Death of a River Guide (6 page)

‘The old jim-jams,' says Smeggsy to Old Bo. ‘That's all it is, mate, the old jim-jams.'

I watch as the next day Harry makes good time up the Gordon River. He rows for half a day without seeing a soul. Up past the Gordon's junction with the Franklin and then up the Franklin itself. Up past Pyramid Island he rows, and the river grows shallower and slower. Up past Verandah Cliffs, where as high up as he looks he sees fresh driftwood deposited by the recent flood. Near the top of the serrated limestone cliff face, a large long log of pine sits precariously balanced in a hole in the cliff, threaded through there by the river in flood like a piece of cotton through the eye of a needle. Harry laughs in wonder and keeps on rowing. Up to the Big Fall, around which he carries his gear and drags his punt.

The day turns to drizzle and Harry pulls an oilskin over the bags and puts a woollen flannel on over his singlet. Beyond the Devil's Hole he comes to another shingle rapid, flowing fast and ripply over the rocks. He takes the punt close into the riverbank and rows up the side eddy as far as he can, then jumps out with the bow rope. He walks up the river's edge, knee deep in rushing water. He walks twenty yards or so beyond the rapid, turns and walks into the middle of the shallows. He gets a firm footing facing downriver and begins to pull the rope in. He plays the line a little, letting the boat get in the middle of the current, where it is least likely to be flipped or to snag on one of the logs that litter the edge. And with a slow rhythm, like a strange ritualistic dance, he begins to haul the boat up the rapid, putting one arm right out then twisting his torso slowly, powerfully around, until that arm is at his waist and the other is fully extended on the rope, ready to pull the next length. I watch with respect as he skips the punt up the rapid's choppy waves.

Something makes Harry look up. There, a hundred yards downriver, high up a precariously leaning myrtle stag, a sea eagle stares back. Harry stops hauling, his body frozen in position, one arm fully extended, one arm at the end of the cycle. The sea eagle. Auntie Ellie was big on sea eagles. She told Harry they were the family's animal and that the family had to be kind to them, that the souls of Harry's ancestors came back into this world as sea eagles.

Suddenly the sea eagle falls from the tree. Halfway down to the river, the fall turns into a glide, and the glide is straight toward, straight at, Harry. And just when the bird seems to Harry as if it is about to snatch his face in its claws, it swoops up and climbs a cone of hot air, spiralling ever further upwards, each circle larger than the preceding one, without apparent effort, its wings outstretched and only the slightest tremor of feathers and body to correct the angle of ascent. Harry notices that two of the flight feathers on its left wing are missing.

And now, though he can no longer see it, Harry knows its eyes bear down on him.

 Harry as a child 

My vision is lost with the sea eagle in the white clouds. I scan them so intensely that the world below is lost to me, and the cloud begins to take on the shape of a snow-covered country. For a short time I am unsure where I am, but then I know I am seeing the road from Paradise, on the way to Beulah and Lower Beulah, normally long and lush and green but this night, this snowy midwinter's night, the road is white and impassable. This night of the birth of Harry Lewis. And because of the blizzard the doctor cannot be fetched to bring Harry into the world.

My vision, as if seeking refuge, passes from this cold white outside world into a rude wooden house that stands alone in the snow-hushed bush. There Harry's mother Rose pants and screams the agonies of birth in a tiny kitchen, the warmest of the three rooms that comprise her home. At the end of the kitchen the fire burns and crackles with fury, sparks lifting into the chimney from the piled up gum logs. Her husband, Boy Lewis, as he was known until his dying day, helps her through the birth himself, and when she has delivered the afterbirth he lays the two small bodies upon her chest, the dead boy baby and the living boy baby. Rose lies on a blanket on the split paling floor and listens to the sleety wind rustling the branches of the huge stringybark gums outside, and she thinks it the saddest sound in the whole world.

Rose names the dead baby Albert and the living baby Harold. The next morning, early, even before the blue mountains near them have become properly defined in the cold wash of first light, I see Boy Lewis bury the large placenta, like some giant lamb's fry, he thinks; walk ten yards and bury his cold blue son beneath one of the silver-and salmon-trunked stringybarks. He covers the hole and stands there for a time, not wondering. Then he kneels. They had not expected two babies. The doctor had suspected nothing. So, he thinks, he should not feel what he feels. But they had had two, and one was already gone. Boy Lewis rises unsteadily to his feet, turns, and slowly walks back home.

Each winter thereafter, no matter how cold, no matter how much snow, the stringybark gum would burst into immense flower. After a time the tree became something of a local landmark, then after a further time the unique unseasonal flowerings came to be expected and hence commonplace and went largely unremarked upon, save for beekeepers who fought each other for the right to put a hive beneath the flowering gum of Paradise, which produced honey sweeter and more succulent than any other known.

The gum of Paradise lay in the shadow of the Gog Range in which Boy Lewis had a wallaby snaring run. Boy also had a run with his brother George near No Where Else, but then he and George had a falling out and, besides, it was too far to walk, least that's what Boy told Harry. When snaring, Boy could be away for months on end and in that time he lived high up in the snow country, in a hut of King Billy pine he had made himself.

So I watch and continue to watch Harry Lewis as he grows up, watch how even to Harry as a small child his mother's body seems small and frail, his mother who had been sick for as long as Harry could remember. Her body seems unequal to what she has to do with it, the endless, relentlessly hard physical labour of housework, the bringing of children into this world, the sewing and ironing she takes in to try to make ends meet. I watch Harry recoil when Rose on the rare occasion finds time to tenderly stroke her son, for her rough, callused hands grate upon his soft boy skin and he is repelled by them, and all his life he will feel ashamed of having not wanted the touch of those beautiful worn hands. During her last years her body smelt close and sickly, and even after her weekly bath - for Rose was a woman who prided herself on her cleanliness - Harry was struck by how the smell remained. No matter how much she scrubbed the smell away, it would be replaced by more of the same - stale, rancid and repugnant. Harry would always remember his mother as old, even ancient, though when he was ten she was only thirty-five. Her thin face was harsh, harrowed. The flesh, rather than rolling in curves to form a round whole, was strained into planes that made her look, at least to Harry, vaguely Oriental. When Rose was angry, which was often, Harry ran out of the house into the bush, but he never felt scared. Only when she stopped her incessant work out of weariness and sat down on the old russet-coloured armchair in the parlour, her shallow green eyes focused upon nothing, her fingers absently pick-picking out the threads of horsehair through the holes in the arms, did he glimpse a despair so total that it terrified him. There was an old photograph that sat upon the mantelpiece, which showed Harry's mother when she was a young girl. The card, yellowed, acid-blotched and silverfish-chewed, had curled so much that it was now almost impossible to stand it up properly. The photograph seemed only to want to lie down and curl in upon itself, and the gentlest of draughts would knock it over. Across the back, in a bold round hand, was written, ‘Rose agd 8 y.o.' Written in brown ink that had dried and faded like blood spilt long ago. She looked beautiful, soft, happy. Harry would sometimes get this photograph down, run his fingers over it and whisper some of his secrets to its sepia image, and wonder what it was that connected this happy child with his unhappy mother, and what it was that had separated them.

Harry, born in the moist shadow of the Gog Range in the north of the island, could never summon the same feelings toward the dry Richmond country of the south that his mother, whose birthplace it was, could. For Rose, Richmond was, as she was fond of saying, a place where people knew their place and where, she said, her family was much respected because her mother was a woman of some culture, who could read most beautifully and movingly from the Scriptures and who even was a friend of musicians. Not only that, but her grandfather Ned Quade had once been mayor of the mainland town of Parramatta. Around Paradise, on the other hand, people were altogether coarser and some even talked openly of their convict forebears in the mean little wooden huts that they called homes, set in paddocks stubbled with tree stumps too big to pull out until they had rotted for years or decades. Such talk narked Rose, who rarely missed an opportunity of reminding the locals how her family, even if poor, was nevertheless descended from stout free settler stock. ‘People have to make of themselves something better than they be,' she was fond of saying, ‘so why on earth do they put themselves down by reminding others of their sinful origins?'

Rose believed there was nothing so shameful as having convict blood, and in her family she was not alone in this opinion. Rose was proud of her family, who, as she often remarked, had been people of some standing around Richmond. Occasionally one of her many brothers or sisters would come to stay with her and Boy up at Paradise. The men were soft creatures who brought sherry and proffered tailor-made cigarettes from tin cases that had their initials inscribed in the top right-hand corner in italics. They had jobs in Hobart as clerks and teachers. They had snobbery as a dog has fleas. It wasn't offensive. It was simply part of them. Albert, the eldest, was a priest. Boy liked Rose's brother Olsten the best, the one they all called Ruth. Rose said Ruth was a musician, which was true, but like much that Rose said about her family, it was a half-truth, as Boy discovered from Jack Roach, a fellow snarer, who had met Ruth at Boy and Rose's home. ‘Musician my arse,' Jack said to Boy, ‘that brother-in-law of yours tinkles the ivories in the Blue House in Hobart. The night I went there he was so pissed that one of Ma Dwyer's girls had to lean up against him to stop him falling off his stool while he played.' Even Ruth was not immune from the family weakness. He would sip sherry and talk of how the grand families were going on this or that estate, how the O'Connors had not had a good year at Benham, how the Burburys were set to expand, and so on and so on, expounding endlessly in a familiar fashion about a world that had nothing but contempt for a man who played piano nightly in a brothel on Hobart's wharves.

I tell you, it's far from an easy thing for a drowning bloke to watch the wretched truths of his family unfold. Because for me to watch all this is the same thing as telling it to you, as if I were simultaneously filmmaker, projectionist and audience, and I am not sure if it's really the right thing to do to divulge the family truths in this manner, even to myself in this watery hole. Loyalty is boasted of as both a Lewis and Cosini family trait, in between the whispered tattle-tale. Maybe I'm a miserable bastard even watching such things, for instantaneously what I see is what I know, and what I know you know, and what I see is that Rose's sisters were, like Rose, vivacious redheads, and, like Rose, I see that they had a streak of hardness that became more obvious as the sheen of fun that had been their youth tarnished. Boy learnt to respect them, but he could never find it in him to like them. They became more and more dogmatic in their religion as they grew older. Like Rose they craved respectability, which they equated with education and a peculiar accent that much amused Boy. Over tea - an elegant if somewhat forced and awkward ritual that inevitably took place in the parlour - they would purse their lips, pushing their top lip forward in a V shape, and in endless failed attempts seek to inflate their flat vowels by speaking a half-octave higher than they would in conversation in the kitchen. But their words sank to the floor and remained there, draped across the parlour like so many uninflated balloons. Their conversation was about priests they had known and about bishops they had never met, but mostly it was about Richmond and the people they had grown up with there. Some they spoke of with great affection, and some, such as the Proctors, the local bakers, with great hate. This was unusual, for although the Quades were good haters, they also were obsessed with etiquette and believed that while it was permissible to whisper poisonous asides, it was a rudeness to openly condemn anybody. But of the Proctors - and particularly their eldest son and now the town baker, Eric, referred to only as Doughy Proctor - they were openly venomous. This perplexed Boy until Ruth, one night after two bottles of sherry and a few whiskies, told Boy how, as children, the Quades would come in from the farm on their dray to Richmond for church on Sundays, and Doughy Proctor would walk in the dust behind the dray as it slowly wheeled into the main street, with a gaggle of kids behind him, all of them chanting, ‘Convicts! Convicts! Convicts!' And how their mother would just look straight ahead, as if the thin lines of her bonnet defined her world.