by Carmel Bird
I was actually a bit disgusted and horrified by myself, by my reaction to this woman whom I had gone to the convent to interview for illumination on the spirits and ghosts of Cape Grimm. I had even expected to gain some insights into history, and into Caleb. Perhaps I had indeed gained those insights. At that moment I had almost forgotten the spirits of the Aborigines, and I no longer cared anything much for Caleb Mean. I knew in my heart of hearts that I had fallen in love with this woman through her journals months before, and that my visit to her in Hobart had been a pretext, and I could tell that Ben, for one, knew or sensed this as well. Had he deliberately left the briefcase behind? Surely not. It was much too precious. Or was it? I will probably never know the answer to that question.
Gilia began to sing a soft lullaby, and Stella fell asleep in Gilia’s arms, and, as if bidden by a force outside herself, Claudina stood up, stretched, and began to dance on the dark geometric rug in the middle of the room. She moved as if in a trance, swaying to the music, and slowly from her throat there came a sound, a song, a silvery melody. It mingled, it braided with the song that Gilia sang. It was an old Welsh lullaby and it haunted the room. Candles flickered on the table and Claudina moved in and out of light and shadow, and she sang. Nobody spoke. Claudina, in her song, in her dance, moved from the candlelight into the shadow, and out through the passageway, and was gone. She did not return to the living-room that night.
The company was silent. The first to speak, after a long, long time, was Ben.
‘So it has happened,’ he said. ‘It was only a matter of time before her voice began to come back. Any day now she will speak. I have seen it coming.’
‘But why now?’ asked Gilia.
Ben did not reply, and then the phone rang again, and they were all off on their desperate and hopeful campaign to save the forests, the contents of the briefcase possibly having furnished them with some vital piece of documentation.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean VI
‘The eyes are the third great gateway of the psyche. Here the soul goes in and out of the body, as a bird flying forth and coming home.’
D.H. LAWRENCE, Fantasia of the Unconscious
He stood in the lighted doorway, the flooding rain pouring down on him, drowning. Yet through the oceanic drumming tempest sheets of water his eyes could glitter, his smile could gleam, and about him glowed a fine nimbus of ethereal radiance. And from somewhere, I know not where, in my throat, from my heart, I hear myself frame a whisper: ‘Paul?’ He did not hear my voice over the sound of the falling rain, but to me the faint whisper, the flutter of wings, was like the breath of God. I knew that I had spoken a word for the first time since the night of the fire, and I knew with that word I had betrayed my past, had betrayed Caleb, had betrayed love, had changed everything forever. Paul. Who was he? Why did he appear before me as a spectre in the teeming night, wrenching from within me the sound of his name? Standing in the light, framed by the darkest gloom, his spirit reaching out to mine, like calling to like. I was powerless to resist the truth of what had happened in that moment, in that twinkling of an eye, a blink, a wink, a long slow weeping dancing tear. ‘Paul?’ I whispered. And the angels heard the sound. Paul. The day after, Paul was gone. He had not heard me, but I knew that he and I were linked and I knew also that he was aware of this.
In the night-time I began almost to sing, to make a low chanting sound in my throat which was sadly unaccustomed to the exercise. But I knew that I had begun my journey to speech. Nobody commented upon it, and it was some days before I began to sing old songs to Stella. I slept a great deal, and I wept a great deal, and eventually I began to speak to Gilia, to Michael, to Ben, and I left my notebook behind in my bedside drawer. It was almost as if I had never been silent, except I could read the relief in the eyes of those around me, those kind people who have cared for me and sheltered me all this time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Taos
‘Unless the Lord had been my help, my soul had almost dwelt in silence.’
PSALM 94:17
I held in my heart all my sudden feelings of amazement and joy, and I returned to Black River, where there was soon a letter from Virginia simply telling me that she had begun to speak again. I replied warmly but almost impersonally, so fearful was I of upsetting something I felt was coming into being between us. We communicated very little over the following months, indeed over the following years during which time I did not see her, but I felt profoundly secure in the knowledge and the hope of a happy resolution in a future not too far distant. I threw myself into my work, as people may do when faced with the impossible in their emotional and romantic lives. In the late nineties we began to use email and, I am sorry to sound so banal, it was email that finally brought us together, email through which we were able to explore the possibilities of our lives, for she was in the wilderness house, Stella was in school in Hobart, and I was at Black River. It would be still some time before Virginia was able to break free of the past and emerge in person from the forest.
My meeting with Virginia in the wilderness on that night long ago had awakened in me sharp memories of the first time I met my wife, Paloma García, the circumstances so different, the feeling of swift enchantment that goes far deeper than physical attraction, almost the same. I fell in love with Paloma; I fell in love with Virginia. But these events were many years apart in time, and many worlds away. As I longed to take Virginia in my arms, I trawled in my mind and heart back over my history with Paloma, seeking self-knowledge, seeking an illumination that I knew I needed before I could proceed.
When Caleb was sent first to the Black River facility I was far away in New Mexico. My coming back to Tasmania is full of mingled feelings and reasons, some to do with the pull towards Black River, some to do with the break-up of my marriage to Paloma. I think, if I am honest, that the break-up was the dominant factor in my return. Although I generally feel like blaming Paloma and Jesus the Jesuit for the break-up, I must admit that some fault existed on my side. No, I wasn’t interested in another woman at the time, but I was impossible to live with—I realise that now about myself. I was writing a lot of bad poetry and falling into a close identification with D.H. Lawrence, a writer Paloma, a feminist, certainly could not stand. I have always admired Lawrence’s poetry and essays and I just went into a kind of fugue of crazy closeness. I am fascinated by the fact that Lawrence owed some of his inspiration for Kangaroo to Willem Siebenhaar, the brother of my ancestor Claesgen, whom Lawrence met several times in Perth. Paloma and I originally went to Taos to ski, mingling with hundreds of people, most of whom were suffering from a mid-life crisis. To Paloma Taos also meant Easy Rider, but when I realised Lawrence and Frieda had lived there for two years, I went a little mad. Before that I had never even heard of the nine Lawrence paintings that came to be known as the ‘Forbidden Paintings’. When I saw them, in the manager’s office at the Commercial Hotel, I was hooked. They’re not great works of art, but thinking they were painted by the hand of D.H. Lawrence made me go hot and cold. Paloma grudgingly admitted that she also liked them, so that was something. People these days generally go out to the shrine at the Kioma Ranch to pay homage to the writer, but the thought of Lawrence’s ashes out there in the cement of the altar is a heavy-hearted thought to me. He should never have been mixed up in cement. In my opinion. To me the trees and the sky arching over Taos speak of the poet, but the shrine is dumb and numbing. The memorial seems to me to be so ordinary, so predictable, like a shrine to anybody. The scent of the damp earth, the gushing water at the fountain, the sudden rustle of leaves at twilight, the brutal blonde intensity of the sun, that is Lawrence. This kind of talk drove the rational, pragmatic Paloma wild.
I suppose you could say I was unfaithful to Paloma with Lawrence. Some friends have even suggested that I could in fact blame the poet for my loss of my wife. I don’t know. She fell in love with another man while my attention was temporarily diverted by the magic and
the poetry of a place. Why could she not share my fascination? I loved to breathe the air Lawrence had breathed, see the sunsets, the trees, the country he saw, talk to the people, imbibe him. The place has changed a lot since he was there, there are fewer adobe houses, and more folkloric restaurants and museums and general tourist traps which he would have hated. But I still thought I could commune with him, and I was at the time lacking in any irony regarding all this. I was like some mad undergraduate wouldbe poet, and now I can scarcely recognise myself. I really meant it, and Paloma got fed up. She called me, in her cute little accent, a wanker, and she was right, horrible as it is to admit. Also a loser. It is painful to write this, because there was a time when we would laugh together in the very joy of our existence. But I suppose that’s the way of love, it comes and goes. Now laughter, now tears. Because of the fragility of that love, I am very wary of my feelings for Virginia, who has suffered so much.
Paloma and I had rented a tawny adobe cabin, with simple wooden furniture covered with local native rugs, bright against the softness of the walls. I say ‘we’ rented it, but the truth is that I was the one who rented it. It was less than ordinary to Paloma, who saw it as a fake Spanish-American-Indian hovel tarted up for tourists. There was a small painting of Nuestra Senora de la Salud, which was a bit ironic. She was all blue cape and stars and roses. Paloma was right, the place was only a childish tourist facsimile of an original cabin, but I didn’t want to acknowledge this at the time. High up in one wall there was a window in the shape of a hemisphere, like a jellyfish. When we were first there, and we were still in love, we both enjoyed looking at the moon through the jellyfish, making love by the light of the moon through the funny wobbly glass. I wrote a song about it, and about us, and about love—the madness and all the rest of it—but as time went on and things went downhill between us, she began to call me her jelly-jellyfish and to look up at the window with a sneer. I hated seeing that in her, but there were awful things about me too. I know that and I admit it. We traded some very ugly insults in our new misery.
I was, in my demented state, convinced I had developed tuberculosis, a reference, mirror-image of Lawrence’s disease, and I refused to see a doctor. I would cough all night and half the day, meanwhile lying on a long seat, half under a Ponderosa pine, half in the sun, reading books and writing poems, my Lawrentian beard just visible beneath my big straw hat. I started writing a play but it came to nothing. There seemed to be an urgency about getting the poems written, driven by the disease. It was in fact Jesus who finally insisted I go along to the medical centre, and there I was told by an old-fashioned American doctor in a soft blue shirt and braces, with a white moustache and sad doggy eyes like Einstein, that I had nothing to fear, a viral cough, it would clear up. He prescribed a cough syrup that was principally codeine and so not unpleasant. But nothing to fear? I had Paloma to contend with. She was merciless in her scorn at my hypochondria and my obsession with Lawrence, a man, she said, who writes poems addressed to flowers and treats women like dirt. What kind of a man is that? It is a fact that as the love-object (by which I mean Paloma) degenerates and fades, everything about her becomes—well—a matter for disgust. Paloma, once so perfect and seductive in my eyes, so warm, sexy, adorable, beautiful, graceful, intelligent, became so tarnished, flat, and above all irritating. I didn’t hate her exactly. But I hated her voice, for some reason. It got to grate on me, whereas once it had only delighted me. I did hate tall handsome dark Jesus though, and I thought that he was a disgrace to his church, but I felt only bewildered and sad about Paloma, once so desirable, now so trashy. Love is blind. Well, so is hate I suppose. I was hurt, deep down hurt by the whole thing, I don’t deny that. Insulted. Love destroys judgment and, afterwards, a man can feel he has been tricked by it, not by the woman, but by love itself.
I suffered from terrible, brilliant dreams, dreams of insects with the detail and glitter of precious jewellery. I could make no sense of them, except as an escape from, a defence against, my present life predicament. I confess that these dreams were not unrelated to the times I spent with Dr Einstein—he was lonely too, and his real name was Henry Millar, which is funny enough in itself, when you consider I was still doing my impersonation of Lawrence at the time. We started driving out to his cabin and sampling his stash of magic mushrooms, and he was fascinated by the fact that my family grows opium commercially. Really, he said in amazement, fields of opium at your own back door? I said I would send him some pictures after I got home, and I think maybe it was then I started to put my numb mind and my dull heart to the idea of coming home. Home. The magic mushrooms really spelled the end of Paloma and me. I began to think seriously about leaving them to their thing and going home. The last few weeks in New Mexico are quite strange to me now, but I finally broke free of the scene, free of Henry, free of Paloma, and headed home to Christmas Hills. True to my word I did send Henry pictures of the farm, my nephew on the new tractor, a bleeding scarlet ocean of tulips in the spring, undulating waves of dreaming green-grey-pink poppies, my mother and father grinning on the verandah of the old house. I never heard from him, never heard what he thought. I realised the pictures that would have really interested him were the ones of the poppies—he seemed so amazed that way off in Tasmania—which was practically mythical to him, as it is to many people in other countries—there were opium fields, something he associated with a place like Afghanistan. Is it wild like Afghanistan? he asked me. He spoke of paying us a visit here, and maybe some day he will.
The bright morning Jesus came with the rose and his basket of fruit and stole Paloma away, I was chopping up apples in the narrow kitchen, in preparation for an attempt at making my mother’s cinnamon apple slice. Paloma had never heard of such a thing, never tasted or imagined tasting such a thing. I was trying to make my way back to her, to get past the poetry and the mysticism and back to the way we had been or the way I thought we had been. Henry had said the night before, make her one of your mother’s apple pies, son. And he gave me a special bottle of Californian wine. So that’s what I was doing, chopping the apples for the cinnamon slice. And Paloma was fresh from the bath, all amber and glowing and dressed in white linen, with red sandals and silver bracelets, and through the russet-red wooden door, through its wibbly-wobbly panes of old glass, I could see the image, the sun behind it, of a tall man in black with a basket of oranges and a rose.
After everything I came back home, the first member of the family to leave Australia, the first to return. I came back without Paloma, whom my family had never even met, and after a time of working on the farm I began to recover from whatever it was that had been bugging me, exorcised the ghost of D.H. Lawrence, and looked around for a job. My family asked me so little about Paloma, it was as if she had never existed, and my mother and aunts engaged in strategies to get me to meet the local women, but nothing came of any of that.
As I worked at Christmas Hills among the fruit trees and the poppies and the tulips and the chrysanthemums—which we used to call chrysanthe-mothers when we were kids—as I went fishing with my brother, as I sat in the pub listening to the local band and drinking Australian beer, as I played at mild flirtations with the few unmarried women hereabouts, I recovered from the condition of unrest and depression that I had been suffering, and began to look ahead again. Looking back it now seems that destiny guided me, that I was meant to be on hand when the job at the facility came up.
I had heard with horror and fascination all about Caleb’s murderous rampage, and I had also heard about the facility, which is an object of interest in some international circles, and suddenly there it all was before me, falling into place. I would come here to Black River and make a close study of one of the world’s most notorious criminals, a man who grew up in my own district, a figure from my own past. Caleb Mean. As well as Caleb, I have to say, there are other inmates who are well worth studying.
Caleb was the first leader of the Skye sect to turn the community’s beliefs back onto the people and i
n doing this he murdered one hundred and forty-seven members of his church, of his own flesh and blood. An unusual aspect of this is that he did not also destroy himself, as such leaders usually do. I compare his case with the suicides of the Heaven’s Gate people near San Diego in 1997—Marshall Applewhite, known as King Do, died with his followers. Among his papers at the Rancho Santa Fe they found notes and newspaper articles about Caleb and the community at Skye. He had written that Caleb’s one mistake was to allow himself to be taken prisoner. King Do believed Caleb should have taken the leap off Cape Grimm with Virginia and Golden, and he also wrote approvingly of the fact that Jim Jones died with his people in Guyana in 1978. There is some evidence that Caleb meant to race off the cliff on his horse, but something held him back. What this was nobody will ever know, although you can speculate that somewhere in his thinking, or in his heart, there was a powerful impulse for self-preservation. Having had some time to study him, I would certainly argue that. This deep desire to continue to live on earth over-ruled his own image of himself and his little holy family sailing off the clifftop into the air before dropping into the sea.
Caleb was treated as holy from the beginning, a kind of non-Catholic incarnation of El Niño, a concept leftover in the family from the time of Minerva and Magnus Mean. He spent very little time with other children, concentrating on his studies and his preaching. I don’t know how often he made appearances like the one he made to us at Duck River, but when I look back I see him that day as being so poignantly tragic. He was a child like us, but his only contact with us was as a freak shouting scripture from the top of a rock.
