Mullumbimby (31 page)

‘But you're asking me to give up my
land,'
Twoboy cried. ‘My budheram jagan! It's too much, Jo! How many times we gotta lose our country? How many times?'

‘I'm not asking you for anything,' Jo said, refusing to be seduced into yelling. ‘I'm just telling you – this jahjam's not gonna front any court. It's my job to keep her safe, not to put her up in front of some white court to be shamed and picked apart. I love you, man, but you've got to believe me: this kid comes first.'

‘So that's it?' Twoboy asked, sinking back against the kitchen bench and clutching at his temples in disbelief. ‘You're gonna sit here on ya twenty acres and let us lose our Native Title? Just sit back and watch it all happen?'

Jo hesitated, knowing Twoboy's huge anguish, his years of desperate hoping. She measured the man's pain, and put it in her mind against Ellen's silent racking sobs, the folded agony of the child in front of her. She felt the pressure of the child's fingers reaching for hers, and she thought of the ink-blackened lines on Ellen's palms, the mystery and wonder of them. The country is pressing tight upon me, Jo thought as she grasped Ellen's hand hard in return. The country is holding us together, me and my girl.

‘It'd only be one single day in court,' Twoboy went on hammering, sensing a tiny change in Jo. ‘Just a few hours. Our mob have
died
for this jagan, Jo, you know that. How bad can one single day be, Ellie, just one day – with us there beside you?'

Without looking up, Ellen shook her head violently. Jo gazed down at her brown curls, seeing the single matted dreadlock that
Ellen had grown. She let herself imagine how bad
one day
of standing in a dugai court might be for a thirteen-year-old child. She thought about the look on Ellen's face on that one day, and on the day after that, and the day after that. The army of women clustered close around her. She could feel them softly breathing.

‘You can do it, bub. Talk straight, now,' said Aunty Barb, putting a flame to her durrie and drawing back on it to make a bright red coal in the far corner of the room.

‘I'd rather sink that blade in your neck,' Jo said quietly, pointing at the knife box. ‘Now go, and don't bother coming back till you've changed your tune.'

In the wee small hours of the night that followed, Ellen slept beside her mother, her tear-stained face resting on a ragged pillow with synthetic fluff spilling from its end. Jo tossed and turned for hours before finally, as the red numerals of the clock read three a.m., falling into a deep slumber. She dreamed, then, that she was standing in the backyard as a tremendous storm raged. Huge purple thunderheads surged across the valley and came towards her over the ridge; the whole sky boiled with water and fury. When the howling wind peeled the tin roof off the farmhouse and took it sailing eastward, Ellen was revealed standing exposed in the kitchen. Thunder rippled around the hills, echoing in the roofless house. Lightning snapped down like great silver flashing knives and found the mango tree, exploding it in a shower of flame. Then, to Jo's horror, a second bolt struck Ellen. She sprinted to her daughter's rescue but when she arrived inside the roofless walls she discovered the child standing there unharmed. Ellen laughed joyfully, holding both her bare wet palms up to the purple sky as she waited for another strike to arrive.

I am jalgani,
she told her mother.
I am the lightning; nothing can hurt me now.

Jo woke from the dream gulping for air, her heart drumming madly in her chest. For a long moment she had no idea where she was. It took minutes for her to realise that she was inside her house, safe in her own bed, and that the dream wasn't real. Ellen was still fast
asleep beside her, faintly snoring. Jo threw herself flat onto her back and stared into the darkness in bewilderment. What did the dream mean? Who in the world could she ask about Ellen's hands? Had she made the right decision to send Twoboy away, and, above all, what on God's green earth was she supposed to
do?

The army of women had dissipated as she slept. Jo was once again lying alone in the dark, clueless. Somewhere there had to be answers to the impossible questions of her life, but she didn't know where to even begin looking for them. Unless.

‘Help me, Aunty Barb,' she called tentatively, not wanting to wake Ellen, ‘which way?'

The silence grew thicker, and the night darker.

‘Aunty Barb!' Jo repeated in growing desperation. ‘What do I do now?'

There was no reply, only the hint of a feeling – but this sensation gradually grew stronger and more insistent as she lay looking upwards. Beyond the ceiling the Emu was wheeling in the Milky Way, a billion miles above the farmhouse. The growing feeling had no voice, no face and no name, but it brought an irresistible message:

Jo left the house in bare feet, ignoring the soft whickering of the horses when they saw her looming in the starlight. Daisy and Warrigal padded in her wake, but she didn't see them. In the sheen of the waning three-quarter moon, she clambered through the barbed wire gate at the back of the Big Paddock and headed up along the trail she'd ridden on the day of the talga. She padded steadily higher, until she reached the fallen gum.

Jo stood there, listening to the night sounds. The urge to keep going remained. She clambered over the high white trunk and kept on walking, growing breathless from the steepness of the trail. She
hoped that Ellen was still sleeping in the house below. Anxious as she was about this, the sensation dragging her to the top of the ridge was far too strong to disobey. It felt, now that she was out of the house and actually walking westward, as though the pulling was a kind of long unsung music inside her, growing ever louder, demanding to be voiced when she reached her destination. As she drew closer to the summit, Jo felt the blood in her veins becoming richer, turning to a mingling of many bloods and of many stories. She felt a strange and ancient current springing from the jagan to course through her body and her brain. Walking the trail as it rose through the folded hills, Jo knew that nothing else in her life mattered as much as this. She had been born to walk to the top of this ridge, and put on earth to look, at this particular time, from its summit to the western horizon, where Mullumbimby slumbered. She could no more have turned around to check on Ellen than she could have leapt from the hilltop and flown.

At last, mud-streaked and grazed from a myriad of tiny lantana scratches, she was finally there. She stood atop the spur of Chincogan, her right hand resting on the trunk of a huge mountain ash. She breathed hard as she looked down into the crease of land below. A dozen patchwork farms, Rob Starr's among them, lay sprawled between her and the distant silvery curve of the river. In the far distance, the shops and houses of Mullum were faint, lit squares in the misty pre-dawn light. Chincogan squatted fatly to the side of the town, its high, curved, saddle peaks rising up against the still-starry sky. The Southern Cross hung directly over the town, and Bottlebrush Hill was a dark bulge behind her, surveying her as she stood and waited. Jo could hear the distant pounding of the surf hitting the beach at South Golden; gradually she became aware that the regular thudding of the waves on the hard sand exactly matched the metronome of her own insistent pulse.

Well I'm here,
she thought, listening, her nerves wildly alive with expectation.

Nothing happened for a long, pregnant minute. Then, as the first touch of dawn began to break far in the east, she became aware of
small rapid movements in the bushes around her. She heard familiar twitters. Fairy-wrens, a dozen or more, were lining the low branches she stood among. The birds flicked their tails upward, popping from branch to branch. They chirped severely at her. As she watched, more and more of the tiny birds arrived. After five minutes there were two dozen, three dozen, fifty, a hundred fairy-wrens, chirping and scolding in the trees surrounding her.

The hair on the back of Jo's neck slowly rose as she understood that every single wren was looking straight at her. She swallowed.

Jingawahlu nyawarnibil,
she offered nervously.
Hello little birds.

In response, the birds rose as one body. For a crazy moment, Jo thought they meant to attack her. She flinched, and went to protect her face with her hands. But instead, the mass of tiny feathered souls flashed past so close that they brushed her arms and her hair. She felt a small grey wingtip against her cheek. Then as she stood and watched, the flock hugged the curve of the hillside, diving down through an ocean of crisp morning air until they reached the bottom of the western slope, where Rob Starr was squatting beside a rocky waterhole, facing a shirtless Sam Nurrung.

Jo couldn't find the air to breathe.

The black boy had his back to her. He stood facing west with his arms outstretched, a crucifix backlit by the emerging dawn. From her vantage point, half a kilometre above, Jo couldn't see Sam's face. Nor could she make out the expression on Rob Starr's. Fearful, and with a sense of growing disbelief, Jo watched as the wrens wheeled in unison above the distant figures, to land on the spreadeagled arms of the boy. Sam Nurrung didn't move, but stood in front of Starr unflinching. A low hum rose through the air and Jo knew that she was hearing the talga again. The song was making its way up the face of the ridge to where she stood, invisible and trembling. She let out a small moan.

Ah, no. Nothing makes sense. It's too much.

She wanted desperately to turn away and bolt home, back to the safety of her own house, her own bed. But something in the song
caught her. The talga held her, trapped beside the ancient mountain ash, as the sound reverberated through the valley. Far below, Starr spoke to Sam, who spun around and faced the ridge. Starr pointed directly at Jo. Horrified, she lunged a couple of panicky steps backward into the bush. Starr couldn't have seen her so far away and so shrouded in forest, she told herself.

Sam shaded his eyes, searching, staring. The movement of his arm made the wrens flutter and wheel above his head, protesting and looking for another perch. Then the boy let out a stark cry in words that Jo didn't recognise.

The birds reformed themselves into a squadron, and flew like bullets back up the slope. They found Jo easily where she crouched among wattle branches in fear. They danced in the air around her, circling her, pirouetting from branch to air and back again to the trees. They followed her escape downhill, chittering in annoyance all the way, until, dew-soaked and sobbing for breath, she reached the fenceline. Jo flung herself through the wire and bolted across the Big Paddock, back to safety and home, back to some semblance of normality, where she could hear the phone ringing off the hook as she arrived at the back door.

Jo stepped out of the shower and towelled herself dry. Hot water pounding on her head for half an hour had helped push down the sight of Rob Starr and Sam Nurrung. It was now time to think about Ellen. From the doorway of the big bedroom Jo looked at her daughter still lying in the foetal position beneath the warm blue doona. The child absolutely refused to entertain the idea of going to school, or even of leaving the farm with Jo to seek answers. She refused to do anything but lie still, and hope that everything inexplicable in her life would simply go away. That she might wake up, the next time, with nothing at all unusual on the reddened, black-lined hands she constantly scraped at as Jo talked.

‘Well, will you come with me and see Uncle Humbug?' Jo urged
gently. ‘He might know. It might have happened before, to someone else.'

Ellen shook her head, obstinate with incomprehension and fear. Nobody could explain her, let alone help her. She was a freak of nature, and she was staying put in the hope that nothing even worse would go wrong.

Jo rubbed hard at her face in frustration, trapped by impulses that tore at her in different directions. The solace of the shower had told her that she needed to go to water now, to be beside the healing ocean until she found some direction, but at the same time Ellen clearly needed her here at home. Chris was sick again. Therese couldn't help either, for she was in Brisbane where Amanda's mother was now in intensive care. Jo gazed at her daughter, wondering how her life had come to this pass. It seemed such a short time ago that the biggest mystery she faced had been the old headstones at work, and who they belonged to; a question, and a state of being, that now seemed pathetically simple.

At the other end of the house, the phone rang on and on. Caller ID said it was Twoboy. Jo blocked out the clamouring, then finally threw the phone onto the kitchen bench, disconnected. The man could wait, along with his stupid blokey blindness and his mad demands upon Ellen. There were no good answers to be had in his phone calls, nor in the Native Title Tribunal either.

‘I just feel like Uncle Humbug might be able to help,' Jo said tiredly, sitting down on the bed and holding Ellen's soft white wrists that were black where the Nikko pen had smeared during the night. Hadn't the old man claimed to be
the one true blackfella
for this country? In the absence of her parents and her darling Aunty Barb, in the absence of other elders, Jo would take what was on offer. She had to look for Humbug.

‘You go,' Ellen said, roughly shrugging Jo's hands away and pulling the doona high around her ears. ‘Holly's coming round. She'll be here by one.' Jo breathed out, closed her eyes, and assessed this idea. Was Ellen waiting to see if she was going to abandon her? Or would
she really be alright if Jo went seeking the old man in the park, if she went and spilled her tales to him of mapped hands and enchanted wrens, of the signs and wonders of the Mullum ridge?

‘I'll wait till she gets here.' It was too risky to leave the kid alone, and, anyway, Humbug might take some finding. Ellen rolled over in the bed and squeezed her eyes tight in obvious relief.
Good call,
Jo thought, as she lay down beside her child and held her tight, all the while trying to find some way to put a squatting Rob Starr together with a crucified Sam Nurrung in her head and not go stark raving mad.

Jo pulled up in Bruns and switched off the clattering ute. The river beyond the massive Norfolk Island pines was a mere skin of water on the land. Long fingers of exposed sandbank had dried to yellow in the midday sun, and the pirate ship loomed menacingly out of the river, marooned there until the turning tide came and floated it again. Now that school holidays were over, a mere handful of locals were sprinkled throughout town. Jo was the only person standing on the pub side of the river. She walked across Torakina Bridge, peering beneath the heavy timbers, and wondering where Slim and Humbug might be found.

‘I brought Slim home,' DJ told her from where he sat fishing on the rocky seawall beneath the casuarinas, ‘but Uncle Humbug's in the lockup again. That prick of a copper in Mullum booked him for drunk and disorderly.' He raised his bushy eyebrows at Jo:
It sucks, but what can you do.
Jo grimaced in return, seeing her chances of easy enlightenment collapsing. On the beach behind them, DJ's kids played sandcastles. The toddler was learning how to count using the half shells of ugari which the full moon had left in its wake.

‘Least he'll get a feed, I suppose,' she said.

DJ grimaced.

‘Feed of shoe leather maybe. The dogs flogged him up real good, from what I heard. Palm Island all over again, except you've gotta die to make the news – or no, you need a riot to make the papers,' he corrected himself. ‘Nobody gives a shit if you just die.'

‘How can they do that to an old bloke?' Jo curled her lip in disgust. She imagined the outcry if a blackfella had belted into one of the grey-haired pensioners who sat gossiping each morning outside the newsagent. The Goories would never hear the end of it, but because Humbug had shown the terrible judgement to be both homeless
and
black, well, that was an entirely different kettle of jalum.

‘How ya doing, anyway, tidda? You look tired,' DJ asked.

Jo muttered something dismissive. Instinct told her that no Wiradjuri man, however decent, would have the answers to her Bundjalung problems. Defeated by his news, she turned back towards the other side of the river – but then stopped dead in the middle of the sandy track.