Some of those who were there, and who were being tormented by discovering lives of their own, now came out from the spasms they were enduring, to laugh.
What next? snorted some of the women, but quietly, down their noses, into their chins.
But Amy Parker knew. There are times when you know nothing, and times when you know all. So her eyes glowed.
So she leaned down from the bridge, to pick the faces floating there. Some lips were open to be kissed, some were closed tight. All bobbing in the grey flood. And the old letters, and the yellow photographs.
‘You will do better to stay quiet for a bit,’ she said to Mrs O’Dowd, ‘and keep your strength.’
She was herself exhausted by too much motion.
‘It is that airless in here,’ said the woman with a hairy mole, opening a window. ‘It makes you sleepy.’
The man from Deniliquin, Mr Cusack, whose eyes were smarting from the smoke and who was belching back the beer that was a rather bitter brew, would have liked to tell a story, something tremendous, but tremendously truthful, that would make people look round at him, and remember him afterwards, but such a story, on close thought, eluded him, and he sat back a cavernous man with blue chin, and what had he come here for, except to receive a corpse into the world? By this time almost everyone was deceived. Only the geranium blazed, now that it was evening, upon the sill.
Then the husband came in, who had been sent out to get a breath of air, and to divert himself generally. He was a nuisance at the bed. Sometimes his love for his wife became unsavoury, and he would start licking her hand, like a blind dog, and whining, showing his teeth, which at least were still white and sharp.
Nobody bothered about O’Dowd. He was the remains of a man. What could become of him afterwards? Would somebody be expected to feed him and mend his clothes? Sympathy can become attenuated. It will be best if, like a dog, he will lie down under a blackberry bush and die. He will do this too, but not yet.
The husband was feeling his way across the room, bumping into objects that had changed their place, and into the bodies of unexpected people, a big, shambly man in clothes that had been put on in darkness, and looked like it. O’Dowd was all awkward clothes. His eyes were running, either tears or matter. If he had lost control of his face, it was still a private grief, to him at least, since most things had become disguised by a privacy of darkness.
So he advanced across the room. Some people shifted their faces out of reach of his nubbly hands with obvious alarm. Others slipped aside with more discretion and became shadowy with their simulated unconcern.
‘Where is Mrs O’Dowd?’ the man then asked helplesssly, lost in the crowd. ‘Is she any better, can you tell me?’
‘Mrs O’Dowd is as well as can be expected,’ Mrs Kennedy spoke up, whose cousin was a probationer nurse, a fact from which she borrowed no little importance. ‘Sit down there. But be quiet. You must not be any nuisance.’
She guided the man across his own room, towards the bed in which he had been paramount these many years, and in which he had caught at much elusive poetry as it slipped by.
‘What are you after now? grumbled Mrs O’Dowd from behind her eyelids.
She could do no more for her husband. Her hair had grown heavy.
‘I will sit here for a while,’ he said.
Feeling the quilt, of which the pattern was a raised-up honey-comb.
For some reason she did not intend him to have her hand, perhaps because she had passed beyond him and was nothing to him now. But to Amy Parker’s hand she clung. Some people will desire a new friend to tell their greatest secrets to. And Amy Parker, who was old, had become new by length of absence. So the two women held hands. There was still much to tell and show.
‘I never did tell you, Mrs Parker,’ said Mrs O’Dowd with the skin of her lips.
And smiled.
‘What, dear?’ Mrs Parker asked.
And bent to see. Because it was doubtful she would hear.
‘The fuchsia bushes’, said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘are all cut down.’
So that Amy Parker heard the trembling of the red trumpets. She felt the hot blast of morning. She looked deeply into the eyes of Mrs O’Dowd, which had become a heavy golden, occupied with matters of minute importance.
‘Just now’, she said, ‘I seen your face, Amy, for the first time.’
Because nobody in all her life had said anything so personal to her, Amy Parker blushed.
Then O’Dowd, who could not interpret the several languages that were being spoken round his own bed, began to hit the air with his arms, and grow nasty, and shout, ‘Why don’t you all get out, and let us die in private?’
But they put him in his place, those organizers who consider that death is a public occasion.
And the woman with the hairy mole came and lowered it to Mrs O’Dowd’s face and said, ‘Are you sure you will not have the priest, dear?’
‘What would I be doin with a priest?’ Mrs O’Dowd asked.
‘You could try anyways,’ the helpful neighbour said.
Then O’Dowd, who had felt a terrible draught, and was crumpling up the quilt, cried out from the depths of his lungs, from the centre of the black room, so that everything was shaking, ‘Ah, Kathy, Kathy, you are not leavun me? What will I do when I am on me own?’
Mrs O’Dowd was quite tranquil.
‘I shall not be havun any priest. I am not afraid. I can talk for meself. Thank God.’
Then there was such a noise, of praise, and disapproval, and teeth sucked, and the poor man crying, some people could only listen to that, because it is not often you get the opportunity of listening to a man crying, and him a big man, that they did not notice the entry of the doctor, who had performed the act of delivery over at Fingleton, and come on.
The doctor was a surprised and diffident young man, who had so little patter that no one ever believed in him, though they went along and would even pay. At times, when he was dead-beat, he wished that he had been a conjurer.
‘How are we?’he asked now, of someone and of everyone.
Or if he had become a juggler. To hold his audience with a stream of coloured balls.
She had been suffering terrible, though cheerful enough, said Mrs Kennedy with importance. She had been asking for the needle, just a little one, a while ago, Mrs Kennedy said.
The young doctor was only too pleased to be able to produce something from his bag, into which two children were already looking.
But Amy Parker, who sat holding her friend’s hand, knew that it was dead. She must tell this now, she said. Her throat had swelled though, with great words.
‘Mrs O’Dowd’, she said at last, ‘is dead.’
And went away holding her handkerchief to her mouth, to stop it up.
She had never cried much, and would not now, in front of other people.
With the result that all those who rushed to see, to do, to compare, to lay out the body with inherited skill, and to drink tea afterwards in warm communal compassion, said that Mrs Parker had always been a cold woman, and stuck up, for no good reason, and not well liked thereabouts, not when you came to think.
The old woman, when she went from the room, past the geranium which was still glowing, and the crying hulk of a man to whom she did not know how to offer sympathy, walked across the yard to her pony, across whose rump she had placed a bag, to protect it from possible cold. It was cold too, on that spring evening, the trees stirring with a dying wind, as the old woman drove home. Driving over sticks and leaves. In her frail trap.
When she got in the old man her husband was on his knees, raking together some embers.
‘How is Mrs O’Dowd?’ he asked, looking up.
‘She is gone,’ she said, letting the door flap back outwards.
The old people did not say any more about the death, but soon sat down to a tea of chops and chips. As they wiped the fat from their lips, and drank cups of sweet tea, and said warming though insignificant things, they were dest
itute even of each other.
Later on they did begin to feel calmer, by some dispensation, and as they lay beneath the eiderdown dared to think of the dead woman as she would mingle with the sandy soil down at the cemetery. It was fantastic. Mrs O’Dowd, if they dared, in a narrow trench. Whose words had danced, and would still dance, anyway in memory, itself a dying thing.
Till finally the old couple were dead asleep.
Chapter 24
QUIGLEYS were still there, in their house along the road. They are the kind that grow from the landscape with the trees, the thin, dusty, unnoticeable native ones. Some people round about, in brick cottages with waterproof tiles and privet hedges, who were there by assault of nature, and for that reason loved to proclaim their morality, said it was a disgrace the way the stink of poultry manure rose on damp evenings from Quigleys’ old ramshackle place, in what was now a residential area, the Council must be told. But it was not. They did not in the end tell on Miss Quigley, for she would look at them, and her face was quite open. Then those people would retire into the brick tombs which they had built to contain their dead lives, and tune into the morning radio sessions, and as they stood on the floral carpet, in a blaze of veneer, would wonder what simple harmonies had eluded them. They would become as angry and as desperate as their millet brooms.
Doll Quigley had not altered much, except that her skin was more positively rough and speckled, and her knuckles were enlarged, and that goitre which she had always had. She was slower too from minding turkeys all those years as they stalked grey and pernickety round the horehound clumps, or down the hill to where the tussocks were, always stalking greyly. Doll had an old apron that she wore, she had made it out of clean bag, and would put on for turkey-minding almost always. This operation was not exactly necessary, but she liked it, and so would go stalking, a brown-grey, behind the turkey school.
There is something convalescent about the grey slope of turkeys’ wings. Their chirp is sick, or invalid at best. This would explain why Doll Quigley loved the birds. There were not the buyers for compassion. Could she not go out into the rain, and take the bag from her head, and lay it over someone’s shoulders? There were not enough accidents for Doll. People will accept compassion, casually, as if a component of abstract goodness, they will not take it and wear it for what it is, someone else’s emotional skin. That would be embarrassing. Why, even Bub Quigley was irritated at times by his sister’s hands.
Anyway, everybody respected Doll, and took from her many material things, and made use of her a lot. Take her family, for instance. They would come out Sundays in their sedans, the long, muscular brothers, who had become gnarled and dry, and their long, muscular, similar sons, they would lie around, or look for something they might fancy, some tool, or piece of iron, or fat cockerel. Doll won’t mind. Or the flatulent wives, and the wives of sons. They love to sit, and pass on the wet nappies, and tell about their operations and household appliances. Sometimes they pause, and look at Doll, and look quickly back into their own lives, which are necessarily more absorbing. The bellies of the wives of the sons are permanently filled with babies. And the children, these run around at Doll’s place, and call for the lavatory, and smash things. They get into cars at evening, and do not look back, because they will return. It is the unalterable in children’s lives that is the most admirable, and cruel. If Doll was not wounded, it was because she had given too much of herself, there was little left. It was logical, though. Goodness is given to give.
She was reduced by this time to the essence of goodness, which is what made people ashamed or afraid, because it is too rare. Sometimes her brother Bub, out of his simplicity, would recognize the nature of this predicament, or exaltation, better than others did. He would run along the passage and start looking at her, like some animal, like some rat that has been let live in a house unharmed, and that, while taking the situation for granted with its limited animal intelligence, will look out suddenly from its limitations and close with the human consciousness on the verge of all manner of mystical understanding. So Bub, now an elderly man, with his sometimes slobbery rat’s teeth and his blue, shadowy face, would stand beside, though a little behind, his sister on the brick floor of the larder, which smelled cool all the year round, and within the world of candlelight would eye milk or bread, of which the shapes themselves are good and touching, beginning and end, in fact, perfection. Then Bub Quigley would sigh like some animals, looking more closely at his sister for some communication of recognition.
But she, of course, moving the bowls of swaying milk, or feeling the new loaves of bubbly bread, had passed several stages further than her animal brother. Infinite love and peace will spill from candles and dissolve the flesh into silence. Then I will the readily, said Doll Quigley.
Though it was wrong, of course.
And Bub there.
Then she would step back quickly, and draw in her breath, and say, ‘What is wrong, Bub, treading on my heels in this small room, that is only space for one. and breathing on the milk? You should blow your nose too. You can blow your own nose.’
That was angry for Doll Quigley, and she would go away knowing it in her narrow shoulders. I should love Bub more, she said, but how? And Bub was snivelling there. His handkerchiefs got twisted up to string. Though he could manage himself well enough when told.
Sometimes she would go out and sit on the front steps, the side the rail had not yet fallen off, and put her arms round her knees in the position she had adopted as a girl, and attempt deliberately to approach that state of perfection which would sometimes drop voluntarily over her head like a simple bag, but she could not always then, she was intimidated by the greatness and diversity of the universe, which dwarfed her own limited powers. And there was her brother, seated behind her, drowsing and drooping over his pointed knees. Then she had a choking feeling in the lump of her neck. She had led a happy life, but it became suddenly oppressive and sad.
‘Why don’t you go in, Bub?’ she would say, sideways, to the darkness. ‘You are droppin asleep. It is bedtime now. Run along.’
But even when he went, he almost always did what he was told, and the shadows of his body were jerking on the blind, and then the darkness fell, Doll Quigley herself was not released from the fiendish difficulties of constellations, they would not be solved, she sat there late, knotting her hands.
No one realized any of this, of course, because some things are too great to tell. Until that day she went down to Parkers’.
It was the summertime, Amy Parker would remember, it was a time of juicy weeds and heavy air. Doll was decent. Her legs were very thin inside a cotton dress of some little checkered pattern, with a little purple eye. It was her best dress, Mrs Parker noticed by degrees. There was some awkward powder smudged along Doll’s jaws, she did not put it ordinarily, but now. And she wore a cameo brooch. It was a good piece. It was forgotten how Quigleys had come by it. It was too good to excite much attention, though a lady that once stopped for eggs had offered to buy it, but Doll would never sell.
‘Well, Amy,’ she said in her long, slack, Quigley voice when the screen door had flipped back and she had sat down.
‘What can I do for you, Doll?’ asked Mrs Parker, who was moistening a bundle of clothes to iron, and who was really a bit annoyed.
‘I have come to tell you something’, said Miss Quigley, looking at her long, gentle hands, ‘that I don’t know who to tell.’
‘Well, what is it?’ asked Mrs Parker, who was not interested on such a close day.
‘My brother is dead,’ Miss Quigley then said.
‘Your brother, your brother Bub? You don’t say!’
‘Yes,’ said Doll Quigley. ‘I put him away. I will not say kill. Because I loved Bub. And now when I must go, I will not feel that bad, Amy, if you understand. Sometimes I do see clear; if sometimes I am confused. This I do know, though, is for the best. His face tells me so.’
Then the two women were looking at each other, and Doll Quigley’
s face was so open that Amy Parker saw right into her soul, and began to take her friend’s hands, and to lay them here and there, and to rub them, because she herself could never hope to reach such heights of simple sacrifice. And rubbed the side of her own face. And felt the closeness of the kitchen. Altogether confused, or blinded. As already there crept over her a fear and distaste for the blinding logic of Doll’s act.
‘Oh dear, then we must do something, and Stan is not here,’ said Amy Parker, who was the confused woman of ant-proportions, even smelling of ants.
‘If you will ring the constable, Amy, and tell him what has happened,’ Doll Quigley now said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Parker.
She did.
It shook the collar stud that was lolling loose on Constable Tuck-well’s throat.
‘We had better wait at our place,’ Miss Quigley then said.
‘If that is what you wish, Doll,’ said Mrs Parker.
‘Oh, he won’t frighten a person. He is covered with a sheet. He is peaceful. Poor Bub.’
So the two old women walked down, against many people that did not notice them from their polished cars. They were elderly, rather simple women, poor even. So the two old women walked down from the beginnings of their lives, linked together for some comfort that their flesh still craved. Everything was strange around them that they had seen before, and desperately necessary. Amy Parker went smiling at things, a tree, or a tin, or a patch of scrub, though she, of course, was less involved.
The Tree of Man Page 58
