Carpentaria (11 page)

Although Elias never remembered his origins, he was able to acquire other people’s memory. They gave him their imagination. Through adopting their childhood memories as his own, he was able to close the gap on the past he could not remember. The faintest recollection he had left of an original memory was that he thought he had been thrown on the night sea from a bolt of lightning. He was able to describe in vivid images how he had entered the atmosphere at sound-breaking speed and because his memory could not keep up, it was left behind. He told his story so persuasively he was able to convince people of just about anything. Nothing was said to the contrary, like his having a screw loose, perhaps. He told the people who gathered around his hut just to hear him speak that when they heard thunder warring out at sea they ought to take care
.

Since one angel was unable to care for all of the sinners of the town, he said, ‘What you are really hearing is God arguing with the Devil about bringing down other angels on earth to fight the wicked people.’ People believed he made storms come in from the sea to Desperance. The way the dark cloudy skies loomed low in storm above the flat claypan country could make you believe Elias was telling the truth. He had become almost as crazy as Finn.

‘Look out!’ Elias would cry, running out onto the rain-drenched streets in an electrical storm. The old Pricklebush people looked at him out there in the pouring rain and said he had been bitten by a flea. He frightened Uptown by yelling out with his booming celestial voice, pointing his long holy stick towards the heavy clouds, and saying, ‘More angels are coming.’ It was true how those dark clouds stretching across the long, flat horizon, resting low above the town, seemed as though the heavens were about to break open. Anything could happen around Desperance.

Alright! We will get out there and draw the covers
, and the council workers drove out in the Council’s trucks to each corner of the town in the rain and they cast an eye, and threw the invisible net invented by Lonely. Lonely was a misnomer. Lonely was not lonely at all. He was just another Uptown outcast said to have
jumped the back fence
, which, in the language of Uptown, meant marriage by a white man to an Aboriginal woman. Together, Lonely and his wife, Glenny, had twelve kids who all lived together in a noisy little corrugated-iron hut in the Pricklebush, all yelling and screaming at each other, laughing and crying, surviving the good times and the bad, as you do. Anyone had to be plain stupid to call his life lonely just because he did not have a white life. Their circumstances were pure dire straits, you better believe it, and poor old Lonely fished all day long in the estuaries to feed them all.

This man’s real name was A.D. Smith, who came from somewhere and died with every single one of his family crowded around his bed. His grave no longer existed because the year he died a cyclonic flood washed out the cemetery. The yellow waters were like whirlpools tearing through the mud, searching for the bodies of all the old fishing men and their wives, and when the arms of the earth gave up clinging to their wooden boxes, the coffins shot up, poof, to the surface and were carried off to sea. Sometimes, the coffins of Desperance can still be seen floating around in the circular currents of the Gulf. Nobody ever had the nerve to haul them in, even if it was their dead Aunty or Uncle. You could just wave to them. There was nothing else you could do. If you touch the home of dead people it would bring bad luck for fishing. But what if you knock on wood? Doesn’t that cause good luck?

There was nothing to be done about the holey cemetery except to put a grader over it and build a new cemetery right over the top. The disastrous burial ground of Uptown made people react like dog-bitten sailors, demanding that a family had the right to bury their freshly dead at sea, even though the Council’s by-laws had put a stop to sea burials. So much consternation caused by the heartache of fish versus pollution versus dead people: Who was right or wrong? What were basic human rights, family rights, town rights when the dying called up the Town Council, begging to be allowed to be buried at sea? Nobody knew the answers to any of these insoluble forays of life and death. Nobody could agree about changing the law because the bottom line was: What if it meant more bad luck? Really! At the back of people’s minds what it really boiled down to, was who wanted to end up being dragged by their dead corpse of a neck by some old rotting-guts reptile living in a submerged Holden station wagon, somewhere out there in the shallow waters of the bay?

In a vivid dream before he died, A.D. Smith had envisaged a defence system in the form of a giant net made of prayers and god-fearing devotion – a protective shield, saving the town from a cyclone. The legacy of this dream was glorified every November, at the onset of the Wet, at night, when some of the Council men could be seen congregating in secret. You knew the net was being drawn, because you could see the mysterious flashing of torchlight in the long grass. In the Pricklebush, everyone stopped to listen when the bush creatures became silent. Crickets and frogs were the guardians of the night for generations of Pricklebush folk. The old people said,
Don’t worry
. They explained the men were checking their magic nails in the fence posts in case anyone was stealing them. In early March, after the Wet, the Council men were instructed to drive out again and draw the net back –
Make the town nice.
So, they went out to retrieve the net and let the fresh air flow in after the rain.

Yes! Sweetening the nostrils. Beautiful mango blossom scent filled the air wafting down the broad streets into the widely spaced-out houses and passing through the many spare allotments in between. And inside sat the lonely spinster women crocheting and knitting blankets or repairing holes in the net made by seagulls. They laboured with good works through their winter nights, gingerly picking out, here and there, trapped morsels of other preoccupied so-and-sos’ lives who were otherwise tied up with woeful marriages in clammy doonas, until the net was renewed, back to its original condition, and the Dry had passed.

One day it was decided that Elias should guard the town. For no good rhyme or reason, Elias had the big job handed to him on a plate. Why Desperance was mad about surveillance was not unexceptional, because everyone in the nation was crazy about peace of mind. Sallyanne Smith, the town’s scribe, had been running back and forth to the Shire Council office reminding the Councillors that the town had always had a guard, so they decided Elias should do it.

Not long after that, old Joseph Midnight tried to have an affair with Miss Sallyanne on the sly. He said it was in retaliation for making Elias guard. Even his wife teasingly asked him, ‘What? You want to become the guard or something?’ He said if anyone was smart like him they would be doing the same thing. He said he was going to steal her brains even though everyone told him to stop wasting his time. To steal the story on Uptown, he should have snuck down the white lady’s prickled and bindi-eyed backyard, then with a rock broken into her padlocked shed and stolen the ‘Book of Books’. Joseph Midnight would be a very useful man to know if he had her books in his possession, the complete collection of the Smith family’s sagas, in volumes wasting away in dozens of dusty cardboard boxes in her rusty old shed.

In those yellowing pages chewed by defecating vermin lay thousands of blue-inked words describing countless years of hot-collared Shire Council meetings debating imagined threats of invasion. The countless whorled words described numerous incidents of spyglasses snooping along the unguarded coastline of crocodile-infested, mangrove mudflats lacing the northern frontier. ‘Of course everyone on earth longed for such a landscape,’ she wrote. Hordes of Asians swooping down across the Pacific ocean were screaming,
We want it! We want it!
And where was the national military? In other countries. Southern states. Pretty good job vermin couldn’t shit on what the Pricklebush had locked up inside their heads.

Every day, a job being a job, at precisely four-hourly intervals, Elias would drop whatever he was doing to walk the buffel grass, spinifex, prickly bush circumference of town. His best fishing mate Norm Phantom now went to sea without him. It was no use taking him out on a boat fishing anymore, because right on the hour, without the aid of a watch, he would start off to his job on the edge of town, even if he had to tread water to get there.

‘Where hid reality?’ Elias asked in the Pricklebush, yet who could say what existed in one ordinary coastal town plonked at the top of the nation? Who knows what wars Elias thought he was looking for? What war, which war, in whose mind? Somebody could have said,
Elias, there is no war
. War was somewhere else, something to do with the USA or those foreign countries in Europe, the Middle East or Asia. Yes, all of those kind of things were just passing by, far, far away from the things people would talk about in Desperance.

Years later, some very unfortunate things happened while Elias was on patrol searching for clues about what he should be guarding against. There were several mysterious fire incidents in town – grassfires, burning of the Queen’s picture, backyards set alight. Then Sallyanne Smith’s Book of Books exploded into a bonfire when the roof lifted off her shed. On the very same night, another explosion. The Shire Council office became a gaping view onto the pale blue yonder. And with a simple dong, the toll bell fell off the burning inferno, flat to the ground. Who would have thought anyone would burn the history of Uptown? So much, thank you very much, you could say about the net of security. Arson became a new word for Desperance to deal with.

By late that night Elias Smith’s fate was all but sealed by every adult from Uptown who had crowded into the stale-beer-smelling Barramundi Bar of the Fisherman’s Hotel. Even though it was the middle of the week, people had to come to terms with new meanings in life. No one was spared. Every flashy Uptown person regretfully slipped into their plastic raincoats and, trumping and slurping with thonged feet through the deep mud to the only pub on the main street, silenced countless million frogs croaking in the ecosystem. There was nowhere else to go, no prospering community centre in spite of sitting on a Solomon’s treasure – the so-called mineral rich provenance winding underground across the Gulf country.

Men came marching into the pub in their work clothes smelling of perspiration built on old odours dried slowly over several humid days. There was mud all over the floor of the pub for Lloydie the barman to clean up later. Anyone would have died for a whiff of fresh air and every couple of minutes the townswomen, who seldom frequented the pub, sprayed themselves with lavender-scented water. Many who had been directly affected by the arsonist(s) said they should speak first. They said they were accusing Elias, it was their basic human right, since their lives had been ruined and they expressed their agreed wish:
Let us take him outside and shoot the bastard.
Voices reverberated from wall to wall, talking about:
shooting, getting rifles, killing being too good for the bastard(s)
. Everyone competed to be heard. Nobody would have thought there could be so many ideas of how Elias had gone around causing so much damage to the town. There was such a frenzy inside, someone from the edge mob, peeping through the window, eager to get a look, ended up running away whispering to himself,
Oh! Spirits
, when he saw all the shadows of Elias’s accusers, laughing around the ceiling.

Outside the pub, all the children played in the muddy waters spread about like great shallow lakes. It did not matter to them that it was night-time and they were out in the storm. They were using bedtime for running up and down the street in the rain, kicking water onto each other in all the deeper puddles made by car tyres in the muddy clay under the floodlights along the main street. Their wet bodies glistened in drenched, clinging clothes. Only the seagulls hovering in the rain around the streetlights kept an eye on them. The parents were far too preoccupied to notice that night had fallen, or even that there was a storm brewing outside, but who would have noticed? Desperance storms were like second nature to these people. Inside – their hearts and minds were inside.

Lively local youths, with girlfriends in tight clothes who were standing around hanging onto their jittery emotions, watched while pool balls rocketed all over the ripped green-clothed pool table in the weekly competition. In another corner a group of older, pot-bellied men wolf-whistled moderately at each other’s scores, as they took turns to fling three darts for a bullseye in the comp.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the bar, people from the Pricklebush sitting in the snake pit were stretching to look through a small opening into the Barramundi Bar, watching Elias defend himself. Whispering back to the others gathered behind them:
Poor thing! Poor thing!

Wild white-haired Elias was standing in front of everyone else, alone, looking proud-faced, everyone talking over him. He never had a chance. What argument did he have against a stick-up of prominent residents? He had been speaking all day at one place or another and his voice was dry. No one offered him a drink. Hmm! Hmm!
Shameful!
Yesterday’s people who could not do enough
. Smug faces surrounded Elias as they pushed up closer, their voices becoming louder, and he strained to be heard above the racket as he answered the repetitious accusations.

But listen! Listen? Quiet, quiet, at the back. Listen. You are not going to believe this but good old Elias was telling them straight. Alright! Go for it man. No one believed it. The whole pub became silent when he told them what a total, unsurpassed act of ignorance in the memory of human kind it had been for a town to have singled out one person on which to hang its destiny. Don’t say? Never heard him talk like that before. And he told them that the town must surely be registered up there somewhere in God’s book of records as being the most ridiculous place on earth. Well! That went down like a lead balloon. Desperance had standards. What a nerve, Elias.