Rifling Paradise

by Jem Poster

  ‘Yes, in that respect I count myself fortunate. I’ve only been blessed with one son, but I couldn’t wish for a better helpmate than he’s turned out to be.’ He threw back his head and called out, ‘Billy! Come up and meet the gentlemen.’

  I had assumed, seeing the half-naked brown body stooping above the turned soil, that the boy was a hired hand, one of the aboriginals of the neighbourhood, and I was glad to have recognised my error without having revealed it. Billy straightened up and wiped his palms on the seat of his ragged breeches before starting up the slope towards us.

  He moved lightly and with a dancer’s grace, his slender arms held out a little from his body, his feet sure and nimble. As he drew level with us, he swept the tangle of black curls back from his forehead and flashed me a smile of such unguarded warmth that my own more formal greeting died on my lips. Bullen gave the boy a curt nod and turned aside.

  ‘You’re Mr Redbourne, aren’t you?’ said Billy, looking into my face with undisguised curiosity. ‘Da says you’ve come from England.’ His voice was deeper than his childlike manner and physical slightness had led me to expect, and I saw, examining his features more closely, that his cheeks and chin were lightly downed with dark hair.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where I live. Very far away, Billy, on the other side of the world.’

  Even before he replied, I could see from the change in his expression that I had struck the wrong note. ‘I know where England is,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’ve not had much schooling but I’m no dunce, and we’re not short of books and maps. You’ll see when you step inside.’

  ‘If you gentlemen are agreeable,’ said Preece, cutting in quickly, ‘we’ll have a bite to eat now. Billy will take the ponies down to the station and collect your luggage.’

  Bullen gave a grunt, which I took to signify assent. Preece indicated a low bench in the shade of the vines. ‘If you’d like to sit there for a moment,’ he said, ‘I’ll call you in when it’s ready.’ And then, turning to Billy, who was showing signs of wanting to resume his discussion with me: ‘Go on now – the sooner you’re off, the sooner you’ll be back.’ The boy flitted away towards the gate with Preece following on at his own slow pace.

  I sank gratefully on to the bench. Bullen made no move to join me there but stood looking down the garden, tugging irritably at his beard.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  He swung round savagely. ‘For God’s sake, Redbourne, you can see what’s wrong. We’ve been palmed off with shoddy goods. As scrawny a runt as I’ve ever clapped eyes on, and a bloody half-and-half into the bargain. If I’d known—’

  ‘Quietly, Bullen. Preece will hear you. And in any case, I don’t see any great difficulty. Assuming Billy’s up to the job—’

  ‘How could he be up to the job? I’m prepared to believe that he knows the territory – these people always do – but how’s he going to cope with his share of the baggage? We need a man with the strength of a mule, and we’re lumbered with a skinny boy.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive. And no one in his senses would set himself up with a job he knew to be beyond his capabilities.’

  ‘These are poor people, Redbourne, scratching a living from the dirt. You can see how it is. I send word that we’re willing to pay good money for certain services, and of course they’ll come forward claiming to be able to provide those services. Whether they can be relied upon to do so is another matter.’

  What little I had seen of our hosts inclined me to give them the benefit of the doubt, but all my attempts to reason Bullen into a more charitable frame of mind proved futile. I was relieved when Preece appeared at the window and called us in to eat.

  It took me some moments to adjust to the gloom of the interior but there wasn’t, in truth, a great deal to see. Bare walls and floor, the sleeping area curtained off from the living room with a length of plain burlap; four shelves supported on iron brackets, three lined with books and one piled untidily with cooking utensils; a small blackleaded stove, a sturdy pine table set for our meal and four wicker-seated chairs that had evidently seen better days. There was only one item of any distinction: against the side wall stood a dresser of dark oak, beautifully crafted and speaking with mute eloquence of another time and place.

  ‘It’s not what you’re used to, perhaps,’ said Preece, catching my glance, ‘but you’ll get used to worse once you’re out in the bush. And I’ll guarantee,’ he added, motioning us to our seats, ‘you’ll not taste food as good as this again before your return.’ He leaned over the stove and began to ladle thick orange-brown stew into an earthenware bowl.

  At certain junctures in my privileged but not entirely happy life, I had found solace in contemplating the pleasures of a simpler existence. Imaginary pleasures, I would tell myself, returning obediently on each occasion to the cares and duties I was born to; but sitting at my meal with Preece that afternoon, listening as he discoursed with quiet passion on his own experience of simple living, I was seized again by the old longings, and forcefully struck by the notion that a man might take more pleasure in a single well-managed acre than in a neglected estate.

  Bullen was clearly less favourably impressed than I was. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, shifting and fidgeting as Preece veered from agricultural matters to philosophical speculation, and at last he set down his spoon, scraped back his chair and rose to his feet. ‘I’m going for a stroll,’ he said. ‘Do you want to join me, Redbourne?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, irritated by the interruption and scarcely troubling to glance up. ‘I’ll stay here.’

  ‘As you please.’ Bullen picked up his rifle and strode to the door. ‘Call me when the boy arrives with the luggage.’ I heard the rap of his boot heels on the steps, and then he was gone.

  17

  I was, to tell the truth, glad to be rid of Bullen for a while, and I sensed that Preece felt much the same. His manner became more confiding, his matter more directly personal, and I, for my part, was sufficiently intrigued to encourage his disclosures. I don’t mean to imply that there was anything culpably indiscreet about his conversation, but it seemed to me that I was being offered privileged access to his life, and I was flattered by the thought. His childhood, I gathered, had been a happy one, and he had been considered something of a scholar in the small-town school he had attended, but he had chosen to follow his father into the mines, moving westward in his early twenties as the industry expanded.

  ‘It wasn’t what my parents had wanted for me, but I was doing well for myself, earning good wages. My lodgings were cheap and I’d no family to support, nor any vices to speak of, so I was able to put something by. I’d had it in mind from the time I started at the mine that I should work there until I was thirty and then get out and buy myself some property – a few acres, a small herd of cattle. I’d even chosen the spot. There’s a stretch of land along the Hawkesbury river, a little beyond Wise-man’s Ferry, that I used to visit with my parents when I was a child – meadows so fresh and green they seemed to glow with their own light. That was where I thought I’d fetch up, though as you see …’ He leaned back in his chair and spread his calloused hands palm upward.

  ‘It seems to me, Preece, that you’re very well placed here.’

  ‘Oh, don’t mistake me. I’m where I belong, and glad of it. But in those days I thought a man – any strong-willed man – could choose his path through life, and I had to learn through suffering that that’s not so. I had a notion that by bending my body to my will I could bend the world, and the closer I drew to my thirtieth birthday, the harder I drove myself. In the end I was working all the hours I could keep myself upright, sometimes two shifts back to back. I won’t say no one questioned it, but no one stopped me. There was an understanding: they needed the labour – and when I was whole there wasn’t a man in the company could match me load for load – and I wanted the money. And though I’d begun by imagining a small-holding, I came to think – well, it was a kin
d of madness, Mr Redbourne, dreaming of myself as a big landowner in a fancy house. Thoroughbred, servants, society wife, the lot. I’d got it all mapped out in my head, that other life, so different from the one I was leading. And though I knew it for a dream, I couldn’t rid myself of it.’

  ‘Young men are bound to dream,’ I said. ‘It’s natural. And there’s no telling how their visions may inform the pattern of their future lives.’ I was thinking, in fact, of my own case, of the strange, late flowering of my youthful ambitions in a land as extraordinary as any I had ever dared to imagine.

  ‘True enough. But I think this was a dream gone wrong, like clear spring water souring where it pools. And what I was about to tell you is that it came near to destroying me. It was a sweltering evening in early January, and I rolled up for the night shift half dead on my feet with weariness. My mates could see at once that I wasn’t fit for work. “You go home,” they said, “go home and get some sleep.” It was good advice, but I wouldn’t heed it. And that was the night the dream came to an end.’

  There was a crash from outside, the echoing report of a rifle-shot. Preece eased himself to his feet and stepped over to the doorway, squinting into the sunlight. ‘It sounds as though your friend is starting as he means to go on,’ he said drily. There was, I thought, a hint of reproof in the observation, but I didn’t respond. After a moment, he returned to his chair and picked up the thread of his tale.

  ‘I was working, I remember, in a kind of daze, keeping at it by sheer force of will. I was hunkered down when it happened, reaching for my pick, my cheek up close against the coalface so I couldn’t see clearly. I heard it all right, though – a hard, tearing sound as the lump split from the seam – and if I’d had my wits about me I might have got clear in time, but I was slow on the uptake and slow on my feet. I remember one of my mates crying out, but I think I was already under it by then, pinned by the legs and twisting from side to side like a crushed snake.

  ‘I was lucky to be alive, I see that now, but that’s not the way it seemed then. I was screaming fit to wake the dead as they lifted the fallen coal, moaning and crying out as they stretchered me down to my lodgings. When Dr Milner told me the left leg would be fine, I knew at once what he was going to tell me about the other, and I began to blubber like a baby. He’d have had it off there and then, but I wouldn’t let him. “You think it over,” he said at last, “and I’ll call by again first thing.” I let him dress it as best he could, but I wouldn’t take the morphine he gave me, for fear of weakening my resolve.

  ‘When he arrived next morning, I told him I wanted more time. “More time for what?” he said angrily, and then, a little more gently: “You must believe me, Owen, the leg’s too badly smashed to mend.” There were moments I thought so myself, but there was a kind of stubbornness in me kept me going, though the pain gave me no rest. “You’re putting your life in danger”, Dr Milner told me when he called again that evening. “If you won’t let me amputate, I’ll take no further responsibility for you.” Even then I wouldn’t let him. I was waiting. I can see that now.’

  ‘Waiting? For what?’

  ‘For her. The third morning after the accident she turned up at the door. Let herself in as though she’d been summoned, though I know for a fact that no one had sent for her. I’d had a terrible night, I remember, the pain a little dulled by that time but lodged close, if you take my meaning, as if it had moved deeper into my body and meant to stay. And I can see it now, how she steps in – yes, with the shine from outside making a path from the doorway to the foot of my bed so that she seems to be walking on light – and unslings a small basket from her shoulder. And though she comes towards me so softly—’

  ‘Who is this, Preece? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘My wife. I mean the woman who was to bear my child, though at the time I’m speaking of, I’d no more idea of that than – but that’s not quite right. Because what I was going to say was that as she approached the bed, I began to tremble, and my heart banged away at my ribcage like a steam-hammer.’

  ‘Love at first sight,’ I suggested, smiling.

  There was no answering smile. He was staring out through the open door, his eyes glittering in his thin face.

  ‘Love didn’t come into it,’ he said. ‘Not then. Just the certainty that she was there by way of answer to some cry or prayer I’d been too proud to utter. And it was fear I felt – no doubt of it – but something else too: a sense of being visited by a power that wasn’t my own. Not hers either – not exactly – but streaming from her like sunlight off a looking-glass. I’d been a chapel-goer all my life and I’d often thought about those early Methodists, the way they’d known the call when it came. Well, this was my call, Mr Redbourne, only it came from a quarter I’d no knowledge of – had barely thought about. And perhaps that’s the nub of the matter: we know it’s the real thing because it’s like nothing we could ever have invented for ourselves.’

  ‘So this was some kind of religious conversion?’

  He seemed to consider the phrase. ‘I don’t know what you’d call it,’ he said at last. ‘What I do know is that from the moment she walked through the door I understood that my life was set to change, bottom to top.’

  ‘And your leg?’

  ‘I was coming to that. She set her basket on the floor and pulled the coverings down to the bed-end. And it might have been because of the pain and fever, but I felt no shame at that, nor when she lifted my nightshirt and pushed it back. And she, for her part, didn’t flinch, though knee to ankle looked like something you’d find on a butcher’s slab. Everything was strange, yet nothing seemed out of place, if you see what I mean. I remember her holding the leg, just above the damage – her hands very cool against my skin. And with that, the pain drew off, and the fear with it, and I found myself watching her with a kind of curiosity, as though her actions had nothing to do with me. She reached down and took a little knife from the basket – not a steel knife, but one of the chipped stone blades they make. And even though I thought at first she was going to cut me, I wasn’t remotely troubled by the idea.’

  ‘But she didn’t?’

  ‘Cut me? No. She stretched out her arm and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. Then she nicked the flesh’ – he tapped the spot on his own arm – ‘just here, on the inside of her elbow, and began sucking at it.’

  I said nothing, but my expression must have given me away. ‘Maybe we’re the unnatural ones,’ he said, looking hard at me. ‘Anyhow, you can’t judge this until you’ve heard the upshot. After a while she spat the blood into her palms and rubbed it over the upper part of my leg, very gently at first and then with firmer movements. And as she worked – I can’t explain this, Mr Redbourne, I can only tell you what happened – as she ran her hands back and forth, my leg began to throb and twitch, and the life flooded back into it like water through a lifted sluicegate. I don’t want to call it a miracle – it was weeks before I was able to walk again and, as you see, I’m still slow on my feet – but the point is, the leg was saved. And that’s not the whole of it, either, because whatever happened on that morning set my mind off in new directions. I had plenty of time for reflection in the days that followed, of course, and little by little I came to see what a fool I’d been, reaching out for a dream while the life I’d been given slipped by without my noticing. She showed me what I’d almost lost, and made it all real to me again. Just ordinary things, you might say – the sound of rain beating on the panes or the doorsill, the smell of hot bread, her footfall as she crossed the floor to tend to me – but coming at me so sharp and sweet they brought the tears to my eyes … Does this make sense to you, Mr Redbourne?’

  I nodded. It crossed my mind that I might tell him something about Eleanor, but before I could speak, he rose stiffly to his feet and pulled open one of the drawers of the dresser. ‘I’d like you to see this,’ he said, handing me a photograph mounted on a dog-eared rectangle of green card. ‘It doesn’t do her justice, but it catches someth
ing of the look of her.’

  The photograph itself was scarcely larger than a postcard and I had some difficulty in making out the detail, but it seemed at first sight to be a rather conventional studio portrait. Preece’s tale had led me to expect a figure altogether more dramatic than this full-featured housewife, a little beyond the first flush of youth, her hair pulled back from her face in the European fashion and her dark skin set off by a plain white blouse. But peering more closely, I was struck by something in her gaze, some quality of abstraction or inward concentration, as though she’d taken the measure of it all – the photographer and his paraphernalia, the absurd painted backdrop she’d been posed against – and decided that it didn’t concern her. It wasn’t haughtiness exactly, and certainly not contempt, but she had the look of a woman whose mind was on higher or deeper things. I handed back the photograph. ‘Mrs Preece was evidently a woman of character,’ I said.

  ‘She never took my name. To tell you the truth, we didn’t marry, though that wasn’t for want of asking on my part. “We have what we have,” she used to say. Sometimes I wondered whether she’d already given herself – to one of her own people, I mean – before she came to me, but she never said, and it didn’t seem right to question her. I didn’t even know where she came from – she certainly wasn’t from the mountains – but after a while there seemed no need for questions. She was right: we had what we had, and though I wish she’d been with us for longer, you’ll not hear me complain.’

  I sat very still, waiting, watching his face. He seemed to have withdrawn into a state of quiet meditation, and after a while it occurred to me that he had said all he wished to say, and that I should leave him to his thoughts. But as I made to rise, he looked up sharply, as though at some unwarranted interruption, and I realised that there was more to come.

  ‘They were the best years of my life, no doubt of it, the years I spent with her. Once she had me back on my feet again I found work in the company office, but I knew that wasn’t for me. I was biding my time, Mr Redbourne, waiting for the next thing. Not fretting, just waiting. And one day she looked across at me as we sat at breakfast – and I remember her having to raise her voice a little against the rattle and clank of the freight-wagons going by on the track beyond the back yard – and she said, very simply and firmly, “I don’t want the child to grow up here.” That was how she broke the news to me, and it was the sign I’d been waiting for. Within a fortnight I’d found this plot, and by the time Billy was born the hut was built and furnished, and I’d started to clear the scrub out back. And as I worked, the strength returned to my arms and shoulders, and the hope to my heart – not the mad hope of wealth and power that had led me astray, but a sweet and steady sense of the worth of what I was doing.