Tuarts. Tuart trees on the sandy coastal plain. In the days before the old man sawed them down and ground out the stumps vengefully, the house was encircled by tuarts. His mother loved them. Graceful, and grey-barked, their shade cooled the yard and brought birds and from the largest hung a tyre swing that Darkie and he rode until their feet ploughed a four-way furrow in the dirt and the tree bore a shiny patch from collisions.
The broad crowns of the tuarts roared with the unceasing wind of the midwest coast. On summer mornings it sounded like a mob up there high off the ground and in storms the tuarts made the wind sound like an advancing army.
It was just a trip to the chookyard. A northerly gale was blowing, the kind of warm mealy blast that preceded the passage of a big winter front. His mother’s hair streamed back across her shoulders. Her laugh was musical. They squatted to gather eggs. He held the wire basket. They headed back for the house; he remembers the feel of his hand in hers and the bummy smell of eggs.
They were under the swing bough, leaning on the wind, when a gust wrenched the tree with a noise like a slap round the earhole. She swept from his grasp. Half a second later a storm of foliage yanked him off his feet. He lay there a moment staring up through the leaves at a fishscale afternoon sky. A birdnest hung above him speckled with foil and feathers. The very earth beneath him seemed to vibrate with the struggle of trees against the wind but the blanket of gumleaves felt like protection. He felt dreamy, safe. When he did get up to find his mother, there was no blood on her that he could see, just spilled yolks and the sinister, glistening albumen smeared up her bare legs. The sheared point of the bough was in her chest but he didn’t yet understand that she was dead. He would be ten in a few days.
Tonight every flurry beneath the rock feels like the breeze of her passing. It buffets him all night; he knows it too well. All his life it seems he’s been walking in the slipstream of the dead and he hates it.
Always that slap of wind. Left behind.
And here he is again bringing a snakeskin in from the creek to show them. She holds up the papery tube and smiles.
Look, Wally, she says. Look how good the world is, look at the things it leaves us. It means us no harm.
The boy senses he’s stumbled into a debate in progress.
Doesn’t count, mutters the old man hardly looking up. It’s an illusion, a dream we have to pass through.
But look!
Things. Stuff. Just things.
And the smile on her face as she sits back in her chair with the book open on her lap and the hair shining with each happy shake of her head. Holy, she says with a hint of teasing. Holy, holy, holy.
Shit and gristle, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.
Holy. Tell him, Lu.
Standing there openmouthed between them, wondering if bringing it home has been a mistake.
Holy? He always wanted to believe it, and it felt instinctively true from a thousand days spent dragging a stick through the dirt while crows cleared their throats benignly at him and those stones whined gentle upon the hill. But there she is in the end with a tree through her. And the old man all that time dying with those blue fibres in his lungs. God’s good earth. Tilting away from him time and again, stealing from him. Sliding beneath the tyres of that old ute and then suddenly catching, biting enough for it to roll and send the kids out into the paddock like flung mailbags. The world is holy? Maybe so. But it has teeth too. How often has he felt that bite in a slamming gust of wind.
At dawn he crawls through the run-off and stands on the scoured ledge to see that the worst is over. There is the smell of brimstone in the air. From there he can see slagheaps of shell and the log ramparts thrown up by the sea. On his way down he sees his freshwater pool overflowing. The track is a rivulet through the chaos of strewn rainforest. He picks his way until he comes to the great asterisk in the beach where the giant boab used to be. Within the lightning crater coals still glow. A few amputated limbs lie smouldering beyond it but most of it’s ash now, ash and fire-glazed shell. A few nearby trees are scorched but the fire hasn’t spread back into the belt of green below the bluffs.
There are jellyfish in the trees. They glisten in the sudden sunlight.
Fox chips oysters and throws them into the hot coals of the tree until they bubble and hiss and open their mouths.
IN THE WAKE of the cyclone the season wanes and the days become clear and hot, the atmosphere drier. Fox senses the beginning of a contraction, a scarcity of berries, a browning off of grasses. He works harder for his daily catch and he sees that the basin at the foot of the bluff, although wide and generous in its supply of drinking water, may not get him through the Dry season.
On hot, breathless days he paddles around the spit toward the mainland and heads up mangrove creeks to search for water and maybe a camp spot. He finds the remnants of the creeks’ freshwater sources in shrinking billabongs, but the hikes are brutal and the sources unlikely to last. He heads north into the archipelago and finds lovely places but none more practical than where he already lives. In a week of day trips he moves through the islands without success until he’s forced to consider the mainland coast enfolded by them.
Coasting back toward his island on the early change of tide he comes upon a white hummock at the side of a tiny mangrove creek. Beside the hummock are slim boabs and a sandy cove. He paddles in for a quick look, puzzling over the shelly mound. It’s the size of two Landcruisers parked together and it’s not until he’s stood on it a while that he realizes that it’s a midden. Within the pearly surface are veins of grey and black, bits of charcoal, mussel shells, cockles, oysters.
Behind the midden is a wide flat area dotted with pandanus palms. Curious, he goes down and finds a steady trickle of fresh water winding its way seaward across the field of crushed shell. Beyond is a thorny vine thicket and the sound of frogs. Fox works his way around until he comes to a sandstone breakaway. There’s a promising overhang here. Yes, a good camp, an alternative should the water ever dry up completely on the island.
Fox climbs up the little escarpment to get a view and on the next ridge he finds a wide-mouthed cave shrouded with rock figs. On the ledges outside the overhang are tiny dancing figures the colour of dried blood upon the yellow rock. He gives a little grunt of surprise. He examines the dynamic images, most smaller than his hands, and marvels at their tufted head-dresses and skirts. Many are weathered into obscurity.
Inside the cave he sees other paintings in a different style. He stoops to look, but hesitates. On the rear wall a large mouthless face stares at him. Rays stream from its head. Fox feels green ants dropping onto his shoulders from the fig. He thinks what the hell, and goes in crouched.
The ceiling is taken up by a huge ochre figure in red and white. Its head is the size of a turtle shell, the eyes big and dark, and it too is mouthless. Arms like plucked wings. Between the splayed legs a strange trunk reaches down.
Fox lies on his back to see it better. Such a fierce, staring face. Like a stormcloud.
Hello, he whispers. Just visiting.
The weathered face is twice the size of his own.
Dirt creaks beneath him. The cave smells of charcoal. He thinks of that kid Axle and wonders if he’s seen this. Insects have daubed mud nests across this fella’s knees. Parts of him are fading altogether but the face is bright enough, the eyes still fiery.
Halfway out into the light Fox catches himself making the sign of the cross and he stifles a laugh. Hasn’t done that for a while.
Fox holds the midden camp in reserve. Meanwhile he looks for food, measures it, ekes it out, thinks about it. His dried fruit is gone now and with it his rice and precious chilli powder. He gathers pinches of salt from rock dimples at low tide. He finds himself scrounging longer and longer every day. He can ill afford to spare fish carcases for the sharks.
In the end the thought of all that stuff cached down the other end of the gulf is too much for him. On a day of modest neap tides he strikes out in the kayak at fi
rst light.
Even with a light breeze at his back it’s a four-hour paddle. He goes ashore at the headland and lies among the rocks a while to make certain the fishing camp is still deserted. But there’s no sign of anyone. The cyclone has knocked the bough verandah down and torn its spinifex thatch.
Inside the cave a few crates have tipped as though water’s been through and stuff has spilt on the shellgrit. There’s quoll shit everywhere; the hardy little marsupial buggers have been at everything. The generator and freezers seem to have endured inside their plastic wraps, and beyond them, in foam and PVC boxes, Fox finds candles, cigarette lighters, antiseptic cream, a carton of beer from which he takes a six pack, curry spices and black pepper, weevilly flour, bags of rice, tubes of sunscreen and repellent. With persistence he finds freeze-dried vegetables and even raisins. He piles it all into a plastic drum and lashes it to the kayak.
He searches in vain for a book or magazine. He consoles himself with an iron skillet and a tiny jar of paw-paw ointment. He has no luck replacing the insect net he’s ruined catching prawns, but he makes off with a thrownet he wishes he’d seen last time. He stuffs it into the kayak and hopes the disarray from the storm might cover his pilfering. He seals every container and before he goes he rakes the floor of the cave with a dead branch. He goes back on the tide in high spirits and makes the island well before sunset. The sharks are waiting but he has no time to play. He plunges the six pack into his dwindling freshwater pool to let it cool while he stashes his haul. He cooks rice in his skillet with peas and dried apricots and while the new moon gets up he opens a can of beer. He’s surprised at the unearthly sound it makes when he rips the top and how sour it is and how quickly it makes his head spin. It goes down in three swallows and he fetches up another. He lights a candle just for the novelty of it but blows it out again, wishing there’d been a book; anything to contain his mind, direct his thoughts, feed him.
He sits on the smooth warm terrace looking out across the treetops. He drinks the entire six pack and falls asleep in the dirt.
FOR DAYS AFTER the six pack Fox feels persecuted by thirst and heat. He’s listless and in his afternoon stupors he fantasizes about refrigeration. Beaded cans, foggy plastic containers of lettuce, sweating bottles, red dripping tomatoes, snowy ice shavings and the trickle of chilled liquids. The torment ruins his new plenty; it sullies the luxury of soy sauce and chilli and the soothing balm of paw-paw cream on his many wounds. The evenings lag. He lights a fire just for something to watch. Something is building in his head; stuff fizzes and flickers, bloated pictures and half-thoughts that run into one another and cancel themselves out. Even simple, physical tasks no longer organize and pacify him. He believes he’s going mad.
Lubricating his reel with precious cooking oil one afternoon, Fox plucks the taut-strung leader tied to the last runner of the rod and hears something like B-flat. He twangs it again and laughs. From the spool in the cave he reefs off a couple of metres of nylon line and strings it between two limbs of the fig tree shading him. The slack old note it gives isn’t much of a sound but when he tightens and re-ties it he likes it well enough. It makes a nice drone, a sound just outside nature but not dissimilar to it. He clears his throat uncertainly and hums the note. He thinks of Darkie’s little hairless bum sticking out of the piano as he pulls the strings. His heart races; it feels dangerous, listening to this, giving in to the sound, but his thumb whacks at the string out of reflex. How many times in the past year has he walked past that steel guitar and seen his face distorted in its tarnished steel curves and just kept on going by? God knows, music will undo you, and yet you’re whacking this thing into a long, gorgeous, monotonous, hypnotic note and it’s not killing you, it’s not driving you into some burning screaming wreck of yourself—listen! Within the drone, all those sweet multiple timings there to embroider with, the gaps and fills, the hot gurgle coming to your throat. The sudden groove you’re in—damn, just listen to that! You’re humming and stamping and chanting nylon bloody B-flat and it’s good. Whang-whang-whang-whang, wucka—whang, whang!
He growls out a chant, his throat burning with pleasure, and begins to hyperventilate to sustain it. His body fizzes. Bubbles on his skin, twisting strings of bubbles in his vision; they dance across the gulf before him while his ears chirp through the pressures of descent and his collarbone aches. There’s an inward glide in the drone. Like the great open spaces of apnoea, the freedom he knows within the hard, clear bubble of the diver’s held breath. After a point there’s no swimming in it, just a calm glide through thermoclynes, something closer to flight. Within the drone, sound is temperature and taste and smell and memory, wucka-whang.
And when he surfaces from it, the sun is down and the mosquitoes are upon him. The sound of the world is raw. At his ear, in the fig tree beside him, a leafball of green ants chickers a scratchy gossip and beyond it he hears the wingbeats of outward-bound bats and the frothing mandibles of crabs at feast amongst the mangroves.
He rubs paw-paw ointment into his hand and sits up in the dark feeling sated, stunned, excited.
In the following days, whenever he’s not gathering food, he plays the drone. At first he plays for the liberation of it, as rebellion against the discipline that he’s maintained so long, and the return to music is sheer physical pleasure, a kind of relief-in-relenting which is more than sensual. But when he has exhausted plain musical playfulness, the hide and seek of improvisation, he finds that within that long, narcotic note there are places to go.
He beats a path south, across deserts and mountains to the coastal plain of the central west. He strides across the parched, alkaline paddock to the verandah steps and down the dim hallway to the library and hour after hour he swims into books. Their covers creak like doors. Sometimes they give up the tiny gasps of split melons and he moves through their lines as a man walks through home country. He scrambles up through the crags of The Prelude and Tintern Abbey, across hot, bright Emily and into the spiky undergrowth of Bill Blake. The lines come to him. He chants them in B-flat, in a kind of monofilament manifold monotone that feels inexhaustible, as though it’s a sea of words he’s swimming in, an ocean he could drink.
With this fullness, this ecstatic sense of volume, there’s only one regret and that is having no one to share it with. He thinks wistfully of Georgie and her playful prodding, her curiosity about the books, and his stunned inability to say what he felt. God, the things he had wanted to tell her. Fox doesn’t know what you’re supposed to make of Wordsworth and Blake, how you might speak of them if you’d been taught by experts, but he knows he would have tried to explain this sense of the world alive, the way they articulate your own instinctive feeling that there is indeed some kind of spirit that rolls through all things, some fearsome memory in stones, in wind, in the lives of birds.
After some days of chanting, he finds he can travel beyond the library, move through the house with exquisite intimacy, an almost painful vividness of presence. He smells his own bread baking. And there he is at the sink, beside himself in his own kitchen, barefoot in Levi’s. Before him, the window needs washing. There’s a riverstone on the sill and Bullet’s front tooth in a butterdish beside it. The sound of the kids somewhere in the house. When he turns, Sal looks at him from the dust mote cascade of the doorway and scratches herself with the rosined bow as though he’s no more present than a dog under the table.
Out in the laundry he’s small and pressed against the whirring Hoover twintub which threatens to launch itself into space. But the whor-whor-whorr, the sound of it!
And the sleepy sound of the rip saw in the jarrah log, sheet home, sheet home, sheet home, while his father’s sweat shines in the sun. Standing beside himself, Fox rocks on his dimpled infant legs to the rhythm, puzzled at his father’s wry grin.
Bird wrapped in his denim jacket, her milky breath upon his face as she sings hymns in his arms. The north wind is tossing the leaves, the red dust is over the town, the sparrows are under the eaves, and the gra
ss in the paddock is brown. Christmas, then, it has to be Christmas, and her head no bigger than a runty cantaloupe.
Fox walks out to himself hunkered in the noonday paddock amongst watermelons at picking point. Hot Christmas. The sun on the back of his neck. And he looks up to see them, Darkie and Sal, sprawled on the verandah steps watching him work.
Standing behind Bird in the shed. She’s paralyzed at the sight of the old man’s sign.
Christ is the head of this house,
The unseen Guest at every meal,
The silent Listener to every conversation
The day after the poor old bugger’s funeral Darkie tore it off the kitchen wall and here it lives. Bird gives it a wide berth on her way out into the glare of the day. She knows when you’re there. The way his mother knew if you were there, or when one of you was hurt. A sudden hand across her chest. You saw it yourself.
In the afternoons the sharks cruise the shallows but he plays the drone. His thumb is callused now; he can go for hours.
Fox sings himself down sheep pads and yellow washaways to walk up the dry riverbed toward the farm. Paperbarks are shrivelled spindles of themselves. The silicate soil of the high paddock squeaks underfoot and where the house should be there is no house. His trees are dead and not even a silver filigree of dead melon vine remains on the ground. He expects at least a mound of ashes, a lightning crater, but there’s nothing. Only the bones of rock up there on the hill. When he gets up among them, the pinnacles’ shadows are treacly. The air smells bitterly of sweat and piss. The monoliths lean on the wind but even the perennial southerly is no more. Fox stands there beside himself and slips his hand into the stone fissure for the tea can, and the limestone stirs against him, its hip on his as he leans in. It’s hot and damp inside and slippery on his arm as though felted with wet moss. The tin is just out of reach. When he strains deeper, the rock moans and cries out in his ear and right beneath his leaning weight it grows a bluish bark, a smooth, fleshy covering that causes him to recoil so fast that when he rips his arm from it there follows a gout of blood and water.