Ted wonders whether all the trouble with Tom is because of something they’ve done, or not done. Sure there was that incident at the end of his first year of school, but maybe he should have listened to Marge all those years ago when the first of the trouble had started. Got him some help. But Ted had grown up all right helping his own father in the garage, so had his brothers. They hadn’t taken to school straight away either, but in the end they’d managed just fine. And they’d had their own share of hardships. Hadn’t everyone? Ted thought it would be the same with Tom. And then maybe they should never have told Tom about Lil. And Oliver.
Marge isn’t talking and Ted turns his head towards her. It isn’t a good sign. He knows he’ll have to agree this time. Find the money to get Tom some help. Trouble is Ted loves his boy too much. He likes his company, his manner. He likes the way he talks as he works. It’s a game, thinks Ted. What Tom does with cars – and her. Nothing more.
He’s wondered lately whether Tom should have gone to Kate Guthrie back then, instead of them. Hell, Marge was already nearly forty when Tom came and he was the answer to their longing for kids. The Guthries were young – too young, some said. But Kate had just buried a baby of her own. She still had her milk when Tom came. But Marge had insisted. She’d waited longer; she had blood-rights.
‘You know there’s talk of a flood coming,’ Ted says, ‘there’s a lot has to be done in town. We’ll have to start building levee banks, soon, for when the time comes. What’s say we wait a few months?’
Marge slams a cup down in the sink. ‘When isn’t there a flood in the riverland? Every year, every two years? This one won’t be any different, mark my words. You all want your crisis, don’t you? She’ll take all your attention and probably pass by without wetting the tops of levees built in ’31. Our boy needs help now, Ted,’ she pauses. ‘I’m making arrangements.’ Marge pulls the plug from the sink and the water gurgles down the drain.
BIG RIVER
January 1956
Tom looks into the water sometimes, on dusk, and it’s a wonder how still Old Mother Murray becomes. She’s quiet and calm and Tom leans closer. His foster parents don’t understand why he needs to be there as the sun goes down and how it’s got nothing to do with shirking his responsibilities or being lazy, or crazy.
Sometimes Murray Black finds him there. Or Tom finds Murray Black. Even though most Aboriginals at Swan Reach Reserve were moved onto the Gerard Mission near Berri back in ’46, Murray refused to move on.
It was Murray who taught Tom to hold a rod and feel for fish. To see beneath the surface of things and listen to what is truly important.
He was seven when Murray took him in a raft across the river to the cliff hang where the limestone extends at the base, level with the water, to form a ledge large enough for two people to stand on. The hang is visible from the beach beside Lil’s hut but Tom had never been up close to it before that day.
Murray showed Tom how to make a raft out of thin mallee trunks lashed together with binda-twine. Tom followed Murray around the scrub while he cut the branches, listening to the whoosh of his knife as it whipped through the air and the dull thud of it biting into the wood. Tom dragged the felled branches back to the beach beside the water and, when Murray said they had enough, he lashed them together, making Tom hold the branches steady while he knotted the rope. Murray tested the strength of the raft by bouncing up and down on it, which caused the branches to squeak as they rubbed together. The raft floated in the water but Tom hadn’t been too sure about getting on. There wasn’t anyone he trusted more than Murray, yet he hesitated all the same.
‘Some times you gotta trust life to hold you up, Little Fish,’ Murray said. ‘You can’t learn to run and jump in here,’ Murray tapped his head and his white smile flashed.
Murray has the warmest eyes Tom has ever seen. Looking into them sometimes feels like drowning into forever.
Lifting Tom under his armpits, Murray placed him down in the middle of the raft and pushed it out into the water before Tom could say anything more. Tom gripped the sides and heard the splash of Murray running in the shallows. The raft tipped backwards, and down towards the river, as Murray jumped clear of the water to sit behind Tom and row them across with a mallee branch oar.
The raft bumped up against the rock and Murray took hold of a scraggly gum to keep them steady as they got off the raft to stand on the rock shelf. Tom looked back across the river to where they had just been; his mum’s hut looked so small.
‘I wanna show you something,’ Murray said, dragging the raft out of the water, to stop it floating away, and leaning it up against the cliff. ‘Here,’ he said, bobbing down on his haunches side-on to the cliff.
Tom bobbed down beside him and watched as Murray dragged his finger across the jagged rock. Veins of orange and white, darker pink and browns, meandered in irregular lines through the limestone, as if the cliff had been built by layers, one on top of each other over time, like a tower of blocks. Murray finished tracing the rock and looked to Tom who shrugged, not sure what he should be seeing.
Murray placed his finger on the rock and traced again. ‘See?’ he said.
And then Tom saw it. As if it just then appeared out of the rock for the first time. An engraving, a tracing where a white line – different to the veins and colours – formed the shape of a fish. Murray took Tom’s finger, placed it to the rock, and traced the shape. The rough rock tingled under Tom’s fingertip and to Tom it was Old Mother’s current rippling through him, sending goose pimples rising up along his arms in a wave.
‘You should never doubt you meant to be here, Little Fish,’ Murray said. He’d always called Tom that. ‘Some things about life just written a certain way and can’t be changed for all the wishing and longing in the world.’
Tom traced the fish again by himself. He could feel Old Mother’s pulse coursing through those cliffs. He could feel it strong, as if she were alive. And that fish inscribed on the cliff was a word and he could actually read it. Three distinct letters. Written for a backwards brain like his. That day Tom saw his own name engraved in bones of Old Mother herself.
Tom has a collection of fossils back home, tucked away inside an old Arnott’s tin. They’re pieces of the past he’s dug out of the rock that he used to like holding in his hands, when he was younger. He liked putting them under his pillow. They’re the hope that what happens in the past is not forgotten. And if you keep going forward, one day you’ll find a place to dig up what was lost.
He can almost hear her; Old Mother Murray. And that’s what Tom loves. She talks. Not real talk. It’s her pulse, a feel; a way of knowing and, at fifteen, he’s learnt that no one else hears life like that. Or if they once pretended too, they’ve long since given it up and left it back there with other childhood things like dolls and die-cast cars and Kellogg’s collection cards.
Tom’s first teacher, Miss Ladley, used to say, words are a particular magic that can bring the past to life. Kings, queens, bushrangers and bandits; even those who never really existed. All you had to do was write them down, and read them back.
While the rest of the class was busy with their bookwork and arithmetic, she would take Tom aside and help him with his letters, holding his hand and moving it across the slate to form the shapes. She wrote words for him to copy. Smiling and ruffling his hair she would say, there’s plenty of time to get it right. She told Tom to close his eyes and imagine words; that life was a better teacher than anyone in a classroom. She said sometimes she liked to sit in the bush and tell her stories to trees and rocks. Cockatoos, especially, loved good stories told by young boys. Tom showed her his fossils and she said, maybe even the cliffs tell stories.
Just before the Christmas holidays, when Tom was still seven, Tom told Miss Ladley about his name on the cliff.
‘I’d love to see it,’ she said.
So one Saturday morning she picked him up from h
is house in her fiancé’s car. Tom hopped in the back seat and Miss Ladley introduced Tom to the man driving the car saying, ‘My fiancé thinks there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the river, Tom. And I want to show him otherwise. What do you say?’
Tom smiled. Miss Ladley had red hair that curled and bounced and she smelled like clean washing. Her fiancé was big. He was strong and his eyes looked like he’d spent a lifetime laughing. He had a habit of smoothing his moustache and beard, no matter whether it needed the attention or not.
They drove down the main road, over the cattle-grate and into Big Bend Road with limestone dust blowing up underneath their wheels and flying behind them like clouds. They sang ‘Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom’ all the way until they stopped at the river.
Miss Ladley brought a picnic of bread and cheese and lemonade, and her fiancé carried it all the way along the river to the fishing beach where they spread out a picnic rug and sat together. They ate, told stories, and laughed. Her fiancé had his tinny all ready to go at the edge of the water to get them across the river but Miss Ladley suggested a walk first.
‘I need to walk off this bread,’ she said, tapping her stomach.
‘You don’t ever need to walk off anything,’ her fiancé said, smoothing his moustache and beard, and Miss Ladley’s mouth pouted and her eyes softened and she leant over and rubbed her finger across his cheek. Tom helped Miss Ladley shake the blanket free of the breadcrumbs and watched them rise like confetti in the air.
Miss Ladley held her fiancé’s arm while they walked ahead of Tom along the edge of the river around Big Bend. He liked watching them, the way she leant over and touched her head against his shoulder. Tom ran a stick through the dirt as he walked.
When they stopped ahead of him, Tom watched Miss Ladley let go of her fiancé’s arm and walk off the path into the scrub. She stopped, turned back to Tom and waved, then pointed to a tree beside her. Tom followed the length of her arm, beyond her fingertips to the top of the trunk where it divided into a spread of branches. Lodged in-between the trunk and a branch was a bulbous growth. Miss Ladley walked closer, she looked up and put her hands on her hips. She glanced back at Tom and waved him over. She was smiling and the sun seemed to outline her face, it lit up the ends of her hair as if she was glowing.
Tom saw her step up on tippy-toes. She didn’t reach out her hands, but extended her body as far upwards as possible, on the balls of her feet. There was no noise, no warning. The growth wobbled and exploded, suddenly alive with bees. Tom would like to think he ran to her, but he didn’t. Rather her fiancé ran to her. But it happened so quickly, those bees attacked and swarmed her, they formed a shroud around her body as if she was on fire. And the picture he still carries in his mind is of her bee-swamped body thrusting and waving and running. Then falling.
Her fiancé pulled her, he thrashed his hands around the bees, but it was useless. He was stung so many times, too, he was hospitalised for a week. But Miss Ladley, she was stung more. And Marge said – in an effort to explain to Tom what happened – that she must have had a weakness for bee poison. Some people have what she called a sensitivity. But whatever the explanation, without ever seeing Tom’s name on the cliff ledge, Miss Ladley swelled up and died. Just like that.
Marge says it was her dying that started all the fuss for Tom. Whenever Tom happened to see Miss Ladley’s fiancé, he pretended Tom didn’t exist. Like they’d never known each other at all.
After the Christmas holidays, when Tom went back to school, a new teacher stood in the same place where Miss Ladley had once stood. She sat in her desk, used her chalk. Her name was Miss Pinny. Her hair didn’t bounce or catch the light, but was pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head. She believed in rules and discipline and conformity, she said on her first day. Her voice was loud and intimidating. Her mouth was a thin, sad line.
She didn’t talk about stories and words outside the classroom and the only ones she seemed to understand were those that could be written on a black slate with a white piece of chalk; the kinds of words Tom didn’t have. If Tom closed his eyes to see something, she’d hit him across his fingers with a ruler. She called imagination ‘a lack of concentration’ and said it made him retarded.
After that first term, his foster parents began talking about the fact that something was wrong with him and they told him about Lil and he saw her grave for the first time. Tom knew then that his backwardness was responsible for everything. If he’d been able to write words in a classroom, Miss Ladley would never have been in the bush that day. And if he’d been able to come out right in the first place, it might have saved them both.
Big river, little fish.
Old Mother; she says that a lot.
It’s almost dark, but Tom runs up through the scrub away from the river. Past the ancient river red gums standing in the water, the scraggly-barks and spear grass and clumps of yellow daisies. He follows the snaking path where the earth turns red and flat and opens up to where Stan Tildon farms potatoes. He cuts around the side of the paddock, which is ringed with small rocks and a thin wire fence. He likes the sound of his breathing, the even measured feel of it, the feel of his body, strong and capable, as he pushes himself to make it right up to the top of Big Bend road as quick as he can.
Some afternoons he stops in at a few of the shacks by the river. It’s a habit he’s developed over the years of his life, picking up tasks and jobs and responsibilities. Old John’s knees are buggered with arthritis and Tom helps him see to the water pump once a week and repair his fishing lines. His shack smells like baked beans and old fish heads and he spends his spare time making ornaments with corks.
Mrs Cath lost her husband not so long ago, and her mind not long before that. If Tom finds her down by the river with a torch looking for him, Tom takes her home and makes her a cup of tea. With Jimbo, Tom makes swords and shields and battle-grounds and slingshots, and Jimbo slips him chocolates and humbugs and fresh-killed rabbit to take home and he calls Tom, Tommygun. But with everything Tom does like that, like sitting down by the river’s edge, he neglects his chores back home. He adds to a growing list of disappointments about him in town.
Swan Reach is a small town – even by riverland standards. Mannum has its own national bank. But Swan Reach was one of the first paddle steamer ports in the heyday of river transport. Lil’s father ran a steamer up and down the river taking on wheat cargo. Now Swan Reach has a general store, a post office down by the river, a pub up on the hill and a ferry crossing. There’s a garage and even a café. The telephone exchange brought in teams of workers, for a while, camping out in their white tents until the work was done. And there’s the Swan Reach Town Hall for dances and pictures and council meetings.
And there’s the school.
‘You sure you’ve got time to help, Tom?’ Mrs Guthrie says.
Tom’s standing at the back door offering to help the Guthries with the lambs before he goes home, gulping in the air now he’s stopped running and his lungs are heaving. The house is a cream brick rectangle with wide verandas on all sides and grape vines clinging to the posts.
When Tom was really young, his foster mother would bring him over for Mrs Guthrie to look after during the day if she had too much bookwork to do. Now Tom comes whenever he can.
‘Sure,’ Tom says
‘Mot!’ Hannah says appearing in the doorway. She’s the closest thing to a sister and a friend Tom’s got; the kind of girl Tom thinks all boys secretly want but few have the guts to talk to. Tom likes it that she doesn’t pretend he’s something he’s not, and she’s the only one brave enough to call him backwards to his face which, in a strange way, makes the world seem right. Honesty can be a safe place. With Hannah there’s no way to get things wrong. Not really.
Hannah steps out through the doorway to stand beside him. She peels the orange and Tom can taste the citrus on the breeze. Hannah says she wishes Tom was her brother f
or real, that he’s the son her parents couldn’t have. Because, up until now, they’ve had trouble making children. Tom says they’d have had to be twins because they’re practically the same age. Hannah ignores details like that. When Tom points out things like that she says, ‘don’t get all real on me, Tom’. And he likes it that time doesn’t own them.
Mrs Guthrie smiles and closes the screen door.
‘Race you,’ Hannah says, taking off towards the lambing fence, her laughter lagging behind her and the sound of her feet thumping on the ground.
Tom is sitting on the fishing beach, mid-afternoon, at Big Bend beside his canoe. He looks across the river to the cliff hang, when he sees Hannah walking towards him along the water’s edge. He sucks on the last of his cigarette, squashes it under his foot, and puts the butt into his shirt pocket.
Hannah’s hair blows blonde in the breeze and the skin on her arms is tanned from the sun and her coming for him feels good. Knowing he can count on that.
‘Miss Pinny’s a bitch, Mot,’ Hannah says, sitting down beside him. ‘She went too far. Everyone thinks so. She shouldn’t have said what she did.’
Tom shrugs his shoulders, stands and pushes the canoe off the sand into the water. He holds it steady with his hand as Hannah steps inside, sitting down on the front seat and shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. Tom pushes the canoe out from the shallows and jumps in to sit on the back seat. Together they paddle across the water to the cliff hang.
‘Anyway,’ Hannah says over her shoulder, ‘you’re predictable, where else would you go?’ she says, smiling.
The canoe bumps into the rocky edge of the cliff hang and Tom takes hold of the trunk of a scraggly gum growing on the edge. He winds the canoe rope around the trunk and knots it tight.
They’re quiet for a while as Hannah sits beside him on the ground, linking her arm through his and laying her head on his shoulder. The wind whistles through holes in the limestone cliffs where cockatoos come home to nest. The canoe bumps against the rock with a dull clunking sound. Occasionally a fish pokes a nose up through the surface of the water. Tom feels the warmth of Hannah beside him and it’s the best he’s felt all day. It makes him uncomfortable because lately he’s begun realising that nothing can last forever. His foster mum, Marge, is always telling him he has to grow up and maybe she’s right. He and Hannah aren’t kids anymore.
Big River, Little Fish Page 2
