Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Simon Palliser slept for a while then, his head jogging on his shoulder, and woke when we were coming through Parnassus. I was going to explain the origin of the name for him when we saw a small girl and her doll waiting patiently for the rural delivery man on the grassy roadside by her farm mail box. ‘She reminds me of a child I met once in Mexico,’ said Palliser. ‘On my way to Tierra del Fuego I stopped in Mexico and took the opportunity to visit the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. I drove out from Mérida after a meal of tamale with black beans. Rather than the pyramids and temples it was the sacred well of sacrifice that interested me. A huge, circular limestone opening, and twenty metres down sheer rock walls to water which is twenty metres deep again. Young men and virgins were sacrificed in full finery there. The remnant of the jutting altar can still be seen. Government divers have recently managed to recover gold masks and skulls from the mud.

  ‘I had my lunch of chocolate and melon by the stones and shadow of the well’s lip, and some Indian children squatted around me to beg a share. I could hear the murmur of the visitors and the more assured, single voices of the guides. I could see people clambering up the stepped side of the pyramid. I thought how this setting of absolute tyranny and religious death had become with time a picnic spot and oddity, the stones and pits denied the sacrifice which had given them their significance. When they had eaten my food the children left me, except for one small girl who calculated that I must have something hidden, or that I would tip her for the privilege of being rid of her. She sat by the rim of the well of sacrifice, and childlike twisted her fingers into the cracks of the wall while watching me intently. All in an instant her fingers drew out a ring of gold with blue amethyst centre, which had lain so long so close to all the people passing. While my mouth was still opening, she rolled the ring once in her fingers as a pebble, and still with her eyes fixed on mine, reached her thin hand over the rim of the well and dropped the jewel to the water and mud far below.

  ‘She must have seen something in my face then that dismayed her, for she bounced up and skimmed away through the heat of Chichen Itza to join the other urchins. There was nothing I could do, you see, nothing that would bring back such a chance missed.’

  I thought the Canterbury plains a good contrast to the landscape earlier in the day, and I told Palliser that the Waimakariri, which was coming up, was one of our major rivers. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘the river which has my soul is the Okavango, and I’ve seen both Niles, the Mekong, Mississippi, Rhine, Ganges, Amazon, Yangtze, Congo, Euphrates, the Don and the Orinoco. The Okavango flows away from the sea into the Kalahari, wonderful incongruity. In ancient times there was a huge lake over most of Botswana, but earthquakes altered the courses of the other rivers which fed it, and now only the Okavango continues spreading over 18,000 kilometres into a million channels and lagoons: the inland estuary of a once inland sea. The great Okavango flows into the sand, holds back the shimmering menace of the desert each year. It’s one of the most beautiful and luxuriant places in the world, and protected from the worst of modern encroachment by the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness. I’ve been drawn back again and again, as perhaps you have yourself. On an early visit I was charged by a tusker while hunting zebra, and had to shoot. The authorities made me pay an excessive elephant licence fee despite my protests that I had acted only in self-defence. The ivory was confiscated, although I kept the tail, and later had an ebony stock fitted to it, making a fly swat.

  ‘On that visit to the Okavango old Johannes de Wette was still alive, and living on one of the estuary islands in the south. He was 87 years old and his brother-in-law had captured Winston Churchill during the Boer War. De Wette was one of the true white hunters and we sat overlooking the papyrus beds, listening to the slap of catfish and myungobis, the ugly cries of the malibu stork, while he told me of the old days on the Okavango. They used to make hippo rafts to navigate the swamps by shooting four hippo in the head and sewing their mouths closed. After twelve hours the heat so blew their bellies up that they had the buoyancy of gigantic corks, and were used one at each corner of a log raft. De Wette and his comrades would drift through the channels raised up on hippo carcases as if on a dais. Among the Botswana in those days they were treated like royalty, and de Wette said that a bed of Botswana maidens was provided for the hunters — 18 or 20 girls, their bodies gleaming with fig oil, would lie with arms and legs intertwined to make a couch for the night. De Wette’s seamed, Afrikaner face was impassive as he told me, but his deep eyes were wistful as we watched a magnificent white-necked fish eagle plummet from the sky into the deep channels of the Okavango.’

  As we came into the quiet, spread suburbs of Christchurch, Palliser contrasted them with the intensity of Calcutta. He had come down from Tibet to convalesce he said, after suffering from frostbite, and to avoid the tourist traps had found a room in the Ashin district of Calcutta. ‘It’s always been my object to take part in the real life of any place I find myself in,’ he said. ‘You will remember no doubt the typical stench that part of Calcutta has, the cooking fires, exhaust fumes, oil and dung, the smell of the river and of the cremation grounds further out. Part of that smell too is poverty and loss of dignity. All within sight of the domed Victorian Railway Terminus, memorial to the Raj, and not far from the maidan — the lungs of Calcutta.

  ‘My room was made of tar paper and the sides of packing cases from the Bala engineering works. As I lay on my sleeping bag at night I could see stamped on the boards above the curtained doorway the words, Store Away From Boilers.

  ‘My small-time landlord liked to entertain me by taking me to the bazaars in the evening, spurning the untouchables from our path with the hauteur of a man of property. Street after street where life went on. Everything is done in the streets because there is no option. Past the pumps in the street for household water, the stall holders and beggars, the people crouched in doorways, the goat boy selling milk as required from his animal’s udder, the banana sellers, hooded rickshaws with their drivers squatted between the poles and resting. One night we saw a goldfish and ball-bearing eater outside a flower shop and a potter’s. There are no ends to the way a man can be demeaned in search of a living. Up to ten goldfish and ball-bearings I saw him swallow, then sing for a while, then regurgitate them into a plastic bag of water, so that they swam again apparently unharmed. In the narrow alley at the side of the potter’s shop were piles of clay and wood, shards of pottery, trays of small images of Kali set out to dry. The sideshow swallower may have noticed me watching with more interest than most of the passing crowd, or perhaps it was just as a European who gave him an American dollar that I received attention. He stood before me with a smooth, handsome face, and swallowed five ball-bearings the size of golf balls and in good English told me that he was a B.A. “You are seeing what a person will be doing for sake of family,” he said. “What we are brought to is a terrible thing.” Behind his personal misery was all the beauty of the flower shop, garlands of jasmine and marigolds from the red soil, roses even, and a few sacred lotus blooms set further back. The swallower became vehement at his plight, shouting to be heard above the transistors and bazaar noise. In his misery he forgot to maintain muscular control of the ball-bearings in his gut, and they must have moved down, for suddenly he screamed with pain and fell back amongst the marigolds and jasmine. It drew more people and more interest than his former act, and all the watchers loudly gave advice as to the best way to cure him. The flower seller called loudest of all about the dying man. I asked my landlord what he was saying and was told the vendor demanded to know who would pay for the crushed jasmine and roses.’

  I left Simon Palliser at his hotel by the Square. He was grateful he said to have had the opportunity to see something of the nature of the country here, and to spend time getting to know me. We could see the Cathedral quite clearly, and Palliser said as I left that it reminded him of a peculiar thing that happened while he was staying in Strasbourg some years before.

  The Dungarvie Festiva
l

  Ivan and Len worked together for two years, and then by chance got to know each other on the summer day they didn’t make it to the Combined Local Bodies Civil Defence Seminar in Dunedin. Each council had to send two representatives, and there was a good deal of duck-shoving to sort out who had to go. Ivan was landed with it because he was a comparative newcomer, and wouldn’t be missed anyway. To show that the council was taking civil defence seriously there had to be a chief as well as an Indian, so Len, who was administration officer, had to go.

  He came around early to pick Ivan up, so that they could be away in good time, and Ivan saw that they had been given the oldest vehicle in the fleet. They would be the Kettles come to town in Dunedin. The ute’s left front guard had been in pink undercoat for years, and in the back was an assortment of road signs and three boxes of poisoned carrots that someone kept forgetting to set out around the treatment ponds. Low on both doors were paint bubbles, showing where the rust was eating through from the inside.

  Len knew he looked incongruous. His good suit was already picking up a variety of rubbish from the wool sack which covered the front seat. Neither of them said anything about the ute, though, and Len drove, as befitted a chief, and Ivan sat on the pink wing side as the Indian. Len’s manila envelope with the programme for the seminar lay on top of the dash, so Ivan put his there as well. They didn’t discuss the programme: it had headings such as statutory responsibilities of local authorities, and counter-disaster logistics for rural communities.

  Reticent, I suppose, is a word that you could use for Len, and professional would be another. He did his job from day to day without malice or favour, and without any inclination to pry into the thoughts or lives of colleagues. A working relationship over two years had for Ivan merely confirmed those aspects of Len’s nature that he had recognised within the first week.

  ‘We’ve drawn the short straws,’ said Len with a smile.

  ‘It looks that way.’

  That’s all they said for a while, but to be fair to both of them the ute didn’t encourage conversation. The motor laboured and the road signs and poisoned carrots in the back had a disappointing fellowship. Also there was the threat of the Central summer, even at that time of the day. The ground had little cover, and the schist outcrops were bright, scaly, with no sweat to give.

  ‘I don’t much like the sound of the old girl,’ said Len when they were close to Dungarvie, and as if by speaking of it he gave recognition, even acquiescence, the motor sickened in that instant and then died. They drifted, with just the road noise and the diminishing quarrel of the road signs and carrots, almost to the restricted speed zone of the village, and where they should have reduced speed the ute stopped completely.

  ‘Ah well, Jesus,’ said Len.

  ‘At least we’re not far from a garage. That’s a welcome fluke.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  There was a garage at Dungarvie. They could see it clearly. In fact all of Dungarvie could be clearly seen ahead. On the left the garage, then a community hall, on the right three stock crates jacked up on a section until needed, then the gap of a lucerne paddock before the store. Past the store was the only separate house they could see for all Dungarvieites. Len tried the starter several times without success, then went to the front of the ute and looked at the engine, more from a sense of responsibility than any hope of finding what was wrong. Ivan stood by him, but looked along the flat road to Dungarvie. He saw no one. Nothing moved, and in the time between the ute stopping and their walk to the garage beginning, only a blue Triumph passed them, paying no heed to them, or the restricted speed zone, disappearing down the road before they had taken many steps.

  Len and Ivan took off their ties, and folded them and put them in the pockets of the coats they carried as they walked into Dungarvie. ‘I suppose I should have rung up the yard yesterday and insisted on a better vehicle,’ said Len. ‘I just never thought we’d end up with that ute. I mean they knew we were going through to a meeting in Dunedin. It’s poor.’

  ‘I suppose it’s mostly bad luck really.’ Ivan was more accustomed to being given the ute as council transport.

  ‘Yes, but after all we are going to the city as representatives of the council, aren’t we.’

  Ivan could feel his lips drying as he walked. He licked them, and moved his coat from his shoulder where it was making him sweat, and let it hang over his wrist. Through the thin soles of his best shoes he could feel the unevenness of the seal. It seemed to take a long time to walk the two hundred metres or so before the garage. Some barley grass heads had attached themselves to his trouser legs. He felt his face screwing up against the glare of the sun.

  The garage was wooden: so old and so high that it may once have been a smithy. There was no one amid its workday untidiness, although a transistor radio, hidden like a cicada in the jumble of the side bench, sang on. Ivan and Len were not surprised. They knew that in a country district one mechanic is thinly spread. They kept walking and, even before they reached the hall, the sound of laughter claimed them: laughter despite the few, quiet buildings and the sky burnt to a powder blue. The laughter billowed from the community hall, but then lost its force in all the calm, surrounding space.Laughter at once natural and engaging, asking to be found out, yet also with defiance perhaps at all that emptiness, all that press of the given moment that there was no movement to disguise.

  The hall was representative of a persistent species: outside all cream weather-boards and bleached red tin roof, inside a wooden floor with chairs stacked to one side, and on the walls the district rolls of honour for the Great War 1914–18 and the Second World War 1939–45. At the far end was one door to the committee room, and another, plus a slide, to the ‘facilities’. A rolled bowling mat leant like a furled flag in a corner and on top of chair stacks were three jars of dried flowers and an unclaimed cardigan.

  The laughter came from the far end of the hall, in the open door of the facilities, but Len and Ivan found it difficult to see the people there at first, because of the alternate shadow then fierce shafts of light from the windows as they walked the length of the floor. Two women and a man sat on chairs and peeled potatoes. One woman had yellow shorts, matching sneakers and the ease of attractiveness, the other had a floral dress and a laugh like a string of firecrackers. Their helper was a Maori, very thin, wearing a green army singlet, shorts and heavy boots. Even carrying their coats and ties, Ivan and Len felt over-dressed. The three had a sack of potatoes and two enamel basins at their feet. They washed and peeled the potatoes in one basin and laid them in the water of the other so they wouldn’t brown.

  Ivan and Len had found their mechanic it turned out — Charles. Evonne had the Hollywood legs, and Judith the laugh which made every speaker feel a wit. The two of them were mother helpers for a Guide camp being held in the domain next to the hall. It is the way sometimes that the more random the meeting, the more relaxed the mood. They all fitted in: there was not a nark among them. By rights they should never have met up at all. Ivan and Len should have been on their way to the seminar in Dunedin, should have been through Dungarvie too quickly to have heard the laughter from the hall, or to have seen the red crosses by the names of soldiers who had fallen. Yet Ivan could smell the bowling mats, and old paper lining cupboards, see the withered flowers in their jars, and the table tennis challenge ladder which displayed its champion so aptly as C. Meek.

  Ivan sat with Evonne and Judith, offered himself as a replacement potato peeler, while Charles and Len went back to examine the ute. ‘Does it matter much if you’re late getting to Dunedin?’ asked Evonne.

  ‘We’re supposed to be going to a civil defence meeting.’

  ‘I don’t know much about civil defence,’ said Evonne, ‘but then I don’t know much about Girl Guide camps either, yet I’m here.’

  ‘All camps have certain fundamentals, like peeling potatoes.’ Ivan was flattered by Judith’s laugh into imagining he had made a joke. She threw a potato into the bas
in with such force that the droplets as they scattered were caught in the sun from the window and for an instant held all the colours of the rainbow within themselves. Judith and Evonne began their story of all the indiscretions and mistakes they had committed as mother helpers, and of the Guide officers who never failed to discover them. As Charles, Len and Ivan held no rank within Guides, they were seen as reassuring envoys from a more tolerant world.

  Carrots had replaced potatoes by the time Len and Charles returned, and Ivan had joined in so completely that the other men returning had to break the circle. ‘Charles says it will take a while: probably something electrical,’ Len said.

  ‘Could be the distributor,’ said Charles. Judith laughed and Evonne joined in. ‘Heh,’ said Charles, ‘I’ve told you before there’s nothing the matter with my name. I bet plenty of mechanics are called Charles.’

  ‘How many Maori ones?’ said Evonne. Judith’s laugh, so sudden and so complete, drew them all in. Charles looked at Len and Ivan. He tried to make his thin face deadpan.

  ‘These women are trying to offend me,’ he said.

  ‘I rang the office,’ said Len.

  ‘What do they think?’ asked Ivan.

  ‘Well, they want us to go on if we can be on the road again before midday, otherwise we might as well wait here and bring the ute back when it’s fixed. Someone would only have to be driven over to get it anyway.’