Cicada

by Moira McKinnon

  Wirritjil scanned the trees. She was looking for her jaarinel but she could not find the bright colours and the fast dipping flight of the rainbow lorikeets, the wirrilijkel. She sank down on the sand feeling its moisture as the horses drank.

  Emily woke, wild-eyed, fighting the rope that tied her to the brumby’s back. Wirritjil went to help.

  ‘Don’t.’ Emily slipped off the horse onto her bad foot and folded into a bundle. ‘Don’t help me.’

  She crawled to the water and drank, letting her cheek lie in the coolness, feeling the sand against her face. ‘Wirritjil, take me back to Joseph.’

  ‘Ammie, dat way.’ Wirritjil pointed downstream. ‘Some bit then datta way.’ Wirritjil pointed upstream.

  Emily closed her eyes. ‘I can tell him about the stars, how they bite the moon.’

  Wirritjil pulled her away from the water’s edge and they slept there on the moist sand bank.

  Wirritjil woke before sunset and caught a large jampinparuny easily with her hair twine, a whittled bone hook and a grasshopper. She cooked it on a small fire and watched as Emily shovelled the segments of hot white flesh into her mouth with trembling hands and lips.

  Evening came and they buried the fire and headed south, downstream along the Fitzroy River, skirting the rocks and coming close to the water when they could. The moon rose, just a sliver before dawn. They stopped on the clean sandy bank of a deep dark pool fringed with the sharp blades of pandanus palms growing thick alongside tall screw palms, their trunks marked with deep circular scars and, up high, spirals of iridescent knife-like leaves.

  Emily dismounted and stood on one leg.

  Wirritjil took the blanket and water bag and draped them on a low-lying branch. She looked at the billy for a minute and placed it in the fork of the tree. She put two of the three ropes they had on a branch and the third she looped around her waist. She took the tobacco the drover had given her and buried it behind a rock, ruffling the sand in front and laying a strand of only four hairs across the rock. She didn’t hobble the horses; instead she hit them hard on their rumps. They stared at her. She threw sand at their flanks and hit them again. They took a few steps away and looked back, puzzled.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Emily limped towards the brumby.

  ‘Datta way, nyarnagum.’ Wirritjil waved her hand like a river flowing. ‘Follow ’im.’

  She drew her firestick from her pouch of damp bark, blew on it until it smouldered then wrapped it in another wad of damp bark and stuck it in her hair. She walked into the water. ‘Aamee. Come, miss.’

  ‘I can’t swim.’

  The horses stepped towards Emily and nuzzled her. Wirritjil came out of the water and shooed them away again. Emily sat down. She put her hands around her foot; the cut was open and gaping, the sand stung on the raw flesh. She clenched her foot, calmed herself and the words came slowly. ‘The soldier’s leg had gangrene. Father had to saw it off. We gave him opium but he felt everything. He gave me a little statue of Mother Mary and William stole it.’

  Emily closed her eyes tight against the sting of her foot. The morning light came onto the river and bee-eaters in their feathers of many colours dipped in flight to sip the still water.

  ‘He said that religion was made up by kings and queens so that the people put up with suffering. I ran after William and he held the statue up high on the bridge. I tried to grab it and I fell. The water was so cold, it was rushing fast. Too many skirts. I went down, couldn’t breathe. I remembered what my father told me. Keep straight and float. He said to keep your fingers together and push down like this.’ Emily pushed down with her palms.

  ‘I did. I sank again so I had to push, push against the water. It came into my mouth. I coughed and coughed but more came in. I was drowning. Someone grabbed me. He put his arm around my shoulder and under my chin and pulled me to shore.’

  Wirritjil sat with her legs folded to the side, listening, trying to pick out words she knew.

  ‘It was Trevor, Wirritjil. He saved me.’

  Wirritjil looked up. ‘Mister Trevor.’

  ‘Then he went to war.’

  ‘What dat?’

  ‘You know: war. There was a big war where people killed each other with rifles and there were other weapons. I can’t remember why it started.’

  Emily stood and limped into the river. The sunlight came in shafts through the trees and struck like swords into the depths of the waters. She let herself sink, pushing with her hands and kicking, but the water tumbled into her mouth and she coughed and stood up, shaking. Wirritjil waded in and crouched in front of her. Emily wrapped her arms around Wirritjil’s shoulders and rested her head against the Aboriginal woman’s neck as they walked and paddled through the pool and onto another.

  ‘William said sorry,’ whispered Emily.

  The horses stood on the sand long after the women had disappeared.

  Nunnawarra was ahead by several horse lengths. It was the fourth day since turning west. They had been travelling hard, keeping to a pattern of slow canter then walk. Trevor was surprised to see Nunnawarra stop by a group of miserly acacia trees that gave only a small arc of shade.

  Trevor caught up and followed Nunnawarra’s gaze. The sand was swirled where horses and humans had stood or sat. A few short cut reeds were clustered next to a patch of darkness in the soil. Trevor peered down from his saddle. He could see the blood. There was no need to talk. The three men pushed their horses into a gallop.

  Emily leant on Wirritjil, hanging onto her shoulders as they crossed sandbars and deep pools. There were long stretches of sand, unshaded and hot. The leather patches the drover had given Emily were torn. Wirritjil cut and twisted locks of Emily’s hair into string and used the strongest bark she could find to reinforce the leather.

  They reached a pool edged by grey rock that was smoothed by thousands of years of flooding, rushing waters. Wirritjil swam to the side and pushed Emily up. They sat as their skin, wrinkly from the water, dried. Emily’s wound had been washed clean but it was black on the edges and her foot was swollen and mottled in colour.

  Wirritjil took Emily on her back again and headed west away from the river, walking on bare rock and avoiding loose stones or sand. She turned upstream, her hardened feet padding quickly over the scorching rock. Emily slipped in the sweat that formed between them and every few steps Wirritjil pushed her upwards, back into position.

  The sun set and Wirritjil climbed several stepped layers to find a stony corner partially hidden, close to where the sandstone merged into grass-covered soil. Wirritjil dug deep around the base of a wattle tree with emerald leaves and faded yellow blossoms, and brought up several fat grey grubs, dusted the dirt off and ate them, raw and wriggling. She dug again and offered some to Emily. Emily raised her hand, but it was all she could do. She did not eat.

  Wirritjil used the rope and the drover’s shirt to tie Emily to her back and they continued into the darkness, Wirritjil felt her way across large flat rocks cut through with gravelly tracts until they came to a tall salmon gum, pale and majestic even in the moonless night.

  They slept fitfully for a few hours. In the early light Wirritjil heard the whip-crack sound and the rippling jee ee, jee eee of the jiyikjiyikjil and imagined him close, his head back and his beak pointed to the sky, the yellow-flecked feathers of his breast ruffling with the strength of his song. She climbed the salmon gum, shinnying in a fast crawl up the trunk to the lowest branches, listening to the jiyikjiyikjil, and searched the sky to see if there were any hunters to tell her where to look for game.

  She gave a loud whoop, jumped down and ran along the rock into the grass. The kilpa goanna was thin and weak at the end of the dry season, the sun was not yet there to warm him and he was slow. She caught him easily by his rough tail and swung him hard against a tree.

  She hung the kilpany in her belt and wondered what his meal plans had been. She had heard the kur lur kur lur coo of the kurlaraim and headed in the direction the kilpany had been going. She
found the dove’s loose grass and stick nest on a rock shelf. There were three creamy eggs. She hesitated then took two.

  Emily was awake when she returned. She showed her the eggs and with a pointy twig put holes in both ends in one egg and sucked on the larger hole. She pierced the second egg and held it out to Emily. Emily put her lips on the shell but did nothing more. Wirritjil came close and blew gently on the opposite end and the yolk slipped into Emily’s mouth. Emily coughed and swallowed. Wirritjil cracked the eggs and they sucked the shells, spitting the pieces out as Wirritjil hoisted Emily onto her back.

  They continued their journey north, passing the place where they first came to the Fitzroy River.

  Wirritjil waded back into the water. Emily was feverish and the water was like icy knife blades. She closed her eyes and when she could, let herself slip into darkness. As night came they moved slowly by the light of the stars. Wirritjil used her feet to feel the terrain under the water, moving northwards up the Fitzroy River. Her movements were sure and measured. There was no change in her speed or rhythm, or in the expression of her face. The birds called to her as she passed, asking her where she was going; she heard them but did not answer them, she did not want to bow to the fear that she knew she should have. Her jaarinel was not there.

  In the morning she made a fire and cooked the kilpany, stripped the meat and offered small bits to Emily until she ate a little.

  The old man with a halo of white hair was two days’ walk from Fitzroy Crossing. He sat not far from the river under the shade of a woollybutt tree that was alive with green ants. The ants soldiered in lines across the soil and enclosed the old man in a circle but did not touch him. Other insects were loud, their legs and wings rubbing in whirring sounds. Juwurru Charcoal faced the west and addressed the sky in a clear and direct voice. He began a slow rhythmic tap with the karrpakji sticks. In the west clouds gathered, purple and grey, rolling into each other and rising in the sky.

  Sweat rolled down William’s face and trickled down the back of his neck. The sky blackened in the west. Lightning shot out, snaking across the land like the long whips of stockmen, and in between rumbles of thunder faded away to nothing only to return, teasing with the beat of crescendo drums.

  William jumped at shadows and tried to stop the cough that came as his chest tightened with fear. He went to the kitchen but the coals in the oven were dead. He picked up a piece of wood to set the fire and put it down again. More heat in this damned inferno was too much. He drank from yesterday’s billy, tepid on the top of the stove. He returned to the veranda to watch the sky and, as always, he gazed westwards to see if they were returning with her.

  ‘I am sorry, my forget-me-not,’ he murmured.

  He had taken to sipping whisky as he sat watching. There was little left in the decanter of the day’s ration. The station hands, he thought, had not run but would finish their work and be back any day with the horses. He knew they would be silent, distrustful of his sharp ways. He regretted that he had ordered them so brusquely, demeaned the young strapper, and told him how useless he was in this tough country. Maybe he was talking about himself. William laughed. He called out to the country from the veranda and shot his rifle high into the air.

  ‘Come and get me, see if you can eat me, make me cry.’

  He did not regret killing the blackfella and surely the strappers thought it was the right thing to do. He had seen the glint in their eyes, the thrill of the pack. He had given them that at least.

  William put his rifle down and picked up the whisky, draining the last few drops. He needed to talk to someone, needed to clear his head, find a way back to what was, to the freshness of the beginning. His soul was tainted, he knew that, he had known for a while of the shadows reaching in. He had agreed to baptism at Emily’s urging. He had allowed the priest to anoint him with the cleansing spirit of God, but he did not believe, he was just appeasing his wife. God belonged to the upper class, and he, William, hated the upper class even though now he was part of it. Pretended to be part of it. The colony was meant to be classless, but no, here, he had class, upper class—and, worse, he had power. The very power that he hated so much in England. The power of the lords. He hated it, the power. He had no control over it and it ate into him. He wanted to tell Emily that. I want to be powerless. He never thought he would say that. Powerlessness had killed his family, torn them to shreds, made them thin and ghostlike, and only their voices, strident in anguish, survived to be handed down to the next generation. That’s all we know, how to tear each other to pieces. How to shout. Lady Josephina had promised more, she had teased him. She was a liar.

  William smashed the decanter against the pole that held the roof of the veranda. He needed to talk, to talk to someone. If only they would return, he would hitch a horse to the buggy and ride to Halls Creek straight away. He walked down to the workers’ quarters and looked into the empty rooms. The wireframed beds were like skeletons with wafting pieces of old newspaper their slight shrouds. A poem formed in his head but it was full of dark words and he let it go. He picked up an old tobacco tin and opened it. Inside was leather wax that had turned to liquid.

  Down at the native camp the fires were long dead. Each eddy of wind took a little more ash into the sky and tugged at the bark of the humpies. He saw the camp was folding back into the land. He remembered how, at first, he had been bewildered by the natives, their simple way of life, how they came and went without obligation to anyone. At first he had respected this but had since come to the conclusion that only animals acted in such a way and so they must be animals.

  He peered into the entrance of a humpy that had been strengthened with rusty pieces of corrugated iron. Inside the ground was hollowed into sleeping spots. He crawled in and sat there and could only think of the occupants’ lowliness, their barbarity. He saw the pathetic piles of twisted human and animal hair string, and pieces of bone that had been partly carved.

  Outside, he passed the semicircles of falling windbreaks, sheltering nothing now except small stacks of flat cooking rocks.

  ‘For what reason are they on this earth?

  Scant is their soul, little is their worth.’

  He thought about that couplet for a minute.

  ‘For what reason are we on this earth?

  Strong is our soul, great is our worth.’

  He shrugged and looked at the darkening sky.

  He climbed to the hill where he had chased Emily. The thought came that he had wanted to and would have killed her and his hand moved involuntarily on the body of his rifle as if getting ready for the chase again. He strode forwards to rid himself of such thoughts, following the path of the women’s flight to the gorge. He stood in the darkness between the two walls, immersed in the consideration of what punishment he should mete out on her return. His mouth was dry with the thought of her deed. A beast, she had decided, was more fit then he.

  He would not beat her. He would kiss her if he felt that desire, but forgive her and bear her own begging kisses? The only penance would be that she would stay locked in her room for ninety days. Wasn’t there something about that period of time in that Bible of hers? They could, they would hide the truth but he would, of course, never forget and never trust again. There would be rules, strong rules. No riding. She would never ride again.

  William reached the horse yards. The gates were all open, the troughs were empty and nothing stirred. He looked around suddenly. No dogs. He was alone on his own land.

  At the camp, he lifted his rifle at the butcherbird that seemed to follow him everywhere. It banked away sharply, squawking like a crow. He stopped at a small pile of disintegrating kangaroo bones mixed with pieces of cast-off hide crusted with traces of desiccated flesh. He kicked at it and dried maggots fell in a shower.

  ‘Yet they draw us into our naked shame,

  The dirt from where we came.’

  Somebody was watching him. He turned. The old gin was sitting at the opening of a humpy looking at him. She stood and
wobbled towards him. The butcherbird came from nowhere and flew in circles above her head.

  ‘Bacca?’

  He looked at her beaky face and reddened eyes and took fright. He walked quickly back to the house, looking over his shoulder and pulling at the bolt on his rifle.

  In the hills, a painted man with a spear moved quietly as the evening came. Red and brown ochre ran jagged across his face and striped his chest. His head, waist, ankles and wrists were circled with bands of kangaroo skin and decorated with emu and hawk feathers. His spear was striped with ochre and the shaft circled with feathers of the nightjar owlet.

  Thunder clouds collided and spears of lightning lit the darkness, one after another, sometimes many striking the earth at once.

  Wirritjil collected fallen branches and stripped more from the needle-leaved hakea trees, lashing them together to form a raft.

  On the river the raft floated well. It dipped in the water with Emily’s weight. Wirritjil placed the drover’s shirt over extra wood as a pillow to lift Emily’s head from the water. They moved upstream, Wirritjil dragging the raft along the stretches of sand between the pools. Sometimes Emily walked a little, shuffled, or crawled. Wirritjil caught a small water monitor, a kurlungarnany, sliced his skin with her flint and ate him raw. Otherwise they ate little, berries occasionally if a piriyalji bush was close to the banks. The river was full of fish, glinting in the slightest light, but Wirritjil ignored them, there was no time to fish, they had to keep moving. It was difficult to travel at night for there was no moon and the evening cloud hid many of the stars. It would only be two, maybe one cycle of the moon before the rains would come.