The Tree of Man Read online

  It was as if she had come out of herself for the first time in years, to take surprised notice.

  And he was surprised too, for his manhood did not feel exactly different.

  They were both awkward for a while.

  Then Stan Parker knew by his mother’s shoulders and the gristle in her neck that she would die soon. There was, too, a smell of old letters in the room.

  She began to talk of money in the bank. ‘And there’s that land that was your father’s, in the hills back from here, I don’t just know the name, I don’t think it ever had one, people always called it Parker’s when they spoke. Well, there is this land. Your father did not think much of it. The land was always uncleared. Scrubby, he said. Though the soil is good in patches. When the country opens up it will perhaps be worth a little. The railway is a wonderful invention, and, of course, assistance to the landowner. So keep this property, Stan,’ she said, ‘it’s safe.’

  Mrs Parker’s voice had been scrubbed clean of the emotions. It was bare and very dull.

  But the young man’s breath thickened, his heart tolled against his ribs – was it for a liberation or imprisonment? He did not know. Only that this scrubby, anonymous land was about to become his, and that his life was taking shape for the first time.

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said. As always when she spoke of matters of importance. And turned away to hide his certainty.

  Not long after that she died, and he touched her cold hands, and buried her, and went away.

  Some people said that young Stan Parker had no feelings, but it was just that he had not known her very well.

  Nobody took much notice when the young man left for good, in a cart that he had bought from Alby Veitch, with a shaggy sort of a brumby horse. As the wheels of the cart moved over the melting ruts and screaming fowls made way, only a face or two, released from the beating of a mat or kneading of dough, remarked that young Stan was on the move. Soon there would be no reason to remember Parkers in that place. Because the present prevails.

  Stan Parker drove on, through mud and over stones, towards those hills in which his land lay. All that day they rattled and bumped, the sides of the sturdy horse grown sleeker in sweat. Under the cart a red dog lolloped loosely along. His pink tongue, enormous with distance, swept the ground.

  So they reached their destination, and ate, and slept, and in the morning of frost, beside the ashes of a fire, were faced with the prospect of leading some kind of life. Of making that life purposeful. Of opposing silence and rock and tree. It does not seem possible in a world of frost.

  That world was still imprisoned, just as the intentions were, coldly, sulkily. Grass that is sometimes flesh beneath the teeth would have splintered now, sharp as glass. Rocks that might have contracted physically had grown in hostility during the night. The air drank at the warm bodies of birds to swallow them in flight.

  But no bird fell.

  Instead, they continued to chafe the silence. And the young man, after sighing a good deal, and turning in his bags, in which the crumbs of chaff still tickled and a flea or two kept him company, flung himself into the morning. There was no other way.

  But to scrape the ash, but to hew with the whole body as well as axe the grey hunks of fallen wood, but to stamp the blood to life, and the ground thawing took life too, the long ribbons of grass bending and moving as the sun released, the rocks settling into peace of recovered sun, the glug and tumble of water slowly at first, heard again somewhere, the sun climbing ever, with towards it smoke thin but certain that the man made.

  A little bird with straight-up tail flickered and took the crumb that lay at the man’s feet.

  The man’s jaws took shape upon the crusts of stale bread. His jaws that were well shaped, strong, with a bristling of sun about the chin. This was gold.

  Down through him wound the long ribbon of warm tea. He felt glad.

  As the day increased, Stan Parker emerged and, after going here and there, simply looking at what was his, began to tear the bush apart. His first tree fell through the white silence with a volley of leaves. This was clean enough. But there was also the meaner warfare of the scrub, deadly in technique and omnipresence, that would come up from behind and leave warning on the flesh in messages of blood. For the man had stripped down to his dark and wrinkled pants. Above this indecency his golden body writhed, not in pain, but with a fury of impatience. Anaesthetized by the future, he felt neither whips nor actual wounds. He worked on, and the sun dried his blood.

  Many days passed in this way, the man clearing his land. The muscular horse, shaking his untouched forelock, tautened the chain traces and made logs move. The man hewed and burned. Sometimes, possessed by his daemon of purpose, the ribs seemed to flow beneath his skin. Sometimes his ordinarily moist and thoughtful mouth grew rigid, fixed in the white scales of thirst. But he burned and hewed. At night he lay on the heap of sacks and leaves, on the now soft and tranquil earth, and abandoned the bones of his body. The logs of sleep lay dead heavy.

  There in the scarred bush, that had not yet accepted its changed face, the man soon began to build a house, or shack. He brought the slabs he had shaped for logs. Slowly. He piled his matchsticks. So the days were piled too. Seasons were closing and opening on the clearing in which the man was at work. If days fanned the fury in him, months soothed, so that time, as it passed, was both shaping and dissolving, in one.

  But the house was being built amongst the stumps, that in time had ceased to bleed. It was more the symbol of a house. Its prim, slab walls fulfilled necessity. There were windows to let the light into the oblong room, there was a tin chimney, shaped like a matchbox, through which the smoke came at last. Finally he stuck on a veranda. It was too low, rather a frowning addition, but which did not forbid. Seen through the trees, it was a plain but honest house that the man had built.

  If there had been neighbours, it would have been a comfort to see the smoke occur regularly in the matchbox-chimney. But there were no neighbours. Only sometimes, if you listened on the stiller days, you might hear the sound of an axe, like the throb of your own heart, in the blue distance. Only very distant. Or more distantly, a cock. Or imagination. It was too far.

  Sometimes the man would drive off into that distance in his high cart. Then the clearing was full of the whinge and yelping of the red dog, left chained to a veranda post. Till in time the silence grew, and his yellow eyes watched it. Or a parrot flurried the blue air. Or a mouse glistened on the dirt floor of the house. The abandoned dog was at the service of silence at last. He was no longer attached, even by his chain, to the blunt house of the man’s making.

  The man always brought back things in his cart. He brought a scratched table and chairs, with mahogany lumps in the proper places. He brought an iron bed, big and noisy, of which the bars had been bent a bit by kids shoving their heads between. And he brought all those necessities, like flour, and a bottle of pain killer, and pickled meat, and kerosene, and seed potatoes, and a packet of needles, and oaten chaff for the shaggy horse, and the tea and sugar that trickled from their bags, so that you crunched across them, almost always, on the hardened floor.

  The dog’s collar almost carved off his neck when the man came, and there was always the joy and excitement and the smell of brought things.

  Then, once, when the man had been gone some time, longer than normal perhaps, he brought with him a woman, who sat beside him in the cart, holding the board and her flat hat. When she had got down, the dog, loosed from his chain, craned forward, still uncertain of his freedom, on trembling toes, in silence, and smelled the hem of her skirt.

  Chapter 2

  DOWN along the coast there was a township of Yuruga, to which Stan Parker had paid visits, to a cousin of his mother’s called Clarence Bott. Already as a boy in large boots he had known that town, and had, in fact, worked near Yuruga for a few months, on a dairy farm. In later life, whenever he approached Yuruga, the man recalled the sleepy, morning smell of cows, the smell of warmed milk-bucket
s waiting to be rinsed, and the feel of cows’ teats, proud and rubbery at first, then dangling empty like a silly glove.

  It was as a young man, rather, that Stan Parker had paid the visits to his mother’s cousin Clarrie, a draper, whose stomach looked like a small melon underneath his calico apron. Altogether unlike the heaving paunch of the young man’s blacksmith father. Clarrie Bott was quite unlike. He did not overflow.

  Still, the draper had managed to get three rollicking girls, Alice, Clara, and Lilian, who had all three put up their hair and were taking an interest about the time Stan Parker had become interesting. These girls were continually baking fluffy sponges, and writing scenty letters to friends, and embroidering mats and table runners, and playing the piano, and thinking of practical jokes. So that it was quite natural for the kind of cousin, Stan Parker, now a young man with shoulders, to gravitate towards their house. Not that it was intended any of the Bott girls should marry the blacksmith’s son, himself with hard hands and a shack somewhere in the hills. Oh dear, no. But the Bott girls themselves were not above sticking a sponge finger into a young man’s mouth, to see whether he would bite, and fizzing like their own sherbet as they waited for signs of intimacy. Alice, Clara, and Lilian were taut with interest as they waited to repulse their Cousin Stan, or to rend him, if there were no need to repulse. They waited. And their sherbet fizzed.

  The young man did not propose to or even attempt to kiss his cousins. Why he did not, it is difficult to say. He was backward or something. Because, with their small waists and dainty fingers, and talent for folding table napkins and paper fans to put in grates, he should have been overcome. Consequently he became a bitter subject in the Bott household. Particularly when, on almost his last visit, he broke the corner off the marble washstand in the best room. At once it was confirmed that Stan Parker had been designed to do the wrong thing, and they should never in their senses have expected anything else from the blacksmith’s son.

  The evening Stan Parker broke the washstand was the evening of a dance in a hall to raise church funds. Such an act on such an occasion should have shaken Stan, but he kicked the marble into a corner, as if it had been tin or wood. His mind was quite steady, and the window of his room, he saw, was full of stars.

  All that night the fiddle could not have been more watchful that sawed the waltzes up and down. The grave face of the young man sitting in conflicting clothes followed the logic of the lancers. He was not surprised. Their golden patterns merged and opened. The giggles flowered on the faces of girls. The young man’s deep eyes protected him from any who might have struck. He was quite defenceless. But nobody dared.

  Then, after a time, when it looked as though he might almost fathom the figures of the dance, after he had sighed and crossed the hot serge of his legs, the parson’s wife came across, still warm from the cakes she had baked, and the programmes she had copied out, and children fed, and napkins changed, and people pushed together how many times that night, came across and was arranging, between the gasps for breath, and the ends of hair that got in her mouth, some contract of elaborate and refined importance.

  Almost before he could uncross his legs Stan Parker saw that the parson’s wife had gone, leaving in her place a thin girl.

  This girl was turning her head, he saw, in almost every direction but his.

  ‘Sit down,’ he commanded her.

  While watching his own feet slide back and forwards on the glazed boards in some act of deference or defence.

  The girl sat.

  Her arms were very thin.

  ‘This is the first ball I have ever been to,’ said the girl.

  Her hands, which were less elegant than those of Alice, Clara, and Lilian Bott, picked at pieces of her blue dress. This was obviously too big, and had, in fact, been lent by Mrs Erbey, the parson’s wife, from a box in which it had been put away.

  Stan Parker wished she had not come.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘it is hot.’

  ‘It is cold outside,’ she answered, touching something that might have happened to her dress.

  ‘But all these people,’ he said, ‘breathing in the one room.’

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘Mrs Erbey once told me about a diver, she had read it, see, in a book, who used up all the air in one of those suits.’

  Then they looked at each other, under the sea of music. The brown man was yellower. At any breathless moment the girl’s black hair might stream.

  ‘Don’t you dance?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She was about to confess, what suddenly she would not tell. Courage had made her craftier. Instead her face embarked on a little smile.

  ‘It is just as much fun’, she said, ‘to watch.’

  She did not sense dishonesty. Already he had seen her thin dismay, and that was too much.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Stan Parker,’ he said.

  The whole room was filling, and filling, with music and the laughter of dancers, so that it was difficult to hear the obvious question, but she knew that this had been asked in turn.

  ‘Mine?’ laughed her thin mouth.

  Then she bent her head and quickly scribbled on the piece of paper with the little pencil that Mrs Erbey had given her that evening to note the partners she would not have.

  He saw the eyelids on her lowered face grow dark, and the shadows beneath the bones of her cheeks.

  ‘There,’ she laughed shortly,

  ‘Amy Victoria Fibbens?’ he read in a slow voice that clearly doubted.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it. Still, you have got to have a name.’

  Intent on her lowered eyelids, his eyes had already abandoned that name as an unnecessary label. But her eyelids did not notice this.

  Now Stan Parker had begun to remember the thin girl.

  ‘You one of those Fibbens from Kellys’ Corner?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her face thinking. ‘But I’m not one of those really. My mother and father is dead. I’m an orphan, see? And I live with Uncle and Aunt, who are those Fibbens at Kellys’ Corner.’

  Her blue dress was quite anxious, and the narrow sash that had been tied too many times.

  ‘Go on,’ said Stan Parker. ‘Now I remember.’

  Which made it worse.

  Because he remembered the shed at Kellys’ Corner. He remembered the kids playing in the rain. There was a mob of Fibbens kids, and when they walked out they walked in a string, their bare feet kicking dust or slapping mud. He remembered this girl, the mud halfway up her bare legs. He remembered her also once in shoes, so raised up it was perhaps the first time, and the string of Fibbens kids that walked behind.

  ‘What do you remember?’ she asked, trying to see it in his face.

  But she could not. All she saw was the face of a young man, and it seemed she had never been so close before.

  ‘What do you remember?’ said her hollow mouth.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘I dunno there was anything else.’

  If this man’s skin is not honest, she said. For two pins she would have touched it.

  ‘As if that’s not bad enough.’ She laughed, rocking safely on her hands.

  ‘I was working then for Sam Warner, out at Narrawan. Of a Saturday evening sometimes I’d come in to town.’

  ‘Uncle’, said the girl, ‘worked for Warners for a bit.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What was his job?’

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘I forget.’

  Because Old Man Fibbens had been employed shovelling up the cow manure and putting it into bags. It was only for a bit, because, where Uncle Fibbens was concerned, it was always only for a bit. He liked to lie on a bed beneath a tree and look at his toenails from a distance.

  Amy Fibbens had not got great affection for her uncle or her aunt. She had not yet felt affection for any human being, except in a respectful and unsatisfactory way for Mrs Erbey, the parson’s wife, whom she went to help by day when she ha
d turned sixteen. There her life was not so different from what it was in the Fibbens shed. She wiped the noses of a string of children. She stirred the morning pan of porridge. But she also ate the remains of puddings. And she did wear shoes.

  So she was fond of Mrs Erbey. But Amy had not yet been loved, except by her mother, fretfully, for a short time before she died. The thin girl did expect something to happen eventually, because it does, but these expectations were timid and wholly theoretical.

  Thought had made her silent in the middle of the music, and the young man, exhilarated by the questions and the answers, was brought a little closer, and was glad.

  Stan Parker thought he had never been so close to any girl. Not even to the mouth of the unknown woman yearning on the window-pane. The thin girl became familiar to him in the ages of silence in which they sat. For the wobbly music had receded, and the voices of the dancers, assured of their beauty and their cleverness. Only the girl’s face, from which the subterfuge had slipped, was not so sure. Stan Parker knew this girl. As all oblivious objects become known, and with the same nostalgia, the tin cup, for instance, standing in the unswept crumbs on the surface of your own table. Nothing is more desirable than this simplicity.

  ‘I must go now,’ said Amy Fibbens, standing up in her awkward dress.

  What is Stan, on whose arm somebody has spilled a custard, doing all night with the Fibbens girl? Clara asked Lilian.

  ‘It is not as late as that,’ said Stan.

  ‘Oh, yes it is,’ sighed the girl. ‘I have had enough of this.’

  That was true, he knew. His own face ached. He was only waiting to be told.

  ‘But don’t let me take you away.’ said the girl, with a measure of borrowed tact.

  He followed her out of the room, his back obscuring her departure for those who watched.

  Their steps, if not their voices, were mingling through the empty streets of the dead town. Iron lace hung from dark pubs, and the heavy smells of spilled beer. Dreams broke from windows. And cats lifted the lid off all politeness.