Harland's Half Acre, Page 2

  It didn’t interest Frank all that much – he did it to please his uncle – and the galleon Ned had made when he was only thirteen remained a reproach to the younger boy’s lack of skill. He preferred drawing.

  Uncle Fred began by showing him how to make a picture of a horse with high-stepping feet and a cart with a stiff little driver, and he quickly learned to make a livelier picture of his own. His horse had more fire; there was more detail in the eye, the nostrils, the mane. He went on from that to copying illustrations out of the newspaper, automobiles with curved mudguards and spoked wheels, houses from the land agents’ advertisements with wonderful trees and clouds. His hands, though small compared with his uncle’s, were too clumsy for the matches but felt easy with a pencil. He loved the precision it took to recreate, detail by detail, and with delicate strokes for shading, the professionalism of the newspaper ads, and was delighted when his aunt accused him of tracing.

  ‘But you must have,’ she insisted. ‘You did, didn’t you, Frank? It’s silly to tell a fib about such a little thing.’

  He heard from his father of new brothers, and from Jim, who stayed overnight once on his way to a bush-children’s holiday by the sea, of their stepmother, Sally.

  ‘She’s oright,’ Jim admitted. ‘A bit scotty but. She doesn’ just go crook on yer, she flies f’ the hairbrush, then feels sorry afterwards and cooks golden-syrup pudding, ’cause it’s me fav’rit.’ He gave a big-toothed grin. ‘She’s oright. She’s got three small little kids to manage.’

  When asked what he remembered of their real mother he looked embarrassed and had nothing to tell.

  *

  It was, perhaps, Jim decided, because he had never known Sally that Frank thought of their mother’s place in the house as empty. It was not. Sally filled it with her flaring temper, her shouting and swearing at them all, her clattering about with pans, her preoccupation with nappies in a tub and with babies who were always tugging at her nipple or hauling at your knees under the chair.

  Sally was only half grown-up. She had a scar above one cheek where a pebble had flicked up in the school playground. She went barefoot. And once, to Jim’s astonishment, when she was fed up with them all, she had shinnied up the trunk of a pine tree in the yard and refused to come down. She had just gone on climbing right to the top, swinging on the springy top boughs and shouting out all she could see. His father had come out of the cowshed in his boots, laughing at first, then anxiously pleading with her. But Sally, unwilling to give up her moment of tomboyish elation and high freedom, had told him to piss off. She had to be coaxed down like a cat.

  When she did come at last, in a bit of a huff, her legs were all scratched and pricked with blood and his father that night had bathed them tenderly in warm water and Solyptol.

  The wonder of all this Jim could not have conveyed. He would have had to admit how he too clung to Sally and accepted even her tongue-lashings and cuffs, and the attacks of tickling that left him helplessly squealing, as the effects of a female presence he could not have done without. She was mother and woman enough, Sally, to have replaced their real mother. He found Frank’s attempt to revive that shadowy being and restore old loyalties disturbing.

  But for Frank the question had had another point altogether. He was not surprised by his brother’s blankness of memory.

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that he had had no mother at all but had been born out of some aspect of his father that was itself feminine; not in being soft or yielding, but in being, quite simply, powerful, and so full of animal warmth that it must inevitably give birth to something other than itself.

  He had begun to think of himself as existing in a unique relationship to his father that ought not to be spoken of, and guessed that it was for this reason, as a kind of diversionary tactic, that his father had sent him away. They shared a secret, perhaps even a crime. How else explain the shyness his father showed before him – which he took to be of the same kind as that awe, that sense of being in the presence of the powerfully sacred, that he himself felt when, outside the influence of his aunt’s house and her sceptical eye, he was swept up into the folds of his father’s coat and carried out onto the slope.

  There, seated together on a round boulder and gazing out beyond a landscape of cataclysmic upheaval towards the lush green valley that was Killarney, they would be in utter communion. His father would have a suffering look, as if their being together like this, and for such a short spell, evoked pain as well as love, or as if those emotions were insolubly linked or were the same emotion in different forms; like the two forces, male and female, out of which his father, by a process that was not to be referred to and which obeyed other laws than the ones he had observed among animals and learned from the brute facts of the schoolyard, had brought him to birth.

  Breath – that was the sacred thing. Even the Bible said it. Hence the clear silences and bare swept spaces of his aunt’s house, which was entirely secular, and on the other hand his father’s talk, the endless flow of words on that caressing breath that must itself, Frank decided, be the creative medium. He could only have been breathed forth in a great bubble or spat bodily from his father’s mouth.

  His father’s talk of his youth at Killarney, and the odd bits and pieces of family history he liked to retell, all mixed in as they were with myths, legends, jokes, facts, fables – these things explained to the boy’s satisfaction, and more convincingly than anything he had been told either at church or at school, both what he was and where he had come from, and gave him such a vision of Killarney itself that he knew just how it would look when he returned there.

  Every grass blade and bush, the many waterholes and their names, and the little round hills and farmhouses and timbermills and barns, were utterly familiar to him. Killarney was the realest place he knew. It had been created for him entirely out of his father’s mouth.

  [3]

  All this was secret in the boy and would remain so. It belonged to a religiously preserved silence.

  In the meantime, he lived with the ordinary facts of school on five days of the week, farmwork on the others, and with such scraps of information as his aunt, who was a close and lonely woman, might impart to him on stormy afternoons when they had draped all the mirrors in the house against lightning, put away all the knives, and in rivalry with the rain that was drumming on the roof, sat knee to knee tumbling peas into a pot.

  It took a good thunderstorm to shake words out of his Aunt Else.

  ‘When me and your father were young,’ she told, ‘we were very poor. Poorer even than your father is now.’

  She frowned, and might already after twenty syllables have felt piqued with herself for having said too much.

  ‘He was younger than me, your father. Twelve years. And a fascinator. He got away with it. With everyone, including my mother. But not with me.’ She looked for a moment at the peas lying side by side in the transparent shell and then pushed them out with her thumbnail. They clattered. ‘I reckon he’ll get away with it all his life. I used to think, people will see through him. In the long run, truth is truth. Only it isn’t. He used to fascinate people because he was just a boy. Now he fascinates ’em with the same trick because he isn’t. People never learn. He’s always looking for sympathy, he makes use of everyone. He’ll never change.’

  He recognised in this some confession or complaint on his aunt’s part that might be the nearest he would ever come to hearing her view, not just of his father but of life itself. Perhaps she intended it as a warning. In so far as it appeared to warn him against his father, he could not accept it.

  He was just eleven.

  Later, when he tried to establish in his mind the order of events, he would place this conversation in the midst of a storm whose beginnings he had seen from the top of a granite bluff; which means that it must have followed immediately on the announcement that he was to leave his aunt’
s house and go back. But he could never be sure of this. Storms were frequent in that part of the country, and he might simply have made this last storm the most violent he could remember, and then, conflating two passions – the one recklessly breaking, the other tightly held in – have transposed his aunt’s words to the eve of his departure.

  He had seen the storm’s approach and had clambered up, using his bare feet and knees, to a viewpoint high above the farm, in a stillness, once he had reached the top, that seemed ultimate.

  The birds had fallen quiet. They had gone in out of sight. Only a chicken-hawk, high up, sailed and propped, then stood perfectly still in the air as if it had been stopped by an invisible hand. The leaves around him were glowingly still. They seemed to have passed out of any reality in which they might be touched by rain or wind. They were transparent, you could see right through them.

  It was the light. The granite outcrops and enormous stone eggs were also changed by it. They showed their fault lines going back into the earth.

  The light was inside things. He thought of the stained-glass window of St Michael’s when there was a night service and all the colour and glory of the figures, afloat above clumps of darkness, existed for those outside – animals or tramps or ordinary passers-by on the road – for whom they had a brightness and clarity of line and form that was denied the kneeling congregation. It was as if he had got to the other side of things. It was the quality of his seeing that was changed. Every tree now started out of the earth as a separate object newly made; not a peach tree, one of a row, but this tree and no other, all the trees in their rows utterly separate one from another and casting shadows of individual shape on the sloping earth, which was all rough clods, each one golden brown and also lighted from within, and so real that it came to you as if it had been flung clean at your head.

  On the horizon to the south-west a great stack of cloud was building and spreading, so fast that time might have been speeded up. Invisible pitchforks were at it. It tumbled within itself. It whirled and spiralled in wisps of blue, purple, black. It began to tease out and topple towards him.

  It was the activities of this cloud that made the light so strange.

  He looked at his hand. Even that was different. It had never before had quite this shape or colour.

  Was he responsible? Had he brought this cloud into being as, through some power of wishing or working that he only half-believed in, he had brought about the event that would take him away? He took one last breathless look, which he would retain as his final view of the place – that was why he had climbed so high – and sliding down the smooth curve of the rock began to race the cloud home, controlling its tumbling power of growth and motion as he ran, watching it roll, within his will, right across the sky towards the town: an immense stack of water, tons and tons of it, suspended there, swirling and darkening everything its shadow touched, but at the same time catching it in a new light from within.

  He ran fast.

  Old Mr Koenig, whom he was fond of and would never see again, was out among his bee-boxes, covered with a gauze helmet like Ned Kelly and working quick spells with his hands. The bee-boxes were a brilliant blue. You could see the bees dancing in miniature storm clouds above them while Mr Koenig conducted.

  The O’Deas were at the clothes props, shouting and hauling down sheets: Mrs O’Dea with the clothes basket, the two skinny girls, Francie and Rena, even Leo, who would be ashamed to be caught like this. Leo was his best friend at school. Or had been.

  ‘It’ll be a humdinger!’ Jake Shoals called down to him, standing still a moment, halfway up a slope strewn with bits and pieces of machinery, car engines, the cabin of a truck, stacked oil drums, the ribs of a dismantled harvester. His wife Milly – they were their closest neighbours – was driving chickens into a shed, whose rusty blood-redness in the new light hurt.

  High up on the roof of the house an iron sheet had risen and begun to flap. Jake Shoals had never got round to nailing it down – too busy always with the machines at his feet, which alone stayed anchored as the grass suddenly flattened and flowed uphill, and dry leaves, twigs and feathers ascended and whirled.

  He ran as fast as he could. His breath was holding out, he didn’t have a stitch and the cloud was still growing.

  His Aunt Else was terrified of thunder and would be alone in the house. There would be things to do, windows to fasten. And in a storm she liked to shut out the noise with talk. He was sharply aware as he ran that he would never see any of these things again, was taking leave of them and of a whole phase of his life. He hadn’t expected to have to do it on the run, or to find himself seeing them for the first time as well.

  Milly Shoals turned and waved to him. Her luminous old dress was the colour of soft butter, and the chooks, leaping up and flapping their wings as she drove them in a dusty rabble, crowding, trampling one another, were of an angelic whiteness.

  He turned up the long drive, still running under the cloud.

  The first drops came, so big they splashed.

  When he left next morning his aunt was upset and would have liked to cry over him but would not allow herself. He was fond of her and did not know what to say. She too had known that his father would take him back one day. She had insured herself against a second grief by never really giving herself to him. ‘Be a good boy,’ was all she said now. She embraced him briefly then locked her arms over her flat chest.

  It was his uncle, who was simpler and had fewer defences, who said, ‘We’ll miss you lad. Won’t know what to do without you. It’ll be like losing Ned all over again.’

  He promised himself that some day he would say what he felt for them, these two quiet people who had fostered him for so long. Or show them. But for the moment he was too full of his own passionate exultation.

  The talking was done by his father.

  ‘No, no, Clem,’ his uncle insisted, shaking his head. ‘It isn’t necessary. We on’y done what anyone would. What’s family for?’

  His aunt made a line with her mouth. She had baked an early Christmas cake with holly and a frill and made a tin of pink-and-white coconut-ice.

  No one would ever know the triumph he felt in having made all this happen. He was going back to his father, to his real family, and to the place. Killarney. His father’s wife, that Sally, had died of the Spanish ’flu and his father had decided they should be together again. His will to return had been stronger than the woman’s will to survive.

  ‘He wants a cheap nursemaid,’ he had heard his aunt whisper in bed after the letter came.

  ‘Ssh! The boy will hear! There’s no point in carrying on at this stage –’

  ‘It’s always the same. He never thinks of anyone but himself. It’s the unfairness of it!’

  They were whispering in bed with the door open, and he was standing barefoot at the sink, having come out in his pyjamas to get a drink. He wouldn’t dare now. The gulping and sudden rush of the tap would give him away. He stood eavesdropping while they whispered over his life, smiling to himself that his fate was, after all, in his own hands, and aware, with the same physical sense as of the cold that came up through the flags and made his teeth chatter, of a turning point in his life, of his being set in a new direction.

  [4]

  The house he moved back to was in every way unlike the one he had known for the past eight years. It was immediately familiar to him, not as a place of particular walls or objects but as a quality of warmth and proximity that his body had clung to and agonised over in the clear swept spaces of his aunt’s house and in his single bed.

  It was one big room with two beds: a double bed where his father and Jim slept, and where he now rejoined them under a patchwork quilt, and another for the smaller kids, who were seven, four and three years old and all had a dazed, dark-eyed look that he guessed was their mother’s, and flat, straw-coloured hair.

  He loved them at once for
their difference. They were all three alike but of another family – it might have been another planet. They hung together and had signs and even a language of their own that was all sing-song vowels. Muddled together like puppies in their own bed, which was set at right angles to the other, in a communal warmth and breath, and murmuring secret syllables to one another in a tangle of arms and legs and almost indistinguishable blond heads, they made the strangest possible link between him and this old yet changed world he had come back to.

  Half-brothers. He found the concept magical, especially since they came to him complete. He would stare at the one photograph of their mother, who seemed more like a cheeky boy, and trace their strangeness back to a likeness there of snub-nosed, dark-eyed blondness that was a new element of his life. He felt guilty before them, and this too determined the quality of his passion: he had, by the power of wishing, driven their mother from the house. Though unrepentant he was consumed with guilt.

  But physical closeness in his father’s bed made up for any chill he might have felt on his soul, and the three little boys were innocently forgiving, delighted to have a new adult in the house to pester and perform for, and especially one who needed to be shown and told so much that they already knew: like how many scoops went into their father’s morning pot, the half-dozen places a lost tea-strainer might get to, and in which of the stepped canisters you would find cinnamon or rice or sago (since whoever had first established a kind of order here hadn’t stuck to the worn and unreadable labels); how to flake Sunlight Soap for washing, where to keep butter from ants and bread from the eternally scampering mice, and a hundred other details of their rough housekeeping.

  Then too there was the fuggy warmth and rich, earth-animal smell of the cowshed, which he had never forgotten and was delighted to rediscover. He was gathered back into a daily routine that was the ground of his father’s life and the source of that essential smell of the man that had come with him on all his visits, reminding the boy always of the different life they lived here, among animals rather than trees, and lingering afterwards to torment him with homesickness and a passionate longing. He burrowed back into it. It became his own.