To the Islands

by Randolph Stow

  At the sound of wind and at the fall of the branch the girls screamed like birds, clutched one another, trembled. ‘Ali! Mummy Dido!’

  But Dido, huge as a round boulder and in no mood to encourage them, looked placidly over her flock of orphans and growled. ‘You girls, you think a bit of wind hurt you? Nothing going to hurt you in this dormitory. Real strong, these walls. You stop you shouting and stay on you own beds.’

  Nothing could move her. She took the hand of a small child who was crying. ‘What all you girls doing, just sitting there?’ she demanded. ‘You better sing some songs.’

  They shivered as a bough scraped down the roof.

  ‘Ruth,’ demanded Dido, ‘what wrong with you? You start singing, go on now.’

  ‘What you want us singing, Mummy Dido?’

  ‘You know plenty songs,’ Dido said impatiently. ‘Ah, you girls, you no good! I going to sing myself.’ And the rich voice crooned, ‘God that madest earth and heaven, darkness and light—’

  At the sound of her voice they took courage, and around Ruth’s bed rose a murmur of singing, growing to a raucous shout.

  From this valley they say you are going,

  We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile—

  Under this opposition Dido faded slowly into silence and sat still, looking out towards the anguish of wind in leaves and branches. She was a Buddha, a round rock, vast and warm and immovable in the knowledge of her responsibilities.

  In the swirling dust, at midday, and at the height of the wind, Heriot plodded through the village, his clothes flapping, his wild white hair on end like the crest of a crane.

  The village was indoors, sheltering behind its mud walls and threatened roofs from the possible violence about to come. The road was deserted, dotted with small fallen boughs.

  Being so alone and in such chaos of air he could have shouted out to the wind that he loved it and worshipped it, that overnight he had become its convert, forestalling ruin by embracing ruin. The wind at least, which knew how to tug and tease a weak branch until it slackened and cracked and fell, would understand him, who had been for a quarter of a century the sheltering tree of this small kingdom and was now, by modern ideals and modern discontent, to be brought down.

  Broken. Broken. Broken. On the far shore of the world.

  In the breaking of the crucifix he had confessed, at last and forever, the failed faith. Now he could admit to himself that what was once the bright fruit of a young tree had shrivelled and dried and sifted away in the late years of loneliness, and was not to be found again on the ant-bed floor of a church. He cried to himself under the thrashing trees to be taken and broken on the wheel of the wind.

  All his age and all his frustrations had come suddenly upon him, he was an old, tired man, though he walked straighter than trees in the dust.

  He would take this last walk around his domain, wait for the wind to die, then with all the whites assembled in Way’s living room, announce his departure. He had already, soon after Way left him, transmitted his telegram of resignation to the far city. This walk in the wind was his farewell; afterwards there would only be waiting and going.

  He found that he was coming to the skeleton of the half-erected building, the last work begun under his command, and made towards it automatically, according to his habit, although there were no workers to check on or progress to admire with the village behind its own walls. As he came driving forward, head down, over the road, a man moved in the shelter of a wall.

  ‘Rex,’ Heriot said, stopping sharply. ‘Why aren’t you inside?’

  The man stared blankly at the blowing white hair. ‘Why not you, brother?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Heriot softly, with his sudden shattering grin. ‘So you’ve quarrelled with Gregory.’

  ‘I got plenty friends, brother.’

  Above, on the incomplete roof, a sheet of iron grated and rattled in the wind.

  Heriot said: ‘That’s going to come off in a minute.’

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘You’d better go and tell Brother Terry. He’ll give you tools to fix it.’

  The eyes of Rex still surveyed him expressionlessly. ‘I don’t work here, brother.’

  ‘But you’ll go.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rex—I’m not boss of this mission any more. I’m not ordering you.’

  The dark neck moved, the eyes fixed on his with an intenser gaze. ‘You going, brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can stay, now?’

  ‘No. You can go away and come back in a year, if you behave well.’

  ‘That no good,’ Rex said loudly. ‘No good!’ The eyes grew larger and burned. ‘All this people going with me if I go. You know that, brother.’

  He pushed himself away from the wall and came into the wind, his scarlet shirt flapping. And Heriot, flooded with strange compassion, put out his hand and seized the dark arm. ‘Understand,’ he said gently. ‘Oh, but you’re lost—’

  Rex tore back his arm and stepped away, and stood stooped and fluttering in the dust. ‘I don’t go,’ he said, in his deep broken voice. ‘I don’t go.’

  ‘We’ll speak about it again,’ Heriot said. ‘Later, later, Rex, when it’s calm. I should go,’ he murmured vaguely, with the curious excitement in him, turning away.

  The wind was reaching its peak, filling the air not only with dust but also with leaves and grass, tearing down branches. The loose sheet of iron clattered on the roof, a continual assault on his nerves. He walked with his head down, his hair tormented into white wisps.

  Then on the calf of his leg came an enormous impact, a great numbing pain. He swung round, looking down, and found what he had half-known would be there. The first stone.

  The first stone. And across huge desolations towered the figure of Rex, appearing and disappearing through a curtain of dust, his teeth showing in an uncertain grin.

  Heriot bent down and took the stone in his hand, heavy, lethal. He was the martyr, struck by the first instrument of execution. The air was full of faces and raised hands. Walking towards Rex he was stumbling through murdering crowds, buffeted with screaming, spat on and wounded. And before all was one face, the dark face with its frozen white grin above the bright shirt.

  But he would be no martyr, not submit to these flailings as if owning himself wrong, he would strike back, godlike; not he, but the fierce crowd would die.

  He sobbed in his throat. The stone flew.

  With a violent gust the wind threw up a white curtain, Rex was gone, vanished in a shroud of dust. Around him Heriot believed he saw dark figures struggling towards him in a dry mist.

  He went forward through the haze. Dust already lay thinly in the folds of the red shirt and on the thick flow of blood down the forehead. The man had reeled back, wounded by the stone, and fallen among rocks. There was blood also running muddily down from the back of his head.

  Without bending, without touching him: ‘Dead,’ said Heriot, feeling in himself the thickening of blood, the stiffening and relaxing of fingers. ‘Rex—’

  He turned and abandoned him, half-running through the wind. With the shriek of a mad bird the flapping iron tore itself free from the roof and crashed among the trees.

  When he came out of his house he was carrying his rifle and had thrust a box of cartridges into his pocket where it bulged solidly. There was no expression in his grained, carved, wooden image’s face, and no uncertainty in his movements. He walked strongly into the weather and went to the yards where the collected horses shivered and trembled with the wind in their manes and their great eyes on the wind.

  He dragged out bridle, saddle, and saddle-cloth from the shed and picked a quiet piebald called Albert Creek, the only horse he knew now in these sedentary days. His hands were very firm with the buckles, but Albert Creek was restless, it took time.

  As he quietened the horse: ‘Brother,’ said someone behind him, and he turned and found Justin standing at the rails, his hair waving on end.
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br />   ‘What is it, Justin?’ He was impatient and his eyes were strange and unfriendly.

  ‘I seen you going past my place, brother.’

  Heriot reached for the bridle and led the horse from the yard, saying nothing.

  ‘Nandaba grambun?’ Justin asked placatingly. ‘Where you going?’

  Slowly Heriot swung into the saddle and towered there with the rifle before him, his shirt and his hair fluttering, but himself as still as a ship’s figurehead set on a flinching horse nervous at the ears. He said sadly from the sky: ‘Mudumudu-gu ngarambun, abula.’

  ‘Ah, brother,’ Justin murmured, not smiling, ‘you got those islands on you brain.’

  ‘I want you to tell nobody, Justin. This is a secret. I need to go now, while the wind’s still up.’

  ‘How long will you be, brother?’

  ‘A long, long time.’

  ‘But you come back tonight?’

  ‘I won’t come back.’

  ‘But, brother,’ Justin asked anxiously, ‘where you blanket, eh? Where you billy and you tucker?’

  ‘I’d forgotten them.’

  ‘I go and get them? They in you house, eh?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go and get them, if you like.’

  ‘You got plenty tucker in you little kitchen?’

  ‘Plenty of tucker. It’s all yours, as much as you like. But go now, hurry.’

  ‘I hurry,’ Justin promised, turning and running back into the gale.

  When he was out of sight Heriot kicked Albert Creek into a gallop and ran with the wind towards the giant baobabs of the lagoon. Already the fringe of cyclone seemed to be passing, though the white dust still scudded ahead of him in waves, and grass blew, and the lagoon was a grey sea with all its lilies sunk. There he pulled in to a walk and sat loosely in the saddle, and watched the hills, which were no longer blue but grey and spectral, infinitely far.

  He had come five miles across the plain, passing the creeks with their spare cadjiput trees and chapped water, and reached at last a place where the water ran through sand among gums and wattles, a shady forest where he was bewildered by watercourses, crossing one after another and never coming to the last, until he imagined he was on an island circled by seven creeks and could never put out again. But the hills were his aim and the cause of his vast calm, and he was not discouraged. So he reined in there and looked quietly around for a passage from the maze, and while waiting heard behind him a crashing among the fallen branches of wattle. He turned and watched, and saw presently Justin climbing his horse up the sandbank of the last creek.

  Heriot’s face went perfectly still, was so wooden and forbidding that Justin, coming up on his sweating horse, could only stare at him with timid eyes and was afraid to speak. Until finally Heriot, surveying with the same stunned calm the blanket roll, the old flour bag, the billy and the two spears that accompanied the brown man, asked softly: ‘Why did you follow me?’

  ‘You angry, brother?’

  ‘I wanted to be alone. Who did you tell when you left?’

  ‘I didn’t tell nobody, brother. First I get you tucker and you blanket and go to the yard, and you gone from there. So I go to my place and get my spears and nobody see me, then I come after you. I only seen you other side of the creek, brother. I thinking you were lost.’

  ‘Yes. You’ve ridden hard.’

  ‘I take one of you blankets for myself, brother. That all right, eh?’

  ‘Go back, Justin. I’m going on alone.’

  Justin asked stubbornly: ‘Where you going?’

  ‘You know, I told you.’

  ‘You don’t really go to those islands.’

  ‘I’m going to a place no one comes home from. You understand an order, Justin. I don’t want you here.’

  Justin said, with perfect deference: ‘I got to come, brother.’

  ‘Go back to Ella and your children. It’s your duty, you understand that.’

  ‘Stephen look after Ella and the little kids, brother.’

  ‘I’m going nowhere,’ Heriot said. ‘Nowhere,’ a desperate anger in his frozen eyes.

  ‘You don’t know that country.’

  ‘Nor do you.’

  ‘I been there once, with my old lady, all over up to coast.’

  With the rifle weighing like rock across his thighs: ‘Listen,’ said Heriot in a choking voice, ‘I’ll get to the hills tonight and I’m going no farther. There’s nothing you can do, I don’t want you or need you. Or your food or blankets. I need nothing at all.’

  The fading wind tossing the wattles over them, they watched one another with such curious intensity that they might have been the two last people left on earth, each hastening to impress on his memory, before it should be too late, the face of the other. Still in his anaesthetized peace of spirit: ‘You’ve brought food,’ Heriot said.

  ‘Yes, brother. Tin food here.’

  Restlessly the two horses craned their necks towards one another. ‘Good,’ said Heriot softly.

  ‘Brother—’

  They stared hungrily at one another. ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you go along with me, I go with you, always.’

  Behind the uneasy trees rose the hills, and beyond them again the country of the lost, huge wilderness between this last haunt of civilization and the unpeopled sea.

  ‘Welcome, my Good Deeds,’ whispered Heriot. ‘Now I hear thy voice, I weep for very sweetness of love.’

  Late in the afternoon, under a torn sky, the village woke suddenly into wild mourning. The wailing of women broke out on the wind, mixed with the frightened cries of children. The whites came to their doors and looked out. Gunn and Dixon, emerging from their houses, met in the windy road with a simultaneously shouted question.

  They saw by the hospital a little bunch of keening women, their heads bent and covered, and from the gate Helen appeared and came running up the road, her skirt flapping and her smooth hair ruffled by the wind.

  As she came up: ‘What’s wrong?’ they demanded, and she stopped, panting a little, and stiff with apprehension around the lips.

  ‘They say Rex is killed,’ she said, breathless.

  That shocked them, they looked at one another. ‘How? Where?’ they wanted to know.

  ‘I can’t stop. Come with me. They may be wrong, they were about Dicky, remember?’ She broke away again, and they ran with her. ‘It’s at the new building.’

  ‘How’d it happen?’ Dixon asked.

  ‘They say a sheet of iron—blew down and—hit him. Oh—terrible if I were late...’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been out,’ Gunn said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ In front of them was the building, and under a tree a group of squatting men with their heads bowed. They had not known how to take this death, whether to mourn as white men or as black. Though two older men had wounded themselves on the forehead with stones and were quietly moaning, the blood running down, the others were still and silent.

  ‘Over there,’ Dixon said. He hung back from her as she approached the body and knelt beside it. Dust lay over the clothes and had crusted thickly on the bloody forehead.

  She unbuttoned the scarlet shirt and put her hand to the brown breast. As she held it there she was not looking at the man, Gunn saw, but at something far away or perhaps invisible, and with such passion that he was startled and found her unfamiliar. It was as though she were willing life to push down and pierce through her fingers into the heart beneath them, or as if by concentration she could absorb death into herself and there overcome it. He heard Dixon breathing lightly beside him, and glancing up saw his eyes were fixed on her with puzzled awe.

  She said in a toneless voice and without moving: ‘He’s alive.’

  Dixon moved back and cleared his throat. After a pause: ‘Thank God for that,’ he said sincerely.

  She had lifted, very tenderly, the head. ‘He’ll have to be moved gently. It’s dangerous. Would you get some men and go for the stretcher, Terry?’

  ‘Like a shot,�
�� he promised. He went quickly away towards the mourners, shouting: ‘He’s okay, boys. He’s alive. We just want the stretcher.’

  They got to their feet and looked at him. There was a silence. Then they began to make comments to one another, then jokes. In a minute bursts of laughter were drifting over from the trees.

  Gunn said quietly: ‘After a decent interval they’ll begin to celebrate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s the sheet of iron, over there, by the trees. It must have dropped pretty sharply and been blown along the ground.’

  She was watching the quiet dark face. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You looked—different, just then. We both noticed it. Like a doctor. Or a mother.’

  She turned to him for an instant her rapt face, and said in the same remote voice: ‘Please, Bob, don’t say anything. He’s so nearly dead. And this is, really, my first child.’

  Before dark Justin and Heriot entered the hills, passing a wide pool at the mouth of a gorge and directing the horses along the flat shelves of rock above it. Beyond the pool, glimmering greyly among spidery pandanus, the stream broke over rapids, the cliffs above grew steadily huger, until there was only a narrow echoing chasm with a strip of grey sky over it and deep shadow filled with the rush of water all around. Great boulders, cast down from the crumbling cliffs, lay across the rock platforms, and the horses slithered and snorted, sliding past chunks of stone twice as high as themselves. In the stillness that overlaid and crushed all sounds of horses and water, Heriot sang softly and interminably to himself.

  Then the stream took a bend and widened into another pool between cliffs vaster and more silent than those the men had passed. There Justin pulled up, Heriot following him. A stone, kicked from Albert Creek’s hoof, rolled and dropped with a sound that the cliffs threw back as a gunshot.

  ‘We better camp here,’ Justin said, half-whispering for fear of the echo, ‘it going to rain pretty soon. We stay dry here.’

  Very slowly Heriot dismounted, and went and sat down under the overhang of the rock. There was a flutter of sound as bats burst from some cranny behind him and skittered out across the grey water. He did not move, he sat quietly in the dirt, his arms folded round the rifle.