Landscape of Farewell (15 page)

He considered the book. ‘I think you’ll soon run through that.’ He looked at me. ‘Then what will you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I may reread it. All good books are better at the second reading.’ He seemed to wait for me. ‘Is there something you would like me to do?’ I asked him.

He indicated my journal with a small fling of his hand. ‘You keep a diary.’

‘It is my journal,’ I said. ‘I don’t write in it every day. It is not really a diary.’

‘Have you written about the nanny?’

‘No.’

‘Will you?’

‘Is that what you want me to write?’

He laughed. ‘Do you think you
will
write the story of your night with Vita’s little goat?’ he asked. ‘It would be an amusing thing to read.’

‘I’ve not thought of doing so. I don’t think Vita would be amused by it.’

He considered me. He was half-turned from the hearth, in his hand a stick which he had been using to adjust the pieces of wood on the fire. ‘Would you write something for me?’

Although he made the request in a relaxed, even in an offhand way, and without evident anxiety, I sensed that my answer was of great importance to him. ‘I would be very happy to try,’ I said. ‘What is it you want me to write?’

He looked about my room, as if he looked for something, then he turned back to the fire, which was well alight by now
and burning brightly. He poked at it with the stick nevertheless, ‘I would write it myself,’ he said, a flicker of annoyance in the way he poked at the fire, ‘but I can’t do it. I write reports and am often the advocate for my people but I have not been able to write this story. I don’t know why that is. I can tell it, but I can’t write it.’ He twisted around and looked at me. ‘Why is that, do you think?’

I was about to respond with some conjecture or other when he went on, not waiting to hear what I might have to say.

‘I’ve tried. Often. But I can never get it down on paper the way I have it in my head. I use the same words as when I tell it to myself but something is lost. It used to anger me. It still puzzles me. If I can tell the story, why can’t I write it?’ Once again he did not wait for me to respond but turned back to the brick hearth in front of him and set about rearranging the pieces of burning wood with his stick, as if he sought an ideal arrangement for them and would not be satisfied until he had found it. ‘When Vita went to the university,’ he said, pausing to struggle with a flaming log, ‘I thought she would write the story for me one day. But she was soon busy with her own concerns and I saw that she was never going to find the time for it.’ He turned from the fire again and looked at me. The fire might have been his principal concern and my presence little more than an adjunct to his purpose. ‘I’m the only one left who knows the truth of what happened. If it’s not written down the truth of it will be
lost when I die. It was told to me by my grandfather. It was his own father, my great-grandfather, who did these things and told him of them. No one else is left alive today who knows the truth of it but me.’ He waited, looking at me, and eventually he smiled slowly at something he saw in my features. ‘I think of it all the time.’ He shrugged, as if apologising for his seriousness. ‘My fear is that I will die suddenly and it will be lost. That’s what I fear, Max. Not to die, I don’t fear that any more than you do. What I fear is to lose the truth of this thing.’ He waited again, as if he expected me to say something.

‘I will do my best,’ I said. ‘But I may not be the writer you imagine me to be.’

He sat looking into the flames, touching the stick to the burning wood until it glowed. He held the stick up and blew on the end of it until it took fire. ‘My father was a dangerous man,’ he said, narrowing his eyes at the small flame he held before his face. He waved the burning stick at me, as if he wrote a word in smoke with it. ‘This is not it,’ he said. His voice grew in confidence by the minute, and as he spoke he acquired an air of greater authority. ‘You should know something about my life. How I came to have the truth of this thing, or you will not be able to write it.’ He turned to me and I saw my reflection in the lenses of his spectacles—there I was for an instant, a prim white midget propped in bed against an even whiter ground of sheets and pillows. I was scarcely more substantial than a tiny ghost.
He waited, the stick poised in his hand—a smoking baton. ‘Before my father’s and grandfather’s time, we were leaders among our people because of our size and our courage. I’m not boasting. That’s the way it was for us. It was our tradition that we feared no one but freely offered help to our neighbours when they needed it. Distant peoples turned to us and asked for our help. If their claim was just, they knew we would not refuse them. That is what we were known for, as other people are known for other skills. It was no secret but was our tradition and we were respected for it far beyond the borders of our own country. And, of course, we were also feared for it. Our reputation lodged in the minds of evil people and they thought twice before lording it over their neighbours.’ He watched the end of the stick burning in the fire. I watched the stick burn with him. When the stick was well alight and the flames began licking towards his hand he set it on the fire and sat back. The air in the room was grey with wood smoke. It touched the back of my throat, just as it had when I sat of an evening with my uncle over our meal in his kitchen—the smell of wood smoke and the unresolved enigmas of my childhood.

‘My father was a big man,’ Dougald said. ‘He had three sons. We all grew into big men. The old days were gone but we still carried the size that had been bred in us. When we were boys, my father worked on the railways in a maintenance gang out west and was away from our home for long periods. When he
came home he stayed drunk for several days, and while he was drunk he beat me with the fury that was in him. There was a spirit in my father that enraged him and which he could not control or understand, and when he drank this spirit got the better of him. I believe it was the loss of the old ways, and of the respect we once enjoyed, that enraged him, though I don’t think he ever understood this himself. I was his eldest son and he beat me in particular before all the others. He drank overproof rum straight from the bottle. Alone and at home, sitting at the kitchen table, brooding and silent for hours. The others left the house and went to our aunty’s place, or sometimes they hid from him out in the scrub at the edge of town. But I sat by the back door and watched him.

‘At first, when he had only had one or two drinks and was still sober, he told me stories of the fettlers’ camps where he lived alongside the line out in the flat country towards Longreach, and how they called to the passengers on the passing trains to throw them the newspapers and begged tobacco and drink from them. After a few drinks he grew quiet and his mood darkened. And out of this dark silence he began to curse his fellow workers, or to curse some foreman or boss who came into his mind. At last he noticed me sitting in the doorway watching him and he called me to him. I stood in front of him and for a long time we were both silent, looking at each other. I knew then it had begun. Some force in me, superior to my will, made it impossible for me to
speak or to run away. I always believed that if I had spoken to him, he would have broken from his drunken trance and would have forgotten to beat me. But I could not break my silence any more than he could break his trance. I still do not understand what power it was that robbed me of my voice, but only that it was a force greater than my own will.

‘I stood no more than an arm’s length from him. Always in the same attitude, my hands held behind my back, my thumbs hooked over the belt of my shorts, my feet bare. And always I was without a shirt. Our eyes were on the same level. His eyes were like deep wells and I looked into them and could never see all the way to the bottom but found my own gaze lost in their depths, as if I looked into his soul and into my own soul, and saw only our solitude. I loved my father and I can smell him now that I have begun to speak of him. He had a peculiar smell that was him and no one else. Without warning he hit me with the back of his hand. His blow struck my cheek and knocked me to one side. I did not step back or cry out, but righted myself and stood as before, looking into the solitude of his gaze. Then came the second blow. He beat me in silence. One blow following another. I did not cry out and there was no fear in me, nor do I have any memory of the pain. When the blood was flowing freely down my face and over my bare chest, and his hand was red with it, and he had lost control of what he did, and had begun to cry out as he struck me, my mother came into the house and she
took me by the arm and led me away and bathed my injuries. If she had not done this my father would have beaten me until he killed me. And I would have stood and not run away. To me that is all a mystery now. After my mother had taken me away from him my father roared and bellowed like a bull that is tormented by a pack of dogs, and my mother and I looked at each other and we knew it was over.

‘That night he came to my bedroom and took me in his arms and wept. And I forgave him. I loved him. He was my father and I wept with him for the loss we had sustained. My sisters and brothers lived in great fear of him, but I did not fear him. He never succeeded in making me afraid of him. He asked me often,
Why don’t you run away from me and hide like the others?
I had no answer for him. I believe the spirit of violence in him was provoked more than anything by my lack of fear, by what he took to be my stubbornness and my resistance to him. But still I never found a way within myself to show him the fear that might have satisfied him. Even as a small child, when he beat me I saw in the emptiness of his gaze that he was punishing something within himself that he hated and did not understand and could not reach, and I did not think it was my father who beat me but some other, a demon.

‘Until the day he died, I saw in my father’s eyes a bewilderment and a despair so deep it had no bottom to it and it made my heart ache to see it and I thought how it might have been otherwise
with him and me if he had not been cursed in this way. And I knew he had always been a lost man. It is as if he had searched in vain for an answer to the riddle that cursed him from the day of his birth. He asked himself,
What is it I am supposed to do?
And he had no answer. I shall never forget my father holding me to him and sobbing and asking in a voice filled with anguish,
Why do I beat the boy I love the most?
As if he expected God, or some other power greater than himself, to answer him, but heard only the silence, which he had learned to take as contempt for his kind. I wept with him for his torment, and I knew in my heart that he beat me because he knew that only I could withstand the beating. He might have killed one of the others in his rages and my mother might not have been able to prevent it. I stood between him and the terrible possibility that he might murder one of his children. And our knowledge of this stood between us and it was our bond.’

Dougald stopped speaking and he held his hands out in front of him and looked at his open palms. He was moved by the story he told me. ‘I have never told anyone this,’ he said. His hands were the misshapen hands of a workman. He held his large palms open before him as if they were an open book from which he read his memory. At last he shook his head and put his palms together, then turned and looked across at me and he smiled that soft and yielding smile he had, which was both an invitation and an acknowledgment of trust, and which I found
bewitching. But it was also a sad smile, in which there was a kind of apology, or an appeal, and something of shame for what he was about to say. ‘There are no stories I can tell in praise of my father,’ he said then.

I was greatly moved by this confession and wished to speak, for what he said touched me and my own relations with my father very deeply, but he continued without a pause, and seemed not to wish to hear from me, his attention inward still.

‘I believe my father’s remorse for the pain he caused, and for the evil things he did, was genuine. I can say that for him.’ He shrugged. ‘Sometimes I wonder what I really knew of him. Most of his life was spent away from us. It was my mother who made a family of us.’ With this mention of his mother Dougald sat more upright and he lifted his arms and stretched, as if he freed his muscles from his father’s violent tyranny. ‘My mother,’ he said with feeling. ‘She was an educated white woman from the city. She feared my father, but she also loved him and often took his part, even against his own people. My mother remained loyal to my father until the end. I was no longer at home in those days but was out there fencing with my grandfather. Against everybody’s advice my mother cared for my father in his final years when he was infirm and at his most vulnerable. That was a time when many of his own people who had once feared him turned on him and taunted him. I never knew my mother to complain about my father, nor would she ever hear a word said against him.
I believe she sensed something of the deeper causes of his rage as I did, and because of this she found the courage in herself not to judge him. She had married him and had taken her vows in the church and, although she never afterwards spoke to a priest that I remember, she held true to her vows until the end. In her own way she loved him. On the day we buried him, when we were all gathered in the kitchen of the old place, she told us,
Remember, all of you, this man was your father
.

‘His own father, my grandfather, was a very different man. He was known as Gnapun. Although I never heard him claim it, I believe he had received from the Old People the benefits of the passage to manhood when he was a boy. Unlike my father, my grandfather was a man who knew himself. He was sober and hard working and was well liked and respected in his own country, both by the whites and the blacks. When I was nine, and had been in the hospital with the injuries my father had given me, my grandfather heard of it and he came to our house and took me away. Despite my father’s drunkenness and his violence, my grandfather showed him respect. I saw how those two, father and son, shared a bond that nothing would ever break. I felt the power of it between them and have not forgotten it. It made me understand that there was something strong in our family that went beyond each of us, and that this thing had never broken despite my father’s fierceness, but had held fast under the severest test. Strange as it must sound to you, this
made me proud to be who I was, which was not something I had ever found easy.