by Carmel Bird
Together we knelt and kissed the earth and then we slowly made our way out of the ruined village, and took the winding path that leads out to the Temple of the Winds. It was a clear day, blue and lilac, with a sweet and gentle breeze ruffling the grasses. As we strolled along it was difficult to believe in the reality of the violent history of this place. Petrels and gulls wheeled, lazy in the air above us. We passed the disused, ruined beehives that had supplied the people of Skye with their wonderful honey, honey that they had exported all over the world. We have our own honey at Christmas Hills, but the Skye honey was always better, much better. Their bees were believed to be direct descendants of the first European honeybees to come to Van Diemen’s Land in 1821. Where are they now, those honeybees?
The Temple of the Winds has the look of something that has always been there, of something that will last forever, as if the ancient Greeks had sailed here to this remote and lonely hilltop and had brought with them a perfect little temple kit that they assembled here against the sky before leaving for other lands, other seas. To be inside it is to be inside a great seashell, at the still point of the world. The pavement is a mandala made from the vertebrae of whales, and from a selection of the sworls and spirals and speckles of all the seashells of the world.
We came back towards Cape Grimm but were unable to enter the government enclosure where the weather station stands. Somewhere over there in the distance was the cliff where Caleb and Virginia had waited on their horses the night of the fire. This same young woman I now hold in my arms. Somewhere over there was Suicide Bay where Mannaginna died. I believe in the ghosts of the Aboriginal people who lived on these lands, and who died here so violently at the hands of sealers and shepherds and others in the nineteenth century. You can sense their presence here—it is in the rocks, the waves, the air, and it will never be erased. And I believe wholeheartedly in Virginia’s visions of them, but the world will never really know.
Our street in Tallahassee is lined with wise old magnolias and live oaks, and these are decorated with the silvery drifting fairytale beards of Spanish moss. Across the street, Miss Henrietta Missildine sits in her rocker in the shade of her porch. She is nearly ninety, and every morning early, when I pass her as I am about to jog round the park, she waves to me and calls out. ‘Have a nice day!’ she cries, and then she laughs and adds, ‘Oh, have a nice dream, it lasts longer.’
In a pecan tree in our garden we have a resident pileated woodpecker tap-tap-tapping like something in a cartoon, flashing red, black and white stripes as it flies. I asked a colleague about the extinct ivory-beaked woodpecker, mainly because old Philosopher Mean fancied he saw one on the northwest coast of Van Diemen’s Land long ago, and hence the name Woodpecker Point. There are no Australian woodpeckers at all. Impossible for him to see an ivory bill, said my colleague, but he also explained to me that although the bird is believed to be extinct, there are occasional excited sightings. Like the Tasmanian tiger I suppose. The last one of those died in sordid captivity in the Hobart zoo in 1936, yet people dedicate their lives to believing it still lives in the bush. And in fact they see it, and some scientists are also hoping to clone it from some old preserved tissue. How we long for the lost animals to return to grace us. These days the tiger exists in a TV commercial for beer. He hides in bright and unconvincing fabulous forest ferns and is finally revealed as a tame, firm, and rather wooden character, beside a large bottle of beer. He is, as a handsome graphic, the symbol for tourism in the state, and his image also adorns the council rubbish bins in some towns. Poor dead lost animal, he must now carry the weight of all the fantasies and romances of Van Diemen’s Land. Once he was hunted out of existence, a bounty on his head; now he is the key to paradise, an obsession, and a tragic joke.
Virginia is enrolled as an undergraduate at Florida State, studying the Poetics of Evolution and Ecology. I have given her a Swiss watch that belonged to my grandmother, to help her to get to lectures on time. She loves this watch, linking her as it does to my ancestors and my past. She is very punctual—in fact she is strangely meticulous in all things, but is specially particular about time. She never speaks of Caleb, although when we had a celebration for my birthday, she stopped for a strange moment, a breath, a hiatus before picking up her fork to eat a piece of birthday cake, and she said, ‘Yes, you were born in 1959 too. That was a very memorable year.’ That was all she said.
Then she opened her mouth and popped in a mouthful of angel cake, and life continued its flow that had for that brief space been arrested. The theme of birth is very much in the air as we are expecting, at Christmas time, not one child but two, and Virginia sat serenely at my birthday table with her hands folded on her belly, a medieval madonna with a little Swiss watch glinting on her wrist. The twins are a boy and a girl. Fraternal twins are something of a tradition in Virginia’s family. And already we have named them Jane (in honour of Lady Franklin who first took the stories of the Brothers Grimm to Van Diemen’s Land) and Jakob (after one of the Brothers). Thus we remember our place of origin.
Golden is now a student at Godby Junior High School, looking much like any other high school student from around here, except that she still sounds different, but that will change. Her first name is not at all eccentric among her peers at Godby where there are kids called Silver and Nomad and Shadow and Hannibal and Helvetica as well as twins named Vanity and Sanity. The strange journey she has followed thus far must make it in some ways difficult to adjust to her new life, but maybe coming here, right away from everything that used to be home, is going to turn out well for her. Human beings are so fragile, and yet also so resilient. She’ll be OK, but I confess I am sometimes thrown by the ice-bright blue of her eyes, and by her dazzling, captivating smile. Where have I seen those before? A chill goes through me as I recall the dark cold chamber that was the heart of Caleb Mean. At least Golden has not been brought up to believe she is God’s anointed. In so many ways she seems to be my own daughter, and yet I know in my heart, as she too will always know, that the late Caleb Mean was in truth her father, and who can tell what shards and splinters of that frightening man’s strange composition lie within her soul? When we stood on the top of the Bluff, the three of us, Golden faced the open sea, and she said, very loud and firm: My father is my father and my father is dead.
Virginia recently wrote a creative paper for her Poetics of Ecology tutorial, giving it the title: ‘What the Hedgehog Knows’. I found it deeply interesting, but at school it received only a C+ grade. The comment on it was highly critical of her spelling and punctuation which are, to say the least, whimsical. I have a feeling that the tutor didn’t actually read the story. I later corrected it myself out of interest, and I think it was pretty good.
It goes thus: ‘I am the Scribe. Long long ago, once upon a time, in a far far country, on the edge of the world, at the tip of the land where the sky meets the sea and the sea meets the land and where the light of heaven meets the shadow of the inferno, there lived a man and his wife. Now this couple had been thrown up by the sea itself, born as Venus was born, floating towards each other on the wings of a great and purple storm of rhinoceros proportions, she on the platter of a cockle shell, he in the pearly chamber of a nautilus. They stood together in their nakedness on the shining tip of a rocky island, and on the foam of the swelling wave which flowed across the ocean, they saw, as they searched the horizon for the boat they hoped would rescue them, a huge and silky poppy, pink as sunset in the tropics, soft as the skin of an unborn goat. And upon the poppy lay a child, a small and perfect female child who wafted in, in, in towards them on the wave, and they forgot their hunger, and they forgot their thirst, and they waited for the child with open arms, and they gathered her up and they loved her. “For she is the child of our dismay, and we are called to love her and to nurture her and to put her before our own good. We must name her Niña.” That is what they said. The man, whose name was Magnus, was a fierce and warlike Scot; the woman, who was named Minerva, was a strangely b
eautiful creature from Peru. Their languages, in consequence, were not compatible, and neither were their given faiths, for he was a Scots Protestant, and she was a South American Catholic with a deep strain of Inca superstition still bubbling joyously in her blood. Why had these two with their divergent tongues and gods come together in this haunted icy place? Well, before long a ship hove into view, and the captain of the ship was amazed to see the man and the woman and the child as they stood waiting for him, naked, beneath the gleaming scarlet canopy of an oriental parasol. He fell to imagining, as the ship drew closer to the mirage upon the rocky shore, that he could discern a jewelled elephant, a banyan tree, and a dark-green glittering serpent beneath a joyful double rainbow, beneath a burning azure sky. He blinked and shaded his eyes the way such sea-captains must do, and the glow of mysterious haze fell from the scene, and the ship sailed closer, and before the afternoon sun began to glide over the rim of the mulberry horizon, the man and the woman and the child were safe in the bosom of the good ship which was called, by a coincidence, Marvel of Peru. And the ship delivered the little trinity from the small island to the larger island of Van Diemen’s Land, where they would dwell forever more. But the people of that land were troubled in their hearts by the naked truth of the little family, by the supernatural mood of the cockle shell and the nautilus shell and the silky, milky poppy, and they glanced at the trio out of the corners of their eyes, and they whispered little stories out of the whip whip whip of the corners of their mouths, and the couple and their daughter were not so gently waved and wafted out out out to a distant corner (where, as I said, the sky meets the sea and the sea meets the land and heaven runs into hell) and there they stayed. And they built a house of bark and logs, and they called the house ‘Skye’ after the island where Magnus was born in the far away Hebrides. They shared a strange and deep understanding and a profound and pearly faith in a new and seaborn providence, and they discovered, as time went on, that they had been gifted with a secret new religion, had been sent from the sea to the end of the world to seed the new way to the Great Good. And by their quiet and shining example of courage, diligence and charity, they gradually gathered about themselves a community of like-minded folk who followed Magnus and Minerva as if they had been the Prophet. And the little community of Skye grew and prospered, and their faith was in the earth and in the stars and in the power of that pink and silky poppy wherein Niña had floated to her destiny. They established a large and healthy family of their own, and when the time came, Magnus handed to his eldest son, the Chosen Son, the torch of the faith of Skye, and in the fullness of time that son too died and handed on the torch. And so it went. The community developed a devotion to the winds and to the air itself, and to the simplicity of following their Chosen Sons. The star of their faith was the limitless human and divine Imagination, fed by music and by the poppy itself, until there came a time, in the fullness of all Time when all of God’s species were beginning to wane, and the Chosen Son knew that the Time had come, and he, who was known as the Hedgehog, saw that the faithful should fall into a final slumber, and should return by fire to the stars. When this was done he handed on the Knowledge to the Scribe, that the story might be told. I am the Scribe.’
So there it is. I thought it was quite revealing, in its naive way.
In the evenings I am reading the old Mabinogion with Golden, as if I were after all perhaps her father, or her uncle, or her friend. I am in fact none of these; I am her mother’s husband, the father of her unborn half-brother and half-sister, and I can sense in the air between us, something knowing and resigned, some fine reserve that will perhaps exist forever between this child and myself. She reads some of the book aloud, I read some.
‘A most strange creature will come from the sea marsh, as a punishment for iniquity, and his hair and his teeth and his eyes shall be as gold…’
We are fascinated by the idea of his gold teeth and are swept along gleefully by the narratives. We have completed The White Book and are about a third of the way through The Red Book. Golden says she plans to write her own Black Book as part of her English Study Assessment. That will be an interesting thing to see, but so far she has been very secretive about it. She says she is going to set it in Florida State Prison, and is making some connection between ‘Mabinogion’ and ‘Mabo’, the word ‘mab’ signifying both ‘son’ and ‘story’ in Old Welsh. I taught her to make Aunt Edda’s gingerbread men, and she took them to school where they were highly acclaimed. She says, in this post-millennium, late postmodern age, that she is going to incorporate the gingerbread men into her assignment. Run, run as fast as you can.
I became interested in Florida State Prison myself in the late eighties, when Ted Bundy was on death row. The issue of capital punishment has always been one of my most passionate interests, its meaning and purpose. In Australia we don’t have the death penalty any more, which probably accounts for Caleb and Dee Dee and others being at places like Black River for life. The last execution in Australia took place on the day when a woman named Victoria Field was murdered in the grounds of Sophie Goddard’s father’s Mandala Clinic—more than an irony, I think, more like a message signifying the pointlessness of the punishments human beings can devise. I followed Ted Bundy’s progress towards his execution in 1989, and I kept in touch with James Dobson who was the last person to interview him. I am only being fanciful when I say that I can sense the spirit of Ted Bundy in the place where I now work. But as I have already made clear, I do believe in ghosts. I can’t explain them and I have not made a study of them, but yes, I do believe in them. I confess to a frisson of excitement when August, the man next-door, told me that Bundy is believed to have spent a week hiding out in his house. Sometimes as I sit on August’s porch I fancy I can feel Ted behind me in the empty study, or above me in the attic, looking down in his cool, handsome way.
To reach the prison I drive through pines and live oaks, past the old farms and cattle pastures of North Florida until I come to the iron sign that arches above me like a wingless insect: ‘Florida State Prison’. I get my first glimpse of the pale-green buildings that stretch, an excrescence across the landscape. The guards in brown, the prisoners in blue. If I mentally compare this place with the tiny frosted castle of Black River, where there is such a small population, and where prisoners like Caleb and Dee Dee are stamped ‘never to be released’, where there is no chance of state-assisted death, I see them simply as two extreme faces of the same problem. The problem of where to put the people who offend against society’s sense of the good, and what to do with them when you have put them there. Obviously, in the case of Caleb the solution to the question was very faulty. But the Bundy solution served no real purpose either, as far as I can see. The Black River experiment is not the answer—I suppose there is no answer. The question defeats me, anyhow. Thor Gulbransen applied his vivid imagination to the question of how to house the criminally insane, but maybe the pale-green multiplying boxes of Florida State are just as good, just as bad, as Black River anyway. Just as good, just as bad. Maybe there is something terribly wrong with the luxury—for staff as well as prisoners—at Black River. In hindsight, for one thing, imagine giving Caleb access to the rowing machine.
Another mistake—and we make these mistakes over and over again in our work—was to deny Dee Dee his ration of tobacco and at the same time to give him access to the linocutting tools in the craft hall. It was part of a Health Department directive to save money on nicotine patches. Dee Dee was a heavy smoker suffering from withdrawal when he went berserk with two knives and before he could be stopped he had stabbed not only the man across the table, but also Dr Sophie Goddard. The other prisoner lost an eye but he recovered; Sophie Goddard died.
In my opinion Dee Dee had developed a violent hatred for Sophie, blaming her for the loss of his companion, Caleb. The withdrawal of the tobacco ration was the last straw, I imagine.
There will be an inquiry, the same intense deliberations that occurred after Caleb’s escape
, Dee Dee will get his tobacco, his linocuts will be worth a fortune and will probably be collected and published in a handsome coffee-table volume for Christmas. The value of the Venus on my office wall has risen considerably.
I have, in fact, made a decision to move out of prison work and to set up somewhere, who knows where, in private practice. And I need to write poetry again. The muse is upon me, she speaks to me from the inky waters of the Florida swamps, from the sweet sharp perfumes of the citrus groves, from the mysterious ecstasy of the rocket launch, from the eerie slow finality of the death penalty, from the starving reality of drought and flood, from the loom of war, the bursting star shapes of disease. There are people who suggest that Caleb and all the other modern prophets such as Jim Jones and the guy at Heaven’s Gate might have had an inkling of the right idea, that the end of the world perhaps is nigh. I don’t know—we are just enjoying life in Florida, and heaven seems very far away. We took Golden down to Orlando one weekend—you couldn’t bring a child to Florida and not go to Disney World. It was incredibly clean, smelling of a disinfectant that reminded me of the facility at Black River. That place seems now to be light years away—far off in time and space. And I think with horror about what happened to Sophie; I wonder about mad Scandinavian Thor Gulbransen who died quite pointlessly in the hotel fire and who never got to hear about what Caleb did, what Dee Dee did. I suppose just about everybody in the world read some version or other of ‘GIANT SQUID TAKES HOLOCAUST PREACHER’, and perhaps many people also read about what came to be called the ‘OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY MURDER’.
