Harland's Half Acre Read online

  The times had grown rapidly worse. The advertising agency where he worked went out of business, and Frank, after a month or two of hanging miserably about the city, looking for any sort of work, took to the road. He joined others out there, moving on daily from one settlement to the next all up and down the state, in a changing company that was sometimes three or four strong and sometimes a mob, but keeping always to himself.

  The villages and larger townships where they appeared were never happy to have bands of homeless men in the vicinity and they were often hunted. They slept in ruined homesteads and barns, or on farms deserted by men much like themselves, or in camps that sprang up overnight in clay-pans, along a creek bed or in the showgrounds of country towns, and if they developed the threat of permanency would be broken up by citizens armed with the law.

  He shared a fire or a good sleeping pozzie and talk with many different sorts of men and heard their stories: drought stories, mortgage stories, wife stories; stories of the war that had been raging during his years in his aunt’s house and which some men were still fighting, deep to the eyeballs in mud; stories of prickly-pear, of rust in wheat, of dyptheria and whooping-cough epidemics, of prison terms, the ordinary miseries of the poor. Though it wasn’t always misery. Sometimes there were tunes on a mouth organ or on the button accordion some man had saved out of the ruins of his settled life, or old jokes made new with a turn of phrase or a different situation; even, on occasion, snatches of philosophy, since it wasn’t only the unskilled who were driven to this nomadic existence, and he began to wonder if even education and the profession he wanted for the last of his brothers was a fence against disaster. The open air did him good when it didn’t reduce him to bone-shaking fever, and he saw something of the land he had been born to: canefields waving their plumes under the moon, and so sweet-smelling you could get drunk on them (that was rum country); greyish plains where ant hills taller than a man were stacked all the way to the horizon – buried cathedrals showing only the tops of their blood-red spires; sea inlets fringed with glossy-leafed mangroves, thunderous surf.

  These scenes fed his senses. They were of a grandeur that caught all his blood up in a display of cloud and colour that could transfigure the most ordinary day. They were a drama that had never been expressed. Well he would find forms for it. Great eloquent evenings as solemn and still as the brows of women – that sort of grandeur. Whip-like dawns: a crack of sunlight from sinewy arms. It made up a little for the shame he felt at being ragged, and dependent always on the charity or pity or wary suspicion of women at whose back verandahs he sought the chance to clear up a bit of untidy yard or to clean out gutters or chop wood, and for the hostility he saw in the eyes of men who were still settled and safe but might not be.

  He found a companionship in misery that he had never known when he was in work, or which in those days he had not needed. He discovered that he belonged. But with those who were outside.

  He might at any moment have gone home. It would have been most natural to him to burrow back into the warmth of his father’s house, since he was, of them all, the one best fitted by temperament and inclination to settle and become in time their father’s companion and keeper; to do otherwise was to go against himself. But it was the way he went. He had some obscure sense that his life was meant to go crosswise and be led in defiance of his nature rather than in the easy expression of it.

  But the choice was not easy. It wasn’t his fate alone that he was deciding. Among those subtle pressures this way and that in which they still lived, all of them, even those who had moved away, he was delivering up Tam – who would stick to their father now out of duty, then habit, then inertia, and would never get free. That had been determined years back among the shifts from bed to bed, when he had moved to the bench by the stove that Jim had vacated, making it possible for Clyde to move back to his old place and Pearsall in with their father, and leaving Tam, in his innocence, the only one of them who had never come close enough to their father’s soft power to throw it off.

  He wrote:

  My dear Father and brothers,

  Like you I am knocked out and in deep sorrow over this news. Poor Clyde. I can’t believe a young man with so much in front of him could do such a thing, but know well enough from all I have seen out here how much despair and suffering is in the world, and how a man can be beaten down by it. The thought of another spell in gaol – real prison this time – made him desperate, and he did what he did to escape. But he was young. It was only time. And the number of months or years wasn’t even decided. I feel bitter, but what can any of us do?

  I cannot bear to think of your grief, Father, because I know my own. I think of our old times together, and all the while this terrible thing up ahead. I blame myself, as well as all circumstances, that Clyde has not been saved – though I did what I could. I am desperate myself sometimes, both for money and in spirit, but ought to have done more.

  Tam, I will do what I can in the other matter. I’ve asked friends in Sydney to give me an advance on some work I sent them, but don’t get a real lot done these days, what with the need to be always on the move. As you see, this news has arrived only now. My best love to you all.

  Your loving son and brother etc.

  *

  Two or three times a year a bundle of paintings, done on paper or cardboard and crudely packaged, would arrive at the Sydney dealers. The money, when it found him, went home.

  Occasionally, in one of the bigger towns, he would make his way to a library, and under the gaze of students, librarians and odd citizens who had slipped in to while away an hour between appointments (settled people to whom his laceless boots and thin jacket, carefully buttoned to disguise a temporary absence of shirt, proclaimed ‘tramp’ or ‘swaggie’) would tremblingly take down from a shelf one of the folio-sized art books he craved but could not afford.

  They gave only the barest indication, the flat prints. But by fixing his attention on them and creating, re-creating the rest, he glimpsed what was possible, understanding best for his own purpose when his state of excited imagination got between him and the mere image so that he fiercely, ecstatically misunderstood. When he crept away these pictures went with him. He stored them in his head, lighting the corner of a shed where he slept on bags with his own version of what he had seen, till the dark grew vivid and his fingers twitched.

  Later, when a stranger’s generosity allowed him for a time the use of a back verandah, or a boat shed or a greenkeeper’s hut haunted by mice, he would lay out his brushes and feverishly, but with cool assurance, begin.

  Faces, figures, occasions – some tender, some brutal as blood. He had carried them so far that they had gone already through a dozen transformations, and as his hand gave them form they revealed another and yet another, so that he too was amazed. What appeared, though long planned for, had the effect even for him of something never dreamed of breaking new into the world.

  He worked with small means, and the difficulty they imposed became his triumph. He worked in paint when he could find it, thick ochres and greys with just a touch of scarlet and expensive, ordinary blue. Mostly he used line, crimson or blue ink with a thin wash, in which he recorded the presence and particularities of men whose names he never knew, sleeping by a fire or playing cards or posing for him briefly after a meal.

  He had been adrift so long now that he thought he might never get back. Cross-currents and storms became the normal conditions of his existence; the paintings were flimsy rafts, then islands with their own weather and their own crowded history, then messages scribbled in what was sometimes a cool clear happiness like floating but more often a maddened despair. When he was washed up somewhere it was because he was too sick or too tired to go on.

  One night of low cloud under an intermittent moon, wearing a stained felt hat and looking for all the world like a scarecrow that had just climbed down from a stake among rattling husks, he entered a town
ship that spread all along a river-mouth. He had to walk the whole length of it, past tin fences where dogs leapt barking and windows threw their light across stony yards, past one-storeyed stone banks, stores with corrugated-iron awnings, a brightly lit picture theatre where a crowd of slick youths and girls with Alice Faye hairdos stood about eating chocolate hearts under a streetlamp blackened with moths.

  He was looking for a place where he could doss down for a day or two and let the fever he had picked up in the mosquito swamps further north run its forty-eight or seventy-two hour course. He was already some hours into it. He sweated, shivered, his bones grated in their sockets; they jarred.

  The township was scattered. He thought he would never reach the last streetlamp and the welcome dark.

  It was nearly midnight when, on the outskirts, beyond the yelping of the last farm dog, he came to a kind of car dump, a place of infested water puddles and coarse grass, evil-looking in the half-dark and worse under the moon, where the bodies of cars, many of them without wheels – square-bodied limousines, sedans, trucks, roadsters with a hood and dickey-seat, their iron paintless and showing lines of rust – sat on their chassis in the swamp as if they were already half-sunken earthwards and the least weight, a night-cricket or a fingertip, might take them down.

  Masses of thin cloud rolled overhead. The moon came and went. The land sweltered in tropical heat. In moments when the moon was hidden it was pitch-black, a darkness so dense that you might have stepped back into a time before creation, before any of this – grass, mud, rocks – had been thought of. You could turn your head into it and lose all track of east or west or inland or oceanward, and might wonder if there was anything under you at all, and what it was you were on the edge of, what not-yet-formed or created continent. Then the pallid moon showed the tip of a horn; sickly light came flooding back, and there you were again in a familiar century, with piles of highway junk laid out before you like a forgotten carpark.

  In one of these shells, he thought, in this graveyard of journeys, I can curl up for a time, a day or two, till the fever shakes loose.

  He staggered into one of the lanes between the derelict bodies and had only to make his choice.

  It was like standing in a stream of traffic, in the path of a coming pile-up that had already occurred, with your hand out, waiting for one of the stopped vehicles to stop. He set his hand on the handle of a once-green Buick. It refused to budge. Inside, he saw, it was filled with a kind of mould that had grown all over the leather seats with their burst springs, a malignant cloud. He started away.

  Sometimes the doors were off and the insides burnt out. They smelled of ash. Approaching one, a limousine with a high hood, he tried the handle, turned it and was hurled back by a blood-curdling cry. Crouched there on the seat was a black devil, all blue-black hair and breathing fire. Its look of prior right and of fierce dark ownership went right through him. He began to shake, and thought it might be best if he simply lay flat on his back in the spiky grass and closed his eyes. He had no wish to dispute possession with the spirits of the place or with the ghosts of previous owners.

  He lay still. After the sound of his own footsteps on the pavements of the town, and then heartbeats, the silence was wide enough to get lost in. He might escape.

  But it was not that easy.

  A blue shadow approached that seemed to be cast upward out of the earth. Clouds moved behind it. He closed his eyes. Now he was being lifted up, heaved violently aloft and rattled, he heard his bones shake, and smelled the creature’s closeness, a smell of char. He felt its fiery warmth as his ribs were crushed and he was clawed at. So that was it! He was being tossed about at the centre of an accident he had hoped to step out of the way of, and when, in the prolonged crashing of metal on metal, the moon appeared through cloud-wrack, he saw by its sick flare that behind the webbed and frosted glass of every car there were watchers: stately figures, also black, who looked on but did not move, their eyes unblinking under the moon.

  The place was haunted by spirits older than the ghosts of cars and their owners. He had disturbed a rite, or interrupted an assembly of the dispossessed.

  He was shaken. Then the black angel or blue-black devil had its victory or acknowledged defeat; anyway, withdrew its forces and spat him out. When he came to his senses it was daylight. Damp red soil was at his eyeball with blades of blunted, razor-sharp grass sprouting from it, so coarse you could see the crystals that would cut. A host of ants was going about its business all around him, intent and scrambling, as if he were just another element in the landscape they had to negotiate and had been lying here from the beginning, or had dropped from the sky overnight. He lay watching them, their furious, fiercely organised life.

  His back, he discovered when he tried to move, was sunburned right through the shirt, but when he staggered to his feet at last it was into a feeling of wholeness, of renewed power and strength, though he could never be sure afterwards which side he had come out on, or what pact he had made with his native earth.

  An Only Child

  [1]

  In the big bedroom off the front verandah of what I thought of as Grandma’s house, with a view, beyond scraggy bunyah pines where sparrows squalled, to the still pale light of the Broad­water, my grandfather was dying. He had been doing it for more than a year, and since my mother alone was tolerable to him as a day or night nurse (my Aunt Ollie was already occupied in the kitchen and his younger daughters he thought too incompetent, too silly or too young at forty to be faced with anything so serious as dying), we had moved from our house in Brisbane and were settled, not uncomfortably, in the spare room off my grandmother’s porch. My father had the journey up to town each day and I was sent for a term or two, or for however long this period out of our regular lives should last, to the local school.

  Southport with its pier and beaches was a place I associated with holidays, and our whole time there had for me an unreal air, as if we were all marking time – my grandfather’s time – and even the hard business of parsing and analysis and mental arithmetic were in that place mere pretend.

  It was a heightened unreality. I was just twelve, and freer than I had been in town to make the sort of discoveries that a freshly awakened sense of myself demanded. Of myself, but also of the world and the way my body suddenly fitted into it.

  The school had looser rules than I was used to. The pupils, boys and girls both, went barefoot and we spent a good many of our lessons drowsing peacefully in the shadow of gums. I slept out of doors on a verandah. It was not at all like my room at home, with its built-in cupboards and the collection of old service medals, inkwells and little celluloid boxes (treasures from the junkshops in Melbourne Street) that had kept me tied to my previous self and created a continuity, I might have thought, in which I could only develop along fixed lines. At Southport I had scope. There was nothing on that sleepout but an iron bed, and moonlight when there was a moon and at moments the crouched outline of a cat. The air was cool, even on the closest summer nights, and since the sleepout had no walls, this air, in which leaves rustled, night insects twiddled and the sea lapped or lashed according to the weather on the roughstone promenade, was the real medium in which I slept. Faintly silvered with starlight and smelling of salt, it changed everything it touched, so that even my belly out there belonged to a different creature; I too was changed. My body seemed all on its own to have hit upon a new mode of apprehension, and I couldn’t tell whether it was time or place that had done it, or some leap I had taken into a new and more passionate form.

  Since there was so little traffic on the roads, I was allowed at last to have a bicycle and could sprint off wherever I pleased. In the late afternoon, when the waters of the Broadwater turned mauvish-pink and the dunes that closed it in developed shadowy dents, I could follow the Front all the way to Labrador, exploring inlets along the shore and paths leading down to the river, putting on speed to see how fast I could go
or stopping, in the free and easy way of seaside places, to talk to strangers. I made friends of a different sort: boys whose fathers were professional fishermen. They taught me to trawl the sandbanks with a gunnysack full of fish-heads to attract ‘pippies’, how to lay a crab-pot, and what time of day or month of the year was best for prawning or fishing the still-water for whiting, or when the trevally were running with tailor amongst them for setting a rod beside the surf. My father, aware of what a rupture all this had made in our lives, and how little time my mother now had for me, took me on the excursions he made – sometimes on business but mostly to satisfy his own curiosity about things and people – into the odd, hidden life of the town. We became friends. He was returning to the world of his youth, and was happy to see me discover, thirty years later, what had once been his.

  He had about him, my father, something of the small-town dandy. He had inherited that from his own father. He didn’t carry a stick as Grandpa had or wear cutaway collars or a soft hat, but he did on all occasions wear a suit, and that was unusual in those days, and especially at Southport; some wheat-coloured or dove-grey material in summer, with a knitted tie, and in winter a three-piece herringbone.

  He knew almost everyone we passed on our walks, and was greeted, I thought, by some of the queerest characters I had ever seen. They called him ‘Boss’, or ‘Mister’, or simply ‘Bob’, and many of them stopped to yarn, expressing surprise at my existence or the extent to which I had sprung up since last time, or would recall with a moist eye my father’s own promising youth, and depart the richer, usually, by a shilling piece.

  These were the old-timers of the place. They had been old-timers, most of them, in my father’s day, and had names like Snow, Nudger and The Champ. Some of them were returned soldiers from one of the wars. Others had been boxers or footballers, and one was a politician who had suffered a fall. He wore a good dark suit with a watch-chain, and looked, from a distance, every bit as dandified as my father. He was walking, as we approached on the Front, with what I took to be a portly swagger, but when we got close I saw him hesitate and prepare to cross, then dither, then determine to come on; but with a pretence that he was deep in thought and had not seen us. I was surprised when my father, who was usually sensitive, quickened his step and with his hand already extended, called ‘Dick, Dick Allan! How have you been?’