Captain Battery tipped his hat at me and I thought, how can a limping man be here so soon? I thought of A.P. Elkin’s ‘clever men’ who can run more than a foot above the ground.
‘That is Mr Bachhuber,’ the driver said.
Battery gave no sign that we had any previous acquaintance.
‘He bin go mad, that short one teacher,’ Doctor Battery said.
‘He in hospital.’
Garret lifted his great nose, a movement precisely understood by Battery who grinned.
‘This fellah here? He bin teaching?’
‘Hop up,’ Garret said.
‘Maybe I see old Cricket nother time.’
‘Jump off when you like.’
The old fellow disappeared and I did not understand that he was riding the rear bumper and holding the roof rack as we entered a site of abandoned trucks, untidy sheds, a bulldozer, some empty stockyards. He rode like a general inside a cloud of red dust, between the sorry iron buildings, past the workshop cut into a knotted limestone bluff, through the shanties of a blacks’ camp, between a line of women carrying kerosene drums on their heads. Having driven straight through a burned out shed and without having seen one of those fifty thousand cattle, we arrived at the ‘Big House’, a low wide-roofed structure with walls of corrugated iron protected by a barbed wire fence. Behind this barrier stood the manager of Quamby Downs, a blond haired, sunburned farmer whose good looks were quite destroyed by his parrot nose.
‘Where the fuck have you been you mongrel?’ he said to our passenger and of course he was Carter nicknamed Cricket. He slapped his leg with a fly swatter. ‘We’re in the middle of the muster. I’ve got the fucking Chev out of order for three fucking weeks. Lochy, mate, you can’t do this. I had the cops out for you. Exemption or no exemption, you’re lucky you aren’t in the lockup.’
I climbed out of the car with my airline bag, but although the manager had come out from his wired enclosure, he was not ready for me yet.
‘Mate, you can’t just piss off when you feel like it.’
‘Sorry boss.’
‘What you doing now?’
‘Need parts, boss. Fix up that Chev.’
‘I got you your bloody parts. We flew them in. They’ve been here ten weeks. Where you think you’re going?’
‘Talk that old Chev.’
‘Chev’s not down there.’
‘No boss. This way.’
So saying he limped back along the rutted track, and the manager, with nothing to distract him, turned to meet me formally.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘This is Mr Bachhuber,’ said Garret Hangar, ‘a schoolteacher straight from Melbourne.’
Carter beamed. He shook my hand and took my ‘luggage’ and escorted me into his enclosure where, on his generous verandah, he introduced me to a slight girlish woman, also blond, who was watering a hanging plant.
‘Melbourne,’ he said by way of introduction.
‘Mrs Carter,’ she said.
We assembled in a wide dark room smelling faintly of kerosene and the recent application of a damp mop. At its centre was a claw-legged table presided over by a huge black chair studded with pearl shell. A large rectangle of grimy calico – a punka – was suspended above the table, and this swept continually back and forth, distributing the unappetising smell of beef and fat. In the shadows stood its engine, a very black fine-faced man pulling on a rope. From this individual’s glittering eyes I shied away.
I ‘pulled up a pew’ as instructed. The school inspector, for that is what the scoundrel was, produced a ‘little something’ from his Gladstone bag and the boss studied the bottle as if it were a rare and precious stamp. ‘Alice,’ he bawled. ‘Alice.’ In response there appeared a much laundered Aboriginal woman with a fortress face. She placed a glass before me which I had no choice but to push away.
‘Not for you, Bachhuber? You’re not going to be homesick for the opera are you? No. The last fellow missed the opera,’ said Carter. And I saw the Punka Wallah listening closely so I knew he had his hearing, unlike those fellows in the British Raj who were famously recruited from amongst the deaf.
‘Poor bugger,’ said Carter. ‘Your predecessor was what you might call an idealist. Are you an idealist Mr Bachhuber? No, it’s OK. I’m not a monster. Of course, I blame the state of Western Australia, the curriculum or whatever you want to call it. No-one wants to teach these buggers anything practical. If the education department could see what Garret sees, they’d change it. Garret knows what I want, don’t you Garret? Give me a kid at twelve and he’ll be a working stockboy two years later. It’s alright, mate, I won’t kidnap them. We’ll get on. I can get on with anybody. Of course the grog is a problem here. They can’t take it like a white man.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘I take it there is a position here.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the ropes. You’ve got to get to know the characters, the communists. There used to be five of them, but I took to shooting out their radiators. Not one of them has got a job himself, but there they are, riling up my people about getting paid. You know how many people I feed? One hundred and bloody fifty. The day I have to pay them I’ll kick the whole lot of them off the property.’
I felt the Punka Wallah was the only one who guessed my resistance. At that time I imagined him to be Tamil, with his sharp and slender nose.
I sat at Carter’s table in the gloom and darkness and then the kerosene lamps arrived and he carved a huge roast beef by the smoky yellow light. Two quiet fair haired children came to join us but I was not told their names.
Garret sipped his good share of rum and allowed himself to defend the education department as he was expected to.
‘See, Mr Bachhuber,’ said Carter, ‘I can get along with anyone.
Ask the missus. Tell them, Janet. My bark is worse than my bite.’ Mrs Carter bestowed on me her weary smile and I knew there was no force that could keep me captive in this hell. I would rise early and stay by the Morris Minor until the brakes were done.
3
Perhaps it was the damage to my marriage that made me cry, or perhaps it was the tension of that endless Redex Trial. More likely it was the frail old pastor carrying his mandarins exactly as his son had once offered his welcome gift of eggs. He was Willie’s father and so, of course, he comforted me, his hand as light as a leaf upon my arm.
‘Dear lady.’ He relieved me of the cardboard box. ‘You clearly need a cup of tea.’
He turned without knowing who the hell I was. I followed. His figure was erect, narrow shouldered, his gait a little rusty. I snuffled behind, down the concrete path, beside a powdery sun-damaged Ford Prefect, then the compost heap, and then into a garage which had not seen a vehicle in many years. It had become a standard model ‘Dad Shed’, given over to carpentry, and garden pots, and incubators and drying plants like rooster tails hanging from the rafters.
He shifted a large wooden plane with his elbow and placed the Ardmona box on the workbench. What the heck was I to tell him?
There was a wobbly card table and a stool and kitchen chair. He gave me the chair and took the stool and poured black tea into a screw-on thermos cup. There was no sugar and no milk.
‘So?’ he asked.
When he saw I wished to open up my box, he produced a bone handled pocketknife, old and yellowed, and cut the electrical tape my husband had used to bind it shut. Then I knew I must speak quickly.
‘I am Mrs Bobs,’ I said. ‘From Bacchus Marsh. Near Melbourne.’ But the flaps were already open, and he saw.
‘I hoped you might give him a proper burial?’
His jaw was long, his lips compressed. I apologised.
‘You came from Melbourne?’
‘I know, but his own people will not touch him.’
He cupped his freckled hand over his mouth and chin. ‘His people?’
‘Aboriginal.’
‘And you are from Melbourne. But you have come here?’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Bachhuber. I had no-one else to ask. You see we are in the Redex Trial.’ (This last was a mistake, leading only to confusion which took some time to untangle.) ‘I know your son,’ I said at last.
He spoke sharply. ‘Which son?’
‘Willie.’
‘How can you know Willie?’
‘Just days ago. In Broome.’
He looked stricken.
‘We are in a car race.’
He turned to the cardboard box and removed the skull from its bed of crumpled newspaper. ‘But this,’ he said carefully, ‘this is a little child.’
‘Might we not bury him?’
He did not answer immediately. ‘You know our Willie?’
Who, of any age, would not suffer confusion? He did not know me from Adam. He had never heard of Bacchus Marsh or his son’s presence there. Did he even know Willie had turned into a teacher?
‘Poor Willie,’ he said, running his hand around that skull, as smooth as an eggshell, hesitating at its hole. ‘I did not serve you well dear fellow.’
His pale eyes wanted something from me which I could not have named.
‘It was an awful thing for a Christian to do. I think about it every day.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently (he had not wanted sympathy). ‘But you see, he was so at home here, so contented, truly. He ran, oh he ran, Mrs . . . Would you like to see his room?’
I couldn’t spare the time, but yes I must see the room, and the pastor was now very certain in his manner as he lowered the skull back into its nest. He closed the flaps and laid the wooden plane across the top. He then took my arm, not at all impatiently, and guided me out into the sunlight. It had rained not long before and the drops were crystalline on his silverbeet and the new back steps of his cottage were bright and yellow.
He need not have told me that his wife had died. The sad state of the kitchen, the little plastic bags hanging on doorknobs for the scraps, was enough to say ‘I am on my own these days.’ He hurried me into a hall, and then a musty room where he raised the dark brown holland blinds to reveal, like a faded photograph taken in the days before Kodachrome, a bare and tidy bedroom with tarnished athletic cups, a scuffed up cricket ball, and three volumes of the children’s cyclopedia all arranged on long shelves above a tiny desk. A much used teddy bear rested on the pillow and on the wall above there was secured, with rusty flat-headed drawing pins, a black and white picture of a castle. I supposed it was from a fairytale but frankly it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
‘Germany?’ I asked.
‘His castle on the Rhine.’
I thought, where are his toys?
The old man was already lowering the blinds. ‘I did not trust him enough to tell him,’ he said. ‘And somehow he must have felt that, don’t you think? He was sweet and affectionate but he could not rely on our love. It’s clear, isn’t it? Why else would he run away with the girl? We would have loved her too. And all their babies, every one.’
The room was gloomy but he showed no inclination to leave just yet.
‘I could not tell him he was not our natural son.’
‘I see.’
‘No, I’m afraid you don’t. He is Aboriginal. You see the problem? Mrs . . . ?’
‘Bobs.’
‘Mrs Bobs, why would I bother him with that when he fitted in so well? In Adelaide? I thought I was sparing him. But then he gave the poor girl a black baby. What did he think? Where did he go? We saw her afterwards, but never him. All those years we loved him, cared for him, and at the same time we were white ants at the very foundations of his life. We were destroying him.’
His eyes, startled, frightened, accusing.
‘I wish I had brought him back,’ I said, thinking how it might have been if he were still our beloved navigator, how different it might have been to see that pair united.
‘Then what is that in the box and why have you come to taunt me? I should have told him. I should have found his people for him. There was a letter inquiring, you know, from Mardowarra.
Frankly, I could not see the point of it. He was a baby very badly treated, you know. When he came to us he had a dreadful infection. He could have died. Really. I thought, why trouble him with what he can’t remember?’
‘This was the injury to his shoulder?’
‘Ah, you know about that? He did not know what caused it. We invented a funny story.’
‘But then he had the child.’
‘If only they had not run away. If I had been there, if only I had been there. What a mess I’ve made.’
He escorted me back through the house. My time was short.
‘Mr Bachhuber, may I use your telephone?’
‘I am retired from the ministry. When people need my counsel they drop by.’ And he smiled and I realised I could not call a taxi.
Back in the garage, he lifted the wooden plane from on top of the cardboard box. ‘At least you leave me this.’
I thought, oh dear, he is gaga.
‘Mr Bachhuber this is not Willie.’
‘How could it be Willie? This is a child.’
‘Yes.’
‘To be perfectly clear, Mrs Bobs from Bacchus Marsh, I cannot legally do anything for this poor fellow. We have no coroner’s report, I assume, no death certificate. It’s as if you found him by the road.’
‘Yes.’
‘We did horrendous things, you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not only Germans, you understand.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know, Mrs Bobs, it often happened that a member of my parish would ask me to hold some thing, a letter, a little photograph, which they could not bear to throw away but were worried their family might discover when they died. Many times I have taken these burdens.’
‘Yes.’
‘So I will hold yours.’
‘But it’s not the right thing.’
‘There is no right thing,’ the old man said, ‘there are just many, many wrong things and sometimes we can do no better than pray to be forgiven.’
In the shed he drank tea without remembering it had been poured for me.
‘You see, his son needs him,’ he said. ‘His little boy is disconnected. The mother has married again, some American chap, a black man I believe, what you would call a confirmed bachelor. Is that the right thing? Or the best thing?’
‘Mr Bachhuber, I am sorry. I have to leave.’
He did not reprimand me, but he cocked his head and frowned.
‘I do not have a phone,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Yes, but wait. I have a number.’
I waited. I could not be late. He messed around on his workbench amongst wood shavings and jars of nails and offcuts of timber. At last he took a carpenter’s pencil and wrote with it on an offcut piece of tongue and groove.
‘If you have news of him,’ he said, ‘the boy should have it, or his mother. This will find them.’
I didn’t want it. I had to take it. I should have stayed with him.
I had to go. I kissed him and I felt him go quite rigid.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, meaning for the unwanted kiss, for everything, my rudeness, my inability to stay. This was the guilty burden I carried with me up that concrete path, back to the empty streets of Payneham where, finally, out of breath, in a panic, I walked into a service station and there, in the grubby office, its door smudged with greasy fingers, I found my picture on the wall and a big fat oil-stained woman who was pleased to drive me to the starting line. When she kissed me I did not mind at all.
4
Wherever they travel in the Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Bering Sea, when it is time to leave the great oceans and go home to spawn, salmon have the ability to find their way back to the river of their birth. It is thought that they use magnetoreception (Off he goes)to locate the general position of their river and when they are nearly there they switch to their sense of smell
to locate the river entrance and, from there, the spawning ground where they were conceived. (Listeners, block your ears.)Even bacteria can have this magical ability to turn themselves into active living maps. In these cases the bacterium demonstrates a behavioural phenomenon known as magnetotaxis in which it orients itself along the lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. (And you have nothing to lose but your smoker’s cough.)
It is reasonable to assume that Bachhuber the Navigator might have had a skerrick of magnetotaxis in his bones, but my experience suggests the opposite. For I had been accidentally delivered to my spawning ground and did not see or smell or even feel it. I had no clue. I was irritated and unsettled by these confident references to my race. I feared Carter and his rum. I was afraid of the loneliness, the dust and dirt, the red rutted roads emerging from the spinifex and acacia, the scalded soil. The huge diesel generator throbbed throughout my first night. The dogs were never quiet. I twisted and turned and the mosquitoes bit me and my gut churned up and I panicked that I would oversleep and miss my ride in the school inspector’s Morris Minor. There was no question. This was the flaw in my human clay, to always flee.
But I would not be a teacher again, at least not in a place where they held me in a dusty mudbrick ‘teacher’s residence’, a pioneer’s ruin with a corrugated roof thrown up across its eroded walls. There were plenty of nasty drafts but none sufficient to blow away the stink of something dead or dying, a snake I thought. There was angry shouting in the night, then some wild creature scratching at the wall. Of course I wished to flee.
With morning I discovered that my ‘bedroom’ was a store-house stacked with a jumble of old motors and all sorts of scrap. I found the outhouse which had eluded me all night, picked up my ‘luggage’ and carried my fake belongings – the crumpled newspaper and pencil sharpener – out into the weary air to face that single limestone bluff, the survivor of four hundred million nightmare years.
I know, I know: life was all around me and I was a white man, a kartiya, who saw only death. I rushed through a failed plantation of species I did not know and, having contrived to open an ingenious gate, arrived at Carter’s front verandah. The concrete slab which had been wet and clean when first I saw it was now littered with beer cans and broken glass and it was from this chaos I beheld Carter rising slowly to his feet. He was unshaven, of course, and his yellow hair was a nest of broken straw, but he tugged his trousers up above his hips and looked down his parrot nose at me and I understood, in that moment, the status of a schoolteacher on Quamby Downs.