Landscape of Farewell

by Alex Miller

  Indeed, I soon found it was not possible to keep myself entirely out of it and, as I began to live more deeply within the events over the following nights, the spirit of Dougald’s story and the spirit of my own story merged in my imagination and became one—until I was Gnapun the warrior and he was me. It was no longer the exploits of Dougald’s great-grandfather that I wrote of, but became the deeds of an imaginary and heroic self—none other than that same brave good man whom I had longed to become when I was a boy peering anxiously through the hole in the wall of my bedroom! And it was of that same great battle that I wrote now; that old struggle within us all to be good and just and to do no evil, a struggle which finds its final resolution in our death. It was only when I at last conceived the story in these terms that were intimate to myself that I was able to compose a version of it that at all pleased me. The question of whether it would please Dougald, however, or dismay him, remained undecided and was a source of great anxiety to me. In making his story my own, I feared I may have betrayed him, as a poor translation betrays the work that inspires it. Or had I—this faint hope in my heart—by giving his story a voice that was intimate to my own voice, found the only means by which I might offer him, in a written version of his story, the illusion of the intimacy of his own interior voice? It was a conundrum and I did not attempt to resolve it. I read over my story many times but could not answer this question to my satisfaction. When I finally handed it to him it was with my doubts and worst fears intact. His reading would have to give me my answer. Nothing else could. I titled his story ‘Massacre’. It was a true and apt title for his story, of this I have no doubt. But it was—and I alone knew this—also a title closer to my own history of failure than any other title or subject that I might have chosen to speak of from my own experience. When I finished it, I felt I had at last written my own book of massacre.

  15

  Massacre

  To choose the moment of his own death. There was a nobility in that. The vision had been with him even in childhood and had persisted. Towards dawn in the escarpment high above the valley a disc of silver slid between the trees, touching the rocks with its aluminium light. When the cold light reached him he stirred in his sleep. A few moments later he sat up and tossed aside his cloak and rose from beside the ashes of his fire. Leaving his possessions in his sleeping place within the overhang of the cliff, he began the long descent by the light of the moon to the camp of the messengers. He carried only his favourite spears and travelled alone. An hour later the sun struck the peak behind him, but he did not turn to look back at the gilded mountain. He knew who the messengers were. He had known long before they arrived that they would come into his country and wish to speak with him of their troubles. He reached the wide meadows at the base of the valley and walked without haste between the black trunks of the great ironbark trees, the ground mist breaking before him, as if he breasted a pale tide in his nakedness, his body shining with the vigour that was in him, his limbs strong and well-proportioned, his long stride assured and full of purpose. He met no one, and as he advanced through his country he did not look about him, for he knew what lay to his left and to his right, but kept his eyes always to the front, his gaze touching the ground where he would tread. The sun was well up when he paused at the river to drink.

  He caught a drift of the perfumed smoke from their fire among the leafy river gums before he saw them. They were camped on the sandy spit beside the long waterhole where he and his people had left for them the sign of welcome. There were four of them. He stood on the bank above them, and they quietly rose and looked at him, but did not utter a single word. He stood a while, neither moving nor greeting them, but permitting the morning stillness to settle around him after the disturbance of his arrival; giving these supplicants occasion to consider their position, allowing them a little time in which to wonder if he may not have come to them alone after all, but had his warriors concealed nearby. Standing above them on the high bank of the river he saw, in the nervous glances they exchanged with each other, how they travelled in their uncertainty to the scene of their own imminent destruction and looked with longing to where their weapons were concealed. He saw too how filled with anxiety the long night had been for them, for they had burned a great deal of wood during the hours of darkness, and had surely risen with the moon, having already breakfasted on several roasted ducks, the abundant remains of which were scattered around their sleeping places.

  He called a low greeting to them then and, laying aside his spears on the grass, he went down among them. They were moved by his trust and returned his greeting eagerly, all speaking at once and complimenting him on the waterhole and the plentiful fish and duck, and thanking him for his generosity in providing such a camp site. Soon they had begun to relax and to smile and even to make a few jokes, the tallest of them saying, with cheeky bravado, ‘Well, boys, what say we come and live here and fetch our families with us?’ The others looked uncertainly at Gnapun when their lanky companion said this, and only laughed when they saw that Gnapun himself was amused.

  Their laughter broke the tension of the morning and they tossed more wood on their fire and at once gained greatly in confidence. They sat together, watching the new wood take fire and begin to blaze noisily. And soon the tall man who had made the risky joke began to speak with animation of the trouble that had caused them to leave their families and had brought them three days through the empty scrubs of the miserable brigalow country from their own valley to speak with him. As he spoke of their troubles this man became increasingly agitated, gesturing wildly with his long skinny arms, and shouting unnecessarily loudly into the morning, his eyes shining like the eyes of a madman, until one of his companions was moved to lay a hand on his thigh and to advise him softly, ‘It is better if we are calm, or our friend will not understand the gravity of our situation.’ The tall man apologised and calmed down for a minute or two, but soon grew agitated again and started shouting and flinging his arms about just as before, which made his account difficult to follow in its detail.

  Gnapun said nothing but observed the man’s three companions—who evidently left the talking to their excitable friend because it was not possible for anyone to silence such a man for long. But his shouting and his wild jerky movements were a kind of silence in themselves, for they left the others at liberty to reveal their feelings in the private expressions that remained unguarded on their troubled features. Watching them, Gnapun saw that their fear was real, and that there was a deep panic in their hearts that they did not wish to let him see in case he judged them to be cowards and unworthy of his help. But he had seen this panic before in other men and it did not trouble him, for he knew the means by which frightened men can be made brave. At last he turned to the tall man and reached to lay his hand on the man’s shoulder. Startled by the touch of Gnapun’s hand, the man fell silent and stared at him, his eyes wide with astonishment and expectation. They waited anxiously for Gnapun to speak. It was clear he had made his decision.

  He kept his hand on the tall man’s shoulder and watched a pair of black swans that just then sailed fearlessly to the centre of the waterhole from the concealment of the rocks. Seeing the direction of his gaze the others turned and looked. ‘It is time for us to leave this waterhole to the swans,’ Gnapun said. ‘I will return with you to your country through the brigalow and I will meet these strangers. When I have met them, I will decide if anything can be done about them.’

  With great emotion the four men thanked him. The tall man wept, standing and turning away, shamed by his helpless tears. The others laughed at him gently and slapped each others’ arms and apologised to Gnapun for him with their glances.

  Gnapun said gravely, ‘This is not the first time I have seen a brave man weep when he has reason to.’ The tall man looked at him with gratitude for these words, and in that moment he became Gnapun’s faithful follower and wished only to prove his courage to him when the time came for him to do so. Gnapun glanced to where he knew their
weapons were concealed, which was his permission for them to retrieve them. ‘We have a long way to go,’ he said. ‘We should leave at once.’ A few minutes later they set off, carrying their long shafts at their sides and walking in single file behind the tall man, each careful to step into the footprints of the man he followed. Soon they had left their camp site far behind them in the possession of the black swans.

  They walked all day down the narrow valley until it opened out onto the flat country where the haunted silence of the great scrubs awaited them, the thin trees tight-lipped here and not a word of comfort to be expected from them, but a shifting uncertainty in the flickering play of light and shade that might lead a traveller to lose his purpose and direction. They hurried on through the haunted scrubs without pausing until dusk each day, when they lit their small fires and rested until dawn. The messengers’ spirits were strengthened on this return through the dismal scrubs by having the famous warrior Gnapun as their companion, the hope in their hearts now that when he saw how badly things stood for them with the strangers he would become their champion and would help them. Their situation, they knew, was hopeless otherwise.

  * * *

  Gnapun’s people feared the visionary seizures that possessed him before a battle, and he had been required by custom since his early youth to sleep alone in order to remove from them the dangerous contagion of his powers. That night, in the desolation of the waterless scrubs, while he lay sleeping beside the cold ashes of his poor fire—the messengers were camped together some way from him—Gnapun was visited by a vision of such power it woke him with a start as if a woman slapped his face. He sat up, chilled and sweating, a deep pain gathering around his heart. There was no moon yet and he crouched beside the ashes of his fire in the blackness of the strange night, the deathly pain a tight band around his chest, like grief. It was surely death who had breathed on him while he slept. In the vision that haunted his waking eye he knew himself to be his own chief victim and understood that while he slept he had been magically inserted into the person of the leader of the band of strangers who had invaded the country of the messengers. In his vision he bore witness within himself to the slow death of this mortally wounded man, who was himself and was not-himself, a white man and a stranger to him, yet intimate and familiar, dear to him in ways he only knew but did not understand.

  He saw through the dying man’s eyes as he lay on his side in the noonday sun. Through the crisscross of the trellis in the vegetable garden, beyond the patch of bare ground where he was lying like a piece of meat baking on the stones, he could see his wife. She was no longer young but was a handsome woman all the same. She was his faithful life’s companion and had shared his dreams and trials with him for thirty years or more. He loved her as he loved no other and knew no life without her by his side. He had lived in order to please her and his God. As she leaned forward, listening now, her dark hair falling across her face, he recalled the moment he had submitted willingly to her enchantment. Her hair shone now in the sunlight as it had then, falling lightly against the collar of her flowered dress. On her head the pale straw hat with the ribbon that lifted and was held by the breeze for an instant, then was released to trail over the flowers of her dress, like an indrawn breath that is held in expectation, then is slowly exhaled. She was standing very still, as if she had been alerted by a sound and was listening, her arms hanging emptily at her sides. She was looking away from him towards the hills, which were a smoky blue and just the colour of the ribbon in her hat.

  He made to raise himself then, but cried out with the thrust of pain in his side where the spear had entered him and opened his liver, its fierce quartz point lodged deep in the marrow of his pelvis. The pain was great and he closed his eyes and sobbed, his body trembling, the sweat coming out of him like grease from the flesh of a swan on the coals. When the pain subsided a little and he opened his eyes again his wife was no longer there. He heard her scream then. It was a howl sucked from her lungs by the agony of her moment. The terrible sound flew away into the emptiness of the morning, birds rising from the trees and shrieking with it, the air startled and the branches trembling. He felt his wife’s howl in his chest and the horror of his helplessness in her moment of utmost need. To know he could do nothing for her. He was unable even to brush at the flies that swarmed over his face, probing for the moisture in the corners of his eyes, his nostrils and his parted lips, as if he was theirs and had been provided to them by their unearthly god. He murmured a prayer to his own God, his Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, or perhaps it was directly to his God that he addressed himself at this last: O Lord forgive them!

  The meat ants had found him and had begun to enter him. He would have twisted around and inspected the wound in his side, and might even have attempted to draw the spear, but the pain was so exquisite his body would not obey the command of his will and he was not able to stir. After her scream the stricken day was filled with the chorus of the cicadas. He could see his pocket Bible, given him by his father more than fifty years ago on his tenth birthday, and never away from him since that day of blessed memory. It was lying in the dust two yards in front of him where it had flown from his hand, like a sudden black bird released when the heavy blow of the spear felled him. Lying beside his Bible were his broken spectacles, their lenses blindly reflecting the sky—reading eternity. The sacred book had fallen open and the light airs riffled its fine pages, as if an invisible hand searched the text for a suitable passage with which to memorialise the moment.

  Above the hills white clouds bloomed. He imagined the clouds to be bed sheets tossed by an exuberant housewife. Perhaps his wife had been looking at the clouds and this was her thought that had entered his mind. He had often known himself to be one with her. They were companions of the flesh as well as of the spirit. This the secret truth of their love, the bond that united them and which had never been spoken of, but had been enacted. Another long drawn-out howl ended in a choking sob. He waited in the shrieking silence of the cicada chorus, his heart hammering, the sweat running from his pores, knowing the moment of her death now … But what was it to wait in this way after the death of the beloved? Now that the world was no longer his, for what did he wait? He was thinking of their two eldest sons, seeing the mob of sheep moving easily ahead of their horses, a fine dust in the air, the boys travelling the mob through the great scrubs far to the south. The boys would be finding abundant feed along the way, for it had been a good year for rain and everyone was happy and filled with optimism by this, and the sheep would not lose their fine condition.

  It was true, he had been careful to choose his moment and had been commended, and even envied, for it. His move to the north had been soundly based, cautious and well planned, a certain boldness of purpose made explicit to the admiring crowd of onlookers at the moment of their departure for these distant pastures to the north. There had been a natural expectation of establishing themselves here successfully. Theirs had been the most numerous, well-armed and best-equipped party ever to enter this region. He was proud to have been the leader of such a community of Christian men, women and children. To have done this was to have done more than most men aspired to do. And it was such a place of beauty and abundance. A place blessed by God. It had been a cause of great rejoicing among them when, on drawing up here, they found a plentiful supply of perfectly mitred stones lying about on the ground waiting for their skilled hands to build the walls with. This blessed place had needed only their presence to complete it and they were confirmed in their belief. They had dismounted and offered thanks. He had known an inevitability in removing his family and his flocks to this place, for the voice of God’s messenger had come to him in the night and commanded him to go forth into the wilderness with his family and his flocks. It had been a venture determined by a higher motive than mere advancement of fortune. In coming here he had known himself to be the instrument of God’s plan. It is Providence that has set me here, not the greed of country that drives ordinary men into the bountif
ul wilderness with their flocks. This he knew in his heart. His purpose was a vision of love.

  And he was modest in his love of his stewardship of this land. It is as if we have come home, he said to his wife that first night as they lay together under the stars. He was astonished to know a certainty in himself that the land had once been the home of his own true ancestors and was familiar to his blood. He even loved, with a kind of sad and helpless amusement of feeling, the little trellis that John made from wattles that first day. And loved too, in this same gentle and indulgent way, the vegetable garden his wife and the girls tended with the help of the women of these people. But, before anything, he loved these people themselves, and knew himself charged by God to bring them into the light of His redemption. Against the cautioning of his neighbours that they were not to be trusted as were the natives of the south from where he had come, he welcomed them into his home with respect and offered them the gift of the Gospels. He spoke with them of the great mystery of the love of Jesus Christ, Lord and Saviour, redeemer of mankind. Death shall have no dominion. This blessed place. And they, these naked and benighted children of the wilderness, smiled into his eyes and accepted his gifts and took the hand of welcome he extended to them, holding his fingers softly in their own, entering his home at his wife’s modest entreaty, shy, trusting, curious and ready to believe. He was possessed by the passionate justice and the beauty of his vision of a Christian society in which black and white were to live in equal fellowship and not as master and slave. He knew himself to be no ordinary man, and that his new neighbours called him a fool, but he did not feel the passing shadow of imperial arrogance in his soul as they did. We have so much to learn from them, and they from us, he told his wife, her hand warm in his. And the sons and daughters of our mingling shall people a new Eden. It was his dream. It was her dream. Their shared vision of establishing Paradise on earth. He invited these people to sit at his feet while he read to them from the sacred Book: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And he saw how their eyes shone to hear the words. It is the book of God’s great plan, he told them, and promised to teach them the secret art so that they might read it for themselves …