The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  So Amy Parker sat in the plaited cane chair, and thought, or snoozed. She was speaking to her boy. It is funny we are able to speak together, she said, often it is not possible with people. Under the pepper tree. These beads are bullets, he said. Don’t shoot at me, Ray. I am not Ray, he laughed. You are Ray. They are not bullets, they are words. Words are bullets, she said, if you mean them to be, I shot him, over and over again, and he stood up for more. I am shooting you, he laughed with his teeth. Terrible words began to confront her, and in necklaces. Raaaaaay. Shot for shot, laughed the boy, whoever you shot. It is not Stan, she was sweating, Ray love, it is not. And what is your grandfather to you but an old man in the workshop who will go on nailing things rather than come in for his tea? Come on then like a good boy. Bending with her lips, they were foolish.

  Amy Parker touched the cane chair. She had woken from a miserable sleep, only of a minute or two, but clammy. She would have liked to see someone that she loved.

  But the afternoon was empty.

  That boy had gone crawling off. In time, she supposed, I shall not understand him. Some tall man coming up the path would treat her as a joke. Educated men bleach the meaning out of words, there is no colour left.

  So she mumbled and wetted her lips.

  ‘What is it, Mother?’ asked the daughter-in-law, who had been drying some glasses and putting them away, and relining a shelf of which the paper had got dirty, and doing a few other unnoticeable jobs.

  ‘The boy has gone off somewhere,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Is he all right?’

  Am I all right? it signified. Afternoon dreams, when they happen, are crueller than those at night. They are intensified by the life that is going on all around, that persecutes the sleeper brutally, because he has been forced to give up.

  ‘He is all right, I expect,’ said Elsie, whose faith did not allow her to anticipate a blow, in spite of the one she had received. ‘He is a sensible boy really.’

  The young woman would have liked to add to the physical comfort of her mother-in-law, speculating that in this way they might meet on common ground. She looked at the old woman, to see whether she could arrange her in some way, but realized that this would not be possible.

  Because Amy Parker did not like Elsie.

  She sat and watched Elsie doing crochet work. She stared at her thick, creamy skin. Elsie Would not look up, dedicated as she always was to whatever she was doing, and because there was nothing to guard against. Her glossy eyebrows were never raised to question, but in innocence.

  Once her face broke up. She laughed and blushed. Statement, not narration, was her forte, though now, it seemed, there was something that she had to tell.

  ‘I used to know a girl who was always doing crochet work. She would drop stitches and begin to count, but she would forget her count. So she never got anywhere. But she was always starting, all sorts of things, a quilt once, and babies’ bonnets, she was making things for her nieces. Oh, once I think she did finish a piece of work. It was a doily, and then her mother helped her. Her name was Ethel Bonnington.’

  It was boring.

  Ah dear, said Amy Parker, I cannot follow this.

  Grey grass stood in the paddocks at that time of year, or lay down. Most days there was a wind. Birds floated in the air with long, slow calls, almost totally arrested, as the two women sat in the prison of each other’s company.

  Ah dear, Amy Parker said, once I would have burst.

  But Elsie persisted, on visits of whole days, or week-ends, or she would come for long weeks. With the boy, of course. She would work too. She would wring out sheets. Once she teased a kapok mattress, it transpired she knew how. And she loved her mother-in-law, she had begun and would not end.

  Then Amy Parker rose up, she was compelled, to see whether she could leave her mark on the board of Elsie’s face.

  They were on the veranda, as many times before. Elsie was doing crochet work.

  ‘That girl Ethel, that you were telling me of,’ Amy Parker said, ‘was she a relative?’

  ‘Oh, Ethel,’ Elsie laughed and blushed. ‘No.’

  ‘She seems to have been a stupid sort of girl.’

  ‘Poor Ethel,’ said Elsie, who had nothing against her. ‘She was clever at school. She passed exams and things. She had a head for facts. But life, of course, is not facts. So Ethel got confused. She took to crochet work. But she was good to her mother.’

  ‘Fancy, crochet. If it had been knitting.’

  ‘I like crochet. It is soothing,’ Elsie blushed.

  ‘It is a jiggery sort of work,’ Amy Parker said.

  Elsie breathed.

  ‘I don’t know that I particularly want to be soothed,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Where is Ray now, Elsie?’

  ‘He has his job,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Has Ray left you?’ asked Amy Parker.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Elsie, for whom the pattern had become complicated, of little double roses, in shiny beige silk, that she had chosen. ‘He has been back.’

  Then Amy Parker began to pity Elsie. Her skin was terribly pitiable, thick and wholesome, with that way of flushing upward from the neck. In pity, the older woman’s own failure began to seem less a failure, almost a success. She began to like Elsie.

  ‘You will not hang on to Ray,’ said Amy Parker.

  Who had gone up to Glastonbury on some such night, of inkiness and brass, to put him in that same box in which she would have kept, for safety’s sake, all human love.

  ‘But I did not intend to hang on to Ray,’ Elsie said. ‘Nor on to anyone.’

  Whatever she did not know, she knew this.

  But the older woman looked at her.

  The sky which had formed above the two women in clots of cloud and veins of brass hung lower, it was on their heads. To the old woman it was unpleasant, filled with personal threats. But the young one was unmoved, or too impersonally moved to fear. In her impersonality she could have been split right open. Wind blew at her hair, revealing the secret places of her temples. For a moment her face was less flat.

  Looking at, or into, Elsie, if only for the second of lightning, Amy Parker knew she had begun to love her. God save us, she said, Elsie is perhaps strong.

  Then the storm was breaking on the two women. Their chairs were grating. They laughed, and recovered themselves, and chased the ball of silk that threatened to escape them, and were bent by the wind into unusual, supple shapes. Their eyes were shining with the moisture of the storm and green lightning.

  Till suddenly the grandmother remembered and cried, ‘Where is the boy? Not out in this!’

  But the mother was still protected by her mood.

  ‘He will have got in somewhere,’ she said, soothing, smoothing her hair.

  ‘And Stan.’

  The old woman began to remember her husband, whom she had forgotten. She forgot him now for whole days.

  The two women walked mechanically through the shaking house, to find whatever was intended for them to find.

  ‘We just made it,’ said Stan Parker, who was standing at the screen door at the back, the gauze was still quivering, as he wiped the water from his leather face.

  The boy had pressed his on the window till his nose was white, and he looked out through water.

  ‘Look,’ he called excitedly, turning back into the room. ‘Life under water would look like this. To a fish. Come and do it. You will see.’

  But no one would share his moment of belief, perhaps had not even heard his words. So revelations are never conveyed with brilliance as revealed. The boy knew, however.

  ‘I am not wet,’ he protested, throwing off his grandmother, who began to feel her husband with less anxiety, but to establish some authority.

  ‘You are both soaked,’ she said. ‘To my hands, anyway.’

  And was angry. It was her right.

  ‘It is one of those showers,’ said Stan Parker. ‘A little bit of wet never did no one any harm.’

  And began to fray out tobacco, with w
hich to roll a cigarette.

  ‘Who will pay the price?’ the angry woman asked.

  She was impotent, but above all she resented his leatheriness.

  ‘You will,’ laughed Stan Parker, licking the thin paper.

  The boy, who was content now, in the dry, tobacco-scented room, came and stood beside his grandfather. He liked to watch minute operations. He liked the smell of the little rubber bag in which the old man carried tobacco.

  ‘Let me light it?’ he asked when the thin and tinkling thing was rolled.

  ‘It is all very well,’ said Amy Parker, whose eyes were feverish with what she had suffered, with what she still had to suffer for Stan.

  Once she had thought of taking a knife, not against her husband, which would have been less painful, but against herself, and there where the breasts parted, plunging it in. What would it have met, she wondered, at slow, sick leisure, and what words would he have found as they watched the drops drop, big remorseful drops, on to the floor?

  ‘Go on, Granpa,’ said Elsie, to whom none of this was fatal, ‘go and take your clothes off.’

  The boy was watching the paper catch alight. It flared at first. Then settled down.

  Presently the old man went to change.

  Other clothes changed Stan Parker less than they do most people. Different mysteries emanated from his wife Amy with different clothes. But the husband was more honest, which also made him irritating. At this age, anyway, he could see an object as it was, and interpret a gesture as it was meant. His life was no less wonderful for this baldness. If his wife were to die, he said, he would live in a room with bed and chair, he could keep his possessions in a couple of packing cases and hanging from hooks on the walls. But his wife was not dead, and there seemed no likelihood that she would die, he was glad enough to admit. He did love his wife, though she would make him nearly crack his jaws from clenching them.

  They had been together a lifetime, in which certain simple habits had formed. They preferred boiled meat because it was easier on the stomach. She expected to wake in the night and hear him groping through the darkness, he would get up round about one, and go to make water, then they would drift, and fall deeper into their last sleep.

  The night of the storm or shower, when he had got wet, Stan Parker had never seen more clearly. After he had carved the beef he looked at his wife where her hair had thinned at the parting; she would not look up yet, nor speak, since her scene. He looked at his grandson, who was gathering crumbs on the moistened tips of his fingers and licking them off with cat’s tongue. His mother was there ready to protect somebody.

  Then the old man dropped the carving knife. It stunned.

  ‘Ach,’ complained his wife, holding her heart.

  Things were terribly distinct under the electric light.

  Elsie had begun to tell one of those stories about somebody she knew.

  But the brilliance of the old man’s light defied all else. All began to float presently in his world of light. He recollected some bookshelves he was making, he had developed a passion for carpentry in recent years, and could now see with peculiar distinctness the grain of the particular wood on which he was working, and the little nick near a dovetail which had been worrying him because of the blemish it would leave. Otherwise the simplicity and rightness of his work was greatly satisfying.

  After he had sat contemplating this object for some time, and smiling out of his rather leathery, sympathetic cheeks, he said surprisingly, ‘I think I will turn in now, have an early night.’

  ‘There,’ said Amy Parker when he had gone. ‘He has got a chill.’

  She had known it, had been herself feverish all along. Of whatever tragedy that might follow she would be the centre.

  She listened to her husband in the night, and touched him once or twice. Whether he was asleep or spiting her she could not tell.

  So she slept. She was sleeping when her husband woke and lay rigid in the bed, looking at the darkness. In his fever he could not have been cleaner swept. All that he had lived, all that he had seen, had the extreme simplicity of goodness. Any acts that he relived in that ample darkness of the room were performed with the genuine honesty of freshly planed wood. Yet his rigid face was not convinced. It was turning and grating on the pillow. His dry mouth would have asked questions, not of his wife, of course, because she would not have known, but of some secret source of knowledge that he had failed to discover yet. So the clear, feverish light in which he lay, and thought, and saw things, began to blur. He would have liked to read something printed in large letters. But in the absence of signs he was rubbing his cheek on the pillow and touching his joints. He was tired by now, and at times even in pain. Short pains. At times he spoke to express his pain and distress. Oh God, oh God, he was saying from time to time, but very quietly and dustily, like sawdust.

  Once the man saw beneath the skin of his eyelids that they were standing in the workshop again, amongst the shavings, which curled round their ankles. It was the boy who was with him, of course, because at this time of his life it was his grandson who filled his thoughts, though he would never have admitted. Their relationship was a marvellous one, almost entirely confined to the workshop. Outside the workshop they did not exist for each other, it appeared, anyway they scarcely spoke. But in the workshop each conversation that they had was in the nature of a confession.

  ‘See,’ said the old man, laying open the surface of the wood with a sweep of his daring plane, ‘it is like a map. There are the mountains. That is a mountain peak. The round one. That is the highest.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘And the rivers, and the bays.’

  ‘When I was a boy,’ said the grandfather, ‘I would sometimes draw maps and shade in the bays with a blue pencil. The Gulf of Mexico, that was a good big one.’

  ‘I can’t draw much,’ said the boy,

  ‘What do you reckon you’ll do?’

  ‘I shall write a poem,’ said the boy.

  ‘What do you know about poems? Have you read any?’

  ‘No,’ said the boy, chewing the inside of his cheek. ‘I know, though.’

  The boy was stretching his arms in the sleepy afternoon till they were embracing air. His eyes were opening.

  ‘Don’t you ever know, Granpa, about things, because you just know?’

  Now that the old man was locked in the prison of the bed he could not answer. His throat was that dry. In his feverishness, his childishness, there was something that he still had to do, know. So he thrust his head back into the pillow, tilting the darkness, in hopes that revelation would reward conviction.

  It was the light that shone, though.

  It is time, Stan, his wife’s thick eyelids said.

  ‘I feel terrible crook, Amy,’ said the old man. ‘You will have to get Jack Finlayson to give a hand with the cows.’

  After that Stan Parker was sick for some time. He had a pleurisy. They nursed him through, though. Jack Finlayson came, who was agreeable to help, he was a decent sort, who had made a mess of his own affairs, and his wife Merle came and did odd jobs, and was yarning in the doorway over cups of milky tea. Stan Parker sensed all this, all that people were doing. He let them. He was in no hurry, but got up when they told him, with assistance at the armpits, and was soon walking again in his large clothes.

  He had gone one step farther into himself, however. During his convalescence he would look out at people from the verge of his face, and they mostly preferred to switch over and talk to his wife. He was not yet quite right, of course. He had a habit of looking at people as if there were something standing behind them, and they did not like that, because they could not very well turn round to make sure.

  But Stan Parker was just surprised at the newness of what he saw.

  Chapter 21

  DURING the last few years a number of other homes had been built down the road at Durilgai in which Parkers had always lived. There were the original few weatherboard homes, of which the landscape had taken po
ssession, and which had been squeezed back from the road, it seemed, by other developments. The wooden homes stood, each in its smother of trees, like oases in a desert of progress. They were in process of being forgotten, of falling down, and would eventually be swept up with the bones of those who had lingered in them, and who were of no importance anyway, either no-hopers or old. If the souls of these old cottages disturbed, any uneasiness can almost be excluded from the brick villas simply by closing windows and doors and turning on the radio. The brick homes were in possession all right. Deep purple, clinker blue, ox blood, and public lavatory. Here the rites of domesticity were practised, it had been forgotten why, but with passionate, regular orthodoxy, and once a sacrifice was offered up, by electrocution, by vacuum cleaner, on a hot morning, when the lantana hedges were smelling of cat.

  There were the old inconsiderable wooden houses, there were the waterproof brick ones. There was also another kind, which caused resentment, and against which it was hoped the Council would revise its policy. There were the homes in fibro-cement. These were to be found in outcrops, of a different stratum. It was in their favour, of course, that they could last only a little while. But for how long? In the meantime human beings went through the motions of living in them. Young couples locked their doors and left their homes as if they were not open. A child had kicked a hole in one, for fun. And at night the fibro homes reverberated, changed their shape under the stress of love or strife, changed and returned, standing brittle in the moonlight, soluble in dreams.

  All of this which was going on all round them affected and did not affect Parkers. It did not affect them in that they had reached an age where all that was happening visibly was hardly credible. Past events in recollection will splinter brick and distribute the fragments. What is still to happen must flow with a parallel, not with the same stream. Where it did affect these old people more credibly was that their property had been subdivided and most of it sold up.

  This began to happen not long after Mr Parker had his illness. Implacable cows stood in the mellow evenings, or in the mornings, stood rubbing their necks against the grey posts. The man, who continued to go down as usual, but tauter than before, sometimes with a tingling in his skin that made him smile unexpectedly, and his wife, who was troubled by her leg, besides having grown rather big behind, and old, and resentful, clung to the cows as a motive of existence, and dared not substitute another. Like many old people who have been wound up, they could not regulate themselves, they were afraid of breaking down. So they continued to plod. It was hand milking too. Mr Parker would not have the machines because, he said, he knew they were no good on the teats. Younger men sniggered at old Parker, who had, in any case, only a handful of cows in what had become practically a suburb. It was so unimportant to most people that they did not bother to think about it. But it was obvious that something would have to be done.