Joan Makes History (6 page)

Joanie, Joanie,
Duncan whispered in the dusk behind a bush of the Botanical Gardens.
Your body is pleasing to me,
and I had to laugh at his prissy way of saying that he was huge and greedy in his pants.
It is late, Duncan, I must get home,
I said, but this bush
was an old friend, and the grass beneath us was warm from an afternoon of our bodies against it, so it seemed too difficult to move. Everything was humorous now, with the bottle empty beside us, and the guardian of the gardens was a great joke, walking by swinging his lamp and never spotting us.
Oh Duncan, you are a caution!
I told his ear under its gingery hair, and felt him laughing, for he was teaching me how the country folk spoke, and enjoyed the way I did not believe what he told me about what it was like there.
We get on like a bushfire, Duncan, and you make me as happy as a box of birds,
I whispered, crushed against him, feeling his breath pant against my cheek.

And you, Joanie, are a wonder,
Duncan said, and slid his hand smoothly between my thighs. I slapped his hand but he, the animal, laughing and transparently sly, removed it from my thighs only to slide it into my blouse, between flesh and undergarment, in a single smooth action that demonstrated that he had been that way before.
Duncan, you will be the undoing of me,
I said, and although Duncan was busy with a nipple between fingers, he was not too busy to say:
Joanie, all the undoing is already done.
It was true, for now my nipple and most of my left breast filled his hot soft mouth, his spiky hair tickled my chin, and there was nothing in the world but flesh against flesh.

Of course it was Duncan who penetrated that ravenous flesh of mine at last, and made a woman of me. My body did not seem to need to learn any trick of pleasure, but was my sly guide into every cranny and crevice of lust. Where had I learned so much?
You know a lot, Joanie,
Duncan whispered later as our flesh cooled together.
Do all the girls know so much, back in old Transylvania?
He fingered my body as if to memorise it, and said,
Joanie, you did not come down in the last shower.
I had the right answer for
him, quick pupil that I was.
No,
I said,
I am not still wet behind the ears, or green around the gills, or a brick short of a full load, either.
We laughed so loudly from behind our bush that a startled cat leaped in fright from a tree and ran in a hounded way across the grass into the darkness.

There it is then,
I told myself and the stars, and the heavy head of Duncan now asleep on my shoulder.
I have done it. I have become a woman. I am known of man.
It was comforting to tell myself what I had done in such rotund and respectable phrases, for I was feeling weightless, shadowy, marginal, lying on sharp nasty twigs among a smell of where someone had been taken short in a serious way and feeling bruises and aches in parts of myself that had never before been subjected to such stresses.

When it comes to the history of how this land was penetrated, much has been said. There were all those who heaved themselves up over mountain ranges, those who trudged over stones and sand, those who were tossed from wave to wave around unfriendly coasts. They are all famous fools: the books record their privations, and their fond hopes of El Dorado in the secret interior of the land, places of bliss they would succeed in penetrating and basking in for ever after.

I was there with them, and I could tell you that if they had listened to me in their blind folly, they would not have had the troubles they did, of which children read with awe: they would not have been swallowed up by deserts, or turned back by unscalable cliffs: they would not have fallen dead in their tracks from starvation, or been speared by men who knew trouble when they saw it. Ah, if only they had listened to that Joan, instead of making sure she was left out of those lying books of history, they would be sleeping sound in their beds now, and not skeletons being mumbled at by desert winds.

Those were the flamboyant reckless ones who preferred death to obscurity, but there were others, duller ones, whose minds were not on glory, but on the solider pleasures of level acres for
sheep and cows, and whose names live on in the names of potholed highways and small timid streams of water. They trundled over this new landscape, naming things carelessly, after some trite thought or other:
Frying Pan Creek,
where the frying pan had been squabbled over, or
Perambulator Hill,
where their mile measuring machine had broken, or, on a day even more barren of imagination than most,
Friday Mount.

The journals of these explorers were full of no wild hopes, nor the terse phrases of despair, but of numbers: of pounds of flour per man, of spare horseshoe nails (they were proud of themselves, these methodical men, for the way they forgot nothing, and had everything noted on a list somewhere), of the number of cows per acre that could be raised for profit from each bit of land they crossed, of miles covered and logged in the neat little book so the wild was reduced to small crawling figures in columns.

With these tedious men, every river was just one more river to cross, every mountain nothing more glorious than a fixed point against which to check their trigonometry. With such men there were no dramatic peaks or gorges, just each day a few more hills, with wretched rocks on top like old grey teeth, to be put behind them.
We have covered another thirteen miles,
they announced after doing their sums in the leather-bound book at night. The members of the party nodded and sighed, because it did not add up to anything much, even though, as they were reminded:
For a country to be mapped, it must be travelled over.
The leaders of these parties were men of tiresome enthusiasm about what they were achieving, and waxed poetic on the virtues of the land that was being revealed to their theodolites.
These beautiful recesses of unpeopled earth must no longer remain unknown!
they cried, and the men became embarrassed at such excess.

Sometimes it was years, sometimes not so long, before others arrived with axes and saddlebags. They gave the land names of their own:
Dolan's Flat
or
Braeside,
and having named it they thought they owned it. Those who had been there first watched in curiosity in the beginning, and later with spears, as these new folk did more than slash a tree and move on. The new arrivals hung water bags from trees, stretched pieces of canvas over the ground, and began the work of chopping down, heaping up, clearing away, burning off: finally they attacked the earth itself with mattock, hoe, and plough. And I, Joan, was there, among those hungry-eyed settlers with soil under their fingernails.

Unlike so many in the new land, I had not been thrust here without choice, but there had been too many glum hungry winters back in the cheerless Old Country, so that I had sickened of the struggle, and had chosen to leave the world I knew, where things grew worse each year, and to take the great leap over the oceans of the globe. I, bold Joan, had leaped up on the back of the great blind galloping horse of history that tramples the weak underfoot, and seized my destiny in both hands.

There were those on board the ship who would have liked to join themselves and their destinies to me. One in particular, a young man of carrot-coloured hair, was also being urged over these waves by the thirst for adventure and the memory of an empty stomach. Like me, he was determined that his future would not be like his past, and he hoped for great things.

Jim muttered and blandished, and held my hand so tightly I had to pull it away and laugh at his disappointment.
We would make a fine couple, Joanie,
Jim whispered, but I did not think I was ready to be any kind of couple yet.
Oh no, Jim, I am out for a bit of a lark, I am after excitement and a new life,
I exclaimed into
his smiling face, but Jim, with his sandy skin, and the freckles lying along his cheeks like pollen on a petal, did not believe that I could turn him down.

On that day when a low green land to starboard was being examined in silence by everyone massed on deck along the rails: on that day, when excitement and fear were in the air, Jim found a corner where he could take my hand, blush, and mutter a few words about
Going forward together, Joanie.

Oh, what has Jim to do with this history of Joan's? This is her history: he is irrelevant! Let us leap over Jim, and cut a long story short, omitting a hundred and one intervening tales of arrival, and the tricks played on us innocents by those waiting for us, so that we quickly became innocents no longer—but let me leave those tales untold!

Let me show you a small plot of sandy land covered with gum trees and small prickly shrubs, down where the explorers had enthused over the land they had subdued to trigonometry. What was neat on their maps, and wondrously promising, was to the naked eye somewhat less enticing. Tall pale stands of straight gums grew like gigantic weeds, spearing up and then branching into untidy bunches of leaves, and bushes of all kinds made it impossible to stroll as they had somehow implied they had. But morning sunlight between those trees was soft: birds trilled and whistled in a secretive excited way, and those odd flat leaves caressed each other against sky as clean as a china plate.

I grew to love those gums in the mornings: I loved the sinuous massive way their trunks rose up into the blue, and the way the bark hung off them in long feathery strips, exposing the solid white skin beneath. On those mornings when the smoke from
the breakfast fire hung blue in the air, I walked among them and touched each trunk to feel its cool flesh.

But later in the day I loathed them, when I had to chop at the hard dense wood that was as dry and unyielding as stone, and as heavy. Horizontal, those slender trunks were hateful, bleeding brown sap and resisting every effort with crowbars, wedges and saws. At night I could feel muscles twitching in legs and arms, and lay dreaming of endless heaving effort, levering a log along the ground to be laid across another, and even in my dreams I clenched my mouth with effort, braced my shoulders and back, and felt pain streak up my legs from thrusting too hard against that unforgiving wood.

The old hands here had devised a few ways of cheating the bush and those gums of a few gallons of the sweat they wanted to extract from us.
Save a third of your chopping,
one whiskery old fellow directed as he passed along the track to his own bit of ground.
You chop a little ways through the trees in a row, see, then when you fell the one on the end, down they all come tumbling like ninepins, you mark my words.
Well, it sounded good as he said it, sitting behind his horse. It sounded grand, and simple, and elegantly labor-saving, but those foul gums foiled such ingenuity by growing just too far apart, and branching out wildly so there was no ninepin-like trunk to come cracking down, and they twisted and leaped as they fell so that they missed each other, laughing, it seemed, and each one still had to be hacked right through.

That left the stumps. Those stumps! They were so close together it would never be possible for a plough to make any kind of furrow around them. They lingered and haunted, tiresome powerful roots gripping yards of soil and rock in a death vice it was impossible to loosen. There were endless hot afternoons of sweat
and blisters and flies coming to suck at sweat dripping off my face into the earth, as I battled with the blind strength of those roots. Like a furious mole, becoming more clumsy in fatigue and exasperation, I chopped and gouged at the earth around the dead roots, chipped and grubbed, scratching out earth and stones in a ring around the stump, always feeling the pick strike yet another branch of root whenever there seemed a straight go at a bit of earth. All this tedious scrabbling went on until at last the stump perched in a hole with its roots branching out from it into the ground.

The fires I lit later around those stumps were a cruel satisfaction: I stood watching the flames of the twigs lick out and blacken that pale dead flesh, dry now: but even in death, and even when dry, the wood resisted and quenched almost any amount of fire. I was willing to think I had not waited long enough for the wood to dry, or that I had not the knack of lighting the right kind of fire, or even that these particular trees were of a hitherto unknown variety, completely impervious to flame. Fury mounted in me as I heaped and heaped dry sticks until, reluctantly, without any satisfying flare and blaze, but smokily, sullenly, the stone-like timber began to char and fall away, and the loathed stumps began to smoulder, sending out urgent plumes of white smoke from their tops like a death cry.

With so much timber, after the scarcity back Home an extravagant embarrassment of timber, you might have thought there would be joy in sawing and planing and chiselling, constructing a snug dwelling and a sufficiency of rustic furniture. But no, that wretched timber would not split straight: it twisted and warped in perverse ways, tearing ragged along the grain. Then it was so hard it blunted the saw, and sharpened immensely the tempers
of those doing the sawing, so that hours passed filled with hatred for that clotted, obdurate wood.

However, at last there was a hut of sorts, a hut like those we had housed a pig or two in, back Home: a hut all skewed and lean-to, with not a square corner anywhere, just great crude slabs of that loathsome timber stuck upright in the ground and roofed after a fashion with flattened-out slabs of bark. Our hut was like a tiny Stonehenge, built of such huge-hewn lumps, for nothing could be made small with such wood, nothing made fine, no two surfaces ever made to fit snugly together. The great fissures between the planks were filled with such clay as could be found, and I spent hours trying to smooth and beat the mud floor that was slimy when wet but became powdery dust when dry. In the first rains, the clay washed from the cracks and the bark roof let in water along every crack, so that a painstakingly flattened floor became a quagmire of thick mud full of the heel prints of exasperated feet.

Then I laboured over the patch of earth that was starting to appear, like a bright spot on tarnished brass, from the wilderness. Each day I heaved at the soil with my pick, thrust at it with a crowbar, and at last with a shovel when the soil was loosened. Such quantities of stones emerged from the soil that I heaped them in long rows, picturing a wall of stones as we had had at Home between the fields. How tame and easy all that seemed now, what mad luxury it seemed to have a plain bit of earth to dig, and four walls and a roof, and a door that was more than a flap of wood hanging from some bits of leather!
We will have a wall here,
I pictured, and wasted a morning with those stones, but there was some trick to it that I had never learned, having had all my walls built for me long before I was born, before even
my mother and father and their mothers and fathers had been born. Some trick there was to keeping the stones clinging to each other, some trick of wedging and geometry against gravity: some trick I did not know, and could not learn now, and all my walls came to nothing more than the long heaps of obstinate rocks that had been their beginnings.

As I dug I teased myself with imagining the cornucopia that would pour out of this sandy grey soil. I sweated and panted, and the moisture gushed into my mouth, thinking of the sweet mealiness of tiny pale potatoes, brought up fresh-faced and surprised out of the earth and popped into the pot, of the succulence of young cabbage heaped steaming on a plate, of the tang of an onion eaten in the hand with a great slab of good crusty bread. Oh, the feasts I had in my imagination! And meanwhile it was peas and weevilly flour, the odd bit of salt pork, and now and again a bit of possum that was foolish enough to fall into the snare.

Seed was the most precious commodity. There were many notions shared with us by the old hands, of preserving it in borax from the ants, of waxing the necks of jars, of tying up the bag with Condy's crystals: of keeping many small stores of it, rather than one large one: even of sleeping with one's arm around it, so precious was that seed. Bought so dearly and hoarded with such care, checked every day against damp and the predations of insects and mice and who knew what other alien seed-snatchers this violent land might harbour: that seed was hope. Its successful sprouting meant life, its failure to sprout meant ruin.

Advice was the one thing that was plentiful. There were convictions announced with the flying spittle of certitude that the precious seed must be planted only after the sun had set, or, from
another plausible face passing along the track, only in the full heat of the sun: that it should be planted when the moon was full, or on the contrary that it would shrivel where it fell if planted under a full moon. Then there was the dung man, who in a thickness of foreign tongue explained how to mix cow dung to a paste and pack the paste into empty cow horns (where one would obtain such a quantity of cow horns in a place almost empty of cows I did not ask his passionate Slav face). They were to be buried in alignment with longitude, or meridians, or some such, and brought up under the new moon three months later. Scattered on any desert, this Russian or Rumanian gutturally insisted, this substance would make everything bloom in profusion, would ensure that every single seed would sprout, and would produce potatoes the size of a horse (or was it house?).