Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  Given that the so-called aunt was the cousin of the widower who was my friend’s father, I have always supposed that she would have looked forward to settling after her marriage in a township that she was somehow connected with. In short, I saw a cottage that surely had a wooden draining-board in its kitchen. I saw that cottage as standing in a township mentioned previously on the margins of the plateau mentioned several times previously in this report. The cottage would have been a humble rented cottage, and the returned soldier would have been an unskilled farm-labourer. I had heard from my friend that his father had often tramped the countryside as a young man looking for work during the so-called Great Depression and had been grateful to the proprietor of a troupe of boxers who travelled through the inland parts of several states and set up his tent at one after another annual show. The proprietor had employed the young man to stand on a platform outside the tent and to persuade young men from the crowd to challenge the members of the troupe to box for an agreed sum of money. The young man was paid no wages for his work, but the owner of the troupe bought him a meal in a café each evening and a pot of beer in a hotel.

  If her cousin had once worked for no more than a meal and a pot of beer, how grateful would the young wife have been, and how sincerely would she have thanked God in her prayers every night, after her husband had found employment on the largest property in the district: a wide expanse of mostly level grazing land on the plateau mentioned previously, with plantations of black-green cypress trees forming stripes and bars on the otherwise bare paddocks, emerald green for half the year and yellow-brown for the other half. It was not God who arranged this, of course, but I, a man she knew nothing of. She had taken no notice of me during my few visits to her widower-cousin’s house fifty years before, nor did I know even the year of her death. I had decided, however, while I was falling asleep in the room where she herself might often have fallen asleep that the best of the possible lives that she might have imagined herself as living was as the wife of an employee on the large property mentioned, where not only sheep and cattle grazed but thoroughbred horses also.

  At first the young husband rode his bicycle between the property where he worked and the township where he lived. Later, he moved with his wife and their first child into one of the cottages provided for workers on the large property. That was as far as I followed the story, so to call it, of the persons seen in her mind by the young woman whose image was sometimes in my mind while I lay before sleep in the room where the so-called aunt may once have lain while the upper panes of the window beside me were mildly coloured by the light from a streetlamp outside. I left the story thus suspended because I supposed that the so-called aunt was unable to conceive of any more desirable way of life than to live on a large grazing property in a cottage provided by the owner of the property. My having supposed this implies that I myself, in a certain mood or under certain conditions, am likewise unable.

  I have not yet forgotten the period of my life when I read book after book of fiction in the belief that I would learn thereby matters of much importance not to be learned from any other kind of book. I have not yet forgotten the appearance of the rooms where my books (most of them works of fiction) stood on shelf after shelf. I have not yet forgotten the places where I sat reading. I am able to recall many of the dust-jackets or the paper covers of the books that I read and even particular mornings or afternoons or evenings when I read. I certainly recall some of what took place in my mind while I read; I can recall many images that occurred to me and many moods that overcame me, but the words and sentences that were in front of my eyes when the images occurred or the moods arose – of those countless items I recall hardly any.

  What is the name of the author of a certain collection of pieces of short fiction that I read perhaps thirty years ago? I remember nothing of my experience as a reader of his fiction, but I remember the import of a few sentences in an introductory essay at the head of the fiction. The works of fiction had been translated from the German language, and the author of the essay seemed to have assumed that the author of the fiction would have been previously unknown to English-speaking readers. At the time when I read the essay and the fiction, I was a husband and the father of several young children. The small house where I lived was so crowded that I had to keep my books in the lounge-room and in the central passage. The books were shelved in alphabetical order according to the surnames of their authors. The collection with the introductory essay was kept on one of the lowest shelves in the passage. The surname of the author must therefore have begun with one of the last letters of the English alphabet. Whoever he was, I have remembered about him for perhaps thirty years that he could conceive of no more fulfilling way of life than that of a servant: a person scarcely ever required to instigate or to decide matters but able instead to experience the peculiar joy that comes from carrying out an instruction to the letter or from following the strictest of daily routines. I have just now seemed to remember about the author that he spent much of his later life, and may well have died, in a lunatic asylum, so to call it, but this has not dissuaded me from stating here that I am much in sympathy with the man as I seem to remember him. Nor am I dissuaded from thinking of the young woman and the husband mentioned as being content to spend the remainder of their lives as the writer in the German language claimed to want to spend his life with the difference, perhaps, that the writer might have wanted to spend the last hour of every evening in his tiny room with pen and paper, writing one after another work of fiction of the sort that I once read but later forgot whereas the young woman and her husband might have wanted no more, before they fell asleep, than to see in mind some little of what they had failed to see by day: she, perhaps, the huge, dim rooms on the far side of some or another window when the afternoon sunlight picked out the fields of colours in its panes; he, perhaps, the faces of the young female persons whose voices he sometimes heard from behind the vine-covered trellises on the long return veranda at the far side of the wide lawns and the symmetrically located flower-beds and fishponds.

  (Whenever I recall, here in this quiet district near the border, my mostly aimless activity during my fifty and more years in the capital city, I begin to envy the sort of man who might have been paid a modest wage during most of his adult life in return for feeding and watering and grooming and exercising a half-dozen thoroughbred horses in a certain few sheds and paddocks behind a plantation of cypresses on the far side of an assortment of outbuildings in the vicinity of an immense garden surrounding a sprawling homestead out of sight of the nearest road, which would have appeared as one of the faintly coloured least of roads if ever I had seen it on some or another map of some or another of the mostly level grassy landscapes that seem often to lie in some or another far western district of my mind.)

  I reported in the fourth most recent paragraph that I was accustomed to leaving the sequence of imaginings of the so-called aunt suspended at a certain point. While I was writing the two previous paragraphs, however, a number of image-events occurred to me such as might readily have prolonged the sequence while keeping it still relevant to this report. The first of the possible events is the so-called aunt’s giving birth to a daughter at about the time when my own birth took place. (Several problems kept me at first from moving beyond this event. According to the time-scale that I had in mind, this birth would have taken place nearly twenty years after the so-called aunt’s marriage and when she was nearly forty years of age. At that period of history, such a birth would have been by no means improbable, but it was likely to have been the ninth or tenth of its kind, so that the daughter would have been the youngest of numerous siblings. This was not to my liking. I wanted better for the daughter than that she would have been the ninth or tenth child of a farm-labourer; that she should wear hand-me-down clothes and lack for finery and toys and have to do housework when she might otherwise have been reading or day-dreaming. I was ready to decree that the child should have been adopted by the so-called aunt after she had
been childless for many years – a pampered only child better suited my narrative than a threadbare child-drudge – until I recalled the girl-woman who had once guided me towards a fishpond overhung by leaves of a certain shade of red. She had been the only child of a mother whose hair was greying. A quite separate problem was that I seemed to be calling into existence the daughter and her circumstances as though I and not the so-called aunt was lying before sleep in a room with coloured panes in its window and envisaging possible events. But this ceased to seem a problem after I had reminded myself that this is a report of actual events and no sort of work of fiction. As I understand the matter, a writer of fiction reports events that he or she considers imaginary. The reader of the fiction considers, or pretends to consider, the events actual. This piece of writing is a report of actual events only, even though many of the reported events may seem to an undiscerning reader fictional.

  The daughter, as I intend to call her, had an upbringing rather different from mine. I lived at times in suburbs of the capital city and at other times in a provincial city or in a remote district of mostly treeless countryside where three previous generations of my father’s family had lived but where I never felt at home because the district was bounded on one side by ocean. She lived until she was almost a young woman in the one house on a far-reaching plateau, seeing every day views of mostly level grassy countryside such as I knew for many years only from illustrations. One of the houses that I lived in had in one door a pane of coloured glass. She saw every day not only the coloured panes in several doors of her own house but distant views of many a door and many a window of a mansion in room after room of which, on walls or floors or furnishings, were zones of subdued colour where fell in early morning or late afternoon what sunlight was still able to reach beneath the beetling iron roof and through the vines and creepers of the return veranda. Her parents may not have been regular churchgoers but they had been married before a clergyman and they sent their daughter to the Sunday school conducted by the same Protestant denomination that built a certain church of pale-coloured stone and fitted in the porch of the church a coloured window the sight of which prompted me to begin writing this report. Her upbringing and mine were rather different, but she and I, like almost every other young person of our time and place, had been compelled during year after year of our childhood, during freezing mornings or hot afternoons, to find interest, or to pretend to find interest in one or another of a series of reading books compiled by the Department of Education in our state and sold cheaply to all schools, whether state or denominational. Capable readers such as she and I read the whole of our reader, as it was called, during the first few days after we had taken possession of it. Then, during the remainder of the year, we were obliged to sit during so-called reading lessons while one or another of our classmates read aloud laboriously some or another paragraph from some or another prose item that we, the capable readers, had long ago tired of reading. The reading books were first published ten years before my birth and were in widespread use for nearly thirty years afterwards. During those years, many schools, whether state or denominational, were so poorly equipped that pupils read no other books than their readers. This was certainly so in the schools that I attended, and I could not have begun to write this paragraph if it had not been so in the school that the daughter attended.

  The daughter and I were sometimes repelled, not so much by the subject-matter of many items in the readers as by their moral overtones. Neither she nor I could have devised such an expression – we might have said that the compilers of the readers, if not the authors of the texts themselves, were preaching at us. Sometimes their preaching was strident, but even when they preached subtly we were alert to them, we who had been preached at so often as children by parents and teachers and pastors. The readers contained many illustrations, but all were black and white. The daughter and I understood that coloured illustrations would have made the readers prohibitively expensive, but we wondered why so many of the line-drawings failed to attract us and so many of the reproductions of photographs were murky and their details blurred, and we even fancied sometimes that the stylised children in the line-drawings and the grey landscapes in the half-tone reproductions had a moral purpose: to remind us that life was a serious matter. Very few items in the readers were overtly religious. I recall only an extract from The Pilgrim’s Progress, an account of the Pilgrim Fathers’ first years in America, and my learning from the notes at the rear of one of the readers that John Milton, the author of several extracts in the series, was the Poet of Puritan England and second only to Shakespeare. Even so, I often felt as though every one of the readers had been put together single-handedly by a well-intentioned but tiresome Protestant clergyman. As a boy, I could not have distinguished between the various Protestant denominations, but thirty-five years later I talked at length with a woman whose thesis for a higher degree in education had argued that the implicit message of the series of readers embodied, as she put it, the world-view of Nonconformism in the early decades of the twentieth century.

  And yet the readers contained items that the daughter and I were apt to remember throughout our lives. For whatever reason, the compilers of the series had included in each volume one or two items that were not only free from preachiness but likely to leave a child-reader at least pensive, if not troubled. In one of the many possible lives that I might have led, the daughter and I met as young persons and began to keep company. Among the many things that we were pleased to talk about were the freezing mornings or hot afternoons when each of us searched the school reader for one of the few pieces able to lead our thoughts away from the unhospitable classroom, the moralising text read haltingly aloud by one after another of our dull classmates, the cheerless illustrations. I was pleased to hear from her that she read often and pondered over the story of the mare employed during her last years as a pit-pony who was fond of telling the foal born to her underground about the green meadows and the blue skies she had once seen, even though the foal thought the mare’s tales were imaginings and the mare herself began at last to be of the same opinion. She, the daughter, was pleased to hear from me that I had likewise read and pondered over the poem about the old horse that had been harnessed for most of its life to a capstan-like device at a mine and compelled to trudge continually in circles until a time when the mine was abandoned and the horse was put to pasture near by but loitered until the last hour of its life as near as it could draw to the place where it had formerly toiled and suffered. I was pleased to hear that she had read often and pondered over the poem about the toys that had been gathering dust and turning to rust for year after year but were still waiting faithfully for the return of their owner, the small boy who had set them in place but had still not returned. She was pleased to hear that I had likewise read and pondered over the poem reporting the thoughts and imaginings of the poet while he stood at evening in a country graveyard and pondered on the possible lives that might have been lived by the persons whose remains were buried near by.

  While I was writing the previous three paragraphs, I had at hand a complete set of the readers mentioned: facsimiles of the original books issued as a commemorative edition twenty-five years ago. After I had finished writing the previous paragraph, I turned to the pages where was printed the third of the poems mentioned in that paragraph. I was surprised to find that the text published in the reader was an abridged text. Missing from the text that I read often as a boy were several stanzas of the original, most notably the last stanza, in which the Deity is mentioned reverently. I can hardly believe that the poem was abridged because space was short in the pages of the reader. Nor can I readily believe that the compilers of the series of readers would have censored, as it were, what they would have considered a masterpiece of English literature. I can only marvel at the seemingly inexplicable circumstance that the possible self of mine who sometimes seemed to stand beside the personage seemingly responsible for the writing of a certain famous English poem – that o
ne of my possible selves was never obliged at last to bow his head and to lower his eyes and to feign devotedness to the divine personage in whose honour had been built the church near by but was instead free to look up from among the graves and the headstones and to observe from a distance the subdued glow effected by the setting sun in at least one coloured pane of one window.

  The daughter had an upbringing rather different from mine but each of us sometimes, during one or another of my possible lives, recounted something that surprised the other and made his or her secret history seem explicable after all. I would have been thus surprised when she first told me that she had sometimes during her childhood arranged on the mat in her lounge-room glass beads from her mother’s sewing basket. The beads were of different colours, and she arranged them as the images of coloured jackets of jockeys were arranged on the far side of an image-racecourse in her mind whenever she heard on some or another afternoon certain indistinct sounds from which she understood that her father’s employer, the owner of the far-reaching property where she lived, was listening on the return veranda of his mansion to a radio broadcast of some or another race contested by one or another of his horses on some or another distant racecourse.