‘Used to be a bit of stock here one time. No good though. Everything shut down. No one around any more. It was a hell of a long time ago.’ His voice faded away into remembering.
‘You weren’t a missionary?’ Heriot said.
‘No, not me. Gardener, that was the last thing I was.’
‘I was a missionary,’ Heriot said.
‘What for?’ asked Sam, his voice increasingly somnolent. He edged away from Heriot and lay down, his knees up. ‘Keep on talking, you’ll know when I’m asleep.’
‘Expiation,’ said Heriot. ‘Yes. This is my third life. My third expiation.’
‘What was the others?’ asked Sam incuriously.
‘I suppose it was my birth, as a human being, that drove me to charity. Yes, that was the first. And then there was the massacre, done by my race at Onmalmeri.’
‘I heard of it,’ said Sam.
‘That was the second. It drove me to the mission. And then at the end there was my—my hatred.’
‘What’d that drive you to?’ murmured Sam.
‘That?’ said Heriot pensively. ‘That has made a lost man of me.’
The old man scratched himself. ‘Haven’t you ever been happy?’ he demanded, with disapproval.
‘Happy? Yes, sometimes. But in all my—expiations, there’s never been a reconciliation. And what less,’ asked Heriot, ‘what less could I hope for now?’
A sighing snore came from Sam. Heriot smiled. He lifted Justin’s head and moved his knees away.
Three goats followed him as he made his way to the spring. He climbed the fence that enclosed it and stepped through the jungle of cabbage and pumpkin vines towards the brushwood shelter under which the water lay in its cup of built-up stones. He took off his shirt and plunged his torso in the water, and drank deeply, too. But it was warmer than he had hoped, and less refreshing, and he rose spluttering and more tired than before. The sun on his back as he kneeled there seemed to be drawing the blood from his body, and the sick, revolting smell of rotting cabbage was in his nostrils. His stomach moved.
He rose then, shakily, to his feet, and went to the fence, and leaning there vomited, the goats scampering up to watch him. He felt that his body was being torn inside, but at last the retching stopped, he went back with his legs shaking to wash again at the spring.
The two men still lay supine outside the shanty. Pulling on his shirt, Heriot watched the goats nose tentatively round his vomit.
‘I am vile,’ he told the goats humbly. ‘I am vile.’
He climbed the fence and went back to the shack, his legs so weak that he seemed to himself to be fainting as he sank down by Justin, catching the sleeping man’s elbow in the crook of his arm.
Screaming, a flock of white cockatoos passed over the shanty and descended on the spring. But their storm of cries could not even suggest a dream to the three sleepers in the shade.
So long, thought Gunn dejectedly, and no sign of them. Is it time to go back? How am I to judge when we should give up?
‘Nothing yet,’ Rex said. ‘Nothing.’
‘No.’
‘Reckon we’ll find him, brother?’
‘I don’t know. This is a long way to come without seeing a track.’
‘Might be they went through gorge, brother.’
‘Even if they did, we should have cut their tracks somewhere.’
Stephen said: ‘Might be they...dead, now.’
‘No,’ Rex said loudly. ‘They not dead.’
‘You’d better get used to the idea,’ Gunn said. ‘Sorry, Rex. But don’t count on seeing him again.’
‘I got to see him,’ Rex said. ‘I got to talk to him. We never talk before.’
‘It might be too late,’ Gunn said. And he was thinking: So would I like to talk to him, clear up some things he wondered about me, whether I’d come back to the mission, for instance. I could tell him now, I could promise him. That’d mean a lot to the old man. So would Rex, much more. So would Stephen. But what chance have we got? Too late now.
Rex stared sullenly ahead. ‘You giving up, brother? You not caring about that old man now, eh?’
‘That’s not true—’
‘I never giving up.’
‘We must, sometime,’ said Gunn. ‘Sometime.’ Thinking: It’s hopeless, already. What’s the point of it now? They feel humiliated that he ran away to escape from them, but perhaps they’ll get over it, perhaps we’ll be able to help them forget it. What’s the use of all this stumbling through the wilderness?
The bush man, Naldia, far ahead, stopped, watching the ground, and dismounted, and squatted in the grass, peering.
The sullenness died out of Rex’s face and he came alive, kicking his horse forward, shouting to the older man: ‘Angundja? Angundja?’
And Naldia stood up and turned, grinning, proud. ‘’Ere,’ he called, ‘’ere. Track ’ere.’
10
‘And so,’ said Heriot, ‘there’s no way I can help you. I’m reduced to accepting charity at last.’
He looked around the wretched room, taking in the dirt floor, the sagging hessian of the bed, the rusted stove spilling out the old man’s only light. On the table lay a cooked haunch of goat, killed in Heriot’s honour, and now cold. ‘Though your charity’s very acceptable,’ he said.
‘You can’t help me,’ said Sam. ‘I don’t want no help. Plenty of people worse off than me. Well, plenty of natives, anyhow.’
‘How long,’ asked Heriot, ‘have you been out?’
‘Out? How d’you mean?’
‘Out of the world. Civilization. Out of touch, in fact.’
‘It’d be two years,’ said Sam. ‘Yeah, two years ago it was, last time I went down to the town. Hundred and fifty mile it is. I had horses then, but they died on me. Didn’t worry me, I was getting too old for it.’
‘Yes,’ said Heriot. ‘We do get old. Quite suddenly.’
‘I been here fifteen years. Raising me own tucker and all that. The goats was left here, lot of them gone wild, but I raise up a few. And I got me garden. Don’t look too good now,’ Sam said apologetically, ‘been going off for years. Need some new seed, that’s what it is. Same with them scraggy old chickens, but I like the sound of them. Live on nothing at all, they do.’
‘You too, Sam,’ said Heriot.
‘I keep alive,’ Sam said. ‘God knows why.’
‘It’s hard to die,’ Heriot said.
‘You’re right there.’ The wizened face peered through the firelight, suspicious, curious. ‘You’re a queer sort of bloke, rolling up like this.’
‘I am,’ said Heriot, ‘a queer sort of bloke.’
‘What went wrong with your place?’
‘Nothing,’ said Heriot, glancing sidelong at him. ‘What went wrong here?’
The old man shifted in his chair, sour-mouthed, his eyes full of resentments. ‘You know the story,’ he said. ‘Don’t have me on.’
‘I don’t know it, Sam. Or if I did, I’ve forgotten.’
‘It was—that trouble. Nothing but trouble we ever had with them natives. Didn’t like the whitefellow, see, weren’t going to take nothing from him—excepting clothes and tucker and tobacco and the like of that, of course. Take any amount of that.’
‘I know. We make the best or the worst of them. But why did they hate you?’
‘Never had no idea,’ Sam said. ‘Never could see it myself. Ah, the missionaries, they was a bit hard, maybe—you know, holy, not what you’d call laughing men. And some of the natives went off on stations and come back again hating the white men there. They was too clever, you see, too big for their boots, not right for stations.’
‘What were they right for?’ Heriot said.
‘Couldn’t tell you, mate. I know this, but—they wasn’t right for here. Just one blow-up after another, all the time I worked here. Then we got the real blow-up that finished it off.’
Tenderly feeling the welt on his shin: ‘What was that?’ asked Heriot.
The old
man looked at him disbelievingly. ‘You heard about that, mate. Don’t tell me.’
‘I can’t remember. My memory’s not good now.’
‘The bomb,’ Sam said patiently. ‘You know, the bomb the Japs dropped here. Fell in a trench, killed three of the only four white blokes we had here.’
‘And that was the end,’ said Heriot. ‘I remember. But we were busy ourselves then, I suppose I forgot soon after. I remember the planes, of course, and the people running out of the village into the hills, but they didn’t bomb us. And there was Broome and Darwin and the Koolama to think of.’
From a dark corner: ‘I could see their face,’ said Justin.
‘Whose face?’ Sam demanded.
‘Them Jap. One time I hiding in the hills and they went over, and I could see these little men looking down out of plane with big goggle on their eyes. I thought I going to die then. I reckon they see, but they just went on, they didn’t even bomb me. I real scared that time.’
‘Imagine it,’ said Heriot dreamily, ‘setting out with a load of bombs for a country you’d never seen and wanted to conquer, and when you got there—nothing. Nothing at all for hundreds of miles. And then a few little houses that no one would want to destroy. They must have felt lonely at first.’
‘That old man Wandalo,’ said Justin, ‘he made real good corroboree about when they bombing Broome.’
‘Cyclones have done more damage,’ Heriot said. ‘O imitatores,’ he said scornfully, ‘servum pecus.’
‘Voo parlay fronsay,’ Sam said. ‘Ooay l’estaminay silver play?’
Heriot peered at him through the flickering light. ‘You’re an old soldier,’ he said. Their eyes met and slid away, distrustfully.
‘That’s right,’ said Sam.
‘I am, too,’ Heriot said. ‘I am, too.’
‘All right,’ said Sam harshly. ‘What do you want us to do? Sing songs together?’
‘No. Anything but that.’
‘Took a lot of time to forget those days,’ Sam said. ‘A lot of time.’
‘I know that, Sam.’
‘You say it ain’t easy to die. It ain’t easy to kill, neither.’
‘No, harder, much harder.’
‘And when you get to want to do it—’
Heriot said sharply: ‘Don’t say that, Sam.’
He had broken something then. A stillness fell over them, and they were wrapped in memories; Sam, on his chair at the table, head bent over his hands, scrawny profile outlined by firelight; Heriot on the sagging bed, his face turned to the dark floor. Outside, the silence of the moon.
‘What are you thinking, Sam?’
The old man licked his lips. ‘Thinking we was all animals, that’s all. Just animals. No, worse.’
‘And suffer more for it. We have pity, and conscience, and reason. Those things hurt.’
‘I made a muck of my life,’ Sam said.
‘That’s something animals don’t do,’ said Heriot.
‘Nothing ever turned out right. I never done nothing. And these days—’
‘You sit and rot,’ said Heriot, ‘like an old buggy in a shed.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Sam. ‘Anything?’
‘I did a little,’ Heriot said, ‘but what a little when you think what was to be done. Whatever you try to build they knock down with their wars and debates. Sometimes I wonder if there’ll ever be a revolt against picking up the pieces.’
Sam turned on his chair, his back to the fire, searching Heriot’s face. ‘Where you going?’ he asked quietly.
‘Nowhere,’ Heriot said, trying to see the old man’s eyes in the shadow. ‘Why, Sam?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sam—?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I stay with you?’ Heriot asked, almost eagerly. ‘I could, couldn’t I? There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. We could talk, Sam, and wait.’
‘Yeah, we could do that.’
‘Two old men—it’s fitting enough.’
‘Time goes slow,’ said Sam.
‘I want that.’
‘You get sick of it—waiting.’
‘But there are always new things to think of. Not new to the world, but new to us. Nothing’s true until you feel it. That’s why we have poets.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘Don’t know what to say.’ He stood up and shuffled across to his stove, his grasshopper-body black against the glow.
‘Say what you think,’ said Heriot. ‘Don’t deceive me.’
Sam bent and pushed more wood into the stove, and stood stooped in front of it.
‘Be honest, Sam.’
‘What would you be doing?’ asked Sam privately. And turning back from the fire said, in his cracked voice, ‘You’d be mad, mad as I am. What do you think I do here? What’s the good of my kind of living? Nothing to live for except eating, and nothing except eating to keep you from dying. And the food hard to come by at that. You’d need to be mad, I tell you.’
‘Yes,’ said Heriot softly, staring at the fragile body of the old man, the bird-claw hands. ‘Yes, you’re right.’
‘I ain’t mean,’ Sam insisted. ‘I don’t mind having you, I’m just thinking of you—’
‘I know,’ said Heriot gently. He leaned back in deep shadow, hiding his face from the anxious eyes. ‘We’ll go in the morning, Sam.’
*
‘I must go,’ Way said, ‘but I thought you two should know about the new men coming and everything. It’s cheering news.’
‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘And you look cheered.’
‘More than that,’ Dixon said. ‘Joyful.’
Way smiled, flushing a little. ‘Why shouldn’t I? This is a happy day. More staff, more money. Nothing can hold us back now.’ He pushed open the screen door and shut himself out. ‘Good night,’ he called from the darkness. ‘God bless us all.’
‘Amen,’ Helen said. She turned back to Dixon, laughing. ‘He really is in a blissful mood. I’ve never seen him so happy.’
‘Well, aren’t you?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I could make a speech. This is a great day, a new era is dawning—’
‘Scrub it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to marry a politician. Do you reckon we should have told the padre while he was here?’
‘Told him what?’
‘About wanting to get hitched.’
‘That was the wrong answer,’ she said. ‘You should have said coyly: “About us.”’
‘Don’t talk smart,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to start beating you before we’re married.’
‘It’s the last chance you’ll have, Terry, because Mabel’s promised me her fighting stick. What’s more, Mabel and the whole village already know about us, and if you don’t marry me pretty soon there’s going to be some ugly talk.’
‘You’ve got no hope,’ he said, laughing, ‘of keeping a secret in this place. Arthur asked me this morning if I’d have him for my best man.’
‘Ruth wants to be my bridesmaid, too. I promised her.’
‘Have I got to marry you with one of those brass rings Father keeps for weddings?’
‘I won’t mind. Brass lasts well.’
He was looking at her, and held out his hand palm upwards on the table, and she put hers in it. ‘I feel funny about all this,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that’d happen to me, somehow.’
‘I feel a bit odd, too.’
‘Gee, eh, fancy me being married.’ He shook his head, looking into her clear eyes, and felt his foreignness leaving him. No need ever again to wander in Darwin, lost as if in a great city, or idle like a gangling waif in Perth or Adelaide. He had his home here, she was his home. Her hand was cool and dry.
She was smiling, intent on him. ‘What’s funny?’ he asked.
‘You look like a little boy sometimes,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a little boy like you, running round naked with the other children.’
‘Ah,’ he said, embarrassed, ‘have as many as
you like.’
‘Everyone’s so happy now,’ she said. ‘Not only us. If only Bob and Rex and Stephen were back—’
He dropped his eyes, his hand slackening. ‘Listen—’ he said. ‘What about Bob?’
‘Bob doesn’t want anyone,’ she said gently. ‘Not yet. He’s a lonely man, like Mr Heriot. Don’t think about Bob, Terry. You’d be wrong.’
‘Would I?’ he said, looking up again. ‘That’s good. I wanted to be honest...’
He put out his other hand and she took it. ‘You are honest,’ she said, and because he was poor in words they sat silent, and looked at one another across the table.
In the early morning they crossed the little plain and came once again into the hills. Pigeons with delicate antennae scattered from the rocks, but Heriot no longer noticed such things, deeply weary as he was, and sick, and full of valedictions. The country before him was an endless recurrence of rock and grass and tree; all that could be seen had been seen, all that could be learned would never be learned, never now. He sat like wood in the saddle and loved nothing but the constant sky.
Before nightfall they crossed and camped at a small freshwater river in a valley filled with tall gumtrees and cadjiputs, and dense ferns and pandanus and tropic shrubs draped with wild passion-fruit vines and the laced and furred white flowers of the wild cucumber. Clear water ran shallowly over the stones and in the broad pools appeared the fleeting shadows of fish. It was a calm and gentle place, yet Heriot slept brokenly, and woke in the morning surprised by the sun. For death was his one thought and destination, and he saw himself now as a minute lizard in the grass, over which death hovered and hung like a hawk, delaying the strike out of delight in its own power.
Climbing the hills again in the morning he shivered, and cried out to Justin for reassurance. ‘We’re very small,’ he said.
‘You big bloke, brother,’ Justin said kindly.
‘No, no, you don’t understand. Think of it. This world. A little molten pebble spinning in air. This rock we walk on, a thin skin, changing every second. And the trees, what are they?’
‘They just trees, brother.’
‘A little fur, less than the bloom on a peach. But we creep under them. And in the split seconds between the heaving of the earth millions of generations of us are born and grow and die.’
To the Islands Page 17
