The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  Then Amy Parker continued on her way, through that fresh and innocent landscape of her own solitude and sadness. At the end of the road her children were waiting for her to affect that strength which they expected, and cows did not doubt, and fowls would fling themselves towards her, sensing that her hand would dispense from on high.

  It seemed that her life was planned, and she was glad. She was glad of her house, even if it looked frailer in that drawn light of afternoon, standing amongst the raggedy rosebushes, and the oleanders that she did not care for, they were too stiff.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 14

  WHEN the years of mud and metal were over, Stan Parker would seldom talk about them. He would not be coaxed into telling the interminable boys’ adventure stories, as some men will after wars, for chaos was not his opportunity. At the height of violence, when even the seasons had been destroyed, his functions appeared to have gone from him, who had been happiest looking at the sky for signs of nature, listening to oats fall, picking up a wet calf that had just dropped from the womb, and showing it that its legs worked.

  Things were made to work. But the contrary process of destruction was far more convincing, once perfected. So his skull saw, as the green lights drifted in the night. The lovely fireworks showed him the hand that had just fallen at his feet, thrown there. The fingers of the lost hand were curled in its last act. It lay there like a tendril that had been torn off some vine, and dropped when the motive, if ever there was one, had been forgotten. So the living skull of the green soldier looked at the suppliant hand. He was waiting in the darkness for an order. Which did not come. But would, he hoped. He was standing there. He was the last man on earth, to whom the hand had begun to beckon. Then the order came through the greeny, drifting darkness, and his sweat ran again. He kicked aside the soft hand-thing. What else could he do?

  Often afterwards, in the silence of mud and exhaustion, or when the bombardment opened the flesh and laid out the nerves in grey skeins, he would wonder about the hand, how it had taken hold of things, whether it had shaken after drink or in touching women, and to whom it had written home. Once in a village he had seen the arthritic hand of an old priest make the sign of blessing on the air. He looked at it with longing, for this hand too seemed irrevocably lost. In the broken villages he would have talked to someone, if it had been possible. But as it was not, he lay in a ditch, and held the hot hands of a woman he had not seen for darkness, and they offered each other their longings in the desperate convulsions of such love, and went away separately afterwards, arranging their clothes, and wiping their confessions from their mouths. As he went, the man thought with increased longing of a God that reached down, supposedly, and lifted up. But he could not pray now. His stock of prayers, even his chunks of improvisation, no longer fitted circumstance.

  He wrote home, though. Stan Parker sucked his pen until his cheeks grew hollow, thinking of all those things he would not write, but knew. He wrote:

  Dear Ame,

  … I could tell you a thing or two if only I could write it, but then we have never been ones for talk, anyway. I have not, you have done the talking, you have been the tongue of both of us, and how I would like to hear that tongue telling what has happened since dinner time – even if it was disastrous, like the roof blowed off, we could always put it on again. I could always do most things with my two hands. That is the terrible part of all this. It is taken out of my hands. I am weak, Amy….

  My dearest Amy,

  You did not tell me if Cherry had calved yet, only that Dorcas and Ally had dropped theirs, that will be nice to have two such heifers, you say they are good. Now when Cherry is ready next I want her put to Regan’s bull, the one that he got from Bega, and that you say is extra special, so that perhaps we shall have a little heifer jumping and butting by the time I open the gate, and we shall call her Peace, eh?

  I do not feel so bad since I knew that I would come through all this, that I did not tell you, I think. It was in the entrance to the dugout. It was particular bad that night. Then I could smell the grass, like it was after a storm, and the smell of wet lucerne, I could have sworn there was sunlight up above, but it is night and winter here. And I was that happy and sure, I was groggy at the knees with so much happiness. I would not be swallowed down into the mud. I would go home. Then they said, what was I doing there. I looked as if I was drunk, and nothing to drink. I said I did feel queer, and went and laid down, and had a dream that you was reading the paper beside the quince tree, I could see the big grey quinces, with the fluff on them, not yet ripe, and you looked up.

  Tell Thel I got the socks, and no knots. I thank her, and for the photograph with plaits. She looks neat. And Ray, I have the helmet and the hand grenade.

  You have made the dress out of the old blue, Amy, and I am glad. I am glad you tell me all these things, because I can see you then. I can see you sitting in the rooms, and walking down the path. I can see the rosemary bushes. We must bear up, Ame, and soon it will be over….

  He held his head on one side, and wrote slowly, but surely, once he began, in the respectable hand that he had learned from his mother, who had been a teacher. He was a bit excited at himself, writing these letters, of which the words became transformed – they were grass, and slow cows, and the bits of paraphernalia, axes and hammers and wire and things, that lay around a place, and that he liked to remember. The words became, too, contained in their bluntness, experience of death, and exaltation, and love.

  Stan Parker wrote:

  My dear Ame,

  I have thought it over and it is best for you to spell the Creek paddock after summer, unless it rains real hard this autumn, and divide the herd between the Sally wattle and the Square paddock. I think this is best. And get the oats in if you can, with the help of some man, perhaps that old Skinner with the gammy leg would come from Wullunya if you make it worth his while.

  If Ray has blunted the good axe chopping into nails and stones, he must learn to sharpen it. If anything should happen to that axe, I don’t know what I would do.

  Tom Archer is gone, and Jack Sullivan. They were good men. Tom knew he had it coming for some time, and was changed. Jack Sullivan was a noisy sort of coot, but you could not help liking Jack. He could do a trick with a penny, it was that quick you could not see it, and another with an egg, if he had one, that brought the house down. Well, they are gone.

  I sat awhile in a church in one of the villages here last week. It was what remained of a church. It was all sky. There were the frames of the windows, but the glass had fallen. But people come there. There was a priest poking about as if the roof was on. There was a wind blowing, and rain, and dogs coming in. I could have sat there forever doing nothing. I could listen and watch and think of home. Good God, Amy, it is a long time, but there is a lot that has been longer. There was an old woman in that church, skin and bone, praying as if she had just begun to pray. She could have told a thing or two. But we cannot speak, we can only look at each other.

  Some of the coves reckon it will soon be over. They heard something. Mick O’Dowd says he can only hear the guns, and will believe when he is deaf from silence. Tell his missus that Mick is good, and will write when he has got his muscle up….

  He did, in time:

  Dear Mother,

  I am all right. You shod see the girls (ha! ha!) you shod see the beer here, it is like piss.

  Hopun this leaves me as it finds you, your ever lovun hossbarnd

  M. O’DOWD

  Chapter 15

  DURILGAI did not suffer from the war. In some houses, certainly, women ached for their husbands, and some women who were afraid of the silence or interested in variety went out and took other men, sleeping with these with varying degrees of guilt or appetite, and some women were crushed as if they had been empty eggshells when news came that their men had been killed, and some ate the potatoes they sowed, and would have gone hungry but for these and the milk they pulled out of some old horny cow. But Duri
lgai was not touched, by and large, because it was a long way away, and besides, in those parts the earth predominated over the human being. The grass still grew and bent in the wind. The hot wind still blew from the west, and the cold from the south, and the languid, moist breezes came in from the east, from the sea. Sometimes in stormy weather gulls came, even from that distance, and glided and dipped above the black wattles, crying with their cold, starving voices.

  Once Ray Parker shot a gull, and took it quickly, and hid it, because his mother would have been annoyed. He buried it in the gully, after he had ripped it open, to see. He would have liked to do something memorable and heroic, but as he could not think of anything great enough, and yet within his reach, he had shot at the gull on that afternoon. For some time after, he had the fishy smell of the bird on his hands, and was half-pleased.

  ‘Shall I go out to work when Dad comes home?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I expect so,’ said the mother. ‘You can’t hang around forever. What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said sullenly.

  He slashed at the air with his knife. Because he did not know, he wandered in the paddocks, and cut his name into green trees, and made stones skim on water, and put his hand into the secret depths of nests and stole the jewels of eggs.

  He did not want these much. He wanted the souvenirs of dead Germans that his father would bring. He wanted to wear the steel helmet, and would charge through the dusk to challenge strangers.

  ‘Ray,’ called his mother, because it was time she asserted herself, and stood there wiping her hands on her apron to do so, ‘can’t you stop mooning about and do something useful, and chop a bit of wood?’

  He did so, silently.

  When he brought her the armful of wood, with his face closed above it, he reminded her of her husband, whose letters she had tied with a piece of string and stuck behind the tea canister. She tried sometimes to remember her husband in such minute detail that she would make him stand before her. But she could not. Outside her love for him, which was real and permeating, he was by this time vague. Most often she remembered him lifting his leg over the side of the cart, getting in to sit beside O’Dowd, when they were leaving for the war. His back was turned to her.

  ‘Come here,’ she said when the boy had let the wood fall in the box beside the stove.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Give me a kiss,’ she said laughingly, as if it had been a red apple.

  ‘Oh, why?’ whined the lumpish boy.

  He dragged his cold cheek away from her face, and bit his lip, and looked hot.

  ‘What good is it?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose it is not much good.’

  And she began to sort some clothes she had washed, and to sprinkle them with water, and to roll them into bundles.

  She too went into the paddocks. She went in the evening when the work was done. There were times when she could feel so peaceful that she awoke from her peace with a start of guilt, to urge herself on to some fresh restlessness, in this way to do homage to her absent husband. From the peace of her finally achieved self-sufficiency, of farm and children, he was absent. But in the restlessness of her footsteps over grass, in the restlessness of wind in tumbled grass, in the crying of gulls, in the uncompromising line of a black wire fence, he was always present. It was right that she should torment herself, though sometimes it was possible that even these torments were for her own pleasure. Years of sorrowing will bring a voluptuousness of sorrow.

  When the children were at school she would go down to the edge of the road, about midday, and stand in the steady but not oppressive sunlight of those early autumn days, waiting to see who would pass. People would talk to the woman by the road, and tell her about their relations, their ailments, their animals, and about their dead. They would take the woman into their confidence, because her face was asking for it. Sometimes they would even tell her thoughts they had just had, that they would not have told their families, but they would never see this woman again. And the woman thought about all she had been told, which filled what would have been an emptiness. She entered into the strangers’ lives, as she strolled in the garden afterwards, picking off the dead heads of flowers. She entered into their lives, forming relationships of sympathy, and even passion, which nobody would ever have surprised her into admitting. So that in this way her husband’s absence became reduced to a dull unhappiness. It was there. But sometimes she did not stop to think of the cause. Her surroundings, of sunlight and dappled bark, and her relationships with the departed strangers, were too vivid, far more vivid, indeed, than the strangers themselves, or the natural landscape.

  One day as she stood by the road, longing for events or faces, shading her eyes to bring them into her vision, a young Digger passed along with his hat on one side. As he came along the road he hung his head at first. He was brassy, but not enough, not in these surroundings, which were foreign to him. So he came on, and spat because he was being stared at, and turned his face, so that he was looking at the paddock opposite. For all his strength and brassiness, caught like this he was like a girl.

  The woman who was watching him, and not, saw that now he would probably pass without recognizing her right to conversation. She blushed and nearly cried for her concealed weakness, because she would have hung over the fence and said, I am waiting for you to tell me things, of war, and death, and love.

  But the young man was passing on. He looked at his red boots, that the road had made white. His eyes denied her presence. Then suddenly he turned at her, as if only at that moment he had thought to do so, and tossed his head with its cocky hat, and still not looking at her, or only sort of, through his transparent eyelids, said, ‘How are we doin? Know anyone down this way name of Horner?’

  ‘Horner?’ she repeated, starting, as if she had only that moment seen this young, strange man, with the leather strap of his hat caught on his lower lip, it appeared, now that he was full on.

  ‘Why, no,’ she said, collecting herself, and putting back a strand of stray hair behind her left ear. ‘I have not heard of anyone of the name of Horner. Not down this road. But it is a long road, and down that end where you are going it is not at all closely settled.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘doesn’t sound too good.’

  He came to her, to the side of the road, where she was standing by her fence, where the garden became raggedy grass; it was too hard and dry there for anything else to grow.

  ‘They’re relatives of Mum’s,’ he said, tossing a coin. ‘Jack’s got a few acres. He’s crook in the chest. Mum wanted me to come down here and see em. That’s why I come. I don’t go much on Horners. Jack sits around and spits. It turns you up to watch sick people like that. They put a bucket in the kitchen for him to spit inter. They say one of his lungs is gone. He was a shearer. From Bombala.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  On these occasions she did not give, in words; she received. But people seemed to take to her. They had confidence in the eyes and the brown skin of the quiet woman. So the young Digger was prepared to grow in the shadow of her quietness. There was nothing that he would not reveal of his own shadowlessness.

  ‘I only come back a few weeks ago,’ he said. ‘They took a piece out of me leg, the bloody bastards. Look,’ he said, pulling up a leg of his pants. ‘That was near Dickiebush. They grafted on a lump of skin.’

  ‘It must have hurt,’ she said, looking at the wound, neither with disgust nor emotional sympathy, almost as if she were examining the limb of an unusual insect that had been crushed or torn off.

  Yet she was not cold. And the Digger knew this. Her distance was part of the dream of dust and sunlight that they were sharing in the long grass at the side of the road.

  ‘Cripes, it hurt all right,’ said the young Digger. ‘But I’ll go back and have another go at the bastards. If they’ll let me. Or in the next. I like a good fight,’ he said.

  ‘My husband is over
the other side,’ she told him, in her detached and at the same time warm, lingering voice.

  ‘What’s his mob?’ asked the young man.

  She told him the figures and letters, which added to the grave mystery of her conversation.

  ‘He was wounded once. They took some shrapnel or something from him. He has it for us in a box. He won a medal,’ she said.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Digger, looking inwards. ‘There are all kinds of medals.’

  He was more interested in his own, still unmutilated ego, and the muscles of his hard body.

  ‘All kinds,’ he said.

  ‘But I am sure this is a good kind to have,’ said the flushed wife of the man who had won it.

  ‘It’s funny the way things happen,’ said the Digger, unclasping his collar and leaning on the fence, so that she looked inevitably at the Adam’s apple in his taut throat. ‘I got sort of engaged to a girl over there. She was a Belgium. She wasn’t a bad-lookin sort of girl. They’re different there, of course. Her old man had a charcootery business – that’s kind of small goods, see, sausages and things.’

  The weight of his body drew the fence down in the lovely sunlight. He was hanging on the wire, swinging slowly to his confession, and she waited for his words with fixed eyes. She looked at his bony temples and realized she was older.

  ‘And didn’t you stay engaged to the charcootery girl?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno. It got taken out of me hands, like,’ he said simply.

  He had stopped swinging. For an instant the man and the woman were intensely conscious of some same fear that they shared. Now the woman also stood exposed to the possibility that all things might be taken out of her hands.

  ‘Getting sent back an all that,’ said the Digger, more to himself.

  ‘I was gonna write in the hospital. I got the paper out. I didn’t write. I won’t now,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’