River

by Shira Nayman

  Jimmy looked back in the direction of the plane wreckage. “So, what happened, anyway?”

  The inflections of Jimmy’s voice intrigued me; his Aussie accent was broader than Talia’s and Grandpa Jack’s. I was also wondering whether or not to be scared. There was something disconcerting about Jimmy, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt in my gut though that he meant us no harm.

  Talia gave a brief account of our misadventure.

  “Your dad will be back here, one two three,” Jimmy said, eyeing Talia as she picked up one of our bottles to pour water into the billy. “Hang onto that, you’ll need it. The Darling’s got lots of little creeks and stuff. They’re like her granddaughters. Nice, sweet water. Just have to know where.”

  Jimmy reached over, took the billy and disappeared back into the scrub.

  Talia and I looked at each other.

  “What d’ya reckon?” Talia said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He seems nice and like he wants to help. But there’s something odd about him.” I pulled the blanket tightly around my shoulders.

  Talia nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “His face is smooth, but he has the eyes of an old man. No, a child. I don’t know, it goes back and forth, like he’s young and old at the same time.”

  We were both quiet for a while.

  “I’ve never met an Aboriginal person before,” I said.

  “There aren’t a lot of Aboriginal peoples in the city,” Talia said. “Not in Melbourne. I knew an Aboriginal girl, Alexi, when I was in third grade. She lived in the orphanage. I went there a few times to play with her. She slept in a dormitory with the other girls, and they were all like sisters. But the housemother was horrible. The kids were scared of her.”

  Talia poked among the sticks on the ground in front of her.

  “I never asked her what happened to her parents. Why she was living in the orphanage, not with relatives or something.” Her voice was grim, her face looked tight and closed. “I’ve thought about her a lot lately. With all the news stories about the stolen generations. I can’t believe the terrible things our government did. This is their country, their land. Imagine! Stealing children from their homes. Destroying families. Decimating cultures. Makes me want to run away to someplace else. But where would I go? It’s not like there’s some perfect place where peoples have never been mistreated.”

  I thought of Billy, asking that little boy in Nashville if he was a slave: thought of our own terrible history, in all its brutality. Of the countless injustices that still prevailed in so many areas of our society.

  “After I left primary school, I never saw Alexi again. I always felt like there was some awful secret going on. I can’t explain it, but I felt it. And it was true! There was an awful secret!” Talia’s eyes filled with tears. “I want to—I don’t know, say sorry to her.”

  This seemed to make Talia remember something. She sat up bolt straight. “You know, the Aboriginal people have asked the Australian government to apologize for their terrible brutality. For stealing children. For destroying their culture. And the government won’t! They’re too afraid of having stuff taken away from them—the land that they stole in the first place!”

  I remembered so clearly the day, a few years ago, when Mama excitedly showed me the video recording of the new Australian prime minister finally issuing the long overdue apology to the First Nations. Way too late, and way too little, Mama had said, but still, she had smiled through her tears as she watched. I closed my eyes and again saw in my mind’s eye the prime minister, reading from his notes, heard again his words—so clearly, as if he were speaking right into my ear. “To the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say Sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say Sorry.”

  I wanted to take Talia’s hand and tell her that one day, many years from now—thirty-four to be exact—Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would finally issue the apology to the First Nations, though of course this would do nothing to undo the unforgivable wrongs that had traumatized the Aboriginal peoples.

  So much had happened in the past day, I found myself feeling confused trying to take it all in. Before I could sort my thoughts out, Jimmy reappeared, holding our billy, filled to the brim with water.

  “That was quick,” Talia said. “The river must be nearby. Funny, I don’t hear the sound of water.”

  Jimmy set the billy down on the string Talia had rigged up, tied to two long, sturdy sticks, above the thriving flames of the fire.

  “It’s just a creek,” he said. “I hear it. But my ears are from around these parts. You girls from the city, yeah?”

  We both nodded.

  “Here—look,” Jimmy said, walking a few yards to where the bush thinned a little. He gestured to us to follow. Rising, my knees creaked, and my ankles wobbled. We followed Jimmy and then all three of us crouched down by a bare patch in among the bushes. Jimmy pointed through this opening. I saw a glimmer and, a moment later, heard the faint sound of moving water, as if my glimpse of the creek had brought the sound to my ears.

  Jimmy smiled, as if he’d just sighted an old friend.

  “Gubba give some real stupid names to things,” he said. Then caught himself, adding: “No offense. But I like that one—the Darling River. She is a darling. She’s my mother’s sister.”

  We walked back together to the fire.

  “You girls hungry?” Jimmy asked. “I’ve got some bush tucker.”

  “Yes, please,” I said. We’d not eaten since our afternoon tea at the Flying Doctor Service base. Talia nodded, too. Jimmy opened the canvas satchel that was slung across his chest and drew out a bag of sliced white bread—what we called, in America, “Wonder Bread”—a jar of mayonnaise, and a package wrapped in wax paper and tied with twine.

  “Dried ‘roo meat,” he said, untying the twine and pulling some reddish-brown strips from the wax paper. I let out a little involuntary groan.

  “No worries,” he said. “Tastes just like chicken.” He proceeded to coat three slices of the white bread with a thick layer of mayonnaise then placed a single strip of dried meat on each. He handed one open sandwich to Talia, the second to me, then placed his own on a large dried leaf in front of him.

  The water was beginning to boil; Talia put a teabag in each cup, filled them with hot water, and added a teaspoon of dried milk and sugar.

  Jimmy bowed his head in what looked like mock prayer, a little smile playing around his lips.

  “Rub a dub dub. Thanks for the grub. Yay, Lord!” How amazing! That was the funny grace Mama had taught us when we were little, the one Billy loved to say. An Aussie thing, poking fun at everything. I was surprised, though, that Jimmy just happened to know it and trot it out now.

  “Grace,” he said through his mouthful of sandwich. “Learned that from my gubba mates at school.”

  Jimmy was beginning to see, I think, that neither of us seemed to get his jokes very well. I didn’t know how Talia felt, but I was a little nervous. Here we were alone with a man who was a complete stranger.

  Jimmy put down his sandwich, chewing thoughtfully.

  “You very safe, here,” Jimmy said, his smile gone. He had read my mind! That seemed to keep happening here, on my strange journey. “This is friendly country. We’re happy to have you here. I’m gonna wait with you till your dad comes back. I will tell you about this country, if you like. I will introduce you, very serious.”

  Now, he looked directly into my eyes. “I’ll even tell you secrets—some secrets of my people, of this land.”

  The kangaroo meat tasted surprisingly good—Jimmy had been right, it was like chicken, with a gamey aftertaste. And it went surprisingly well with the white bread and mayonnaise. Maybe I was just so hungry I’d have found live witchetty grubs delicious!

  For a moment, I recalled seeing the kangaroos at the Melbourne zoo on two past trips to Australia with my pare
nts. But then I reminded myself that for farmers, kangaroos were pests—like rabbits could be in America. In parts of the country, kangaroos had over-multiplied and needed to be controlled to maintain the ecological balance.

  The fire quickly warmed our hands, feet, and faces. It also provided additional light, by which I could make out the contours of the bush around us. As I looked around, the dark shapes of the unusual variety of bushes and trees started to seem like appealing creatures that might soon uproot themselves from the dusty brown soil and join us around the fire.

  Jimmy had finished eating and was drinking his tea, his face glowing in the firelight. He turned toward me and I saw that his eyes had changed once again. No longer young-old but timeless, like water or sky.

  “You want to know about my people?” he asked, his eyes brushing over me like a breeze.

  I nodded.

  “I want to know, too,” Talia said.

  “When the gubba—white man—first came here, you know, real long time ago, he said to his boss, no man owns this land. No fields ploughed, no houses or churches. Okay, no owners, we take the land. They was wrong, of course. My people was here. Many peoples, all one people.

  “Even today, a lot of people say Kooris never ploughed, never grew wheat, never planted apple trees and orange trees. We never had to. Our mother, the earth, she gave herself freely to us. And because we respected her and loved her, we never had to go and do all them other things. That would have been harming our mother. So we just took what she gave us.

  “You see, this land, it is my father’s land, my grandfather’s land, my grandmother’s land. I am related to it, it give me my identity. That’s why I left town and came back to live on the land that is the land of my grandfather and grandmother.”

  Jimmy looked at me again with airy eyes—like he was looking right through me.

  “Our story is in the land … it is written in those sacred places, that’s the law. Dreaming place … you can’t change it, no matter who you are.

  “This is what Kooris—Aboriginal people—believe. I believe it is true for all peoples, gubba too. Just they don’t know it. So, like I say, this is my Mother.” Jimmy reached down with one hand and stroked the ground at his feet—lovingly, as one might caress a baby.

  “Mother to my people. We are the Yuin Monaro. We live here a very long time, all the way back to the Beginning, to the time of the Dreaming.”

  Jimmy paused. He seemed to be thinking something over. Again, he looked at me—singling me out, I felt, which made me a little uncomfortable. Talia did not seem to notice.

  I had the uncanny feeling that Jimmy knew me, or had known me, long ago.

  “You are interested in water, no?” Jimmy said to me with that faint and private smile. “Our Darling River. My people have depended on it since the Beginning. I will tell you how the waters came to our Mother. I will tell you about the creation of Toonkoo and Ngaardi, in the Dreamtime.

  “When Darama, the Great Spirit, came down to the earth, he made all the animals and the birds. He gave them all their names. He also made Toonkoo and Ngaardi. One day, Toonkoo said to Ngaardi that he’d go out hunting. He went out hunting kangaroos and emus, while Ngaardi stayed home and got some bush tucker. She was waiting and waiting, but Toonkoo never came home.”

  I was getting used to Jimmy’s way of speaking; now I could understand everything he said. He was lost in his story, staring into the flames, which sent light and shadow dancing across his features.

  “Ngaardi started worrying. Then she started crying and as the tears ran down her face, she made the rivers and creeks come down that mountain. She waited there all day for him to come back with the food, but he never came back.

  “As Toonkoo was out there hunting, he chucked a spear and got a kangaroo. Then he walked a bit farther and he looked up and saw Darama, the Great Spirit, up in the sky, watching him. He chucked a spear up to the sky, up to hit Darama, but Darama caught it, bent it, and chucked it back. As it came back it turned into a boomerang. That’s how we got our boomerang.”

  I thought of the boomerang my mother had bought me at the Sydney airport when I was five, on my first trip to Australia, sitting in its pride of place on my bedroom dresser. I saw again the smooth wood with the splashes of color in the center, a lizard painted in traditional Aboriginal dot style, then in my mind’s eye looked around my bedroom: the bookshelf packed with my books, the windowsills and shelves mounted on the walls filled with mementos—shells from the beach, pretty rocks and stones I’d foraged during our many family trips. There was the door, leading out onto the hallway, across which my parents’ room was to be found.

  I turned my attention back to Jimmy’s story.

  “Toonkoo was out hunting and he was still wild with Darama, so Darama took him away and put him in the moon. As the moon was coming up, Ngaardi was still crying. As she saw the moon coming up over the horizon, over the sea, she looked up into the full moon and there she saw her man, Toonkoo.

  “She went to the mountain and she laid down. She said to herself: ‘If ever he should come back, I’ll leave my heart on the mountain for him to find.’ Today, her heart is the red flower called the waratah.”

  Jimmy’s gentle voice cast a spell. I looked over to Talia; to my surprise, she was fast asleep, curled up by the fire, wrapped in a blanket.

  Jimmy stared into the dwindling flames. He picked up a stick and poked at the embers.

  “You liked the part about the boomerang, yeah?” he asked, still staring into the flames. I sat very still. Had Jimmy actually read my mind this time? Could he have known that my thoughts had turned to my own home, so very far away, as his Dreamtime story explained the origin of the boomerang?

  I nodded, slowly.

  “Boomerangs. They go from the earth—our Mother, our home. They fly up and across, very high. Toonkoo—he sent it all the way into the sky, where the spirit people live. But they come back. They always come back to your country, to your Mother.”

  I was beginning to understand the special way Jimmy used certain words. For him, the words country, people, mother, land, earth, and home seemed to all mean more or less the same thing.

  “But that’s only one message of the story,” Jimmy said. He put down the stick and turned to look at me. “And for you, not the main one.”

  Jimmy’s eyes held the reflection of the flames, though he was no longer looking into the fire.

  “The story tells of the origins of water in this land. Our land is very dry, which makes water even more precious. The Dreaming story tells us that water—it comes from crying. But it is life.”

  He looked back into the flames of the fire.

  “You know about water, don’t you? Anyway, what is your name?”

  I almost said Emily but caught myself. “Jasmine,” I said. “My name is Jasmine.”

  Jimmy smiled. “You are a flower. You need water to blossom and grow. You are not red, like waratah, heart flower. But Jasmine: white. Like a star. You are Star Flower. You travel in the sky, but you search for your place. Where you can put in your roots. Find the water of the land. Blossom and grow.”

  I had begun to tremble again—not from cold, this time, as it was warm by the fire, but from the way Jimmy had reached right in and touched my soul.

  How did he know all this? About my strange, impossible journey? About me?

  Jimmy leaned close toward me, placed one hand on my arm.

  “You will find your country, your Mother,” he said, his hand patting the earth again, as he had done before. “She has cried her river for you and you will come to settle on its banks.”

  I glanced up at the black sky. The stars shone fiercely.

  “Yes, but how do I find it?” I whispered back. Jimmy extended his hand. Tentatively, I reached for it. His palm was smooth and dry.

  He put his lips up to my ear, as a child does when telling a secret. “You will hold their sadnesses in your hand,” he said, “but you must also be touching their land. Then you wil
l tumble, and in your tumbling, you will find what you are looking for.”

  What did he mean? The thought of the pink baby booties Grandma had given me flashed across my mind; I had forgotten all about them. I stuck my hand in the pocket of my sweater. They closed around the soft little wad. Here they were! They had been with me all along! I clutched onto them. You will hold their sadnesses in your hand. Then, you will tumble. I had been holding these booties when the storm had hit in Grandma’s house. You must also be touching their land. I had been sitting on the bankie chair, that beloved object from Grandma’s own childhood home, made of rare South African stinkwood, which she had brought to Australia from South Africa—her home, however troubled a home it might have been.

  I closed my eyes. The pain in my head had thankfully receded, though my neck still ached. Exhaustion poured through my limbs. The warmth of the fire felt soothing, lapping against my body like hot, feathery waves.

  The sound of rumbling wheels snapped my eyes open. I jumped up, Jimmy jumped up; our hands flew apart.

  “Your dad. He’s back,” Jimmy said. In one quick movement, Jimmy had his mug tied around his waist, and his satchel packed. He leaned down, took me by the shoulders, looked at me straight with his deep and changing eyes.

  “Remember,” he said, “the Dreaming happened long ago, it is happening still, it will always be happening.”

  His eyes flashed with humor and warmth. “You have a white face, but you are like my people. You must go walkabout to find yourself. Follow the water, it will take you home.”

  And he was off—a streak in the dark. I stared into the bushes. The leaves, in their small fluttering motion, shuddered and shook a little, and then were still.

  Over by the fire, which must have flickered out while Jimmy was saying his goodbye, I saw that Talia had opened her eyes and was looking at me sleepily.