Death of a River Guide (23 page)

She sat on the floor in front of the fire and Harry knew from the amount of rouge on her face that she wasn't right, for the worse she felt, the more she powdered her face. She was proud of her skin, always talking of how lovely and light it was, though it never looked that light to Harry.

Not long after he first arrived in Strahan Harry looked at Auntie Ellie and asked, ‘Is you an Abo, Auntie Ellie?' Ellie, for the first and only time that Harry ever remembered, laid into him.

‘Don't you go talking about decent people in that sort of way. It does no good, you hear? We are good decent Catholic folk, good decent
white
Catholic folk, you understand?'

Harry didn't understand.

‘I'm truly sorry, Auntie Ellie, I just thought you mighta been an Abo -' Harry got no further before Ellie cuffed him again and again, this time with a methodical violence that Harry recognised did not come from her, but was learnt, as she wanted him to learn it. For that reason it did not hurt him, but he took care to listen. She would slap him one side of the face and then say something, then slap him the other side and say something else. And as she slapped him the tears ran down her face, though her voice was fierce.

Slap
.

‘We ain't no Abos, we ain't no boongs, ya hear?'

Slap
.

‘Ya talk like that they'll take ya away, ya understand? They'll take ya back to the islands. I already told you what we are - decent white Catholic folk.

Slap
.

‘What are we?'

Slap
.

‘White Catholic folk.'

She stayed her hand at the side of her face. ‘That's right.' Her head momentarily turned and she caught sight of her open palm, ready to strike again if necessary, and then her eyes quickly moved back to staring fiercely at Harry, as if she had glimpsed something alien and frightening which she had no wish to see. ‘Decent white Catholic folk,' said Auntie Ellie, but her voice was now shaky and somehow less certain.

Though he did not understand, Harry knew not to say such things again, and neither of them ever referred to the incident. But Harry, with a child's unerring sense, proceeded to explore the area by subterfuge. He found that as long as he didn't specifically mention the word ‘Abo' or ‘Aborigine' there was much Auntie Ellie would tell him. Not that he consciously sought information to discover what it was that Auntie Ellie didn't want to talk about. He continued to push though he did not know he was pushing, or what purpose his questions and dissembling served.

Harry found the best time for his questions to be when they were out walking, a pastime of which Auntie Ellie was fond. They would walk many miles along Ocean Beach and they would eat the fleshy leaves of the plant they called pigface and she called dead men's fingers, would rub the bite of jack-jumpers and the inchmen with the pulpy flesh. They would walk in the bush up around Piccaninny Point on the King River and beyond the rain-forested ruins of Teepookana. At such times she reminded Harry of a dark plum. She would pick the ripe kangaroo apples after they cracked open in the early morning sun and push them in his mouth, the taste sometimes like a boiled floury spud and sometimes like a banana. Auntie Ellie herself was particularly fond of mullas - large blueberries to be found on vines in the rainforest. And as they walked and Auntie Ellie fed him from the bush, she would start chattering away and tell him how they had to look after the land for the land was the spirit. When there was a mining disaster at Queenstown and many miners died, she said, as she always said in times of drought or flood or fire, that the land was soaked with blood and that such things happened ‘because the spirit angry, because the spirit sad.' Sometimes, when she was ill or drunk or in the bush, she talked of her mother and her people, whom she only ever referred to as the old people, and sometimes, when she felt particularly happy or particularly sad, she would talk about the old people's ways. She was a stern and proud Catholic, though occasionally she called satan Werowa, which she said was the old people's name for the devil.

‘Not that I know much about the old people,' she would say. ‘A bit. Not much. A bit. You'd have to ask them professors at the museum, Harry, to get your answers. Now they know the lot.' She would tap her head and heart with her hand. ‘I only know what I got in here and here and that's two parts of bugger all.' Then she'd look up in the trees, trying to find another possum run or batch of ripe mullas, and, never looking at him, say in a disinterested sort of way, ‘Them poor buggers had it bad. Oh Lord, yes. Real bad, they had it.' But about herself she would only say, ‘I am a good respectable white woman.' Much of being respected for Auntie Ellie was being part of the church, and her religion was, like her, a cranky combination of both the new and the old. She observed the church's great ceremonies - baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage, mass - wearing her other dress, her best dress, made of a dark serge material. But around her neck, in contrast to the prim drabness of her dress, she wore layers of beautiful meriner necklaces that she made from seashells she collected from Ocean Beach, that had all the colours of the sea upon a single thread of catgut. In anything that really mattered to her it was the old people's ways she stuck to, not the ways of the Church of Rome.

The following morning Harry knew for sure she wasn't well when she called him to scatter the ashes from the fire in the direction of the morning star, so as to warm it and ease its journey through the day. All that day, family from her mum's side gathered at home, a rough mob they were, but nice and decent and polite as could be. Late in the afternoon Harry's uncles Basil and George turned up. They all sat around with their dogs and chatted and laughed and hoyed their dogs to cut out this and that.

Auntie Ellie was dying.

It had begun after Daisy's death. Auntie Ellie began to shrivel up. She stopped doing everything. She stopped smoking all the time and took to smoking only of a mid-morning after she had chopped the firewood for the day, and then only rollies and not her pipe. She went to church only of a Sunday, not every day that the priest happened to be saying mass. She talked little and laughed less. She came to find walking very difficult. Each Sunday she would get in a tiny horse cart that she owned and, possessing no horse, get Harry to pull it in a harness they had found on the tip and which she had converted for Harry's use. Harry would pull the cart to church and back. This practice went on for some months, till the Siddons took to calling in on their way to mass and giving Auntie Ellie and Harry a lift in their A-model Ford.

When the priest came to administer the last rites Auntie Ellie grew - for the first time anyone could remember - Auntie Ellie grew contemptuous, even abusive. ‘Bugger off, Father Breen,' she said. ‘I'm off to see the old people, and I ain't got no need of going to the Catholic heaven.' Father Breen was perplexed but determined to be forceful, until Harry's cousin, Big Mick Brennan, smelling strongly of muttonbirds, draped his arm, two threatening hairy joints of mutton, around the priest's shoulders and, smiling, repeated his aunt's injunction. ‘Be a good fella and bugger off, Father.' Father Breen took his hat and bade farewell.

After the door slammed Auntie Ellie had a cup of tea and started telling stories about the old people. She didn't tell any of the stories that she had remembered that night when she had been chased by the cow along the road to Lettes Bay, only the good stories and the funny stories about the past. Mostly stories about the family.

Then Auntie Ellie stopped telling her stories and lay back down on the floor. As Auntie Ellie lay on the floor dying, her brothers sat around in that old sky-blue tin house and told more stories. The stories got the men drinking, and then some of the men drank too much and the women grew angry and ordered them out of Auntie Ellie's house until they were prepared to give the bottle a rest. There was some screaming and shouting, then it all calmed down again, except for Noah, who just wouldn't shut up carrying on about how some people were saying he was drunk, just because he kept falling over, and how he knew plenty of sober people who fell over all the time, so how the hell did him falling over prove a thing, how did it prove he was drunk, when all it meant was that his balance wasn't perhaps as good as it might be? Then the women grew angry again and the men started to laugh and open bottles. In the end, even Auntie Ellie, sick as she was, had had enough and she rose up from her possie in front of the fire, where she had lain for some hours, and went outside to whistle up the wind in her anger. That was when everybody knew that it had all gone a bit too far. Normally Auntie Ellie only called up a wet westerly, but when she was really shitty she whistled up a northerly - she called it Werowa's breath - to give people headaches and bad chests. She'd make a high-pitched whistle, eerie really, and then the trees would begin to quiver and rustle, and before you knew it, there was a full bloody gale roaring.

As Auntie Ellie stood on her verandah in that soft mid-morning light, lips pursed and emitting a shrill strange sound, the wind rose like a slow-forming wave, at first just a small rustle, then, as it gathered power, beating at the windows and doors of her little tin home, making them rattle, and finally shaking the very house itself, so much so it frightened everybody inside. It was like a violent song, and every now and then, when it seemed to be beginning to wane a little, Auntie Ellie, with the door behind her slamming open and shut in the wild gusts, would whistle again, and the wind would immediately respond, even more ferocious, even more powerful. Everyone grew quiet, for Auntie Ellie had the powers of the old people. The men tipped their beer out and Auntie Ellie came back inside and resumed her possie and her impassive stare into the fire.

Harry had never met half of them, but they seemed to know all about him. Harry asked how they knew Auntie Ellie was so sick, because no word had been sent, and they just pointed to the tips of the trees moving in the wind and smiled. The wind seemed to make Auntie Ellie a lot happier, even though her normally immaculately tidy house was being turned upside down and she was, if nothing else, a fiercely proud housekeeper, but she continued to fade through that day and the following evening.

Near the end she lay down on the floor and asked for the fire in front of her to be built up. She curled up in front of the red heat and her dogs lay around her licking her hands and face and she seemed happy for this to be the way. The light of the fire played upon them and she stared past the dogs' panting tongues into the ever changing, dancing forms that seized and then fled from the red embers at the heart of the fire - mesmerised, as if seeing things in those flames that she had never seen before. When Harry arrived she became unusually talkative. ‘A strange thing, Harry. Since they took the old people away, Harry, a strange thing. God has not filled this land with animals. The land used to be alive with wallaby and kangaroo, possums would come to your door to eat and you'd eat them. Now you have to hunt all day to find one. The emu gone, the tiger gone. The old people gone.'

Harry did not know what to say. ‘We're still here, Auntie Ellie,' he said.

Auntie Ellie smiled. She looked up at Harry and said, ‘Seems the whiter and whiter I get, the blacker you get,' and laughed and laughed. Then coughed, and the coughing became a sort of convulsion, then went quiet again.

‘My people call,' she suddenly said and the dogs howled. ‘No you cry for me, Harry,' she said. ‘I go back to my people. Me going back. No you cry. My people take me away.' She took Harry's hand in hers, as if they were back in the bush and she was guiding him around. ‘They rowing hard to get to me, Harry,' she said, pointing at the ceiling as if she had suddenly there spied a boat coming through the sky to take her away. ‘Pull, you lousy buggers!' she shouted in an outburst uncharacteristically loud and vulgar for Auntie Ellie. ‘Pull
hard
!' And she gripped Harry's hand so hard that it hurt and he could not believe that the old woman had so much strength left in her. Tears welled in Harry's eyes. Auntie Ellie cast her eyes downwards from the ceiling to look at Harry and spoke one last time.

Saying: ‘No you cry for me, Harry. My people call.'

After Auntie Ellie died everyone howled, the family and the dogs, and even the rusty corro shook, for half an hour or more.

 Harry, 1946