I got into trouble because people did, in the years when things were at their worst, with the bread lines and men walking the roads looking for work. You see, even with all those men out of work, and willing to work for the price of food, the bloody government still had its Prosperity Measures—the penal code.”
He broke off. “I don’t expect you to agree with me about this. You’re a well-dressed girl with rounded vowels.”
“I’m glad I’ve got something rounded,” Laura said.
They had stopped in a patch of shade. Flies had found them—or him, for he was rank with filth. They were too tired to go on right away.
He said, “How do you like my story so far?”
“I hate it.”
“Not enough romance?” he said, acid.
Laura burst out laughing. He sounded so like Sandy. Her laugh was affectionate, and he was rather thrown by it. “Oh—just go on,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“If you stepped over the line, back then,” he said, “you’d end up contributing to the economy in some involuntary way—believe me. I got into trouble during the worst years of the Depression, the very worst. My violin was my means of making money—but no one was hiring musicians. I pawned my violin to buy food. But I couldn’t bear not having it. I’d patrol the pawnshop window looking at it. And one evening, I just broke the glass and took it.
“I got caught and sent to prison. I had a light sentence, I was with the chicken chokers and the disgruntled men who set fire to their employers’ wheat fields. The work they gave men on light sentences wasn’t exactly hard labor, and I was young and fit. But the wardens were sadists. One day I witnessed something very cruel. Impossibly cruel. I lost my temper, attacked the guard, and injured him badly. After that I was in for twenty years. I was very young, and at first I didn’t understand twenty years. What young person understands twenty years?
“I worked building the causeway, and on the Howe Peninsula digging bird shit for the nitrate trade. I worked in the coal mine at Westport. Over time I lost all hope, except of escape, which isn’t much of a hope on an island, even a big island like Southland.
“Then came the riot in the prison, and the fire. I escaped with a couple dozen other men. We took a sloop from the wharves, but none of us were sailors and we foundered off Pillar Point on the west coast of So Long Spit. The search party and their dogs caught up with us on the Spit, and, at some point, I left the others and took to the sea. I was lucky. I was carried by the rising tide back along the shore of Coal Bay to Debt River.
“And this is where my story will become incoherent to you—or very interesting possibly, because you’re a bit of a strange girl, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Laura said. Then, “Let’s go on and find that stream and get a drink.”
Telling his story seemed to have calmed the man and helped him regain some sense of consideration. As they went on, he stopped now and then to see how she was—though he was in far worse condition than she. Nothing further was said between them till they reached the stream.
It was a quick, small stream that came onto the beach and cut a sharp-edged channel on the sand. The man lay down on his stomach and sucked at the water. Laura scooped out a hollow in the sand, waited for the grains to settle, then dipped the lemonade bottle into the pool she’d made.
The sun was setting over the mountains on the far side of Coal Bay. The dark was coming, so when they finished drinking, they crawled up the beach and flopped in the fringe of salt-burned scrub. Without consultation, they had decided together not to try to traverse the beach of boulders in the dark.
“After this stretch it’s all easy going,” Laura said. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. She heard him say, “Why are you doing this?”
She shook her head, her hair rasped on the sand. She nestled into its cold softness.
“Strange girl,” he said. Then he went on with his story.
“The search party wouldn’t have expended any energy mopping up one stray convict. They only had to wait for me to turn up somewhere I couldn’t give a good account of myself. They only had to wait for someone to turn me in. But I d
ecided they were still in pursuit. It was because I felt special. Especially hated and feared. Even when I was a free man, I felt that some people I met would act as though I were a tiger pretending to be a schoolboy or a musician. It was my name, you see.”
“Hame,” Laura said.
There was a long silence. Finally he said, testing, wary, “But you’re not chasing me, are you?”
“No,” Laura said.
Another long silence. Laura broke it. “You’re someone I’ve just met. Someone I feel for.” She thought, “Family.”
“You don’t think I’m mad?”
“No.”
“You wait,” he said. “We’re not there yet. Wait till I tell you what I did—what I tried.
“Some guards had been killed in the riot, and the prison was razed. I imagined they would kill us when they caught us. It seemed to me that just running wasn’t enough. I wanted to defend myself. And later, once I’d lost my mind, I just wanted revenge. I should have gone to a farm family and trusted someone to have pity. But I was in a bad way in my head—wet, and cold, and hungry. I didn’t feel human, or entitled to fellow feeling. I hated everyone free. It seemed to me that whoever was free had let us convicts be beaten and broken, and driven into the river to drown. They’d stood by and let it happen.
“Something came into my head at Debt River. A story I’d heard my great-aunt tell, between music lessons, about magic. She’d taught me a song, though I was only interested in tunes I could play on the violin. The song was supposed to be a spell that would make a little portion of the earth come to life—be alive and obedient. At Debt River I remembered the song, and I remembered an earthquake that had frightened me when I was little. No one we knew was hurt in the earthquake, but I remembered going into the city afterward, once they’d replaced all the sections of wriggly rail line. I remembered seeing heaps of tumbled stone in the street. There were little aftershocks. I’d wake up crying, and my mother would sing to me. She, too, had sung that song. To comfort me she told me that she and I—if we wished hard enough—could make the earth itself listen. Listen and lie still.
“At Debt River I was hiding near the mining camp, eating fern shoots—stripping off the black fur and eating them raw. After a short time I’d exhausted the food supply; I’d found every freshwater crayfish in the stream and had gouged out the heart of every tree fern. The sounds from the camp made me sad rather than kept me company, and so I just began. I began without thinking. It was as if something in my head had more use for me than I did for it. I took the first steps of the spell I’d been taught and had thought was only a quaint folk ritual. Or, rather, I began the spell but adapted it to my purposes.
“I’d decided to show everyone. The men hunting me, the oblivious miners, the families on the farms I didn’t dare go to. I’d show them, I thought. I started to sing and made a mark on the ground and began to run again. I traveled up Debt River and into the mountains, then I crossed over into Wry Valley.
“I traveled like that for more than a day. Then I slept, and dreamed the song, woke up, and kept on singing. That’s how I went along. And at one place I slept I made another mark on the ground. The song seemed to be consuming me—and I dreamed impossible things. I dreamed of being saved and starting over.”
The man fell quiet.
Laura waited. She was too afraid to prompt him or comfort him. She did want to know his story, and she wanted to help him, but she didn’t know what to do.
When the man spoke again, his voice had changed; it was remote and resigned. “I did die,” he said. “But there wasn’t another garden beyond the gate, there was a whole world, the same again. More thirst and cold and hunger. Here. Here with you—you strange girl.”
“You dreamed something impossible,” Laura said. “But that isn’t the end of your story.”
“No. I woke up.” He stirred. Then he sounded faintly amused. “You know, that’s what is comforting—that parts of what I recall, even after I lost my mind, still seemed logical and real and practical. I remember wrapping my feet in strips of cloth after I lost my shoes. I remember singing and walking many more miles, mending my makeshift shoes as I went. I remember how my last meal wasn’t much, because wasps had spoiled the apricots left hanging in the orchard by a grand mansion. I remember deciding that it was altogether too big a gesture to dig my own grave with my hands, and spending some time finding a flat stone to serve as a spade.”
“You dug your own grave?”
“After days, and miles—and the same thought in my head for days and miles. I didn’t have to survive it. All I had to do was keep singing, and come to a place where I’d feel that I’d closed a circle. When I did come to that place, I scratched out a hole in the ground, a hole big enough to lie in. I lay down in it. I was finished. I wanted time to stop, and to let me stop with it. And I wanted revenge.
“I made the final mark that finished the spell—a W—and then said to the land, ‘Bury me, and rise up. Rise up and crush them all.’
“And then I felt you brush the earth from my face.”
The outdoor, nighttime quiet had a stealthy quality, as though it was listening to both of them, stalking them with its attention. Laura thought of Nown and could almost feel him, far, far away, reaching for her, his wish to touch so strong that she felt touched.
This man’s vast servant had obeyed him. The earth of his excavation had fallen in to cover him and had piled up over him to make what he’d imagined for himself, a low grave mound. His servant took him to its heart, as its heart. And then it rose up. There was an earthquake—and back along the miles of its master’s journey the ground moved and cracked and broke the N that came to be known as Foreigner’s North. By its master’s own actions, the first letter of that Nown’s name was erased. It was its Own, it was free, and it remembered an earlier promise it had made: “I promise in the future to do more, to do— I know not what—to save whoever you love.”
Laura knew she would love her as yet unborn son. She had loved him—she, the woman who had lived a quiet life caring for him and her invalid father. Laura’s servant, the Ninth Nown, had loved her, and so the giant, immobile, speechless Tenth, the Place, remembered having loved her and went looking for her to ask for help. To say, “Here is one you love who has asked me to stifle him. What should I do?” It moved its territory of stopped time back in time. It went too far, went on until it found the first someone it felt it knew—Laura’s father, who had taught its heart music. It tried to tell him. It showed him his grandson, standing in chains beside a rail line. It tried by the only means available to it—the memories of the lives its territory had encompassed—to tell anyone who would listen. To show them not just the injustices but the beauty of human life that injustice is a blasphemy against—the joy of the boy on the shore racing the schooner, the happiness of the sing-along around the beach bonfire; dancers, banquets, desires, balloon rides, the miracle of rivers. Life. It said, though not in words, “There is something underneath all this, someone buried alive.” It was like a person talking in his sleep—speaking urgent nonsense. It waited, and it felt Laura as she came toward it, through time, being born, growing up, reaching the age of her Try. And sometimes it would rap out its faith and rapture on the Founderston—Sisters Beach telegraph line, singing: “She is coming, my own, my sweet …” Singing a song she had taught it.
“Why the hell are you crying?” the man asked. He seemed offended. “It wasn’t my intention to make you cry, girl. Look—if I was crazy, it’s passed now.”
“Shut up!” Laura said. And cried.
He got up and shuffled down the dark beach to drink some more. When he came back, she said, “I’m glad it’s so dark. It’s easier to talk to you without seeing you.”
“I guess I am a pretty pitiful sight—especially for anyone in prime condition.”
“I’m not feeling guilty because I’m healthy and you’re half-dead!” Laura shouted. “You idiot! And the condition I’m in is pregnant!”
“You’ve run away from home because you’re pregnant?”
“Shut up!”
He did, and she knew that was perhaps because he felt sympathetic—if exasperated—and that he wasn’t at all the hard and heartless person he made himself out to be. She couldn’t help but feel for him—he was so like Sandy, and he had her father’s beautiful black eyes.
After a time she said, “Do you think you can stay awake long enough for me to tell you my story?”
“I think I should hear your story. And I’m not sleepy, only hungry and weary. I feel as if I’ve slept for ages.”
“Well—you have,” she said. And then she told him her story.
5
ERE WAS A ROUGH TRACK FROM THE AWA INLET ACROSS THE SADDLE. IT WASN’T ONE DREAMHUNTERS KNEW, OF course, since it was within the section of the map they couldn’t enter. Mamie was familiar with a few miles of her end of it. Her family sometimes went along it to have picnics at the lookout. Beyond the lookout, sparse foot traffic meant the track was overgrown. Gorse shoots grew out of the path, and the bare patches were stippled by holes cicada nymphs had tunneled out of. It was rough going, and the girls stopped walking when it got dark. They curled up in their coats, back to back, and Mamie shed more tears about her “stupid situation” and Rose’s “exaggerated ideas” about her father’s scheming. Rose let her friend cry and complain, and they were both soon asleep.
The following morning they were walking along the spine of a hill over the sea when they spotted two figures far below, making their way around a cove, stepping from boulder to boulder.
Rose stopped and shaded her eyes. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Laura!” She saw her cousin hesitate and look around, then wave to her. “Stay right there!” Rose shouted. “Come on,” she said to Mamie. “We’re going down there.”
Mamie moaned, but when Rose set off downhill, she hurried after her.
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