There was a struggle going on in the truck. Kestrel’s hat was knocked off, and he was singing out for someone to remove Byrne. But he won, in the end, without help, and Byrne came tumbling down, grabbing at the door as he fell, and staggered over and lay flat, among the dust and the ashes.
The door slammed. And as the engine started, Kestrel leaned out, grinning, and shouted to the diviner: ‘Look after Tourmaline for me.’
And the truck crept away; through the galah-feather dust, towards the far blue ranges, like storm-clouds on the horizon. The worn tyres left tracks sharp as new carving. The diviner was staring. We all were.
While Byrne, in the dust, cried: ‘Bring back my ma, Kes. Kes, bring back my ma.’
—On that night I began to write my testament.
The call of a bugle in the early morning. In the cool, in the blue dawn, ringing as if in great forests.
I got up from my bed, in the blue-lit room. I went out to the veranda, to the table beside the kitchen door, where an enamel basin stood; and pouring into this a little reddish water I washed myself, the small dawn breeze cool on my wet skin. It is for this I live nowadays, for the pleasures of my senses; a scent of leaves, a voice, a breeze on my dripping body.
The senses decay, alas; the world withdraws. The earth too, that with shortened breath and clenching scrotum I have so loved, the earth will fade and be drawn away, like pools to the sun. Dear God, let me fall still quick, let me fall responsive.
The bugle rang, on the wide cool heights of the air. The day of the dead began.
*
I dressed, in the blue light, and went out into the road. The town was all in shadow, but behind the two hills to the east the sky was fire-golden, and the church rose, burning. The lonely bugle call came again, from the end of the road, where Charlie Yandana stood with his head thrown back and the bright instrument glimmering.
Others were making their way towards him. I saw Jack Speed coming down from the mine, in company with Dave and the faithful Jimmy Bogada, who must have come in on the previous night. Rock came from his shack and fell in beside me as I passed, and looking back I saw Byrne and the diviner turning into the road from the track behind my gaol.
We stopped by the war memorial. Slowly the others gathered, from the shanties and from the camp, called by that ancient and haunting bugle-cry, whose sound to me is like the memory of a grief so old that all pain is gone from it and nothing remains but a kind of pleasure, a bitter-sweet reminder of vitality in which grief was possible. We have no ceremony, no celebration, but this.
Slowly they gathered. And Mary came to me, carrying a wreath of leaves she had made, as on every year. And as on every other year I went forward and laid it at the foot of the obelisk, the tip of which was receiving the first rays of the sun from over the small hills.
I turned to address them all, watching the light slide down their still bodies. I said what was true, that I had nothing new to say. ‘We come every year to remember the dead, and there’s not much more to add. Once it was said they died for us. But we’ve never truly known what they died for. Some for us, some for God, some for themselves. Most for no one, for nothing, not understanding, not even asking. Once it was taught that their death was somehow to our credit. We would come, in the name of the dead, to admire ourselves. That was a long time ago. Now all we understand is that we don’t understand. But we come in humility, and in guilt, knowing that in some way we are all murderers, we are all cannibals, and the dead have been our victims. We come to acknowledge our guilt to the dead, because we have eaten their flesh and drunk their blood, and because their curse is on us, and the seed is dead in the ground and in the bodies of men and women, because of them. And in remembering them we remember also God, who lives and reigns in the galaxies outside us, and in the galaxies within us, and was and is our judge and accomplice, before and now and forever; and we ask him, in his good time, to revise our sentence.’
The old words came easily. But I felt them as new. All eyes were on me, but I did not think of myself, I did not imagine myself standing, pontifical, before the obelisk. I spoke as a voice from the stone; I felt myself to be the stone, the law and memory of Tourmaline. They were not my eyes that met Dave Speed’s; and what his eyes saw was not me.
Again the bugle sounded, on the empty fire-flooded heights. And when it had trailed away we began to sing, raggedly and uncertainly, a hymn of which no one remembers the words, but which is nevertheless the only formal expression of our unity. And when that ended the bugle broke out again, wild with triumph this time, but dwindling to grief, and then again reviving, and sending its brave cry to wander through the immensity like a lone traveller in the desert, until struck down by weakness and sinking, without pause or tremor, to earth; and there, at last and utterly, dying away.
The diviner’s hair burned in the sun. He was watching me, and the colour of his eyes seemed to me, suddenly, ugly; a deformity. He was studying me, and the others, like a scientist, cold as ice.
Afterwards I had breakfast with Tom and Mary. Deborah and Dave Speed were also there.
Deborah was like a ghost. She had never been more invisible. As for Dave, he seemed a little quieter every time he came into town. But signs of the old opinionated brawler would keep showing through.
‘You did it pretty well,’ he said to me, scarcely bothering to look at me as he made this restrained compliment.
‘I’m practised,’ I said, ‘as you know.’
‘Well, no one preaches a prettier sermon,’ he said. ‘And what would we want with a different one every year?’
It was not a talkative gathering in the kitchen. The dead were too much on our minds, and would be for some days. For we do not soon forget any event, and there is no occasion more solemn in our lives.
But Deborah asked, almost inaudibly: ‘What’s it all for? What’s the use of it?’
‘I hear Kestrel’s voice,’ I said; and may have sounded a little malicious, as I realized in a moment.
She looked angry, and demanded to know what the dead had to teach us.
‘To stay alive,’ said Tom.
I could not tell in what spirit this remark was made, and glanced at him, suspecting him of cynicism.
‘To die,’ Dave said, ‘later on.’
‘To treasure the living,’ said Mary.
‘But above all,’ I said, ‘to repent—isn’t it? To atone.’
‘Atone for what?’ Dave wanted to know. ‘To who?’
‘To God, surely. For the crimes, the cruelty——’
‘And save the dead from the consequences of their actions,’ Tom said, softly. ‘There’s a plan for you.’
And Dave laughed.
‘Is nothing sacred?’ I burst out; in despair, because without bearings.
‘Everything,’ Tom said. ‘Because nothing exists that isn’t part of his body.’
‘That we’ve wounded,’ I said, ‘that we’ve killed, perhaps. Tom, Tom, I think God will die.’
I remember the pain and guilt with which I said that, and the teapot in front of me: white enamel, chipped, showing steel-blue underneath.
‘Dying’s not serious,’ Tom said. ‘Everything’s indestructible. If God can die, he’ll die in glory. Watch out for the flowers on his grave.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘the way you talk——’
‘It’s you that keeps throwing words around,’ Dave said. ‘Stone me, you pick up words like a bower-bird, and what a balls of a nest you make with them. Words are no good. Words are crap. Throw ’em away, and think.’
‘Think of what?’ I asked, or begged to know.
‘There’s no word for it,’ Tom said. ‘You can call it the nameless, if you need a name.’
When he spoke of it there was great strength and quietness in his face and body. And Dave was the same.
‘So,’ said Tom, ‘we needn’t talk about it again.’ And he reached for the teapot, and as he moved whatever it was that had been holding the three of us together snapped, leaving me stranded. Only between Tom and Dave that impersonal understanding, wordlessly, endured.
‘Then——’ I began.
Deborah was looking at me, at all of us, with great eyes.
‘If we talk about it,’ Dave said, ‘we’ll talk crap. This is one of the laws of the universe.’
‘But there are feelings,’ I said, ‘there are feelings. As if things might end. That’s the frightening kind. But on the other hand——’
‘Have some more tea,’ said Tom.
I pushed my cup across. And went on, defying him: ‘Something might appear. Like a track that’s been walked over, year after year. Stones surface. The true bedrock gets laid bare.’
‘This won’t happen,’ said Tom, from some distance. ‘Not now, not ever.’
‘But there are feelings——’
‘Bugger your feelings,’ said Dave. ‘They’re the wrong kind.’
And Tom said, more gently: ‘Dangerous. You’re dangerous. I wish to God you were the only one.’
Deborah got up and wandered out of the house, casually, as if to fetch something.
‘I don’t understand you,’ I protested to them. ‘What do you mean? Can’t you talk in words?’ But they said nothing at all; more in sorrow than reproof.
Deborah went past my gaol, and on, until she came to the point where two paths diverged, one leading to the old huts, the other to the church.
She meant to go to the diviner’s hut. But looking up the red hillside, glinting with sharp edges of broken rock, she saw Byrne coming down from the church. And so she sat down to wait for him, on a hot boulder.
He came with his pitted face dark and rapt, and did not see her at first.
‘Byrnie,’ she called.
Then he started, and turned aside towards her.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked him.
‘Up at the church,’ he said.
‘Where’s Michael?’
‘Still up there.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Going to see Rocky, that’s all.’
‘Up there, I mean. You and Michael.’
Still dark and rapt: ‘I don’t know if I can tell you yet,’ he said. ‘Later on, maybe.’
‘Is it water?’
‘Something to do with it,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘He’s been slow, hasn’t he?’
‘You don’t understand him. You couldn’t.’
‘Will he mind if I go up there?’
‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t think so.’
‘You don’t know much,’ she said, ‘do you?’
‘It’s the day,’ he said. ‘It’s a bloody strange day. But go up there, if you want to. I’m going on down.’
‘All right,’ she said. And she sat there on the hot rock looking after him, until his drought-stricken figure had turned the corner of the gaol and gone from sight; and then got up and took the path to the church, glancing back now and again at the bleak and unpeopled panorama of Tourmaline that presented itself, and the infinite horizons.
The diviner was sitting on the ground outside the church, in the narrow shade of its front wall, with his knees drawn up and his head back against the stone, looking very high into the sky and seeing nothing. He did not hear her, or so she thought, as she came barefoot over the hard ground. She went to the corner of the church and leaned there, as though she meant to run away if he should see her. At length, idly, he turned his head.
They said nothing for a time. They had not spoken since the day she left Kestrel, and it was difficult. But he was very calm, very sure, by then.
‘You didn’t hear me, did you,’ she said, to be friendly.
‘I thought it was Gloria,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Your grandmother. She is, isn’t she?’
‘Oh, Gloria. Yes, she is.’
‘D’you have much to do with her?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘She thinks of me as Mary’s daughter. They all do, in the camp.’
‘She’s a fine old woman.’
‘You mean, she’s almost human,’ Deborah said, with an edge.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said, angry and shining.
She shrugged.
He got up and came towards her. And she shrank back slightly.
‘Things have changed,’ he said. ‘I thought it was me that was supposed to be scared of you. So you told me.’
‘You’ve changed,’ she said. Her bright, dark eyes were wary.
‘What way?’
‘You’ve got like Kes,’ she said, in a low voice.
He was impassive. ‘You reckon?’
‘You’ve got like each other.’
‘That’s a bad thing, is it?’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t be like him. I hate him.’
‘Why should I care?’
‘Do you
want
to be like him?’
‘I want to be myself,’ he said. ‘To come true. And what you think I should be doesn’t enter into it.’
‘I never thought it did,’ she said, sadly enough.
He was gazing into her eyes. Not naturally, not casually, but with some fixed intention, as if he meant to hypnotize her. She tried to look away. She was afraid of him, because of his strangeness, because his curious eyes were the colour, almost, of copper sulphate. But he reached out and held her by the shoulders. And when she still would not meet him, letting her head fall back and drawing away, he came closer and captured her face between his long hands, and went on staring into her.
‘Don’t,’ she cried out. ‘Let me go, Michael.’
‘Why?’ he asked, softly.
‘I don’t—I don’t like you to touch me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you—you’re not——’
‘What?’
‘You’re not—like other people.’
‘This didn’t worry you a while ago,’ he said, with the rather dreadful insinuating gentleness he was beginning to acquire.
‘Please, don’t talk like that,’ she begged him. ‘I was wrong. I was wrong. Please, Michael, forget that.’
‘I have to talk about it,’ he said. ‘To win you.’
‘Ah, no!’
‘To win you for God.’
She struggled again. But he held her fast.
‘You’re a harlot,’ he said, still gentle.
‘No!’
‘How long were you with Kestrel?’
‘Eight months,’ she said. ‘Michael——’
‘Were you faithful to him?’
‘Yes!’
‘You’re lying. Have you forgotten that day at my hut?’
‘I was faithful to him!’
‘Was he the first?’
‘Yes!’
‘You’re lying. Don’t try to look away.’
‘There was only——’