by Kim Scott
‘Well, get there at least half an hour before it starts, I promise you – hangovers, DTs, withdrawals or whatever . . .’
‘Bus ok?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Here she is now.’
Tilly was walking toward them, hand in hand with Nita. It could not be said who was leading whom. Again the wind gusted, and lifted ash from the fire. The old woman paused in her approach, steadying herself in the wind. Tilly looked to her companion, waited, and they continued, their shadows tremulous in the strange light.
‘Fire somewhere,’ offered Susan as they waited for the two to reach them.
‘Sandstorm,’ said Wilfred. ‘Overcleared all down this way; bit of wind the soil lifts. Might be a proper storm inland, rain even, but it’s the sand makes the light like this. Fire too.’
‘Might get a bit of water running down the riverbeds,’ said Wally. ‘Most weather from the south-west round here, but sometimes storms inland.’
‘Quiet camp this morning, unna?’ said Nita as she joined them. ‘’Cept this wind.’
‘Morning, Nan.’
‘Angela’s crook,’ the old woman continued. ‘Grog sick. Got home just now.’ They listened to the wind and the trees and saw their shadows rippling on the ground. ‘Tilly’s the one had a hard time, I hear,’ the old woman went on. ‘She’s steel, this one. Gold too,’ she added, confusing the image and Tilly saw herself as some sort of Tin Man from Dorothy’s Kansas, walking a sandy version of a yellow brick road, shining with stainless steel and cheap strips of gold alloy.
‘Tough and precious,’ said Wilfred, ‘like . . .’ and then he named sandalwood and jam tree in the old language. ‘You like our backbone, Tilly. Our skeleton,’ he continued, seeming to make it up as he went. ‘Precious that way. Hold us together, you and the younger ones. Better than bones; voice and spirit.’
The two newcomers hung off his words, doe-eyed and reverential. They stared at Tilly, looked away. Glanced again.
‘Meat and bones, you mean,’ said Wally. ‘Want some breakfast?’
‘Cup of tea – proper sized, mind,’ said Wilfred. ‘And then we’ll get going, eh, Nita? Check out this other property of his, and get ourselves ready for the Peace Park thing, all going well.’
Wally hitched up his trousers. ‘We’ll get these drunks and party animals sorted and be right there with you. They can sleep later – keep ’em out of trouble tonight.’
‘And Gerry – Gerald?’
‘He’ll get there alright. He’s got some help,’ said Tilly.
*
Dan had not expected a whole busload to turn up, and was not sure if the bus could get down the track. But otherwise they would have had to ferry people . . .
‘I’ll follow you, give you a toot if I get nervous,’ said Wally.
Then another vehicle arrived, Wilfred and two women. Wilfred was quickly out of the car. ‘Susan and Sylvia,’ he said, gesturing over his shoulder. The women waved, but remained where they were. ‘You gotta bench drill I can use, Dan?’
‘Yeah.’
Wilfred surged ahead of Dan as they entered the shed. He seemed very excited. ‘Just gotta finish my artwork for the ceremony today, for our presentation. They wanna help,’ he tilted his head back to the women in the car, ‘but I don’t want them, not this last, tricky little bit.’
The bus idled, passengers still in it. They leaned their heads against the window glass.
‘Bit cramped, but,’ said Wilfred, entering the shed.
‘’Cause of the truck,’ said Dan, stating the obvious. It did take up a lot of the space in the shed. ‘I got a load of wheat on, gunna drive it to town, drop the load at the depot afterwards.’
‘Me, I got some timberwork I want to string together. All articulated, you’ll see what I mean. Very delicate operation, getting it right.’ Wilfred produced a thin, carved piece of timber the size of a bony forearm from a bag. ‘Once I put it together I might just drop it on top of the wheat until we get there. It’s clean, no dirt or nothing on it to taint . . . but it’s delicate, and will be too awkward to fit in the car or bus, especially with that mob.’
‘Yes, alright.’ Dan turned to the bus, concerned not to keep them waiting too long.
‘Go on, I’ll catch youse up,’ said Wilfred. ‘I think I know the place; springs in the riverbed, bit of a clearing?’
Dan concealed his surprise, nodded.
They followed the fence line down a gentle slope. Small trees the other side of the fence on the left, and trees on the right too. The trees moved closer, pressed up against the fence, limbs reaching over the wire. They went through a narrow corridor of whispering sheoak and jam tree, and then it opened and they rolled onto a wide sheet of rock. An old campfire; charcoal and ash in a small heap, a metal grill.
The sound of tyres gripping the rock.
Then silence; but a bird called, the trees whispered. Was that the sound of running water?
Someone on the bus pointed out the horizontal slab of a lizard trap. Another. Many.
Granite sheet under their feet, the sky widening above them, they left the vehicles behind. The riverbed – red and brown and grey granite too, scattered ledges and fissures and crevices, boulders strewn here and there, water making its way patiently, a thin trickle sometimes hard to find, but pools everywhere. Flat areas or rock-like terraces stepping down from bony crowns, trees in small groups, their trunks lifting and bringing their heads together in shady canopies. Three long pools, one after the other, stretched across one wide, level floor of rock little higher than the clean sand surrounding it. Spring water in a land of salty pools. Small, green leaves floated in the first pool. They tasted sweet, fresh water.
‘Never dries,’ Dan told them. Rejuvenated, people scattered along the lengths of the river, up its slopes. ‘We used to hang around here all the time, when we were children.’
He led a few of them along a path into wispy, whispering, thin grey-green leaves. There, a mark in dark sand where two kangaroos slept, time after time. Elsewhere, furious scattered diggings of an echidna and small, decorous arrangements of droppings. They picked their way along ribs of stone, under the trees, around tufts of vegetation. Spider webs made airy skins stretched between the thin tree trunks, leaves and dry insect bodies clinging to each ethereal surface.
Then, a clearing.
Dan had said, ‘There was a bit of an old fence around it and I thought it must’ve been the sheep kept it bare, but . . . Still cleared, nothing ever grows there.’
It is an old dancing ground, the earth compressed by countless generations of pounding feet, of saplings plucked and put away. Very old sandalwood trees, most of them dying and with lichen clinging, stood in a vast circle around the space, a vast crowd of trees behind. On the lower side, closest to the river, a small collection of stones on the soft ground. A grave?
A glossy black snake raised its head, opened its mouth to show fangs and flickering tongue at the end of its arcing body. They backed away, from the grave and its guardian.
Going gently downward they paused on a flat ledge of stone. Beside it a towering tree, grey and shining, and it seemed dead, except for green shoots near its base, and there, above their heads, a heavy tangle of twigs. More than a nest it seemed, and large enough to hold a group of children. Wilfred said the old word for eagle. Before then a steep two-metre drop to a rock pool, a couple of metres across. Similar walls of stone at rough, right angles on three sides around the pools almost made a courtyard. They followed another sandy path between the huge boulders to the water, their voices multiplied by rock and sunlight falling from the open roof above them.
Some were rubbing and scratching themselves. ‘Mozzies,’ said Dan.
It was a place that would once have been approached with smoke, with scents of jam tree and sandalwood and oils and unguents in your skin. For ceremony and respect, b
ut function too.
After, they walked back along the riverbed, following a wet and thin black line that flowed along and among all this stone, marking the river’s persistence and, now and then at some steep change in the level at these, its dry depths, they heard the melody of water.
Tilly began one of the songs from the workshops. Stopped.
Dan said, ‘When the river is in flood you can hear it from the farmhouse. Oh, but that’s quite something, it’s lovely, what you were singing.’
Tilly sang again, her voice bouncing among rocks, escaping from gullies, sinking in sand.
A crack of thunder, rumbling among the rocks. A hungry silence followed and then another voice, not Tilly or that of thunder, but some other, as if replying.
A figure, tottering a little but nevertheless nimble, was making its way toward them.
*
Downriver, some hours earlier and at a breakaway in the riverbed, Gerry had heard someone crying, and ventured a little way into a gully. Suddenly, unimaginably, he saw the old stone house in the distance, further up a bleached slope. A Noongar woman dressed only in a petticoat was running from the house. She paused to tear off the petticoat, looked back up the slope but there was no house there now, and resumed her flight. Tears streaked her cheeks. Tilly? No, she was too dark-skinned. Gone.
Gerry turned around and around. The gully, the twisted earth opening to bird song and sky. More figures, women, moving back among the trees, except for one, the same very young woman again, and now this Tilly moved away from him. She glanced over her shoulder from further along the gully, making her way up out of this tangle of earth and trees, up a yellowing, dry slope toward some house of bone? Wanted him to follow her? Light pulsed and dazzled in the tree leaves, and the treetops were alive with birds, rustling, calling . . .
Or perhaps he fainted. He was sitting on river sand; there was a small pool nearby. After all, he had been up all night, had been drinking, hitting the gear. Expect to become disorientated.
He heard a human voice singing, and moved toward it. Yes, a song in language. Then a crack of thunder, and his whole body seemed a chamber for that great voice, and he was shaping his renewed breath, had become an instrument for this old sound.
His people, his old people, in his blurred vision ahead. Clustered on a wide flat sheet of stone, a stone courtyard behind them, tilted shafts of sunlight in its shade. The song had reached him first, and now they came, now they welcomed him.
*
The little crowd who’d been camped for days at the caravan park in Hopetown had scattered across the dry riverbed, and now they reformed and took Gerald into their centre. He was fine, he told them. Fine. They began to slowly pick their way back in the opposite direction to the thin stream wending its way among the rocks and pools, barely more than a trickle.
Wilfred, late to join them and the only one apart, called from further upstream. When he realised that Gerry was among them, the two men hugged. The others stood around them, patting the shoulders of the two men. Gerry seemed completely recovered from his long walk and hours without sleep. Wilfred led them to a declivity in the riverbed a little upstream from where they’d parked. It was filled with river sand that had absorbed the blood-red stream trickling into it, and was now beginning to seep, to let the red stream continue.
‘Raining inland, this is the first of it.’
‘Red from the ochre, like you know that place we been? It’ll dilute with more rain.’
Walking back to the vehicles, Wilfred and Dan were side by side. Wilfred called for Tilly to join them. Dan did not hesitate. ‘I have a plan,’ he began. ‘I’d like to, what I’d like, if . . .’ Tilly and Wilfred waited, the three of them kept walking. It was hard to say.
‘One day, I’d like to leave the farm, just this property, I mean, not the others, just this one, to you, Tilly. You and your people, and my son. Representing us. Partners. Business partners. Real reconciliation, I mean. Not just a park. You can have those workshops here, no need to stay at the caravan park.’
Tilly blanched as if she’d tasted something vile.
‘Doug is on the property somewhere today, I saw him earlier. I tried to tell him, but I don’t think he heard . . .’
‘But your son, Dan, what he’s done,’ said Wilfred, placing his hand gently on Dan’s shoulder. ‘We need to talk, I will tell you.’ Tilly had already walked away.
*
Wilfred had known it would of course be a shock, but had not expected such a reaction. Dan thought it was a joke; then shook his head, looked incredulous. For a time. Did not want to believe. Then confronted the truth of Wilfred’s account, and next moment was in his car and leading a cloud of billowing dust toward the farmhouse.
The rest got on the bus, and Wilfred and Tilly piled into the car with Susan and Sylvie.
*
They drove in Dan’s dust, and only as they reached the homestead did they see the vehicle itself. Dan was walking from it toward the shed, his hand held up to halt the car emerging from there.
The old man pulled open the passenger door of his deceased wife’s car. The vehicle sat quietly for a moment, and then Dan fell into it and the car accelerated away.
‘Peace Park, unna?’
Wilfred walked over to the bus. He leaned against Wally’s door and spoke to him through the window.
‘I left my art-thing in the trailer, back of the truck. Can’t take it in the car. Got it in the wheat bin, otherwise it’ll fall apart. Dan was gunna drive it in for me and dump his wheat at the silo, but I’ll take it – and the wheat.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Tilly said, softly.
*
Wilfred and Tilly hauled themselves up into the cab. The shed resonated with the motor.
Tilly looked down on the gate posts, and felt the wind whip and pluck at the cab. Black and blue thunderclouds bulged in the distance, and ahead of them a vast, dark cloud raced across the paddocks. Sand hissed against the windscreen and Tilly, protected by glass and metal, cringed with the imagining of it. The truck slowed: hard to drive in this red and gloomy light, surrounded by this hissing.
Then they were out of the sandstorm, and there was the roaring motor, the eerie light. The sun was a coppery disk. Lightning flashed from the ranges inland.
They reached the speed signs at the crest of the hill, the edge of town already. Tilly looked to Wilfred, thinking why not slow? and realised his agitation.
‘No brakes.’
He changed gear. The truck convulsed, the motor roared, but they slowed only a little. Wilfred tried to change gear again; the gears grated, crunched, something screeched. The motor screamed, but they sped on. Wilfred glanced at Tilly. Frightened? He gripped the steering wheel, glared ahead.
They were rolling down the main street.
‘Trust your ancestors, I always say.’ Tilly could hardly hear him.
She leaned back, gripped the seat. Nothing she could do.
‘Fuck.’ Wilfred again.
Tilly agreed, with his sentiments at least; ancestors could not help them now. The street seemed mostly empty but, ahead, Doug stepped onto the road’s edge, expelled from a little group of people gathered there. Wilfred sounded the horn, and Tilly could’ve laughed at Doug’s fear as he ran, arms flailing. Wilfred swerved to avoid him. Tilly was disappointed.
Faces turned to them as they rushed past. Dan was at the front of a group, the Peace Park crowd. One of the twins stood with Dan. Tilly saw the open faces, all heads turning . . .
Wilfred scanned not just the road, but to either side and further ahead.
‘Brace yourself.’
Tilly put her feet up on the dashboard. They left the road, were bouncing, helpless, riding their momentum, slapping trees aside, bellying boulders, and they rose and Tilly saw the sky, and they slowed, the truck rose again, and then went sprawling onto its si
de.
Tilly heard birds, a creaking and ticking, the rumble of wheels spinning. She hung in her seatbelt, braced herself again with her legs and looked down at Wilfred. Blood flowed from his forehead, but he was still in his seat, his hands still on the steering wheel.
‘Unna?’
The window still worked. Tilly wound it down, grabbed hold of the door, unclasped her seatbelt and began to climb from the vehicle. It was surprisingly easy, as if she was being lifted, gently pushed from behind. Adrenaline, perhaps. She stood for a moment on the side of the upturned cab, saw a car approaching, people in the distance rushing down the street toward her. Then she reached in to help Wilfred, but he was making his way, and he gestured for her to give him room. He hauled himself out as she made her way to the ground, and sat for a moment on the cab. ‘Do that again?’ Began climbing to the ground. Tilly saw there were eagles in the sky, far above, circling.
The wheels, still spinning, rumbled, and wheat spilled slowly from the truck and its trailer, small runnels pouring to growing, golden heaps, warm and golden like great wealth. A luxurious sound, soft and comforting, that whispered it might go on forever.
Come close. Closer.
The sound of the grain running, a rumble of thunder. Grain, smooth and reassuring; thunder, to demand attention.
Transfixed, Tilly and Wilfred watched a pile of golden wheat grow beside the trailer. The tarp had split, thus the runnels of grain, and they saw the outline of Wilfred’s puppet creature beneath its skin. The tarp shifted, the figure slid down, and as the grain continued to flow they could see, behind the edge of tarpaulin, a small dark dome beginning to appear. A skull? It was too dark to be bone. The tarpaulin shifted again and, like a body in a draining bath, shoulders were revealed, then upper torso, knees . . .
Tilly glanced up the street. People from the Peace Park were at the bridge, were picking their way along the wheel ruts through the sand and broken scrub toward the overturned truck.
A golden dust hung in the late sunlight, the grain continued to run, revealing more of the figure. Skeleton? Mannequin? The tarpaulin shifted and suddenly – it must have been the grain sliding and spilling that pushed the figure, because its legs and pelvis shifted and, leading with the head – it rose from the spilling grain and stood, swaying on still invisible feet, in a shimmering shroud of golden wheat dust.
