Siddon Rock (4 page)

Henry walked into the exotic garden and plucked handfuls of papery flowers, their unexpected stiffness rustling together like a distant wind.
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd
, he murmured to himself as he pulled, many plants coming out by the roots. Then he recalled the lines that followed.
No, it was builded far from accident
, he recited as he stood there with his arms full of the flowers called everlastings.
It suffers not in smiling pomp,
nor falls / Under the blow of thralled discontent.
He stopped in amazement; that such a message could be sent to him in this place so far from anything he considered civilised. That the desert could bloom into such beauty, and that this spectacle recalled Shakespeare's words to him, must surely be an omen. He was not to turn back, it seemed. He must go on. The butterfly would indeed be his.

Pretty, eh?
said Jack.
Anything like this in your England?

Like this?
Henry replied.
No, not like this. Definitely not like this.

On the seven hundred and sixtieth day the party made its way through thick gimlet scrub and sheltered from the afternoon heat at the base of a low-lying mass of rocks. A woman of Jack's family asked Henry about the butterfly he sought, and what he would do when he found it.
Take it home to England
, Henry said,
to prove that it is here.

That night as he lay in his blankets under a small tree part-way up the largest rock Henry felt the same dull thrumming rhythm he had heard in the library in the Midlands. He threw off his blankets and rose above the rock, and as he flew over the members of Jack's family sleeping below, through his butterfly eyes he saw them as fragments, and fragments of fragments, and in the fragmentation were the trees and the rock. He tried to look at his wings, to identify himself, but could not see them in the blur of movement that kept him aloft. He flew over the rock, and saw, over the place where he had been sleeping, a hovering
cloud of
Papilio venenatus
. He had a surge of sadness of such painful intensity that he cried out in sorrow and dropped down into them where they became as one, and the trembling of their wings beat time with the thrumming of the rock. Henry had become as one with the rock.

When Henry woke the sadness was with him. What had happened to little Hal Aberline, heir apparent to the family cotton mill in Lancashire? Look, there he was as a toddler, riding his wooden horse up and down the driveway of the family home. He loved the cool gardens even then, and liked to go to the stream with Nurse. And later, as a young gentleman, he was on his way to boarding school in Surrey. How sad he looked as he waved goodbye. Such a home-body he was, young Hal, never happier than when riding with Father before breakfast, or taking tea with Mother in the afternoon. What then had driven him to this arid and isolated place – a whim that turned cruel; a fantasy he became enmeshed in, and now could not escape.

So there he sat, under his tree, and would not be moved. He broke a limb from the tree and watched the trunk ooze slow, thick blood until it congealed and scabbed to hide the wound. He watched in dull abstraction the swarms of brown moths that hid from the heat in dark gullies, thinking that their short life would be far preferable to the one he now inhabited.

Henry's male descendants, for at least five generations, would carry the sadness of the Aberlines, and often, like Henry did, find life too much to bear.

Henry stayed under his tree, in bad weather retreating to a small cave. Over the years stories about the Englishman who lived under a tree that grew out of a rock seeped back to the capital, attracting adventurous sightseers to visit the place. Women in particular were drawn to the idea of the romantic adventurer alone in the wilderness. These people would ask Henry why he did not move, at which Henry opened his arms wide, indicating the dull waves of gimlet and mallee scrub that surged from the base of the rock to the horizon.
I will disappear
, he'd say.
It will drown me
.

This answer often did not satisfy those more determined to have a rational explanation, and they'd find members of Jack's family and ask them what had happened.
He's a butterfly
, one said.
He flew
, said another.

What rubbish
, the sightseers said, or
absolute balderdash
, and off they'd go to Jack himself and ask him what had happened.
What made Henry Aberline stay at the rock?

He got tired
, Jack always said.
He gotta sit down.

This seemed entirely logical, and gradually the curves of dark granite that rose above the bush became known as Sitdown Rock.

Occasionally one of the sightseers asked Jack's people if there was another name for the rock.
Yeah
, they'd say,
this Yad Yaddin
. And if there was pressure to give a meaning there would be a shrug and a mumbled reply that sounded like
stay here
. But the listener could not always be sure.

New Wickton, written very small in cursive script on approved maps, was the designated name of the town: an
official recognition of the origins of Henry Aberline. But those who first came to the place referred to it as Sitdown Rock, and by popular usage and lazy tongues this became Siddon Rock – and so it remained until there was no other name in the memory of the town.

Macha Connor's great-grandfather was George Henry Aberline, one of the several sons of Henry (for women found the tree on the rock a most romantic place). George Henry proposed marriage to Eliza May Winton, youngest progeny of the Wintons, who were newly arrived from Cheshire.

Eliza May looked at the barren settlement where George suggested they live. She viewed with distaste the shabby tents and lean-to shanties that made up most of the town and which seemed to have no order, apart from two shops that huddled for security close to the pub. She thought of her grandmother's home in Manchester, of how peaceful and calm it was, and considered that she, Eliza May, was entitled to at least this.

Eliza May accepted the proposal of marriage from George Henry. However, she had heard enough stories about Henry Aberline to consider that his disposition towards melancholy and inaction may well have been passed to his son, and so she added the condition that a house must be ready to move into before the marriage could take place. This house was not to be in the town. George was to take up land and they would make their own farm.

With the realisation that a bedroom was necessary for wedded bliss, George considered his options. The few houses in the settlement of Siddon Rock that were neither shanties nor tents were built of lightweight and easily transported tin pressed with stylised swirls of
fleur-de-lys
or other popular European patterns. But it took many months to write an order, mail it to England for the tin sheets to be manufactured and shipped to the port, then carted to Siddon Rock. Neither was he prepared to wait the uncertain length of time for native timber to be ordered, cut, milled, seasoned and transported from the distant forests. As for a brick house, the impossibility of this was overwhelming, what with the cost of transport from elsewhere. Brickworks near the capital were but an idea in the minds of businessmen, as a suitable deposit of clay was still being sought.

In short, George decided to buy a house already built, and he set out on his quest.

People in the district soon became accustomed to the ornately twisted and curled chords of music that billowed behind George in red arabesques as he rode through the landscape in search of a house. Although he was no musician, George recognised snatches of Mendelssohn's
Wedding March
that sang out each time he approached a house that was, possibly, for sale. And each time he left unrequited, the chords lost colour and drooped down his back, wilting and straightening like the unravelling ringlets of pale honey-coloured hair tied in bunches each side of Eliza's round, strong face. As the search widened into the surrounding districts,
basso profundo
notes of the nuptial
benediction joined the chorus in an increasingly desperate counterpoint. The sound was remarkably similar to the exhortations of Mister Bloom, the minister of the newly established Methodist church, who was well aware of arousals of the flesh.

The summer of George's ride into the inland, when his desire was fresh and new and needing to be slaked regularly, was particularly hot and he stopped often in the shade of small stands of low trees to drink from his water bag and purge various bodily fluids. Vast amounts of piss and semen were expended into the thirsty summer earth where they sank, seemingly without trace.

The following winter found him on the track back towards Siddon Rock. He was returning home, after searching the small settlements and remote homesteads of the bush and desert, still with no house in which to consummate his marriage with Eliza May Winton. He stopped now and then at small shallow ponds that had formed where he had relieved himself on the outward journey. There winter rain had drawn salt water from the ground– like to like, so to speak: salt from the earth joining with the salt of George's bodily fluids. The water was as salty as the sea, as salty as tears, as salty as Eliza's sweat, which he had yet to taste.

George tied his horse to a dying ghost gum tree at the edge of one of these ponds, wondering at the whiteness of the salt-embalmed trunk that seemed as
solid as rock. To take his mind from the heat in his body, and to dissolve images of a dark curtained bedroom, he walked out onto the pond's apparently firm surface. As George was bulky – not fat, but rounded and solid, being in stature like his father's side of the family – the surface soon crumbled under him and left him floundering waist-deep in salty water and mud that sucked him slowly but relentlessly into its depths. As he tried to extricate himself from the mire, George sensed a shadow falling over him and looked up to see the ghost gum leaning towards him, falling in slow motion into the pond. His mind flashed pictures of himself trapped by the heavy tree, pushed into the muddy salt water and held until he drowned. He screamed, and tried to get out of the way of the falling tree, but the water was too shallow to allow him to swim and too deep for him to run, and he knew he was going to die.