Bridge of Triangles

by John Muk Muk Burke

  He came to realise that at that time all things in the city—throughout the land, for his people, had lost their meaning. Even death. But finally he would see Aunty Rose in her own time. He came to understand that her time was when the soil was prepared. His people had been pushed back by the invaders. They had resisted until their numbers fell to almost nothing. The remnants had been rounded up and caged, like birds. A scattering of food was thrown their way each day through the wire of their cages. And within the prisons and reserves and fringe camps, many, many in their time were lost. But the ground was being prepared. The scattering into a landscape which had almost transformed itself into something forever alien slowed, and in pockets about the land, reversed into a movement. The movement would grow and out of a desolate landscape would spring up a garden nourished with the blood of a people. All the lonely graves would finally be remembered and the spirits of the sad victims they contained would be truly mourned and honoured by those who had given them life. When the boy became a man Aunty Rose’s death would grow into its fullest meaning. Not, after all, a little tragedy in time but a tragedy which flowed on and on through years and finally reshaped itself into a healing unction and an inspiration. There were those who would never forget. Years after when the paraphenalia of a white funeral had long been forgotten the death itself would take on a new life.

  And so it was that a childhood was ending. The court had decided in favour of Jack. The car arrived one Saturday morning. It stood on the crunch gravel of the Home’s driveway. The doors stood open, waiting for the two boys who would be taken to the railway and put on the Limited to speed through another long dark night behind a trail of streaming smoke. To cross over many bridges under the huge sky with its million lights. To float on the black lines like a leaf being carried by the strong and powerful current of a river which flows to the sea.

  And as the train was sweeping over bridges and past gentle cows with upturned heads in a mist-filled golden sunrise, the man was shuffling round the shack in Waterbag Road and wondering where his boys would sleep that night. He threw a few sticks into the makeshift fireplace and got a dirty fire going. He still had enough time to eat a bit of breakfast before he got into the car and drove to the station.

  PART III

  The boys were entering a phase where the Koori contact with their mother, their daily reminders of their origins, the connections, tenuous though they had been for Chris, who was the one who sought them, were about to be denied. The invasion continued and for them it gained intensity. At Waterbag Road it was as if the Old Granny had indeed become a ghost. As if the great bulk of Paula were a chiasma which floated somewhere in the imagination of a heart which had partly died. And which threatened to completely die. The man looked at his boys and refused to see anything of their mother. The man was completely white. And so, in his ordering of the whole universe, were his boys. The older boy, Joe, with his stark reminding skin and hair, was gone. Where had he gone? When would he return? The man neither cared nor worried about these questions. Like a mistake in spelling he’d been rubbed out and rewritten.

  “Don’t you worry about that Joe. He’s got nothing to do with your life now.”

  “What about mum?”

  “Your mother’s in bloody Sydney. She’s happy. Don’t think about her now. You’re with your father now. That’s all that matters.”

  “And Mary? I suppose she’s gone away too?”

  Mary had gone away. Taken buses and trains to distant, hot desert parts in search of her father and stability and love. In a wind-swept mining town she found him. A gambling drunken man whose stability was secured by a wet topped bar of imitation marble. A man whose love was buried deep beyond bloodshot eyes which squinted hatefully at a world that had given him nothing. He clung to the slightly rusted chrome stool and teetered on an edge.

  Mary was to spend all of her life searching for the Real Father. This child was to find many fathers. False all of them. Truck drivers wiping remnants of steak and eggs against dark blue overalls in smoky roadhouses; hair-oiled refugees from Europe scratching through the outback dirt in search of the big break; small men with fresh combed dirty hair drifting through caravan parks and social security offices.

  Mary the mother of God, squinting under a peppercorn tree where pegged to a rope a sequinned dress dried on a Saturday afternoon. Mary who would learn to create and shape a sustaining myth of her own, which she glued up around her rented house like some latter-day filmstars to inspire her onwards and away from memory.

  Children learn what they live. Christ is the head of this house. The unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation. A friend is one who strengthens the heart. Don’t give up when your luck is out. In resisting untruth I will put up with all suffering. I will pass this way but once. Peace—be still. A smile costs nothing but gives much. The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms. Be patient—God isn’t finished with me yet.

  “Youse kids ask too many bloody questions. Now get your boots and polish them for school tomorrow.”

  Jack Leeton established a new routine for the boys. Outside behind the furphy stood a wooden box with an enamel dish of water. It was Chris’s job to walk down to the dam every afternoon and reach into the still green water with the bucket. The water was carted back to the shack where it became the means of the new male family to wash itself. The bucket was set on the ground and water was dipped out with a tin mug and poured into an enamel dish, a cake of washing soap was next to the dish. A towel hung from a nail hammered into the supporting framework of the furphy. With his solid ways the man set about establishing habits and values which had about them a certain immoveability. There were potatoes to be peeled and washed so that the white flesh was without blemish. Every night. And wood to be split over on the woodheap which straggled across the yard next to the vicious blue heeler’s kennel. The big kettle needed to be filled as soon as the boys arrived home from school. Struggling with its weight Chris placed it on the rough brick hearth of the blackened tin fireplace. He lifted it up onto the dangling hook and arranged chips of wood and slender sticks so that the man could easily light the fire when he came in from the pad-docks. He came in from his labour with his work-worn hands.

  “Don’t let me catch you lighting the fire. I don’t want the bloody place burnt down.”

  “I can light the fire dad.”

  “Don’t be cheeky and quit your answering back. Listen and you’ll learn.”

  And every so often the man would recite the legend contained in the circular writing on the end of the furphy from which the drinking and cooking water was taken. “There it is there, plain as day for youse to read.” He pointed to the convex end of the wheeled water butt and read with solid satisfaction:

  Good better best

  Never let it rest,

  Until your good is better,

  And your better best.

  “And don’t forget it. If you live by that rule you won’t go far wrong.” The man’s reading of it was mechanical—like a tired prayer.

  The boy wondered how he would ever get good if he were never allowed to try anything. Even the kerosene lantern was out of bounds. At night the man would wait until the interior of the hut was grey and it was impossible to make out the lettering on the jam tin. Only then would he solidly move with the lantern over to the lino-covered table and raise the glass with the wire lever. The lamp gave its familiar metalic protest. The match was struck and applied to the saturated wick. It caught and flared. The glass, partly covered on the inside with black soot, was lowered and the yellow light caused shadows to dance around the walls of the shack. Tom Piper Apricot Jam. The table’s shadow gently rocked on the concrete floor.

  Over in one corner the man kept a circular incubator in which he raised chickens. This contraption had a kerosene-fed flame in its centre which warmed the cheeping fluffy birds.

  “Can I hold one Dad?” Keith’s eyes were large.

  “Don’t b
e so bloody stupid. They’re not bloody pets. When they’re big enough I’ll knock their heads off and they’ll feed us.”

  The world was closing in. The great sky-hill was being dragged down into dimensions controlled and manageable. The whole world was to be ordered about and contained. The great sky-hill was in danger of losing all its wonder and hugeness. It was in the man’s safety that the greatest danger lay.

  “Can I get a guitar Dad? Joe had a guitar...”

  “Don’t be bloody stupid. You can’t play a guitar.”

  “I could learn.”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid. Howya gonna learn? You can’t even play one. And besides, money doesn’t grow on trees.”

  The logic was purely his own.

  The man had bought a radio. In the evening he carried it out to the ute which stood in the lane. Methodically he lifted the bonnet and wired up the radio to the battery. The strident orchestra introduced the news. As the important voice finished its urgent speaking and began in a far more relaxed tone, “In just a few moments we begin our evening’s programme...” the whole process was reversed and the wireless was carried back into the shed. “Don’t want that rubbish on—waste of a bloke’s battery.” The announcer’s voice died.

  “Don’t know what’s going on with the world. Whole place’s going mad. Man needs his head read for being alive.” And so in the deepening night they would sit—two boys and a man. All of them waiting.

  In the night a few crickets sang away off amongst the grasses and laneways. Around the group their shrill song pierced into the silence. And away and above it all if Chris listened hard enough, he could just hear the distant distant stars humming in the vast black immensity of sky.

  “Where does it all go to Dad?”

  “Where’s all what go to?”

  “Behind the stars?”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid.” The man looked at the boy and scratched his head. “I reckon you’ve been out in the sun too long.”

  Somewhere in his memory a flickering recognition of a young man in the leech crawling jungles of New Guinea asking a similar question as the open staring dead eyes of a soldier mate momentarily shone in the light of the moon as thick tropical clouds scudded overhead. But in a time long long gone. No, it won’t do you any good. Don’t ask, don’t ask. What’s the fucking point?

  The man reached out his rough hand. He touched his shoulder. He added, “...son.”

  The wooden chairs on the dirt outside the shack sighed in the darkness. Then, strangely, the man started to softly sing a song he’d remembered from somewhere in that deep hurting past,

  The strangers came and tried to teach us their ways

  They scorned us just for being what we are...

  Somewhere, in his heart, the man did know. He knew he had been used. He knew he was a user.

  And so a pattern of days and nights formed. Days which held a promise at their close. A promise that tomorrow might be somehow, miraculously, better than today. That the all-consuming meanness of the life these people lived would transform itself into something wider, broader, lighter. Chris didn’t know. While he held vague hopes for the future there was no plan. His mother, although finally taking off to the big smoke, had never included her kids in any of her planning. Likewise the man, his father, never spoke of the future. Never thought ahead except to worry that tomorrow would no doubt be bleaker than today.

  “We’re out of wood for the fire. Get over and split a few logs up.”

  “Jesus, that wood heap’s looking a bit low—you been wasting wood again?”

  “Get down the lane and scout around for bottles.” The man would have run out of money. Half a ute load of beer bottles and soft drink bottles might bring in a couple of pounds, to get them through till he got his next pay. This towards the end of the long Christmas break.

  “I s’pose there’s not much bottles left lyin’ round the lanes. I s’pose you bloody kids been down there and collected them already!”

  “Right then, get your boots on and hop in the ute. And run a comb through ya bloody hair. What are ya, blacks or something?”

  “Where’re we goin’?”

  “Just get in the bloody ute.”

  The man eased the ute down the rough lane. The red rutted road was fringed with the bleached grasses of a summer’s ending. Slender gums cast deep shadows over scrubby saplings. The boy breathed in this landscape which was there—just out there, beyond this dusty ute with its three occupants cramped against the sweating leather seat. He pictured the roof of the ute, slightly dusty, with the sun, the heat, beating down on it; on the roof of the shack they’d just left behind. Over there, behind the darkening trees, the fence wire shone dully. And beyond the gentle hills curved away. And further—on the crest, were the rocks, massive boulders, blocks of whitened grey rising up from the cracking thistles and clumps of milk grass. Those rocks with lizard-green lichen that could be peeled back in small pitted sheets. And from the rise the shack, with the wood heap and the furphy and the waterhole, now black, now silvered by the sun, all viewed from above.

  The ute travelled through the landscape. The man was retreating, groping around for some sort of strength to live with the awful knowledge of his own ignorance and powerlessness. Something to relieve the inexorable power of the forces which had shaped him. If only he could get through this day.

  The boy too was retreating—escaping—surviving. He would survive by dreaming, by holding on to the, what was it? To say the land was too simple and not enough. The land, like him was always retreating—was always just somehow beyond. And yet what it was, came, emanated, began and dwelt in what the land really was. Or what he suspected it to be. But it, whatever it was, could never be known, nor seen, nor satisfy the pain of his need. Strangely, as with his father, there was no future. Who were the destroyers? at had the boy forgotten that might have carried him joyfully into the future? The man neither willingly lived remembering a past nor for a future. Nor in a present. His was the real tragedy. Not to have taken his youthful sex seriously—was that it? Was he just another in a long line of mindless rapers of land and those whom the land gave life? In what agony of secret guilt did the white man live? What was the war all about? It is certain that he never knew with his brain. His heart felt that somehow he was paying for the unknown evils of a system which turned relentlessly and was fed by what was ultimately a deep contempt for the earth and all who dwelt thereon.

  Long after, when this ute was a rusting carcase in some backyard near a levy bank overgrown with sticking grass—then in some strange way the boy came to understand a little. That this man had eventually sensed the forces which had led them all to this present time and place. Chris could understand how the heart of the man came eventually to reject these forces. Nine words could never be enough to speak of the evils he came to perceive. And because he rarely used more than nine works he dwelt in silence and suffered for the part he had unwittingly played in putting his caloused hand to the wheels of human misery which those from across the sea caused to turn in every league of this invaded earth. Invasions are escapings.

  “S’long time since we saw Ted. Run’ll do the ute good. Charge the battery up a bit.”

  Ted was over in the next town.

  The ute left the dirt lane and swept itself of loose dust and leaves as it geared up to the tarred surface of the new road which stretched forward into the summer day; between fenced paddocks cleared of most trees; across man-made culverts of concrete where reflectors flashed on the dust white posts. Above, the arching blue-white sky shone like a new sheet of cartridge paper on which black crows drew their slow lines.

  Ahead lay the town with its towering grain silos and dark green kurrajong trees; its squat long railway station; the verandaed shops with their corrugated iron side walls stained with ghostly aftershadows of advertisements for tea and ice-cream.

  Chris knew that Ted was his father’s brother and he could vaguely remember him as a young man who had lived with ol
d Grandma Leeton in the big dark house in town. Now Ted was married and had a couple of kids and worked on the railway in this two-pub town. It would be good to meet his cousins and his new aunty.

  “Me brother’s married now. You call her Aunty Vera.”

  As the ute neared the tidy cream railway cottage Chris saw that there were two cars—one under an attached roof and another, shiny and well cared for, next to the trimmed hedge. Jack saw the shiny black car.

  “Well, I’ll be buggered.”

  “What’s wrong Dad?”

  “Be quiet, be quiet, nothing’s wrong.”

  Ted came out from the house. “G’day stranger. Bugger me if it doesn’t rain but it pours.”

  Vera came and lounged on her husband’s arm. She squinted up at Jack. “G’day stranger. Bugger me if it doesn’t rain but it pours.”

  Ted looked at his wife. “Hey, mind your language.”

  “Oh phu to you—just ’cause ya mum and dad are here.”

  Chris had thought the car was Grandfather Leeton’s.

  “Anyway, you better come inside. We’re just having a cuppa.”

  “Thought I’d charge up the battery. Take the boys for a bit of a run.”

  Vera squinted at Chris and Keith. “You must be Chris and Keith. Which one’s Chris?”

  “He’s Keith,” Chris whispered.

  “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Anyway, I’m your Aunty Vera. Come back to live with your dad, eh? Bit different here from the big smoke I bet.”