To the Islands

by Randolph Stow

  The sun drifted behind rock hills, and the sky grew green. Later Justin lit a fire and cooked his goanna on it, filling the air with the stench of grilling fat.

  ‘You ain’t going to eat that,’ Rusty said.

  ‘He good, this.’

  ‘You going to give it to the old bloke?’

  ‘He like bush tucker,’ Justin said defensively. ‘You watch him.’

  But when Heriot was wakened and a goanna leg thrust in his hand he could only take a few mouthfuls of it, then the fatty, faintly crablike taste disgusted him and he threw it away and lay down again and began softly to weep.

  ‘Ah, cut it out,’ said Rusty, shocked. ‘Have a bit of tinned dog.’ He pushed an open can into Heriot’s hand. ‘Jesus, don’t bawl about it.’

  The old man picked out pieces of meat with his fingers and ate slowly. Then he pushed the tin away.

  ‘Where d’you come from?’ Rusty asked.

  Heriot stared through the fingered baobab leaves at the sky, which was deepening from green to aquamarine. The rush of the waterfall came clearly down from the hills. ‘I come from Annalup,’ he said, ‘in the timber country.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said the man, startled.

  The uncollected memories broke up in the old man’s mind, became separate, fell into place. Old pictures returned to him, clearer than photographs, superimposed on the wild country of his wanderings. He saw an attainable peace at his fingers’ end, reached for it, grief springing in him like a delicate green thing among the rocks.

  ‘My father was a doctor. We had a house near the town. One of those grey, wooden houses. And some land. There was a creek and the arum lilies grew wild in it. It had high banks near the house and a log in the middle and you could sit there and no one knew you were there. They told me to sit and watch for the trout, but there weren’t any trout. I was deceived,’ said Heriot bitterly.

  ‘Stiff,’ said Rusty.

  ‘You could go walking through the forests, through the karri. Huge trees, miles high, smooth, pale, no branches except at the top. When they cut them down, they tore the branches off other trees falling. When they hit the ground it jolted up through your shoes. It made a noise like a cannon.’

  ‘Never seen that sort of country myself,’ Rusty said.

  ‘There were gullies full of ferns and blackberries.’

  ‘I heard about blackberries,’ the man said. ‘Real weed, they say.’

  ‘We’d go to the sea sometimes. It’s green, then it’s blue. In summer clouds pile up on the horizon and stay there. I said to my father: “What is that country?” and he said: “That is Antarctica.” I was deceived.’

  ‘They do that to kids.’

  He saw rising out of the sea the white mountains, the crags, the fires.

  ‘“Oh whaten a mountain is yon,” she said,

  “Sae dreary wi’ frost and snae?”

  “O yon is the mountain o’ Hell,” he said,

  “Where you and I will gae.”’

  ‘You know a bit of poetry,’ Rusty said, with distrust.

  ‘I was a clever man,’ said Heriot strongly. ‘I knew a good deal. But I lost it all, looking after my huts and houses. And now they’ve ruined me. Ah,’ said Heriot, laughing, ‘to fei giubetto a me delle mie case.’

  ‘What’s the joke, mate?’

  ‘My wit,’ said Heriot weakly. ‘My erudition. I knew French, too. De nostre mal personne ne s’en rie, Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absouldre.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I knew Spanish,’ Heriot boasted, ‘y se yo bien que muero por solo aquello que morir espero.’

  ‘You knew a lot,’ the stranger granted.

  ‘I knew German. Owe war sint verswunden alliu miniu jar! Ist mir min leben getroumet, oder ist ez war?’

  Rusty shook his head, baffled.

  ‘Quod nunc es fueram, famosus in orbe, viator, et quod nunc ego sum, tuque futuris eris. That’s Latin,’ explained Heriot, laughing feebly. ‘I’ve forgotten my Greek. Thalassa! Thalassa! That will be useful soon.’

  ‘What d’you do?’ Rusty asked curiously. ‘Schoolteacher?’

  ‘Missionary.’

  ‘Jesus, why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I had nothing to do and I was restless.’

  ‘Funny sort of life for a man.’

  ‘Once I was sick in hospital, one summer, and there was a sunset, one of those gaudy southern sunsets, and I looked out and saw a nun watching it, quite still, with a bedpan in her hand. I thought if I were a nun I’d feel like that, as if I’d earned the sunsets for myself.’

  ‘You need a shave,’ Rusty said, ‘if you’re going to be a nun.’

  ‘Then I met a woman who had—that goodness. And I married her.’

  ‘Happy ending, eh?’

  ‘We weren’t young. No. And she died after a few years. That was twenty-one years ago. But,’ said Heriot with surprise, ‘she was young, young to die.’

  ‘You have stiff luck,’ Rusty said.

  ‘No,’ Heriot protested. ‘I didn’t say that. I’m not sorry for myself, not now.’ He fixed his awakened eyes on the man. ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said the stranger irritably. ‘I wasn’t getting at you, mate.’

  ‘No. No, I’m sorry,’ said Heriot with remorse, ‘forgive me.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Rusty said. He had rolled a cigarette and lighted it from the fire, puffing smoke towards the old man, whose craving for tobacco woke at the smell. In the last days his miseries had lain on him like a heavy cloud, but now they began to separate out into fatigue and stiffness and homesickness, and hunger for such things as tea and tobacco. He held out his hand and asked humbly: ‘Please, would you—would you give me some of your makings?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Rusty invited, handing the tin. And as he watched the old man’s fingers fumbling with the paper his thick mouth was touched with compassion. ‘Tell us,’ he said, ‘where you’re really going. Dinkum, now. What’s the idea?’

  But Heriot could not remember where he was going. He lit his cigarette and left it hanging from his mouth while he ran his fingers slowly through the tangle of white hair. It came back to him then, smokily.

  ‘I’m exploring,’ he said.

  ‘What d’you want to explore this country for?’

  ‘Not the country. No, not the country. I’ve found out—too much,’ said Heriot sadly. ‘Too much.’

  ‘You got a real queer way of talking, mate.’

  ‘Found weakness I didn’t know of. And despair. And worse than that. But I’m beginning to come out of it, it’s like waking, but I can’t tell myself it was a dream. Oh, God, that’s hard.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Rusty tentatively, ‘what’s the trouble? If I can give you a hand, you just got to ask.’

  ‘What did Cain use against Abel?’ Heriot demanded softly. ‘Was it a stone?’

  He began to notice for the first time the face of the man opposite, how the eyes gazed and shifted, how the mouth moved with a faint throb of the cheek below the beard.

  ‘I wouldn’t know, mate,’ Rusty said warily. ‘Don’t go much on the Bible.’

  ‘But the first murder was done with a stone. The first tool, the first weapon—’

  ‘There was hands,’ said Rusty quietly, and his own hands, bony and red-haired on the backs, tightened. ‘Listen, what d’you want to talk about murder for?’

  ‘It’s a terrible thing. A terrible responsibility.’

  ‘Cut it out,’ Rusty said sharply.

  Their eyes met, his red-brown eyes and Heriot’s faded blue ones, in a strange and listening stillness. Then: ‘They’ll send a revenge party after me,’ Heriot said. ‘That is always done.’

  ‘Shut up now!’ Rusty shouted, breaking free of the old man’s eyes and standing. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘If I had strength,’ Heriot said, ‘I could go to those cliffs and break them. Then there’d be boulders, and I’d break them, and break them into smaller stones, and br
eak them into pebbles.’

  ‘Go ahead, if it’ll shut your mouth while you’re doing it.’

  ‘Then I’d break the pebbles until there were molecules, and break the molecules into atoms.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re mad.’

  ‘Then I’d break the atoms. They all have their moons, did you know, spinning round their own sun. I’d take that sun and break it into its protons and neutrons, and take the innermost of them and break it—’

  ‘Well, go on, finish your bloody breaking.’

  ‘And what if that should be God?’

  The man came back and sat down hopelessly.

  ‘The stone I killed him with,’ said Heriot, ‘was full of God.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man in an empty voice.

  ‘God was an accessory. He always is.’

  ‘No,’ said Rusty violently. ‘God forgives you.’

  ‘Your fingers forgive you, before you’ve used them. God is like that.’

  ‘No. He pays us back for what we done.’

  ‘We pay ourselves back. You know that. Because you know our crimes are like a stone, a stone again, thrown into a pool, and the ripples go on washing out until, a long time after we’re gone, the whole world’s rocked with them. Nothing’s the same again after we’ve passed through.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Rusty said. ‘No.’

  ‘But you must. Why are you here?’

  The man’s hands were scaly on the backs, reddened with sun, never quite at rest. His eyes rose quickly to Heriot’s, then, as quickly, hid under their sandy lashes.

  ‘I come looking about the country. You never know, there might be something you could make a go of.’

  ‘You must have money.’

  ‘I’ve got a bit. What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘I’m remembering,’ said Heriot. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘What are you getting at? What do you remember?’

  ‘Something that happened a few years ago.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The Wet uncovered the skeleton of a white man buried in a creekbed.’

  In the light of Justin’s fire the man’s eyes flicked up to meet Heriot’s, and stayed there, burning a little with reflected light. Into them there came a curious expression, the expression perhaps of an escaped convict rescued by his own warders from country infested with tigersnakes and hostile blacks. Yet fear was dominant. He licked his lips, and swallowed, without intending it. ‘You’re mad,’ he said flatly.

  ‘No. Tell me.’

  Behind their voices there was unvaryingly the roar of the waterfall, the quiet stirrings of horses. A faint wind coming up the gully touched the red beard.

  ‘Listen,’ Rusty said, ‘listen. It wouldn’t have been the money.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be. Not completely.’

  ‘Supposing two blokes was camped out week after week in the Wet. They could drive each other crazy after a while.’

  ‘Yes, they could.’

  ‘Supposing one of them had a dog, say, and it kept coming into the tent.’

  ‘And you said: “I’ll shoot that dog if it comes again.” And it came.’

  ‘He went for me. What else could I do?’

  ‘Your hands,’ said Heriot, ‘your wicked hands—’

  ‘But I didn’t mean to do it,’ said Rusty harshly. ‘I didn’t mean it. Oh, Jesus, what do you want to know all this for?’

  ‘And you buried him in the dry sand. But in another season the water came higher. He was there.’

  ‘Three years, it was. Three years, waiting.’

  ‘And you went on, working and wandering, as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘But I kept wanting to go bush.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rusty said vacantly. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What do you do, out here, all alone? What do you think about?’

  ‘I don’t do nothing. I don’t think, I just—I just wait for something to happen to me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just wait.’

  ‘And nothing happens?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  Heriot leaned back in the shadow. ‘Nothing ever happens,’ he said.

  And truly nothing happened, though their strange, watchful understanding seemed to expect it. Only a sigh came from Justin in his sleep and a pebble rattled from the hoof of a horse.

  ‘You ought,’ said the man with the nervous hands, ‘you ought to be scared of me. Yeah. You ought to be careful.’

  Heriot put his hand over the clenched red one. ‘You’re not scared of me,’ he said. ‘No. We’re all lost here.’

  8

  ‘What are you looking at, Paul?’ Gunn asked.

  The long-legged man shaded his eyes against the morning sun. ‘Someone come up, brother,’ he said, pointing back. ‘Blackfellow, riding.’

  After a moment Gunn picked out, among the low trees, the figure of the horseman. ‘That’s an old man, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘He’s got his hair tied up in a rag, like Naldia’s.’

  ‘Old man got no horse, brother.’

  ‘Well, keep watching him,’ Gunn said, and in a little time, while the rider was still to Gunn a shape of indistinguishable age, Paul murmured, with a painstaking concealment of surprise: ‘That Rex, brother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It Rex, all right. I know him.’

  ‘Well,’ Gunn said quietly. ‘Well.’ And waited for Rex with a scowl growing on his face.

  Rex also, when he came up, was frowning, uncertainly, and could not face Gunn and his disciplined anger. There was sweat on his face, below the bandage, and stubborn determination in his thick mouth.

  ‘Well,’ Gunn said again. ‘You followed us.’

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘Didn’t bother to say good-bye to Sister Bond, I suppose?’

  ‘He don’t know, brother.’

  ‘And where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘I—I want to go with you, brother. I want to help you looking for Brother Heriot.’

  ‘You clot,’ Gunn said viciously. ‘You idiot. Do you think it’s going to help us to have you tagging along, likely to get a haemorrhage at any minute?’

  ‘I better now,’ Rex protested. ‘Sister Bond, he say that himself.’

  ‘Did she say you could go riding round? In this country?’

  Rex said defiantly: ‘I want to go with you. You can’t send me back now, brother.’

  That was true, and Gunn’s face admitted it. Ahead of them lay the untracked country, hiding somewhere among its blue bluffs and green pools two solitary men, and already it had been openly confessed that hope of finding them was on the ebb. And what is it to me, asked Gunn of himself, what is it to me if he chooses to put himself in danger? The old man’s done more to earn his life.

  ‘Well, you’ve messed us up properly. Hope you realize that.’

  ‘I know. I sorry, brother.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Gunn said sourly. ‘Doesn’t matter at all.’ He turned away and left Rex to the curious attentions of Stephen.

  ‘You ain’t going,’ Rusty said. ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s a long way,’ Heriot said. ‘I don’t even know how far.’

  The red man looked up at him with the eyes of a lonely dog. ‘Thought you was going to stay with me. After all we talked about—’

  ‘No,’ said Heriot remotely. ‘That wouldn’t be possible.’

  ‘All I told you—’

  ‘I know. I know it wasn’t easy.’

  ‘You listened to me. You knew what I was talking about.’

  ‘Yes, I understood you.’

  ‘Listen,’ Rusty said, pleading with him, ‘listen, I told you things no other bloke in the world knows. I felt good after that, I thought you was going to stick with me and—teach me things, about—God and all that. But you ain’t the same bloke as what you was last night. Jesus,’ said Rusty, ‘you ask me what I feel like, and when I tell you, you
don’t care no more. What sort of a snooping bastard are you?’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Heriot, ‘no way I can help you. All we could do for one another we did.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘We showed each other we weren’t alone.’

  ‘Just so we could be alone again?’

  ‘I must go on. There might be—something, ahead of me.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Rusty offered. ‘I got nowhere to go. Yeah, I’ll come.’

  ‘No one can,’ said Heriot.

  ‘What about the black? You’re taking him, ain’t you?’

  ‘He’ll come back,’ Heriot said, ‘in time.’

  The other man sat down dejectedly on a rock and bit his thumbnail. ‘Well, I can’t stop you,’ he said. ‘This is mad. Every bloody thing’s mad. I don’t know.’

  ‘It has happened before,’ said Heriot, ‘often, in this country. Hundreds of...outlaws, like you and me, in lost man’s country.’

  Rusty’s forehead wrinkled under the red forelock. ‘What are you running away from? What was it you done?’

  ‘I wanted to kill someone,’ Heriot said quietly. He stood woodenly by the rock with his stiff hands hanging down, and the wind moved in his white hair, and his eyes were empty as the sky. ‘That was my—that brought me here.’

  The other’s eyes moved up his face, puzzled, looking for deceptions. ‘Wanted to? Didn’t you do it?’

  ‘But that isn’t important,’ said Heriot, with faint surprise. ‘It makes no difference at all.’

  ‘Except to the bloke.’

  Then new thoughts moved behind Heriot’s eyes like yachts on an empty sea, and for the first time he remembered Rex alive, and what it must have been to be Rex, to take pleasure in clothes and women, to be sullen and rebellious and know the causes, to suffer injustices and to invent injustices in order to resent them. He thought of Rex dancing by canegrass fire and delighting in the rhythms of his body, or subsiding into sleep under shade at midday, or swimming, or hunting, or sitting round a fire at night talking or singing to a guitar. Rex’s life presented itself whole to him, the struggle against sordor, and then the defiant return to sordor, and the bitter pride underlying it; the old tribal grievances, real or inflated by legend; the fights and the humiliations, the quick gestures of generosity and the twists of cruelty; all the ugly, aspiring, perverse passions of a living man.