Death of a River Guide (8 page)

After a time the men made their farewells to Boy and his family. The women cleaned up and put the children in bed, then they too left, until there were only Boy and Ruth sitting in the parlour. Ruth pulled out a tin hipflask, a sister piece, Boy observed, to his cigarette case, complete with Ruth's italicised initials engraved in one corner. He poured half the hip-flask's whiskey into his empty beer glass and half into Boy's empty beer glass. Boy sipped at the whiskey. Ruth didn't. Ruth ran the nail of his right thumb along his upper front teeth. Then he spoke.

‘You think I am the only one of Rose's family here because the rest of them are snubbing the funeral. Because they think Rose married below her station.'

Boy looked up at Ruth. ‘No,' said Boy.

‘You'd have a right to think it,' said Ruth.

‘No,' said Boy. ‘I don't think it. It's a long way, Richmond to here, and they've got their work and their families. I understand that.'

‘They could have come,' said Ruth. ‘If they had wanted to. But they're snobs. You know that, Boy. You don't need me to tell you. But you have got to understand.'

Boy looked at Ruth and saw he hadn't touched the whiskey in his beer glass. He saw that Ruth was looking at him, not at the beer glass and not at the floor, and he guessed that he could perhaps speak his mind. Boy spoke without rancour, without even bitterness. But with a certain deep sadness that now Rose had gone the wrong he felt would never be righted. Boy spoke slowly. ‘What do you mean, I've got to understand? Ain't nothing to understand. They think I am shit. Well, they're right. I am shit. I snare in winter and I work on the threshing machines in summer and in between jobs I poach to feed the family. I ain't proud but I ain't ashamed.'

Ruth looked at Boy uncomfortable in his old cheap navy suit cut in the fashion popular before the Great War, at the wide black band around his right sleeve; looked at the way his big flat fingers played with his beer glass, at the thin black hair parted in the middle.

‘You have to understand,' said Ruth, ‘why we are snobs.'

‘Well, I understand
that
,' said Boy. ‘Some people are cranky and some are bone idle and some are snobs. That's just how it is.'

‘Maybe,' said Ruth. ‘Maybe not.' He paused and leant forward in the overstuffed armchair with the horsehair falling out of the holes in the arms. ‘Look. Did Rose ever talk to you about family? Our family?'

‘Yeah. All the time. Never stopped about what you were doing and how well you were all going.'

‘But did she ever talk about old Grandad Quade?'

‘No, not really. A lot about old woman Quade. But not much about him, no.'

‘He was a convict.'

‘Who?'

‘Ned Quade. Rose's grandfather.'

Madonna santa!

I can see that Boy was shocked and not shocked. And no wonder - so am I. Nobody ever told me this either, and yet, I, like Boy, feel as if I always knew but never suspected a thing, never ever thought but always knew such momentous shame hung over the family.

Boy's lips started to move, then stopped. Boy then mumbled a word or two, all the time the furrows in his face dancing up and down as if he were doing some long involved piece of mental arithmetic, adding up so many different things that he had never before recognised as being part of a single grand equation. Realising that he had not said anything proper in reply, Boy grew a little embarrassed and made a small joke to buy a bit more time thinking. He lifted his beer glass and said, ‘Thank God you poured me a whiskey,' smiled weakly, gulped down some of the whiskey, then finished the glass off with a second, more determined, swallow. And then he was back adding up all the strange evasions, the conceits, the curious pride, the black shames that had been his wife's nature and his despair, and he arrived at the same solution that Ruth had offered. He checked and rechecked the evidence in his mind, but the addition was its own truth, allowing no other solution. Ruth continued to watch. Boy's face finally stopped twitching and moved upwards to look once again at Ruth.

‘Why the hell …?' said Boy, but his voice trailed off, because he did know why the hell, because he did know what it must have meant to her, because he did know how it must have been terrible for her to continually lie to herself and to everyone else, but worse to turn and look at the unspeakable, unnameable shadow, and to give it a name and give tongue to that name in conversation with others. ‘Why the hell didn't …?' said Boy, but for a second time his voice trailed away, because he knew fully why, even before Ruth told him.

‘Why would she want you to know? Ain't no good anybody knowing you got convict blood. Who's going to respect you? There ain't nobody respects a crawler's kith and kin. And respect is everything. Without respect a man is no better than a dog. Who's going to give you a decent job if you've got the
taint
?' The final word came out of Ruth's throat with a peculiar harshness, as if the word itself carried chains and could be summoned up only with some effort from his guts, as if it flagellated his throat and tongue on its journey to his lips. Ruth sipped his beer glass of whiskey to ease the pain the word gave his mouth.

‘It might not matter much snaring up in the highlands,' he continued. ‘But it matters everywhere else. And what sort of future your children got if word gets out they got the taint? They're as good as filth. There's no future with that sort of past.'

Now, I've never been much interested in history. What's past is past, that's been my motto. Get on with now. All this business Ruth is dredging up should be dead and long gone. But it's not. The past isn't ever over, otherwise why would I be starting to get that pain back in my guts just watching Ruth and Boy? And if the past doesn't matter, why was Boy getting so angry?

I can see that now he knows the lie, he hates the way it came between him and Rose, the way it always kept them separate despite his love, the way it always made her despise as dirt the one she loved above all others, and inevitably left him unhappy when he was with her. But the angrier he gets, the less any of it makes any sense, and though he knows the answer he asks the question.

‘Then why the hell is the family such a pack of bloody snobs if they're only the whelps of an old crawler?' Boy asked Ruth.

‘Because they
are
the whelps and the whelps of whelps of an old crawler. Because to get somewhere we had to make up a new world to replace their old world, because there was no hope for any of us in that old world. That's what old Eileen taught us, and she was right. And if part of that new world means being a bit superior and putting on the plum - well, so be it. I admire the family for making something of itself out of nothing. Cos having nothing and wanting something meant pretending to have everything.'

Ruth paused. He had played piano for some difficult crowds at Ma Dwyer's and he had learnt the value of the pregnant pause. Boy looked up at Ruth, expecting him to say more, then looked away when no more came, then looked back and said, ‘But you can't go around denying your own blood.'

‘Why not? Look, the whole country does it. We pretend we're gentry and we're not. And you think it's bad. But do you ever wonder why they renamed Van Diemen's Land Tasmania? They wanted everyone to forget, that's why. And everyone wanted to forget with them. Whether they were convict or policeman, none of them thought it was worth remembering.' Ruth was an educated man. He had, after all, finished high school. And Rose had often told Boy how, if he had not followed his path in music, he would almost certainly have become a school teacher, so clever was Ruth. He was a great reader and owned over fifty books, all of which he kept locked in a big battered green trunk in his bedroom. Boy found it hard to say anything that came close to matching the cleverness of what Ruth was saying. But without being able to analyse and reply on equal terms to Ruth, he felt - as he sometimes felt when he saw a piece of timber and, without using a level, without even raising it to his eye, felt so strongly that he
knew
- that something in Ruth's logic was warped.

And the next morning when Ruth arose late and said that he had drunk so much that he could remember nothing of the night before, then Boy knew that what he knew was right.

A river can grant you visions in an act at once generous and despicable, but even a river like the Franklin in full flood cannot explain everything. It cannot show me where, for example, after Rose's death, Harry's three older sisters were sent into domestic service in Launceston, cannot even show me what their faces were like, and that is a cause for sadness for which the river seems to try and compensate by showing where his baby sister Daisy was sent, the town of Strahan, a small port on the remote and wild west coast of the island, to there live with Boy's mother, her grandmother, known in spite of her many and varying blood relations only as Auntie Ellie. Nor can the river's waters reveal to me why Boy was at such a loss what to do with Harry, or why, when the snaring season opened, he felt impelled to take Harry with him, but I can only assume that he too must have had some vision, some premonition of his own mortality.

The river does show me that the father and his son spent two weeks packing their gear and food into the remote hut. They walked through the last of the farmland, the boggy, marginal paddocks of the soldier settlers whose hope sagged even more than their post-and-rail fences. The meadows gave way to button-grass plains and scrub, then, as they slowly climbed, to a wonder world of pencil pine and King Billy pine forests, wide and open, interspersed with lawns of undamaged moss, the occasional deciduous beech copse orange in its final autumn show. Harry had never been to the hut before, and was surprised when he first had it pointed out to him by Boy. They stood at the head of a thickly forested valley, and down below them in a small and pleasant grass clearing sat a hut built of split timber and roofed with wooden shingles, the whole long silvered in the rain and sun, each plank finely etched with tiny tendrils and tufts of dry moss. To the left of the hut was a more roughly built shed, which Boy explained was for storing the skins.

Harry learnt to lay the thin twisted brass-wire snares out along the wallaby runs. He set them so that they dangled just above the track, near invisible. When a wallaby or possum came scurrying along their customary track it would run straight into the snare. The wire loop would slip around the animal's neck and, released from its peg in the ground, spring into the air, tightening as the desperate animal struggled and thrashed to be free. ‘It but bothers them little,' said Boy to Harry, but Harry was never quite so sure. The small shit that hung out of their arses and the dried blood line down the side of their mouths said otherwise. But Boy was not one for killing anything unnecessarily, and all his family were as soft as warm dripping when it came to killing things that didn't need killing. Boy's brother George would lay a piece of wet bark down the side of the logs burning in the fire to allow the ants to escape, and only shot just what was needed for his pot. Harry learnt to kill quickly and cleanly. He learnt to cook wallaby stew, to not cook the delicate meat for too long lest it became dry and papery to the tongue, learnt to cook his father's favourite meal, roo patties, and he learnt to make bread in a fire. He learnt also to love his father, who until that time had been a distant figure, often away for months at a time snaring, or working on the huge threshing machines that went from farm to farm up the coast, returning to sleep, drink, and fight with Rose, sometimes hitting her when he had drunk too much. At such times Rose would cry, though it was evident even to Harry that she cried as much out of sadness as physical pain. When she held her children to her belly and Harry's head pulsed in and out with the sob of her body, Harry knew, though he would not have been able to say it, that she wished for something better between her and Boy, and that she knew it would never happen.

In the hut and out on the snaring runs Harry found Boy neither distant nor violent, but quiet and happy and warm and open to his son. He pointed out the ways of the animals and the birds and plants and smiled more than Harry could ever remember him smiling. One morning Harry asked Boy why he had never brought Rose up to the hut. The question seemed obvious to Harry, for if they had lived in the hut, he thought, then their lives would have perhaps been happier. ‘What would your mother be wanting to live here for?' said Boy, perplexed by the question. Harry never raised the matter again.

Of an evening Harry would make the roo patties and watch the red firelight flutter upon his father's small compact body as he tacked the latest batch of skins around the inside of the fireplace to dry. Harry would watch the fireglow briefly illuminate in old-gold puddles the grey flannel his father wore upon his upper body, long and loose, flapping down to his worn brown breeches. The glow would sometimes throw his father's face into total darkness, then highlight in turn a part of the wooden wall behind, so that Harry would imagine his father merging into the soft brown and grey hues so completely that he became one of the hut's upright King Billy pine posts. Sometimes Harry would be sent out to the drying shed where the skins were stored to fetch more wood, and though he would go obediently he would be filled with fear by the leaping, cavorting shadows thrown by the dull greasy yellow light of the kerosene lantern that swung from his outstretched arm.

Those shadows, those greasy, slippery shadows, they dance before me now like some cabaret of lost souls of slaughtered animals performing a burlesque in Hell, and amidst the moist snouts of possums and wallabies I can see one more soul depart its human body. But then, of course, nothing was so immediately or obviously apparent, particularly for Harry. Watching him now, I can see Harry did not know when Boy died. Harry did not know for four days that his father had been squashed lifeless under a rotten myrtle limb, fallen down in the wind and his father unlucky enough to be standing beneath it. Harry lay in bed all the first day, sick and sweating from a fever, seeing in his hallucinations strange things form themselves out of the rough split rafters, animals cavorting and square-ended dinghies rowing through the air. Boy had told him to stay put for the day on account of his sickness and not bother with any work. ‘Cept maybe keeping the fire going and getting the roo patties ready for tea.' Harry lay there till late afternoon, then he built the fire up good and blazing. He went out to the drying shed and picked the oldest of three wallaby carcasses hanging in the drying chimney there. The carcass was black from the smoke. Harry cut a leg off the carcass and took it inside where he boned and minced the meat. He then boiled and squashed some potatoes into the meat, adding some bacon and diced onion, then, despite his nausea, rolled the mixture into ten balls, which he squashed flat. He set them in the pan with some dripping, but didn't put them on the fire, waiting for the signal of the noise of his father returning. After it had been dark for some time Harry's unease turned to a terrible cold fear, and he fought the fear down by pulling the blankets over his shoulders and face and retreating into the strange strong sleep of the sick.