by Carmel Bird
CHAPTER TEN
Gold
‘What need is there to weep over parts of life when the whole of life calls for tears?’
SENECA
There came a point in my reading of Virginia’s Chronicles where I felt she had learnt to trust me, and I knew I must enter into a correspondence with her if I was ever going to understand more of how Caleb Mean’s mind worked. Virginia is, after all, the only sane and living key to the community of Skye, and to have gained her trust is probably some sort of coup, people in closed communities being traditionally suspicious of the outside world and its ways. There are other Means scattered through the countryside and the backwoods of the northwest, but the community itself remains the mystery it has always been, and it still exercises its fascination for me. My father used to know (and disapprove of for a number of reasons) Bedrock and Carrillo Mean who lived at Copperfield and who ran the Bedrock Press that published so many of Carrillo’s books, of which there is a vast number on every topic under the sun. Every topic, that is, except the community at Skye which seems to have been a skeleton in Carrillo’s closet and thorn in his side, as far as I can gather. Just as I caught some glimpses of Caleb when I was young, I also saw Carrillo once, although not Bedrock. Bedrock was Carrillo’s twin sister as well as his wife, a detail that so appalled my father he became a vehement Mean-hater for life. Once my sister said that perhaps the Means were like the Ancient Egyptians in their attitude to marriages within the family. This comment probably only succeeded in turning my father against the Pharoahs, about whom he knew very little.
Carrillo Mean came out to Christmas Hills to buy bulbs and seeds from us. Father was happy enough to sell them, in spite of his moral prejudice. The visitor was tall and handsome, with white-white skin and bright auburn locks—I say ‘locks’ because his hair was thick and long and springy, standing out from his brow in sparkling angelic rays. I knew he was Caleb’s second cousin or something, and there is a strong family resemblance. I was bedazzled by his presence, and also because he was related to the Preacher Boy. I followed him and my father round the farm, probably hoping to gather some inkling of the glamour and mystery I sensed in the lives of the Means. My mother seemed to fall under his spell, and she picked an opulent bunch of zinnias, all shades of pink and red, which she presented to him. He held them in both hands like a bride, a bloodstained nuptial bouquet. I believe it was an amazing sight to witness Bedrock and Carrillo Mean side by side, as they were identical apart from their gender. There is a sad story attached to them. Their young daughter disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night and was never found. I was very young when Carrillo bought the bulbs, and I don’t recall much of what he said, but I do remember that his voice was what I could only call mellifluous, and the words sounded to me like poetry, although he was presumably only describing the kind of plants he wished to buy. The part I remember was when he said he wanted some mauve foxgloves that would ‘shoot up like a melancholy rocket’. I remember it because my father took to quoting it whenever the name of the Means came up. ‘Shoot up like a melancholy rocket,’ he would say, and laugh a kind of bitter little laugh. One time Carrillo won a local poetry writing competition with his epic ‘Playing With Fire’ and I read the poem when it was published in the Circular Head Gazette but I couldn’t understand it. I was about twelve, and had planned to write to Carrillo in admiration, and in the hope that he might write back and ask to see some of my own work, but as it turned out I was far too embarrassed because I didn’t even get what he was on about. He was always in the local news for one thing or another, and he also had quite an international reputation, going into the more academic side of psychology, in fact. He founded a well-respected centre for the recovery of lost children in California. Bedrock never recovered from the tragedy of the loss of their child, and I think she still lives alone somewhere in one of the ghost towns, making incredible patchwork quilts, one of which my sister bought, much to my father’s disgust.
But as I said, Carrillo was never part of the community at Skye. His branch of the family escaped early and settled at Copperfield and Woodpecker Point, but there were other families who moved in to Skye, marrying Means, and bringing new blood, and, in at least one instance, gold. I had heard the stories about a miner who found a large nugget of gold at Beaconsfield and somehow ended up being wrecked off the west coast on his way to try his luck at Mount Bischoff. How he got to Skye remains a mystery, but he did, and he fell in love with Rosa Mean and stayed and married her. This turns out to be a true story. Without what came to be known in the family as ‘the Beaconsfield gold’, the whole enterprise of Skye might have foundered before the end of the nineteenth century. As it was, Magnus and Minerva read the miner’s gold as a miracle and sign of God’s blessing, and the future of the community was confirmed. Rosa and her miner, a Chinese man whose name was Charles Beaumont, had eleven children, nine of whom survived childhood, and six of whom remained at Skye. If you have ever heard of the violinist Atocha Beaumont, who played in London, Paris, New York and Berlin, you have heard of one of Rosa’s daughters.
That golden nugget ensured the future of Skye. It set down the foundations from which would rise the child Caleb, who would be born under the rainbow, who would be the harbinger of so much woe. Who would have thought?
Virginia calls me her pen-friend which I think is very touching.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean III
‘We live already in the shadow of future events.’
MAURICE MAETERLINCK, The Great Beyond
I have heard of a butterfly—and I have seen pictures—that lives in Africa, and it is called the Mother-of-Pearl. I imagine lying somewhere in a quiet sage-green place where the light is soft and clear like the notes of a distant flute, and my eyes are open, and I am visited by quiet loving flocks of Mother-of-Pearl. To go straight across the open, open sea from Skye to Africa! To lie in a silent place where the wings of insects shimmer, translucent palest green, blushing with whispers of dark violet, and they make a sound like paper-paper-paper. Their wings resemble the petals of the opium poppy, and I fall into a sweet and mystical slumber.
When the winds blow through my Temple of the Winds, it sings and sighs, and sometimes it roars. When it is silent in the moonlight, it is an eerie, magical, mysterious place like the floor of an ancient sea. The surface of the floor is composed of the vertebrae of whales caught in Bass Strait in the early part of the nineteenth century, white, hard, yet soft, geometric, warm and lovely. The place is guarded by the spirit of the homeless moonbird and is believed to be situated at an entrance to another universe. On the Night of the Dead which we celebrate in February the floor is strewn with the petals of calendulas, the flowers of the eleventh hour, leading here from the graveyard so that the souls of the recent dead may find their way to this haven, and beyond. In our houses on that night we serve bowls of fish soup with calendulas, and we celebrate the lives of those who have died by saying the Fish Prayer, a prayer that moves from one member of the group at the table to another. ‘May the sacred unknown creatures of the deep guard you and keep you forever more.’ We are taught to be unafraid of the sea, yet in truth I am afraid.
I speak as if all this was still part of my world. I hope that one day I may return to the Temple of the Winds, across the wind-beaten tawny gorse and twisted prostrate bushes, across the Honey Meadow where the flowers blow in the summer sun and you can hear the happy yellow songs of bees. I may lie on the pavement and melt into eternity, return to the no-time when the star-god fell to earth and became the father of the original peoples of this island.
The night of the fire the police took us and drove us for hours and hours, bumping along, to the airport at Launceston, and then we were flown to Hobart. I have almost no memory of that night except that it was a black, blank tunnel that went on forever and ever, and I imagined I could smell the fire on my skin, on my clothes, could feel the smoke smarting in my eyes. I could not ans
wer any of their questions properly, and I was put in isolation, with a guard. Sometimes Golden was with me, and sometimes she was not. She was only two years old, and it must have been terrible for her. This continued for days, and then for weeks, and the police and the doctors and strange women came and talked to me, but I was often drugged and whole nights and whole days, fade and blur when I try to think about it. I never saw Caleb again. They finally told me he was ‘unfit to testify’ and was put away ‘never to be released’ in the new facility on the Black River. He is more than clever, and will certainly escape from there one day. It is they who are crazy to imagine they can contain him.
They decided I was crazy and consequently unfit as well. In a technical sense I am I suppose innocent of the crime of killing the people at Skye. I am not insane. I am innocent, truly innocent, but not insane, yet many of the people around me since that night have thought I must be insane. For a long time I never knew exactly what Caleb was planning to do in response to his thirty-third birthday. His language is poetic, his meaning sometimes obscure, and by the time his meaning was clear it was too late to do anything. What could I do? And I still love him. That is why they say that I must be insane. Perhaps I am stupid and crazy they say. Am I crazy? Am I stupid? Clearly I am not. I waited for Caleb on the cliff with Golden, and the air was pierced and filled with strange and other-worldly screams carried in the still darkness, filled with ash and smoke, and I could see the fire in the village, and I was frozen to the place where my horse was standing, a bruised mist of purple and sulphur between myself and the reality of the night.
Somewhere between the night on the cliff and the time when I became conscious of my surroundings in a hospital or prison in Hobart, I lost the ability to speak.
The first person who really made any sense to me, after the fire, was Father Benedict Xavier Fox from the Catholic Welfare Office. I had to trust somebody. I trusted him. Now I am uncertain of what my expectations were of a priest from the Catholic Church, but I have a strong recollection of my first response to him. With Father Fox I felt safe, deeply safe, for the first time in a very long while. He told me they could not decide what would be the best thing for me, where I should go to live, and what would become of Golden. The day when he came to visit me, there in the room with Alice the guard who so unsettled me, was a true turning point in my life.
Father Fox is a very tall man with black hair and a square face with freckles and square hands, blunt square hands. There are freckles on his hands, and sandy hairs that glint in sunlight. I found myself staring at the hairs on his hands and wondering why they were not black like the hair on his head. He was wearing a black shirt with his white priest’s collar, and he was smiling, truly smiling with his whole face. His shoes were shiny black. When he spoke my name—Virginia—it was music, music that I loved to hear, and which he seemed to love to speak. Suddenly my eyes were brimming with tears. It was so long since I had seen somebody smiling. He appeared in the doorway, and he spoke my name, and he was beaming like a shining, gleaming, smiling raven. I saw my salvation in the aura that hovered about his form as he stood filling the doorway of my prison room which was generally populated by frowning scurrying anxious bothering ugly oppressive folk and the spider woman Alice. Golden was lying asleep in her cot beside me.
In his hands Father Fox held a plastic bag containing a yellow knitted sheep with a bell around its neck for Golden, a bottle of ginger beer and a packet of chocolate teddy bears and a beautiful fancy flowery nightgown with lace and satin bows. The nightgown resembled nothing I had ever seen in my life on earth. It was like a breath of paradise, sprinkled with small flowers, winking with tiny green leaves, and decorated with bluebirds all around the hem. I held it in my hands and it took my breath away. At home in Skye families made their own clothes, buying the fabrics from a shop in Burnie, or spinning, weaving and dyeing our own woollen cloth. Everything was used several times, until eventually an ancient skirt, for example, would re-surface in a patchwork quilt where it would appear to last forever and forever. My old dresses and nightgowns were sound and simple, in keeping with our beliefs and our way of life. Beauty and embellishment existed principally in the realm of the imagination, and there they knew no bounds. I had never dreamed of owning, of holding in my hands, of wrapping around my body, a drifting, floating, whispering garment such as this was, from a shop somewhere in Hobart. Hobart Town we always called it, a place where I was incarcerated with my child, and yet a place where I had never been before, a place of mystery and glamour and impossible strange music. The packets of biscuits were more familiar to me, as occasionally such things were seen within my Hobart prison walls, but they were also a much desired luxury. In Skye we mostly did all our own baking, and we enjoyed many treats. My favourite, and also Golden’s favourite, is the shoo-fly pie. The recipe is my grandmother’s—always when I write of members of my lost family I must stop to weep and to reflect and to pray. I believe with all my intellect that they have moved on to a glorious place, but in my heart I have a dark and heavy feeling that they should still be here on earth. Perhaps this is simply a reflection of my own selfregarding desire to be surrounded by the people I love. I felt like crying when I saw the bottle of ginger beer Father Fox brought me. Actually I never liked my mother’s ginger beer which was celebrated in the community. I always preferred the ones we bought in milk bars whenever we went to Stanley or Burnie, but now I am sorry, so sorry. I cry over the strangest little things. I think it helps.
I wrote notes to Father Fox on this matter, and he replied that perhaps I would find comfort and meaning in giving thanks for their lives and in praying for their eternal souls. I asked him also how he knew I liked Gillespie’s ginger beer, and he smiled the way he does and said that it was common knowledge about me and my fondness for Gillespie’s ginger beer. That was very strange. He gave me a shining new copy of Wuthering Heights with a romantic picture of Cathy and Heathcliff on the cover, sweet and full of tragic promise. This book is one of my most favoured stories. Did he know this? How did he know? The first time I read it, many years ago when I was very young, I was unable to stop reading it, and then unable to stop myself from thinking about it for a long long time.
Father Fox also requested the people in the prison—I describe the place as a prison, but in truth I do not know what it was—bring me a television set. He also gave me magazines such as TV Week and Vogue, saying they were the first stage in my new education. I confess I found them to be full of wonders. They were so shiny, and they had a delicious aroma, spicy, and they took me into worlds of the imagination that I had never known before. TV Week is very jumpy, but quite easy to read, and it seemed to be almost instantly familiar to me, which is quite strange I think, since it took me into a world that had before been so alien. Vogue is like magic. I leaf through it over and over again as if I am looking for a secret or a clue to some lovely mystery. The people are so beautiful. And there are images of jewels and shoes and perfumes and dresses and ideas that can pick me up, place me on a magic Arabian carpet and transport me to worlds beyond worlds. I drift and wander through Aladdin’s cave where there are riches dripping from the walls and the trees in clumps of green crystal as the middle of the sea, great chunks of ruby red and smooth as the ruby in the heart of God. But the most common image is that of the watch. The point at which technology and adornment and luxury and mortality converge. Time was so different at Skye, it stretched back before thought and measurement, moved in its twist of figure eight, back onto itself in the shape of eternity. But in Vogue there is a real obsession with gleaming elegant timepieces by famous fashion designers and the watches are either thick with diamonds or they are smooth and almost faceless, and they are shocking.
Father Fox was talking to me and observing me closely as I accepted all the gifts, and as I turned over the pages of the magazines. I know he was watching me. My eyes said thank you, and I wrote the word very firmly on my notepad. Father Fox smiled at me some more and drew a picture of a funny
dog.
I realise that my thinking is possibly forever out of step with the world outside Skye. The world outside had for so long been the prison hospital walls, the prison bars, the prison labyrinths. And then suddenly the world outside is the world outside and I am in that world. I am going to become obsessed with watches and seconds and minutes and hours and the time of this world. I long to own a Nomade made by Hermès, oh how I long for that. It is not bejewelled, it is like the silver steering wheel of a magic car because of the way two watches are displayed together in the picture. I love Roman numerals. I realise that I have no real concept of society in general, for that is the way we were always meant to be in Skye, ignorant of the wicked world. Our thinking was superior, and we knew of matters that were wrongly overlooked by the people beyond our world. That world of Skye is now no more, it is gone forever and forever. I mourn for that world, I mourn for my lost sweet family. I cling to the goodness of Father Fox, praying as he says to pray, reflecting on the goodness of God who has given to me and to Golden the opportunity to survive a holocaust, to embrace the beauty of the world beyond Skye. For there is great beauty here.
If I am to survive in this world, I have much to learn of its ways. I am as a child. This is a most interesting position in which to find myself. Golden and I will grow up in the world together. Golden needs me, and she anchors me as I float in the flinty sea into which I have been tossed. She needs me and I need her. I have to be strong for her, for when my world disappeared, so too did hers, and she is imprinted with the knowledge of that world, even though she can not articulate her loss. I placed the yellow lamb in the cot beside her and she stirred in her sleep and turned her face into the pillow.
While Father Fox gifted me with the nightgown and all the other treasured objects, Alice was watching. She sat on her chair by the door, and her long nose was pointy with intense disapproval. Her eyes—close together and round like stones—glittered with repressed rage and other choked-up emotions that I could sense radiating from her. For Father Fox represented a Higher Authority. He was from the Catholic Welfare Office who had, I believe, taken it upon themselves to champion the cause of Virginia and Golden Mean, since our case fell outside the interests and capabilities of all other bodies. He was not attached to the prison, not attached to the police, not the doctors, not even the press, not anybody to whom Alice could appeal. Father Fox was able to follow a regime and a law known to himself alone. When I realised this I thanked God for bringing me to the attention of Father Fox. Sometimes there is a nice reason and logic in the universe.
