Eucalyptus (17 page)

Some older men suggested he think about keeping his mouth shut, and that he leave the farm girls alone. If he was warned he took no notice. He was told again.

Kearney was returning to Lifford one night from seeing a girl back to her house. This girl who lived in Northern Ireland had allowed him to undo the front of her blouse. As Kearney crossed back into the Republic he was whistling, both hands in his pockets.

A man lighting a cigarette stepped out in front of him. Others came forward. Kearney looked around and tried to bluff. In daylight or inside a bar he could have charmed them. A fist or an axe-handle struck the side of his head with terrific force. It seemed to break his head open. There was another blow in his face, then others, still more from other sides. He felt his nose go. To gain sympathy he fell to the ground, and curled up, where it was worse, for it attracted their boots. So many parts of him were cracking, splitting. He felt himself going. He was only dimly aware why. He remembered feeling relieved: there's no pain. He also wondered about his motorbike. Less than an hour ago these hard teeth had touched the pale breast of the solemn farm girl, and now Kearney cried out as they snapped and bits of them fell inside his mouth.

In the struggle one side of his body was beaten up in Northern Ireland, the other in the Republic. His ribs broken and lungs punctured on one side, the fractured cheekbone, fingers and ankle on the other.

One side of his body was beaten black, the other blue. One eye closed.

Kearney was left half-dead, half-alive. Not even he was sure. Early in the morning he was found by the milkman lying in a puddle, more dead than alive.

It was as if—from that day on—one part of his feelings was dead, the other alive. It was pleasant talking to Kearney, for a while. He didn't express an opinion, he didn't take sides. One part of him would think one thing, the other part the opposite. On the one hand this, on the other hand that.

With a disability pension he moved to Dublin. There he drifted into photography.

For a person who adopted a neutral position on any given situation a career in photography was ideal, and after easily handling an apprenticeship as a police photographer, his extreme qualities of dispassionate even-handedness were recognised by Fleet Street, and Kearney was given the difficult assignments of civil wars and famines and executions in Africa and South America, assignments which had wrecked the peace of mind of others before him. Kearney showed no feelings about what he saw. His black-and-white photographs became famous in the Sunday magazines for their harsh objectivity.

And in those busy years Kearney himself became a familiar figure with his battered face, crooked leg and permanent camera bag.

In one of the newspaper offices in London he met an Australian journalist from a country newspaper in New South Wales. She had strident views on everything under the sun. Perhaps he saw something of his old self in her! Besides, she found his extreme ability to see both sides attractive. He tended to balance her; at the same time, she could see she'd be able to manage him—a life of some consistency.

No sooner had they married than she suggested they move to Sydney. One city was the same as any other city, as far as he was concerned, although in Sydney it meant beginning all over again with his camera doing police work.

It was she who convinced him to avoid black-and-white photography, and turn to colour. That was all right by him. Colour could achieve things that black-and-white couldn't, and vice versa. From a terrace house in Newtown, where doors and windows open and gasp in the humidity—gritty suburb, Newtown—they started a small business producing photographic calendars for stock agents, greengrocers and butchers to hand out in December, every year featuring a photograph of a paddock full of merinos, or a view of the same solitary Ghost Gum from different angles.

The business has not prospered. Nor has it declined.

To get an opinion out of Kearney is still impossible. He never argues. She has begun going to church. They appear to be a contented couple.

• 22 •
Rudis

THE IDEA
that a tranquil man would have a violent imagination doesn't seem possible; and yet signs of the Napoleonic phenomenon are quite common in the outer reaches of Protestantism. In fact, it may not be at all farfetched to claim that tranquillity and violent imagination are precisely what have attracted men to serve in the church in the first place. So common is this trait among ministers, pastors and missionaries it can be ignored by the Protestant leaders at their own peril. In certain conservative parishes, or when a seemingly tranquil man is shipped out to a strange and difficult country as a missionary, there's always the possibility of unseemly conduct. Missionary work, incidentally, appears to be at odds with the cardinal rule, ‘In seatedness and quietness the soul acquires wisdom'.

The story of Clarence Brown—the Reverend Clarence Brown—begins, for our purposes, not in Edinburgh where he was born, but on a river in 1903 in West Africa, in his early thirties, and finishes up (more or less) in suburban Adelaide and other parts of Australia, his traces scattered.

His father was a preacher in Edinburgh who loved the ocean-rolling surge of his own voice. Even ‘good morning' on the steps of the church was spoken with such conviction that veins bulged in his temples and forehead. It came as little surprise to the congregation one Sunday when he seemed to stammer, with his arm raised as if holding up a broad sword, and pitched forward in the pulpit.

Clarence knelt beside his father. ‘Go ye…' he seemed to be trying to say, before letting out a final sigh from the deep. Clarence had decided anyway. In early 1903 he landed in Lagos with his young wife, and the following day travelled up the River Niger to a remote hot village.

Nothing had prepared the Reverend Brown and his bonneted wife for Africa's incredible heat, the signs of illness and starvation, and everywhere an air of impassive hopelessness. He had been to London once, that was all.

The bewildering strangeness of the country was made more melancholy by the breadth of the river and the distance between people and objects. From the moment they landed in Africa and the further they went up river they felt forgotten by their own people, another tribe decked out in elaborate clothes and customs. Rubbing his hands the Reverend did his best to console his wife who was missing the piano and her many sisters in Edinburgh. In the heat she had gone red in the face and breathed through her mouth. She hated the slightest noise outside and refused to handle babies.

No rain had fallen in that part of the world for seven years.

The crops had withered away affecting the eyesight and bones of second-born children, and the communal wealth which consisted of untidy herds of black-and-white goats was decimated, permanently altering the dowry system. For the first time in living memory the River Niger had stopped flowing, and from upstream came reports of it flowing
backwards
. To the people who grew up along its banks, the world as they knew it was coming to an end.

If the entire shape of the river was simple and visible, like the sun or the moon, or a tree, or even fire, it might have been worshipped. The people took their river seriously. It passed by their lives, always there, and gave life to others. There were stories, again from upstream, of bodies floating down in flood and stopping outside houses to point to a faithless wife.

Normally the river's strength could be felt with a hand. Now that it had stopped flowing and was nothing more than a long warm pond a similar lassitude entered the people, which caused the Reverend Brown to weaken, then rapidly to lose all appearance of tranquillity.

He was like something out of the Old Testament. The gaunt figure stumbling around in a barren landscape is cannon fodder for the fables. He was a good man; it showed in a kind of hectic innocence. He could not bear to see people suffer—the children, the children. As a new arrival and a white man invested with religious powers he became the point of focus. He had to do something.

They kept looking at him, singly, in groups.

Wearing his full religious regalia the Reverend Brown prayed for rain, first in private, then alongside his silent wife—who had become unaccountably savage to the natives; then in the sweltering corrugated-iron church; and, when that failed, by the river itself before a large crowd. He looked up into the heavens: hot, entirely cloudless. This went on for weeks. He heard his own words rolling out as thunder; someone was in full control of misery and death—he called out if anyone was listening; until in a rhythmic momentum of hope and bewilderment, perhaps inherited from his father, he rushed from the church and threw into the river the large wooden statue of Christ.

Later the same day the great river seemed to move. The following day it was flowing strongly. Within a week nothing was stopping it: the river broadened, broke its banks. Frail animals and the few crops were carried away; old people and children weakened by famine too; makeshift huts along the banks swept away; even Brown's church, which was supposed to occupy the higher ground, was flooded.

To these story-telling people the Reverend had brought nothing but trouble. Since his arrival their miseries had multiplied. Behind his back was a flood of abuse. Brown couldn't understand why his weekly sermons were ignored. Reports reached London of his difficulties and the shocking action of throwing Christ into the water—aside from anything else, the statue was church property—and he was recalled, never to set foot again in Africa.

In Adelaide, which is the city of eucalypts, Clarence Brown and his wife settled in a bungalow with a red verandah in the suburb of Norwood. The placid suburb of faded grey paling fences produced a calming effect, at least in her. With his surplus of energies he became busy as a lay preacher and a furniture removalist during the week.

They had a daughter. At eighteen she was forced to marry an older man. For a while her father tried to keep her condition hidden inside the house; but when that was no longer possible he sent her, against her mother's pleadings, away.

The man she married was an insurance executive, always on the road. His name was Cave. Their child born was a son, who grew up strong and close to his mother. Due to the circumstances she became extremely dependent on him. Avoiding church she took him instead to concerts, always in the same two seats. And he never failed to be concerned at how music encouraged a violent imagination in his mother, parting her mouth, ruffling the normal tranquillity of her face, sometimes producing a tear. He still sat with her in concerts; but Mr Cave remained wary of music, which is written to the glory of God.

For a while he tried standing back to picture himself. Although solid in his socks he saw himself as a light and sketchy presence. Very easily did Mr Cave feel accidental.

At least the world of trees offered a solid base. After all, here was an entire world, psychology-free, a world both open and closed. The task of classification and description was complexity enough. Eucalypts, for example, were an intricate subject he could almost contain with his own shape, as if it was a single, endlessly reproducing person.

More than once Mr Cave had been on the point of telling Holland some of this—as if the telling would make any difference; but he decided instead it was Ellen who would show more sympathy. It was about time he opened up a conversation with her.

It was simpler with Holland to meander in and out of the subject of eucalypts. Exchange of information was easy—easier—for both of them. Mr Cave could do this as he went on naming the trees. On his many field trips along the Murray and the Darling, and Cooper Creek and beyond, Mr Cave heard stories about floods, almost as many as about bushfires or inexperienced people getting lost and dying of thirst. Walking with Holland across his property Mr Cave felt compelled to tell some of these stories, and Holland mentioned one in passing to Ellen, because it included a woman in town they both knew.

Not so many years ago during the shortage of schoolteachers, the story went, the government advertised in Great Britain. A science teacher with a pale wife and two daughters arrived and was sent to Grafton—one of those northern river towns.

They moved into a wooden house, not far from the river. They'd hardly got used to this vast land, let alone the ways of the small country town, Grafton—they'd been there barely a week—when the river rose and overflowed its banks. Still more water came down—brown, unstoppable, and everywhere. The teacher and his family were taken from their house by boat.

After the flood there was mud. It stained the walls. The teacher had to use his shoulder to open the door to the bedroom, and when it opened his wife and daughters shrieked and stepped back. The flood had deposited in their bedroom a dead cow, where it lay rotting and bloated on the double bed.

What a country! It was enough to make anyone catch the first boat back to the postcard greenery of England.

But they stayed on. He became a headmaster.

And their daughters, they eventually married in country towns. One of them is the gasbag at the post office, Holland told Ellen; the one with the brown hair set like headphones. Traces of a Midlands accent remain, the way a flood deposits a trail above a window.

From the day Ellen stepped off the train this woman in town had followed her progress. The child was without a mother! Often she asked Ellen questions about her father, at least early on. Noting the suitors who made their way out to the property the postmistress found herself almost every day handing a letter to Mr Cave, or selling him a maroon stamp. Although he was somewhat older than Ellen, she fancied his chances; he was a solid, dependable type.