Salt Creek Page 8

  CHAPTER 7

  Chichester, 1867

  THE WONDER IN OUR FIRST YEARS in Chichester was the rebuilding of the cathedral spire, which had fallen a year or two before my arrival there. That something that had stood for more than seven hundred years could fall so quick was miraculous to me, in the sense that it could scarcely be comprehended.

  No one was killed, the event having been expected and the area cleared, which many called a blessing and a sign from God that it was not punishment that was intended. I held my counsel on that point for I had seen enough of people to know that they can persuade themselves of anything at all regardless of the merits or justice of a thing. It was the predictability of the fall that saved people, not justice, and where there is no justice I do not find the hand or the presence of God.

  I had never before seen a cathedral and this one appeared caught between two states of existence: construction and decay. All around it heaps of stone were piled up waiting to be restored to their proper place. People were accustomed to the sight, though Mrs Wickens said it had not always been so. ‘It was like it had had its head cut off, Madam.’ She put a hand to her stomach. ‘If a cathedral can fall, anythin’ might happen. And I saw it fall, mind, I felt it in my feet.’

  I dreamt of the collapse once or twice: the air and ground thunderous and the cathedral spire subsiding as the mast of a sinking ship might be swallowed by heaving sea, and people swarming in and out of the black spaces of its blasted doorways, as frenzied as ants.

  Some things collapse slow, and cannot always be rebuilt, and even if a thing can be remade it will never be as it was. I heard the rebuilding of the cathedral called an abomination, a view that was not generally held. People were glad of it; they loved it more tenderly, I think, seeing its fragility. They knew what might befall even something so vast and old.

  Joss and I came to know those involved: the workers, the architect, the engineer and the benefactors, these last glossy with wealth and importance. The calculations, at least, I could discuss sensibly. I had not known that buildings were so mathematical. People are not of course, which is a pity. The stress points are particular to an individual, and are not always visible to those around. A person might appear to be complete and be invisibly crumbling, or might appear to be falling apart and yet persist despite all expectation. Connections between people are not so different.

  Observing the work on the cathedral was Joss’s favourite entertainment. It put me in mind of the duck that Fred and Albert left to rot once as a scientific study after the visit from the troopers, the ants mining it for life, and of a story that Tull once told of ant people swarming across the land.

  The Coorong, July 1856

  Winter began in earnest, worse than the last. Thick rain and squall came from the ocean across the peninsula and the sand hills were no more than a ripple in their path. At first we were cosy within, the saturated sky and clouds and air and ground outside something to endure. Soon enough it began to find out the house’s true deficiencies, the porosity that its roof of shabby thatch had developed since the spring, and we placed bowls about to catch the drips and squeezed into the dining room. It was as warm as it could be with its various draughts; better at any rate than the veranda which, deep as it was, was wet to the door. Drying clothes steamed on racks over the stove and over the backs of chairs, their vapours misting the windows and obscuring the view until someone went over and smeared the steam and water aside to peer out. But it was just water outside too, veils slipping in the air and flopping about in the lagoon. The peninsula was a smudge.

  Once, maddened with confinement, I went walking in that weather and saw an old man throwing on his possum cloak, hands stretching it out to either side so it was a rich curtain he stood against and he swept his arms in, one and the other, the slow beats of huge wings. I tried it with my shawl but it was nothing that would hold me up and keep me warm. It was wet in an instant.

  Fred and I took turns milking the house cows. They gave only a little milk at this time of year. The other cows were let loose. They became wary, staring at us with the eyes of scarce-remembered obedience if we chanced upon them, or sheering away into the bush on their way to becoming part of it. Sometimes they became stranded between soaks and the boys would splash towards them or circle from behind with windmill arms and the half-broke shouts of burgeoning manhood, and Skipper wild with the excitement of pursuit charged at them. Lacking any instinct for self-preservation, they enmired themselves at the edges of soaks and thrashed themselves deeper – rolling their eyes and bellowing until, exhausted, they slumped and settled and waited for death. Papa and the boys dug them loose and pulled them free by degrees and encouragement and they lumbered away in a state of bovine jubilance until hunger restored them to unthinking life. There were times when there was the sign of a great struggle: gouged and churned mud. We thought that they had broken free is all, that they had been fortunate or strong.

  Papa was out each day, sometimes overnight with Hugh and Stanton. They found a gap burned in a fence, which they had to repair before travelling further afield to see if stock had strayed beyond our boundaries. After a night curled about a campfire they came across a native encampment that they hadn’t seen before. They were quiet when they returned, even Stanton, and sat so close to the heat that the steam lifted from them.

  Papa said: ‘I have not seen them so ill this far south before. It was as if they had no fight in them. It wasn’t only their bodies that had sickened, but their spirits also. Chills and fevers for the most part. And their stores run low. We gave them what we had.’

  ‘All of it?’ Mama said.

  ‘All. We told him not to. They’ll die anyway,’ Stanton said.

  ‘Yes, why slow what is inevitable?’ Hugh said.

  ‘They are people, Hugh. That is why,’ Papa said.

  Hugh would not meet his eyes. ‘Where are those cattle, eh? They can’t all be hiding in the scrub. The blacks will be stealing them. It’s no wonder people take matters into their own hands, and I say it’s time for us to be thinking of it.’

  ‘If they are taking the cows, why would things be so bad that they needed provisions?’ I said. The things Hugh said were like equations that could not balance.

  ‘You could not possibly understand what it’s like, Hester,’ he said.

  ‘Take me. I’d gladly come. I would like to understand.’

  ‘Hugh, Hettie. Enough,’ Papa said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mama said. ‘Hettie, we must do more potatoes,’ and she left the room pushing her sleeves up as she went. I believe she really thought they might be murdered each time they were gone from home, and their return was marked each time by her small surges of purpose.

  ‘Papa,’ I said, pausing at the door. ‘Was it Tull’s family there? Did you see him?’

  ‘No, not his. I didn’t know them. It was a long way from here, north of McGrath’s. In spring he will be back I daresay and then we shall see.’

  It seemed the cold would never end, but there came a day when the air turned soft and I took the dishes and the basin to the end of the veranda where the sun skimmed it in the morning, and filled it with hot water from the kettle and washed them. In the week that followed birds teemed in from the north and flung themselves at the lagoon and began a cacophonous calling. They were urgent in all that they did, action coming from impulse rather than consideration and duty. It would change when their eggs hatched.

  Fred and Addie and Albert sat on the veranda to do their lessons, Albert kicking and fidgeting, their heads lifting to gaze at the lagoon. It was more molten metal than water. I could not help feeling my spirits rise and shut my eyes to feel the warmth on my face and when I opened them again Tull was there. He stood poised at the top of the steps waiting for a greeting, a welcome, whatever form that might take. I never met a more conscious person on the particulars of manners and customs.

  ‘Tull. It’s Tull,’ Albert said. Everyone leapt up.

  Tull was
embarrassed at this effusion, and smiled in relief and came forward and was one of us again. His teeth, so white, startled me afresh. He had grown again and was pale, for him, after the short days. He wore a cloak and Stanton’s old trousers. There was the stitching I had done at the thigh where they had caught, their worn knees, the frayed heels above Tull’s ankles, which gave a curious sailor’s look to his attire.

  He began to stay with us more constantly, and after Papa found him asleep on the back step one morning wrapped in nothing but his sea-grass cloak for warmth he said he might stay with us if his family were agreeable, which they were. They knew we were no danger to him by then, I daresay. Papa built him a room of his own by closing off a narrow section of the veranda’s return. Fred envied it. In it was a simple bed of wood that Papa had made, two hooks on the door to hang his clothes from at night, two carved clubs, a shield and several spears, which bristled in the corner behind the door.

  The early morning was taken up with milking and lessons, and we took turns with the cheese in the afternoon, but there were occasions – Sunday afternoon, or before the evening milking – when Fred and Tull could slip away on explorations, either along the lagoon or across to the peninsula. Fred preferred Tull’s company to Albert’s, which I know Albert felt. His eyes followed them. Fred did not mean any harm or malice; he was oblivious. If Albert wished to go with them, Fred agreed – ‘Only try to be quiet this time, or you’ll scare everything off again’ – but it is never pleasant to be merely tolerated and Albert began to go about with Papa and Stanton and Hugh even if his help were not needed.

  If the weather was fine and Mama and Mary were napping and the chores were done I sometimes rowed to the peninsula with them. Papa and Mama saw no harm in it as a Sunday activity. We roamed the sand hills together, Fred with his note book and a satchel containing collection jars and the cloth bags that he used to keep his plant specimens safe and Tull with a spear and a net bag.

  The ocean side of the peninsula must always be visited to experience the waves smashing the beach and the salt spray on our faces. The wind roared from the south, driving the fine white sand into clothes and hair and faces. Tull melted away high up between two sand hills. When I scrambled up to see where he had gone he was already at the far side of a sand-filled valley. Fred came up behind and we went into the deep hollow, and flopped in the lee of the hill. In an instant, the sounds of the sea beach became muffled.

  All about us, erupting from the sand, were spiky single-stemmed plants about a foot tall: hundreds, thousands of them, irregularly spaced, neither sparse nor dense. I lay with my front against the warm sand, my chin separated from the sand only by my flattened hands.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Fred said.

  ‘Everything is different from here. It’s like being in a forest.’ With my gaze at the height of some small creature I could imagine the plants about me to be strange trees towering around. ‘They’re like pine trees,’ I said. ‘Only miniature. Look, Freddie, how neat they are and all exactly the same.’

  ‘They’re not conifers,’ Freddie said, shifting his gaze from his drawing to the plants.

  ‘They might be.’

  ‘They’re not. They’re euphorbias. At least I think they are.’

  ‘Oh.’ I thought of Papa’s stories of visiting Japan during his voyaging days, how people there liked to transform tree seedlings into miniatures of their grown selves by pinching at their roots and leaves, and contorting their limbs into the shape that they saw fit, regardless of their natural inclination. I could not do such a thing to a living thing that had its own design and purpose, and so I said to Papa, who replied mildly enough that I saw nothing wrong with pruning a rose bush or a lilac, which was true, but the degree of interference made it different to me. It was more than enough, it was marvellous to see the ingenuity of pure nature on those windswept slopes, the plants responding to wind and moisture and light. Papa would say it was God’s genius. Whether he was right or not I did not know.

  ‘Do you remember those plants Papa told us of, when he was in Japan?’ I said.

  Fred gave one of his frowns of patience balanced with impatience. ‘I suppose,’ and was intent again on his work.

  When he had finished his drawing and notes and there was still no sign of Tull, Fred arranged himself in imitation of my posture. ‘I see what you mean. We are become Lilliputians, Hett. Imagine if a lizard came through: a monster, half the height of the trees, crashing them out of its path.’

  It was an alarming thought, but I could see nothing when I raised my head. Instead, a millipede entered the canyon between us, its legs writhing and antennae feeling the air.

  Fred scooped it up and observed the slow ribbon of it flowing across his skin. ‘It doesn’t know that I am dangerous, that on another day things might end differently.’ He touched it and watched it coil, then uncoil, before releasing it.

  ‘Is it a sort of diary that you’re writing?’ I asked when the millipede had gone. I had turned a few pages of Fred’s book once. He drew the whole plant, and then details: the set of the leaves, the shape of the flowers, with notes to the side about the colours of both, the location where they grew, and the date. I thought his work showed some talent.

  ‘No. A record of what’s here, of life here. A book.’ His voice was quiet. He put his hand to his satchel where the book lay. ‘Biology, botany, geology. Not the natives. Mr Angas has already drawn them.’ He seemed reluctant to speak of it.

  Then Tull was next to us, when neither of us had seen or heard a thing. I wondered if there were a trick to his lightness that could be learned.

  Another time on the peninsula we found charred sticks in the lee of a tall hill; evidently we were not the first to sit and watch the world from this lookout. A ship slid across the sea and we took turns with Fred’s telescope to see tiny figures moving about the decks and the gossamer rigging. I vowed that one day I would be on a ship like that and sail the length of the world, and looking at Fred’s face I did not think it was so different for him.

  The stinging sand of the peninsula made our eyes sore and they crusted overnight so that in the morning we could barely open them. Tull showed us how the juice from the succulent plant that he called ngunungies rubbed gently across our shut eyelids would soothe them.

  That is just one example of the useful knowledge that Tull possessed. He knew the correct reed to make string from and the sedges used for baskets or bags and the time of year when the mullet and the eels came into the lagoon, and many other things besides. He and Fred often sat in the kitchen while I cooked late in the afternoon, and I listened. It was quieter there than the dining room. I had made it as pleasant as I could: the jugs and pans and bowls were neat on the shelves, the table was scrubbed white and the small red flowers of Grandmama’s geranium flowered in the window.

  I had thought the blacks did as they pleased, roaming this country and never doing a day of school. But they had many rules: don’t bathe until a particular flower has finished, pay attention to what birds tell you, leave the mullet for the men, don’t walk about at night in case a bad spirit gets you, and many more besides. He saw things that we did not and told us which plants might be eaten and what other purposes they had. Ngunungies can also be eaten, for instance. I imagined the little fat leaves would have a slimy, snail-like texture (though I have never eaten a snail) but it was astringent and not unpleasant and could be eaten raw or cooked.

  How to catch a duck

  The natives were most ingenious and skilled. It was a delicate and patient task to catch a duck. I only saw it once when I was concealed within a stand of saltbush, from a distance. My dress would frighten anything wild away, Tull said.

  You must first have string or twine to hand. Tull’s was native-made (the women chew a particular reed and the men twist that into string) and was prized by all who use it. Attach a good length to a long stick and fashion a hangman’s noose at its end. The hunter must be downwind of the prey and move with the utmost stealth,
manoeuvring the noose slowly until it is close to the duck’s head before dropping it about its neck and drawing it tight. The duck protests, as might be imagined, scaring every other bird about into flight. You must succeed at the first attempt, or else move to a place where the birds have not been disturbed. It is an easy matter then to dispatch the duck.

  Tull spoke of another way of catching waterfowl with huge nets that the natives stretch above an expanse of water, which the birds fly into when frightened, but this is a job for many people when a large gathering is expected, such as for a ringbalin. Tull could catch a duck without a great deal of trouble and light a fire in a trice.

  How to cook a duck

  I only ate duck cooked in this way on a few occasions; Fred enjoyed it quite often. And now Joss wishes to try it.

  Tull did not trouble to dress the bird but flung it into the flames until its feathers were burned away, then he dug a hole and heaped coals into it and lined it with grasses. The duck went in and was covered with more grass and coals and we waited. When he said it was ready we scraped the lid of coals back. It tasted a great deal better than stew. Sitting in the hollows of the sand hills while tending a fire was a delightful way to eat. There was no need to plan – in spring and summer at least – for food was at hand wherever we were. Besides the birds there were fish in the lagoon or crayfish in the reeds or cockles that we could dig from the sand, though Tull would only do that if all else had failed. There were plants, too, and small fruits we might eat if we were hungry.

  When we had finished, Tull covered the fire with sand. The blacks were much given to setting fire to the land. Papa did not allow it on the run because of the danger to the stock. Fred once asked why they liked to do it and Tull looked at him in a pitying way.

  ‘After the fire, it rains and the grass grows,’ he said, as you might say two plus two.

  ‘Yes?’ Fred said, as uncomprehending as I.

  ‘And the kangaroos come,’ he said.