Death of a River Guide (24 page)

I look into the fire, but be buggered if I can see what Auntie Ellie saw there. I stare at the ceiling, but there's nothing there save the painted Huon pine boards Reg nailed there many years before. And even though I have the power of my visions, the only boat I can summon into my mind's eye is Harry's punt as he continues his journey up the Franklin River and then up the Jane River.

It took Harry the rest of the day to get up to the junction with the Jane River, and from there up the Jane as far as the bottom of the first gorge. He camped the night there, then the next morning pulled his boat high up the riverbank, turned it upside down and tied it up. He waited half a day before Norry and Joff Halsey turned up, having walked around the first gorge. Together they spent the next two days carrying the supplies Harry had brought in the punt around the gorge to Norry's camp. The camp was a roughie, a sheet of canvas pitched in an A-frame, for there had been but little pine in the vicinity, and Norry and Joff had cut and hauled most of what was worth taking while waiting for Harry. Now they were to move up above the second gorge, where word had it there was plenty of good pine. The next day they began the hard labour of carrying all their gear and supplies, as well as Norry's punt, up over the part of the mountain range known as Punt Hill. But before they went searching to find the traces of the track that Barnes Abel and his boys had cut back in 1936, they rowed up into the mouth of the second gorge for a look-see. Harry had never seen anything like it. The walls of the gorge cut up hundreds of feet and a cold wild dank breath of wind ran down this corridor of darkness. It seemed as if light hardly ever reached inside the bottom of the gorge, so slimy and mossy were the rocks. The river now ran low, but the walls and rocks sweated moisture. Water seemed to drip from every opening, down every slope, over boulders the size of houses. The gorge glistened green and black in its splendid solitude, a world complete unto itself. Nobody spoke. Norry pointed to driftwood caught fifty feet up a cliff face, and the piners' blood ran cold with the thought of the gorge in flood, a wild demented cataract, an avalanche of white water sweeping before it everything unfortunate enough to be in this green and black world. They looked in excitement and in fear, in exhilaration and in terror, smelt the gorge's heaviness, felt its power turn their legs to jelly and make their heads reel with the vertigo of imagination.

‘Bugger me dead,' said Norry. They turned and slowly rowed back to their camp at the base of the gorge.

They cut and hauled pine for the next six weeks from a stand above the second gorge that Norry had been told about by Barnes Abel. The stand was a few hundred yards back from a cliff that fronted the river. The logs of pine were branded with Norry's ‘H' brand and, with the aid of block and tackles and a few long irons, the piners hauled them to the cliff, over which the logs were dropped into the deep water below. The pine trunks that had inched so slowly and with so much difficulty to the cliff would suddenly slither over the edge like seals, falling vertically into the deep pool below, briefly pogoing back out of the water to finally fall sideways and silent. They spent a few days freeing the logs from log jams that snared the river, and floated them down to the mouth of the gorge. There they left them to be carried out in the winter floods, and headed home.

At Flat Island they came upon Smeggsy and Old Bo, who told them how Old Jack had wanted a drink real bad and had decided to go out with another gang of piners they met heading home as Smeggsy, Old Bo and Jack were heading up the Franklin. Smeggsy was keen for a hand with hauling some logs, given that he was a man down, so Harry said he'd stay on with them, though as Norry and Joff disappeared around the corner he wasn't sure why.

It was early morning and the rain had been piss-dripping all night down onto the mossy King Billy pine slats that roofed their hut. Harry sat up in his sugarbag-lined bunk, rubbed a fist in each eye, and took a deep breath of the sweet smoke-heavy air. In the fireplace he found his boots, dusted with the fine light grey ash left by the burnt Huon pine, still a little damp, but warm. He pulled them on and they felt hot and comforting and he revelled in the good feeling they gave his feet, for he knew the rest of the day they would feel like murder. They ate some bread Old Bo had made on the previous Sunday and some bacon that Smeggsy fried, drank some tea, then they rowed the punt upriver to the track that led to the stand Smeggsy and Old Bo were working.

Old Bo had found the small stand of pine many years before, but then the trees had been a little too small to cut. Now they were of a good size. The stand lay about twenty chains back from the river. To get their logs through the rainforest they had a small kerosene-powered winch they had brought in pieces from Strahan in their punt and assembled in the rainforest.

Old Bo and Smeggsy took the wire rope up through the bush and hooked it up to a fallen log. When they were done Harry started the winch. It ran a little roughly, so as the log slowly inched toward him, Harry picked up the grease can and went to grease the winch. His damp boots skidded on a slimy sassafras sapling that had been felled along with the other scrub to make a clearing, and Harry fell, the thumb of his right hand going through the cog drive. Harry looked at the mangled stump that emerged and his legs felt weak and his head light. He called Smeggsy and Old Bo to come. They looked at Harry and Harry looked at them. Smeggsy went back up the gully and returned with his axe. Harry laid his injured hand on a fallen myrtle log. Old Bo clawed at the log and a big lump of brown mush came off the log like it was chocolate cake. The entire log was rotten to the core, a mass of decomposed peat held in shape only by the mosses and lichens that encircled it.

‘Not there, Harry,' said Old Bo. ‘It's too soft, mate.' It was the first word any of them had spoken since Harry had called them back. Smeggsy scarfed a flat surface from the top side of a pine log they had winched down the day before.

‘Operating table, eh Harry?' said Old Bo and they laughed.

Then the laughter stopped.

Harry put the pulp, with its bone-flecked gore, upon the pine log. It looked to Harry like a blob of fatty silver-side flecked with desiccated coconut. Smeggsy put a loose headlock upon Harry, swivelled Harry's face away from the sight of his hand, and tightened the headlock. Old Bo pinned Harry's right wrist firmly to the log with his left hand, and with his right, holding the axe halfway down the handle, raised the axe in the air.

‘Hold the boy gentle, Smeggsy,' said Old Bo.

Then he let the axe fall.

Do I have to watch the rest?

Thank God for small mercies.

 the fifth day 

Instead of a toppling thumb I am seeing a watch, and looking down upon it is Aljaz. He realises with a shrug that the watch has stopped working. He looks back up at the valley upon which mist sits so low and heavy that the entire river seems shrouded in white. An extraordinary moment of peace, really - I can see that is what Aljaz is feeling. There is a silence about the river as the punters load the last of the gear on the rafts and do a final check of the campsite. Looking upon it now, it was a serene start for a day that was to prove anything but. And, as if respectful of the quiet, the rafts are untied in silence, kicked off from the riverbank by Aljaz and the Cockroach in silence, and they glide into the tea-black waters of the Franklin River with no sound. The paddling begins without talk. For once, all the punters manage to paddle in unison and the rafts follow each other as if held by some invisible thread. The current is far stronger than the punters have until then experienced. They feel the strength of the moving black sheet of river in their arms and are excited by it, excited by the way the rafts, formerly sluggish when the river was barely running, now seem to move at an almost excessive speed.

The reverie is broken by a scream. It is Ellen, on Aljaz's boat. ‘A leech, a leech!' she cries. Aljaz clambers over the gear frame to the front of the boat where Ellen sits, and pulls a sleek black blister of blood off the back of her hand and throws it in the river, leaving Ellen shivering with a small free-flowing wound.

They paddle on. Noises strange and harsh crack the enshrouding mist, announcing the overhead flight of a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos. The punters briefly observe the birds through a hole in the mist before the flock has flown the length of the valley and left for elsewhere. For a time after the flock has disappeared the wild and rough cries can still be faintly heard, as if prophesying the imminent rain half humorously, half grimly. They paddle on. The mist rises to reveal clouds moving at a pace almost frantic across the narrowing slit of sky above. Nobody talks. The fear is upon the punters, though not yet their guides. They have been on the river for only an hour or so when the air turns suddenly and strangely chill. The Cockroach's raft is leading. The Cockroach slows his raft up and Aljaz's raft bumps into it. The Cockroach points up a side ridge further down the valley. It is covered in rain. They look at one another. Nothing is said. The weather has swung back to westerly. They paddle on.

They pass a small beach upon which a tiger cat strolls, watching their passing, too ignorant of who they are and what they are to flee. It is not afraid of them, but they are afraid of the small carrion-eating marsupial who observes the passing red rafts and their inhabitants as if they were nothing more than driftwood decorated with baubles being washed downriver by the flood, further strange flotsam of faraway worlds.

The day grows dark. An hour or more before midday, the sky looks as if night were about to fall. The patches of blue grow smaller and less frequently seen, until at length they can no more be found anywhere in the black sky, so strong and close and immediate that it makes the punters lean nervously into the centre of the raft. The hills grow steeper until the river is flowing not through a valley but into the beginning of a deep gorge. One of the punters on the Cockroach's boat begins to sing the old Willy Nelson song about seeing nothing but blue skies from now on. They laugh from relief at having been shown their depression without having to name it. The song ends. The laughter dies. Around them hangs an immense and still silence.

And they continue paddling into it, into the gorge, into the darkness.

I look into that darkness more now, far more than I did then, attempt to look into its heart. The darkness begins to fragment. It breaks into black pieces and each piece takes on the shape of an animal: a wombat, two ringtail possums, five pademelons, three potoroos, seven blue wrens, four bats, one rather handsome looking green tree frog, two companionable goannas, a serene-looking freshwater lobster, an angry reddening crayfish, and all sitting down one side of an old lino-topped table that has similarly manifested itself out of the darkness. On the other side of the table appears an equally bizarre menagerie: three Tasmanian devils, two tabby cats, a quoll, a Tasmanian tiger - jaw hugely distended, presumably waiting with anticipated appetite - a querulous mob of black cockatoos, a small whip snake all eager twists and turns, and next to it a rather disinterested coiled-up tiger snake seemingly oblivious to its reptilian cousin. An oak skink next to them, and next to that an owl and a pigmy possum, four mongrel dogs, two platypuses, five kangaroos and, right at the end, a shuffling echidina. And standing above this banquet of animals, smiling benignly, is an aged Harry.

The animals are slurping out of their plates and seem to be having rather a good time. Harry looks down upon them like the patriarch he never was. Of course, although Harry and Sonja only ever had me before Sonja died, they did dream of a large family and of all the things that they and their many kids would one day do together. After Sonja's death Harry continued to serve up a plate of food for her at his weekly barbeque. After a time he began to serve up an extra plate of salad and grilled meat and fish, additional to that he would normally serve for himself, me, Maria Magdalena Svevo and my dead mum. It was eighteen months or so after her death. He began to serve up a very small plate of diced meat and a few squashed vegetables, a baby's meal. After that, every eighteen months or so, he would add another plate to the number, as though he were feeding some growing family of phantoms. The servings grew over time, as if the ghost receiving them was growing from baby to child to adolescent to adult. Then he began to put out more food and drink for more invisible guests, whom he claimed were long-lost relatives come visiting, or friends of the phantom children. No one ever said anything. As if it were normal, which after a time it became, a curiosity only commented on by the occasional flesh-and-blood visitor to our weekly barbeque.

Toward the end, it must have become faintly ridiculous, though I never saw it, having long since left. Harry had the tables placed next to his barbeque, and he left them each Sunday afternoon heaped with rissoles and grilled fish. You might think that cats and stray dogs would have come and scoffed the lot, but it never happened. The food sat there on the long bench tables, under the grapevine that grew on the rickety old trellis above, until each Monday evening when Harry would whistle, a low eerie whistle, and a slight wind would blow. Animals would appear from everywhere: cats, dogs, possums, wombats and devils. Where, in the middle of a city the size of Hobart, they all came from, to this day I'm stumped. They seemed to materialise out of the earth. They would sit around and upon the tables and eat, sometimes spratting, sometimes sharing, while Harry stood above them puffing away on a hand-rolled cigarette, saying nothing, smiling a bit.

I watch as the Tasmanian tiger pulls itself with its forepaws up to the table edge, observe how it leans across a plate of cold rissoles, picks up an old green-handled kitchen knife and brings the raucous gathering to attention by banging its handle upon the table top. And - I swear it's true, if I wasn't seeing and hearing this myself, I would never have believed it possible - she announces she is going to tell a story about loss. The announcement is not greeted with instant silence. A few go quiet, a few continue chatting, and a few howl derisively. The echidina yells out that he isn't going to listen to any animal that looks like a pedestrian crossing, and he and the quoll collapse into helpless giggles. The tiger tells them to piss off, says she couldn't care less what a dopey little ball of spikes thought. She has a fine, if somewhat high-pitched, voice, full and resonant, perhaps because of her splendidly large mouth. And so she begins.

 an ocean of wheat foretells a death 

The two men never exchanged a word, though they did pass the occasional cigarette. Once a year the small man would wait at the place where his farm was entered from an empty dirt road. This small man would wait, wearing a neat pair of purple Koratron trousers - the same pair of neat purple Koratron trousers that he had worn on this same day every year for the last twenty years - and an old faded green-checked flannelette shirt, worn and washed so much that it was now so thin it was pleasant to wear even in the worst heat. The dirt road ran through flat country that remained flat and, to those who did not understand its subtleties, featureless for many hundreds of miles, a land considered remote even to those in the remote town of Esperance, Western Australia, which this road had as its destination. The sleeves of the checked green flannelette shirt were neatly rolled up to the elbows, and below the flannelette folds the muscles of skin-cancer scored forearms twisted like old sisal rope as he rolled up a smoke and put it in his mouth. Once a year he would dawdle up to his farm's decrepit gate and there lean on a post, waiting for his mate to pick him up en route from Kambalda to Esperance for the annual races. This arrangement was never confirmed or acknowledged by either. It was part of the rhythm of their life which they neither questioned nor considered strange. Once a year a grubby grey-green EH utility kicking up a cloud of dust came to a halt alongside a small rundown farm and picked up a farmer and took him through to Esperance. It was a friendship that knew no doubt and hence required no conversation. It was as large as the country they drove through without talk hour after hour, and as irreducible to words.

Except this year.

This year was to be different. They picked up a hitchhiker, a small stumpy man with a swarthy complexion and a big nose. He wore a pair of faded khaki work trousers, a pink singlet over which was draped a blue flannelette shirt, and on his head was a soiled yellow Caterpillar baseball cap, out of the back and sides of which protruded short red hair. The farmer got out of the EH on that hot dusty road and looked at the flat earth that rolled away forever. He wiped his brow and indicated to the hitchhiker that he was to sit in the middle. After an hour or so of driving, the driver asked where he was going.

‘Home,' said the stumpy man in a voice that gave away nothing, flat, slow, burred.

‘Home?' said the driver.

‘Tasmania,' said the stumpy man.

‘Further than we be goin',' said the driver. The farmer in the purple Koratron trousers and faded green flannelette shirt smiled. But only a little. Not so much that the stumpy man could see it. Not that it mattered. The stumpy man smiled too.

Nobody bothered to speak again for a few more hours until they pulled up at a road house that shimmered like a red brick mirage in the middle of the low blue-bush desert. They all got out and walked around a bit and the farmer looked up at the stumpy man and said, ‘Go home much?'

‘Not much,' said the stumpy man. ‘Not for ten years.' The stumpy man looked at the farmer and decided to add, ‘Family business.'

‘O,' said the farmer, knowing full well that meant something bad. ‘Ya mum or ya dad?'

‘Me dad,' said the stumpy man.

If the farmer had then asked him when he knew his father was dying, Aljaz would not have been able to say it was when he first saw the wind swing round from east to west in an ocean of wheat in Western Australia. The wheat was bowing in its customary humility to the prevailing westerly wind. The wheat lay swept to the left of Aljaz, entombed within the dusty airconditioned dryness of a combine harvester that was heading relentlessly south. The wheat, which was one flat brown colour, suddenly lifted up then fell to the right of Aljaz, changing to a golden hue as it did so. Then, almost as soon as the colour had altered for as far as the horizon, the wind changed back, the wheat returned to its original position and resumed its dull brown. The ocean had changed colour. It was if the wheat were a Persian rug being flipped first this way then that by a salesman keen to reveal the magic of its perfect weave.

Nor would he have been able to say that it was during the course of the night following that day, when, as he lay in his motel room, airconditioner clunking through the long black evening, he dreamt of sea eagles flying far above a glittering river. But he would have said that after he rang home the next morning - the first time he had rung home in many months - and a neighbour had answered the phone and told him that his father was ill in hospital, he realised he had to go home. He went to the foreman and, asking for his pay, said he had to get home on urgent family business. The foreman said, ‘Come back any time and I'll see you right.'

‘Sure,' said Aljaz. The foreman was fair about his wages, paid out what Aljaz was owed, but it was nothing compared to what he would have got if he had worked the full hot summer. They both knew that.

‘Shame,' said the foreman. ‘You're good labour. And there's plenty of work for good labour,' said the foreman.

Aljaz said nothing. The foreman looked at him and wondered who the hell he was. Most of the drivers were local boys, and if he hadn't grown up with them he knew someone who had. Aljaz had blown into town, been told about the job in the pub, and applied to the foreman the following day. He had a New South Wales licence, but said he was from Tasmania. Beyond that he didn't say much at all. People liked Aljaz, for he was easy to get on with. He drank enough with the men that they were not suspicious of him, but not so much that anyone really got to know him. The whisper was that he had done time in Long Bay, but the foreman somehow doubted it. Still, there was something about Aljaz, about his easy straight-batting of personal questions, that made the foreman curious. The foreman kept talking, hoping to find out something more.

‘Plenty work, plenty money,' said the foreman.

‘Them's the breaks.'

‘It's a long way from here to there,' said the foreman.

‘Yeah,' said Aljaz. ‘Spose. Spose always has been.'

‘Well, that's how she goes, I reckon,' said the foreman.

‘Reckon it is,' said Aljaz.

The farmer didn't bother talking any more. They went into the café, had a feed of steak and salad and chips, got back into the EH utility and did not speak again until they arrived at Esperance late that night, when they bade each other farewell under the huge southern night sky.

Aljaz had to wait until the next morning for a light plane to fly him up to Perth. That flight, via half a dozen bush airstrips, took half a day. He got into Perth to find there were no planes east for six hours due to a refuelling dispute. Then he was overcome with a great fear. He suddenly felt too frightened to return home, afraid of the people and the place. He did not know what to do. Having come so far it seemed ridiculous to halt his journey at this point. He felt paralysed and sick. He saw a phone booth and without consciously thinking walked up to it and rang the directory, asking for the number of a Couta Ho in Hobart. He was given a number which he then dialled.

The telephone sounded its pulsing signal twice, thrice, four times, and then Aljaz suddenly hung up.

He walked out of the terminal and looked at the taxi rank and looked at what remained in his wallet from his payout four days before in a faraway ocean of wheat, and made a calculation as to how much would remain after an airfare back east had been paid. He needed a drink, and not in an airport bar. He walked over to a taxi and asked the cost of a fare to town. The taxi driver was a thin middle-aged man with thick black hair that he wore swept back. He wore gold-rimmed sunglasses, of a type that had been voguish ten years previously and no doubt would be voguish again before the taxi driver was finished with them. He looked straight ahead all the time Aljaz talked to him.