by Murray Bail
The train was late.
Those darkened sleepers which cushioned the tremendous travelling weight of trains: they had been axed from the forests of Grey Ironbark (E. paniculata) around hilly Bunyah, a few hours to the east. The same dark eucalypts felled by the same axemen filled export contracts for the expansion of steam across China, India, British Africa. Most of the sleepers for the Trans-Siberian railway were cut from the forests around Bunyah, and so—here’s poetic justice—carried the weight of thousands of Russians, transported to isolation and worse. Truly, Grey Ironbark is one of the hardest woods available to man.
Faint whistle and smoke. The rails began their knuckle-cracking. The train appeared, grew, and eventually came to rest alongside the platform, letting out a series of sighs like an exhausted black dog, dribbling, its paws outstretched. For a moment people were too occupied to notice Holland.
Holland tilted his bare head down to a small girl in a blue dress. As they left the station he was seen taking her small wicker case and doing his best to talk. She was looking up at him.
Soon after, women came out in the sunlight on the street and appeared to bump into each other. They joined at the hem and elbow. The news quickly jumped the long distances out of town, and from there spread in different directions, entering the houses Holland had sat down and eaten in, the way a fire leaps over fences, roads, bare paddocks and rivers, depositing smaller, always slightly different, versions of itself.
She was his daughter. He could do anything he liked with her. Yes; but weeks passed before he brought her into town. ‘Acclimatising’ was very much on his mind.
The women wanted to see her. They wanted to see the two of them together. Some wondered if he’d be stern with her; the various degrees of. Instead Holland appeared unusually stiff, at the same time, casual.
Traces of him showed around the child’s eyes and jaw. There was the same two-stage smile, and the same frown when answering a question. To the town women she was perfectly polite.
She was called Ellen.
Holland had met and married a river woman from outside Waikerie, on the Murray, in South Australia; Ellen never tired of hearing the story.
Her father had placed one of those matrimonial advertisements.
‘What’s wrong with that? It has a high curiosity value for both parties. You never know what’s going to come up. That’s what I’m going to do when you’re old enough. I’ll write the advertisement myself. I’ll try to list your most attractive features, if I can think of any. We’ll probably have to advertise in Scotland and Venezuela.’
It is still the custom for certain rural newspapers to run these advertisements, handy for the man who simply hasn’t got around to finding himself a suitable woman, or one who’s been on the move, doing seasonal work. It’s a custom well and truly established in other places, such as Nigeria, where men are given the names of flowers, and in India, one newspaper especially, published in New Delhi, is read avidly just for these advertisements artfully penned and placed from all corners of the sub-continent. There it’s a convenient service for marriages arranged by others, when it becomes necessary to cast a wider net.
Worth mentioning in this context. In circular New Delhi, wherever the eye turns, even as a bride tilts her cloudy mirror-ring to glimpse for the first time the face with pencil-moustache of her arranged-by-others husband, it invariably picks up the Blue Gum (E. globulus)—they’re all over the place; just as the tall fast-growing E. kirtoni, common name Half Mahogany, has virtually taken over the dusty city of Lucknow.
Of the three replies to Holland’s one-liner clearly the most promising was the childish rounded hand on ruled paper. Some suggestion here about being a fresh widow: hers was another man who’d ended up headfirst in the river, still in his boots.
She was one of seven or eight. Holland saw bodies draped everywhere, pale sisters, transfixed by lines of piercing light, as if the tin shack had been shot up with bullet holes.
‘I introduced myself,’ Holland explained. And your mother went very quiet. She hardly opened her mouth. She must have realised what she’d let herself in for. Now there I was, standing in front of her. Maybe she took one look at my mug and wanted to run a mile?’ Daughter smiled. ‘A very, very nice woman. I had a lot of time for your mother.’
Sometimes a sister sat alongside and without a word began brushing the eldest sister’s hair. It was straw blonde; the others were dark. The kitchen table had its legs standing in jam-tins of kero. The father would come in and go out. He hardly registered Holland’s presence. No sign of the mother. Holland presented an axe and a blanket, as if they were Red Indians.
At last he carried her back to Sydney.
There in his rooms, which was more or less within his world, she appeared plump, or (put it this way) softer than he imagined, and glowed, as if dusted with flour. And she busied herself. Casually she introduced a different order. Unpinned, her hair fell like a sudden dumping of sand and rhythmically she brushed it, a religious habit in front of the mirror. Amazing was her faith in him: how she allowed him to enter. His hands felt clumsy and coarse, as did sometimes his words. Here was someone who listened to him.
What happened next began as a joke. On the spur of the moment he took out, with some difficulty, insurance against his river woman delivering twins. He was challenging Nature. It was also his way of celebrating. The actuaries calculated tremendous odds; Holland immediately increased the policy. He waved the ye olde certificate with its phoney red seal in front of his friends. Those were the days he was drinking.
‘I’d emptied my pockets, every spare zac I had.’
Ellen had little interest in the financial side.
‘You were the first born,’ he nodded. ‘We named you Ellen. I mean, that was your mother’s preference—Ellen. Your brother lived just a few days. Something broke in your mother. No one has ever seen anyone cry as much, I’m willing to bet. The top of your head, here, was always wet. And blood, a lot of blood. She just lay there crying, you know, softly. She couldn’t stop. She grew weak with it. As I watched, her life seemed to leak away. There was nothing I could do. I’d hardly even got to know her. I don’t know how it happened.
‘And you, the picture of health and the fat cheque arriving soon afterwards. I should have been throwing my hat up in the air. I’d never seen so much money, so many noughts. I had all this dough on a piece of paper in the back of my trousers for a month or more before I had the stomach to march into a bank with it. And so, here we are. There’s a fine view from the verandah. At least I’ve got some say in that. And look at you. Already you’re the prettiest doll for a hundred miles.’
And Ellen never tired of hearing the story, and asking questions, often the same questions, about her mother. Often in the retelling Holland would stop and say, ‘Come over here and give your father a big kiss.’
• 2 •
Eximia
SOME PEOPLE, some nations, are permanently in shade. Some people cast a shadow. Lengths of elongated darkness precede them, even in church or when the sun is in, as they say, mopped up by the dirty cloth of the clouds. A puddle of dark forms around their feet. It’s very pine like. The pine and darkness are one. Eucalypts are unusual in this respect: set pendulously their leaves allow see-through foliage which in turn produces a frail patterned sort of shade, if at all. Clarity, lack of darkness—these might be called ‘eucalyptus qualities’.
Anyway, don’t you think the compliant pine is associated with numbers, geometry, the majority, whereas the eucalypt stands apart, solitary, essentially undemocratic?
The gum tree has a pale ragged beauty. A single specimen can dominate an entire Australian hill. It’s an egotistical tree. Standing apart it draws attention to itself and soaks up moisture and all signs of life, such as harmless weeds and grass, for a radius beyond its roots, at the same time giving precious little in the way of shade.
It is trees which compose a landscape.
A long time passed before Holland c
ould accept the idea (rather than the fact) that the land he was standing on, including every lump of quartz and broken stick and tuft of dry grass, every tree upright and growing or fallen grey, belonged to him, was his. Sometimes then it felt as if even the weather belonged to him.
In a rush of keenness Holland decided he wanted to know everything, beginning with the names of things—the birds and the rocks, above all, the trees. Almost smiling and with a certain blank politeness the town people could not always come up with the answers; Holland ordered a number of reference books from Sydney.
By the time Ellen arrived in her blue-check dress Holland had planted a few eucalypts, and often she would accompany her father with a bucket and yellow spade, squatting alongside as he planted more.
So she, Ellen, was sowing the seeds of her own future.
The first eucalypt—if it’s possible to be precise about a passion—is the one closest to the front of the house. Positioned off-centre it breaks the accelerating horizontality of the front verandah, and from most angles happens to obscure the window of the daughter’s bedroom.
Holland could have put in any tree under the sun, a creepy pine, for example, with its sycophantic shadow (an Umbrella Pine? a Norfolk?), or else an acacia, the dreariest of all trees; a loquat would have been the sentimental local favourite. And if he was especially attracted to eucalypts, because they were native so-called, or solitary or whatever, plenty of different seedlings were commercially available in rusty tins, even in those days.
Holland planted a Yellow Bloodwood (E. eximia).
Here we have a tree so sensitive to frosts it sticks close to the coast, within cooee of Sydney. Holland’s first attempt quickly died. With peculiar stubbornness he planted others, and nursed the last remaining plant, a weedy-looking thing. Every day he forked the earth, and gave it a drink from a cup, distributed bits of sheep manure, and at night threw up an anti-frost barricade of tin and hessian. It grew and thrived. There it stands now.
Unusual for a eucalypt the Yellow Bloodwood has a shivering canopy of leaves almost touching the ground, like an errant oak. The botanical journals have this to say: ‘the specific name is taken from the English adjective eximious, in the sense that the tree in flower is extraordinary.’ Late spring the flowers put on their show. It is as if someone has merrily chucked handfuls of dirty snow into the military-green leaves. Dirty snow—so far inland? Colour of beer froth. Make that a blonde’s hair. Perpetually oozing red gum is the ‘blood’ in the rest of the name.
As she grew older Ellen wanted to know still more about her invisible mother. The sophistication of Ellen’s expectations, her impatience with his replies, puzzled her father.
A photograph might have eased the pressure. But apparently no such point of reference existed—although Holland’s wife had grown up in the very midst of a national outbreak of black-and-white as well as brown photography, the flowering of the gawky pose. (The boredom of picnics caught, black sheep there pulling faces, the country cousin in the old teapot pose, babies grimacing in prams like angry motorcyclists. God knows, a long list of the regulation snaps could be made, along with a disgusted footnote on the unreliability of the locally made photo-corners…) From the moment the shutter clicks, future reactions of shock-horror, pity and surprise are stored in silver and gelatin. Photography is the art of comparison. Anyone can take a photograph. The ‘art’ has already been composed by the subject itself, even when it’s a brick wall—really, the word ‘art’ here is an amazing pretension, since it is merely a description of feet placement, whether the photographer aims for the poetics of shadow, the curious subject or juxtaposition, the concentration of austerity, or merely the decency of the ordinary mugshot.
‘They could hardly afford a loaf of bread,’ Holland explained, ‘let alone a box camera. They had sores, and no shoes. I think their place had a dirt floor.’
As well, the great river was known to spill over every set number of years and carry away the most intimate possessions of a person.
Whatever the reason, Ellen was left feeling incomplete, conscious of a missing element.
Holland did his best. To picture Ellen’s mother he first had to smooth away the blood thinned with the dripping tears which had seeped into her dress, dissolved her shape, that is, those hips, wrists, breasts, mouth with expression, her voice—not that she was one of the world’s great talkers.
But then he saw the woman he hardly knew had haemorrhaged gentleness, whether breathing at his side or sitting in a kitchen chair, an abundance of gentleness, overflowing, so much gentleness and with it serenity, he had trouble realising her true centre. And as time passed this too began to fade.
He hadn’t told Ellen about her grandfather. Holland wasn’t sure what to say about him. Quite a scenario on the outskirts of Waikerie: father, seven or eight daughters growing up inside an oven, mother nowhere to be seen, drowsy brown river slow-flowing in sunlight. Even though Holland had been about to stroll away with his eldest daughter, and so was there most days with his hair Brylcreemed and parted, the father took little notice of him. Loose-limbed, a wreck, a pisspot; by the popular American handbooks on the family, strong on statistics, he was a total disappointment, a really poor low-grade example of what a father should be.
What exactly is a father to a daughter?
The father is a man, yet to the daughter he is not. Wherever she goes he is behind or alongside at an angle, her often clumsy shadow. She’ll never shake him off. The father has the advantage of the older man. He is solid; at arm’s length; at the same time, distant: a blurry authority, always with the promise of softening. And this particular father in the torn singlet, this black spot on the statistical curve, had a mermaid tattooed on the wrist (a long way from the sea) whose perspiring breasts and fishy hips he liked to wriggle for his many daughters by opening and closing his fist. Talk about mixed signals: he was caught doing it at the funeral.
Holland’s wife had told about the games they played on the river bank, she and her many sisters.
All shrieks and plaits and grazed knees they singled out a tree and took turns to embrace it, whispering against the trunk. It felt iron-hard, though alive, like the tremendous neck of a horse. According to this game any sister whose fingertips met around the trunk would become pregnant. By ‘pregnant’ they meant marriage; they were only girls.
One of these sisters, young and fairly fat, was standing by the tree on a hot afternoon when she was made pregnant. It was a thudding-in, the way countrymen using their strength grapple with a fresh iron bark fencing post. That was the way it happened. Half on the land, half in midair. She was barely sixteen. A few months later everybody knew.
Holland’s mail-order bride led him to the water and pointed to the lingam tree. Holland almost burst out laughing at its bedraggled ordinariness, its helpfully small circumference. (A young Swamp Gum—its leery specific name, Eucalyptus ovata.) Wrapping his bare arms around the trunk Holland shook hands with himself, and to underline the ease said, ‘Pleased to meetya.’ She looked on with an attentive slight smile.
‘I knew then she was going to give me the nod. I’d say she’d decided there and then. Your mother always liked a joke.’
Her gentleness and serenity—it could have been indifference. He was never sure.
It was near the same tree on one other afternoon that something had leaked into her eye, so to speak; her head jerked, her fingers went up and twisted her lips. Other times she’d seen sheep and cows made amphibious, and once a horse, their bellies blown up to billy-o. Never the body of a man in a check shirt coming by slowly with the current, face-down.
As she searched for a long branch or something she made whimpering sounds.
Her father grabbed her from behind: his pet mermaid would have flexed into a belly-dance. Not far upstream was the spot he kept his beer cool, submerged in a wheat bag to the depth of an elbow. Now he was digging into her shoulders.
‘Let him be, poor sap. He’ll get snagged soon enough. Stop
your blubbering, you hear?’
Even as he spoke the body stopped, the river swirled and built up against it. The face tilted towards them. But she knew anyway it was the skinny fruit-picker who’d been seen with her sister.
She wondered if she could reach out with a stick. The body though swung with the current and got moving again. Eventually it came to rest near the town bridge, jammed in the fork of a tree, along with a bucket and other rubbish. What a way to end: amongst things of exceptional ordinariness.
For days their sister swollen to mother-of-pearl wouldn’t speak to anyone. Then she was found eating handfuls of dirt, which their father saw as proof, if further proof was needed, of an altogether different sort of deficiency—not even his savage elbow could stop her.
Elsewhere in history virgins have imagined themselves pregnant; many stories are told of them. But she felt clumsy in her heaviness. She was two and wanted to be back to one; or at least separate from the extra living heaviness within, bearing down at several points. Fluid was pulling her earthwards: a sponge heavy with liquid. Even her pretty feet had swollen. She lost count of the days. She was too young. For no other reason she answered one weekend—there was nothing else to do—Holland’s advertisement and became engrossed in an earnest correspondence. Somehow she knew the words ‘young widow’ were red rag to a long-distant man, even if she wasn’t exactly, not officially. With her eldest sister helping she replied to his suggestion of an exchange of photographs: ‘Come and see for yourself!’
And there he was a few days later, standing in the doorway, not really expected. No one knew which way to turn.
The swollen and smeared one doing her best to merge into the flowers and broken springs of the sofa hissed, ‘I’m not talking to him, you have to, go on.’
