Cape Grimm

by Carmel Bird

  ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.’

  The sailors offered them more water, then from a tin box pieces of cheese, and strips of Irish salty pork to eat, slices of damper and cubes of rich muttonbird fruit cake with warm dark nips of rum. They took only the water and the rum. Magnus ate a little of the meat but Minerva felt she was about to vomit, to faint, to die from exhaustion and thirst. The fishermen stared in astonished reverence at the hot face of the baby, knowing a miraculous sea-rescue when they saw one.

  And so, children of Skye, the red umbrella remained on the rock on Puddingstone Island for a long long time, and it was bright and it was brave, and it was tattered and fluttered by the winds, faded by the sun, cracked and split—until one day it just blew into the sea in a storm, and was returned to its dead owner at the very deep down bottom of Bass Strait. Barnaby Coppin, the man who owned the tin trunk, and his lovely leather umbrella with its chubby red rose at its apex, were together at last. God sees Barnaby, and thanks him for the timely use of his red umbrella.

  One of the sailors, the one at the steer-oar, the black one, reached out with a long slender hand, cradling the baby’s head. He bent over and placed his cheek on the child’s face, and, without a word having been uttered, Minerva gave Niña to the sailor who moved forward, passing the steer-oar to Magnus. This moment, Magnus said to Minerva later, was the true miracle, for the sailor was a woman, and she put Niña to her milky breast, and Niña, limp and mewing faintly, began to feed. Dolly Thunderstone, in the watery wilderness of the Strait, became Niña’s wet nurse. She was also the mother of two children, one a baby. One of the men in the boat, Thomas Riggs, was Dolly’s father, the other, Inglis Finney, her husband. She sensed at once that Minerva was not the mother of this baby, and knew the baby needed to be nursed. Once, Niña choked and brought up a thin stream of pale brownish liquid, half mixed with Dolly’s milk. Then she slept, and then she sucked again quite strongly for a long time, and then she fell asleep. It was a sweet and blessed sleep.

  Thomas and Inglis spied the mahogany case exposed now on Minerva’s lap, and they realised it must contain pistols. Minerva sat very still, wrapped in the blue shawl, with her long linen pantaloons showing. Her black hair had dried and now formed a shadowy nimbus around her face, her skin fine and golden, her dark eyes weary, troubled, alert. Round her neck she had her Claudina pendant as well as the amethyst from the leather bag. Magnus had the hunting knife in his belt. Before very long, out of the mist loomed the great rock that lies just off the coast at Circular Head. The sailors called it the Nut. Then they laughed and called it the Rock of Gibralta, and then somebody said ‘Rock-a-bye baby’, and they laughed again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Earth

  ‘The Monarch butterfly is common throughout the world, and migrates in flocks of millions, fleeing from the cold, returning always to the same places. From November to March they blanket the trees of a Mexican pine forest, spreading a soft murmur that is the collective music of their beating wings, bending the branches with their weight.’

  CARRILLO MEAN, The Butterfly Effect

  As the boat drew near to the wooden dock at Circular Head, Inglis Finney ran up a tattered red and white flag which was a signal of distress to the master of the little harbour. News of the disappearance of the Iris had already reached the community, and there was speculation about the possibility of survivors. A small crowd including Doctor Owen Tully was waiting, and Inglis handed his passengers over with but a brief explanation. Time and Tide wait for no man, he said to Owen Tully. We have done our part. Back to our labours. Certainly it is an ill wind, Doctor, that blows nobody any good. An ill wind.

  In the flurry of astonished looking and talking and excitement that greeted the shipwrecked couple with the baby, nobody really took account of the fact that Dolly never came ashore. With some regret she handed Niña back to Minerva and waited in the boat. Before handing Niña over, Dolly tucked around the baby’s wrist a bracelet woven from the sinews pulled from a wallaby tail, dyed with ochre, on which hung the pale pink frosty arm of a little china doll. Dolly had found the arm one morning early in the mud outside an abandoned shepherd’s hut at Cape Grimm. The white shepherd and his white woman and their child had fled, leaving the hut half-burnt, one black man rotting under a bush, a bullet through his heart. The doll’s arm lay gleaming on the surface of the mud, a little hole at one end where a string had attached it to the shoulder. This treasure had been hanging round Dolly’s own neck for many months, and in a rush of love that was almost too painful to bear, she passed it over to Niña, linked herself in the only way she could to this lost baby from the waters of Puddingstone Island. The mixture of emotions criss-crossed Dolly’s shiny black face, her eyes were glittering, and she wiped them with the flat of her hand. Dolly missed her own baby when he was not with her, and now her heart went out to Niña, small white survivor from the sea. The pale china limb of the doll resembled Niña’s own human arms—Dolly wished to kiss and caress Niña’s arms, hands, fingers, but dared not. She was briefly the black wet-nurse, and it was not her place to love the child. Dolly loved white babies and children, loved to watch them at play, loved to touch them gently, loved to look into their round eyes the colour of the sky or the sea, loved to hear them babble in real white language. The fishermen needed to make haste back out to the islands, for if Dolly had been spotted she would almost certainly have been impounded and taken to live—in fact to die—at Oyster Cove down south in Van Diemen’s Land with the other tragic remnants of the native people. It was already twenty years since George Augustus Robinson had established his disruptive and quixotic programs called ‘friendly missions’, removing the natives from their land, making the colony a safer better place for white folk to live and prosper, and dedicating places where the native people too could live in peace. It is not surprising that the natives died from displacement, disease, depression, loss of hope, and the jagged fading of their broken, broken hearts.

  The bracelet that Dolly slipped onto the baby’s wrist remained in the Mean family, an object of mystery and reverence, coming down to the present day, worn by babies of many generations, a sacred lucky charm. The wallaby-tail sinew has been replaced several times, part of the original being always retained. Followers of modern child-care practice throw up their own arms in horror, saying the child will choke on the little china charm which is just a breeding ground for germs. No child has ever choked on it. Golden Mean was wearing the bracelet when she and her parents were captured at Cape Grimm on the night of the fire.

  ‘What you never tell won’t do no harm,’ Inglis said to Magnus. There was salt and iron in his tone of voice, in his gaze. ‘This Dolly’s just a fisher-man, see. This us is three fishermen here. You understand me? Understand? Silence is worth your life you know. But for you there is a bargain. For your silence, we will promise to row back out to Puddingstone one of these days. One of these days. And we will bring you back the mess of things you left behind. One of these days. But you talk and you’ll be sorry. One of these days. She’s a wise little lady you have there now. She will know to be silent. Wise. She knowed to carry off the arms. Many a woman would ha’ chose a bonnet instead. A wise one.’

  Some of the things left behind in the cave were mysteriously returned, wrapped in an old length of sail, left at the Plough Inn at Circular Head one bleak morning in October, labelled for Magnus Mean. The fisherman had kept his word, had supposedly decided that Magnus had kept his silence and so could have his booty. ‘One of these days’ had arrived. Certain things that Minerva recalled as being in the box and bag were missing—the hand mirror, the olive oil, the gloves, the scissors and the wine. Perhaps she had halfimagined them after all. In any case, perhaps reasonable payment had been made in goods.

  Having delivered the castaways to Circular Head the fishermen were gone, the wind behind them, oars pulling them fast out of sight. Owen Tully led the survivors to the Plough Inn where there was a fire, hot water, fres
h clothing, food, drink, and remedies. The quilts on the beds were made with the down of the moonbird, so soft, so warm, so filled with travellers’ dreams of the Pacific Ocean and the winds of eternal flight. There were a few rooms in the upstairs portion of the inn for travellers. A tall grandfather clock with sun and moon and stars on its face loudly ticked its welcome in the entrance hall. Ticktockticktock. Tidesturntidesturn. To Magnus this clock was one of the greatest comforts, the strong soft tick tick of the sweet old clock that resembled the clock in the hallway of the schoolmaster’s house in Glasgow, a clock whose face was painted with an image of a sailing ship at sea, a clock bearing the motto, in gold and gothic letters: Time and Tide Wait for No Man. Yes, the clock in the hall of the inn was a comfort to Magnus, and yet the memories it stirred of his former life could cast him into deep reverie, sadness, and sometimes a grey despair. Tick-tick-tick. We are strangers to each other, brought together by the storm. Strangers? Strangers? Whose child is this? This sleeping baby girl. We do not know. Who does know? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Oh woe!

  Women in long cotton dresses, their shoulders covered with woollen shawls, and wearing thick boots, gather round Minerva and the baby in a chatter and a chitter and a sweet lavender worry that chants and flurries and whispers. Molly Smedley has a fat baby on her hip. She takes Niña to her breast and again Niña snuggles and mews as she feeds on warm strange milk. She is washed, she is examined by Dr Tully. She is a healthy white female child of six months, recovering from distress, some dehydration, exposure, hunger. Some bruising on the shoulders and the back. Blue-eyed and blonde. Presumed orphan. Now she is dressed in a long gown smelling of sunshine, a holy child, wrapped, and she falls into a deep, deep slumber, so still, waiting upon her dreams. Thrown from the ship, thrown up by the sea. Flotsam child. Alive. The china arm on the sinew bracelet is taken from her wrist and pinned to her gown, taken to be a token of good luck from the child’s homeland, perhaps warding off the evil eye, phallic, porcelain, resembling a pale and frosty worm dropped by a fleeting gull.

  The women, young and old, gaze at the child and run the backs of their fingers across her downy cheek, the tips of their fingers along her silky brow, the hollow of a hand cups the peachy silver ringlets lying damp as chrysanthemum petals on her baby skull. Firelight flickers on the group of women, on the baby, and now the child is sleeping in a rough wooden cradle. Someone has brought in a Chinese screen, making a tiny room where Niña can sleep. Strange tall white waterbirds are painted among the spikes and flags of iris of the screen. The candlelight is yellow.

  In Niña’s dreams, the sigh of the waves, the wing of the air, sweat of the sailors, smell of the rain on the sea. The air rushes past her ears, through her skin, salt on her tongue, in her eyes. A tumultuous violence riots through her blood. Dream, dream little Niña. Dream of the sudden jolting arc described by your flying body, propelled from the splintering deck of the Iris, buoyed by the wings of the hovering angels, lifted and landed and saved on the softest sliver of Puddingstone Island. Dream of storms and squalls and calm evenings, and the singsong harmonies of the women at the Plough Inn. Dream of your father’s hands as they open to release you into life. Dream too of your soft mother’s feathery silken neck, her forgiving breast, her dulcet, singing whisper-voice, long lost, at the bottom of the sea.

  Minerva is offered steaming tea and a dish of hot water with soap and towels, clean petticoats and underwear, snowy white, trimmed with lace and ribbons, and a dress of dark-blue Manchester cotton, stockings and boots. She is given a brown shawl to wrap around her shoulders. She is wearing the uniform of the other women around her, but she will never resemble them. Something of the Indians and Spaniards of Peru marks her out as being quite, quite different, and something in the way she thinks, the way she feels, the things she knows, the way she moves.

  Minerva is a very unusual and pretty name, Mrs Hinshelwood. And now Minerva weeps, for she hears in her heart Edward’s English voice as the Welsh Dr Tully says—Minerva, that is a pretty name. Sometimes when her heart yearns for Edward, Minerva torments herself with memories of a story her English nurse used to tell her, the story of Alcyone and Ceyx. How Ceyx was shipwrecked and drowned, how he came to his beloved Alcyone in a dream, and how she went down to the seashore and leapt onto a great wave, transforming in that moment into a sorrowing bird of the sea. How Ceyx, his own wings new-formed, came to find her, and how the two of them flew away together, sharing fate, sharing an enduring love.

  Now Minerva weeps great stricken tears, and she is inconsolable. They bring her brandy and sugar and warm water and opium, the common remedy for pain. She lies on a bed in an upstairs room at the Plough Inn as Dr Tully, in his black doctor’s coat with the velvet collar and a white cambric shirt, takes her pulse and feels her forehead. He is like a priest in the clean quiet warmth of the room where the ceiling is low, the perfume of the air unfamiliar, the breath of safety sighing in the creak of the floorboards.

  So, you were coming to Port Phillip with your new husband, Mrs Hinshelwood. Do you have family there? No? Ah, yes, well, Father Burke is coming by to see you. You would like to see him? Mr Mean has explained to me that you are a member of the Roman faith.

  Magnus appears in the doorway, shining, washed and shaved and trimmed, dressed in boots and moleskins and a red cloth shirt. He is gleaming with soap and water. With him is Father Burke, black hat and face like some kind of funny monkey with round brown eyes and a smiling, wrinkled wisdom. He blesses Minerva with the sign of the cross and prays for her in Latin. His voice is a velvety voice, undulating, warm, golden—full of sunshine and lovely mists in this strange dark place at the upside-down end of the world. The tears flow more slowly; Minerva stops weeping, bows her head, then raises it and attempts to smile, summoning a feeling of hope now, from the depth of her sadness, bewilderment and lonely despair. The comfort of the murmured prayer, the music of the familiar words. The slightly elusive mingled smell of whisky and tobacco and perhaps incense is more familiar to her than the clean clear natural prehistoric air of this land. The holy busy fluttering birdhands of the priest are making sacred signs in the foreign air, and Minerva’s lips respond. She smiles with her eyes and she feels, again, hot tears of salty sorrow mingled with hot tears of swift relief.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Path of the Insect

  ‘And it came to pass that Magnus took Minerva for his wife at the village of Skye, within the boundaries of the pastures of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, close by the rocky promontory known as Cape Grimm. And in the fullness of time the union was blessed with children.’

  CARRILLO MEAN, Camilo Carrillo and El Niño

  The Mean family Bible is a repository for loose leaves of manuscript, so many pages that the soft black leather binding of the great book has cracked at the spine, shattered at the edges, and must be handled with extreme care. It was left behind in the Temple of the Winds when Caleb set out to incinerate everyone in the Meeting Hall, and became an important source of information, a source through which folk would pore in attempts to discover the paths along which Caleb Mean had come, the paths that brought him into being, the paths that led him to annihilate his people. Observe the path of the insect as it approaches the light. Someone has inscribed these words in a flowing script above the vast and spreading family tree. What was the community of Skye, and who were the people that lived for generations in what was supposed to be utopian harmony, only to give themselves willingly into the hands of a crazed mass-murderer?

  Here in the loose leaves scattered through the Bible a reader will find a newspaper account of the rescue of Minerva and Magnus, from the Circular Head Gazette. The piece of paper has been fingered and read by generations of the couple’s descendants, has cracked in the folds, feathered at the edges, yellowed, the words read aloud by dozens of voices down the years.

  On the eighth day of February Mr Thomas Riggs, fisherman, of King Island brought ashore at Circular Head three survivors from the wreck of the Iris
which foundered in the fierce storm on the night of the fifth day of February. The three, a man, woman, and child were rescued by Mr Riggs and his crew of two in a whaleboat off Puddingstone. According to the survivors the Iris has completely foundered, with loss of all other passengers and crew. A preliminary inquiry into the wreck will commence within the week at Launceston. The Iris was under the command of Captain Charles Delany. The survivors are said to be in good health after a remarkable ordeal and a miraculous rescue. Mr Riggs was commended for his action by the Warden of the Circular Head district.

  A reader will learn that Caleb’s ancestor Minerva grew up in Lima, and was the niece of Camilo Carrillo, the sea captain who, in 1892, first published work on the climatic effect ‘El Niño’. Someone has written out on a piece of card, in careful copperplate, a translation of the words from Camilo Carrillo’s treatise on the effects of currents on fishing.

  Peruvian sailors from the port of Paita in northern Peru, who frequently navigate along the coast in small crafts, whether to the north or to the south of Paita, named this ocean current ‘El Niño’ or ‘Holy Child’, without doubt because it has been most noticeable and is felt most significantly after the feast of Christ’s Holy Nativity.

  The Holy Child is El Niño, and his image in paint and sculpture is familiar to the children of Peru. He is a child resembling a small man, with a sweet kind face, a hat, a staff and a cluster of cockle shells. Minerva painted a small picture of the Holy Child and this is collected in the Bible, along with several copies made down the years by children in the family. For today’s children seeking information on the climatic namesake, there are such sites as www.spacelink.nasa.gov