Tourmaline

by Randolph Stow

  ‘Despair,’ said Tom, moving his thin shoulders. ‘I heard somewhere about how they were dying out in the old days, just the same. It was the change, the white men coming. The blokes reckoned they couldn’t find the spirits of the children. So they stopped breeding.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dave, ‘not enough jigjig.’

  ‘That’s what some missionary told them. And did they laugh. No, it’s one of those mind over matter things—you know?’

  ‘She’s a weird old world,’ Dave decided, after giving the matter due thought. ‘I can’t make her out at all.’

  ‘Keep trying,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve got a lot of faith in your opinions, Dave.’ He grinned at him, defended in irony. ‘I reckon you must get some thinking done out there.’

  ‘Don’t come that on me,’ said Dave. ‘It’s not the time, it’s having the stuff to think with.’ He shifted his knobbly hip on the hard counter, grunting. ‘You’ve told me bugger-all so far. What’s been happening?’

  ‘There’s only one bit of news you’re likely to hear anywhere,’ Tom said. ‘About the diviner.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Dave. He was slightly deaf. ‘Not the Law,’ he supposed (and Tom told me later), ‘gone and made himself archbishop?’

  ‘Diviner,’ Tom said. ‘Dowser. He says he’s going to find water for us.’ And he went on to give Dave a short history of our new citizen, from the time that the driver stepped out of the truck and announced his unprecedented find.

  Dave listened poker-faced. When Tom had done, he breathed out a sort of sigh.

  ‘It’s the end,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a queer coot. Everyone else says it’s the beginning.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I do too. We like water, don’t we?’

  ‘Sure we like it,’ Dave said. ‘But do we like strangers blowing in and sending the word round they got special powers to change the place?’

  ‘He never said that. We wouldn’t know he was a diviner if the Law hadn’t dragged it out of him while he was sick.’

  ‘He’s a fake,’ Dave said.

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ said Tom. ‘Or if he is, he doesn’t know it.’

  ‘What’s he like? Big talker?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Quiet. But not,’ Tom added after a moment, ‘not still. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Sounds like Kes.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Tom said. ‘Funny. Hadn’t thought of it.’

  ‘Kes in favour of him?’

  ‘No. He’s the only one.’

  ‘It’s the end,’ Dave said again.

  ‘You want us all to go native,’ Tom said. ‘That’s what you’ve got against him. Just enough food and water to keep us alive and no distractions. Dave Speed’s Utopia.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with it?’ Dave demanded. ‘I know what I’m talking about. All the years I spent when I was the town drunk, wanting to be a tree.’

  ‘Seems to me you’ve got there.’

  ‘So now I want to be a stone. And I’ll get there too.’

  ‘Won’t we all?’ Tom said. ‘It’s death you mean.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Dave. ‘Well, you can’t get much quieter than that.’

  He swung his legs to the floor and stood up. ‘Better go and see young Jack. Be back in the morning.’

  ‘Good to see you again,’ Tom said, meaning it. ‘I’ll tell Mary to have some breakfast for you.’

  ‘I can see Jack’s going to bash my ear about this divining.’

  ‘Sure to. It’s the talk of the town. And you might come round.’

  ‘I might,’ said Dave, standing there with his hands in his pockets, and his one good eye, of a light clear grey, on Tom. ‘There’s no getting away from it, the idea of water is pretty strong. You and me can remember when that pub veranda was covered all round with passion-vines, and bloody good it was, too, to sit out there at this time of day, with a schooner, in the cool. And what the Law remembers I wouldn’t like to ask him, because I’d never get away if he started to tell. But the place is better now than it ever was then. We’ve got to the bare bones of the country, and I reckon we’re getting to the bones of ourselves. If the water comes, it’ll be when we’ve stopped needing it. We’re coming true, mate.’

  ‘You’re a blackfellow,’ Tom said; ‘or one of these desert saints.’

  ‘I’m a drongo,’ said Dave. ‘I’m a kid. I don’t know anything. They say the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Well, when I was in the grass I liked the look of the desert. And now I’m in the desert I like it even better.’

  ‘And not a flower around,’ said Tom. ‘Not a roo, not a cocky, not a bee.’

  ‘The human race is the toughest thing going,’ Dave said. ‘And the greediest, and the dumbest. Maybe I don’t understand this joker. But we wouldn’t want an emperor of Tourmaline.’

  He stooped as he spoke, picking up his bag from the floor, and went out with a wooden face to rouse Jimmy Bogada.

  That night, at the mine, in the small yellow circle of a hurricane lantern islanded in the obscurity of Jack’s tall room, Dave put forward his views once again; to the annoyance of his son, and the polite disbelief of Rock, their visitor. He was a hopeless case, Jack suggested; a born pessimist, a true old-timer who wanted to keep even the worst things exactly as he was used to knowing them. And anyway, did he think Tourmaline had always been like this? He was raving, said Jack.

  He knew what he was talking about, said Dave. He had lived a bit longer than either of them, as they bloody well knew, and he didn’t need any young fella of twenty-five to straighten his ideas out for him. The trouble with Tourmaline was that too many people listened to the Law, whose memory wasn’t worth that much (snapping, naturally, his fingers) nowadays, and who had always been given to queer notions, as anyone of Dave’s age could confirm.

  Rock said quietly that he thought the Law, for all his faults, had a fair recollection of things as they had been; but that was not the argument. The point was whether they wanted water or not; and could there be any doubt that they did? In which case the diviner, if anyone, was the man to find it.

  Dave repeated his arguments, in a louder voice, and with a new and (as it were) religious conviction. He seemed to preach complete passivity to the drought, to the desert, to the sun. This view Jack rejected with scorn. Dave then demanded to know where the diviner lived, and said he would set out instantly to interview him and make a reliable assessment of the man. But he was talked out of this, on the grounds of the darkness outside and the many abandoned shafts between the mine and the diviner’s hut. At last Rock went home, and father and son went to bed, still arguing. And as things happened, Dave had lost interest by the time he woke in the morning. So he did not meet the diviner, and was not able to give us his reliable and informed opinion of that most controversial figure in Tourmaline’s history.

  At the same time as this debate was going on, Tom and Mary were sitting in their kitchen, where they had a habit of passing the evenings, when Deborah suddenly appeared in the doorway, panting, and looking wild.

  Mary got up and went to her, without a word. She put her arms about her. And the tall girl bent her head to Mary’s soft neck and wept a little.

  ‘I hate him,’ she announced, when this was over.

  Mary patted her shoulder, murmuring something.

  ‘Come home, Deb,’ Tom said. He pulled up a chair for her at the kitchen table, to which Mary led her. And they sat down together, the three of them, and looked at each other, their chins on their hands.

  ‘There’s no need for you to stay with him,’ Mary said, after a time.

  ‘No,’ said Deborah. ‘I won’t. I won’t. I think he hates me.’

  ‘He’s got a bitter tongue,’ Tom said. ‘But he doesn’t mean all he says, maybe.’

  ‘He’s cruel to me,’ she raged, still reliving whatever quarrel it was that had driven her out of the hotel. ‘He’s so insulting. And he hates Michael. He says I love Michael. H
e must be mad.’

  Perfectly mild in the contemplation of her fury, Tom asked whether she would stay the night.

  ‘I’ll stay for always,’ she swore.

  ‘You know you won’t. You’ll go back to him in the morning.’

  ‘No, Pa! Not ever.’ She appealed to Mary. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mary said. ‘You’re always changing your mind about him.’

  ‘He’s always changing,’ she said. ‘Not me. Sometimes he’s so—— Sometimes I love him, I do really. And then he gets like he is tonight. He wants to own me, like a dog. The way he owns poor Byrnie. I can’t stay with him.’

  ‘And you want to own him, too,’ Tom pointed out. ‘And he won’t stand for that. The trouble is, you’re both in love. It’s not comfortable.’

  She lifted her dark hand to her forehead, and sat staring at the tabletop, quite wretched.

  ‘Will you go to bed now?’ Mary asked, soothingly.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ Deborah said. ‘He makes me so tired.’ And she did look it, with her neck wearily bent, and the lamplight on the crests of the waves in her brown hair.

  ‘I’ll never go back,’ she promised again. But Tom was right to look at Mary with a faint smile. Because she was gone in the morning, she was in the hotel again, moodily cooking breakfast for her man; with one of those flourbag handkerchiefs she sometimes dabbed at her scowling brow.

  SEVEN

  So now I come to what may be the most important of the events I did not actually see; and again I must imagine and invent, I must place in a framework the bare narratives given me by Byrne and the diviner.

  The diviner had told me at the church that he would turn to prospecting before long, that he would work in with Byrne or Jack Speed; but I had not paid much attention. I thought that water was his first object. After that, of course, I assumed, with all the others, that the whole town would return to the gold, and that everyone, the diviner included, would grow rich. But he thought otherwise. He meant, as it turned out, to grow, or to make us, rich first.

  And one day, with this in mind, he called for Byrne and suggested that they walk out to Byrne’s claim; a paltry affair on a hillock four miles from Tourmaline. I saw them go, glancing out of my door by chance. The diviner carried his rod in one swinging hand. Byrne trailed behind him with a waterbag, looking very much like old Jimmy Bogada.

  They walked for a little over an hour through the hard red stony desert (it is a desert now, I may call it that) with Byrne’s hillock like a mountain in front of them, visible all the way, rising out of a flatness so absolute that one can see the curve of the world at the horizons. And when they got there, sweating rather heavily even in that bone-dry air, the diviner was ill again, racked with one of his recurring headaches. So he wet his hair from the waterbag and lay down in the shade of a small open cave where Byrne kept his tools; for he camped there occasionally. And Byrne occupied himself in the meantime by knapping and dollying what he picked out as a ‘kindly stone’.

  He had no luck with that, however, and before he could begin another the diviner was on his feet again, pushing back his dank hair and replacing his hat. From his pocket he took a little knob of gold, and put it into the bottle that hung from his rod. Then he walked down to the foot of the hill. Byrne ambled after him, at a distance.

  He looked quite absorbed, so Byrne told me later, standing there, with the rod between his hands. He held it with his palms up, forcing the forks slightly apart, and his eyes were fixed on the end of it. Frowning, very tense, he seemed to be entering a sort of trance; and he inspired such awe in his talkative friend, as he stood watching, that not one question escaped him. Throughout the progress of the ritual Byrne followed in a doglike silence.

  With his stiff neck bent a little, the diviner stepped out, and began to follow around the foot of the hill; very slow in his movements, and still concentrating profoundly on the tip of the rod. These proceedings occupied ten minutes or more. Then he stopped dead in his tracks, quite rigid, and looking (said Byrne) as if he were listening to something. The rod was still steady and level.

  He turned left and went on, away from the hillock, out towards the stone-littered plain. And Byrne, trailing behind, saw the rod straining in his hands. Suddenly it had defeated him, and was pointing downwards—straight downwards. And the handgrips of ecclesiastical oleander had disintegrated in his hands. He took another step, and stopped. The rod fell to the ground. He looked up, exhausted.

  ‘There’s a reef,’ he said, very quiet and weary. ‘Few feet of overburden. Old-timers missed it. Mark it, will you.’

  Then he picked up the rod and went up the slope again to the rock-shelter. And there he lay down and went to sleep.

  Byrne, in the meantime, in a haze of doubt and excitement, made a pile of stones on the spot where the diviner had stood and went to fetch his pick and shovel. Having almost no water he could not be subtle about testing the surface for gold. He simply dug.

  And the reef was there. The cap of the reef was there.

  With a great shout he bounded up the hill to the diviner.

  In my terrible loneliness I grow elegiac. The news of this find, so great for Tourmaline, in which the diviner promised that all who cared to work it might have a share—this news left me less elated than melancholy. For I remembered how once it would have been received, with what rejoicings in the bar and pilgrimages over the countryside (not quite treeless, at that time) to the site of the discovery, with what prognostications of further greatness for Tourmaline. That was in the days of hope, in the days of tree-lined streets, the days when the verandas of the hotel and other buildings were shaded with vines, and oranges grew in what is now Rock’s garden. Though they mock me for it, how can I forget? The glow of oranges in shining leaves, passion-fruit and -flower; the reds of oleander and bougainvillaea, the pepper trees’ green-white drizzling flowers, sharp-smelling and loud with bees. These were the things I remembered, in my loneliness, when the news came of the diviner’s find.

  The town was moved, certainly, even excited. But gold means little now. It was the method of its tracking down that was the talk everywhere, the cause of all rumours and arguments. It was of water, not gold, that all thought after this miracle.

  ‘What do you say now?’ Byrne asked Kestrel. He was in the bar, but quite sober. ‘Can he divine, or can’t he?’

  ‘I say he’s a bloody good prospector,’ said Kestrel; ‘and the best bullduster I’m likely to meet.’

  ‘You’re so mean and jealous,’ Deborah hissed at him. ‘It’s horrible.’

  He turned on her, for a second, a bitter parody of a smile.

  Tom Spring would say nothing. Divining, he confessed, he did not understand. He sat behind his counter like a small ivory statue of a sage, smiling luminously at Jack Speed, who brought the news.

  ‘Don’t you care?’ Jack asked, incredulous. ‘If he’s as good as that, what about the water?’

  ‘The water,’ Tom mused. ‘The water. I’m waiting, sure enough.’

  ‘You sound like my old man.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Tom said. ‘I believe in the boy—for some things. But the water: I’ll wait and see about that.’

  Rock brought me the tidings, his deepset brown eyes very bright and hopeful. He too thought less of the gold than of the augury.

  ‘Kes is right to call him the witch-doctor,’ he considered. ‘Not natural, somehow.’

  ‘He told us he had a gift,’ I said. ‘It looks as if he has.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ said Rock. ‘Scared to hope too much.’ And he looked across the road at the iron fence of his garden. ‘Are we going to get this water? If we are, how long’s it going to be?’

  ‘How long?’ I echoed, looking about me in a sort of trance; seeing trees spring up and flowers in the street, hearing sounds of sheep and birds in the far green distance. Why, in my great hope, did I remember the easter lilies in our old garden; the smooth pink lilies, so tough, so delicate
, that sprang up leafless from the baked ground, before the earliest rains?

  And the diviner, all this time, was in the church. What did he do there? I cannot truly say, for only one person ever saw him. That was old Gloria, self-appointed vergeress, who perhaps at that very moment was engaged in watching him. He was kneeling, she told me, before the altar, his head bowed, in a patch of sunlight. And I can see him, clearly enough, in the raw blue of his new clothes; his red young neck encroached upon by golden down, red dust on his boots and at the hip-pockets of his trousers. And his hair burning bright, like chaff in a thread of sunlight, such as may steal in through a nail-hole in a shed roof; and did, long ago, at home.

  I imagine him striving, striving to empty his mind, as Tom seemed dedicated to do, awaiting some infusion of force and wisdom. I imagine him. That is all. Ah, but how difficult it is to re-create this young man, who to everyone meant something, and to no two people the same. Can I trust the testimony of Gloria Day, who also knelt before the altar, and was the only one to do so, if he did not? He remains obscure, confusing. I cannot pin him down.

  He was there, at any rate, when she came in. And he heard her, and came quickly before she could escape.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. For days.’

  The old dark woman, with her hair tied in a gaping rag, only looked at him. Glowing, mistrustful eyes she had.

  ‘How long have you been coming here?’ he asked her. ‘Cleaning the place, and writing’ (he pointed at the altar) ‘these?’

  She stood with her hands clasped across her stomach, searching him.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said. ‘How many years?’

  ‘Ah, long time,’ she said at last, unwillingly, in her rather rich and deep voice. ‘When the roof was on I start coming.’

  ‘Why?’ he gently asked.

  ‘For God,’ she said, quite simply.

  ‘You love God?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  She never moved or looked away from him. ‘God very big,’ she said.

  ‘Very big.’