The day Stan Parker died he had been poking about in the back garden a bit, or sitting, mostly sitting, in a coat that she had made him wear, of old discoloured tweed, because that clear, candid sunlight would withdraw swiftly and treacherously from the immediate vicinity, uncovering bottomless wells of cold and the blue pools of evening. So the old man sat there in his coat and cap. He had a black stick, which somebody had produced from the disuse in which it had been lying, and which he walked with now, or propped against his chair, ever since the stroke he had suffered several months ago.
Amy Parker did not speak about that. You do not speak about strokes, especially those which fell members of the family. She would hand the black stick, if it was ever out of reach, hand it back as if it were not visible. How simply Stan, a big man, had fallen down with the connivance of God, and had lain there, blasted. Finlaysons were with them at the time. Jack and Merle had come over about something, and to yarn. It was round about eleven o’clock. She had poured tea. They were all looking back at Stan for long minutes, and asking what to do, not for then, it is easy enough to pick a man up, but for always. They had to have some direction, it seemed, for the future. Only the present will not wait. It is itself potential future. And so, as no communications were forthcoming, jack Finlayson stepped forward and picked Stan up. It was all as simple as that. The old woman did not cry or anything. She was watching it all happen.
But afterwards it was obvious she had had a fright. She did not want to see people, in case she might have to explain something that was not yet clear to her.
It got round, of course, what had happened to Mr Parker, because Finlaysons were there. They had to tell what they had seen, for nothing of a transcendental nature had happened in their lives ever before. But there were others round about who began to shy away from Parkers after this. Most people do not want to be the bystanders at death, particularly the living death of some old person. It is a different matter if it drops on you out of the sky, on the road, for instance, some stranger, that can be stimulating.
The old woman was glad people let them alone, or confined their attentions to formal kindnesses. So that she was able to watch her husband in peace, and, in such time as remained, devote herself to discovering whether he had really loved her, whether he had ever been conscious that she had inflicted on him the great wounds he had suffered, and whether it was still possible at this last moment to love a person in that measure in which he should be loved.
As for the old man, he was quite content to sit in the rather cold sunlight, but well wrapped up. He was soon hobbling about proppily on the stick. He would even go down to the tool shed sometimes, and move the tools from one position to another. Followed by that black dog.
It would be Stan Parker’s last dog, and was itself a great age, distracted by canker and the itch.
‘All dogs like Stan,’ said his wife, pinching up her eyebrows tragically. ‘They follow him around. There was that red one when we first came here, that I could never stand, lolloping thing, would not let me touch him. Some young dog he had picked up as a boy. Look at this one now. All his teeth gone, or stumps. Yellow. His breath is terrible, I tell you. Stan will not have him put away, though. He understands him, I suppose, whatever there is to understand.’
And did the dog, looking up through those milky eyes, grinning through that mauve mouth from which the frill had fallen away, perhaps understand Stan? She would have given him a push sometimes, if he had not been so mangy. But she did also stand bowls of milk for him in the grass, and go away quickly before she could notice the details of his misery.
The dog lay beside Stan Parker, gnawing at a raw place between the toes of one of his paws. He was a quiet dog. The back of his neck was innocent and unprotected. A blow could have fallen easily.
That afternoon the old man’s chair had been put on the grass at the back, which was quite dead-looking from the touch of winter. Out there at the back, the grass, you could hardly call it a lawn, had formed a circle in the shrubs and trees which the old woman had not so much planted as stuck in during her lifetime. There was little of design in the garden originally, though one had formed out of the wilderness. It was perfectly obvious that the man was seated at the heart of it, and from this heart the trees radiated, with grave movements of life, and beyond them the sweep of a vegetable garden, which had gone to weed during the months of the man’s illness, presented the austere skeletons of cabbages and the wands of onion seed. All was circumference to the centre, and beyond that the worlds of other circles, whether crescent of purple villas or the bare patches of earth, on which rabbits sat and observed some abstract spectacle for minutes on end, in a paddock not yet built upon. The last circle but one was the cold and golden bowl of winter, enclosing all that was visible and material, and at which the man would blink from time to time, out of his watery eyes, unequal to the effort of realizing he was the centre of it.
The large, triumphal scheme of which he was becoming mysteriously aware made him shift in his seat, and resent the entrance of the young man, who had jumped the fence and was coming down towards him, stepping over beds rather than following paths, he was so convinced of achieving his mission by direct means and approaches.
Stan Parker was shrinking all this time. He did not like to speak to people now. His skin was papery, you could see through it almost in certain light. His eyes had been reduced to a rudimentary shape, through which was observed, you felt, a version of objects that was possibly true.
When the young man had reached the old one, who purposely did not look up, but at the shoe which had approached, and which was crushing the brown nets of clover, he burst at once into a speech, addressing the button of the old man’s cap.
He said, ‘I just wanted to have a little talk, sir, I was passing, and saw you sitting here on this beautiful day.’
Sir, he said, very respectful. Some kind of a student perhaps. But the old man drew in his neck, which was as wrinkled as a tortoise’s.
‘I wanted, when I saw you, sir, to bring to you the story of the Gospels’, said the young man, ‘and of Our Lord. I wanted to tell you of my own experience, and how it is possible for the most unlikely to be saved.’
The old man was most unhappy.
‘I was a fettler. I don’t know whether you know anything of conditions in the fettlers’ camps,’ said the young man, whose experience was filling his eyes, even to the exclusion of his present mission, the old man.
The young evangelist began to present himself in the most complete nakedness.
‘Drinking and whoring most week-ends,’ he said. ‘We would go down into the nearest settlement and carry back the drink. It was wine mostly. We would knock the necks off, we were craving for it that bad. The women would come up along the line, knowing where the camp was. There were black women too.’
The old man was intensely unhappy.
When the young one had finished his orgasm, he presented the open palms of his hands and told how he had knelt upon his knees, and grace descended on him.
‘This can happen to you too,’ he said, kneeling on one knee, and sweating at every pore.
The old man cleared his throat. ‘I’m not sure whether I am intended to be saved,’ he said.
The evangelist smiled with youthful incredulity. No subtleties would escape the steam roller of faith. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said smilingly.
If you can understand, at your age, what I have been struggling with all my life, then it is a miracle, thought the old man.
He spat on the ground in front of him. He had been sitting for some time in one position, and had on his chest a heaviness of phlegm.
‘I am too old,’ he said colourlessly.
He was tired really. He wanted to be left alone.
‘But the glories of salvation,’ persisted the evangelist, whose hair went up in even waves, ‘these great glories are everybody’s for the asking, just by a putting out of the hand.’
The old man fidgeted. He was not
saying anything. Great glories were glittering in the afternoon. He had already been a little dazzled.
‘You are not stubborn, friend?’
‘I would not be here if I was not stubborn,’ said the old man.
‘Don’t you believe in God, perhaps?’ asked the evangelist, who had begun to look around him and to feel the necessity for some further stimulus of confession. ‘I can show you books,’ he yawned.
Then the old man, who had been cornered long enough, saw, through perversity perhaps, but with his own eyes. He was illuminated.
He pointed with his stick at the gob of spittle.
‘That is God,’ he said.
As it lay glittering intensely and personally on the ground.
The young man frowned rather. You met all kinds.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here’s some books that I will leave with you. Take your time. Have a read. Some of them’s light enough.’
His vice was gnawing at him. He had to get to the end of the road.
After he had gone and the tracts were flapping and plapping in the undergrowth, and the black dog had smelled one with the tip of his dry nose, the old man continued to stare at the jewel of spittle. A great tenderness of understanding rose in his chest. Even the most obscure, the most sickening incidents of his life were clear. In that light. How long will they leave me like this, he wondered, in peace and understanding?
But his wife had to come presently.
‘Stan,’ she said, approaching, he knew it was she, crunching over the grass with her bad leg, ‘you will not believe when I tell you,’ she said, ‘I was scratching round the shack, in the weed, where the rosebush was that we moved to the house, the old white rose, and what did I find, Stan, but the little silver nutmeg grater that Mrs Erbey gave me on our wedding day. Look.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
What was this irrelevant thing? He had forgotten.
Branches of shadow were drifting across his face, interfering with his sight. The scent of violets was a cold blur.
‘When we always accused that fellow who was selling the magnetical water,’ Amy Parker said.
Her face was quite pleased. She was herself bad enough to expect the worst in others. Yet sometimes, if seldom, man is exonerated.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it is all discoloured, and quite useless. Though we never did use it,’ she said.
She was going away, but came back, and took his hands as if they had been inanimate objects, and looked into his face, and said, ‘Is there anything you want, Stan?’
‘No,’ he said.
What could she have given him?
She herself began to suspect this. She went away, wandering through the garden in search of an occupation.
Exquisitely cold blue shadows began to fall through the shiny leaves of the trees. Some boulders that had been let lie in the garden all those years, either because they were too heavy to move or, more likely, because nobody had thought about them, assumed enormous proportions in the heavy bronze light. There was, on the one hand, a loosing and dissolving of shapes, on the other, a looming of mineral splendours.
Stan Parker began to go then. To walk. Though his hip was stiff.
I believe in this leaf, he laughed, stabbing at it with his stick.
The winter dog’s dusty plume of tail dragged after the old man, who walked slowly, looking at the incredible objects of the earth, or at the intangible blaze of sunlight. It was in his eyes now.
When he had reached the side of the house on which the shrubby, gnarled honeysuckle had grown too big, and had reached over, and was scratching the side of the house, his wife was standing on the step.
‘What is it, Stan?’ she asked.
Her face was afraid.
I believe, he said, in the cracks in the path. On which ants were massing, struggling up over an escarpment. But struggling. Like the painful sun in the icy sky. Whirling and whirling. But struggling. But joyful. So much so, he was trembling. The sky was blurred now. As he stood waiting for the flesh to be loosened on him, he prayed for greater clarity, and it became obvious as a hand. It was clear that One, and no other figure, is the answer to all sums.
‘Stan,’ cried his wife, running, because she really was afraid that she had been left behind.
They clung together for a minute on the broken concrete path, their two souls wrestling together. She would have dragged him back if she could, to share her further sentence, which she could not contemplate for that moment, except in terms of solitary confinement. So she was holding him with all the strength of her body and her will. But he was escaping from her.
‘Ahhhhhh,’ she cried when he was lying on the path.
Looking at him.
He could not tell her she would not find it in his face. She was already too far.
‘It is all right,’ he said.
She was holding his head and looking into it some minutes after there was anything left to see.
Amy Parker did not cry much, because she had often visualized this event. She got up unsteadily, she was a heavy old woman, and went through the garden with tenderness, in a torn stocking, to call those people who would come and give her material assistance. She promised herself great comfort from this. And from the grandson, Elsie’s boy, in whose eyes her own obscure, mysterious life would grow transparent at last.
So she rounded the corner of the empty house. Whimpering a little for those remnants of love and habit that were clinging to her. Stan is dead. My husband. In the boundless garden.
Chapter 26
IN the end there are the trees. These still stand in the gully behind the house, on a piece of poor land that nobody wants to use. There is the ugly mass of scrub, full of whips and open secrets. But there are the trees, quite a number of them that have survived the axe, smooth ones, a sculpture of trees. On still mornings after frost these stand streaming with light and moisture, the white and the ashen, and some the colour of flesh.
There is nothing else in the bush, except the little sarsaparilla vine, of which the purple theme emerges from the darker undertones. There is silence, and a stone lizard. And a dog that has died recently, that the maggots have not yet had time to invade. The dusty dog lying with his muzzle turned sideways on his paws in perfect simplicity of death.
The rather leggy, pale boy comes down later into the bush. He is mooning there, and rubbing his forehead against the bark of trees. He is breaking twigs, and making little heaps of sticks in various patterns. He is writing in the sand, and expecting precious stones in the surfaces of rocks.
The scraggy boy, who has grown too long for his pants and for the arms of his coat, has come down from the house of death because he cannot stand it any longer. Well, his grandfather is dead. An old man, whom he loved, but at a distance, amongst wood shavings. Death gave the boy a fright, but he had soon recovered, and absorbed all its strange and interesting details. Then he had begun to suffocate. What can I do? he said.
So he had come away into the bush. He had in his pocket a piece of glass his grandmother had once given him. He lay on his back, on the sandy earth, on the root fibres and decomposing leaves, and looked through the glass at the crimson mystery of the world.
What would he do?
He would write a poem, he said, dragging his head from side to side in the sand, but not yet, and what? He was tortured by impotence, and at the same time the possibility of his unborn poem. The crimson sky drifting on his face, and the purple snakes of trees. He would write a poem of death. Long words wired for the occasion, marble words of dictionaries, paper words in rat traps would decorate his poem. He was a bit frightened of it. But of course he did not believe in it, not really. He could not believe in death. Or only in passing through a dark hall, in which it is an old overcoat that puts its empty arms around him. Then death is faintly credible because it is still smelling of life.
So he would write a poem of life, of all life, of what he did not know, but knew. Of all people, even the closed ones, who do open o
n asphalt and in trains. He would make the trains run on silver lines, the people still dreaming on their shelves, who will wake up soon enough and feel for their money and their teeth. Little bits of coloured thought, that he had suddenly, and would look at for a long time, would go into his poem, and urgent telegrams, and the pieces of torn letters that fall out of metal baskets. He would put the windows that he had looked inside. Sleep, of course, that blue eiderdown that divides life from life. His poem was growing. It would have the smell of bread, and the rather grey wisdom of youth, and his grandmother’s kumquats, and girls with yellow plaits exchanging love-talk behind their hands, and the blood thumping like a drum, and red apples, and a little wisp of white cloud that will swell into a horse and trample the whole sky once it gets the wind inside it.
As his poem mounted in him he could not bear it, or rather, what was still his impotence. And after a bit, not knowing what else to do but scribble on the already scribbled trees, he went back to the house in which his grandfather had died, taking with him his greatness, which was still a secret.
So that in the end there were the trees. The boy walking through them with his head drooping as he increased in stature. Putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end.
The Tree of Man Page 60
