To the Islands (15 page)

‘Hit him, sister. Real hard.’

‘I’ll explain to you. You were hit with a stone, and you fell and hurt your head on another stone.’

‘Yes, sister? That was woman, eh?’

‘Oh, can’t you see?’ she demanded impatiently. ‘I’m trying to tell you that we think Brother Heriot threw the stone. And then, when he thought you were dead, he ran away, and Justin followed him.’

The dark eyes stared at her. He was stricken into silence.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you anything to say?’

‘I—I don’t know, sister. It real hard for me to believe that.’

‘I know it must be, but—’

‘Justin gone, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Might be Justin try to kill me, and Brother Heriot see him and chase him.’

She had never thought of that possibility, and was suddenly in terror that he might be right, that she had accused Heriot unjustly, that she had done irreparable harm to the mission and to the whole white race. ‘But Justin—’ she said. ‘Justin?’

He began to look even a little pleased with the idea of Heriot’s threatening his life. ‘That old man, he must hate me a lot,’ he said wonderingly.

‘No,’ she protested, ‘not hate you, love you, all of you. It’s because he loves you and you disappoint him that he’s so bitter and angry. It’s because he’s given his life to you and you waste it. He’s a good man.’

‘Where you think he are now, sister?’

‘I don’t know. None of us knows. He may be dead.’

Rex stared at her.

‘He ran away because he thought he’d hurt you. You see, he was so sorry he wanted to die.’

‘Yes, sister?’

‘So you must forgive him, and pray for him, and never tell anyone what I’ve told you. And if he comes back you must go up to him and say you’re his friend, and he’ll be yours, always.’

She watched his face, and in doing so could sense the emotions that were moving him. She felt his incredulity, then an odd sort of pride that hatred of him should have forced a divinity like Heriot to such an action. Then something stronger and stranger, a mixture of fear and humility.

‘Sister,’ he said, huskily.

‘What is it?’

‘I know why that old man want me dead. It because—it because he reckon I kill my wife, sister.’

‘I know he thought that—’

‘He always saying that. He not fair to me!’

‘Perhaps not—’

‘He say I give her a belting, and then she have that little dead baby and she die then.’

‘I know. I’ve heard what he said.’

He held the sheet clenched tightly in his hands; his voice had gone higher, his mouth and brows were twisted, and she saw with astonishment that he was seized with grief. ‘You reckon that true?’ he demanded of her. ‘Sister,
you
reckon that true?’

They came to a valley in the foothills, the floor covered with broken rocks, the sides cliffs. Thick grass grew up through the rocks, sign of a stream, but the water was overgrown and probably foul and the source not to be seen.

‘Might be pool up there,’ Justin said, pointing. ‘Better we go up there and camp now.’

Heriot said nothing. He was in a daze, tired to the bones, and the stillness racked him like an eternally recurring noise. So lulled, so deadened, he followed Justin without a word as the brown man turned his horse across the valley floor to the smooth shelves of rock at the base of the cliffs.

They rode in a silence relieved only by the rattle of stones from the horses’ hoofs. Trees, grass, and water were still as death, and beyond them was nothing but rock. They passed a stretch of rock pitted and wrinkled like lava. How old is this country? Heriot wondered. But it’s not old, it’s just born, the sea has never been over it, it was created yesterday, dead as the moon. Let the sea some day come up and drown it and fish come swimming out of the rock-pigeons’ holes. I will ride with my hair green and wild, through the canyons of the sea.

In the silence there came a sudden irruption of sound, the crackle of fire. They stopped, listening, horses and men frozen like statues against the carved cliffs. Then movement came into the scene with the slow drifting of smoke across the valley from the cliff top.

‘There somebody,’ Justin whispered. ‘There, look. Cane-grass fire.’

Heriot stared blankly.

‘Bush people, old man. They seen us.’

‘Bless their black hearts,’ Heriot said listlessly.

Justin grinned. ‘They going to listen to me,’ he said. ‘I got gun.’

Then there was quiet again except for the fire. Someone was watching them, but who it was or where there was nothing to show. Only the smoke, slowly drifting over.

‘We can’t go no farther,’ Justin said, pointing at the outcrop of cliff ahead of them. ‘We got to walk. I fix up horses, eh, and come after you?’

Dismounting, resigning his horse, Heriot began to pick his way painfully along the rock towards the obstruction, all his years and more in the aching spine, the stiff sore legs. He sang to himself in order to forget his pains. Justin caught up with him and supported him as he edged his way round the jutting rock.

Ahead of them the valley ended in cliffs, steeper than any above them, half of the wall in deep shadow, half burning redly in the sun. There was no exit but the way they had come. At the end there was perhaps a pool, but long grass and low trees hid it. Below them the rock shelf dropped steeply down into a little pond choked with grass and lilies.

Justin put his hands to his mouth and shouted: ‘
Bau!
’ Echoes rattled. ‘
Gui!
’ he called. ‘Djanama!’

The words lapsed into the same stillness. ‘Djanama,’ he muttered aside to Heriot, ‘that my bush name.’

‘What a pretty name,’ Heriot said vacantly. ‘My name is Arriet.’

‘
Gui!
’ Justin shouted again. ‘Djanama-a-a-a!’

As they moved forward the air came suddenly to life, with the high shouts of women and the bark of dogs under the farther cliffs. Then, between trees, a woman appeared, her incredibly ancient red dress hanging in rags over her shrunken body. She stood, arms drooping crookedly down, watching their approach.

Justin went forward to meet her; and they looked at one another, nervous, distrustful, until he impatiently laid down the blanket roll, foodbag, and rifle with which he had loaded himself and reached out and touched her with both hands. Then she, reluctantly, with her bird-claw fingers did the same.

They struggled to express themselves to one another, both wishing to know the other’s country and business, both speaking different languages. But finally some sort of understanding came. Justin turned and called out to Heriot: ‘She say she come from that other mission, up that way, but most time all this people live here. She don’t talk English. She say this people don’t like white man.’

Heriot shrugged.

A man came through the bushes, a tall man wearing tattered khaki shorts, and old, with tangled white hair and beard. He surveyed Heriot suspiciously from under jutting brows, seeming to bear out all the woman had said of her people’s hostility. But abruptly, in an astonishing transformation, he grinned, and came forward laughing with shy goodwill to take Heriot’s hands.

‘Alunggu,’ Heriot said in a lost voice. ‘So you’re alive.’

‘
Jau
,’ Alunggu confirmed strongly. ‘Likem budj; me—budj beoble; me—gamb long budj, all dime now. You—bin—go long budj, now, eh?’

‘I old man,’ Heriot said. ‘Close up dead. I go along bush now, yes.’

‘You—gamb—’ere?’

‘I’m running from the hawks. Going to the islands. I camp anywhere.’

Alunggu frowned, half-comprehending. ‘Beoble,’ he said, ‘beoble no—glogj.’

‘What do I care for clothes?’ Heriot asked of the air. ‘I want to sleep. Anywhere.’

Justin spoke in his own language to Alunggu, and the old man reached out for Heriot’s hand, leading him on. Past the bushes and the rocks, they came on a camp area, dotted with bough shelters in the shadows of which ancient women and decrepit men sat in weary peace. A small, deep pool lay below the cliffs and was shadowed greenly by pandanus and vine-strangled trees. Everything in the valley existed in a state of suspended life, the trees were still, and the old, naked people sat like water-sculptured stones.

Justin murmured to Alunggu, a small, dry sound. In answer the old man pointed towards the cliff a little back from the edge of the pool and made towards it, leading Heriot behind him. The ancient statues made no move, no sound; a few of them watched the strangers, but most stared rigidly in front of them. Under the overhanging of rock which Alunggu had indicated, the newcomers found a smoothed patch of earth, and there Justin threw down his load.

‘We camp here, old man,’ he said. ‘That all right, eh?’

But Heriot said nothing, being stricken also with the valley’s silence. He sat down on the blanket roll and stared. Beside him, Alunggu and Justin took up their murmured conversation again, and presently Justin said: ‘This old man want me to go and get kangaroo with my gun. I come back pretty soon. You wait, eh?’

‘Yes,’ Heriot muttered. ‘Yes.’

‘I see you later, old man.’

‘Yes,’ Heriot said feebly.

They went from him then and disappeared, returning to view long afterwards on the top of the cliffs, but he did not see them. For a long time he sat in the petrified attitude of his hosts, until through his trance consciousness came of the clammy discomfort of his clothes and the grime of his body, so that he stood up and went to the pool and stripped off his clothes and swam.

When he came out he felt younger, and came plodding up from the pool naked, carrying his clothes. In his path an old woman sat outside her wurley, gazing at nothing.

‘I am one of you,’ he said. ‘
Ngaia bendjin
.’

But she understood neither language, and did not look at him.

‘I am your friend,’ he said.

She reached out to touch her dog, which was growling, but did not move her head.

‘Ah, you thing,’ he said resentfully, ‘you thing of dirt and wrinkles and pubic hair.’

He realized then that she was blind, and was filled with penitence, and went back to his camp under the rock where the foodbag was, and with his knife hacked open one of the precious tins. And he took it back to her and pushed pieces into her loose mouth. At first she struggled weakly to keep him away and turned her head from him, though she still kept her dog in order with one skinny hand. But then she tasted meat, and swallowed it, and turned to him with a grin that disclosed her great gums and the worn-down remnants of teeth just showing through them. He fed her until she was satisfied, and then she reached out and touched his shoulder with her hand, and leaned over and rested her forehead there. In that way they sat for what seemed a long time in that timeless place, naked brown woman by naked white man, and he stroked the loose skin of her back with tenderness, wanting to laugh, wanting to weep.

A man came out of the hotel and sat down with Dixon on a step. The street was dark and, except for the voices in the bar, silent. After a moment the man pulled out a mouth organ and played a sad, reedy tune.

‘You work around here?’ Dixon asked, when he had finished.

‘Nah, not me. Queenslander.’

‘Bit out of your way, aren’t you?’

‘I been working all up the coast here. Work the wharves a bit, get a bit of cash, and come on to the next place.’

‘Like it?’

‘What, the West? Jeez, I don’t know how to answer you, mate.’

‘Don’t like it, by the sound.’

‘I don’t know. When you go to school you learn about these towns and you think they’re real towns, like the ones we got over there. But when you come over and look at ’em—Christ, these aren’t towns.’

‘Give ’em a chance to grow. It’s a big state.’

‘I tell you what, mate, there’s not a town north of Geraldton we’d call a town.’

‘Looks like you’ll be leaving pretty soon,’ Dixon said.

‘You bet your life. Darwin for me, then Isa, then Cairns. What’s your lurk, mate?’

‘Me? Stockman on a mission.’

‘Mission? Christ. Any money in it?’

‘No.’

‘The wharves are good. I can pick up sixty quid, maybe, in a few days.’

‘I make that in a year,’ Dixon confessed, in a low voice.

‘You’re mad,’ the man said, shocked.

‘Maybe. I like it, that’s all.’

‘Tell you what, mate, you want someone to look after you. Come along with me for a while, pick up a bit of dough. Get a look at Australia.’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Dixon said. ‘I’ve got a job, that’s all.’

‘Chuck it in.’

‘I can’t,’ Dixon said. ‘No good talking about it. Give us a tune on that gadget of yours.’

The man shrugged and put the mouth organ to his lips, breaking into a cowboy melody. Nothing sounds sadder than one of those, Dixon thought, and nostalgia washed through him, the memory of nights around fires with the mouth organ for a background, and men holding forth strongly on their particular subjects, and himself no stranger.

But across the road, in the deep shadow of a store veranda, the black men were watching, waiting for the tide and for him. And he knew that he had made their country his, and their future his, and that many times in his first life he had been as lonely and as foreign as the mouth organ now made him feel. So he filled his mind with the rocky country up the river, and the thin music had no power over him.

Fires starred the darkness of the camp. Under his rock, behind his own fire, Heriot threw aside the remains of the piece of kangaroo Justin had brought him and sighed.

‘That was good, eh?’ Justin asked.

‘Yes,’ Heriot said. ‘Yes.’ He was weary to the point of collapse, and yet restless, unable to find any expression for his violent and disordered feelings.

From the darkness beyond the fires an old man began uncertainly to sing. A few more voices took him up, a sound weak and yet wild threaded through the valley. And Heriot, to a corroboree tune of tearing sadness, sang over them.

‘This ae night, this ae night,

Every night and all,

Fire and fleet and candlelight,

And Christ receive thy soul.’

‘Don’t, old man,’ Justin whispered, shaken inwardly by the desolation of Heriot’s voice.