To the Islands (8 page)

‘Ah!’ screamed the women as the fluid drained into the ground. ‘Ah!’ they shouted angrily at the dog.

The little dingo from running aimlessly burst suddenly into heart-cracking flight, its tail down. The men roared and the women screeched with laughter. Terrified by the uproar behind it the dog, twisting past trees, dodging humpies, dived at last, swift as a snake, into the sanctuary of the grass.

On her knees in front of the old woman, hearing the laughter wash in waves round her: It was such a small thing, thought Helen; and they of all people should have the least laughter. But I have less. I would, if it came to it, have less.

Over Heriot’s head the men perched on the frame of the new building, assured as monkeys, fixing sheets of iron to the skeleton of the roof. Their quick laconic remarks and directions to one another fell around him like leaves from the barren branches on which they clung, and he, so alone in their company, so small in their eyes from their high seats, went to find Way, where, in the shade of the baobabs, he stood supervising the laying of foundations for the other part of the building.

‘They’re doing well,’ Way said, removing his linen hat and wiping his forehead. ‘It won’t be long now.’

Heriot stared at the bent brown backs. ‘I hope it will be finished before I go. It would be—something.’

‘You’re a grudging chap,’ Way complained lightly. ‘It would be a great deal to everyone, I should think. Quite a handsome building, for us.’

‘That was what I meant. To leave just as a new building’s finished—very satisfying.’

‘Your monuments are all around you,’ said Way courteously.

Heriot received that with a meagre smile. ‘I’m afraid to you my monuments must look pretty shabby. But when I think back to my earliest memories of the place, and when I remember what old Walton told me of the beginnings, then it does seem something great was done, at some time, by someone...But not by me.’

‘That’s nonsense, surely.’

‘No. All my reign has been marking time. Depression, then war—very little ever achieved. And now, with the Government giving more money than we’ve ever had, we’re still poor. Nothing seems to grow but problems.’

‘Which, particularly?’

‘The people,’ Heriot said, with a shrug. ‘As they lose simplicity they lose direction. So what are we going to do with them? Who’s going to teach them trades, give them confidence in themselves? Drive them out of this inertia they fall into now their pride’s grown enough to make them want above everything to have some sort of
competence.
I don’t know the answers.’

‘We’re promised a technical school, some day, somewhere within a few hundred miles.’

‘I wish it well,’ said Heriot. ‘And you. Because you’re coming to the most heartbreaking phase in the history of this problem.’

‘We’ll do our best, I hope.’

‘I hope,’ echoed Heriot, and looked at Way, that capable midde-aged man, reflectively and approved him. ‘You’ve time, I think, to see enormous changes, perhaps the end of physical misery among them, as the old ones die out in the way we old ones do. But in the end you’ll have something else to face—misery of the mind. And that will be hardest, Way. It’s come already. You know Stephen.’

‘It could be the whole world you’re talking about. The same’s true everywhere—the same problems. The worst thing, I suppose, so far, is this long cold war in the towns between black and white.’

Watching the long motions of a man on the roof silhouetted brownly against a cloud: ‘Oh yes,’ said Heriot, ‘oh yes. This is my microcosm.’

Never before in their uneasy, sometimes angry association had they been so much at peace with one another as at that moment in the shadow of the baobabs, watching the man’s slow movements on the roof, listening to the slower ring of hammers echoing from beneath it. In Heriot’s eyes Way had suddenly grown, had become a figure of hope and of foresight, fit, if he should propose himself, to take over the torch, the helm, whatever rhetorical term you liked to apply to it, of the small world so long of Heriot’s governing. And Way, for his part, discovered without warning such springs of warmth and depths of seriousness in Heriot that he was left silent for a time with the awe of revelation.

‘I’m very glad,’ he said, when he saw Heriot did not mean to go on, ‘very glad to have heard your ideas on this. Because none of us, you know, have ever had much conversation with you about the place.’

But Heriot had withdrawn again, had no more to say than: ‘Well, I’m sorry for that.’

From his lethargy, brought on by peace and the heat of the day and the languid movements of the figure on the roof, he was dragged back by the sight of a man sitting on the ground inside the building and apparently asleep. ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded abruptly.

‘Where?’ asked Way, too casually.

‘There, sitting down.’

‘That man? Rex, I think.’

‘Why isn’t Rex working?’

‘I thought you were sending him back at the week-end. So he can’t be employed—’

‘I told someone, you or Dixon, he was to work this week, and his wages were to go to Gregory to pay for his keep.’

‘I can swear,’ Way said, flushing a little, ‘you didn’t tell me.’

‘Why do you let him hang around like that, in any case? Didn’t you give him something to do?’

‘I suggested a job for him, but he refused, and I couldn’t see any reason for making an issue of it.’

Now they were facing one another, the craggy face and white mane of Heriot against the smoother head and features of the clergyman, both burning suddenly in mutual defiance. ‘I’d have thought it was a matter of common sense. You know someone must be feeding him,’ said Heriot acidly.

‘Don’t you think perhaps you’re too much down on Rex?’ Way quietly suggested. ‘It begins to look a bit like victimization.’

For a second Heriot stared widely at him, then swung away and went quickly to the building, shouting: ‘Rex!’

Rex got nonchalantly to his feet and turned to face him. ‘What that, brother?’

‘Father Way told you you were to work. Why aren’t you working?’

‘I don’t get no pay, brother.’

‘Your pay will go to Gregory. Do you expect him to keep you for a week?’

Rex said with sweet reasonableness: ‘I give Gregory my big cowboy hat, he don’t want money. You ask him, brother.’

Baffled then, knowing that Gregory would support this statement under torture, Heriot’s anger broke out in a shout unsteady with mortification and defeat. ‘Get up there,’ he ordered, pointing absurdly to the watching men on the house-frame, ‘quickly, before I have you whipped.’

Across the face of Rex as he turned away, and across the faces of the men, a slow grin flickered. Twenty years ago, or even fifteen, this threat from Brother Heriot might have been dangerous; but the old man was weak now and had changed, or perhaps all white men had changed, at all events the whip was gone, and the old man’s almost unheard-of weapons of expulsion and wage-stoppage were powerless against Rex. They watched him, their clever black kinsman, climb with leisurely insolence towards them, and struggled with a mounting laugh.

Absurd, impotent, Heriot turned away. Behind him, Rex settled himself comfortably on the skeleton building and fostered with a gesture the slow laughter rising in the men. Way watched, still beneath his tree. The men at work on the foundations straightened their backs and looked.

‘Get on with the work,’ Heriot snapped at them.

He met Way’s glance fiercely with his aroused eyes. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

But from Way there was no protest, only in his face regret that the veteran chief of a moment ago should have shrunk so catastrophically into a petulant child. ‘Hate is ruinous,’ he said sadly.

From the water flagged with lily leaves, lilies flowering among them, birds rose in sudden stages with a clatter of wings. Ibis and white cranes climbed slowly, wild ducks sped low over the water with a confused whistle, and wheeled, and returned, and flew off again. Geese trailed their long cry over the plain, a single black jabiru following.

Before they had gone the children were already in the water, floundering among the lilies, crying to one another of the coolness of it and of its richness in ducks and flowers. The small children danced naked in the shallows with shining skins. The others, in brief pants, some girls in their dresses, dolphined among the lily stems.

Gunn, seated on one arm of a baobab grown after centuries to resemble a clump of gigantic bagpipes, watched them with contentment. In the rays of the low sun the petals of lilies shone almost translucent against the shadowed hill, the far bank with its leaning pandanus. In that light the lily pads and the reeds glowed green as malachite, the water glistened, rock burned redly on the hilltop. Smooth as a fish, her wet hair flattened, a brown child turned in the water with her arms full of flowers.

He had brought a book with him, meaning to read there, to show Helen that he was not letting his brain lie fallow, but he could only sit and look at the children and the water and the flowers, in a mind-draining peace.

On the lying-down tree, behind his back, he heard the whisper of bare feet on bark, but did not turn. Then two wet brown arms holding long-stemmed lilies came round his neck. ‘Ah, brother,’ a soft seven-year-old voice crooned lovingly.

‘That’s Jenny,’ he said, trying to look at her.

She giggled, the water dripping from her hair on to his neck.

‘Pretty flowers,’ he said.

‘You want one, brother? They good. You try,’ she insisted, pushing a fleshy stem between his lips. ‘Chew him, brother.’

Since the stem was already in his mouth, making it impossible to refuse, he bit off a piece and chewed it. It was tasteless, or perhaps faintly sour.

‘That good?’ she asked.

‘Yes, good,’ he said, with the chewed green strings in his mouth and not knowing what to do with them. He spat them out.

‘You want more?’ she invited generously, trying to force another stem into his mouth.

‘No, no more,’ he managed to say, ‘thank you.’

‘Ah, brother,’ she murmured, and slid around his shoulder to sit down in front of him on the tree. They looked at one another with mutual amusement, he taken with her thin limbs and white teeth, she with his sunburned face and lank hair.

A boy crouching under the leaning tree tugged at her hanging leg. ‘
Ali!
’ she cried, with exaggerated alarm. ‘That Normie, he pull my leg, brother.’

‘Come out, Normie,’ Gunn ordered.

The small boy appeared and leaned grinning against the tree. ‘I don’t hurt her, brother,’ he protested. ‘Brother, why you don’t go swimming?’

‘I’ll swim another time.’

‘There big snake in that water, brother.’

‘What, now?’

‘Might be. I don’t know, brother. Edward, you know Edward, he were after duck one day in the water and that snake, he bite Edward leg, just here, brother. Edward reckon that old snake after them duck too.’

‘Wasn’t it poisonous?’

‘I don’t know, brother. But Edward, he come running out of water pretty quick, and he look at his leg, brother, and there that old snake teeth sticking there in Edward leg. Real big teeth, brother.’

‘He must be a tough man.’

‘Ah, he real tough. He real cowboy, brother.’ Normie laughed, leaning against his tree, to think of the heroic toughness of Edward.

Gunn was looking absently towards the far blue hills. ‘I’d like to go there,’ he said, ‘there, past the hills.’

‘That cowboy country there, brother.’

‘Everything’s cowboy country to you, Normie.’

‘All hill and rock there. Plenty kangaroo, brother. Only old people go there, not mission people. He real lonely, all that country.’

‘I know,’ Gunn said meditatively, turning his eyes back to the pool where three girls were chasing a boy through the rafts of leaves and flowers, they screaming, reaching, he laughing over his shoulder and shining with water-beads. ‘No sense in being lonely, is there?’

*

Outside the store, sitting or standing in the dust in their usual after-work groups, the men and Dixon looked at one another and laughed.

‘Brother,’ shouted Stephen, bent in the middle with histrionic amusement, ‘I go right over your head, brother!’

‘Well, I went right over Gregory’s head,’ Dixon said, ‘and landed on mine.’

Gregory laughed deeply from his fat chest. ‘I thought I were going to sit on you, brother. But then I thought I pretty heavy for Brother Terry, and I don’t do that then.’

‘Good on you, Gregory. I’d be thinner now if you had.’

On the way to collect a load of sand the trailer had become uncoupled from the tractor, catapulting its passengers in a long arc to the ground; and part of their amusement was the thought that if the tractor had been travelling more slowly it might now be decorated with several sets of brains. ‘Ah, brother,’ said Michael, in a deep burst of laughter, ‘you looked funny. You flying down like a duck, brother.’

Matthew, the most serious of them, looked up from tracing designs in the dust. ‘Mary’s husband, he was working in town and trailer tipped over. Killed him. Reckon Mary would get money, but she didn’t get much. Not like white man’s wife.’

Dixon moved uneasily. ‘That was bad luck.’

‘Like they say, brother, one law for white man and one law for black man. You reckon,’ on an inquiring inflexion, ‘eh, brother?’

Dixon hesitated, unhappy at the question, knowing a flat disagreement would alienate them, agreement only foster their resentments. He muttered: ‘I don’t know, Matthew. That was a long time ago, was it?’

‘Yeah, long time.’

‘It wouldn’t happen now. That bloke who lost his leg got a lot of money. I forget how much, but a white man wouldn’t have got any more.’

Michael said: ‘Someday we all be citizens, eh, brother?’

‘Yeah, some day you will. You got to work for it.’ But I can’t preach, he thought, no good me trying to talk to them. Nobody tries to talk to them, nobody tells them the whole thing. That’s what Heriot ought to be doing, or Bob, not me, I don’t know anything.

‘I better go for my tucker,’ he said, turning away. ‘See you in church, some of you.’

They watched him silently, with expressionless faces, while every word he had said and every opinion he had betrayed was sorted and weighed and stored for the future in the tribal archives, their disoriented and searching minds.