Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

  Pollard stayed asleep for about twenty minutes, enough time for Coffin and Paddack to finish their meal, enough time for Paddack to speculate on the amount of baleen a whale’s head large enough to sink a ship would contain.

  “Be worth something, a whale that big.”

  “A ship-sinking monster,” said Coffin, “does not interest me. I’ve enough to fear without that leviathan stalking the seas.” Coffin stuffed his pipe, as did Paddack, and the cabin filled with smoke. Soon, Pollard, overcome by coughing, woke up.

  “Captain Pollard,” said Coffin, his pipe in his teeth, “can I offer you my extra pipe?”

  “I’ve all I need,” said Pollard.

  Captain Paddack raised his eyebrows over Pollard’s head, but Coffin politely ignored him. Pollard was digging around in the pocket of his pants. He came up with a short, wide portion of bone that he raised to his mouth, as if it were a cheroot, and began to suck on it.

  “What, my good man,” asked Captain Paddack, “is that?”

  “This,” said Captain Pollard, “is Barzillai Ray.”

  Later, when the moon was large in the sky, Captain Coffin escorted his friend back to the railing. He was sad to see Paddack go, because, even though he was insensitive and on occasion boorish, he was a friend to Coffin and always in good cheer.

  “I must ask you,” Captain Paddack said, laying a warm hand on Coffin’s shoulder, “what is ‘barsilarey’?”

  “Barzillai, first name. Ray, last name. He was shipmate to the good captain. They were forced to eat him. I thought we took all the bones from Pollard, but he managed to hide that one.”

  “That chills me.”

  Coffin nodded. “Why keep the bones when their friends are gone? What comfort can that bring?”

  As Coffin watched Paddack slipping over the water, the oars dipping in a soothing rhythm, the ocean dappled with moonlight, the sky calm and aglitter, he thought of the monster beneath him, spoiling the clear waters with its dark shadow, slowly mapping its vengeful way through the bottomless deep.

  “Stay down there, beast,” he said out loud. But his was a poor night’s sleep. A light breeze combined with some loose rigging had set something to tapping—something that Coffin translated into Pollard crawling along decks, below his windows, tapping (but why?) with his bone. Finally, thrown into a panic of such heart-thudding, chest-restricted terror, Coffin had lit the candle, crept to his window, and peered into the hopeless, somber night. The face was there: eyes sparking in a dark face!

  “Oh,” said the captain, barely rescuing the candle, which would have fallen to his bed and lit it on fire. “Oh,” he said again, recognizing the face, the eyes as his eyes—not wide with hunger, but with fear. He blew the candle out and returned to his covers. Little comfort, he thought, little comfort. But his mind wandered to the whale circling below him, while far to the north, the scientist’s monster loosed his howl into the sparkling frozen wastes and this was, finally, enough to send him off.

  His Actual Mark

  I. 1840 and North of Adelaide

  Edward John Eyre forays into the interior, northward, to where Sturt before him, and others since, suspect an inland sea. There is naught to confirm this, although a large body of water presents itself. To stymie me, he thinks. The lake—Lake Torrens—has a wet sparkle that tantalizes broken men and broken horses, for how long can they continue without finding water? But Torrens is a salt lake. A lake of salt! The novelty of this, after months of pushing through scrub and mountain and watching the horses stumble on the uneven brickwork of rocks, does not intrigue. A salt lake does not terrify—which might wake him up. A new danger, previously unimaginable, is both stunning and enervating. He thinks of his father, vicar of Hornsea, who talks often of God—the omnipresent God: Eyre, who has never before felt God’s presence, knows it here, at the perimeter of this salted lake, when hope is ebbing. On the lake’s edge, with the only sound the wind rattling the few leaves offered by the stunted trees, God is all about and patient, breathing silently, witness to everything.

  At twenty-four years of age, Eyre will lead the expedition—but no further, merely back to Adelaide, to stave off more death. He wonders if he has accomplished a great deal, but it is possible that nothing has been achieved but for the wasting of horses and time.

  Eyre decides to head west. No one has made it to the western colonies overland. As far as Eyre knows, no one has tried. Cattle and sheep are taken by ship to the southern port city of Albany, and then driven the remaining few hundred miles to Perth. Sea voyages plague livestock with disease, and once in Albany there is the problem of hiring drovers from the few unoccupied members of the population: drunkards, convicts, drunken convicts, desperate men, bored blacks who’ve never before ridden a horse, inland blacks who’ve never before seen a horse, and others, so many others, with nothing to commend them. Eyre knows this, as he has managed such journeys, managed to find the drovers, standing in the heat of almost comic intensity, with the eucalypts waving their fragile fingers in it as if to pantomime breeze, with the magpies coughing in the dust.

  II. Eyre Managing Such a Journey

  Albany! The men stare hungrily as if Eyre’s pockets bulge with banknotes, as if he too isn’t desperate after investing in these sickened sheep and piteously lowing cattle—as if he too doesn’t wonder if he were the fool, just like these men who try to gauge just what sort of idiot would show up with cattle, would consider hiring them?

  “Who can ride a horse?” asks Eyre.

  And all raise their hands, except one young black on the end, an unsmiling sort of aborigine, which Eyre has been warned is just the sort that steals your grog and evaporates into the bush the moment you’re asleep.

  “What are you doing here,” asks Eyre, “if you don’t know how to ride a horse?”

  A thought. “I know where I’m going.”

  Eyre considers this. “You know the route to Perth?”

  The youth nods.

  “Many people know the route to Perth.”

  “But I know different.”

  The boy’s voice (he looks no more than fourteen) is thick, and he delivers his words in a long garbled stream, as if it were one word. This is a skill of Eyre’s: understanding the black man’s delivery of the English language, and if he weren’t feeling judged by those large black eyes, Eyre might have a self-congratulatory moment.

  “That’s Wylie,” the harbor master says, appearing at Eyre’s side. “You’d do well to have him with you. He can find water and has a good sense of direction.”

  “Any caveats?”

  “Not really. The vicar’s been trying to convert him for over a year with no luck, so don’t bother. And his leanness is misleading. He consumes a lot of food.”

  Eyre hires Wylie and a couple of others. With losses counted, overlanding cattle from Albany to Perth is still a success. The trip back to Albany, unencumbered by the herd, is uneventful. Wylie, who has said all of five words to Eyre over their months of shared labor, has asked to accompany Eyre back to Adelaide.

  “But all your people are here,” says Eyre.

  “My problem,” says Wylie.

  Eyre considers overnight, the map of Australia unrolled across his knees. A suggestion of placement and location, hypothesis and desperate guesswork, a place for Eyre to make his mark—his actual mark—driving the lines of ink, drawing the earth itself. Wylie isn’t the most industrious worker, nor is he particularly cooperative. For an aborigine, and one so young, he doesn’t need much company, spends his time at rest looking inquiringly at the leaves waving above him or at the line of horizon dancing in the heat. He is a mystery, says Eyre romantically, he’s an idiot, he says sympathetically, he’s just a boy away from his people, Eyre says, barely more than a boy himself and also away from his people. But Wylie does seem to know where he is going: when a flooded river diverted them on their way to Perth, he knew just where to go, just as, later, when absence of water was the problem, he had no trouble finding it.

&n
bsp; “Wylie,” says Eyre the next morning, “I would like you to assist me in exploration.”

  “Expiration?” Wylie asks.

  “Exploration. Going into the far reaches of the desert, and other places,” says Eyre, but he falters, because, all of a sudden, he can’t remember what exploring is.

  “You go with sheep?”

  “No sheep,” says Eyre.

  “Cows?”

  “No cows.”

  “Why you going?”

  “To take a look and then make a map for others.”

  Wylie nods. “How’s the food?”

  “Good,” says Eyre, “until it runs out.”

  Some of Wylie’s people show up to send him off. None of them seems to know what to do, as if there is no precedent for one of their own leaving, and on a boat, of all things. Then someone remembers to laugh, and they all laugh and pat him, lovingly push him and slap his arms. Which results in more laughter, but after that, and with little ceremony—Wylie has all his possessions on his person—he boards the boat and they sail away at good speed from that far-flung spot that is Albany to that other far-flung spot that is Adelaide.

  III. Sentimental Geometry

  Something about his sense of balance makes Eyre want to think that Adelaide is in the center of the southern Australian coast. But it’s not. All the colonies are crammed together in the east, hugging the shores, clinging to the rivers, while the broad continent happens mostly to the west—a bald expanse, wide open, as if it has nothing to hide. Across this great divide, a Western toehold, although this might as well be its own island: the land that separates Albany and Perth from the east is as uninterrupted as an ocean.

  E. Alfred Delisser, when surveying the plain twenty-five years hence, will note the absence of trees. He will pronounce, “Nulla Arbor!”—the spartan landscape inspiring a Roman moment. And after that, a millennia of schoolchildren in scratchy shorts and restricting frocks will be enlightened that “Nullarbor” is not an aboriginal word at all, but yet again the work of the English invoking the language of their conquerors upon conquered terrain.

  The natives call it “Oondiri” or “no water,” finding trees—there or not there—irrelevant.

  In the 1950s, the British will test nuclear bombs there and request that all inhabitants (who could inhabit this place?) move away, but the Spinifex Wangai tribespeople are hard to find. This place of desolation (bomb it!) looks like home to them. After years of watching the sun sink into the earth, they’ll see its little sister burst from within it. Having been in this one place since the dawn of time, they’ll wonder if they have been waiting for this, like the white man who came—fish-like—from the sea, or the camels who appeared shortly after, lunging peacefully across the desert.

  And Eyre, in 1840, when he looks at his map, sees it as nulla-complete, and if he were forced to call it into existence by thrusting a name upon it, he might call it “No Ink,” since that’s what he finds remarkable, and because his Latin is restricted to a few, seldom-uttered prayers.

  Since his failure to the north, followed by another failure to the north (why does he entertain these northward thrusts?), Eyre faces west. He has first gone northward to Spencer Gulf, pushed onward, returned the same way, essentially erasing all progress, turned west, then headed back south: a triangle. He is walking around in triangles, which is no better than walking in circles—although the degrees are distributed differently. He knows the sum of the angles of his peregrinations equals 180 degrees. He knows the sum of his peregrinations equals naught. As he waits at Streaky Bay for supplies to make the big stab westward (a ray pushing from its point of origin), he’s grateful that the funding is still coming, although he’s supplying half the horses and a significant amount of provisions. Cape Catastrophe and Anxious Bay lie to the east, Denial Bay to the west.

  Wylie, who has missed the earlier exploring, down with some undiagnosable aboriginal malady, arrives with other supplies, and Eyre—along with fresh horses, bread, medicines, flour, tea—now has direction. The horses stamp idly in the dirt, soft noses dilating, eyes kindly. Eyre holds one’s harness, saying, “easy, easy,” to which the horse responds with the backward nod and nod that is the equine’s gentle agreement. Eyre knows that many of the horses will perish on this trip. He might too. But it’s hard to feel sad about his perishing—cold fear accompanied by arrhythmia and trickling sweat, maybe—but sadness? No. Although he does feel sadness for the horses. In the dust, Wylie squats flat-footed, elbows hooked over his knees. The sun that rises coldly in the past boils downward in the future.

  “That’s where we’re headed, Wylie,” says Eyre. He attempts a paternal tone, which he thinks appropriate to both his age and race, but the delivery is off and he sounds unsure and almost amused at the prospect.

  “I know that place,” says Wylie.

  “You do?”

  “Going home, right?” asks Wylie.

  “I suppose, if we’re successful.”

  Eyre can tell by the look on Wylie’s face that he doesn’t know what “successful” means and hopes this is not just a shortcoming of language, but rather an innocence that knows no failure. He hopes that Wylie understands honest progression, uncolored by valor or tragedy: just the before, when one isn’t there, and the now, when one is.

  But he is not there yet.

  And why would Wylie’s understanding of a situation determine anything?

  “You thinking?” asks Wylie.

  “Certain things concern me,” says Eyre.

  Wylie wrinkles his nose, unimpressed with concern, and worry, and all preludes to the English overcoming of inertia. If they didn’t have all these men and all these horses, and therefore all this provisioning for all these men and all these horses, there might be no cause for “concern.”

  “Too many of them, men and horses,” says Wylie.

  “That is your opinion,” says Eyre, he hopes with enough disdain to communicate that Wylie’s opinion was not wanted.

  “Too many,” says Wylie.

  Later, after a profound loss of both horses and morale, Eyre will send nearly all of the party back to the east. He will stand at the head of the Great Australian Bight and squint at the brilliant white continent extending in an unobstructed plain, bewildered by the drop of limestone cliffs to pounding waves, waves clawing at the rock face—at the continent itself—clawing it into destruction. Here, with one’s throat thick and parched, you must raise your voice to be heard above the surf. Here, even Wylie looks alien, not something that could deftly be inserted into the landscape with a few expert strokes of watercolor—black natives holding black spears with black legs at right angles, chasing prey: kangaroos to be jotted in with a few strokes of red or gray. Here, they are all extraneous. Here, at the blank spot where God ran out of ideas and couldn’t be bothered with trees and billabongs and more wildlife than the distant screech of birds digging in the sand, Eyre feels as if he’s wandered onto an empty stage, poorly costumed and with no lines rehearsed.

  Eyre enters stage right with eleven equines (nine horses, a Timor pony, and a foal), Baxter (his trusty-when-not-drunk foreman), Wylie (a native from the west), and Yarry and Joey (two natives from New South Wales as bound and indistinct in all reports as Chang and Eng). He would like to exit stage left, but that lies several hundred miles to the west across Significant Hardship. He wonders if this is suicide, and still wonders as he lifts his left foot and then his right—the mode of executing this stage of exploration, or expiration, as Wylie still terms it—left then right, all the way out of Significant Hardship and into History.

  IV. Significant Hardship

  To write the story of Eyre and Wylie is to stand on the firm plane of History and look back across the desert, much as Eyre, in later years, looks back across his life, trying to sight through more recent regret to this simpler, heroic time. Eyre’s journey is assembled into an epic of great deprivation, friendship, sentimentality (Eyre writes of his weakened horses, “Whenever we halted, they foll
owed us about like dogs”), fortitude, trust, luck, fear—all those elements of rich stories that we tread and tread like song lines are tread and tread, that we rehearse in our minds in the hope that life will provide for us a similar stage upon which to tread and tread (here come Eyre and Wylie across the Nullarbor!) with equal distinction. And if not that, perhaps populate our dreams with adventure, or our moments of rest with a perspicacious wonder more befitting a valuable consciousness than merely what needs next be done.

  Eyre, Wylie, right, left, right, left.

  But what happened to the others?

  When last observed, our intrepid explorer, Eyre, accompanied by his faithful overseer, Baxter, and three native boys—Joey and Yarry, of New South Wales (although they call it something else), and Wylie, of the Swan River Settlement (who also calls it something else)—are struggling across an expanse of desert, having nearly expired due to lack of water, after having nearly expired due to lack of water, after having nearly expired due to lack of water. This is a dry and barren place. One horse has been killed and eaten, although Eyre could not bring himself to touch it. The English do not eat their horses. They adore their horses, withholding much affection from their fellow man in order to maintain this pure, unadulterated love for God’s speechless beasts. What distinguishes Eyre from other English is the fact that he extends this sentimental attachment to his natives, wishing that they not be in pain, feeling responsible for their hunger and thirst. Baxter heaves a sigh skyward.

  Baxter is an alcoholic who distinguished the first stretch of the journey by falling off his horse. He had been dragged out of a grog shop (the things spring up along the new trails like forest mushrooms after rain), feeling the beast of liquor roaring in his veins, the sky whirling above his head (or was he whirling?), and suddenly the ground—old friend—racing up to meet him. Oh well. There’s nothing to drink in the desert—regardless of your inclinations—and what is he doing here, following Eyre across it? It’s easy enough to get from Adelaide to Perth. You go by water, like all civilized creatures. It’s only the blacks who go crawling across the scabbed back of the continent, like fleas on a sick dog. He’s been wanting to turn back for weeks. And each time Eyre has persuaded him to continue, saying that he does not know how much longer they need travel. One can only hope that the halfway point has been passed, and that to return would increase the journey. But Eyre has said that several times to Baxter, and each time they’ve struggled on through weeks that might have brought them home again.