by Carmel Bird
CHAPTER FOUR
Story
‘A butterfly is a messenger of love.’
PERUVIAN PARABLE
Caleb was born under the rainbow.
On the evening of the birth, in 1959, Caleb’s grandmother, after hearing the ill omen in the cry of an owl, had a vision that told her the child was the chosen one, the prince, the preacher, the prophet. She seems to have ignored the ill omen of the owl. The vision was a radiant manifestation of God in the form of a vast white umbrella from which flew, in multicoloured clouds, flocks of butterflies. As they moved they spelt out the name ‘Caleb’ on the turquoise cloth of the sky. The word was a gleaming transcription, lit from within as with a sacred flame. From her own childhood learning the grandmother would intone the names of all the species she saw, none of them native to the area. The flurry of opalescent wings resembled a cloud of insects released, tossed from the violated glass cases of a lepidopterist’s museum. Esmeralda, Blue Night, Purple Mort Bleu, Cleopatra, California Dog-Face, Orange Albatross, Red Lacewing, Cairns Birdwing. And the grandmother heard a voice that spoke to her from the air: ‘Observe the path of the insect as it approaches the light—the path is the number.’ There were tropical, South American, wild scarlets, dazzling blinding blues, treefrog greens—and they swirled and shone and glinted, gliding and wheeling in the sunlight of illusion, billowing out from beneath the great umbrella, the great ghostly, no-colour-glassy-shelter with its sinister ribs etched against the light. Pale shadows hover, shine, shimmer. And singing through the patterns of a million wings the grandmother heard next a clear sweet lullaby, where time and space were one, where good and evil mingled to promise now one direction, now another. Now sunshine, now storm—and look, look at the rainbow, the seven shifting colours of the light’s refractions. If you fly above the earth the bow of the rainbow becomes now a full fuzzy circle, now a bright circle of split light moving from red to violet. Oh, beautiful, breathless, beautiful. It is the song of time and space. Rockabye baby time and space. And Caleb was born under the rainbow, a holy child, a sacred gift, a prophet. Old Testament Noah saw in the rainbow the covenant God made between Himself and humankind, and perhaps Noah was right.
The name of the grandmother who saw the rainbow and all the other sights and sounds was Minnie, wife of Joseph Mean, born Minerva Mercedes Annie Paxton in Skye in 1900. She was a distant relative of little Annie Paxton, who was the child celebrated in the family and elsewhere for ‘walking on water’. In 1849 Annie Paxton stood on the leaf of the Victoria Regia lily at Chatsworth, thereby demonstrating the strength of the leaf’s construction. This leaf was Annie’s father’s inspiration for the design of the Crystal Palace. A blurred copy of the etching illustrating Annie’s moment on the leaf hung in the parlour of the house where Minnie grew up. The frame was a dark mysterious blotchy tortoise shell, glowing with pale amber patterns, and underneath the image of the girl on the leaf was printed a verse from Punch: ‘On unbent leaf in fairy guise/ Reflected in the water/ Beloved, admired by heart and eyes/ Stands Annie, Paxton’s daughter.’ Minnie was born into a rural Tasmanian family where the prodigies of such sciences as botany and etymology were part of the fabric of life. There was also a rich and strange mixture of history and literature and theology informing the whole of the extended family’s daily life. One of the most fruitful sources of the family’s wisdom was the private library of Philosopher Mean, a great collection housed in a stone tower in a remote place on the coast. It was a building and a book collection that had moved into myth, and news of it would sometimes appear in journals or television programs about the strangeness of life on the planet. ‘Believe it or not!’ they said, and went on to describe the fabulous tower library in all its strange richness on the edge of the known world, battered by the tempests of Bass Strait.
Those bright insects of Minnie’s vision of God-the-white-umbrella are not the only miraculous ones lodged in the family memory. There are in fact too many appearances of these things in this family for the sane mind to absorb. They are, for something intrinsically so light, a heavy burden, and they drag in their wake the overuse of verbs such as to flutter to flock to flit to flurry. There were some Blotched Blues suposedly seen in reality, by an ancestor in a time of great distress.
These Blotched Blues are a legend in the family, along with other beautiful wonders that have visited across the years, illuminating the history, illustrating the text, like the embellishments of flowers and fruits and birds and insects in a medieval Book of Hours, the Story of the Means. Unlock the ancient silver clasp of the sturdy book bound in leather marked with crosses, turn the vellum pages, fresh as minted morning across the murmuring years, and read the story inked in black and blood-fine scarlet letters, look at the pictures of the leaves and flowers of paradise, the creatures of the crocodile-dragon mind, see the fresh gleam of antique gold. Smell, if you will, the aroma of the miracle of time.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fire
‘Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.’
ISAIAH 29:6
The story of the Means begins in 1851 on Puddingstone Island in Bass Strait, which is the water that lies between the mainland of Terra Australis and the island named for Van Diemen.
It was on remote, forlorn, uninhabited Puddingstone that Caleb Mean’s ancestors, Minerva and Magnus, met for the first time. The Blotched Blues are only part of the Legend of Puddingstone Island. They come along in the wake of a great storm, and before the miraculous survival and rescue of Caleb’s distant and most significant ancestors.
Waking visions run in the Mean family, while dreams during the hours of sleep, are more rare and fragile. The stronger the waking visions, the weaker the dark night dreams. Caleb’s own waking visions were powerful images of heaven and hell, and strange insights and truths of nature. Sometimes he saw in the heavens a great light which was infinite, and in the midst of it, a large and beautiful rainbow, above which there appeared a second rainbow, and above the second rainbow there blazed a shining cross. Beneath the first rainbow appeared the majesty of the figure of a god whose body flamed with rays of light and tongues of fire, and Caleb stood in wonder, and he was consumed, and yet he was unharmed, and he walked forward from the vision, and told what he had seen. At night Caleb did not dream all. His sleep was a time of floating absence, a cloud of nothingness. Like the echidna, Caleb was free from dreams. There are scientists who claim to be able to prove that not only do butterflies dream, but that the cabbages on which they lay their dots of white eggs are also capable of following the narratives of unconscious nocturnal images. It is worth noting that Havelock Ellis in his book The Criminal, referred briefly to the phenomenon of the lack of dreaming in society’s transgressors. The more confirmed in crime, the less likely to dream in sleep, although the condition of total dreamlessness is thought to be very rare. Ellis, following the lead of Santo de Santis, was inclined to believe that the blankness of the non-dreaming criminal was caused by an anaesthesia of sensibility in the conscious life. Caleb is not any ordinary or regular criminal, and could be classified as lacking a so-called normal sensibility. He might be, after all, a kind of god. Do gods dream? They probably don’t need to. Caleb says his night mind is ‘an infinity of figure eight, like the movement of the Moonbird’. Like the Moonbird forever following its figure eight flight around the Pacific Ocean, moving from Bass Strait to the arctic waters of the Bering Sea and back again—and back again—across the open sea and sky, Caleb’s sleeping homeless mind goes nowhere, never settling on the earth. The questing, restless souls of ordinary people may roam about in dream, following the journeys the sleepers do not take with open eyes. But in sleep Caleb’s soul rests, gathering strange energies and gifts unto itself. And like a sleeping echidna, the sleeping dreamless Caleb goes floating free. Is he perhaps his own dream? I don’t know the answer to that question—this is strange Daliesque territory.
Because of Minnie’s vision of the umbrella and the name ‘Caleb’ which came flying through the air, the child was accepted as El Niño from birth—and so he never had a chance to develop in anything like a normal way, being the Prophet, the Holy Child. And if he said he did not dream, he did not dream. His brainwaves have been monitored and measured ad infinitum, but as yet medical science has no way of establishing what a sleeping person is in fact seeing, although the matter of the dreamlessness of the echidna and other monotremes is definitive. If Caleb and the echidna see nothing; nothing is seen and so Caleb does not dream. That is the end of the story and the beginning of the story. It is its own figure eight.
Caleb is the youngest son of Joshua and Elena Mean, one of the seven families in the tiny community of Skye, a village on the Welcome River, to the southeast of Cape Grimm. Caleb El Niño, the Holy Child, and he was raised in the expectation that he would lead his people to salvation. Some folk said, privately, that he was forespoken, that he suffered the curse of the favourite, the blight of unearned praise. I think there is much evidence to support that point of view. On his thirty-third birthday, February fifth, in 1992, after ensuring that all cats, dogs, horses and livestock were free to escape the fire, he assembled the Skye community of one hundred and forty-seven people at the timber Meeting Hall in the centre of the town. He had with him a document, signed by all members of the community old enough to write, agreeing to what was in effect a suicide pact. The men were dressed in their all-black clothing, the women in white, the children in red. All girls between the ages of thirteen and eighteen were dressed in white, and wore the veils of brides. These veils had been kept in blue tissue paper in deep drawers in the Meeting Hall, and were brought out on ritual occasions. Some of the brides had been marked on the left shoulder with the small blue tattoo of a bluebird, signifying that they had at some time been specially chosen by Caleb for his sexual favours. They carried fresh and shining dark-green sprigs of rosemary in intricate wreaths. Two dogs, unwilling to be parted from their owners, were also drugged and they too died in the fire.
Caleb was careless or carefree of the fact that the community’s valuable and beloved library and archives were likely to be destroyed. They had become meaningless to him, all knowledge being carried in his head. At the Meeting Hall he addressed the people in his most powerful and seductive, soaring kind of lecture, assuring them of their status as people chosen above all others to fulfil a mission and a destiny, to move from this earthly plane to a higher realm through the medium of fire. Perhaps they imagined that at some level his talk was metaphoric. It is difficult, even impossible, for people who have not been subject to the power and magic of a charismatic leader to understand how the people might be so beguiled.
The wine the fasting brethren drank that day was spiced with opiates. When all were drowsy Caleb left the hall, locked his people in, and, as the sun was going down, he set fire to the narrow trench of petrol with which he had already encircled the building.
One of the first things to ignite was the row of Chinese fireworks strung across the front of the hall. Exploding and popping like the beginning of the end of the world. Hot jets flew into the night sky, shooting and whooshing, until they paused, hung for a moment, and then burst into wild vermilion and orange palm trees, raining down slow fierce poetic showers of burning leaves as if a great orgasmic angel was making love to the jasper arch of the sky. Flames exploded through the roof, exultant in the darkness, exposing almost immediately the skeleton of the beams. The bonfire that had been set in the field behind the hall caught and bloomed into a spitting, violent and passionate demon life. And then, as if in a pact with Caleb, with God, with who knows what, the wind coming in from the Strait, the wind which had played gently over the village of Skye throughout the afternoon, suddenly gusted up, and opened wide its jaws, wide, wide, and it hurled the full force of a howling breath right into the heart of the whispering flames that leapt and danced around the foundations of the Meeting Hall, out into the bonfire, and then off it went, a frolicking and roaring dragon thrashing its way into the village, through trees and sheds and wild exploding parked cars. A small flock of sheep was incinerated in an enclosure at the back of the general store.
Without looking back Caleb rode his horse through government boundaries to the top of the cliff that is Cape Grimm, the cliff near the weather station. There he watched and listened as the congregation down in his village died in the trap of flames. The cries of death carried in the cold starry air; gold and crimson and strangely malachite and indigo the flames leapt towards the heavens; sparks and flurries of flying charcoal glowed, glittered, floated, spurted into the darkness as the little town leapt into violent blazing life-in-death. Whirling midnight moths of tissue swept up into the sky. A glimpse of hell, a sudden view of a fairyland lit by the sizzling fat of human bodies, accompanied by the whinnies and shrieks and moans of children choking in crawling billows and wraiths of smoke, lungs and eyes filled with stinging poison as they woke from dreamy slumber to the swirling inky spitting clouds at the doorway to deep oblivion. Billowing. Blooming. Flowers of noxious smoke. Tongues of talking flame. Flying embers glowing bright in the deeper glow of the scarlet sky. Great grey sails and billows crowding the space, swallowing the air, the smoke blooming, the children choking, the pain of cruel knives in their lungs. The children were choking to death, drowning for want of the pure air collected and so carefully measured at Cape Grimm. Their earthly future rushed away, disappearing in a funnel of hellfire. Everywhere the smell of burning timber, plastic, leaves, the stench of burning flesh.
The air being measured in the weather station was polluted as it had never been before, and the pollution was recorded around the world. The smoke from the burning community at Skye rolled up and out towards the cliff and sailed, hung in the atmosphere, and sailed, a fleet of tall dark mutant ships, lumbering majestically away high above the sea which wrinkled, wrinkled deep and secretive, far below.
A little way off from Caleb, waiting since late afternoon on the clifftop, was his cousin and lover Virginia, and their baby daughter Golden. Virginia was mounted on a chestnut mare. She had the child before her, and slung across her shoulders was a backpack containing a mahogany box in which was stored a pair of antique pistols, their powder and shot. If real trouble promises big, they would always say in the family, pack the old pistols in your saddlebag. Rising from the sea before them were the rounded humps of the Doughboys, silky rocks sleeping as the water flowed around them, sweetly sleeping in the shapes of wise and slumbering whales, firm guardians of the ocean. The burning village off in the distance, the silhouette of the weather station, a tall silver castle, wooden, glowing in a wreath of moonlit vapour, to the left. And swiftly from the heavens came the police helicopter, a new dark clack-whup thrumming insect-sound, approaching, relentless, descending. Wailing in the distance were the firetruck and the police van, headed for the empty village where the Meeting Hall was burning brightest, where the fire was running through the timber buildings, a fierce wild celebration of hell. Later on some firefighters said the noises, shaped by the remoteness and the darkness, the noises were one of the most terrible parts of the whole conflagration.
