Tourmaline (24 page)

The diviner broke away from them, impatiently. He stretched out his arm, holding the rod, and with all his strength he threw the rod from him. Cutting the air, it made a high thin sound like a whistling-duck.

Then he strode off down the gully.

I tried to go with him, but he went too fast. When I got to the edge of the lake he was well on his way across it.

The sun was still low; the world still kept its morning colours. The pink lake softly burned, like embers under a thin film of ash.

Very lonely he looked, in all that desolation; very spindly and frail. And dark, too. The only object in the whole glowing landscape that gave back no fight.

I wandered in the forlorn graveyard, thinking about him. Did I, in spite of our hope, want him to fail? Did I resent him? It was, after all, pretty clear that he had come to take my place, and I was not prepared to resign my charge to the first comer, without remark or question. I was the Law of Tourmaline. This was no light matter. And yet, for the sake of Tourmaline, I believed myself capable of humility.

The red ground glared all round me. Who would think it had ever been disturbed? I paused by the white marble headstone of Martin Murphy, aged 104 years. Once, in the dead of night, this venerable man was exhumed by a mob of drunks who had been told there was gold in the coffin. That was long ago. It must have rained since then. The earth above him is smooth and hard as concrete.

All the history of Tourmaline is here. Like an archaeologist I can distinguish the different layers of our culture. White marble and iron railings mark the heyday. Then wooden crosses and other homemade memorials announce our slow decline. The white man’s importance diminishes, the camp people take over. They have no time for grave-markers; instead they concentrate on borders. At the peak of their civilization they outline their mounds with neat ranks of porcelain jars. What huge numbers of small white jars there must have been in Tourmaline. Do we spring, perhaps, from a race which fed exclusively on a substance called Marmite, and preferred a coat of cold cream to clothing? But in time this culture gives way to another, based on the beer bottle; and so dwindles, through the sauce bottle and the baked bean tin, to the primitive simplicity of today, when all graves and graveyards are thought best forgotten.

Ah, the love of ruin is insidious. In the middle of regret, in the middle of complaint, it is growing on one. There is ease in dereliction. Action becomes irrelevant; there is no further to fall. Or if, by any chance, falling is possible, then only action can make it so; and action is therefore suspect, even frightening. And that I was frightened by the diviner I have not denied. I was not alone, I was with Tom in this.

But I did not will him to fail. I could not. Tourmaline is written on my heart. I would have taken water from any hand.

How touching it is, the earliest tombstone in Tourmaline. It is of rough grey cement, and the inscription has been scraped into it with a pocket knife before it hardened.
Kenneth Macarthur
, it says.
Struck by lightning. Aged 22 years. Erected by his mates
.

I did not will him to fail. No. I went so far, in the half-thinking part of my mind, as to pray for him. I willed the water to rise, and he himself to become all that he seemed to claim to be; all that he looked, all that Tourmaline believed him.

Because, even when my disbelief was strongest, he could disarm me. Suddenly, turning to speak to someone else, I would catch sight of him. And the brightness then, the force, seemed beyond resisting; and my mind would go back, through years like buried roads, to the kingfisher-flash by the creek, and the frail pink lilies, breaking the baked ground in my father’s garden.

From behind the church it was possible to see across the lake to the mouth of the gully where the digging was going on. And those of us who were not engaged in it would go up there in the evenings to watch the diggers come home.

Deborah was always there, and sometimes Mary was with her. Their faith was uncritical and complete. And the other women, too, the coloured wives and old Gloria, could not have been moved to doubt by anything less than a divine revelation.

So I, who came every day, and Tom, who came once, did not talk about it. But our disbelief gave the whole affair, for us, a taste of bitter comedy.

The diviner did not speak, either. He came not only in the evening but in the morning too, standing apart, reviewing his faithful labourers down on the lake there like a general.

His hand had been forced. And did he believe? we wondered. I couldn’t tell. And nor could Tom, or so he said.

And the excitement grew; and was at its height on that afternoon when I stood with Deborah and the diviner and saw the men coming back across the lake two hours before they were due to knock off.

They were bringing their tools with them, I noticed. And Deborah noticed it, too, and called out: ‘They’ve done it! It’s finished.’

I watched the dark figures coming across the lake. Finished, indeed.

They reached the foot of the hill and began to climb up to us. There were clinks of steel against stone, but no voices.

Then Rock appeared in front of us. And the others, straggling, massed behind him.

I looked at the diviner as he faced up to him. And something about that bitter resignation, that half-scornful defeat, struck my policeman’s eye as familiar; and the conviction came into my policeman’s head, and never left it, that he had been, somewhere, a criminal of quite extraordinary distinction.

There must be, on the moon, such silences as we listened to then; but rarely, I think, on our planet.

At last the diviner said, hardly parting his lips: ‘Well? Tell us.’

‘We gave it the benefit of the doubt,’ Rock said, ‘and quite a few feet. But no good. It’s a dry hole, and it couldn’t have been anything else.’

He spoke quietly, even with deference. But everything was changed. The faces behind him were saying they had been deluded.

‘Will you keep trying?’ Rock asked. He was hoarse with dust.

‘No,’ said the diviner; so still, it seemed he might never move again. ‘Ah no, Rocky.’

‘Anyone might pick a few dry ones. Especially here.’

‘Not me,’ said the diviner. ‘Not me. It’s gone.’

And all the faces were accusing him. The picks and the shovels, bright with work, were glinting.

He turned away, raising his hands to his eyes. And he cried out, in a voice that didn’t seem to be the voice of anyone we knew: ‘It was there! The water was there. God’s betrayed me.’

One last flicker of his flame before it died. Then all was over. He was nothing.

Life goes on; as I have often, in my long life, had cause to remind myself. One sleeps and feeds. And, once a month, the truck comes.

First of all the dust of it, very far, against the blue ranges. Then the glint of metal. And at last the thing itself, sweeping round the war memorial to pull up by the pub veranda.

We were all there, as usual. Only the diviner was missing, and had not been seen (except by Byrne) since the day God let him down.

As the truck came, we saw that the back of it had grown a canopy covered with a green tarpaulin. And there was a passenger with the driver.

No one said anything. But you could feel the dread.

When the truck stopped, Kestrel got out and went to his front door and opened it. And he stood there, holding it open, while three men climbed out from beneath the tarpaulin and went past him into the hotel.

They walked quickly, not looking round. But I was apart from the others, and caught a glimpse of one of them. He had no nose or mouth; only teeth.

I tried to pray for him. And for us.

When they had passed, Kestrel closed the door. And he turned and walked back towards us, so that for the first time we could see him clearly. He came and leaned against the mudguard of the truck. Behind and above him the air shimmered like running water.

He was looking at Deborah, and then at Byrne. And they were staring at him; all bearings lost.

His respectable clothes were less respectable, and his face had changed. A mask it had always been, but a mask now with something new behind it. He had caught fire.

‘So you got back,’ said Rock, like a vague old man.

‘It had to happen some day,’ said Kestrel. His voice was somehow altered, and it struck me that all that uncertainty, all that baffled energy that used to sound in it was gone, that he knew now what he was, and would never again be angry or bewildered or in any way at a loss. He was a whole thing, and invulnerable.

I felt the eyes of Tourmaline measuring him, measuring his force. I felt the need that the diviner had wakened and failed to satisfy cry out to him. And the new power in him, his unselfdoubting and not unkindly fire, gave a calm answer.

He said: ‘Will some of you blokes unload the truck? You’ll find a lot of stuff there besides the stores: tools and bits of machinery and so on. Dump it under the veranda. The jokers I brought with me are going to do a spot of divining.’

There was no sneer in this. He had changed.

The driver had not left the truck, and showed no intention of doing so. He seemed to contemplate the steering wheel like a sacred object, and did not look out as Rock and Horse and the others went by and climbed up under the canopy.

And Kestrel leaned on the mudguard, easily.

We gathered towards him, Deborah and Byrne and I. Deborah would say nothing. But she couldn’t seem to look away.

‘Well,’ said Kestrel, ‘is he still here, the other bloke?’

‘He’s still here,’ said Byrne.

‘And there’s no water,’ I said. ‘He’s tried.’

‘Poor bastard,’ said Kestrel. ‘Did that surprise you?’

Neither Byrne nor Deborah would answer.

‘We believed in him,’ I said. ‘Most of us. And maybe we would still, if he seemed to believe in himself.’

‘If you see him,’ Kestrel said, ‘tell him I’m sorry.’

‘Why? What have you done to him?’

‘Sorry for what he’s done to himself.’

All the while metallic clankings were coming from the veranda, behind the truck.

‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re going to be our diviner now.’

And he grinned. So serenely and absently that it didn’t look like him, somehow.

‘That’s the theory,’ he said.

He pushed himself off the mudguard, and he asked, beginning to move: ‘Coming back to the pub, Byrnie?’

‘I don’t know,’ Byrne said, wavering.

‘Well, your room’s there, if you want it.’

And he went away, behind the truck, where we couldn’t see him, and was talking to the driver for some time, while we stood in the hot sun, thinking about him. And when at last the truck started and moved off he was gone, and the front door was closed.

Deborah sighed, and turned, and wandered across to the store, looking tired.

The group discussing the mysterious gear under the veranda broke up, and began carting Tom’s stuff over the road.

‘It’s hot,’ I said.

‘It always is,’ said Byrne.

‘I’m going home.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Byrne said, turning to call his dog. But it wasn’t his dog any more, and had gone.

So we went up the road to my house, the dust-cloud of the receding truck ahead of us, and the village square (as I suppose one could call it) sun-struck and empty behind.

Presently Deborah came out again and crossed the road, treading down the raised tyremarks in the dust. She pushed open the front door of the hotel and went in.

Kestrel was waiting for her, sitting on the battered leather sofa in the hall. He stood up. It was dim in there, when she had closed the door. Their dark skins looked cold.

They watched one another, a long time.

‘Is this for keeps?’ he asked, at last. Very gently, for him.

She came nearer. She walked into his arms, and they closed around her.

‘Ah, Deb,’ he said, into her hair. ‘Don’t go again.’

‘No,’ she said, with her mouth against his throat.

‘Why did you go? Why did you come back?’

‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she said.

He stared over her head, stroking her hair. He whispered: ‘Mine?’

‘Of course.’

‘Ah, Deb,’ he said, clutching her, stroking her. ‘Ah, Deb.’ And she suddenly laughed, for pure joy. She could not see his face, with no blood in it.

Byrne did me the honour of coming to sing on the bench outside my door.

I stepped out to listen to him. I studied the blighted face bent over the guitar.

When he had finished, I said: ‘Poor Byrnie,’ to myself. And he looked up, grinning, showing his rather narrow teeth.

‘Why?’

‘Because—you had so much faith in him.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I never believed he’d do it.’

‘Then why,’ I asked, bewildered, ‘why follow him?’

And Byrne said, plinking away, aimlessly: ‘He was there. That’s all.’

The breeze hissed across country. The sun went down. No bell. No fire.

The diviner kept to his hut, up there on the black hillside.

The strangers were shut up in the hotel, seen by no one.

At the mine Jack Speed lay alone in his tall room.

In the shack behind the garden Rock washed his shirt, in dishwater.

Tom’s cat, on the step of the store, slapped the face of Kestrel’s dog, and fled.

While the people at the camp mourned; keening. Raising their eyes to the cold white stars, that promise nothing.

On the war memorial, with a hurricane lantern beside him, Byrne was singing. He had been there for hours. The front windows of the hotel and the store were dark. From my front door, looking out into the darkness, wondering what the wind was going to do, I could hear his voice drifting up the road.

Then there would be silence; and I imagined him, vacant, his guitar on his knees and his head back against the obelisk, staring at the stars. Making up a new song, it could be; for he is the poet of Tourmaline.

I went to bed, closing all doors and windows against the dust. Even then, I could hear outside the steady hiss of the wind, beating across country through the stiff leaves.