Yet by chance alone, I know something of how it worked out for Neil Trumpeter. I had been staying the weekend with my parents in the schoolhouse, and I went running in the evening — part of a forlorn effort to stave off middle age. The privacy of the country saved me from the derision of town acquaintances. The dust of Trumpeters’ Road puffed out beneath my feet as I jogged in the late amber light. I kept to an easy pace, and had time enough to watch the car and tall figure on the roadside. There is a point on Trumpeters’ Road, high on the downs, which gives a good view over much of the Trumpeter place and adjoining properties. You can look down and see the thick, Oamaru stone posts at the entrance, the track from the road gate, the farmhouse and outbuildings, the creek course marked with rough growth in the hills. I could see all that; I could see the abandoned machinery in the grass behind the equipment shed, a record of the Trumpeters’ modest technological advance over several generations. Each piece of machinery cannibalised of useful parts, and left just thick tines, flaps, rods and springs in a clenched frenzy of rust. Neil Trumpeter could see it all as well. He had a casual shirt in the fashionable fitting cut, and blue with contrasting white collar and cuffs, yet I could sense the indifference to what he wore, so typical of a Trumpeter. His plain face was clean shaven, with just a patch of thick hairs on each cheek above the shaving line. I stopped beside him and had a spell. It’s always difficult to avoid feeling small and fussy beside a Trumpeter. ‘Looking at the old place, Neil,’ I said, and watched the birches at the road gate and the lengthening shadows amongst the downs.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ he said. He had one hand over the head of a wooden fence post as if it were struggling to leave the ground.
‘Do you see much of the people who have it now?’ I said. Neil didn’t answer. From his quiet height he gazed over the farm he knew. There was a sense of enquiry in his look, as if he wished some response from the place itself. He looked on the lost land that slow Trumpeter voices had sounded over for a hundred years.
‘Sweet, sweet Jesus,’ he said. ‘What have I done.’
A Poet’s Dream of Amazons
My friend Esler is sick again. His mother rang, and implored me to hurry to the bedside. She spoke in a whisper, not in deference to the sinking Esler, but from fear that her husband might overhear. Mr Esler hates me.
‘He says he mightn’t see the night out,’ said Mrs Esler. ‘He’s had a dream again about a Big Woman, and she turned out to be a preammunition of death.’ Mrs Esler is loyal in her way, but for a mother of that son her vocabulary is less than impressive. ‘The doctor’s been twice already,’ she whispered. I suppose that a really Big Woman, and irrational as women often are in dreams, could quite well be a sinister omen.
I put down my work at once. I knew it was no joke if Esler said he was dying: well rather I knew that he might laugh about it, but die all the same. Esler fights a persistent and terrible battle against the world, but it is a losing battle.
My moped was in the shed, but before opening the door to it, I rattled the neighbours’ fence to start their dog barking. A melancholy and majestic sound that dog made: deep bells in the cold air. Why should anyone sleep if Esler was dying? I interspersed the hound’s barks with appeals to Odin, the god of my ancestors. I didn’t want Esler to die, for he is one who speaks my language in this town.
On my moped I set a course from the forlorn suburb in which I lived, to the forlorn suburb in which Esler lived. Mrs Esler was watching for me: she was at the door when I approached, hoping that she would be able to smuggle me through to the laundry without a confrontation with her husband. I saw half of him in the doorway of the living room, one arm, one side, one leg, one eye looking down the passage to the front door, and half a sneer to have seen a grown man arrive on a 50 cc step-thru. ‘It’s only you,’ said Mrs Esler. She pulled a face. ‘The doctor’s been twice. Oh, it’s bad, it’s bad.’ She made another sudden face. Pulling faces is the qualifier Mrs Esler uses when her husband is at hand. They are the briefest flashes across her long face, semaphore by tic that hints at the hospitality, gratitude and compassion she can’t speak of. They are spasms of emotional intent, and probably quite unconscious. ‘You can’t stay long,’ she said, as we went up the passage, and then a fleeting contortion to nullify her tone. ‘Mr Esler and I don’t want you coming around really,’ she said, and touched my arm. I turned at the laundry door, and went back, and put my head into the living room. I could see the back of Mr Esler’s head as he watched sport on the television. There was a worn patch at the crown, as if he had a habit of twisting his head into the pillows at night.
‘Mr Esler.’
‘Uh,’ said Mr Esler.
‘I’m going through to see Branwell.’ I said it loudly so that it would carry to Esler in his bed.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Mr Esler. He didn’t turn towards me.
Esler had his blue tartan dressing-gown on in bed. He looked bad enough to be dying, but he was trying to laugh. He flipped his hands on the covers, and further down I could see his feet jerk. ‘Branwell, Branwell,’ he wheezed. ‘I love it.’ As well as liquid at the corners of his eyes, there was white gathered there, like a little toothpaste. On his cheeks were patterns from the creases in the pillow. Esler is balder than his father, but in a different way, going back a long way at the temples, and the hair between quite downy. ‘Branwell’s good,’ he said, ‘and look!’ He put his hand under the pillow and produced a flat bottle of brandy. ‘You see before you indeed, the Earl of Northangerland.’
Esler’s voice was squeezed out, as if someone was sitting on his chest. The Big Woman perhaps. His wrist buckled with the effort of getting the brandy bottle back under his pillow. I’d thought up the mention of Branwell as I went over, something to give Esler a lift. He becomes depressed without literary allusions from time to time. He began to tell me about his fantasy of the Big Woman. ‘As did the Pharoah I have a dream,’ said Esler. ‘Each night this vast and determined woman comes to wrestle with me.’
‘All I get are nightmares of rooms without doors, and sinking ground beneath my feet.’
‘Night after night,’ said Esler, ‘she seeks me out, and we must love and fight.’
Esler’s room had been the laundry, but his mother now has an automatic washing machine in the old pantry, alongside the deep freeze. The laundry tubs have been taken out, and Esler’s bed moved in, and a small table by the window. Esler’s boyhood room has become a guest room, which means it’s never used. His father refuses to let Esler keep it, because he is thirty-six years old, a poet, and still at home. Living in the laundry is one of those strange and bitter compromises that families have, and which remain incomprehensible to outsiders.
Mrs Esler came and interrupted her son, just when he was describing to me the body lock that the naked Big Woman put on him in their struggle. All poets have a tendency to pornography. ‘Mr Esler says you’ve started him coughing again. I won’t have it.’ Her lengthening face, pulled inexorably towards the grave, convulsed to disavow the message she delivered. When she left, Esler continued to tell me of his Big Woman: a giant poster nemesis of sex. It was typical of Esler that even those things threatening his very life could only appear ludicrous.
His room retains a faint smell of soap and washed woollens. A fine mould like candle smoke covers the underside of the window sill, residue from a more tropical climate.
‘Is he still there?’ shouted Mr Esler. He must have been taking advantage of an injury stoppage on the television.
‘Night after night she comes, this immense woman,’ wheezed Esler. ‘Hair like a waterfall, navel a labyrinth, thighs like a wild mare.’ Esler’s warm breath had scents of meatloaf, medication and mortality. His gums had shrunk from the palings of his teeth.
Esler’s clothes are on plastic hangers on nails along the laundry wall opposite his bed, and his books are heaped beneath on shelves made from bricks and planks. What can I tell you of my friend that won’t make you feel contempt or pi
ty. What can I tell you of this man who is better than us, whose interests and principles have made him in a modern world a mockery, whose skills are as little considered as those of a thatcher, or a messiah.
‘Waikato have scored again,’ shouted Mr Esler, and Mrs Esler made an odd sound of wifely concurrence, like the instinctive response of a duck to another call.
Esler and I have been friends since we ganged up at eleven to beat the second largest boy in the class: a prematurely hairy slob who used to hold us under water during swimming periods. We became one of those braces so common among boys — Brunner and Esler. We heard our names coupled more at school than we heard them separately. I can imagine the staffroom association.
‘Caned Brunner today.’
‘Who?’
‘Brunner. Fair-haired kid, hangs about with Esler. Caned him too.’
Or perhaps, ‘That’s Esler, isn’t it, smashing those milk bottles?’
‘No, that’s Brunner.’
‘Both look the same to me, little buggers. Call him over.’
We fought together, smoked together, marvelled at the sky and stars together, took out the O’Reilly girls together. I have a scar on the underside of my left arm because Esler accidentally shot me with a home-made spear gun. We both saw Bushy Marsden collapse and die in the gym. We began the dangerous experiment of taking words seriously and so resisting the process of attrition by which life betrays us.
‘The Big Woman has a scent of almonds and macrocarpa,’ said Esler in wonder and dread. His tartan wool dressing-gown is also his lucky writing jacket, ever since he had it on when he wrote his Van Gogh sequence. Constant use without washing, a little lost food and the oils of feverish sweat from his asthma bouts, have taken the nap from it, have buffed it until it shines like silk, and the original tartan pattern is almost lost. ‘Read me something to take my mind off breathing,’ said Esler. He had a hundred poets to choose from, and I read Seamus Heaney to him. He nodded his downy head and squeaked ‘Yes, yes’ at the touches which moved him. The liquid and the white gathered at the extremes of his eyes, spread a little to the corner skin.
‘Will you stop that never-ending jawing in there!’ shouted Mr Esler to me.
‘Exactly,’ Mrs Esler said. I could almost hear the snap as her face, just for a moment, was contrite, bewildered.
‘Read on,’ said Esler.
The laundry never seems a bedroom no matter how long Esler is in it, or how many clothes or hooks he lines the wall with. Images of soap flakes linger in the air as a false Christmas, and one corner of the lino always seems to be damp. There is more utilitarian aura than even poetry can dispel. ‘That’s so,’ said Esler as I read. In a paper packet on the second plank are one hundred and seventy-three green copies of Esler’s poems, printed by the Whip-poor-will Co-operative Press. I have the dedication by heart: These poems are for Bruce Brunner and Frank Heselstreet, fellow poets and friends who share my belief that emotion is like ours a round world, and as far enough east becomes west, so is laughter to tears and genius to insanity.
I have eighteen copies in the top of my wardrobe. Frank and I buy one from the bookstore when we can afford to, and have our reward later when Esler tells us another green pamphlet sold. Frank says we might end up with the whole edition of Esler’s poems: a private joke, but what are friends for. Esler has always been absurd, but it is only one trait of character, as is deceit or shrewdness, composure or ambition. Just one aspect of my friend, but it makes it difficult to decide if he is dying or not. In a way I understand the Grim Reaper concluding that it is below his dignity to come for Esler, and sending a very Big Woman instead, who can laugh in her killing work and not be out of character.
Mr Esler appeared at the laundry door. His face was like that of a rock groper: reactionary and full of low cunning. ‘You’re doing him no good at all. Leave him alone, can’t you. I blame you for a lot of it,’ he said. I never resent Mr Esler’s antagonism. I see it rather as one of the few remaining signs of concern for his son — this determination to blame me.
‘I know you do,’ I said.
‘How many did Waikato win by?’ said Esler in his squeezed voice. His father knew that Esler didn’t care, but couldn’t deny himself the satisfaction of saying the score out loud.
‘Thirty-two, ten,’ he said. ‘Thirty-two bloody ten.’
‘That means a season’s tally so far of one hundred and forty-two for, and fifty-three against,’ said Esler. ‘How many did Mattingly score?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘That makes him the highest scoring fullback in Waikato provincial rugby apart from Rawiri,’ said Esler.
‘You don’t care. You don’t care!’ shouted his father.
‘It’s so, though,’ said Esler. He didn’t care, but it was so though. He spent fifteen or twenty minutes each day on rugby statistics, so that he could know more than his father and still disregard the game.
Mr Esler knew better than to dispute Esler’s facts, instead he looked around the laundry as a rock groper does another’s cave. ‘This place stinks of idleness,’ he said.
‘Mattingly has twenty-four points to go before he reaches Rawiri’s record, and he’s already played three more first class games,’ said Esler. His voice became treble with an effort at volume as his father left.
‘Shut up,’ cried Mr Esler from the passage.
‘Each night now she comes, my Amazon,’ said Esler. ‘Beautiful, but so huge. Dear God. I try to oppose her with intellect and poetry when lust has failed. It’s no use. She’s killing me, the Big Woman, ending me with breasts and kisses.’ Esler cleaned his lips by rubbing them with his fingers, and concentrated on breathing well for a time.
‘I’ve never been afraid of women, or been against women, have I,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘The power, the weight, yet the subtleness of her. I can’t stand it.’
‘Take a sleeping pill or something,’ I said.
‘I can’t. Not with my regular medication.’
Esler is loyal and honest, totally without envy or malice in his friendship, perhaps because the only basis he knows for friendship now is poetry. I have watched his other means of communication atrophy. Esler can discuss anthropomorphic imagery with wit and eloquence for hours, but when the grocer questions him of necessities, Esler grips the counter, is helpless before yet another stranger, stumbles to tell of sliced bread, or free flow green beans. People exchange glances and knowing smiles at this evidence of the dangers inherent in any serious scrutiny of the mind. Esler tries to give Frank and me money from his savings account which has less than three figures; he writes to the Listener to point out that regional poets Brunner and Heselstreet have not received sufficient recognition. He is ugly, incongruous, annoying, ludicrous, and a true friend.
Esler asked me to bring a packet from the laundry table. ‘It’s my new poems to go to Australia,’ he said. ‘I want you to post it for me. You’re luckier than me. Bless it before you put it in the box.’ He made no mention of the postage charge: such things are incidental when you are dying. ‘Send it airmail, and don’t let them use any stamps with heads on. They’re unlucky for manuscripts, I always feel.’ All the seams in the brown paper were traced with sellotape, and the parcel was quartered in string woven of green and red strands. I bet Esler had said a prayer or a curse over his parcel, and sprinkled on some of the lucky dust that he’d collected from beneath Honey McIlwraith’s bed. Esler is that sort of intellectual and innocent. He really believes that there could be someone out there interested in poetry, willing to publish or pay for it, someone who will untie Esler’s two-tone string, unpick his sellotape — and cry genius.
‘If the Big Woman comes again tonight,’ said Esler, then trailed off and began wheezing. It became worse until he was flapping his shoulders, and his veins began to swell.
‘Puffer, puffer,’ called his mother as she ran in. Her face twitched to one side then the other, as if offering her endless Christian cheeks
to be slapped. She meant the asthma gadget with the diaphragm, and she and I tugged Esler to a sitting position, and she did his throat thoroughly as if to ensure it would remain free of greenfly.
When he felt easier, Esler lay back again. ‘Okay Mum, okay,’ he said. ‘I’m fine now.’ He turned away from us until he could regain the personal distance he required after the ignominy of his attack, his weakness, his mother with the puffer. Mrs Esler touched his downy head once, but he turned more resolutely and she went out, first her dull curls and then the rest of her face, feature by feature, as a freight train curves from view. Esler rested: his skin gleamed with the sweat of illness and puffer liquid. I watched the soap flakes, and the light of the moon through the window without any curtain. ‘Where’s Frank?’ said Esler finally.
‘In Wellington at the technicians’ course,’ I said.
‘They’ll destroy him in the end, those computers,’ he said. ‘He left me the last poem in his Scheherazade series. So detached, so nimble. It makes me doubt my own progress. But those computers are the danger for poor Frank.’ He picked up his puffer, held it to his mouth, but forgot to use it. Instead he said, ‘I wish I could have a civilised life.’ Beneath the bottom plank of his bookcase, close to the bricks, are Esler’s two pairs of shoes. Brown shoes with roughly sewn seams, and each left heel worn to a slant, and the inside liners curling up. Where the outlets for the tubs had pierced the wall, Esler has fitted wooden plugs covered with muslin to improve the seal.
Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 21
