by Rodney Hall
Sebastian Brinsmead looked at what he couldn’t bear to believe, the fragments of a jigsaw he ought to be able to bring together, jagged pieces presenting themselves for acceptance and comprehension: the night bursting into flames, the slam of a heaven-sized door, that face clotted with blood searching between the torchbeams for his own eyes, that drunken face in its sickening mask, running, his knees and hips an agonizing reluctance to bend, his barefoot hobbling haste along the passage, sounding loud as boots through their house of no mirrors, wooden elbows thumping on corners as he staggered, smoke already blocking the back door, Felicia’s bundle of hair bobbing out into the night ahead, sitting up in bed not believing and the heart pounding unbearably, a shattered chicken corpse thrown against the porch, the ragged meat hole, a pig’s scream coming from Felicia, himself grappling with her, holding her to him in a parody of affection, hugging her hysterical struggles, pain lancing at him through all his senses, that sweet face in the grass with mouth open, moon-touched trees tossing and feathering, the blood-mask person falling back, with Felicia free and on top of him, her swimming over his liquid form to her son her angel, he himself Sebastian locked upright even now, locked inside himself still, prisoner in the high tower, a dinner of pearls for a starving man, feathers hanging from his feet, a porcelain doorknob white like bone in his hand, the ragged meat hole, Felicia’s words indoors It’s the war! as if she recognized it, as if it had come at last and joyfully, as if it made sense of many puzzles, neighbours banging gates and shouting, himself coughing a horrible thick cough which might choke him, the reek of putrifying food in bile, running stumbling walking feet, stifling gelignite fumes, the thud and rattle of earth thrown up against the wall, that face rising from the slime and speaking The Golden Fleece, a boy’s arm reaching wide, the small hand palm-upwards in grass asking for something.
People stood back as people will. When they knew how little could be done they formed a ring till morning. The trembling torches paled in a steady dawn; the ancient residents whose eyes had seen everything stood waiting to find out what this was about, a dead boy in the garden, half his chest blown away, Bill Swan plastered with blood, Felicia Brinsmead lying beside the child and no more tears left in her, Sebastian her brother rigid still inside the prison of his flesh, and a large hole blasted in the ground. Thus at dawn the living elders contemplated that dead child whom no one recognized, instinct (and perhaps experience) telling them this tragedy would touch them more intimately than they knew. Above the town the mountain rose pale and luminous beneath a thick band of green light pressed down on it by rainclouds. A trace of misty blue light hid along the cream gullies; the crag with tall twin boulders like betrothed figures stood out in bold relief, lichened, pale copper green. Across the countryside a crow called its complaining tremolo.
Jasper Schramm opened up the public bar, there being only one place now for ceremonies. A stale aroma of smoke and sour hops flavoured the sharp mountain air, deliciously nostalgic. Woolly curtains swayed in and out of the open windows, sluggish as if wet. The dun lino gleamed with grease. The bar was a porcupine of inverted stool-legs. As you stood there respectfully, the boy lay on a table, washed and wrapped warmly in a blanket. Sad blanket. The bleeding had stopped. The sun was about to rise. You could see now how beautiful the child was, tall and fair with handsome features and a fine skin, he lay angel-like and translucent. So far nobody had spoken a single word. Then Ian McTaggart, whose right it was to preside as head of the collective families, hobbled in, soft-footed, once all who were needed had assembled. Felicia looked out of the window at the first sunlight to slip down off the mountain among the buildings, she watched it streaming in under that vast raincloud, the land sponging up warmth, she could see across the road over houseroofs to the paddocks which appeared to hang vertically as a green backcloth pinned up by studs fashioned in the form of cows. She was ready. She marshalled the courage of all she knew. She faced her relations, both friends and enemies. And spoke.
– This is my son Fidelis d’Oro Brinsmead. She drew the tremendous silence into herself, needing every ounce of strength to control her voice so she could address the corpse, publicly, at long last.
– Mummy loves … she whispered now crouching beside the body. The word mummy striking her hearers as grotesquely inappropriate. Her face fell shapeless as she blubbered, having no rehearsed expression for this, her burden of hair lolling sideways, forgotten. She was helpless now because she’d been caught in the shocking present.
The town stood in judgment of her. The prisoner in Sebastian’s tunic fought to escape with his secret, fought the ancient war to establish civilization by suppressing individual needs, and his sister’s sobbing made clear that she was waiting for him to complete her confession, that she at least could face whatever punishment might come, the worst already having happened. Flies zoomed in to reconnoitre, sticking first to this face then that, unable to tell the living from the dead.
– He’s twelve, she whispered remembering with pain how she’d tried to make him forget his birthday in case he should ask for a party and they’d have to go through all that anguish again.
The child lay dead.
Only Vivien recognized the face. Vivien, sick with worry about Bill, knew she had seen the boy once peering from under the holland blind when she banged on the shop door while the Chinese lady struggled with her truck on hairpin bends. The boy had watched her and then dropped the blind back into place. She touched Billy’s arm to give him courage, knowing how he felt such a stranger to death. He was still dazed and partly deaf from the explosion.
Out through the hotel window the mourners could see, where the forest nosed down among the paddocks, a ribbon of smoke rising. They knew what it meant: Tony McTaggart, out in the bush, was boiling his billy for breakfast, also being sure to let them know he was alright so no one would send a search party for another lost son.
– I went to blow up the goldmine, Bill Swan confessed in neutral, solitary piano notes, scrubbing his hand over his washed cheeks. It’s marked in Mr Kel McAloon’s notebook. Under their shed. Then I caught that boy watching me. So I had to give up. Went down by the broken fence to go home. But he ran round in front of me. He snatched it right out of my hand. I couldn’t help it. I saw him running up towards the … Billy found himself looking into a mother’s eyes, deep in, to where a frightened girl suffered something uncontrollable, so he held back the word house, knowing house to be a murderous word, also that he had said enough, that he must never tell them the boy ran towards the house. Supposing her son had wanted to kill her, she’d never hear it from Bill Swan. The morning cushioned on paddocks leaned in at the window. The witness nursed his bruised lip while the giant bellows of silence wheezed, he felt shameful tears rise, he was suffocating inside the hangman’s hood.
The citizens watched the child and the child’s mother, enbalming unasked questions in ceremonial tact.
As yet nobody knew that the blast, having shaken the general store like an earthquake, caused the towers of newspapers to collapse softly in overlapping fans of headlines. Suppressed evils began to plump up and slide into the open. The chorus of sou’wester-clad fishermen gaped from sardine tins at the Sydney Morning Herald receiving a letter on the high cost of babies. The convolvulus heard, purple with strain, of a Chicago man tortured and nailed up on a crude cross for Easter 1945. A veiny balloon rolled out with its knowledge of Japanese war atrocities and their solution: the Emperor Hirohito being taxed a billion yen on war profits. The Protestant chickens in their frozen purity puffed rock hard with indignation while the Pope took time off from the second world war to telegraph Generalissimo Franco ‘Thanks to God for Spain’s desired Catholic victory’. An unknown cyclist was killed again by a car at Hunter’s Hill. Ugly and persistent, these ideas, set free from Felicia’s restraining hand, insinuated themselves into public places exactly as Sebastian had feared. Squeezed through improbable cracks in their bid for the open, the world. Trouser-presses declared themselves bla
meless that the editor of an anti-Nazi magazine in the USA was emerging, once more, stripped, beaten and painted with swastikas. The potatoes accepted that Les Darcy’s nephew should be wooed with national attention for victoriously beating another schoolboy. The Dean of Canterbury suggested to the hanging flitch of bacon that part of our Empty North ought to be given to the Japanese. With equal impartiality the bacon also considered Prime Minister Bruce’s reply that the Dean must be ignorant of climatic conditions. Then the first of the slimy crew found its way to the doors which had been jolted loose (today there was no guardian of virtue to force them shut and shoot the rusty bolts): the Financial Times thanking the people for their sacrifices during the great Depression. And it was out. Already proliferating like a burst pinecone, spores taking flight on the Whitey’s Fall wind. And right after it went Mr Non-Unionist explaining that 1930 was a year of plentiful work for men willing to undersell one another and put their backs into it. The jury of spirit kettles heard Robert Augustus Webber declared an habitual criminal. Both the cause of rheumatism, once more pronounced a mystery, and a Royal Commissioner appointed to investigate cold-blooded murder by police of Aboriginals in the Forrest River district crawled from the very year Felicia and Sebastian turned their shack into a shop. And then a dark ripe plum slithered free despite the begging hands of rubber gloves, out past the ghostly mirrors of tin and into the bright sunshine: the Reverend Gossip recommending the life beyond.
The cat among the eucalyptus drops, with his retinue of dead mice, bristled at the upset of his orderly world.
– The Golden Fleece is not in my yard, said Sebastian. It is everywhere under us. That shed only covered the first place we’d touched it.
Now Felicia’s tears broke free in paroxysms, Sebastian was side-tracking the issue, refusing to sacrifice himself to join her. She was alone in the privilege of her grief. The people waited respectfully, granting her this privilege: crones propped up with sticks, wax models in wheelchairs, the world’s oldest village idiot. They gathered to allow her her portion of grief and to pay their respects to the unknown Fido who was leaving behind his diary, his odes to loneliness, his loveletters ready to be slipped in among someone’s groceries, also his inventions, meccano models for escape devices.
– When I was a boy, said Mr Ping surprisingly. Our Chinese name for Australia meant the New Gold Mountain.
The spirit passed out of Sebastian. He could never recapture the mystic peace he’d enjoyed all these years; the sure sense of an interwoven purpose, God’s tapestry. Naturally he considered this in itself might be for a purpose and further proof of the divinity he could no longer witness. But consolation wasn’t what he wanted, his expulsion from this state of grace hurt him in-consolably. Even his hateful devil-ridden sister might begin treating him gently, which is to say with pity. Ping’s daring to speak now when he himself remained dumb inflamed the mortal wound of yesterday: jealousy. He hadn’t the power to shake it off. His peace of mind as well as his outward tranquillity left him. What was worse, fears suppressed for years loomed into the forefront of his consciousness … the instinct for self-destruction tempted him. This one gift from his ancestors persisted in speaking to the blood. Deep in the soft tissues of his bones seeped the timeless intoxication, the call to oblivion, the way out of the labyrinth, a hole slashed in the suffocating tapestry of God’s infinite patience, escape from the appalling prospect of everlasting life. Suicide was one act that nobody else could commit for him, an ancient rite forever modern. Yes, the lure of release from being burdened with a whole people, his saint’s cross. Saints make sure they are martyred; most couldn’t stand the strain of their calling one day longer.
Fido lay dead. Sebastian’s old enemy the licence inspector Kel McAloon who had hounded him for the location of the Golden Fleece, who had been obsessed with snooping for it through his drunken years, had achieved revenge by a simple cross in a notebook. In one respect Sebastian had been proved right; without the enigma of the Golden Fleece, Whitey’s Fall would surely have been abandoned half a century ago. He had granted the people time to finish creating the mountain and grow to be part of it. A half-century of power for Felicia whose role was to show them the hell they’d come from. That’s what her Rememberings demonstrated, so you could rise above the past by mustering its horrors in the placid present and shaping the future.
When he spoke of this to Vivien Lang in the street as they left the ceremonial laying-out of Fidelis d’Oro Brinsmead, she cried out in repugnance at the idea.
– You mean to say everybody has neglected their houses just because they don’t care while they’re waiting to find the Golden Fleece?
– Oh no, he retorted with a flash of his young anger. You jump to such secular conclusions.
Sebastian established his loneliness again and thought once more of taking his own life, drifted into a seductive daydream. But he feared Felicia, who floated through her underwater flowergarden of luscious poisons, bringing him wet blossoms, waterlogged remains, and the rainbow shimmers where her hands finned, the forms of her beauty and her fetid age mesmerizing him. He was afraid to drown, because she’d be there to nurse him tenderly to her purposes. And if he swallowed poison, she’d be with him, being a master of poisons, if he hung himself in the lavatory at the Mountain Hotel by his father’s self-same belt, she’d be hanging beside him in his last moments with her stifling kindness and her understanding of the moment to come; even if he died of old age, hadn’t she been there before? if he died in bed he would be admitting her to his bed again. And now by the most unforeseen blow his treasured captive, his pride, his dear son and nephew, dead in the act of finding out who had solved the secret of the goldmine. The anger remained boiling in him. The body had been arranged ready for tomorrow’s funeral. The condolences of lifelong neighbours inflamed his fury. As a prisoner he drove his stiff prison up and down the street, not willing to go home. He stalked about the township wearing tatters of celestial threads, betrayed by his moral paralysis, his denial of his son, incensed by the distant earth-moving equipment thundering up at the highway laying bare the great wound of gold, grief filling him with energy, goading him again with the delights of death. So Sebastian called out. In his huge voice he shouted, challenging the people to bring their firearms and Fido’s heap of ammunition (which had been entrusted to Uncle yesterday) and answer violence with violence.
– Who will be meek? he roared to the crowd. You can see from here the highway’s already across the saddle. Feel the earth shaking. They’re blasting away the face of our mountain. So we sit back tamely, do we, and let them come here bringing velvet cushions and iron cages for us, the comfort of imprisonment in our own homes, locked in by the stupid kindly curiosity of sightseers, not daring to show our faces for fear of being photographed, for fear of being stared at and talked to by tourists? Are we to shut ourselves indoors because we don’t recognize the outside of our own homes for the new paint and new fittings, for the blue plaques saying we live here, the tombstones of our own reputations? We are going to fight. Fight!
Wind tore and tugged at his tunic. Wind combed back his wispy hair till nothing of the halo remained and his skull was encased instead in a silver-white helmet, his pale cheeks red with anger and effort.
Uncle stared disbelievingly at the transformed Sebastian, then waved his walkingsticks in triumph. The fight was on. The whole town knew it. Their blood was up. It was a call they had all waited for. The moment they stood silently together fascinated by that vast seam of gold up at the highway cutting, they knew they were free of the power that once drew them, and that it was a freedom like all others which they’d have to fight for.
The guerrillas tottered back home on crutches, in braces and on wheels.
Six
Tony McTaggart awoke stiff with the damp and alert to danger, the twilight before dawn being filled with alien presences, the forest creeping quietly round him. He could sleep no more. He massaged his face with both hands to bring it to life. How filthy,
sweaty and cold he was. He began to see, down below him, the foundations of a village and realized this was why he’d had that feeling of familiarity when night came on, he knew the place, a cluster of foundations looking like some mysterious alphabet laid out on the cleared ground. Night being leeched away along the horizon, the first birds called, tiny orange pardelotes jewelled the tree above him, casting up their three notes: topaz, emerald, sapphire. He could not shake off the fear which had been in him; fear leading to his decision that he would not live in the forest surrounded by watching faces, undergrowth alive with human presences. He must come out in the open. He squatted crooning while his thoughts reconnoitred the idea of building a shack down there where his ancestors had lived. For six days or was it eight years his mind had been coming back to one thought: while they worked side by side, Mr Ping had told him of Indian places, shrines, like temples to look at from the outside, but solid rock right through, no spaces inside. It was a conundrum.
With his own rifle, stolen from his father’s house, he shot a rabbit dead-eye through the head and listened to the detonation of that shot magnified, punching holes in the forest. He felt better. There were plenty of plums on the tangled old trees down there. Tony took up the rest of his earthly possessions, which is to say his steel toolkit, and picked his way down the slope to his new home.
